SHINE’s Unique Approach to Fusion
In one way, Greg Piefer thinks like many other fusion researchers. Since he was a graduate student in nuclear engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW), he has dreamed of producing abundant clean energy from nuclear fusion. However, Piefer, CEO and founder of SHINE Technologies, stands out among his peers: He’s making money from fusion now.
Most approaches to fusion seek to mash together the heavy isotopes of hydrogen—deuterium and tritium—to produce helium and an energetic neutron. Generating power requires extracting energy from the neutrons, and no fusion reactor so far has produced more energy than it consumes. However, 18 years ago, Piefer realized fusion could already produce enough neutrons to make them marketable themselves. “We’re selling fusion,” Piefer says. “It’s just that we’ve recognized the value per reaction is highest in the neutron instead of the energy.”
SHINE’s Vision and Business Strategy
Piefer’s office overlooks a slate-flat southern Wisconsin landscape. In the distance stands Building 1, a warehouselike edifice that houses an example of SHINE’s signature technology. Inside, hidden behind concrete blocks, stands a device 4 meters tall that resembles some sort of agricultural machinery. In fact, it’s a neutron source. A small particle accelerator on top drives deuterium ions, or deuterons, down into a gas of tritium to create fusion and 50 trillion neutrons per second, 20 times more than any other fusion-based neutron source.
By hawking neutrons, Piefer intends to fund a four-step plan to reach his ultimate goal of fusion power. The first step was using simpler neutron sources to image the insides of metal machine parts, as SHINE’s predecessor, Phoenix, began doing a decade ago. In a more lucrative second step, SHINE now seeks to use neutron sources even more elaborate than the one in Building 1 to generate medical isotopes—fleeting radioactive nuclei that can be used to image tissue or burn out tumors. Once SHINE succeeds in that multibillion-dollar market, Piefer envisions using its technology to transmute spent fuel from nuclear reactors to less dangerous elements. Finally, a decade or more from now, will come fusion power.
At each step, SHINE researchers will have to ratchet up the rate of fusion reactions. The business strategy is to use fusion itself to meet commercial needs, Piefer says, rather than selling power supplies, magnets, and other ancillary technologies, as some other fusion companies do. “There is this need to build a whole industry around scaling fusion to make it cost-competitive,” Piefer says. “And that’s what I aim to do.”
SHINE’s Current and Future Production
SHINE is already producing a cancer-killing isotope, lutetium-177—although without using its own not-yet-complete neutron sources. A gleaming factory a stone’s throw from Building 1 will house those machines but is just 80% complete. SHINE currently ships precursor material to be irradiated with neutrons at a nuclear reactor elsewhere. Still, SHINE officials expect to dominate the emerging lutetium-177 market, as the company can already produce 100,000 doses per year. “We will be the biggest North American supplier very, very quickly,” says Dave Gelander, SHINE’s supply chain manager.
Such progress has some people bullish on SHINE, which has raised $700 million in capital and employs nearly 300 people. “This is not a paper exercise,” says David Moncton, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist who led an advisory panel for SHINE. “I’m quite optimistic that this company will soon become self-sustaining financially.”
Challenges and Risks Ahead
SHINE isn’t guaranteed to succeed in the rough-and-tumble medical isotope market. But for now, it seems to be an exhilarating place to work. Building 1 has the homey, slightly cluttered feel of a garage, the kind of place engineers might hang out even after work. “I often refer to this place as grad school on steroids,” says Ross Radel, SHINE’s chief technology officer.
Yet the facilities SHINE has assembled next door exude a different feel, that of big business. Ironically, business success could threaten Piefer’s ultimate goal, generating pressure for SHINE to forgo dreams of fusion power and just make isotopes and money.
The Origin of SHINE’s Technology
The key idea behind SHINE’s technology came to Piefer shortly after he finished his Ph.D. in 2006—during a party at his own house. He set to exploring it even as his guests had fun. “Everyone was drinking, so I just went and worked on my laptop,” he says.
Piefer had been mulling a problem from his doctoral research. He had been exploring an old scheme known as inertial electrostatic confinement fusion, in which a small sphere of negatively charged electrodes sits in the center of a larger sphere of positively charged electrodes. Inject deuterium gas and crank up the voltage to 200 kilovolts, and the electric field will yank electrons off some of the atoms to create deuterons and accelerate them toward the center of the contraption. There, they should collide and fuse.
Only it worked poorly. Some fusion did occur, but mostly when the in-rushing ions collided with deuterium molecules lingering in the chamber, Piefer recalls. The collision rate would climb as the amount of residual gas increased. But the gas also slowed the ions, reducing the chances that the collisions would lead to fusion. “I realized that we were doing fusion stupidly inefficiently,” Piefer says.
As his friends partied, he saw a way to greatly increase the fusion rate: Separate the acceleration of ions from the collisions with gas molecules. Quickly running some numbers, Piefer found the “accelerate here, collide there” tack could increase the fusion rate up to 100,000 times. He was elated. “I had just spent a whole educational career pursuing fusion and was walking away thinking it was not useful. All of a sudden math said, ‘Actually, you can industrialize this today.’”
SHINE’s Journey in the Business World
Piefer immediately started to think about how to make the scheme useful. He credits his thesis adviser, Gerald Kulcinski, for stressing near-term applications. Kulcinski, who ran UW’s now-defunct Fusion Technology Institute from 1971 to 2014, credits Piefer’s innate practicality. “He was not a typical student, interested in coming up with some theoretical derivation on some phenomenon,” Kulcinski says. “He was more interested in what do you do with it.”
Piefer had stepped into the business world a year earlier, when he founded a company called Phoenix to explore using neutrons from fusion to search for land mines. Now that he saw a way to produce far more neutrons, he turned to neutron imaging, which is typically done at small reactors. X-rays can’t peer into metal parts because the metal’s free-flowing electrons block them. Neutrons, however, zip through the electrons and bounce off nuclei. They can probe parts such as the turbine blades of a jet engine to reveal defects or suss out the elemental composition of objects.
Achievements and Future Plans
In 2014, Phoenix sold its first imaging sources to a U.K. company that makes systems to monitor nuclear reactors. Those devices fired a beam of deuterons into a solid target laced with deuterium. In 2018, Phoenix inked a deal with GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy to test nuclear fuel rods to make sure they contain the right ratio of fissile uranium-235 to inert uranium-238, after GE Hitachi decided to shut down the only commercial imaging reactor in North America. SHINE offers imaging as a service at a facility in nearby Fitchburg, Wisconsin, to clients including the U.S. military.
Even as that business was sprouting, Piefer was planning his next step. In 2009, reports from the National Research Council and an advisory panel for the Department of Energy (DOE) both warned the U.S. supply of radioactive isotopes for medical uses was tenuous. They highlighted molybdenum-99, or moly-99, the most common medical isotope, which is used to see into organs such as the heart. (At hospitals, moly-99 decays into short-lived technetium-99m. Doctors inject the technetium and use the gamma rays it emits to create an image.) In the United States, 40,000 procedures per day rely on moly-99, which is made in research reactors in other countries.
Two years earlier, moly-99 prices had spiked when a prolonged shutdown of the reactor at Chalk River Laboratories in Canada cut off two-thirds of the world’s supply. The U.S. was already looking for new sources because the reactors that make moly-99 were burning highly enriched uranium (HEU), typically 93% uranium-235, to generate the requisite high neutron fluxes. The neutrons split uranium nuclei in a separate plug of HEU to make moly-99. Because HEU can be made into a bomb, DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) sought ways to make moly-99 in the U.S. without it. Answering the call, Piefer spun SHINE out of Phoenix in 2010, with funding from NNSA eventually totaling $85 million. (SHINE, an acronym for Subcritical Hybrid Intense Neutron Emitter, absorbed Phoenix in 2021.)
Conclusion
To make moly-99 and other isotopes, SHINE researchers had to enhance their neutron source. To produce more, higher energy neutrons, they replaced the solid deuterium target with tritium gas, which requires special handling because it is radioactive. Even trickier, no physical barrier can separate the vacuum chamber of the accelerator from the cylinder containing the gas because the 80-milliamp deuterium beam would melt a hole in it anyway. Instead, the two are separated by a constriction 0.5 centimeters wide, just narrow enough to keep the gas from leaking into the accelerator. Pumps capture the few molecules that do escape and return them to the target.
SHINE’s isotope generator exploits two different kinds of nuclear physics, one to generate neutrons and the other to transform one nucleus into another. This innovative approach combines fusion and fission processes to produce valuable medical isotopes like moly-99 and lutetium-177.
In summary, SHINE Technologies is leveraging its unique fusion technology to revolutionize the medical isotope market while paving the way for future advancements in nuclear fusion power. By continually enhancing its neutron sources and expanding its production capabilities, SHINE is poised to achieve significant breakthroughs in both medical and energy sectors.
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