Shine Technologies, Janesville, Wis., plans to start talking to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission soon about building a used nuclear-fuel recycling facility, the company said in a recent regulatory filing.
“SHINE intends to begin regulatory engagement with the NRC in the 4th Quarter 2023,” reads a letter to the commission from Jim Costedio, the company’s vice president of regulatory affairs and quality.
Shine will build the used fuel recycling facility “at a future location independent of its Janesville, WI operations,” Costedio wrote in the letter, which NRC posted online Tuesday.
Asked when and where the company will build the fuel-recycling plant and who would build it, a Shine spokesperson said Wednesday morning that “we will be announcing those details at a future date.”
On its website, the company says used fuel recycling is the third part of a four-phase plan that culminates with electricity generation from nuclear fusion. Phase one is industrial imaging using neutrons and phase two is the manufacturing of medical isotopes.
Shine, which traces its founding to 2005, is still in the process of setting up a medical isotope manufacturing plant in Janesville using venture capital and grant money from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
The semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons facility has seeded money among several U.S. companies that want to produce molybdenum-99, the precursor isotope to technetium-99, which is useful for medical imaging. Shine is one of those.
The company also plans to manufacture the medical isotope lutetium-177, a component of a cancer-treating drug, in Wisconsin. Lutetium-177 is made from a feedstock of Ytterbium 176, an isotope that occurs naturally but is also a fission byproduct. Russia’s nuclear agency, Rosatom, sells Ytterbium 176 to commercial customers.
Shine expected to start production of medical isotopes in Janesville some time in 2023. Aside from government grants, Shine has raised money from venture capital investors. The company closed a $150-million round, led by Koch Disruptive Technologies in 2021, the same year it got a $35-million grant from the NNSA.
Shine has so far raised a self-reported a total of roughly $700 million, a company spokesperson said Wednesday.
The company now known as Shine was founded in 2005 by Greg Piefer as the neutron-imaging provider Phoenix. In 2010, Piefer spun Shine off from Phoenix and then merged the companies in 2021, with Phoenix continuing as a Shine subsidiary, according to a Phoenix press release from that year. Piefer has a PhD in nuclear engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, according to his LinkedIn profile.
