NDE | USING FUSION
New value from fusion neutrons
Despite major breakthroughs, cost-effective energy from fusion reactors remains elusive. Nonetheless, commercial fusion is already here to stay. Greg Piefer, founder and CEO of SHINE Technologies, tells NEI about the business case
IS FUSION COMMERCIAL? WHEN IT comes to the production of electrons, right now the answer is an emphatic ‘no’, but for neutrons it is a different story. “Fusion is commercial,” says Greg Piefer, founder and CEO of SHINE Technologies who was inspired by the realisation that while cost- effective fusion power was a perhaps a step too far, fusion nonetheless offered considerable commercial opportunities. “Fusion is going to generate some of the hottest densest states of matter ever created by humans in one of the worst radiation environments created by humans and then we are going to put some of the most fragile, exotic and expensive to manufacture materials in proximity to all that. I didn’t see a way of making fusion energy cost effectively. For me the lesson learned was that maybe there are things that can be done with fusion that can add value to the world and they may allow you to learn how to do fusion more cost effectively going forward. Applying those incremental lessons is perhaps the right path to create cost- effective fusion energy,” he says.
Instead of energy, Piefer settled on an application which
focuses on using the neutrons from fusion reactions. And, it turns out those neutrons on a per reaction basis can be far more valuable than the energy produced. “There was a market that I knew we had enough output to be able to address right away. That market is neutron radiography,” he says.
In contrast to X rays, neutrons tend to scatter more off
less dense materials but can penetrate materials like steel or lead fairly easily and so they provide a complimentary imaging process known as neutron radiography. “It’s $100- 200 million a year market. That is not huge, but historically needed nuclear reactors as a source of neutrons. There were only a few reactors around the country that were set up to do this and they were very much limiting the growth of neutron radiography because of access issues. We knew right away we could use fusion to play a role in some of these non-destructive testing markets of which neutron radiography is just one,” says Piefer.
Above: Neutron radiography is used in the inspection of gas turbine blade cooling channels 40 | May 2023 |
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