NDE | USING FUSION
Right: Once commissioned, SHINE’s US facility in Janesville, Wisconsin, will be the biggest isotope production plant in the world, capable of generating about 20 million doses of molybdenum 99 per year
the biggest challenges nuclear energy faces is the waste problem.”
The SHINE CEO believes that scaling up fusion devices
to be able to handle waste management processes also represents an important step on the road to commercial fusion energy. “That’s the next scale-up for fusion in our strategy and the fusion part of it is cool because at the stage where you’re starting to transmute materials at that waste scale, you’re starting to look like a fusion power plant from a physics perspective. The difference between fusion energy and this transmutation process is you actually still get paid a lot more for the transmutation part than your energy, Maybe 10 to 15 times more per reaction than you would for producing energy,” he says. Piefer outlines the staged timeframe: “All these are things
Above: Greg Piefer, founder and CEO of SHINE Technologies, has a vision to develop value from fusion right away
fusion journey, but what we want to do first and foremost
is recycle nuclear waste from power plants,” he says, adding: “To recycle nuclear waste, you take the uranium oxide, dissolve it and separate out the highly valuable materials including plutonium, but also precious metals and other isotopes that you could sell. All these things look exactly like what we’re doing in the isotope plant, just at a larger scale.” Piefer suggests that such a process can remove about 96% of the waste stream that can be recycled and used as new fuel. However, it also ties in with a fusion-derived neutron flux to generate commercial value. “Fusion comes in on the very back end of this. About 96% of the uranium waste stream is recyclable or valuable but there’s a very small amount, about 0.1%, of the waste stream that consists of really long-lived isotopes that have no value and currently have no disposal path,” Piifer explains. “Just like we use transmutation in phase two to turn low value materials into high value materials, we believe we can use fusion to take those long-lived isotopes and make them short-lived isotopes and thus solve the problem of long-lived nuclear waste as well. I find that to be incredibly valuable from a sociological perspective, because one of
42 | May 2023 |
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we’re starting to invest in now. Phase one is growing rapidly now at over 50% a year. We think it’s going to continue that for a bit and it’s profitable. For phase two, longer term, we’ll be using our fusion facility to make lutetium-177 and to make more molybdenum, iodine and xenon around 2024. Right now, we’re using fission reactor neutrons, but we’re using our chemical processing expertise and other technologies we’ve developed to give us a competitive advantage there. Phase three, we think is probably five-ish maybe six years for a pilot plant.” He concludes with a comment on the development
of commercial fusion though: “What we’re trying to do is continue to develop new technologies that make fusion more and more efficient. We’re going to get better and better at building fusion devices as the technology improves, but we’re always going to have a commercial mindset, always trying to build products. That’s first and foremost in our mind, we’re not trying to prove the physics, we’re building products. We call it today’s fusion company because we’re actually doing it today and creating value with it today.” Reflecting on the challenge of fusion energy Piefer observes: “Most people investing in fusion are trying to go straight to energy and so you need to invest so much money to get to a machine that might work and I say might work because I don’t think any of its been proven yet. It’s a bit like if when Steve Jobs was starting building computers in his garage he said, ‘I’m going to set out to build an iPhone on day one’. They wouldn’t have been able to do that, but they did build a product that had value right away.” By using fusion to look within, we might just see the energy iphone of the future. ■
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