AI transcript
0:00:01 This is an iHeart podcast.
0:00:33 When did you get the fusion bug?
0:00:34 When did you fall in love with fusion?
0:00:39 It probably goes back to middle school or before, you know, when a lot of kids would
0:00:44 go out and play on the playground, I’d go to the library and read about particle accelerators
0:00:45 and fusion reactors.
0:00:48 And so, you know, I think the bug was set pretty early.
0:00:50 This is Greg Pfeiffer.
0:00:54 He’s the co-founder and CEO of a company called Shine.
0:00:59 And I watched shows like Star Trek and, you know, certainly even like Star Trek The Next
0:01:01 Generation, where my moral compass was set.
0:01:04 So like, tell me the fusion dream.
0:01:08 I mean, we’ll get to like why it’s going to take a while and it’s going to be hard, but
0:01:11 just like, why is fusion the dream?
0:01:15 Yeah, so fusion essentially, like to me, it represents a level up moment for humanity when
0:01:17 we can commercially unlock it.
0:01:18 Our species will be changed forever.
0:01:20 And it’s very similar.
0:01:23 It’s very akin to when we first started to access chemical energy through fire.
0:01:27 I thought you were going to say fossil fuels, but you’re saying it’s bigger than fossil fuels.
0:01:27 It’s fire.
0:01:29 It’s as big as fire.
0:01:29 Yeah.
0:01:31 So it’s not going to happen for a long time.
0:01:34 But like, what does the world look like when we get to the fusion dream?
0:01:35 Yes.
0:01:38 So as technology continues to improve, energy becomes cheaper and cheaper.
0:01:40 Fuel is no longer an issue.
0:01:45 So fundamentally today, fuel is the issue that would prevent us from making energy super cheap.
0:01:46 We just have to continue to work to extract.
0:01:47 Fusion doesn’t have that problem.
0:01:53 So technology gets higher, the reactors get cheaper, and fusion becomes super cheap.
0:01:55 Now we can solve problems that we couldn’t solve before.
0:01:59 You know, we can desalinate water on a massive scale.
0:02:03 Like we can, you know, we can pull out minerals from the earth very, very carefully.
0:02:07 We can go into space and colonize other planets.
0:02:09 We can make antimatter, right?
0:02:12 And perhaps have an energy source that allows us to go to other stars.
0:02:14 Like Star Trek.
0:02:15 Yeah, exactly.
0:02:15 Right?
0:02:18 So that’s always the secret little motivation behind the scenes.
0:02:19 Yes.
0:02:21 I mean, also, I have a three-year-old daughter, right?
0:02:24 Like, and I want to give her a world that’s, you know, okay to live in.
0:02:33 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and this is What’s Your Problem?
0:02:37 The show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress.
0:02:43 People who are into technological progress and who dream big tend to be into fusion,
0:02:48 a kind of nuclear power that could be safer and cheaper than fission,
0:02:50 which is the way we get nuclear power now.
0:02:55 By the way, as you probably know, fusion is fusing atomic nuclei together,
0:02:58 and fission is splitting them apart.
0:03:01 People have been working on fusion power for decades,
0:03:06 and reliable economic fusion power is still probably decades away.
0:03:08 But in the past several years,
0:03:12 billions of dollars have flowed into a handful of fusion startups
0:03:16 that are using different technologies to try to make fusion power work.
0:03:20 My guest today, Greg Pfeiffer, is definitely on Team Fusion.
0:03:23 He’s been working on it for decades.
0:03:27 But with his company, Shine, he’s taking a different approach.
0:03:31 Rather than going straight to the dream of using fusion to create energy,
0:03:35 Shine’s taking baby steps, or at least mid-sized steps.
0:03:40 The company is using fusion to enter markets that are easier to compete in than the market for energy.
0:03:47 As you’ll hear, Shine has already used fusion to get into the business of scanning jet engine blades.
0:03:51 And the company will soon be in the healthcare business as well.
0:03:54 Later in the interview, we’ll talk about all of that,
0:04:01 and about how Greg hopes those businesses will eventually lead to that big fusion dream of cheap, abundant power.
0:04:06 But to start, we talked about how Greg went from being a kid thinking about Star Trek
0:04:09 to a grown man starting a fusion company.
0:04:15 And in particular, about how that path led Greg to take really a very different approach
0:04:19 than that taken by other people building fusion companies.
0:04:23 I took a class, actually, in college that was taught by two very inspiring people,
0:04:28 one of whom ran something called the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin,
0:04:31 and another one named Harrison Schmidt, who walked on the moon.
0:04:35 And they were teaching a class about going into space and recovering resources.
0:04:39 And recovering fusion fuel was one of the key resources they thought we could extract from space,
0:04:40 in particular the moon.
0:04:47 And so I got super excited about fusion, because those fuels are, if you burn them, you don’t get nuclear waste.
0:04:51 So the promise of nuclear energy without nuclear waste, and these people were doing it,
0:04:53 like on the front edge of it, got me really excited.
0:04:56 I actually went to the moon to bring it back.
0:04:57 Right, right.
0:04:59 Like, these people have done hard things.
0:04:59 Yeah.
0:05:01 And so I’m going to go learn with them.
0:05:01 Yeah.
0:05:03 And so that got me into fusion.
0:05:08 But, you know, for me, it was a different experience than if I had done a physics-based program in fusion.
0:05:11 Like more practical, more hands-on?
0:05:12 Is that the…
0:05:12 Yeah.
0:05:14 This was an engineering program.
0:05:20 And the Fusion Technology Institute, which I joined, its mission was to design viable fusion reactors.
0:05:23 It was to say, let’s assume the physics challenges are overcome.
0:05:25 How would you build a real system?
0:05:31 And that’s where, over the next few years, I just became a bit depressed, frankly.
0:05:45 Because even if you master the physics, it became really clear that the challenge of commercializing and making heat for five cents per kilowatt hour, which is sort of the going rate for it, I couldn’t see a way to do that.
0:05:54 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.
0:05:55 And they don’t live very long.
0:05:58 And they’re super expensive to make.
0:06:07 And so the idea that we could go straight to five cents per kilowatt hour, at least when I was in school, seemed far-fetched.
0:06:09 So it’s sort of a techno-economic problem.
0:06:11 You’re thinking of not just the technical side.
0:06:15 But if people are actually going to use it, it has to be price competitive.
0:06:16 Yeah, exactly.
0:06:17 Okay.
0:06:18 So you get sad.
0:06:22 You get sad because your Star Trek dream doesn’t seem like it’s going to come true.
0:06:27 And then, as I understand it, you go to a party and you have your big idea.
0:06:27 Is that true?
0:06:29 That is the history.
0:06:30 It was a party at my house.
0:06:34 And we were thinking about, well, I mean, most people weren’t thinking about this.
0:06:36 But I had been working on this problem earlier in the day.
0:06:38 So it was already kind of in my head.
0:06:41 And it came down to our research.
0:06:47 You know, I had done work on a specific technology at the UW where we were trying to make small fusion devices.
0:06:50 And the idea was that there were a number of applications you could use them for.
0:06:52 And they didn’t work very well.
0:07:02 And one of the reasons we discovered they didn’t work very well was we were trying to collide these nuclei in the same space that we were trying to speed them up.
0:07:03 Okay.
0:07:06 So you just shoot them really fast into each other is the basic idea?
0:07:06 Yeah.
0:07:14 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.
0:07:17 It’s banging into stuff and losing energy all the time.
0:07:23 And if you take away the target material so that you can accelerate them, then it’s not colliding very much.
0:07:25 And you don’t get a lot of fusion reactions.
0:07:28 So you kind of had to operate in this worst of both worlds space.
0:07:34 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?
0:07:38 Yeah, I was at one point, there were all kinds of people standing around with drinks.
0:07:43 And I was sitting in one of our recliners, my laptop, punching numbers into it.
0:07:50 And I just actually built a really quick model to just see what the fusion rate would do if we did that in theory.
0:07:52 And the numbers came out amazing.
0:07:58 Like, actually, it was like, you know, a thousand times higher than the output we were getting from our university experiment.
0:08:01 And so, you know, like, I quickly disengaged from the party.
0:08:05 I called my former advisor and I’m like, hey, you know, if we did this, like the math.
0:08:07 And he was like, oh, okay, that’s really cool.
0:08:09 Like, what do you want me to do?
0:08:10 And I was like, I don’t know yet.
0:08:12 I’ve got to figure this out.
0:08:15 But I think I’m going to start a company to go do this.
0:08:16 Were you sober?
0:08:20 I probably had had a couple of drinks by then, actually.
0:08:21 So it’s amazing that I got the math right.
0:08:22 But I did.
0:08:23 Maybe, or maybe it helped.
0:08:25 Maybe there’s like a curve, right?
0:08:27 Maybe there’s an optimal number of drinks.
0:08:29 There certainly is when it comes to bowling.
0:08:31 So why not nuclear physics as well?
0:08:32 Yes.
0:08:34 So you have this idea.
0:08:39 When you have this idea, do you think, oh, I’ve solved fusion energy?
0:08:47 This physics revelation doesn’t overcome the techno-economic challenge of fusion energy that I already had.
0:08:51 And so that was already, like, I had already moved past that.
0:08:55 And I was trying to see if there were ways, like what I had put in the back of my head,
0:09:02 are there ways you can make use of fusion, you know, where you might get paid more for the reaction than you get paid for energy?
0:09:10 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.
0:09:13 So two formative experiences.
0:09:24 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.
0:09:31 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.
0:09:39 And those included things like making medical isotopes or detecting hidden material or, you know, contraband material, detecting nuclear weapons, stuff like that.
0:09:44 And to be clear, those are things that people are already doing out in the world, right?
0:09:45 There is a market for those things.
0:09:47 These are existing products.
0:09:50 They’re just not using fusion to make them.
0:09:50 Yeah.
0:09:55 Super definable markets, you know, and there are supply chain issues.
0:09:58 And it’s a good market to get into if you had an alternative way to make things.
0:09:58 Okay.
0:09:59 So that was interesting.
0:10:10 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.
0:10:12 One of my roommates had a hard drive crash.
0:10:13 We looked online.
0:10:14 All the options sucked.
0:10:18 It was like, pay us $2,000 and we’ll try, but maybe we won’t get your stuff back.
0:10:19 And it’s an upfront payment.
0:10:22 And so we decided that was a bad business.
0:10:25 So we started a business and we said, we told people, we said, look, we’re just starting this company.
0:10:30 We’re, we’re new at it, but we’ll charge you a hundred bucks if we get your data and nothing if we don’t.
0:10:32 And, you know, we might break your stuff.
0:10:39 So, so, but you’d be surprised how many people like that better than, than being able to pay two grand.
0:10:42 And so what happened was we got really, really good at it as we practiced.
0:10:47 The volume we could handle and the throughput we could handle, all of this scaled really, really nicely.
0:10:56 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,
0:10:57 that works, we can practice.
0:11:00 And if we practice, we’ll get better at it.
0:11:04 And if we get better at it, like our suppliers and our customers and everyone will grow with us.
0:11:06 So we’ll move this ecosystem forward.
0:11:13 And I really liked that because if you look at some of the most high tech, deep tech industries around, they follow the same roadmap.
0:11:20 You know, if you look at semiconductors in Moore’s law, it was fueled by having products all along the way, right?
0:11:24 Like the first computers may have only had a few customers, but they would pay a ton for them.
0:11:24 Yes.
0:11:27 And by doing that, they got better and they brought the price down.
0:11:30 And then there were new, a new set of customers, right?
0:11:31 That could afford those computers.
0:11:35 More recently, Tesla is the classic model of that, right?
0:11:49 They started with the Roadster, this super expensive electric car that was not for everybody, but enough people bought it that they could go from the whatever that was, $150,000 car to the $70,000 car to the $50,000 car, right?
0:11:50 Yeah, exactly.
0:11:54 And I’d argue that the underlying technology for Tesla started even in other industries.
0:11:57 So the ability to scale batteries even more cheaply, right?
0:11:59 Like these rechargeable batteries.
0:12:04 So you started with toys and special services and you moved to laptops and then you moved to EVs.
0:12:09 And even once you get into EVs, you do this where you build an expensive thing that few people buy.
0:12:18 So you have the idea of applying this framework to Fusion, which is quite different, right?
0:12:26 There are all these other people who are raising lots of money to go straight at making electricity, basically, right?
0:12:27 Making energy.
0:12:32 Like why, I don’t know, like why isn’t anybody else doing it the way you’re doing it?
0:12:38 I think it’s a very exciting proposition to be able to go straight to energy.
0:12:41 It’s very inviting and it sounds very appealing.
0:12:48 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.
0:12:51 And that’s where my education was just different.
0:12:53 Like that’s all we thought about.
0:12:57 Like all we thought about were the engineering challenges and how to overcome them.
0:12:58 Like these were university people.
0:12:59 They’re super optimistic, right?
0:13:04 Like, and we worked, like we developed materials for first walls and things like that.
0:13:12 But like everything we did still broke really fast and it was really expensive stuff.
0:13:20 So, you know, it’s just, that was different for a different experience for me, different formative experience for me than for a lot of people who are trying to go straight to the end.
0:13:32 Now, I do think there are some innovative concepts out there, you know, that, 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.
0:13:36 But the main concepts we know that are likely to work will run into these challenges.
0:13:38 They’re, they’re very, very significant.
0:13:46 Meaning that even if the physics work, actually building a thing at, at a reasonable cost is going to be super hard.
0:13:48 Yeah, I think that’s, that’s my view.
0:13:52 So you actually did start a business and are selling things, right?
0:13:53 Yes.
0:13:56 Using fusion to do stuff that people will pay for.
0:13:57 So let’s talk about that.
0:13:59 Let’s talk about where the company is today.
0:14:01 And then we can talk about where you’re about to be.
0:14:04 And then we can talk about where hopefully you’ll be in some number of decades.
0:14:06 What, what, what do you sell in today?
0:14:07 We sell neutrons.
0:14:07 Uh-huh.
0:14:09 We sell neutrons.
0:14:11 Took me a little while when I started it.
0:14:13 And then I thought, well, you know, I buy electrons.
0:14:16 I buy electrons every time I turn on a light switch, right?
0:14:17 I’m used to buying electrons.
0:14:20 Tell me about the neutron business.
0:14:21 Like, what does that mean?
0:14:22 Yeah, and I’ll, I’ll translate it.
0:14:23 So we sell fusion.
0:14:26 We just sell fusion to the highest bidders.
0:14:29 And the highest bidders are not people who buy energy.
0:14:34 And so it turns out the easiest fusion reaction to do is, is DT fusion.
0:14:40 And DT fusion produces energy on the one hand, but it produces neutrons on the other.
0:14:46 And when sold to certain customers, the neutrons are far more valuable than the energy.
0:14:51 So, so just to be clear, DT fusion is just two different isotopes of hydrogen, right?
0:14:51 Correct.
0:14:58 And they make helium, and then they throw off some number of neutrons, which is just the
0:15:00 neutral, uh, uh, nuclear particle.
0:15:04 And you’re saying there’s people who actually have a use for neutrons.
0:15:05 Yes.
0:15:05 Okay.
0:15:06 Yeah, it turns out.
0:15:07 And they’ll pay a ton for it.
0:15:14 And so, uh, and, and generally the, the historical, uh, neutron sources for these are very specialized
0:15:15 fission reactors.
0:15:16 So research reactors.
0:15:16 Okay.
0:15:19 So more traditional nuclear reactors.
0:15:20 Because fission reactors throw off neutrons too.
0:15:25 Um, and as you, as we’ve talked about already, fission is much easier than fusion, uh, from a,
0:15:26 from a science perspective.
0:15:31 Uh, and so there’s these old reactors that serve these industries, but the, but the, the, the
0:15:34 research reactor fleet that we built in the past is old.
0:15:38 It’s like 60 plus years old and essentially dying in general.
0:15:42 So markets that have been served by these reactors are losing that capacity.
0:15:49 Uh, on top of that, um, fusion based approaches are much cheaper than building new reactors.
0:15:54 Uh, so as you look to replace the infrastructure, there’s a massive, uh, edge for fusion there.
0:15:58 Um, and, and when we looked at the markets, you know, we did very quick, like, well, everyone
0:16:02 else in fusion you probably talked to is chasing something called Q greater than one.
0:16:07 And that’s the ratio of energy out over energy in, and they want to show that they can make
0:16:10 more energy than they can put into it.
0:16:12 That’s the fundamental fusion dream, right?
0:16:13 Sure.
0:16:16 But they don’t even think, you know, most of them aren’t really even seriously thinking
0:16:17 about the economics.
0:16:22 They’re saying first we need to get to net energy and then we’ll worry about net economics.
0:16:27 For me, I, I, you know, I couldn’t see a way to scale fusion unless we were worried about
0:16:28 net economics right away.
0:16:33 And, and, and if we wanted to practice, we needed to have positive net economics right
0:16:33 away.
0:16:35 So we, our, our core metric was Q economic.
0:16:38 And so how do we get more dollars out than dollars in?
0:16:41 Which is the classic business question.
0:16:44 The question every business needs to answer to survive.
0:16:46 How can our revenues be greater than our costs?
0:16:46 Yeah.
0:16:48 And that’s how we have seen deep tech scale, right?
0:16:51 Like that is the playbook by which it scales.
0:16:55 So we, we pursued that and, you know, we found actually customers.
0:16:59 So, you know, if you do a kilowatt hour of fusion, if you produce a kilowatt hour of fusion
0:17:04 heat and, and you can sell that for five cents, let’s say, um, if you, if you took the same
0:17:09 neutrons generated by that kilowatt hour of fusion reactions, there are customers who would pay
0:17:10 $200,000 for it.
0:17:11 Huh.
0:17:13 And so that’s a massive difference.
0:17:17 And so are you in fact selling those neutrons for $200,000 now?
0:17:18 Is that your business?
0:17:18 We are.
0:17:21 And who is buying them and what are they doing with them?
0:17:21 Yeah.
0:17:23 So they’re making airplanes safer.
0:17:26 Uh, you know, they’re making rockets, uh, more reliable.
0:17:31 What is the link between buying neutrons from you and making a airplane safer?
0:17:31 All right.
0:17:37 So, uh, modern engines and jet aircraft operate to get very high efficiency and very high power.
0:17:38 They operate in a really high temperature.
0:17:43 In fact, they operate like 20% above the melting point of the blades in the engine.
0:17:45 I’m glad I didn’t know that.
0:17:48 And now I’m going to tell you something that gets even more scary.
0:17:52 So the way they manage that is they suck cold air in from the front of the engine and
0:17:56 they pipe it through a series of cooling tubes in each fin, like embedded in each fin.
0:18:01 Uh, and the manufacturing process is such that it’s fairly common that one of these cooling
0:18:02 tubes is blocked.
0:18:03 Okay.
0:18:08 And, and if it’s blocked, it will melt, it will imbalance the engine and possibly destroy
0:18:08 it.
0:18:11 Uh, and so we don’t want that to happen.
0:18:12 Um, truly.
0:18:19 But with modern materials, and those are materials that x-ray or ultrasound do not interact with
0:18:19 heavily.
0:18:23 So if you try to see inside these things with conventional techniques, you cannot see the
0:18:23 defect.
0:18:28 So just to be clear, you make this engine and then you want to look inside to make sure that
0:18:32 these cooling tubes are not blocked so that it doesn’t melt and the plane crashes.
0:18:37 And so you think, well, we could use x-ray or ultrasound to common technologies, but you’re
0:18:38 saying those don’t work.
0:18:38 Yeah.
0:18:42 But there’s some way you can, what, shoot neutrons at it and see inside of it?
0:18:42 Yeah.
0:18:43 Yeah.
0:18:44 Yeah, there is.
0:18:49 So, so, um, neutrons have, you know, they have, uh, a characteristic of, there are certain
0:18:50 isotopes.
0:18:57 So certain materials in nature that absorb neutrons like crazy, like, like, and, and you can put
0:18:58 them where you want them to be.
0:19:04 So, so for example, with jet engine blades, um, we just push a liquid solution containing
0:19:06 a material known as gadolinium into the blade.
0:19:09 Uh, and then we blow it out with air.
0:19:11 Uh, and if the channel’s blocked, it doesn’t blow out.
0:19:17 So the gadolinium sits in there and then we hit it with neutrons and any neutron that
0:19:19 comes close to that gadolinium gets absorbed.
0:19:23 Uh, and then behind the blade, you put a piece of film that’s sensitive to neutrons.
0:19:25 It’s a little more complex than that.
0:19:27 And you can see it and you can see it.
0:19:28 It’s like an x-ray.
0:19:29 It’s like a neutron x-ray.
0:19:34 You see the inside of stuff, but, but neutrons can see things x-ray can’t.
0:19:36 And it’s actually very complimentary.
0:19:38 X-ray is good at generally heavy materials.
0:19:41 Neutrons are generally good at seeing light materials.
0:19:44 And so are you in that business now?
0:19:45 We are.
0:19:45 Yeah.
0:19:46 Yeah.
0:19:49 We’ll do tens of thousands of parts, you know, in a year.
0:19:54 And, uh, yeah, we’re, we’re replacing essentially aged capacity.
0:19:59 So, uh, the biggest imaging reactor in the United States shut down about two years ago.
0:20:00 It was run by GE.
0:20:03 Uh, and so there’s this nice tailwind for share acquisition here.
0:20:07 It’s not just a way for us to make money in fusion, but, but a lot of the customers sort
0:20:11 of just come to us proactively because they’re very worried about the future of the supply
0:20:11 chain.
0:20:12 Uh-huh.
0:20:15 So there, they send you the blades.
0:20:15 You have a facility.
0:20:17 They send you the blades.
0:20:17 They do.
0:20:18 And you, yeah.
0:20:21 And we give them back pictures, uh, with the blades.
0:20:21 Yeah.
0:20:22 Okay.
0:20:24 So that’s the business you’re in.
0:20:29 Uh, it seems like the next big step is getting into the medical isotope business, right?
0:20:30 You’re building a.
0:20:30 Yeah.
0:20:30 Yeah.
0:20:31 Okay.
0:20:34 And, and just on the other thing, there are many others.
0:20:35 So turbine blades are just one application.
0:20:39 There’s a lot of other parts and components that we validate, including radiation hardness
0:20:41 testing and electronics, et cetera.
0:20:45 So, but yeah, the next step, um, and it required a huge reduction in the cost per neutron.
0:20:50 Uh, we had to get the cost per neutron down a thousand fold, uh, to make the next step work.
0:20:51 So this is important, right?
0:20:52 Yeah.
0:20:58 The whole arc you’re trying to, uh, follow is like, let’s do one thing where we can make
0:21:01 a lot of money and then let’s do the next thing where they’ll actually pay us less.
0:21:06 So we have to figure out how to do it a thousand times cheaper for it to be profitable.
0:21:09 But they’ll buy a lot more neutrons.
0:21:14 And so the, the, the market opportunity is actually, you know, let’s call it 10 to 20 times larger
0:21:15 than the test opportunity in total.
0:21:20 Uh, and so even though they’re paying you less, they’re buying so many more neutrons that,
0:21:22 you know, you make more money.
0:21:27 We’ll be back in just a minute.
0:21:40 Run a business and not thinking about podcasting.
0:21:45 Think again, more Americans listen to podcasts than ad supported streaming music from Spotify
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0:22:16 The next step for shine for Greg’s company is to start using neutrons to create medical isotopes.
0:22:21 Medical isotopes, as it turns out, are widely used in medical imaging.
0:22:29 To get into that business, shine is building what’s basically a factory that’s going to use fusion to create medical isotopes.
0:22:32 They call the factory chrysalis.
0:22:34 And Greg and I were talking on video.
0:22:40 And at this point in the conversation, he mentioned that you could actually see chrysalis out the window behind him.
0:22:42 And this is chrysalis behind me, by the way.
0:22:46 And it’s not a picture for people who are listening.
0:22:54 It’s like out there, there’s a bunch of grass, and then there’s a building that looks like a rectangle, a cement rectangle over your shoulder.
0:22:57 That’s over half a billion dollars of invested capital is what it is.
0:23:00 Over half a billion dollars of cement rectangle for my information.
0:23:02 So, tell me about what’s going on in there.
0:23:03 Yeah.
0:23:06 So, essentially, we needed to get the cost per neutron down.
0:23:06 We did.
0:23:09 We demonstrated that back in 2019.
0:23:16 And what we knew we could do then is if we got it that cheap, instead of using neutrons just to examine material, we can use it to change material.
0:23:16 Okay.
0:23:19 In a sense, nuclear engineers call it transmutation.
0:23:22 But, like, the common population would think of it as alchemy.
0:23:29 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.
0:23:36 So, at small scale, the most interesting markets for these are in medicine, producing isotopes used for medicine.
0:23:40 Which turns out to be wildly common, right?
0:23:52 Like, medical isotopes, I learned, you know, researching for this show, are like, what, tens of thousands of people a day in the U.S. are tested with medical isotopes, right?
0:23:54 Yeah, 50 million per year around the world.
0:23:55 Yeah, yeah.
0:23:56 So, they’re super common.
0:24:04 And, again, just like in the testing business where we’re replacing fission reactors, that’s how isotopes have been made in the past.
0:24:10 So, old fission research reactors around 60 years old, and, you know, they’re dying, right?
0:24:11 Like, the infrastructure’s going away.
0:24:13 And so, it’s the same tailwind.
0:24:15 We just needed to get fusion a lot cheaper to do it.
0:24:26 And is it right that, in a kind of crude way, the use is analogous in many cases, that medical isotopes are used for scanning, but you’re scanning people instead of jet airplane blades?
0:24:28 Yeah, the mechanism’s a little bit different.
0:24:30 So, but it’s the same idea, right?
0:24:34 Like, so, and it fits our whole theme of illumination around the company, right?
0:24:36 In one case, we’re illuminating defects here.
0:24:37 We’re illuminating disease.
0:24:39 Eventually, we’ll be illuminating the planet, right?
0:24:40 With energy.
0:24:41 That’s a good metaphor.
0:24:42 Yeah, yeah.
0:24:48 But, you know, so what you do is you’ve got enough neutrons now that you can turn, you can change materials.
0:24:58 So, you can take things that are relatively stable, like uranium, you buy it for $6 a gram, turn it into an imaging isotope, molybdenum-99, which is worth like $150 million a gram.
0:25:01 Presumably, people buy it in very, very, very small amounts.
0:25:02 Yeah, they do.
0:25:06 But, you know, it’s a dose for a patient is like one-tenth of one microgram, right?
0:25:15 Yeah, I mean, if it’s $150 million a gram, and you’re making it in a $500 million building, you don’t have to make much of it to redeem your cost of capital.
0:25:17 Yeah, and chrysalis will produce a few grams per year.
0:25:18 That’s it.
0:25:18 Yeah, wow.
0:25:19 That’s extraordinary.
0:25:25 So, it’s like a few grams is like a little cup, not even just a little, like a spoonful.
0:25:25 No, it’s like a sugar packet.
0:25:27 Like the sugar packet you dump in your coffee, that’s a few grams, right?
0:25:29 But that’s millions of doses or something.
0:25:33 Yeah, so one gram is 10 million doses, is essentially the way I think about it.
0:25:34 That is wild.
0:25:37 Can we just have that be wild for one moment?
0:25:37 Okay, go on.
0:25:42 So, you know, in the U.S., for example, most of the testing is to look at blood flow in the heart.
0:25:50 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.
0:25:56 But also for staging cancer, and there’s probably another two dozen tests all that use this on a scan.
0:25:58 So, that’s what you’re going to be making.
0:26:04 Like, tell me about the business end of Chrysalis, of that facility over your shoulder.
0:26:08 Like, what’s it look like in there where you’re actually doing the fusion?
0:26:10 So, there’s a bunch of machines.
0:26:12 So, there’ll be six fusion machines in Chrysalis.
0:26:15 They’re built, and they’re, you know, they’re being installed.
0:26:17 And they are surrounded.
0:26:24 So, there’s a tube in which the particle beam comes down, and it strikes tritium and makes fusion reactions.
0:26:26 And the neutrons come out in all directions.
0:26:30 And we’ve surrounded that tube with a uranium target.
0:26:31 It’s uranium dissolved in water.
0:26:35 And as the neutrons hit it, they cause it to split.
0:26:46 And we get isotopes that are useful for medicine, things like molybdenum-99, iodine-131, which is used to treat cancer, xenon-133, which is used to image brain and heart.
0:26:51 So, you’re actually using fusion to drive a fission reaction that makes the thing that you want.
0:26:51 Precisely, yeah.
0:26:53 It’s like a nuclear turducken.
0:26:53 Yeah.
0:26:56 Versus using fission to drive a fission reaction.
0:26:58 And the difference is cost.
0:27:08 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.
0:27:11 So, fusion turns out to be much cheaper and much safer.
0:27:15 And it produces about, you know, somewhere between one and five percent the radioactive waste.
0:27:17 Of a reactor.
0:27:18 So, much, much cleaner.
0:27:24 And is it right that there have actually been shortages of the isotope that you’re going to be making?
0:27:25 All the time.
0:27:26 Yeah.
0:27:28 And it’s been going on for 15 years.
0:27:31 And so, how close are you to opening?
0:27:32 What has to happen?
0:27:35 There’s a building behind you, but it’s not on yet, right?
0:27:38 The equipment is almost all entirely here in Jamesville.
0:27:39 We need to install it.
0:27:40 We need to commission it.
0:27:42 And then we need to start pushing product out of it.
0:27:44 When are you going to get the first neutron?
0:27:48 I won’t say out the door, but, you know, when are you going to make the first neutron?
0:27:53 Well, the first neutrons are actually, like, being made in a smaller building to the side that we used to practice.
0:27:56 But the first isotopes should be made in about 18 months.
0:27:57 Okay.
0:27:59 So, like, end of next year.
0:27:59 Yeah.
0:28:04 I think, and there’s a big difference between first isotope produced and actually commercial readiness.
0:28:04 Yeah.
0:28:06 And your whole thing is techno-economics, right?
0:28:10 The first isotope produced where the unit economics are profitable for you.
0:28:10 Yes.
0:28:13 You know, and I would say that’s probably more likely two years.
0:28:17 But this is a plant that no one’s ever built before with technology that we have tested in the lab.
0:28:23 But, you know, when you build a working machine that has thousands of moving parts and we’ve de-risked all the…
0:28:23 Oh, yeah.
0:28:26 I’m totally willing to believe that it won’t work.
0:28:26 Oh, it will work.
0:28:29 But the things that are going to break and burn us are, like, you know…
0:28:32 Or that it won’t be economical, right?
0:28:35 Like, nobody has ever done anything like what you were doing before.
0:28:35 Yeah.
0:28:36 It’ll be economical.
0:28:40 I think the question is, for me, is, like, I’m worried about things like valves.
0:28:42 We have hundreds of valves in this plant.
0:28:45 And they might have a very low failure rate, right?
0:28:49 But if the failure rate’s 1% on hundreds of valves, you’re going to have a lot of problems.
0:28:51 You’re always going to have broken valves.
0:28:52 This is your engineering training.
0:28:54 Yeah, it’s exactly right.
0:28:57 Like, I’ve got an earlier Model S and…
0:28:57 A Tesla.
0:28:58 An old Tesla.
0:28:58 Yeah.
0:28:58 Yeah.
0:29:00 The motor runs fantastically.
0:29:02 The car is still super fun to drive.
0:29:04 It’s got 170,000 miles on it.
0:29:07 But I’ve replaced the door handles, like, it feels like a dozen times.
0:29:12 And it’s not fun when you suddenly can’t get in your car and you’ve got to, like, use a credit card to…
0:29:14 Especially if it’s like, oh, look how fancy the door handles are.
0:29:16 Just make regular door handles, man.
0:29:18 And they went back to that, actually.
0:29:19 They learned a lesson there.
0:29:21 But that’s what’s going to hit us.
0:29:27 So I think as we think about that thing, like, really producing reliably, I tell people probably two years is sort of the soonest.
0:29:29 And it could be three, right?
0:29:31 Like, it could be somewhere in that range.
0:29:33 That’s the current step.
0:29:33 Yeah.
0:29:34 I want to get to the big dream.
0:29:41 How many steps between making medical isotopes and creating cheap and abundant power for all of humanity?
0:29:42 Yeah.
0:29:45 And by the way, our steps are, like, pragmatic, not dogmatic.
0:29:46 That’s nice.
0:29:47 But they’ve held.
0:29:51 So, like, if there are new market applications that come up, we’ll definitely look to include them.
0:29:52 I won’t hold you to it.
0:29:55 I promise I won’t hold you to your forward-looking statements.
0:29:55 Yeah.
0:30:00 But they have held for the last 15 years, I guess, is something I can say with confidence.
0:30:07 So the next step is to do this transmutation, right, changing one material into another at a larger scale.
0:30:11 And we can use that to solve one of the biggest problems with fission energy.
0:30:15 So, again, you can see us starting to come into the fission world a little bit here.
0:30:21 And one of the things that we should be doing as a nation is we should be recycling all of our nuclear waste.
0:30:22 We have a lot of nuclear waste.
0:30:27 For a while, we were going to bury it all in a mountain in Nevada, but people in Nevada didn’t like that idea.
0:30:30 So it’s still just sort of sitting around everywhere.
0:30:35 And it’ll be sitting around for millions of years, the right order of magnitude, if we don’t do something about it.
0:30:35 I think that’s right.
0:30:38 And the problem with that is it’s just loaded with value.
0:30:39 Right.
0:30:40 People worry about it.
0:30:44 But also, look, look at all this energy that’s just sitting there ready to be harvested.
0:30:45 Yeah.
0:30:47 So why not solve two problems at once, right?
0:30:49 It’s not super safe where it is.
0:30:50 I mean, it’s pretty safe where it is.
0:30:53 But if somebody wanted to do something to it, they might be able to.
0:30:59 A lot of it’s plutonium, which is stuff that if you worked and you processed it enough, you could turn into a nuclear weapon.
0:31:01 So we should be eliminating that hazard.
0:31:05 And at the same time, we can solve a strategic fuel supply issue for us.
0:31:11 Now that our relationship with Russia is not so good, you know, they were the source of a lot of the uranium that we put into our fission reactors.
0:31:19 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.
0:31:24 And the great part is the more fission reactors we burn, the more recycled fuel we have.
0:31:26 So it just scales with the number of plants.
0:31:36 And so you have a sort of clear technological line to using your fusion reactors to do what?
0:31:40 To get energy out of spent fuel from fission plants?
0:31:41 Like what do you actually do there?
0:31:47 We’ll take spent fuel, we’ll dissolve it into a liquid form, we’ll separate out valuable materials.
0:31:50 That includes uranium and plutonium, which should go back into the reactor.
0:31:54 So close loop, close the fuel cycle with fission.
0:31:59 We’ll separate out other things, precious metals, rare earth elements that have decayed enough to sell.
0:32:04 And then you’re left with this very small waste stream, like it’s less than 5% of the original.
0:32:08 Almost all of that has relatively short half-lives, decades or less.
0:32:17 And a little bit of it has these really long problematic half-lives, million year plus isotopes.
0:32:19 That’s the only place fusion comes in.
0:32:20 It solves that problem.
0:32:25 So fusion neutrons can transmute just like we use them to turn low value into high value.
0:32:28 We can use them to turn long half-life into short half-life.
0:32:38 And one great example I like to use is iodine-129, waste product from fission, lives over 10 million years, over 10 million year half-life.
0:32:39 Which is bad.
0:32:40 It’s going to be radioactive forever.
0:32:40 Forever.
0:32:41 Yeah.
0:32:43 And you hit it with a fusion neutron, though.
0:32:45 It becomes iodine-128.
0:32:49 Iodine-128 has a 25-minute half-life, after which it becomes stable.
0:32:51 And then you put it in salt.
0:32:52 Yeah, you could, right?
0:32:53 Like you could eat it.
0:32:53 Yeah.
0:32:59 So you do this process with fusion, and you solve the problem with the long-lived waste.
0:33:05 So we want to do that two steps, and we know how, because we’re already doing both of those processes in chrysalis.
0:33:13 So as we look to scaling to a waste recycling plant, we’ve already got essentially a prototype for it here.
0:33:15 And, you know, we’re going to build on that.
0:33:20 It’s the same part of the regulatory code that would license a recycling plant, same type of construction, everything.
0:33:25 Yeah, so that one is obviously complicated on multiple dimensions, right?
0:33:28 I mean, you have to—whatever the technical side is, it’s the technical side.
0:33:30 But presumably, you’re dealing with nuclear waste.
0:33:33 There’s going to be a whole, like, political, regulatory side.
0:33:36 That’s—what is that, a decade when you think about that?
0:33:39 Ten years, 20—like, that’s a long game already, right?
0:33:43 But the political winds are changing, and I’m not talking about because of the current administration.
0:33:47 No, the world is becoming more pro-nuclear, you know, basically nonpartisan way.
0:33:50 But people are starting to learn that you shouldn’t think in absolute terms, right?
0:33:56 Like, are you more afraid of climate change, or are you more afraid of the very, very small risk posed by nuclear energy?
0:33:56 Yes.
0:34:03 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.
0:34:09 Even particulate emissions from, you know, certainly coal plants are wildly more dangerous than a fission plant.
0:34:17 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.
0:34:25 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.
0:34:26 Yeah, we’ll see.
0:34:34 You know, the U.S. has had a long-term policy ban on recycling spent fuel, you know, but new executive orders that just came out are challenging that.
0:34:37 So, I’m trying to reinvigorate the nuclear industry.
0:34:39 I mean, when do you think you’re going to do it?
0:34:40 Uh, 2032.
0:34:41 Okay.
0:34:43 Not 10 years, but not too far off of 10 years.
0:34:44 In a pilot plant.
0:34:45 Okay.
0:34:47 Because we want to prove the economics first.
0:34:49 And then can we get to the big dream after that?
0:34:49 Of course.
0:34:52 When do we get to free energy for all of humanity?
0:34:52 Now?
0:34:53 Are we ready?
0:35:02 So, the cool thing is, as you look at, like, these fusion systems that you use for recycling spent fuel, they look technologically very much like fusion power plants.
0:35:05 But you’re still getting paid at least 20 times as much per reaction.
0:35:09 And they don’t need to operate 99.99% of the time.
0:35:12 Because, you know, people freak out if a city loses power for good reason.
0:35:18 If you slow down recycling a material that has a 10-million-year half-life, no big deal, right?
0:35:21 Like, you fix the machine, you get to learn, and you get to move forward.
0:35:27 So, and we’re going to have to build dozens, if not hundreds, of these fusion systems to solve the global problem with nuclear waste.
0:35:37 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 10 or so.
0:35:48 So, really, in your mind, the recycling nuclear waste is like a sort of a straight line.
0:35:51 It just ramps right up to just generating energy.
0:35:56 Yes, in my mind, and this is very hard for a lot of people to grasp, but it really is exactly that.
0:36:00 So, I’m glad that you put that together right away, because it is that.
0:36:08 So, the sort of fusion reaction you would be running in that context, it’s the kind of thing that, well, let’s go back to Q.
0:36:12 Let’s go back to this idea of getting more energy out than you put in, right?
0:36:15 Like, in that setting, how does that happen?
0:36:18 At some point in the future, somebody has to do that.
0:36:18 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:36:23 And I know that’s not your primary goal, and it’s a compelling case for why that’s not your primary goal.
0:36:28 But, like, do you get to that just by incremental engineering tweaks?
0:36:33 Are you ever going to have to, like, have some, you know, physics-level technological insight?
0:36:39 Or do you just think you can keep optimizing and optimizing what you’re doing, and you’ll sort of eventually get to more energy out than you put in?
0:36:42 No, we’ll need physics optimization, too.
0:36:46 Like, so, and even going from phase one to phase two, it was new technology.
0:36:47 Yeah.
0:36:51 But the truth is, through practice and building over time, like, it’s a different path.
0:36:55 And you have a different technology evolution path than trying to go straight to the endgame.
0:36:57 And so, and it’s pragmatic, right?
0:36:59 You’re always building systems that are doing work for customers.
0:37:06 And so, it’s cost-effective built into the model, and it’s pragmatic built into the model, and that’s just how you design new technology.
0:37:12 But what I’ll say is, we have our own technology that we like for scaling into phase three, recycling, and ultimately energy.
0:37:15 But I’m the only fusion company that will say this.
0:37:18 I don’t think it’s more than 10% likely to be successful.
0:37:22 And I don’t think any given technology probably is.
0:37:29 And so, what I do know, though, is we’re going to have an amazing delivery engine that can manufacture fusion systems at scale.
0:37:35 And whatever technology is successful, I know we will have a role to play in bringing this economically to the world.
0:37:42 When you say you don’t think it’s more than 10% likely to be successful, you mean the particular technology you are betting on using.
0:37:42 Yeah.
0:37:46 You think it’s very unlikely that it will work to put out more energy than you put into it.
0:37:47 It probably won’t.
0:37:48 It probably won’t do that.
0:37:49 And to be clear, cost-effectively.
0:37:50 Cost-effectively, right.
0:37:51 Yeah.
0:37:52 For electricity.
0:37:53 Yes.
0:38:00 But you’re saying you’re learning all of these things about the engineering, about the nuts and bolts that will be relevant no matter whose technology works.
0:38:00 Exactly.
0:38:01 Let me ask you this.
0:38:07 I feel like if you think your technology probably won’t work, you must hope somebody else’s will, right?
0:38:11 Like, if somebody else does it before you do it, will you be happy?
0:38:13 Will that be good in your mind?
0:38:13 Yes.
0:38:15 It would be fantastic.
0:38:20 And it’s kind of funny because, you know, it’s becoming a competitive world in the fusion space.
0:38:22 And, like, I’m cheering for everybody.
0:38:23 I love that.
0:38:27 I would love to see anyone be successful in moving forward.
0:38:31 And, look, we’re going to have an awesome economic and manufacturing engine we’d love to work with.
0:38:35 Whatever technology prevails at the end of the day, we’re going to continue to adapt our strategy
0:38:38 and invest in what looks like it’s doing great just so we can move fast.
0:38:42 But this is a tool that I want to see in my lifetime come to humanity.
0:38:45 And, like, that means looking across the page at everything.
0:38:48 Just like we looked at fusion holistically, right?
0:38:49 Not just the energy.
0:38:52 We’re not dogmatic to a single technical approach.
0:38:57 We’re going to learn a ton in the next 10 years with all this funding going into all these different approaches.
0:39:00 And I’m really, really excited to see what comes out of it.
0:39:05 We’ll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
0:39:17 Run a business and not thinking about podcasting?
0:39:18 Think again.
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0:39:50 Let’s finish with the lightning round.
0:39:53 What’s one thing you would do if you had free unlimited power?
0:39:54 One thing I would do?
0:39:59 Well, you know, so this all goes back to my nerdy childhood and space and Star Trek, right?
0:40:05 Like, I’d love to build a series of spacecraft that would go back and forth from the Earth to Mars and otherwise.
0:40:10 I think, you know, if you’ve got a fusion engine, that becomes very, very fast and very, very easy.
0:40:15 You know, this nine-month travel time is actually insanely problematic for humans.
0:40:20 The radiation you get up in space is going to be very damaging over those timeframes.
0:40:27 And so, you know, 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.
0:40:28 You think you’ll go to space?
0:40:30 Well, you know, it’s funny.
0:40:37 I used to always want to be an astronaut, but the reality of very tiny closed-in capsules is something that I’m not, like, super big fan of.
0:40:42 So, if we had starships or something a little more spacious, I’d love to, but not so much in today’s environment.
0:40:48 I mean, you need fusion power to build your Cadillac to space.
0:40:49 Exactly right.
0:40:50 Exactly right.
0:40:52 If you weren’t working on fusion, what would you be working on?
0:40:55 I’d probably also be working on the same thing.
0:41:05 I do think, like, even with fission, there are ways to build spacecraft that can go to and from the different planets in the solar system very cost-effectively and fairly quickly.
0:41:10 Fusion would be faster, but we can get the time down to a couple months, probably, with fission.
0:41:12 If you go anywhere in the solar system, where would you go?
0:41:14 Anywhere in the solar system.
0:41:15 You want to do anywhere in the galaxy?
0:41:16 I don’t care.
0:41:17 It’s just a question.
0:41:18 Well, yeah.
0:41:25 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
0:41:26 without being obliterated.
0:41:29 The world’s most spectacular fireworks show would be something to see.
0:41:39 Greg Peiffer is the co-founder and CEO of Shine.
0:41:44 Please email us at problematpushkin.fm.
0:41:47 We are always looking for new guests for the show.
0:41:51 Today’s show was produced by Trina Menino and Gabriel Hunter-Chang.
0:41:56 It was edited by Alexandra Gerriton and engineered by Sarah Bruguer.
0:42:00 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and we’ll be back next week with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
0:42:15 This is an iHeart Podcast.
0:00:33 When did you get the fusion bug?
0:00:34 When did you fall in love with fusion?
0:00:39 It probably goes back to middle school or before, you know, when a lot of kids would
0:00:44 go out and play on the playground, I’d go to the library and read about particle accelerators
0:00:45 and fusion reactors.
0:00:48 And so, you know, I think the bug was set pretty early.
0:00:50 This is Greg Pfeiffer.
0:00:54 He’s the co-founder and CEO of a company called Shine.
0:00:59 And I watched shows like Star Trek and, you know, certainly even like Star Trek The Next
0:01:01 Generation, where my moral compass was set.
0:01:04 So like, tell me the fusion dream.
0:01:08 I mean, we’ll get to like why it’s going to take a while and it’s going to be hard, but
0:01:11 just like, why is fusion the dream?
0:01:15 Yeah, so fusion essentially, like to me, it represents a level up moment for humanity when
0:01:17 we can commercially unlock it.
0:01:18 Our species will be changed forever.
0:01:20 And it’s very similar.
0:01:23 It’s very akin to when we first started to access chemical energy through fire.
0:01:27 I thought you were going to say fossil fuels, but you’re saying it’s bigger than fossil fuels.
0:01:27 It’s fire.
0:01:29 It’s as big as fire.
0:01:29 Yeah.
0:01:31 So it’s not going to happen for a long time.
0:01:34 But like, what does the world look like when we get to the fusion dream?
0:01:35 Yes.
0:01:38 So as technology continues to improve, energy becomes cheaper and cheaper.
0:01:40 Fuel is no longer an issue.
0:01:45 So fundamentally today, fuel is the issue that would prevent us from making energy super cheap.
0:01:46 We just have to continue to work to extract.
0:01:47 Fusion doesn’t have that problem.
0:01:53 So technology gets higher, the reactors get cheaper, and fusion becomes super cheap.
0:01:55 Now we can solve problems that we couldn’t solve before.
0:01:59 You know, we can desalinate water on a massive scale.
0:02:03 Like we can, you know, we can pull out minerals from the earth very, very carefully.
0:02:07 We can go into space and colonize other planets.
0:02:09 We can make antimatter, right?
0:02:12 And perhaps have an energy source that allows us to go to other stars.
0:02:14 Like Star Trek.
0:02:15 Yeah, exactly.
0:02:15 Right?
0:02:18 So that’s always the secret little motivation behind the scenes.
0:02:19 Yes.
0:02:21 I mean, also, I have a three-year-old daughter, right?
0:02:24 Like, and I want to give her a world that’s, you know, okay to live in.
0:02:33 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and this is What’s Your Problem?
0:02:37 The show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress.
0:02:43 People who are into technological progress and who dream big tend to be into fusion,
0:02:48 a kind of nuclear power that could be safer and cheaper than fission,
0:02:50 which is the way we get nuclear power now.
0:02:55 By the way, as you probably know, fusion is fusing atomic nuclei together,
0:02:58 and fission is splitting them apart.
0:03:01 People have been working on fusion power for decades,
0:03:06 and reliable economic fusion power is still probably decades away.
0:03:08 But in the past several years,
0:03:12 billions of dollars have flowed into a handful of fusion startups
0:03:16 that are using different technologies to try to make fusion power work.
0:03:20 My guest today, Greg Pfeiffer, is definitely on Team Fusion.
0:03:23 He’s been working on it for decades.
0:03:27 But with his company, Shine, he’s taking a different approach.
0:03:31 Rather than going straight to the dream of using fusion to create energy,
0:03:35 Shine’s taking baby steps, or at least mid-sized steps.
0:03:40 The company is using fusion to enter markets that are easier to compete in than the market for energy.
0:03:47 As you’ll hear, Shine has already used fusion to get into the business of scanning jet engine blades.
0:03:51 And the company will soon be in the healthcare business as well.
0:03:54 Later in the interview, we’ll talk about all of that,
0:04:01 and about how Greg hopes those businesses will eventually lead to that big fusion dream of cheap, abundant power.
0:04:06 But to start, we talked about how Greg went from being a kid thinking about Star Trek
0:04:09 to a grown man starting a fusion company.
0:04:15 And in particular, about how that path led Greg to take really a very different approach
0:04:19 than that taken by other people building fusion companies.
0:04:23 I took a class, actually, in college that was taught by two very inspiring people,
0:04:28 one of whom ran something called the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin,
0:04:31 and another one named Harrison Schmidt, who walked on the moon.
0:04:35 And they were teaching a class about going into space and recovering resources.
0:04:39 And recovering fusion fuel was one of the key resources they thought we could extract from space,
0:04:40 in particular the moon.
0:04:47 And so I got super excited about fusion, because those fuels are, if you burn them, you don’t get nuclear waste.
0:04:51 So the promise of nuclear energy without nuclear waste, and these people were doing it,
0:04:53 like on the front edge of it, got me really excited.
0:04:56 I actually went to the moon to bring it back.
0:04:57 Right, right.
0:04:59 Like, these people have done hard things.
0:04:59 Yeah.
0:05:01 And so I’m going to go learn with them.
0:05:01 Yeah.
0:05:03 And so that got me into fusion.
0:05:08 But, you know, for me, it was a different experience than if I had done a physics-based program in fusion.
0:05:11 Like more practical, more hands-on?
0:05:12 Is that the…
0:05:12 Yeah.
0:05:14 This was an engineering program.
0:05:20 And the Fusion Technology Institute, which I joined, its mission was to design viable fusion reactors.
0:05:23 It was to say, let’s assume the physics challenges are overcome.
0:05:25 How would you build a real system?
0:05:31 And that’s where, over the next few years, I just became a bit depressed, frankly.
0:05:45 Because even if you master the physics, it became really clear that the challenge of commercializing and making heat for five cents per kilowatt hour, which is sort of the going rate for it, I couldn’t see a way to do that.
0:05:54 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.
0:05:55 And they don’t live very long.
0:05:58 And they’re super expensive to make.
0:06:07 And so the idea that we could go straight to five cents per kilowatt hour, at least when I was in school, seemed far-fetched.
0:06:09 So it’s sort of a techno-economic problem.
0:06:11 You’re thinking of not just the technical side.
0:06:15 But if people are actually going to use it, it has to be price competitive.
0:06:16 Yeah, exactly.
0:06:17 Okay.
0:06:18 So you get sad.
0:06:22 You get sad because your Star Trek dream doesn’t seem like it’s going to come true.
0:06:27 And then, as I understand it, you go to a party and you have your big idea.
0:06:27 Is that true?
0:06:29 That is the history.
0:06:30 It was a party at my house.
0:06:34 And we were thinking about, well, I mean, most people weren’t thinking about this.
0:06:36 But I had been working on this problem earlier in the day.
0:06:38 So it was already kind of in my head.
0:06:41 And it came down to our research.
0:06:47 You know, I had done work on a specific technology at the UW where we were trying to make small fusion devices.
0:06:50 And the idea was that there were a number of applications you could use them for.
0:06:52 And they didn’t work very well.
0:07:02 And one of the reasons we discovered they didn’t work very well was we were trying to collide these nuclei in the same space that we were trying to speed them up.
0:07:03 Okay.
0:07:06 So you just shoot them really fast into each other is the basic idea?
0:07:06 Yeah.
0:07:14 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.
0:07:17 It’s banging into stuff and losing energy all the time.
0:07:23 And if you take away the target material so that you can accelerate them, then it’s not colliding very much.
0:07:25 And you don’t get a lot of fusion reactions.
0:07:28 So you kind of had to operate in this worst of both worlds space.
0:07:34 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?
0:07:38 Yeah, I was at one point, there were all kinds of people standing around with drinks.
0:07:43 And I was sitting in one of our recliners, my laptop, punching numbers into it.
0:07:50 And I just actually built a really quick model to just see what the fusion rate would do if we did that in theory.
0:07:52 And the numbers came out amazing.
0:07:58 Like, actually, it was like, you know, a thousand times higher than the output we were getting from our university experiment.
0:08:01 And so, you know, like, I quickly disengaged from the party.
0:08:05 I called my former advisor and I’m like, hey, you know, if we did this, like the math.
0:08:07 And he was like, oh, okay, that’s really cool.
0:08:09 Like, what do you want me to do?
0:08:10 And I was like, I don’t know yet.
0:08:12 I’ve got to figure this out.
0:08:15 But I think I’m going to start a company to go do this.
0:08:16 Were you sober?
0:08:20 I probably had had a couple of drinks by then, actually.
0:08:21 So it’s amazing that I got the math right.
0:08:22 But I did.
0:08:23 Maybe, or maybe it helped.
0:08:25 Maybe there’s like a curve, right?
0:08:27 Maybe there’s an optimal number of drinks.
0:08:29 There certainly is when it comes to bowling.
0:08:31 So why not nuclear physics as well?
0:08:32 Yes.
0:08:34 So you have this idea.
0:08:39 When you have this idea, do you think, oh, I’ve solved fusion energy?
0:08:47 This physics revelation doesn’t overcome the techno-economic challenge of fusion energy that I already had.
0:08:51 And so that was already, like, I had already moved past that.
0:08:55 And I was trying to see if there were ways, like what I had put in the back of my head,
0:09:02 are there ways you can make use of fusion, you know, where you might get paid more for the reaction than you get paid for energy?
0:09:10 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.
0:09:13 So two formative experiences.
0:09:24 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.
0:09:31 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.
0:09:39 And those included things like making medical isotopes or detecting hidden material or, you know, contraband material, detecting nuclear weapons, stuff like that.
0:09:44 And to be clear, those are things that people are already doing out in the world, right?
0:09:45 There is a market for those things.
0:09:47 These are existing products.
0:09:50 They’re just not using fusion to make them.
0:09:50 Yeah.
0:09:55 Super definable markets, you know, and there are supply chain issues.
0:09:58 And it’s a good market to get into if you had an alternative way to make things.
0:09:58 Okay.
0:09:59 So that was interesting.
0:10:10 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.
0:10:12 One of my roommates had a hard drive crash.
0:10:13 We looked online.
0:10:14 All the options sucked.
0:10:18 It was like, pay us $2,000 and we’ll try, but maybe we won’t get your stuff back.
0:10:19 And it’s an upfront payment.
0:10:22 And so we decided that was a bad business.
0:10:25 So we started a business and we said, we told people, we said, look, we’re just starting this company.
0:10:30 We’re, we’re new at it, but we’ll charge you a hundred bucks if we get your data and nothing if we don’t.
0:10:32 And, you know, we might break your stuff.
0:10:39 So, so, but you’d be surprised how many people like that better than, than being able to pay two grand.
0:10:42 And so what happened was we got really, really good at it as we practiced.
0:10:47 The volume we could handle and the throughput we could handle, all of this scaled really, really nicely.
0:10:56 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,
0:10:57 that works, we can practice.
0:11:00 And if we practice, we’ll get better at it.
0:11:04 And if we get better at it, like our suppliers and our customers and everyone will grow with us.
0:11:06 So we’ll move this ecosystem forward.
0:11:13 And I really liked that because if you look at some of the most high tech, deep tech industries around, they follow the same roadmap.
0:11:20 You know, if you look at semiconductors in Moore’s law, it was fueled by having products all along the way, right?
0:11:24 Like the first computers may have only had a few customers, but they would pay a ton for them.
0:11:24 Yes.
0:11:27 And by doing that, they got better and they brought the price down.
0:11:30 And then there were new, a new set of customers, right?
0:11:31 That could afford those computers.
0:11:35 More recently, Tesla is the classic model of that, right?
0:11:49 They started with the Roadster, this super expensive electric car that was not for everybody, but enough people bought it that they could go from the whatever that was, $150,000 car to the $70,000 car to the $50,000 car, right?
0:11:50 Yeah, exactly.
0:11:54 And I’d argue that the underlying technology for Tesla started even in other industries.
0:11:57 So the ability to scale batteries even more cheaply, right?
0:11:59 Like these rechargeable batteries.
0:12:04 So you started with toys and special services and you moved to laptops and then you moved to EVs.
0:12:09 And even once you get into EVs, you do this where you build an expensive thing that few people buy.
0:12:18 So you have the idea of applying this framework to Fusion, which is quite different, right?
0:12:26 There are all these other people who are raising lots of money to go straight at making electricity, basically, right?
0:12:27 Making energy.
0:12:32 Like why, I don’t know, like why isn’t anybody else doing it the way you’re doing it?
0:12:38 I think it’s a very exciting proposition to be able to go straight to energy.
0:12:41 It’s very inviting and it sounds very appealing.
0:12:48 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.
0:12:51 And that’s where my education was just different.
0:12:53 Like that’s all we thought about.
0:12:57 Like all we thought about were the engineering challenges and how to overcome them.
0:12:58 Like these were university people.
0:12:59 They’re super optimistic, right?
0:13:04 Like, and we worked, like we developed materials for first walls and things like that.
0:13:12 But like everything we did still broke really fast and it was really expensive stuff.
0:13:20 So, you know, it’s just, that was different for a different experience for me, different formative experience for me than for a lot of people who are trying to go straight to the end.
0:13:32 Now, I do think there are some innovative concepts out there, you know, that, 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.
0:13:36 But the main concepts we know that are likely to work will run into these challenges.
0:13:38 They’re, they’re very, very significant.
0:13:46 Meaning that even if the physics work, actually building a thing at, at a reasonable cost is going to be super hard.
0:13:48 Yeah, I think that’s, that’s my view.
0:13:52 So you actually did start a business and are selling things, right?
0:13:53 Yes.
0:13:56 Using fusion to do stuff that people will pay for.
0:13:57 So let’s talk about that.
0:13:59 Let’s talk about where the company is today.
0:14:01 And then we can talk about where you’re about to be.
0:14:04 And then we can talk about where hopefully you’ll be in some number of decades.
0:14:06 What, what, what do you sell in today?
0:14:07 We sell neutrons.
0:14:07 Uh-huh.
0:14:09 We sell neutrons.
0:14:11 Took me a little while when I started it.
0:14:13 And then I thought, well, you know, I buy electrons.
0:14:16 I buy electrons every time I turn on a light switch, right?
0:14:17 I’m used to buying electrons.
0:14:20 Tell me about the neutron business.
0:14:21 Like, what does that mean?
0:14:22 Yeah, and I’ll, I’ll translate it.
0:14:23 So we sell fusion.
0:14:26 We just sell fusion to the highest bidders.
0:14:29 And the highest bidders are not people who buy energy.
0:14:34 And so it turns out the easiest fusion reaction to do is, is DT fusion.
0:14:40 And DT fusion produces energy on the one hand, but it produces neutrons on the other.
0:14:46 And when sold to certain customers, the neutrons are far more valuable than the energy.
0:14:51 So, so just to be clear, DT fusion is just two different isotopes of hydrogen, right?
0:14:51 Correct.
0:14:58 And they make helium, and then they throw off some number of neutrons, which is just the
0:15:00 neutral, uh, uh, nuclear particle.
0:15:04 And you’re saying there’s people who actually have a use for neutrons.
0:15:05 Yes.
0:15:05 Okay.
0:15:06 Yeah, it turns out.
0:15:07 And they’ll pay a ton for it.
0:15:14 And so, uh, and, and generally the, the historical, uh, neutron sources for these are very specialized
0:15:15 fission reactors.
0:15:16 So research reactors.
0:15:16 Okay.
0:15:19 So more traditional nuclear reactors.
0:15:20 Because fission reactors throw off neutrons too.
0:15:25 Um, and as you, as we’ve talked about already, fission is much easier than fusion, uh, from a,
0:15:26 from a science perspective.
0:15:31 Uh, and so there’s these old reactors that serve these industries, but the, but the, the, the
0:15:34 research reactor fleet that we built in the past is old.
0:15:38 It’s like 60 plus years old and essentially dying in general.
0:15:42 So markets that have been served by these reactors are losing that capacity.
0:15:49 Uh, on top of that, um, fusion based approaches are much cheaper than building new reactors.
0:15:54 Uh, so as you look to replace the infrastructure, there’s a massive, uh, edge for fusion there.
0:15:58 Um, and, and when we looked at the markets, you know, we did very quick, like, well, everyone
0:16:02 else in fusion you probably talked to is chasing something called Q greater than one.
0:16:07 And that’s the ratio of energy out over energy in, and they want to show that they can make
0:16:10 more energy than they can put into it.
0:16:12 That’s the fundamental fusion dream, right?
0:16:13 Sure.
0:16:16 But they don’t even think, you know, most of them aren’t really even seriously thinking
0:16:17 about the economics.
0:16:22 They’re saying first we need to get to net energy and then we’ll worry about net economics.
0:16:27 For me, I, I, you know, I couldn’t see a way to scale fusion unless we were worried about
0:16:28 net economics right away.
0:16:33 And, and, and if we wanted to practice, we needed to have positive net economics right
0:16:33 away.
0:16:35 So we, our, our core metric was Q economic.
0:16:38 And so how do we get more dollars out than dollars in?
0:16:41 Which is the classic business question.
0:16:44 The question every business needs to answer to survive.
0:16:46 How can our revenues be greater than our costs?
0:16:46 Yeah.
0:16:48 And that’s how we have seen deep tech scale, right?
0:16:51 Like that is the playbook by which it scales.
0:16:55 So we, we pursued that and, you know, we found actually customers.
0:16:59 So, you know, if you do a kilowatt hour of fusion, if you produce a kilowatt hour of fusion
0:17:04 heat and, and you can sell that for five cents, let’s say, um, if you, if you took the same
0:17:09 neutrons generated by that kilowatt hour of fusion reactions, there are customers who would pay
0:17:10 $200,000 for it.
0:17:11 Huh.
0:17:13 And so that’s a massive difference.
0:17:17 And so are you in fact selling those neutrons for $200,000 now?
0:17:18 Is that your business?
0:17:18 We are.
0:17:21 And who is buying them and what are they doing with them?
0:17:21 Yeah.
0:17:23 So they’re making airplanes safer.
0:17:26 Uh, you know, they’re making rockets, uh, more reliable.
0:17:31 What is the link between buying neutrons from you and making a airplane safer?
0:17:31 All right.
0:17:37 So, uh, modern engines and jet aircraft operate to get very high efficiency and very high power.
0:17:38 They operate in a really high temperature.
0:17:43 In fact, they operate like 20% above the melting point of the blades in the engine.
0:17:45 I’m glad I didn’t know that.
0:17:48 And now I’m going to tell you something that gets even more scary.
0:17:52 So the way they manage that is they suck cold air in from the front of the engine and
0:17:56 they pipe it through a series of cooling tubes in each fin, like embedded in each fin.
0:18:01 Uh, and the manufacturing process is such that it’s fairly common that one of these cooling
0:18:02 tubes is blocked.
0:18:03 Okay.
0:18:08 And, and if it’s blocked, it will melt, it will imbalance the engine and possibly destroy
0:18:08 it.
0:18:11 Uh, and so we don’t want that to happen.
0:18:12 Um, truly.
0:18:19 But with modern materials, and those are materials that x-ray or ultrasound do not interact with
0:18:19 heavily.
0:18:23 So if you try to see inside these things with conventional techniques, you cannot see the
0:18:23 defect.
0:18:28 So just to be clear, you make this engine and then you want to look inside to make sure that
0:18:32 these cooling tubes are not blocked so that it doesn’t melt and the plane crashes.
0:18:37 And so you think, well, we could use x-ray or ultrasound to common technologies, but you’re
0:18:38 saying those don’t work.
0:18:38 Yeah.
0:18:42 But there’s some way you can, what, shoot neutrons at it and see inside of it?
0:18:42 Yeah.
0:18:43 Yeah.
0:18:44 Yeah, there is.
0:18:49 So, so, um, neutrons have, you know, they have, uh, a characteristic of, there are certain
0:18:50 isotopes.
0:18:57 So certain materials in nature that absorb neutrons like crazy, like, like, and, and you can put
0:18:58 them where you want them to be.
0:19:04 So, so for example, with jet engine blades, um, we just push a liquid solution containing
0:19:06 a material known as gadolinium into the blade.
0:19:09 Uh, and then we blow it out with air.
0:19:11 Uh, and if the channel’s blocked, it doesn’t blow out.
0:19:17 So the gadolinium sits in there and then we hit it with neutrons and any neutron that
0:19:19 comes close to that gadolinium gets absorbed.
0:19:23 Uh, and then behind the blade, you put a piece of film that’s sensitive to neutrons.
0:19:25 It’s a little more complex than that.
0:19:27 And you can see it and you can see it.
0:19:28 It’s like an x-ray.
0:19:29 It’s like a neutron x-ray.
0:19:34 You see the inside of stuff, but, but neutrons can see things x-ray can’t.
0:19:36 And it’s actually very complimentary.
0:19:38 X-ray is good at generally heavy materials.
0:19:41 Neutrons are generally good at seeing light materials.
0:19:44 And so are you in that business now?
0:19:45 We are.
0:19:45 Yeah.
0:19:46 Yeah.
0:19:49 We’ll do tens of thousands of parts, you know, in a year.
0:19:54 And, uh, yeah, we’re, we’re replacing essentially aged capacity.
0:19:59 So, uh, the biggest imaging reactor in the United States shut down about two years ago.
0:20:00 It was run by GE.
0:20:03 Uh, and so there’s this nice tailwind for share acquisition here.
0:20:07 It’s not just a way for us to make money in fusion, but, but a lot of the customers sort
0:20:11 of just come to us proactively because they’re very worried about the future of the supply
0:20:11 chain.
0:20:12 Uh-huh.
0:20:15 So there, they send you the blades.
0:20:15 You have a facility.
0:20:17 They send you the blades.
0:20:17 They do.
0:20:18 And you, yeah.
0:20:21 And we give them back pictures, uh, with the blades.
0:20:21 Yeah.
0:20:22 Okay.
0:20:24 So that’s the business you’re in.
0:20:29 Uh, it seems like the next big step is getting into the medical isotope business, right?
0:20:30 You’re building a.
0:20:30 Yeah.
0:20:30 Yeah.
0:20:31 Okay.
0:20:34 And, and just on the other thing, there are many others.
0:20:35 So turbine blades are just one application.
0:20:39 There’s a lot of other parts and components that we validate, including radiation hardness
0:20:41 testing and electronics, et cetera.
0:20:45 So, but yeah, the next step, um, and it required a huge reduction in the cost per neutron.
0:20:50 Uh, we had to get the cost per neutron down a thousand fold, uh, to make the next step work.
0:20:51 So this is important, right?
0:20:52 Yeah.
0:20:58 The whole arc you’re trying to, uh, follow is like, let’s do one thing where we can make
0:21:01 a lot of money and then let’s do the next thing where they’ll actually pay us less.
0:21:06 So we have to figure out how to do it a thousand times cheaper for it to be profitable.
0:21:09 But they’ll buy a lot more neutrons.
0:21:14 And so the, the, the market opportunity is actually, you know, let’s call it 10 to 20 times larger
0:21:15 than the test opportunity in total.
0:21:20 Uh, and so even though they’re paying you less, they’re buying so many more neutrons that,
0:21:22 you know, you make more money.
0:21:27 We’ll be back in just a minute.
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0:22:16 The next step for shine for Greg’s company is to start using neutrons to create medical isotopes.
0:22:21 Medical isotopes, as it turns out, are widely used in medical imaging.
0:22:29 To get into that business, shine is building what’s basically a factory that’s going to use fusion to create medical isotopes.
0:22:32 They call the factory chrysalis.
0:22:34 And Greg and I were talking on video.
0:22:40 And at this point in the conversation, he mentioned that you could actually see chrysalis out the window behind him.
0:22:42 And this is chrysalis behind me, by the way.
0:22:46 And it’s not a picture for people who are listening.
0:22:54 It’s like out there, there’s a bunch of grass, and then there’s a building that looks like a rectangle, a cement rectangle over your shoulder.
0:22:57 That’s over half a billion dollars of invested capital is what it is.
0:23:00 Over half a billion dollars of cement rectangle for my information.
0:23:02 So, tell me about what’s going on in there.
0:23:03 Yeah.
0:23:06 So, essentially, we needed to get the cost per neutron down.
0:23:06 We did.
0:23:09 We demonstrated that back in 2019.
0:23:16 And what we knew we could do then is if we got it that cheap, instead of using neutrons just to examine material, we can use it to change material.
0:23:16 Okay.
0:23:19 In a sense, nuclear engineers call it transmutation.
0:23:22 But, like, the common population would think of it as alchemy.
0:23:29 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.
0:23:36 So, at small scale, the most interesting markets for these are in medicine, producing isotopes used for medicine.
0:23:40 Which turns out to be wildly common, right?
0:23:52 Like, medical isotopes, I learned, you know, researching for this show, are like, what, tens of thousands of people a day in the U.S. are tested with medical isotopes, right?
0:23:54 Yeah, 50 million per year around the world.
0:23:55 Yeah, yeah.
0:23:56 So, they’re super common.
0:24:04 And, again, just like in the testing business where we’re replacing fission reactors, that’s how isotopes have been made in the past.
0:24:10 So, old fission research reactors around 60 years old, and, you know, they’re dying, right?
0:24:11 Like, the infrastructure’s going away.
0:24:13 And so, it’s the same tailwind.
0:24:15 We just needed to get fusion a lot cheaper to do it.
0:24:26 And is it right that, in a kind of crude way, the use is analogous in many cases, that medical isotopes are used for scanning, but you’re scanning people instead of jet airplane blades?
0:24:28 Yeah, the mechanism’s a little bit different.
0:24:30 So, but it’s the same idea, right?
0:24:34 Like, so, and it fits our whole theme of illumination around the company, right?
0:24:36 In one case, we’re illuminating defects here.
0:24:37 We’re illuminating disease.
0:24:39 Eventually, we’ll be illuminating the planet, right?
0:24:40 With energy.
0:24:41 That’s a good metaphor.
0:24:42 Yeah, yeah.
0:24:48 But, you know, so what you do is you’ve got enough neutrons now that you can turn, you can change materials.
0:24:58 So, you can take things that are relatively stable, like uranium, you buy it for $6 a gram, turn it into an imaging isotope, molybdenum-99, which is worth like $150 million a gram.
0:25:01 Presumably, people buy it in very, very, very small amounts.
0:25:02 Yeah, they do.
0:25:06 But, you know, it’s a dose for a patient is like one-tenth of one microgram, right?
0:25:15 Yeah, I mean, if it’s $150 million a gram, and you’re making it in a $500 million building, you don’t have to make much of it to redeem your cost of capital.
0:25:17 Yeah, and chrysalis will produce a few grams per year.
0:25:18 That’s it.
0:25:18 Yeah, wow.
0:25:19 That’s extraordinary.
0:25:25 So, it’s like a few grams is like a little cup, not even just a little, like a spoonful.
0:25:25 No, it’s like a sugar packet.
0:25:27 Like the sugar packet you dump in your coffee, that’s a few grams, right?
0:25:29 But that’s millions of doses or something.
0:25:33 Yeah, so one gram is 10 million doses, is essentially the way I think about it.
0:25:34 That is wild.
0:25:37 Can we just have that be wild for one moment?
0:25:37 Okay, go on.
0:25:42 So, you know, in the U.S., for example, most of the testing is to look at blood flow in the heart.
0:25:50 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.
0:25:56 But also for staging cancer, and there’s probably another two dozen tests all that use this on a scan.
0:25:58 So, that’s what you’re going to be making.
0:26:04 Like, tell me about the business end of Chrysalis, of that facility over your shoulder.
0:26:08 Like, what’s it look like in there where you’re actually doing the fusion?
0:26:10 So, there’s a bunch of machines.
0:26:12 So, there’ll be six fusion machines in Chrysalis.
0:26:15 They’re built, and they’re, you know, they’re being installed.
0:26:17 And they are surrounded.
0:26:24 So, there’s a tube in which the particle beam comes down, and it strikes tritium and makes fusion reactions.
0:26:26 And the neutrons come out in all directions.
0:26:30 And we’ve surrounded that tube with a uranium target.
0:26:31 It’s uranium dissolved in water.
0:26:35 And as the neutrons hit it, they cause it to split.
0:26:46 And we get isotopes that are useful for medicine, things like molybdenum-99, iodine-131, which is used to treat cancer, xenon-133, which is used to image brain and heart.
0:26:51 So, you’re actually using fusion to drive a fission reaction that makes the thing that you want.
0:26:51 Precisely, yeah.
0:26:53 It’s like a nuclear turducken.
0:26:53 Yeah.
0:26:56 Versus using fission to drive a fission reaction.
0:26:58 And the difference is cost.
0:27:08 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.
0:27:11 So, fusion turns out to be much cheaper and much safer.
0:27:15 And it produces about, you know, somewhere between one and five percent the radioactive waste.
0:27:17 Of a reactor.
0:27:18 So, much, much cleaner.
0:27:24 And is it right that there have actually been shortages of the isotope that you’re going to be making?
0:27:25 All the time.
0:27:26 Yeah.
0:27:28 And it’s been going on for 15 years.
0:27:31 And so, how close are you to opening?
0:27:32 What has to happen?
0:27:35 There’s a building behind you, but it’s not on yet, right?
0:27:38 The equipment is almost all entirely here in Jamesville.
0:27:39 We need to install it.
0:27:40 We need to commission it.
0:27:42 And then we need to start pushing product out of it.
0:27:44 When are you going to get the first neutron?
0:27:48 I won’t say out the door, but, you know, when are you going to make the first neutron?
0:27:53 Well, the first neutrons are actually, like, being made in a smaller building to the side that we used to practice.
0:27:56 But the first isotopes should be made in about 18 months.
0:27:57 Okay.
0:27:59 So, like, end of next year.
0:27:59 Yeah.
0:28:04 I think, and there’s a big difference between first isotope produced and actually commercial readiness.
0:28:04 Yeah.
0:28:06 And your whole thing is techno-economics, right?
0:28:10 The first isotope produced where the unit economics are profitable for you.
0:28:10 Yes.
0:28:13 You know, and I would say that’s probably more likely two years.
0:28:17 But this is a plant that no one’s ever built before with technology that we have tested in the lab.
0:28:23 But, you know, when you build a working machine that has thousands of moving parts and we’ve de-risked all the…
0:28:23 Oh, yeah.
0:28:26 I’m totally willing to believe that it won’t work.
0:28:26 Oh, it will work.
0:28:29 But the things that are going to break and burn us are, like, you know…
0:28:32 Or that it won’t be economical, right?
0:28:35 Like, nobody has ever done anything like what you were doing before.
0:28:35 Yeah.
0:28:36 It’ll be economical.
0:28:40 I think the question is, for me, is, like, I’m worried about things like valves.
0:28:42 We have hundreds of valves in this plant.
0:28:45 And they might have a very low failure rate, right?
0:28:49 But if the failure rate’s 1% on hundreds of valves, you’re going to have a lot of problems.
0:28:51 You’re always going to have broken valves.
0:28:52 This is your engineering training.
0:28:54 Yeah, it’s exactly right.
0:28:57 Like, I’ve got an earlier Model S and…
0:28:57 A Tesla.
0:28:58 An old Tesla.
0:28:58 Yeah.
0:28:58 Yeah.
0:29:00 The motor runs fantastically.
0:29:02 The car is still super fun to drive.
0:29:04 It’s got 170,000 miles on it.
0:29:07 But I’ve replaced the door handles, like, it feels like a dozen times.
0:29:12 And it’s not fun when you suddenly can’t get in your car and you’ve got to, like, use a credit card to…
0:29:14 Especially if it’s like, oh, look how fancy the door handles are.
0:29:16 Just make regular door handles, man.
0:29:18 And they went back to that, actually.
0:29:19 They learned a lesson there.
0:29:21 But that’s what’s going to hit us.
0:29:27 So I think as we think about that thing, like, really producing reliably, I tell people probably two years is sort of the soonest.
0:29:29 And it could be three, right?
0:29:31 Like, it could be somewhere in that range.
0:29:33 That’s the current step.
0:29:33 Yeah.
0:29:34 I want to get to the big dream.
0:29:41 How many steps between making medical isotopes and creating cheap and abundant power for all of humanity?
0:29:42 Yeah.
0:29:45 And by the way, our steps are, like, pragmatic, not dogmatic.
0:29:46 That’s nice.
0:29:47 But they’ve held.
0:29:51 So, like, if there are new market applications that come up, we’ll definitely look to include them.
0:29:52 I won’t hold you to it.
0:29:55 I promise I won’t hold you to your forward-looking statements.
0:29:55 Yeah.
0:30:00 But they have held for the last 15 years, I guess, is something I can say with confidence.
0:30:07 So the next step is to do this transmutation, right, changing one material into another at a larger scale.
0:30:11 And we can use that to solve one of the biggest problems with fission energy.
0:30:15 So, again, you can see us starting to come into the fission world a little bit here.
0:30:21 And one of the things that we should be doing as a nation is we should be recycling all of our nuclear waste.
0:30:22 We have a lot of nuclear waste.
0:30:27 For a while, we were going to bury it all in a mountain in Nevada, but people in Nevada didn’t like that idea.
0:30:30 So it’s still just sort of sitting around everywhere.
0:30:35 And it’ll be sitting around for millions of years, the right order of magnitude, if we don’t do something about it.
0:30:35 I think that’s right.
0:30:38 And the problem with that is it’s just loaded with value.
0:30:39 Right.
0:30:40 People worry about it.
0:30:44 But also, look, look at all this energy that’s just sitting there ready to be harvested.
0:30:45 Yeah.
0:30:47 So why not solve two problems at once, right?
0:30:49 It’s not super safe where it is.
0:30:50 I mean, it’s pretty safe where it is.
0:30:53 But if somebody wanted to do something to it, they might be able to.
0:30:59 A lot of it’s plutonium, which is stuff that if you worked and you processed it enough, you could turn into a nuclear weapon.
0:31:01 So we should be eliminating that hazard.
0:31:05 And at the same time, we can solve a strategic fuel supply issue for us.
0:31:11 Now that our relationship with Russia is not so good, you know, they were the source of a lot of the uranium that we put into our fission reactors.
0:31:19 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.
0:31:24 And the great part is the more fission reactors we burn, the more recycled fuel we have.
0:31:26 So it just scales with the number of plants.
0:31:36 And so you have a sort of clear technological line to using your fusion reactors to do what?
0:31:40 To get energy out of spent fuel from fission plants?
0:31:41 Like what do you actually do there?
0:31:47 We’ll take spent fuel, we’ll dissolve it into a liquid form, we’ll separate out valuable materials.
0:31:50 That includes uranium and plutonium, which should go back into the reactor.
0:31:54 So close loop, close the fuel cycle with fission.
0:31:59 We’ll separate out other things, precious metals, rare earth elements that have decayed enough to sell.
0:32:04 And then you’re left with this very small waste stream, like it’s less than 5% of the original.
0:32:08 Almost all of that has relatively short half-lives, decades or less.
0:32:17 And a little bit of it has these really long problematic half-lives, million year plus isotopes.
0:32:19 That’s the only place fusion comes in.
0:32:20 It solves that problem.
0:32:25 So fusion neutrons can transmute just like we use them to turn low value into high value.
0:32:28 We can use them to turn long half-life into short half-life.
0:32:38 And one great example I like to use is iodine-129, waste product from fission, lives over 10 million years, over 10 million year half-life.
0:32:39 Which is bad.
0:32:40 It’s going to be radioactive forever.
0:32:40 Forever.
0:32:41 Yeah.
0:32:43 And you hit it with a fusion neutron, though.
0:32:45 It becomes iodine-128.
0:32:49 Iodine-128 has a 25-minute half-life, after which it becomes stable.
0:32:51 And then you put it in salt.
0:32:52 Yeah, you could, right?
0:32:53 Like you could eat it.
0:32:53 Yeah.
0:32:59 So you do this process with fusion, and you solve the problem with the long-lived waste.
0:33:05 So we want to do that two steps, and we know how, because we’re already doing both of those processes in chrysalis.
0:33:13 So as we look to scaling to a waste recycling plant, we’ve already got essentially a prototype for it here.
0:33:15 And, you know, we’re going to build on that.
0:33:20 It’s the same part of the regulatory code that would license a recycling plant, same type of construction, everything.
0:33:25 Yeah, so that one is obviously complicated on multiple dimensions, right?
0:33:28 I mean, you have to—whatever the technical side is, it’s the technical side.
0:33:30 But presumably, you’re dealing with nuclear waste.
0:33:33 There’s going to be a whole, like, political, regulatory side.
0:33:36 That’s—what is that, a decade when you think about that?
0:33:39 Ten years, 20—like, that’s a long game already, right?
0:33:43 But the political winds are changing, and I’m not talking about because of the current administration.
0:33:47 No, the world is becoming more pro-nuclear, you know, basically nonpartisan way.
0:33:50 But people are starting to learn that you shouldn’t think in absolute terms, right?
0:33:56 Like, are you more afraid of climate change, or are you more afraid of the very, very small risk posed by nuclear energy?
0:33:56 Yes.
0:34:03 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.
0:34:09 Even particulate emissions from, you know, certainly coal plants are wildly more dangerous than a fission plant.
0:34:17 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.
0:34:25 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.
0:34:26 Yeah, we’ll see.
0:34:34 You know, the U.S. has had a long-term policy ban on recycling spent fuel, you know, but new executive orders that just came out are challenging that.
0:34:37 So, I’m trying to reinvigorate the nuclear industry.
0:34:39 I mean, when do you think you’re going to do it?
0:34:40 Uh, 2032.
0:34:41 Okay.
0:34:43 Not 10 years, but not too far off of 10 years.
0:34:44 In a pilot plant.
0:34:45 Okay.
0:34:47 Because we want to prove the economics first.
0:34:49 And then can we get to the big dream after that?
0:34:49 Of course.
0:34:52 When do we get to free energy for all of humanity?
0:34:52 Now?
0:34:53 Are we ready?
0:35:02 So, the cool thing is, as you look at, like, these fusion systems that you use for recycling spent fuel, they look technologically very much like fusion power plants.
0:35:05 But you’re still getting paid at least 20 times as much per reaction.
0:35:09 And they don’t need to operate 99.99% of the time.
0:35:12 Because, you know, people freak out if a city loses power for good reason.
0:35:18 If you slow down recycling a material that has a 10-million-year half-life, no big deal, right?
0:35:21 Like, you fix the machine, you get to learn, and you get to move forward.
0:35:27 So, and we’re going to have to build dozens, if not hundreds, of these fusion systems to solve the global problem with nuclear waste.
0:35:37 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 10 or so.
0:35:48 So, really, in your mind, the recycling nuclear waste is like a sort of a straight line.
0:35:51 It just ramps right up to just generating energy.
0:35:56 Yes, in my mind, and this is very hard for a lot of people to grasp, but it really is exactly that.
0:36:00 So, I’m glad that you put that together right away, because it is that.
0:36:08 So, the sort of fusion reaction you would be running in that context, it’s the kind of thing that, well, let’s go back to Q.
0:36:12 Let’s go back to this idea of getting more energy out than you put in, right?
0:36:15 Like, in that setting, how does that happen?
0:36:18 At some point in the future, somebody has to do that.
0:36:18 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:36:23 And I know that’s not your primary goal, and it’s a compelling case for why that’s not your primary goal.
0:36:28 But, like, do you get to that just by incremental engineering tweaks?
0:36:33 Are you ever going to have to, like, have some, you know, physics-level technological insight?
0:36:39 Or do you just think you can keep optimizing and optimizing what you’re doing, and you’ll sort of eventually get to more energy out than you put in?
0:36:42 No, we’ll need physics optimization, too.
0:36:46 Like, so, and even going from phase one to phase two, it was new technology.
0:36:47 Yeah.
0:36:51 But the truth is, through practice and building over time, like, it’s a different path.
0:36:55 And you have a different technology evolution path than trying to go straight to the endgame.
0:36:57 And so, and it’s pragmatic, right?
0:36:59 You’re always building systems that are doing work for customers.
0:37:06 And so, it’s cost-effective built into the model, and it’s pragmatic built into the model, and that’s just how you design new technology.
0:37:12 But what I’ll say is, we have our own technology that we like for scaling into phase three, recycling, and ultimately energy.
0:37:15 But I’m the only fusion company that will say this.
0:37:18 I don’t think it’s more than 10% likely to be successful.
0:37:22 And I don’t think any given technology probably is.
0:37:29 And so, what I do know, though, is we’re going to have an amazing delivery engine that can manufacture fusion systems at scale.
0:37:35 And whatever technology is successful, I know we will have a role to play in bringing this economically to the world.
0:37:42 When you say you don’t think it’s more than 10% likely to be successful, you mean the particular technology you are betting on using.
0:37:42 Yeah.
0:37:46 You think it’s very unlikely that it will work to put out more energy than you put into it.
0:37:47 It probably won’t.
0:37:48 It probably won’t do that.
0:37:49 And to be clear, cost-effectively.
0:37:50 Cost-effectively, right.
0:37:51 Yeah.
0:37:52 For electricity.
0:37:53 Yes.
0:38:00 But you’re saying you’re learning all of these things about the engineering, about the nuts and bolts that will be relevant no matter whose technology works.
0:38:00 Exactly.
0:38:01 Let me ask you this.
0:38:07 I feel like if you think your technology probably won’t work, you must hope somebody else’s will, right?
0:38:11 Like, if somebody else does it before you do it, will you be happy?
0:38:13 Will that be good in your mind?
0:38:13 Yes.
0:38:15 It would be fantastic.
0:38:20 And it’s kind of funny because, you know, it’s becoming a competitive world in the fusion space.
0:38:22 And, like, I’m cheering for everybody.
0:38:23 I love that.
0:38:27 I would love to see anyone be successful in moving forward.
0:38:31 And, look, we’re going to have an awesome economic and manufacturing engine we’d love to work with.
0:38:35 Whatever technology prevails at the end of the day, we’re going to continue to adapt our strategy
0:38:38 and invest in what looks like it’s doing great just so we can move fast.
0:38:42 But this is a tool that I want to see in my lifetime come to humanity.
0:38:45 And, like, that means looking across the page at everything.
0:38:48 Just like we looked at fusion holistically, right?
0:38:49 Not just the energy.
0:38:52 We’re not dogmatic to a single technical approach.
0:38:57 We’re going to learn a ton in the next 10 years with all this funding going into all these different approaches.
0:39:00 And I’m really, really excited to see what comes out of it.
0:39:05 We’ll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
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0:39:50 Let’s finish with the lightning round.
0:39:53 What’s one thing you would do if you had free unlimited power?
0:39:54 One thing I would do?
0:39:59 Well, you know, so this all goes back to my nerdy childhood and space and Star Trek, right?
0:40:05 Like, I’d love to build a series of spacecraft that would go back and forth from the Earth to Mars and otherwise.
0:40:10 I think, you know, if you’ve got a fusion engine, that becomes very, very fast and very, very easy.
0:40:15 You know, this nine-month travel time is actually insanely problematic for humans.
0:40:20 The radiation you get up in space is going to be very damaging over those timeframes.
0:40:27 And so, you know, 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.
0:40:28 You think you’ll go to space?
0:40:30 Well, you know, it’s funny.
0:40:37 I used to always want to be an astronaut, but the reality of very tiny closed-in capsules is something that I’m not, like, super big fan of.
0:40:42 So, if we had starships or something a little more spacious, I’d love to, but not so much in today’s environment.
0:40:48 I mean, you need fusion power to build your Cadillac to space.
0:40:49 Exactly right.
0:40:50 Exactly right.
0:40:52 If you weren’t working on fusion, what would you be working on?
0:40:55 I’d probably also be working on the same thing.
0:41:05 I do think, like, even with fission, there are ways to build spacecraft that can go to and from the different planets in the solar system very cost-effectively and fairly quickly.
0:41:10 Fusion would be faster, but we can get the time down to a couple months, probably, with fission.
0:41:12 If you go anywhere in the solar system, where would you go?
0:41:14 Anywhere in the solar system.
0:41:15 You want to do anywhere in the galaxy?
0:41:16 I don’t care.
0:41:17 It’s just a question.
0:41:18 Well, yeah.
0:41:25 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
0:41:26 without being obliterated.
0:41:29 The world’s most spectacular fireworks show would be something to see.
0:41:39 Greg Peiffer is the co-founder and CEO of Shine.
0:41:44 Please email us at problematpushkin.fm.
0:41:47 We are always looking for new guests for the show.
0:41:51 Today’s show was produced by Trina Menino and Gabriel Hunter-Chang.
0:41:56 It was edited by Alexandra Gerriton and engineered by Sarah Bruguer.
0:42:00 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and we’ll be back next week with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
0:42:15 This is an iHeart Podcast.
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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