Janesville's SHINE Medical Technologies LLC has changed its name to SHINE Technologies LLC as it moves toward the company's ultimate goal — fusion energy.
In removing "medical" from its name, the company is reflecting a broader scope that goes beyond its current focus of using nuclear technology to produce valuable diagnostic and therapeutic medical isotopes, the company said last week. The medical application is phase two of SHINE's four-phase plan to become a producer of clean fusion energy.
The first phase of SHINE's plan — neutron imaging and materials testing for aerospace, defense and energy industries — was realized with Phoenix LLC, a company founded by Greg Piefer in 2006 before he started SHINE in 2010. The companies announced a merger in April.
"We kind of got the band back together," Piefer said, speaking last week to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Collegiate Entrepreneurship Organization.
Piefer said he initially thought it would take 20 years to get from phase one to phase two. Instead, it took around four years due to technological advances and supply chain factors that worked in SHINE's favor, Piefer said.
With phase two, SHINE can buy low-value materials such as uranium for around $6 per gram and use nuclear technology to turn it into medical isotopes such as molybdenum-99, which it can sell for $150 million per gram, Piefer told the UWM students.
SHINE Technologies is starting research and development for phase three, nuclear waste recycling, Piefer said. It plans to complete phases three and four of its plan under its current brand, rather than starting separate companies, he added.
Phase four — clean fusion energy production — has a "multi-trillion-dollar" total addressable market, Piefer said.
"It's the next chapter for human evolution in my opinion," Piefer said. "We started to harness chemical energy as a way of producing energy about a million years ago — you know, when we first started finding fire. I think fusion is going to be the next million."
SHINE currently has around 350 employees and has raised $650 million, including $600 million from private investors and $50 million from government funding.
The company's stepwise approach is designed to build technological capacity over time while commercializing products that provide social and financial value along the way, according to the company. While fusion energy is his ultimate goal, Piefer said the company's current medical focus is still impactful.
"If we only make it to making 20 million doses of medicine a year and we do that for 50 years, we helped a billion people, that's OK," Piefer said. "We're going to try to do more, but it's still OK."
