June 26, 2025 • 40 mins
Getting energy from nuclear fusion has been a dream for decades; it would be cheap, abundant, and safer than today’s nuclear fission reactors. Billions of dollars have flowed into fusion startups in recent years, but reliable, economic fusion power may still be decades away.
Greg Piefer is the founder of a fusion company called Shine, where he’s pursuing a different path. Rather than go straight to fusion as a source of energy, he’s using fusion to pursue more profitable markets right now – with the hope that what he learns today will eventually help lead to cheap, abundant fusion energy.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. When did you get the fusion bug? When'd you
fall in love with fusion?
Speaker 2 (00:24):
It probably goes back to middle school or before, you know,
and when a lot of kids would go out and
play on the playground, I'd go to the library and
read about particle accelerators and fusion reactors, and so, you.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Know, I think I think the bug was that pretty early.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
This is Greg Pifer. He's the co founder and CEO
of a company called Shine.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
And I watched shows like Star Trek and you know,
certainly even like Star Trek the Next Generation where my
moral compass was set. H.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Yeah, So like, tell me the fusion dream. I mean,
we'll get to like why. It's going to take a
while and it's hard, but just like, why is fusion
the dream?
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (01:01):
So fusion essentially, it like to me, it represents a
level up moment for humanity. When we can commercially unlock it,
our species will be changed forever. And it's very similar.
It's very akin to when we first started to access
chemical energy through fire.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
So I thought you were going to say fossil fields.
We're just saying that's bigger than fossil fuels. It's fire,
it's it's biggest fire. Yeah, so it's not going to
happen for a long time. But like, what does the
world look like when we get to the fusion dream?
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Yes, so as technology continues to improve, energy becomes cheaper
and cheaper.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Fuel is no longer an issue.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
So fundamentally, today fuel is the issue that would prevent
us from making energy super cheap. We just have to
continue to work to extract fusionis I have that problem?
So technology gets higher, the reactors get cheaper, and and
fusion becomes super cheap. Now we can solve problems that
we couldn't solve before. You know, we can we can
desalinate water on a massive scale, like we can. You know,
(01:50):
we can pull out minerals from the Earth very very carefully.
We can go into space and colonize other planets. We
can make anti matter, right and perhaps have an energy
source that allows us to go to other stars like
Star Trek.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
Yeah, exactly right.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
So that's that's that's always the secret little motivation behind
the scenes.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
I mean, also, I have a three year old daughter,
right like, and I want to give her a world
that's okay to live in.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is What's Your Problem? The
show where I talk to people who are trying to
make technological progress. People who are into technological progress and
who dream big tend to be into fusion, a kind
of nuclear power that could be safer and cheaper than fission,
which is the way we get nuclear power now. By
the way, as you probably know, fusion is fusing atomic
(02:44):
nuclei together and fission is splitting them apart. People have
been working on fusion power for decades, and reliable economic
fusion power is still probably decades away, But in the
past several years, billions of dollars have flowed into a
handful of fusion startups that are using different technologies to
try to make fusion power work. My guest today, Greg Pifer,
(03:08):
is definitely on team fusion. He's been working on it
for decades. But with his company Shine, he's taking a
different approach. Rather than going straight to the dream of
using fusion to create energy, Jine's taking baby steps, or
at least mid sized steps. The company is using fusion
to enter markets that are easier to compete in than
(03:29):
the market for energy. As you'll hear, Shine has already
used fusion to get into the business of scanning jet
engine blades, and the company will soon be in the
healthcare business as well. Later in the interview we'll talk
about all of that and about how Greg hopes those
businesses will eventually lead to that big fusion dream of cheap,
(03:50):
abundant power. But to start, we talked about how Greg
went from being a kid thinking about star Trek to
a grown man starting a fusion company, and in particular
about how that path led Greg to take really a
very different approach than that taken by other people building
fusion companies.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
I took a class actually in college that was taught
by two very inspiring people, one of whom ran something
called the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin,
and another one named Harrison Schmidt, who walked on the Moon.
And they were teaching a class about going into space
and recovering resources, and recovering fusion fuel was one of
the key resources they thought we could extract from from space,
(04:29):
in particular the Moon. And so I got super excited
about fusion because those fuels are if you burn them,
you don't get nuclear waste.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
So the promise of nuclear energy without nuclear waste.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
And these people were doing it like on the front
edge of it got me really excited.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
I actually went to the Moon to bring it back.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
Right, right, Like, these people have done hard things, so
I'm going to go learn with them. Yeah, and so
that got me into fusion. But you know, for me,
it was a different experience. And if I had done
a physics space program in fusion.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Like more practical, more hands on, is that that?
Speaker 3 (05:01):
Yeah, this was an engineering program.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
And the Fusion Technology Institute, which I joined, its mission
was to design viable fusion reactors. It was to say,
let's assume the physics challenges are overcome, how would you
build a real system?
Speaker 3 (05:15):
And that's where over the next few years, I just.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Became a bit depressed, frankly, because even if you master
the physics, it became really clear that the challenge of
commercializing and making heat for five cents per kilo whatot hour,
which is sort of the going rate for it, I
couldn't see.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
A way to do that.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
And it was because you're taking some of the most
exotic materials ever developed by humans and putting them in
the harshest environments ever created by humans, and they don't
live very long, and they're super expensive to make, and
so the idea that we could go straight to five
cents per kilo whatt hour, at least when I was
in school, seemed far fetched.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
So that it's sort of a technoeconomic problem you're thinking of,
not just the technical side, but if people are actually
going to use it, it has to be price competitive.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Okay, so you get sad. You get sad because as
your Star Trek dream doesn't seem like it's going to
come true. And then, as I understand it, you go
to a party and you have your big idea. Is
that true?
Speaker 3 (06:17):
That is the history.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
It was a party at my house and we were
thinking about well, I mean, most people weren't thinking about this,
but I had been working on this problem earlier in
the day, so it was already kind of in my head.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
And it came down to our research. You know.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
I had done work on a specific technology at the
UW where we were trying to make small fusion devices,
and the idea is that there were a number of
applications you could use them for and they didn't work
very well.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
And one of the reasons we discovered they didn't work very.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
Well was we were trying to collide these nuclei in
the same space that we were trying to speed them up.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Okay, so you just shoot them really fast into each
other as the.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Basic Yeah, but the problem is, like, if you're trying
to make something go fast in a highly collisional space
where it's running into stuff a lot, it can't really
speed up. It's banging into stuff and losing energy all
the time. And if you take away that the target
material so that you can accelerate them, then it's not
colliding very much and you don't get a lot of
fusion reactions. So you kind of had to operate in
(07:16):
this worst of both worlds space, and you know, it
was like the revelation was just like, well, why don't
we accelerate in one place and collide in another place?
Speaker 3 (07:24):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (07:24):
I was.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
I was at one point.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
There were all kinds of people standing around with drinks,
and I was sitting in one of our recliners my laptop,
punching numbers into it, and I just actually built a
really quick model to just see what the fusion rate
would do if we did that in theory, and the
numbers came out amazing, like actually it was like, you know,
a thousand times higher than the output we were getting
from our university experiment, and so, you know, like I
(07:49):
quickly disengaged from the party. I called my former advisor
and I'm like, hey, you know if we did this
like the math, and he was like, oh, okay, that's
really cool, Like what do you want me to do?
And I was like, I don't know yet. I got
to figure this out, but I think I'm going to
start a company to.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Go do this.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Were you sober, I probably had had.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
A couple drinks by then.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Actually, so it's amazing that I got the math right,
but I did, or maybe it helped.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Maybe there's like a curve right, maybe there's an optimal
number of efficts.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
There certainly is when it comes to bowling. So why
not nuclear physics as well?
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Yes, so you have this idea. When you have this idea,
do you think, oh, I've solved fusion energy.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
This physics revelation.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
It doesn't overcome the technoeconomic challenge of fusion energy that
I already had. And so that was already like I
had already moved past that, and I was trying to
see if there were ways, like what I had put
in the back of my head, where are there ways
you can make use of fusion, you know that where
you might get paid more for the reaction then you
get paid for energy.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
So tell me about having this idea of like, oh,
maybe there's a way to commercialize fusion to do something
other than generate energy.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
Yeah, So two formative experiences.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
One, my advisor at the Fusion Technology Institute had identified
a family, like, you know, a couple dozen probably applications
where you could use fusion for non electric applications, and
they hadn't really done the economic analysis on any of them,
but they just said, here are some things you can
do with fusion reactions, and those included things like making
medical isotopes or detecting hidden material or you know, contraband material,
(09:27):
detecting nuclear weapons, stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
So, to be clear, those are things that people are
already doing out in the world, right There is a
market for those things. These are existing products. They're just
not using fusion too exactly.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Yeah, super definable markets, you know, and there are supply
chain issues, and it's a good market to get into
if you had an alternative way to make things.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
Okay, So that was interesting.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
And then the other formative experience for me, it was
Actually we had started another company when I was in
grad school that had nothing to do with any of this,
but we were just recovering data from crashed hard drives.
One of my roommates had a hard drive crash. We
looked online. All the options sucked. It was like, pay
us two thousand dollars and we'll try, but maybe we
won't get your stuff back, and it's upfront payment. And
(10:09):
so we decided that was a bad business till we
started a business, and we said we told people, we said, look,
we're just starting this company. We're new at it, but
we'll charge you one hundred bucks if we get your
data and nothing if we don't, and you know, we
might break your stuff. So you'd be surprised how many
people like that better than and then being able to
pay two grand. And so what happened was we got
(10:29):
really really good at it. As we practiced, the volume
we could handle and the throughput we could handle, all
of this scaled really really nicely. And so this was
like just a formative idea for me that like, Okay,
if we can get into a niche with fusion, and
we can find an economic proposition that works, we can
practice and if we practice, we'll get better at it.
And if we get better at it, like our suppliers
(10:51):
and our customers and everyone.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
Will grow with us.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
So we'll move this ecosystem forward. And I really like
that because if you look at some of the most
high tech deep tech industries around, they followed the same roadmap,
you know, if you look at semiconductors and More's law.
It was fueled by having products all along the way. Right,
Like the first computers may have only had a few customers,
they would pay a ton for them, yes, And by
(11:14):
doing that, they got better and they brought the price down,
and then there were new a new set of customers,
right that could afford those computers.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Now more recently, Tesla is the classic model of that.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
Right.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
They started with the Roadster, this super expensive, exactly electric
car that was not for everybody, but enough people bought
it that they could go from the whatever that was
one hundred and fifty thousand dollars car to the seventy
thousand dollars car to the fifty thousand dollars car. Right, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
And I'd argue that the underlying technology for Tesla started
even in other industries. So the ability to scale batteries
even more cheaply, right, Like it's rechargeable batteries. So you
started with toys and special services, and you move to laptops,
and then you move to EV's and even once you
get into evs, you do this where you build an
expensive thing that few people buy.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
So you have the idea of applying this framework to fusion,
which is quite different. Right, there are all these other people,
people who are raising lots of money to go straight
at making electricity basically right, make the energy. Yeah, Like
why I don't know, Like why is anybody else doing
(12:21):
it the way you're doing it?
Speaker 2 (12:23):
I think there's a there's it's a very exciting proposition
to be able to go straight to energy. It's it's
very inviting and it sounds very appealing and even if
the odds are long, But I don't know how many
of them have really spent time critically thinking about the
engineering challenges. And that's where my education was just different,
Like that's all we thought about. Like all we thought
(12:43):
about were the engineering.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
Challenges and how to overcome them.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
Like these were university people that are super optimistic, right,
like yeah, and we worked like we developed materials for
first walls and things like that. But like everything we
did till broke really fast and it was really expensive stuff.
So you know, it's just that was different for a
different experience for me, different formative experience for me than
(13:07):
for a lot of people who are trying to go
straight to the end.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Now.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
I do think there are some innovative concepts out there,
you know that if they work, and I say if
because the physics is far from proven, but if they work,
they could simplify a lot of the engineering challenges. But
the main concepts we know that are likely to work
will run into these challenges. They're very, very significant.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Meaning that even if the physics work, actually building a
thing at a reasonable cost is going to be super hard.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
Yeah, I think that's that's my view.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
So you actually did start a business and are selling things, right, yes,
using fusions to do stuff that people will pay for.
So let's talk about that. Let's talk about where the
company is today, and then we can talk about where
you're about to be, and then we can talk about
where hopefully you'll be in some number of decades. What
are you sell them today?
Speaker 3 (13:55):
We sell neutrons, and neutrons took.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
Me a little while when I started, and then I thought, well,
you know, I buy electrons. I buy electrons every time
I turn on a left switch. Right, I'm just to
buying electrons. Tell me about the new neutron business, like,
what does that mean?
Speaker 3 (14:10):
Yeah, and I'll translate it. So we sell fusion.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
We just sell fusion to the highest bidders, and the
highest bidders are not people who buy energy. And so
it turns out the easiest fusion reaction to do is
DT fusion, and DT fusion produces energy on the one hand,
but it produces neutrons on the other, and when sold
to certain customers, the neutrons are far more valuable than
(14:34):
the energy.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
So, just to be clear, DT fusion is just two
different isotopes of hydrogen, right, And they may tum helium
and then they throw off some number of neutrons, which
is just the neutral nuclear particle. And you're saying, there's
people who actually have a use for neutrons, yes, okay.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
Yeah, it turns out and they'll pay a ton for
it and so uh. And generally the historical neutron sources
for these are very specialized fission reactors, so research reactors.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
Okay, so more traditional nuclear reactor.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Because fission reactors throw off neutrons too, and as we've
talked about already, fissions much easier than fusion from a
science perspective. And so there's these old reactors that serve
these industries. But the research reactor fleet that we built
in the past is old.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
It's like sixty plus.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
Years old and essentially dying in general. So markets that
have been served by these reactors are losing that capacity.
On top of that, fusion based approaches are much cheaper
than building new reactors, So as you look to replace
the infrastructure, there's a massive edge for fusion there. And
when we looked at the markets, you know, we did
(15:46):
very quick. Like well, everyone else in fusion you probably
talk to is chasing something called Q greater than one,
and that's the ratio of energy out over energy in.
And they want to show that they can make more
energy than they can put into it. That's the fundamental
fusion dream, right sure, but they don't even think, you know,
most of them aren't really even seriously thinking about the economics.
(16:06):
They're saying, first we need to get to net energy
and then we'll worry about net economics. For me, you
know that I couldn't see a way to scale fusion
unless we were worried about net economics right away, and
if we wanted to practice, we needed to have positive
net economics right away. So we are our core metric
was q economic. And so how do we get more
dollars out than dollars in?
Speaker 1 (16:28):
Which is the classic business question? Yes, every business needs
to answer to survive. How could our revenues be greater
than our costs?
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Yeah, and that's how we have seen deep tech scale,
right Like that is the playbook by which it's scale.
So we pursued that, and you know, we found actually customers.
So you know, if you do a kill, what our effusion?
If you produce a kill, what our fusion heat? And
you can sell that for five cents. Let's say if
you if you took the same neutrons generated by that
killow what hour of fusion reactions? There are customers who
(16:58):
would pay two hundred thousand dollars for it.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
Huh. And so that's a massive difference.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
And so are you in fact selling those neutrons for
two hundred thousand dollars?
Speaker 3 (17:06):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (17:06):
Now is that your business?
Speaker 3 (17:07):
We are?
Speaker 1 (17:08):
And who is buying them? And what are they doing
with them.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Yeah, so they're making airplanes safer. You know, they're making
rockets more reliable.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
What is the link between buying neutrons from you and
making airplanes safer?
Speaker 3 (17:20):
All right?
Speaker 2 (17:21):
So modern engines and jet aircraft operate to get very
high efficiency and very high power.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
They operate in a really high temperature.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
In fact, they operate like twenty percent above the melting
point of the blades in the engine.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
I'm glad I didn't know that.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
And now I'm going to tell you something that gets
even more scary.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
So the way they manage that is they suck cold
air in from the front of the engine and they
pipe it through a series of cooling tubes in each fin,
like embedded in each fin. And the manufacturing process is
such that it's fairly common that one of these cooling
tubes is blocked, okay, And if it's blocked, it will melt,
it will imbalance the engine and possibly destroy it. And
(17:59):
so we don't want that to happen truly, but with
modern materials, and those are materials that X ray or ultrasound.
Speaker 3 (18:07):
Do not interact with heavily. So if you try to
see inside these things with conventional techniques, you cannot see
the defect.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
So just to be clear, you make this engine and
then you want to look inside to make sure that
these cooling tubes are not blocked so that it doesn't
melt and the plane crashes. And so you think, well,
we could use extra A or ultra sound too common technologies,
but you're saying those don't work. But there's some way
you can shoot neutrons at it and see inside of it.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there is so.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
So neutrons have you know, they have a characteristic of
There are certain isotopes, so certain materials in nature that
absorb neutrons like crazy, like okay, and you can put
them where you want them to be. So, for example,
with jet engine blades, we just push a liquid solution
containing a material known as gadolinium into the blade and
(18:57):
then we blow it out where there and if the
channel's blocked, it doesn't blow out, so the gatoleinium sits
in there and then we hit it with neutrons and
any neutron that comes close to that gatoleinium gets absorbed,
and then behind the blade you put a piece of
film that's sensitive to neutrons. It's a little more complex
than that and you can see it and you can
see it.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
It's like an X ray, it's like a neutron. X
rays you see.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
The inside of stuff, but neutrons can see things X
ray can't, and it's actually very complementary. X ray is
good at generally heavy materials. Neutrons are generally good at
seeing light materials.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
And so are you in that business now?
Speaker 3 (19:34):
We are. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
Yeah, We'll do tens of thousands of parts, you know,
in a year, and we're replacing essentially age capacity. So
the biggest imaging reactor in the United States shut down
about two years ago, was run by GE And so
there's this nice tailwin for share acquisition here. It's not
just a way for us to make money in fusion,
but a lot of the customers sort of just come
(19:57):
to us proactively because they're very worried about the future
of the supply chain.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Uh huh. So they send you the blades. You have
a facility, they send you the blades.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
They do, and we give them back pictures with the blades.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Yeah, okay, so that's the business you're in. It seems
like the next big step is getting into the medical
isotope business.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Right, You're building a yeah, yeah, okay, and just on
the other thing, there are many others.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
So turbine blades are just one application.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
There's a lot of other parts and components that we validate,
including radiation hardness testing and electronics, et cetera. But yeah,
the next step, and it required a huge reduction in
the cost per neutron. We had to get the cost
per neutron down one thousandfold to make the next step work.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
So this is important right now. The whole arc you're
trying to follow is like, let's do one thing where
we can make a lot of money, and then let's
do the next thing where they'll actually pay us less.
So we have to figure out how to do it
a thousand times cheaper for it to be profitable.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Yeah, but they'll buy a lot more neutrons, and so
the market opportunity is actually, you know, let's call it
ten to twenty times larger than the test opportunity in total.
Speaker 3 (21:06):
And so even though they're paying you less, they're buying
so many more utrons that you know, you make more money.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
We'll be back in just a minute. The next step
for Shine for Gregg's company is to start using neutrons
to create medical isotopes. Medical isotopes, as it turns out,
(21:37):
are widely used in medical imaging. To get into that business,
Shine is building what's basically a factory that's going to
use fusion to create medical isotopes. They call the factory Chrysalis.
And Greg and I were talking on video and at
this point in the conversation he mentioned that you could
actually see Chrysalis out the window behind him.
Speaker 3 (21:59):
And this is Chrysalis behind me, by the way.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Okay, so, and it's not a picture for people who
are listening. It's like out there, there's a bunch of
grass and there's a bill thing. Just it looks like
a rectangle, a cement rectangle over your shoulder.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
That's over half a billion dollars of invested capital, is
what it.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
Over cement rectangle. So tell me about what's going on
in there. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
So, essentially, we needed to get the cost per neutron down.
We did. We demonstrated that back in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
And what we knew we could do then is if
we got it that cheap, instead of using neutrons just
to examine material.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
We can use it to change material.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Okay, in a sense that nuclear engineers call it transmutation,
but like the common population would think of it as alchemy,
you can use neutrons to turn low value materials into
I'm going to call them hyper valuable materials and I'll
tell you why in just a second. So at small scale,
the most interesting markets for these are in medicine, producing
isotopes used for medicine.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Which turns out to be wildly common, right, like medical
isotopes I learned, you know researching for this show are
like what tens of thousands of people a day in
the US are tested with medical.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Fifty million per year around the world. Yeah, yeah, so
they're super common. And again, just like in the testing
business where we're replacing fission reactors, that's how isotopes have
been made in the past.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
So old research.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
Reactors around sixty years old, and you know they're dying, right,
like the infrastructure is going away, and so it's the
same tail when we just needed to get fusion a
lot cheaper to do it.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
And is it right that in a kind of crude way,
the use is analogous in many cases that that medical
isotopes are used for scanning, but you're scanning people instead
of jet airplane blades.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
Yeah, the mechanism is a little bit different, so, but
it's the same idea, right, like so, and it fits
our whole theme of illumination around the company, right In
one case, we're illuminating defects here, we're illuminating disease.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
Eventually will be illuminating the planet, right with good.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
That's good metaphor.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Yeah, yeah, but you know, so what you do is
you've got enough neutrends now that you can turn. You
can change materials, so you can take things that are
really stable, like uranium. You buy it for six dollars
a gram, turn it into an imaging isotope molybdenum ninety nine,
which is worth like one hundred and fifty million dollars
a gram presuly.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
People buy it in very very very small pounce.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
Yeah they do, but you know it's a dose for
a patient is like one tenth of one microgram, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
I mean if it's one hundred and fifty million a
gram and you're making it in a five hundred million
dollar building, you don't have to make much of it
exactly to deeve your cost of capital.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Yeah, And Krystalist will produce a few grams per year
that's it.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Wow, that's extraordinary. So it's like like a few grams
is like a little cup, not even just like a
sugar spoonful sugar package.
Speaker 3 (24:44):
You dump in your coffee.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
That's a few grams, but that's millions of doses.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Yeah, yeah, so one gram is ten million doses is
essentially that I think about it.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
That is wild. Can we just just have that be
wild for one moment? Okay?
Speaker 3 (24:56):
Go on?
Speaker 2 (24:57):
So you know, for in the US, for example, most
of the testing is to look at blood flow in
the heart. If you're having chest pain, doctors will give
you this test to see if your arteries are blocked
or where the muscle is receiving blood and where it's not,
and but also for staging cancer. And there's probably another
two dozen tests all that use this on a skin.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
So that's what you're going to be making. Like, tell
me about the tell me about the business end of chrysalis,
of that facility over your should, Like what's it look
like in there where you're actually doing the fusion.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
So there's a bunch of machines. So there'll be six
fusion machines in Chrysalis. They're built and they're you know,
they're being installed and they are surrounded. So there's a
there's a tube in which the particle beam comes down
and it strikes tritium and makes fusion reactions, and the
neutrons come out in all directions, and we've surrounded that
to with The uranium target is uranium dissolved in water,
(25:51):
and as the neutrons hit it, they cause it to
split and we get isotopes that are useful for medicine,
things like molibdidum ninety nine, iodine one thirty one, which
is used to treat cancer, xenon one thirty three, which
is used to image brain and heart.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
So you're actually using fusion to drive a fission reaction
that make the thing that you want precisely. Yeah, it's
like a nuclear turned ducan, yeah, versus.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
Using fission to drive a fission reaction. And the difference
is cost. If you were to look at building a
new research reactor to do what Chrysalis does, you're probably
at something like five to ten times the cost when
it's all said and done. So fusion turns out to
be much cheaper and much safer, and it produces about,
you know, somewhere between one and five percent the radioactive
(26:34):
waste of a reactor, so much much cleaner.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
And is it right that there have actually been shortages
of the isotope that you're going.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
To be making all the time. Yeah, it goes, and
it's been going on for fifteen years.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
And so how close are you to opening what has
to happen? There's a building behind you, but it's not
on yet.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
Right, the equipment is almost all entirely here in Jamesville.
We need to install it, we need to commission it,
and then we need to start pushing product out of it.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
When are you going to get the first neutron? I
won't say out the door, but you know when you're
gonna get the When you're going to make the first neutron?
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Well, the first neutrons are actually like being made in
a smaller building to the side that we used to practice.
But the first isotopes should be made in about eighteen months.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
Okay, so like end of next year, yeah, I think.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
And there's a big difference between first isotope produced and
actually commercial readiness.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
Yeah. Well, and your whole thing is techno economics, right,
the first isotope produced where the unit economics are profitable
for you?
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Yes, you know, and I would say that's probably more
likely two years. But this is a plant that no
one's ever built before with technology that we have tested
in the lab. But you know when you build a
working machine that has thousands of moving parts and we've
derisked all the.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
Home Yeah, I'm totally willing to believe that it won't work.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
Oh, it will work, But the things that are going
to break and burn us are like you know well.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
Or that it won't be economical, right, like, nobody has
ever done anything like what you are doing before.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
Yeah, it'll be economical.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
I think the question is for me is like I'm
worried about things like valves. We have hundreds of valves
in this plant, and they might have a very low
failure rate, right Like, but if the failure rates one
percent on hundreds of valves, you're going to have a
lot of problems.
Speaker 1 (28:08):
You got always is going to have broken falst This
is your engineering training.
Speaker 3 (28:12):
Yeah, it's exactly right. Like I've got an earlier models.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
And a Tesla, an old Tesla.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
Yeah, Yeah, the motor runs fantastically. The car is still
super fun to drive. It's got one hundred and seventy
thousand miles on it. But I've replaced the door handles
like it feels like a dozen times, and it's not
fun when you suddenly can't.
Speaker 3 (28:28):
Get in your car and you've got to like use
a credit card to which oh.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
Look, how fancy the door handles are. Just make regular
door handles, man.
Speaker 3 (28:35):
And they went back to that. Actually they learned a
lesson there. But that's what's going to hit us.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
So I think as we think about that thing, like
really producing reliably, I tell people probably two years as
sort of the soonest, and it could be three right
like it, it could be somewhere in that range.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
That's the current staff. Yeah, I want to get to
the big dream. How many steps between making medical isotopes
and creating a cheap and abundant power for all of humanity?
Speaker 3 (29:01):
Yeah, and by the way, our steps are like pragmatic,
not dogmatic.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
So it's nice.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
But they've held so like if there are new market
applications that come up, definitely we'll look too.
Speaker 3 (29:10):
Include we won't.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
Hold you to it. I promise I won't hold you
to your forward looking sayments. Yeah, but they have.
Speaker 3 (29:15):
Held for the last fifteen years.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Yeah, I guess is something I can say with confidence.
So the next step is to do this transmutation, right,
changing one material into another at a larger scale, and
we can use that to solve one of the biggest
problems with fission energy. So again you can see us
starting to come into the fission world a little bit here.
And one of the things that we should be doing
(29:37):
as a nation is we should be recycling all of
our nuclear waste.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
We have a lot of nuclear waste. For a while,
we were going to bury it all in a mountain
in Nevada, but people in Nevada didn't like that idea.
So it's still just sort of sitting around everywhere, and
it'll be sitting around for millions of years the right
order of magnitude if we don't do something minute.
Speaker 3 (29:54):
I think that's right. And the problem with that is
it's just loaded with value.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
Right, people worry about it. But also look look at
all this energy that's just sitting there ready to be harvested.
Speaker 3 (30:03):
Yeah, so why not solve two problems at once. Right,
it's not super safe wor it.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
I mean it's pretty safe for it is, but if
somebody wanted to do something to it, they might be
able to. Yeah, a lot of it's plutonium, which is
stuff that if you worked and you processed it enough,
you could turn into nuclear weapons. So we should be
eliminating that hazard and at the same time we can
solve a strategic fuel supply.
Speaker 3 (30:23):
Issue for us.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
Now that our relationship with rushes and not so good.
You know, they were the source of a lot of
the uranium that we put into our fission reactors. But
if we recycle all of our spent fuel, essentially we
can become totally independent of any other nation for our
own fission energy needs. And the great part is the
more fission reactors we burn, the more recycled fuel we have.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
So it just scales with the number of plants.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
And so you have a sort of clear technological line
to using your fusion reactors to do what to get
energy out of spent fuel from fission plants? Like, what
do you actually do there?
Speaker 2 (31:00):
We'll take spent fuel, will dissolve it into a liquid form,
will separate out valuable materials that includes uranium and plutonium,
which should go back into the reactor. So close loop
close the fuel cycle with fission, will separate out other
things precious metals, rare earth elements that have decayed enough
to sell, and then you're left with this very small
(31:20):
waste stream, like it's less than.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
Five percent of the original.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
Almost all of that has relatively short half lives decades
or less, and a little bit of it has these
really long problematic half lives million year plus isotopes. That's
the only place fusion comes in. It solves that problem.
So fusion neutrons can transmute. Just like we use them
to turn low value into high value, we can use
(31:44):
them to turn long half life into short half life.
And one great example I like to use is id
ON one twenty nine. Waste product from fission lives over
ten million years, over ten million year half life.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
Which is bad. It's going to be radioactive forever forever.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Yeah, And you hit it with a fusion neutron though
it becomes id ON one twenty eight. Id ON one
twenty eight has a twenty five minute half life, after
which it becomes stable. You put it in salt, yeah,
you could right, like you could eat it.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
So you do this process with fusion and you solve
the problem with the long lived waste. So we want
to do that two steps, and we know how because
we're already doing both of those processes and chrysalis. So
as we look to scaling to a waste recycling plant,
we've already got essentially a prototype for it here, and
you know we're going to build on that. It's the
(32:34):
same part of the regulatory code that would license a
recycling plant, same type of construction, everything.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
Yeah, so that one is obviously complicated on multiple dimensions, right,
I mean you have to whatever the technical side is.
It's the technical side, but presumably you're dealing with nuclear waste,
there's going to be a whole like political regulatory side.
That's what is that a decade? When you think about that,
ten years, twenty, like, that's a long game already, right,
But the political.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
Winds are changing, and I'm not talking about because of
the current administration.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
No, the world is becoming more pro nuclear you know,
basically non partisan way.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
But people are starting to learn that you shouldn't think
an absolutely right like, are you more afraid of climate
change or are you more afraid of the very very
small risk posed by nuclear energy? Yes, And anyone who
thinks about it from a mathematical perspective very quickly comes
to Wow, climate change is going to hurt way more
people than nuclear energy ever, will.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
Even particulate emissions from you know, certainly coal plants are
wildly more dangerous than a.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
Physicially yeah, absolutely, And if you look at like coastal
flooding and stuff like that, multiply that by like tens
or hundreds of times in terms of impacted people.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
So okay, so you're saying the political still, it's going
to be it's going to take a while, and it's
going to be hard despite the political shifts you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
Yeah, well see, you know, the US has had a
long term policy band on recycling spent fuel, you know,
but new executive orders that just came out are challenging that.
So I'm trying to reinvigorate the nuclear industry. I mean,
when you think you're going to do it twenty thirty two, okay,
not ten years, but not too far off of ten
years in a pilot plant, okay, because we want to
(34:04):
prove the economics first.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
And then can we get to the big dream after
that part? When do we get to free energy for
all of humanity?
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Now?
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Are we ready?
Speaker 3 (34:12):
So?
Speaker 2 (34:12):
The cool thing is as you look at like these
fusion systems that you use for recycling, to spend fuel.
They look technologically very much like fusion power plants, but
you're still getting paid at least twenty times as much
per reaction and they don't need to operate ninety nine
point nine nine percent of the time because you know,
people freak out if a city loses power for good reason.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
Yeah, if you slow down.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
Recycling a material that has a ten million year half life,
no big deal, right, Like you fix the machine, you
get to learn, and you get to move forward.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
So, and we're going to have.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
To build dozens, if not hundreds of these fusion systems
to solve the global problem with nuclear waste. So through
economy of scale and through practice on a much more
forgiving environment where you're getting paid more per neutron, we
think we can get that next you know, that next
factor of ten or so that you need to be
cost competitive and drive and the fusion engine.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
So really, in your mind, the recycling nuclear waste is
like a sort of a straight line. It just ramps
right up to just generating energy.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
Yes, in my mind, and this is very hard for
a lot of people to gress, but it really is
exactly that. So I'm glad that you I'm glad that
you put that together right away, because it is.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
That so the sort of fusion reaction you would be
running in that context, it's the kind of thing that well,
let's let's go back to Q. Let's go back to
this idea of getting more energy out than you put in,
right like in that setting, how does that happen that
at some point in the future somebody has to do that?
Speaker 3 (35:37):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (35:37):
Yeah, yeah, And I know that's not your primary goal,
and it's a compelling case for why that's not your
primary goal. But like, do you get to that just
by incremental engineering tweaks? Are you ever gonna have to
like have some you know, physics level technological insight or
do you just think you can keep optimizing and optimizing
what you're doing and you'll sort of eventually get to
(35:57):
more energy out than you put in.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
Now we'll need we'll need we'll need physics optimization too.
Like so, and even going from phase one to Phase two,
it was it was new technology. Yeah, but the truth
is through practice and building over time, it's a different
path and you have a different technology evolution path than
trying to go straight to the endgame. And so and
it's pragmatic, right, You're always building systems that are doing
work for customers, and so it's cost effective built into
(36:21):
the model, and it's pragmatic built into the model, and
that's just how you design new technology. But what I'll
say is, we have our own technology that we like
for scaling into phase three, recycling and ultimately energy. But
I'm the only fusion company that will say this, I
don't think it's more than ten percent likely to be successful,
and I don't think any given technology probably is. And
(36:42):
so what I do know, though, is we're going to
have an amazing delivery engine that can manufacture fusion systems
at scale, and whatever technology is successful, I know we
will have a role to play in bringing this economically
to the world.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
When you say you don't think it's more than ten
percent likely to be successful, you mean the particular technology
you are betting on using. Yeah, you think it's very
unlikely that it will work to put out more energy
than you put into it. It probably won't. It probably
won't do that. And to be clear, cost effective effectively right, Yeah,
for electricity, Yes, But you're saying you're learning all of
these things about the engineering, about the nuts and bolts
(37:15):
that will be relevant no matter whose technology works exactly.
Let me ask you this. I feel like, if you
think your technology probably won't work, you you must hope
somebody else's will, right, Like, if somebody else does it
before you do it, will you be happy? Will that
be good in your mind?
Speaker 3 (37:32):
Yes, it would be fantastic.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
And it's kind of funny because you know it's becoming
a competitive world in the fusion space, and like, I'm
cheering for everybody I love. Really, i would love to
see anyone be successful and moving forward. And look, we're
going to have an awesome economic and manufacturing engine. We'd
love to work with whatever technology prevails. At the end
of the day, We're going to continue to adapt our
(37:54):
strategy and invest in what looks like it's doing great,
just so we can move fast. But this is a
tool that I want to see in my lifetime come
to humanity. And like that means looking across the page
at everything, just like we looked at fusion holistically, right,
not just the energy. We're not dogmatic to a single
technical approach. We're going to learn a ton in the
next ten years with all this funding going into all
(38:15):
these different approaches, and I'm really really excited to see
what comes out of it.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
Let's finish with the lightning round. What's one thing you
would do if you had free, unlimited power?
Speaker 2 (38:42):
One thing I would do? Well, you know, all goes
back to minority childhood and space and star trek, right, Like,
I'd love to build a series of spacecraft that would
go back and forth from the Earth to Mars and otherwise.
I think, you know, if you've got a fusion engine
that becomes very very fast and very very easy, you know,
this nine month travel time is actually insanely problematic for humans.
(39:04):
The radiation you get up in space is going to
be very damaging over those timeframes. And so you know,
we're even if we start to build a city on Mars,
it's going to be very harmful for people just to
get there and back.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
You think you'll go to space, well, you know, it's funny.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
I used to always want to be an astronaut, but
the the reality of very tiny, closed in capsules is
something that I'm not like super big fan of. So
if we had starships or something a little more spacious,
I'd love to, but not so much in today's way.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
Mean you need you need fusion power to build your
Catillac Big cadillact space.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
Exactly right, exactly right.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
If you weren't working on fusion, what would you be
working on?
Speaker 2 (39:41):
I'd probably also be working on the same thing. I
do think like even with fission, there are ways to
build uh spacecraft that can go to and from the
different planets in the Solar System very cost effectively and
fairly quickly.
Speaker 3 (39:54):
Fusion will be.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
Fast, but we can we can get that.
Speaker 3 (39:56):
We can get the time down to a couple of months,
probably with fission.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
If you go anywhere in the Solar System, where would
you go?
Speaker 3 (40:02):
You're in the Solar System?
Speaker 1 (40:03):
You want to do anywhere in the galaxy? I don't care,
it's just a question.
Speaker 2 (40:06):
Well, yeah, I mean, if you could go anywhere in
the galaxy, it'd be great to go to some place
where you could witness like a supernova happening from close
range without being obliterated. The world's most spectacular fireworks show
would be something to see.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
Greg Pifer is the co founder and CEO of Shine.
Please email us at problem at Pushkin dot fm. We
are always looking for new guests for the show. Today's
show was produced by Trinamanino and Gabriel Hunter Chang, who
was edited by Alexander Garreton and engineered by Sarah Bruguheer.
(40:45):
I'm Jacob Goldstein, and we'll be back next week with
another episode of What's Your Problem.
Pushkin. When did you get the fusion bug? When'd you
fall in love with fusion?
Speaker 2 (00:24):
It probably goes back to middle school or before, you know,
and when a lot of kids would go out and
play on the playground, I'd go to the library and
read about particle accelerators and fusion reactors, and so, you.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Know, I think I think the bug was that pretty early.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
This is Greg Pifer. He's the co founder and CEO
of a company called Shine.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
And I watched shows like Star Trek and you know,
certainly even like Star Trek the Next Generation where my
moral compass was set. H.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Yeah, So like, tell me the fusion dream. I mean,
we'll get to like why. It's going to take a
while and it's hard, but just like, why is fusion
the dream?
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (01:01):
So fusion essentially, it like to me, it represents a
level up moment for humanity. When we can commercially unlock it,
our species will be changed forever. And it's very similar.
It's very akin to when we first started to access
chemical energy through fire.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
So I thought you were going to say fossil fields.
We're just saying that's bigger than fossil fuels. It's fire,
it's it's biggest fire. Yeah, so it's not going to
happen for a long time. But like, what does the
world look like when we get to the fusion dream?
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Yes, so as technology continues to improve, energy becomes cheaper
and cheaper.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Fuel is no longer an issue.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
So fundamentally, today fuel is the issue that would prevent
us from making energy super cheap. We just have to
continue to work to extract fusionis I have that problem?
So technology gets higher, the reactors get cheaper, and and
fusion becomes super cheap. Now we can solve problems that
we couldn't solve before. You know, we can we can
desalinate water on a massive scale, like we can. You know,
(01:50):
we can pull out minerals from the Earth very very carefully.
We can go into space and colonize other planets. We
can make anti matter, right and perhaps have an energy
source that allows us to go to other stars like
Star Trek.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
Yeah, exactly right.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
So that's that's that's always the secret little motivation behind
the scenes.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
I mean, also, I have a three year old daughter,
right like, and I want to give her a world
that's okay to live in.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is What's Your Problem? The
show where I talk to people who are trying to
make technological progress. People who are into technological progress and
who dream big tend to be into fusion, a kind
of nuclear power that could be safer and cheaper than fission,
which is the way we get nuclear power now. By
the way, as you probably know, fusion is fusing atomic
(02:44):
nuclei together and fission is splitting them apart. People have
been working on fusion power for decades, and reliable economic
fusion power is still probably decades away, But in the
past several years, billions of dollars have flowed into a
handful of fusion startups that are using different technologies to
try to make fusion power work. My guest today, Greg Pifer,
(03:08):
is definitely on team fusion. He's been working on it
for decades. But with his company Shine, he's taking a
different approach. Rather than going straight to the dream of
using fusion to create energy, Jine's taking baby steps, or
at least mid sized steps. The company is using fusion
to enter markets that are easier to compete in than
(03:29):
the market for energy. As you'll hear, Shine has already
used fusion to get into the business of scanning jet
engine blades, and the company will soon be in the
healthcare business as well. Later in the interview we'll talk
about all of that and about how Greg hopes those
businesses will eventually lead to that big fusion dream of cheap,
(03:50):
abundant power. But to start, we talked about how Greg
went from being a kid thinking about star Trek to
a grown man starting a fusion company, and in particular
about how that path led Greg to take really a
very different approach than that taken by other people building
fusion companies.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
I took a class actually in college that was taught
by two very inspiring people, one of whom ran something
called the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin,
and another one named Harrison Schmidt, who walked on the Moon.
And they were teaching a class about going into space
and recovering resources, and recovering fusion fuel was one of
the key resources they thought we could extract from from space,
(04:29):
in particular the Moon. And so I got super excited
about fusion because those fuels are if you burn them,
you don't get nuclear waste.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
So the promise of nuclear energy without nuclear waste.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
And these people were doing it like on the front
edge of it got me really excited.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
I actually went to the Moon to bring it back.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
Right, right, Like, these people have done hard things, so
I'm going to go learn with them. Yeah, and so
that got me into fusion. But you know, for me,
it was a different experience. And if I had done
a physics space program in fusion.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Like more practical, more hands on, is that that?
Speaker 3 (05:01):
Yeah, this was an engineering program.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
And the Fusion Technology Institute, which I joined, its mission
was to design viable fusion reactors. It was to say,
let's assume the physics challenges are overcome, how would you
build a real system?
Speaker 3 (05:15):
And that's where over the next few years, I just.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Became a bit depressed, frankly, because even if you master
the physics, it became really clear that the challenge of
commercializing and making heat for five cents per kilo whatot hour,
which is sort of the going rate for it, I
couldn't see.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
A way to do that.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
And it was because you're taking some of the most
exotic materials ever developed by humans and putting them in
the harshest environments ever created by humans, and they don't
live very long, and they're super expensive to make, and
so the idea that we could go straight to five
cents per kilo whatt hour, at least when I was
in school, seemed far fetched.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
So that it's sort of a technoeconomic problem you're thinking of,
not just the technical side, but if people are actually
going to use it, it has to be price competitive.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Okay, so you get sad. You get sad because as
your Star Trek dream doesn't seem like it's going to
come true. And then, as I understand it, you go
to a party and you have your big idea. Is
that true?
Speaker 3 (06:17):
That is the history.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
It was a party at my house and we were
thinking about well, I mean, most people weren't thinking about this,
but I had been working on this problem earlier in
the day, so it was already kind of in my head.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
And it came down to our research. You know.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
I had done work on a specific technology at the
UW where we were trying to make small fusion devices,
and the idea is that there were a number of
applications you could use them for and they didn't work
very well.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
And one of the reasons we discovered they didn't work very.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
Well was we were trying to collide these nuclei in
the same space that we were trying to speed them up.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Okay, so you just shoot them really fast into each
other as the.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Basic Yeah, but the problem is, like, if you're trying
to make something go fast in a highly collisional space
where it's running into stuff a lot, it can't really
speed up. It's banging into stuff and losing energy all
the time. And if you take away that the target
material so that you can accelerate them, then it's not
colliding very much and you don't get a lot of
fusion reactions. So you kind of had to operate in
(07:16):
this worst of both worlds space, and you know, it
was like the revelation was just like, well, why don't
we accelerate in one place and collide in another place?
Speaker 3 (07:24):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (07:24):
I was.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
I was at one point.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
There were all kinds of people standing around with drinks,
and I was sitting in one of our recliners my laptop,
punching numbers into it, and I just actually built a
really quick model to just see what the fusion rate
would do if we did that in theory, and the
numbers came out amazing, like actually it was like, you know,
a thousand times higher than the output we were getting
from our university experiment, and so, you know, like I
(07:49):
quickly disengaged from the party. I called my former advisor
and I'm like, hey, you know if we did this
like the math, and he was like, oh, okay, that's
really cool, Like what do you want me to do?
And I was like, I don't know yet. I got
to figure this out, but I think I'm going to
start a company to.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Go do this.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Were you sober, I probably had had.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
A couple drinks by then.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Actually, so it's amazing that I got the math right,
but I did, or maybe it helped.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Maybe there's like a curve right, maybe there's an optimal
number of efficts.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
There certainly is when it comes to bowling. So why
not nuclear physics as well?
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Yes, so you have this idea. When you have this idea,
do you think, oh, I've solved fusion energy.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
This physics revelation.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
It doesn't overcome the technoeconomic challenge of fusion energy that
I already had. And so that was already like I
had already moved past that, and I was trying to
see if there were ways, like what I had put
in the back of my head, where are there ways
you can make use of fusion, you know that where
you might get paid more for the reaction then you
get paid for energy.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
So tell me about having this idea of like, oh,
maybe there's a way to commercialize fusion to do something
other than generate energy.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
Yeah, So two formative experiences.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
One, my advisor at the Fusion Technology Institute had identified
a family, like, you know, a couple dozen probably applications
where you could use fusion for non electric applications, and
they hadn't really done the economic analysis on any of them,
but they just said, here are some things you can
do with fusion reactions, and those included things like making
medical isotopes or detecting hidden material or you know, contraband material,
(09:27):
detecting nuclear weapons, stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
So, to be clear, those are things that people are
already doing out in the world, right There is a
market for those things. These are existing products. They're just
not using fusion too exactly.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Yeah, super definable markets, you know, and there are supply
chain issues, and it's a good market to get into
if you had an alternative way to make things.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
Okay, So that was interesting.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
And then the other formative experience for me, it was
Actually we had started another company when I was in
grad school that had nothing to do with any of this,
but we were just recovering data from crashed hard drives.
One of my roommates had a hard drive crash. We
looked online. All the options sucked. It was like, pay
us two thousand dollars and we'll try, but maybe we
won't get your stuff back, and it's upfront payment. And
(10:09):
so we decided that was a bad business till we
started a business, and we said we told people, we said, look,
we're just starting this company. We're new at it, but
we'll charge you one hundred bucks if we get your
data and nothing if we don't, and you know, we
might break your stuff. So you'd be surprised how many
people like that better than and then being able to
pay two grand. And so what happened was we got
(10:29):
really really good at it. As we practiced, the volume
we could handle and the throughput we could handle, all
of this scaled really really nicely. And so this was
like just a formative idea for me that like, Okay,
if we can get into a niche with fusion, and
we can find an economic proposition that works, we can
practice and if we practice, we'll get better at it.
And if we get better at it, like our suppliers
(10:51):
and our customers and everyone.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
Will grow with us.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
So we'll move this ecosystem forward. And I really like
that because if you look at some of the most
high tech deep tech industries around, they followed the same roadmap,
you know, if you look at semiconductors and More's law.
It was fueled by having products all along the way. Right,
Like the first computers may have only had a few customers,
they would pay a ton for them, yes, And by
(11:14):
doing that, they got better and they brought the price down,
and then there were new a new set of customers,
right that could afford those computers.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Now more recently, Tesla is the classic model of that.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
Right.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
They started with the Roadster, this super expensive, exactly electric
car that was not for everybody, but enough people bought
it that they could go from the whatever that was
one hundred and fifty thousand dollars car to the seventy
thousand dollars car to the fifty thousand dollars car. Right, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
And I'd argue that the underlying technology for Tesla started
even in other industries. So the ability to scale batteries
even more cheaply, right, Like it's rechargeable batteries. So you
started with toys and special services, and you move to laptops,
and then you move to EV's and even once you
get into evs, you do this where you build an
expensive thing that few people buy.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
So you have the idea of applying this framework to fusion,
which is quite different. Right, there are all these other people,
people who are raising lots of money to go straight
at making electricity basically right, make the energy. Yeah, Like
why I don't know, Like why is anybody else doing
(12:21):
it the way you're doing it?
Speaker 2 (12:23):
I think there's a there's it's a very exciting proposition
to be able to go straight to energy. It's it's
very inviting and it sounds very appealing and even if
the odds are long, But I don't know how many
of them have really spent time critically thinking about the
engineering challenges. And that's where my education was just different,
Like that's all we thought about. Like all we thought
(12:43):
about were the engineering.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
Challenges and how to overcome them.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
Like these were university people that are super optimistic, right,
like yeah, and we worked like we developed materials for
first walls and things like that. But like everything we
did till broke really fast and it was really expensive stuff.
So you know, it's just that was different for a
different experience for me, different formative experience for me than
(13:07):
for a lot of people who are trying to go
straight to the end.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Now.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
I do think there are some innovative concepts out there,
you know that if they work, and I say if
because the physics is far from proven, but if they work,
they could simplify a lot of the engineering challenges. But
the main concepts we know that are likely to work
will run into these challenges. They're very, very significant.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Meaning that even if the physics work, actually building a
thing at a reasonable cost is going to be super hard.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
Yeah, I think that's that's my view.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
So you actually did start a business and are selling things, right, yes,
using fusions to do stuff that people will pay for.
So let's talk about that. Let's talk about where the
company is today, and then we can talk about where
you're about to be, and then we can talk about
where hopefully you'll be in some number of decades. What
are you sell them today?
Speaker 3 (13:55):
We sell neutrons, and neutrons took.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
Me a little while when I started, and then I thought, well,
you know, I buy electrons. I buy electrons every time
I turn on a left switch. Right, I'm just to
buying electrons. Tell me about the new neutron business, like,
what does that mean?
Speaker 3 (14:10):
Yeah, and I'll translate it. So we sell fusion.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
We just sell fusion to the highest bidders, and the
highest bidders are not people who buy energy. And so
it turns out the easiest fusion reaction to do is
DT fusion, and DT fusion produces energy on the one hand,
but it produces neutrons on the other, and when sold
to certain customers, the neutrons are far more valuable than
(14:34):
the energy.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
So, just to be clear, DT fusion is just two
different isotopes of hydrogen, right, And they may tum helium
and then they throw off some number of neutrons, which
is just the neutral nuclear particle. And you're saying, there's
people who actually have a use for neutrons, yes, okay.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
Yeah, it turns out and they'll pay a ton for
it and so uh. And generally the historical neutron sources
for these are very specialized fission reactors, so research reactors.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
Okay, so more traditional nuclear reactor.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Because fission reactors throw off neutrons too, and as we've
talked about already, fissions much easier than fusion from a
science perspective. And so there's these old reactors that serve
these industries. But the research reactor fleet that we built
in the past is old.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
It's like sixty plus.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
Years old and essentially dying in general. So markets that
have been served by these reactors are losing that capacity.
On top of that, fusion based approaches are much cheaper
than building new reactors, So as you look to replace
the infrastructure, there's a massive edge for fusion there. And
when we looked at the markets, you know, we did
(15:46):
very quick. Like well, everyone else in fusion you probably
talk to is chasing something called Q greater than one,
and that's the ratio of energy out over energy in.
And they want to show that they can make more
energy than they can put into it. That's the fundamental
fusion dream, right sure, but they don't even think, you know,
most of them aren't really even seriously thinking about the economics.
(16:06):
They're saying, first we need to get to net energy
and then we'll worry about net economics. For me, you
know that I couldn't see a way to scale fusion
unless we were worried about net economics right away, and
if we wanted to practice, we needed to have positive
net economics right away. So we are our core metric
was q economic. And so how do we get more
dollars out than dollars in?
Speaker 1 (16:28):
Which is the classic business question? Yes, every business needs
to answer to survive. How could our revenues be greater
than our costs?
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Yeah, and that's how we have seen deep tech scale,
right Like that is the playbook by which it's scale.
So we pursued that, and you know, we found actually customers.
So you know, if you do a kill, what our effusion?
If you produce a kill, what our fusion heat? And
you can sell that for five cents. Let's say if
you if you took the same neutrons generated by that
killow what hour of fusion reactions? There are customers who
(16:58):
would pay two hundred thousand dollars for it.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
Huh. And so that's a massive difference.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
And so are you in fact selling those neutrons for
two hundred thousand dollars?
Speaker 3 (17:06):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (17:06):
Now is that your business?
Speaker 3 (17:07):
We are?
Speaker 1 (17:08):
And who is buying them? And what are they doing
with them.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Yeah, so they're making airplanes safer. You know, they're making
rockets more reliable.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
What is the link between buying neutrons from you and
making airplanes safer?
Speaker 3 (17:20):
All right?
Speaker 2 (17:21):
So modern engines and jet aircraft operate to get very
high efficiency and very high power.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
They operate in a really high temperature.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
In fact, they operate like twenty percent above the melting
point of the blades in the engine.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
I'm glad I didn't know that.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
And now I'm going to tell you something that gets
even more scary.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
So the way they manage that is they suck cold
air in from the front of the engine and they
pipe it through a series of cooling tubes in each fin,
like embedded in each fin. And the manufacturing process is
such that it's fairly common that one of these cooling
tubes is blocked, okay, And if it's blocked, it will melt,
it will imbalance the engine and possibly destroy it. And
(17:59):
so we don't want that to happen truly, but with
modern materials, and those are materials that X ray or ultrasound.
Speaker 3 (18:07):
Do not interact with heavily. So if you try to
see inside these things with conventional techniques, you cannot see
the defect.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
So just to be clear, you make this engine and
then you want to look inside to make sure that
these cooling tubes are not blocked so that it doesn't
melt and the plane crashes. And so you think, well,
we could use extra A or ultra sound too common technologies,
but you're saying those don't work. But there's some way
you can shoot neutrons at it and see inside of it.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there is so.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
So neutrons have you know, they have a characteristic of
There are certain isotopes, so certain materials in nature that
absorb neutrons like crazy, like okay, and you can put
them where you want them to be. So, for example,
with jet engine blades, we just push a liquid solution
containing a material known as gadolinium into the blade and
(18:57):
then we blow it out where there and if the
channel's blocked, it doesn't blow out, so the gatoleinium sits
in there and then we hit it with neutrons and
any neutron that comes close to that gatoleinium gets absorbed,
and then behind the blade you put a piece of
film that's sensitive to neutrons. It's a little more complex
than that and you can see it and you can
see it.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
It's like an X ray, it's like a neutron. X
rays you see.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
The inside of stuff, but neutrons can see things X
ray can't, and it's actually very complementary. X ray is
good at generally heavy materials. Neutrons are generally good at
seeing light materials.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
And so are you in that business now?
Speaker 3 (19:34):
We are. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
Yeah, We'll do tens of thousands of parts, you know,
in a year, and we're replacing essentially age capacity. So
the biggest imaging reactor in the United States shut down
about two years ago, was run by GE And so
there's this nice tailwin for share acquisition here. It's not
just a way for us to make money in fusion,
but a lot of the customers sort of just come
(19:57):
to us proactively because they're very worried about the future
of the supply chain.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Uh huh. So they send you the blades. You have
a facility, they send you the blades.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
They do, and we give them back pictures with the blades.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Yeah, okay, so that's the business you're in. It seems
like the next big step is getting into the medical
isotope business.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Right, You're building a yeah, yeah, okay, and just on
the other thing, there are many others.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
So turbine blades are just one application.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
There's a lot of other parts and components that we validate,
including radiation hardness testing and electronics, et cetera. But yeah,
the next step, and it required a huge reduction in
the cost per neutron. We had to get the cost
per neutron down one thousandfold to make the next step work.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
So this is important right now. The whole arc you're
trying to follow is like, let's do one thing where
we can make a lot of money, and then let's
do the next thing where they'll actually pay us less.
So we have to figure out how to do it
a thousand times cheaper for it to be profitable.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Yeah, but they'll buy a lot more neutrons, and so
the market opportunity is actually, you know, let's call it
ten to twenty times larger than the test opportunity in total.
Speaker 3 (21:06):
And so even though they're paying you less, they're buying
so many more utrons that you know, you make more money.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
We'll be back in just a minute. The next step
for Shine for Gregg's company is to start using neutrons
to create medical isotopes. Medical isotopes, as it turns out,
(21:37):
are widely used in medical imaging. To get into that business,
Shine is building what's basically a factory that's going to
use fusion to create medical isotopes. They call the factory Chrysalis.
And Greg and I were talking on video and at
this point in the conversation he mentioned that you could
actually see Chrysalis out the window behind him.
Speaker 3 (21:59):
And this is Chrysalis behind me, by the way.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Okay, so, and it's not a picture for people who
are listening. It's like out there, there's a bunch of
grass and there's a bill thing. Just it looks like
a rectangle, a cement rectangle over your shoulder.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
That's over half a billion dollars of invested capital, is
what it.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
Over cement rectangle. So tell me about what's going on
in there. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
So, essentially, we needed to get the cost per neutron down.
We did. We demonstrated that back in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
And what we knew we could do then is if
we got it that cheap, instead of using neutrons just
to examine material.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
We can use it to change material.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Okay, in a sense that nuclear engineers call it transmutation,
but like the common population would think of it as alchemy,
you can use neutrons to turn low value materials into
I'm going to call them hyper valuable materials and I'll
tell you why in just a second. So at small scale,
the most interesting markets for these are in medicine, producing
isotopes used for medicine.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Which turns out to be wildly common, right, like medical
isotopes I learned, you know researching for this show are
like what tens of thousands of people a day in
the US are tested with medical.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Fifty million per year around the world. Yeah, yeah, so
they're super common. And again, just like in the testing
business where we're replacing fission reactors, that's how isotopes have
been made in the past.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
So old research.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
Reactors around sixty years old, and you know they're dying, right,
like the infrastructure is going away, and so it's the
same tail when we just needed to get fusion a
lot cheaper to do it.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
And is it right that in a kind of crude way,
the use is analogous in many cases that that medical
isotopes are used for scanning, but you're scanning people instead
of jet airplane blades.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
Yeah, the mechanism is a little bit different, so, but
it's the same idea, right, like so, and it fits
our whole theme of illumination around the company, right In
one case, we're illuminating defects here, we're illuminating disease.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
Eventually will be illuminating the planet, right with good.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
That's good metaphor.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Yeah, yeah, but you know, so what you do is
you've got enough neutrends now that you can turn. You
can change materials, so you can take things that are
really stable, like uranium. You buy it for six dollars
a gram, turn it into an imaging isotope molybdenum ninety nine,
which is worth like one hundred and fifty million dollars
a gram presuly.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
People buy it in very very very small pounce.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
Yeah they do, but you know it's a dose for
a patient is like one tenth of one microgram, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
I mean if it's one hundred and fifty million a
gram and you're making it in a five hundred million
dollar building, you don't have to make much of it
exactly to deeve your cost of capital.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Yeah, And Krystalist will produce a few grams per year
that's it.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Wow, that's extraordinary. So it's like like a few grams
is like a little cup, not even just like a
sugar spoonful sugar package.
Speaker 3 (24:44):
You dump in your coffee.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
That's a few grams, but that's millions of doses.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Yeah, yeah, so one gram is ten million doses is
essentially that I think about it.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
That is wild. Can we just just have that be
wild for one moment? Okay?
Speaker 3 (24:56):
Go on?
Speaker 2 (24:57):
So you know, for in the US, for example, most
of the testing is to look at blood flow in
the heart. If you're having chest pain, doctors will give
you this test to see if your arteries are blocked
or where the muscle is receiving blood and where it's not,
and but also for staging cancer. And there's probably another
two dozen tests all that use this on a skin.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
So that's what you're going to be making. Like, tell
me about the tell me about the business end of chrysalis,
of that facility over your should, Like what's it look
like in there where you're actually doing the fusion.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
So there's a bunch of machines. So there'll be six
fusion machines in Chrysalis. They're built and they're you know,
they're being installed and they are surrounded. So there's a
there's a tube in which the particle beam comes down
and it strikes tritium and makes fusion reactions, and the
neutrons come out in all directions, and we've surrounded that
to with The uranium target is uranium dissolved in water,
(25:51):
and as the neutrons hit it, they cause it to
split and we get isotopes that are useful for medicine,
things like molibdidum ninety nine, iodine one thirty one, which
is used to treat cancer, xenon one thirty three, which
is used to image brain and heart.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
So you're actually using fusion to drive a fission reaction
that make the thing that you want precisely. Yeah, it's
like a nuclear turned ducan, yeah, versus.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
Using fission to drive a fission reaction. And the difference
is cost. If you were to look at building a
new research reactor to do what Chrysalis does, you're probably
at something like five to ten times the cost when
it's all said and done. So fusion turns out to
be much cheaper and much safer, and it produces about,
you know, somewhere between one and five percent the radioactive
(26:34):
waste of a reactor, so much much cleaner.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
And is it right that there have actually been shortages
of the isotope that you're going.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
To be making all the time. Yeah, it goes, and
it's been going on for fifteen years.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
And so how close are you to opening what has
to happen? There's a building behind you, but it's not
on yet.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
Right, the equipment is almost all entirely here in Jamesville.
We need to install it, we need to commission it,
and then we need to start pushing product out of it.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
When are you going to get the first neutron? I
won't say out the door, but you know when you're
gonna get the When you're going to make the first neutron?
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Well, the first neutrons are actually like being made in
a smaller building to the side that we used to practice.
But the first isotopes should be made in about eighteen months.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
Okay, so like end of next year, yeah, I think.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
And there's a big difference between first isotope produced and
actually commercial readiness.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
Yeah. Well, and your whole thing is techno economics, right,
the first isotope produced where the unit economics are profitable
for you?
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Yes, you know, and I would say that's probably more
likely two years. But this is a plant that no
one's ever built before with technology that we have tested
in the lab. But you know when you build a
working machine that has thousands of moving parts and we've
derisked all the.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
Home Yeah, I'm totally willing to believe that it won't work.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
Oh, it will work, But the things that are going
to break and burn us are like you know well.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
Or that it won't be economical, right, like, nobody has
ever done anything like what you are doing before.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
Yeah, it'll be economical.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
I think the question is for me is like I'm
worried about things like valves. We have hundreds of valves
in this plant, and they might have a very low
failure rate, right Like, but if the failure rates one
percent on hundreds of valves, you're going to have a
lot of problems.
Speaker 1 (28:08):
You got always is going to have broken falst This
is your engineering training.
Speaker 3 (28:12):
Yeah, it's exactly right. Like I've got an earlier models.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
And a Tesla, an old Tesla.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
Yeah, Yeah, the motor runs fantastically. The car is still
super fun to drive. It's got one hundred and seventy
thousand miles on it. But I've replaced the door handles
like it feels like a dozen times, and it's not
fun when you suddenly can't.
Speaker 3 (28:28):
Get in your car and you've got to like use
a credit card to which oh.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
Look, how fancy the door handles are. Just make regular
door handles, man.
Speaker 3 (28:35):
And they went back to that. Actually they learned a
lesson there. But that's what's going to hit us.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
So I think as we think about that thing, like
really producing reliably, I tell people probably two years as
sort of the soonest, and it could be three right
like it, it could be somewhere in that range.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
That's the current staff. Yeah, I want to get to
the big dream. How many steps between making medical isotopes
and creating a cheap and abundant power for all of humanity?
Speaker 3 (29:01):
Yeah, and by the way, our steps are like pragmatic,
not dogmatic.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
So it's nice.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
But they've held so like if there are new market
applications that come up, definitely we'll look too.
Speaker 3 (29:10):
Include we won't.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
Hold you to it. I promise I won't hold you
to your forward looking sayments. Yeah, but they have.
Speaker 3 (29:15):
Held for the last fifteen years.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Yeah, I guess is something I can say with confidence.
So the next step is to do this transmutation, right,
changing one material into another at a larger scale, and
we can use that to solve one of the biggest
problems with fission energy. So again you can see us
starting to come into the fission world a little bit here.
And one of the things that we should be doing
(29:37):
as a nation is we should be recycling all of
our nuclear waste.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
We have a lot of nuclear waste. For a while,
we were going to bury it all in a mountain
in Nevada, but people in Nevada didn't like that idea.
So it's still just sort of sitting around everywhere, and
it'll be sitting around for millions of years the right
order of magnitude if we don't do something minute.
Speaker 3 (29:54):
I think that's right. And the problem with that is
it's just loaded with value.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
Right, people worry about it. But also look look at
all this energy that's just sitting there ready to be harvested.
Speaker 3 (30:03):
Yeah, so why not solve two problems at once. Right,
it's not super safe wor it.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
I mean it's pretty safe for it is, but if
somebody wanted to do something to it, they might be
able to. Yeah, a lot of it's plutonium, which is
stuff that if you worked and you processed it enough,
you could turn into nuclear weapons. So we should be
eliminating that hazard and at the same time we can
solve a strategic fuel supply.
Speaker 3 (30:23):
Issue for us.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
Now that our relationship with rushes and not so good.
You know, they were the source of a lot of
the uranium that we put into our fission reactors. But
if we recycle all of our spent fuel, essentially we
can become totally independent of any other nation for our
own fission energy needs. And the great part is the
more fission reactors we burn, the more recycled fuel we have.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
So it just scales with the number of plants.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
And so you have a sort of clear technological line
to using your fusion reactors to do what to get
energy out of spent fuel from fission plants? Like, what
do you actually do there?
Speaker 2 (31:00):
We'll take spent fuel, will dissolve it into a liquid form,
will separate out valuable materials that includes uranium and plutonium,
which should go back into the reactor. So close loop
close the fuel cycle with fission, will separate out other
things precious metals, rare earth elements that have decayed enough
to sell, and then you're left with this very small
(31:20):
waste stream, like it's less than.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
Five percent of the original.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
Almost all of that has relatively short half lives decades
or less, and a little bit of it has these
really long problematic half lives million year plus isotopes. That's
the only place fusion comes in. It solves that problem.
So fusion neutrons can transmute. Just like we use them
to turn low value into high value, we can use
(31:44):
them to turn long half life into short half life.
And one great example I like to use is id
ON one twenty nine. Waste product from fission lives over
ten million years, over ten million year half life.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
Which is bad. It's going to be radioactive forever forever.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Yeah, And you hit it with a fusion neutron though
it becomes id ON one twenty eight. Id ON one
twenty eight has a twenty five minute half life, after
which it becomes stable. You put it in salt, yeah,
you could right, like you could eat it.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
So you do this process with fusion and you solve
the problem with the long lived waste. So we want
to do that two steps, and we know how because
we're already doing both of those processes and chrysalis. So
as we look to scaling to a waste recycling plant,
we've already got essentially a prototype for it here, and
you know we're going to build on that. It's the
(32:34):
same part of the regulatory code that would license a
recycling plant, same type of construction, everything.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
Yeah, so that one is obviously complicated on multiple dimensions, right,
I mean you have to whatever the technical side is.
It's the technical side, but presumably you're dealing with nuclear waste,
there's going to be a whole like political regulatory side.
That's what is that a decade? When you think about that,
ten years, twenty, like, that's a long game already, right,
But the political.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
Winds are changing, and I'm not talking about because of
the current administration.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
No, the world is becoming more pro nuclear you know,
basically non partisan way.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
But people are starting to learn that you shouldn't think
an absolutely right like, are you more afraid of climate
change or are you more afraid of the very very
small risk posed by nuclear energy? Yes, And anyone who
thinks about it from a mathematical perspective very quickly comes
to Wow, climate change is going to hurt way more
people than nuclear energy ever, will.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
Even particulate emissions from you know, certainly coal plants are
wildly more dangerous than a.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
Physicially yeah, absolutely, And if you look at like coastal
flooding and stuff like that, multiply that by like tens
or hundreds of times in terms of impacted people.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
So okay, so you're saying the political still, it's going
to be it's going to take a while, and it's
going to be hard despite the political shifts you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
Yeah, well see, you know, the US has had a
long term policy band on recycling spent fuel, you know,
but new executive orders that just came out are challenging that.
So I'm trying to reinvigorate the nuclear industry. I mean,
when you think you're going to do it twenty thirty two, okay,
not ten years, but not too far off of ten
years in a pilot plant, okay, because we want to
(34:04):
prove the economics first.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
And then can we get to the big dream after
that part? When do we get to free energy for
all of humanity?
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Now?
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Are we ready?
Speaker 3 (34:12):
So?
Speaker 2 (34:12):
The cool thing is as you look at like these
fusion systems that you use for recycling, to spend fuel.
They look technologically very much like fusion power plants, but
you're still getting paid at least twenty times as much
per reaction and they don't need to operate ninety nine
point nine nine percent of the time because you know,
people freak out if a city loses power for good reason.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
Yeah, if you slow down.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
Recycling a material that has a ten million year half life,
no big deal, right, Like you fix the machine, you
get to learn, and you get to move forward.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
So, and we're going to have.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
To build dozens, if not hundreds of these fusion systems
to solve the global problem with nuclear waste. So through
economy of scale and through practice on a much more
forgiving environment where you're getting paid more per neutron, we
think we can get that next you know, that next
factor of ten or so that you need to be
cost competitive and drive and the fusion engine.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
So really, in your mind, the recycling nuclear waste is
like a sort of a straight line. It just ramps
right up to just generating energy.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
Yes, in my mind, and this is very hard for
a lot of people to gress, but it really is
exactly that. So I'm glad that you I'm glad that
you put that together right away, because it is.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
That so the sort of fusion reaction you would be
running in that context, it's the kind of thing that well,
let's let's go back to Q. Let's go back to
this idea of getting more energy out than you put in,
right like in that setting, how does that happen that
at some point in the future somebody has to do that?
Speaker 3 (35:37):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (35:37):
Yeah, yeah, And I know that's not your primary goal,
and it's a compelling case for why that's not your
primary goal. But like, do you get to that just
by incremental engineering tweaks? Are you ever gonna have to
like have some you know, physics level technological insight or
do you just think you can keep optimizing and optimizing
what you're doing and you'll sort of eventually get to
(35:57):
more energy out than you put in.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
Now we'll need we'll need we'll need physics optimization too.
Like so, and even going from phase one to Phase two,
it was it was new technology. Yeah, but the truth
is through practice and building over time, it's a different
path and you have a different technology evolution path than
trying to go straight to the endgame. And so and
it's pragmatic, right, You're always building systems that are doing
work for customers, and so it's cost effective built into
(36:21):
the model, and it's pragmatic built into the model, and
that's just how you design new technology. But what I'll
say is, we have our own technology that we like
for scaling into phase three, recycling and ultimately energy. But
I'm the only fusion company that will say this, I
don't think it's more than ten percent likely to be successful,
and I don't think any given technology probably is. And
(36:42):
so what I do know, though, is we're going to
have an amazing delivery engine that can manufacture fusion systems
at scale, and whatever technology is successful, I know we
will have a role to play in bringing this economically
to the world.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
When you say you don't think it's more than ten
percent likely to be successful, you mean the particular technology
you are betting on using. Yeah, you think it's very
unlikely that it will work to put out more energy
than you put into it. It probably won't. It probably
won't do that. And to be clear, cost effective effectively right, Yeah,
for electricity, Yes, But you're saying you're learning all of
these things about the engineering, about the nuts and bolts
(37:15):
that will be relevant no matter whose technology works exactly.
Let me ask you this. I feel like, if you
think your technology probably won't work, you you must hope
somebody else's will, right, Like, if somebody else does it
before you do it, will you be happy? Will that
be good in your mind?
Speaker 3 (37:32):
Yes, it would be fantastic.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
And it's kind of funny because you know it's becoming
a competitive world in the fusion space, and like, I'm
cheering for everybody I love. Really, i would love to
see anyone be successful and moving forward. And look, we're
going to have an awesome economic and manufacturing engine. We'd
love to work with whatever technology prevails. At the end
of the day, We're going to continue to adapt our
(37:54):
strategy and invest in what looks like it's doing great,
just so we can move fast. But this is a
tool that I want to see in my lifetime come
to humanity. And like that means looking across the page
at everything, just like we looked at fusion holistically, right,
not just the energy. We're not dogmatic to a single
technical approach. We're going to learn a ton in the
next ten years with all this funding going into all
(38:15):
these different approaches, and I'm really really excited to see
what comes out of it.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
Let's finish with the lightning round. What's one thing you
would do if you had free, unlimited power?
Speaker 2 (38:42):
One thing I would do? Well, you know, all goes
back to minority childhood and space and star trek, right, Like,
I'd love to build a series of spacecraft that would
go back and forth from the Earth to Mars and otherwise.
I think, you know, if you've got a fusion engine
that becomes very very fast and very very easy, you know,
this nine month travel time is actually insanely problematic for humans.
(39:04):
The radiation you get up in space is going to
be very damaging over those timeframes. And so you know,
we're even if we start to build a city on Mars,
it's going to be very harmful for people just to
get there and back.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
You think you'll go to space, well, you know, it's funny.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
I used to always want to be an astronaut, but
the the reality of very tiny, closed in capsules is
something that I'm not like super big fan of. So
if we had starships or something a little more spacious,
I'd love to, but not so much in today's way.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
Mean you need you need fusion power to build your
Catillac Big cadillact space.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
Exactly right, exactly right.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
If you weren't working on fusion, what would you be
working on?
Speaker 2 (39:41):
I'd probably also be working on the same thing. I
do think like even with fission, there are ways to
build uh spacecraft that can go to and from the
different planets in the Solar System very cost effectively and
fairly quickly.
Speaker 3 (39:54):
Fusion will be.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
Fast, but we can we can get that.
Speaker 3 (39:56):
We can get the time down to a couple of months,
probably with fission.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
If you go anywhere in the Solar System, where would
you go?
Speaker 3 (40:02):
You're in the Solar System?
Speaker 1 (40:03):
You want to do anywhere in the galaxy? I don't care,
it's just a question.
Speaker 2 (40:06):
Well, yeah, I mean, if you could go anywhere in
the galaxy, it'd be great to go to some place
where you could witness like a supernova happening from close
range without being obliterated. The world's most spectacular fireworks show
would be something to see.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
Greg Pifer is the co founder and CEO of Shine.
Please email us at problem at Pushkin dot fm. We
are always looking for new guests for the show. Today's
show was produced by Trinamanino and Gabriel Hunter Chang, who
was edited by Alexander Garreton and engineered by Sarah Bruguheer.
(40:45):
I'm Jacob Goldstein, and we'll be back next week with
another episode of What's Your Problem.
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