These charts suggest the ‘holy grail’ of energy is within reach

Nuclear fusion, the old adage goes, is the energy source of tomorrow — and it always will be. Ever since U.S. government scientists made history in December 2022 by generating more energy from fusion than it took to trigger the reaction, investors have been betting billions of dollars that tomorrow is just around the corner.

What if they’re right, but almost everyone is getting is it backward?

That’s what Greg Piefer is wagering. Instead of starting out by building a fusion power plant, the chief executive of Shine Technologies is using the plasma beam technology his company developed to produce something that makes a lot more money: Rare isotopes for diagnostic testing and cancer therapies.

“We’re a bit different from fusion companies trying to sell the single product of electricity,” Piefer told me on a Zoom call from his office in Janesville, Wisconsin. “The basic premise of our business is fusion is expensive today, so we’re starting by selling it to the highest-paying customers first.”

Investors are rewarding his gamble. In an exclusive for Heatmap on Thursday, I reported that Shine just raised $240 million in a Series E round. Nearly 63% of that funding came from Patrick Soon-Shiong, the biotech billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, who will be joining the company’s board.

“I would essentially define electricity as the lowest-paying customer of significance for fusion today,” Piefer said.

Eventually — maybe as far off as two decades from now — Shine plans to generate energy for heat or power. It is, after all, the largest addressable market. But it isn’t even next on the list.

During our interview, Piefer showed me a chart from an internal presentation that he later gave me permission to publish here for the first time.

As I wrote for Heatmap:

So far, Shine’s technology has followed a similar Moore’s Law trajectory to semiconductors.

From roughly 1990 to 2000, microchips used in workstations increased their computation rate per dollar. Then came the gaming era from 2000 to 2015, when videogames drove demand for more and more efficient semiconductors, with upgrades on average every other year. From 2015 until roughly the debut of ChatGPT in 2022, the high-speed computing applications spurred on chip upgrades at a similar rate. Now the artificial intelligence era is upon us, transforming chipmakers such as Nvidia into goliaths seemingly overnight.

Piefer sees Shine Technologies on its own 35-year timeline. From 2010 to roughly 2023, testing dominated the business. From then until about 2028, medical isotopes are the new play. The recycling pilot plant set to come online after 2030 will kick off the reprocessing period. And finally, sometime in the 2040s, Piefer wants to get into energy production.

Right now, Shine is completing work on what will be the largest facility producing medical isotopes in the country. The plant, called Chrysalis, will churn out molybdenum-99 for diagnostic imaging or lutetium-177 for targeted cancer therapies.

More from my piece:

“We’ll make 20 million doses of medicine per year with it,” he said. “It’ll be the biggest beneficial use of fusion for humans ever, and we expect it to be the dominant technology for decades. This will be the way the United States produces neutron-based radioisotopes probably for the next 50 years.”

To make medicine, the company follows four steps. First, it dissolves uranium. Next, it irradiates the material with the plasma beam. Then comes the separation process to remove valuable isotopes from the other radioactive material. Finally leftover uranium gets recycled back into the process. Rinse and repeat.

“It’s the first closed loop ever used for producing medicine this way,” Piefer said.

To recycle spent nuclear fuel, the company just remixes those steps, he said.

“You dissolve uranium from the nuclear waste. You separate out valuable materials. You recycle the uranium and plutonium in a reactor,” Piefer said. Then fusion comes in with the plasma beam technology to transform highly radioactive material that stays dangerous for longer than Homo sapiens is known to have existed into something that decays in half-lives that take years, decades, or centuries rather than millennia, decamillennia, and centimillennia.

“There’s about half a percent of long-lived nuclear waste from fission that we don’t know what to do with. It lives basically forever. We don’t have a use for it. But if you hit it with fusion neutrons, it becomes short-lived,” Piefer said. “So it’s the same four steps. For medicine, it goes one, two, three, four. For recycling it goes one, three, four, two.”

For now, business is good.

Not only is the market for testing and medical isotopes already worth billions of dollars, it’s on track to more than double in the next decade. Currently, it’s largely served by what Piefer called “60-year-old fission reactors.”

“These are specialized research reactors that are very cold and very constrained from a capacity standpoint,” he said. “You can buy new ones, but it takes billions of dollars and probably two decades to bring a new reactor online.”

By contrast, Shine Technologies broke ground on Chrysalis in 2019, and is set to complete the project at what Piefer said would be an eighth the cost of building a new research reactor.

But the real gamechanger is whether the Shine’s technology can, in fact, continue advancing at a rate similar to microchips. If so, tomorrow could come on schedule.

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Signing off from a chilly Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where the debate over the ethics of tossing snowballs at cops is heating up on the neighborhood Nextdoor news feed.