By Eric Wesoff for Canary Media.
Broadcast version by Judith Ruiz-Branch for Wisconsin News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Since its founding back in 2010, Shine Technologies has raised nearly $800 million to deliver on the potential of generating cheap, abundant energy from fusion.

Like the dozens of other startups at work in this field, Shine Technologies has yet to crack the code on fusion, an energy source that has been 40 years away from commercialization for 50 years. But unlike those competitors, Shine is already generating real revenue — not by producing electricity but by essentially selling neutrons from the fusion reaction to industrial imaging and materials testing companies.

Governments, venture capitalists, tech billionaires, and other private investors around the world have pumped more than $7.1 billion into fusion companies, according to a July 2024 report by the Fusion Industry Association.

But despite almost a century of research since fusion’s discovery, engineers have been unable to achieve its holy grail: continuously generating more power than was used to create a fusion reaction in the first place. The fusion world uses a metric called the fusion energy gain factor, also known simply as Q, to measure that ratio. If a project was to achieve a Q greater than 1, it would achieve the much-sought-after energy-breakeven point.

But Shine has a different benchmark — at least for right now.

“If you talk to almost every fusion company on Earth, they’ll say, ‘We’re shooting for Q greater than 1.’ But we have a different Q — our Q is economic. It’s generating more dollars out than dollars in. That’s how you scale a company,” Greg Piefer, Shine’s CEO, said.

A different kind of fusion company 

The fusion reaction is the primordial alchemical trick that powers our sun, propels spacecraft in science-fiction novels and, if the visionaries and true believers are correct, could meet humanity’s voracious energy needs in the centuries to come.

The reaction occurs in plasma, the fourth state of matter. The sun creates plasma by compressing and heating hydrogen to tens of millions of degrees, and it performs the miracle of fusion by confining that hydrogen, along with its variants, with its mammoth gravity.

Humans hoping to recreate the conditions of the sun on Earth have to rely on exotic magnets, Brobdingnagian laser-beam arrays, or other maximalist techniques.

These complex and expensive fusion machines compress and confine plasma in an attempt to bring two nuclei close enough to overcome their repellant electrostatic forces and fuse together. A successful, sustained fusion reaction would heat up a material surrounding the reactor, allowing it to boil water and drive the same sort of conventional steam turbine you’d find in a coal, gas, or traditional nuclear (fission) power plant.

Most of the fusion startups Canary Media has covered — such as Commonwealth Fusion Systems, TAE Technologies, Avalanche Energy, and Zap Energy — plan to take this steam-turbine approach to producing fusion power. Each company has its own (unproven) method for controlling the plasma and wringing out the heat. Some firms use a tokamak design, a very big, hollow donut-shaped hall in which the plasma circulates, or a twisted variant called a stellarator. Some aspirants confine the plasma with magnetic forces while others use high electrical currents or lasers to tame the atomic-particle soup.

So, which technology and approach is Shine using to solve the fusion riddle?

“I’m going to say something really trippy. As a fusion company, when it comes to energy production — I don’t know yet. … We have our own internal technological approach. I don’t think it’s any more likely than any other technological approach to prevail,” Piefer admitted. “You won’t hear that from any other fusion CEO in the whole world. But the truth is, it’s early innings, and we don’t know which fusion approach is going to be the most cost-effective.”

And while today’s cadre of fusion startups aims to provide power to the electrical grid in the 2030s or 2040s, Shine is following a different path to market.

“Fusion-energy people are trying to go from fusion not really having ever been used commercially for anything to it being the most reliable, cheapest form of generating energy,” said Piefer. “Everyone’s chasing the energy.”

Instead, Shine’s CEO wants his firm to scale the way historic deep-tech companies like semiconductor makers have done: “You start small with a market where you can make money right away, and then you iterate over time — and through that virtuous cycle of providing value and reinvesting a portion of it to make the technology better, you continue to access bigger and bigger markets.”

The market where Shine is making money now is the sale of neutrons for use in industrial imaging and materials testing. Piefer estimates that this will generate “on the order of $50 million of revenue in 2025.”

Shine will next move into medical-isotope production, then recycling spent nuclear fuel, and, ultimately, Piefer said, electrical power generation.

Producing medical isotopes requires fewer sustained reactions than producing power, and while net power is a ways away, the technology for isotope production is already available.

Medical isotopes are currently produced via nuclear fission, but if they can be produced via fusion, that would eliminate the need to use highly enriched uranium. And it could be a lucrative line of business: The global market for medical isotopes is about $6 billion a year.

“If you make a kilowatt-hour of fusion energy, you can sell that kilowatt-hour for maybe 5 cents,” he said. “But you can sell the other product of [deuterium-tritium] fusion reactions, neutrons, for as much as $100,000 per kilowatt-hour in certain markets.”

The prospect of getting a foot in that market drove Shine to break ground on a new facility in Wisconsin, which has already been licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It will be the largest isotope-production factory in the world when it comes online in a few years, according to Piefer. He claims that his firm is the only one that has successfully shepherded a new nuclear technology through the NRC process since the agency’s inception in 1974. The firm has also received tens of millions of dollars from the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration to support its isotope-production plans, including $32 million last summer.

Unlike the rest of the fusion-startup cohort, “we’re actually selling fusion,” the CEO said. “That’s an important differentiation because it means we get to practice fusion, which is ultimately what’s going to drive it to be cheaper” — and potentially pave the way for it to become a power source in the decades to come.


Eric Wesoff wrote this article for Canary Media.


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Pennsylvania is among the five states projected to be hit hardest if the Inflation Reduction Act is repealed.

A report from the think tank Energy Innovation showed the law has brought more than $1.33 billion dollars in clean energy and transportation investments, creating nearly 4,700 jobs.

Megan Ziegler, CEO of the Southwest Pennsylvania Municipal Project Hub, said the Inflation Reduction Act helps modernize infrastructure and supports local governments and schools in upgrading outdated facilities. She added reducing tax credits and clean energy projects would negatively affect the Pennsylvania economy and environment.

"These are called direct pay or elective pay," Ziegler explained. "This was a great tool because this was the first time that local governments, nonprofits and schools, because of their tax-exemption status, were able to offset these investments in their buildings and their systems the way that private industry has been leveraging those for years."

The report revealed repealing existing federal clean energy tax credits and funding programs would increase average annual household energy costs in Pennsylvania by nearly $60 per year in 2030 and more than $80 per year in 2035.

Zeigler pointed out many homeowners in southwest Pennsylvania have used state rebates and tax credits to make energy efficient upgrades, helping to lower costs as temperatures rise. She warned cutting the programs would raise expenses and stressed the need for bipartisan support because clean energy investments create jobs and strengthen the economy.

"There was a lot of IRA funding that was dedicated to grid stability," Zeigler noted. "Ultimately, our region needs to make smart investments by diversifying our grid with more renewables, microgrids or even hydroelectric systems. This reduces blackouts and saves ratepayers over time as well."

Robbie Orvis, senior director for modeling and analysis at Energy Innovation, said the nationwide study showed what would happen to energy projects and jobs between 2025 and 2035 if cuts are made.

"When we compared the top 10 states for each of those side by side, we found that there were five states that were in the top 10 in both of those categories, and those were Texas, Florida, California, Pennsylvania and Georgia," Orvis reported.

He added those states risk higher energy bills and job losses due to growth in population, manufacturing and electricity demand. A Moody's analysis found President Donald Trump's 2024 policy plan could fuel inflation, slow the economy and trigger a recession by the middle of this year.

As President Donald Trump rolls back clean energy initiatives at the federal level, states like Maryland are pushing ahead with their own energy transitions.

Legislation moving through the Maryland General Assembly includes a bill to codify Gov. Wes Moore's campaign pledge, to transition the state to 100% clean energy by 2035. Another bill, known as the Abundant Affordable Clean Energy Act, would expand battery storage to the regional grid.

Rebecca Rehr, director of climate policy and justice for the Maryland League of Conservation Voters, said clean energy investments can also help the economy and combat rising energy costs.

"We can create a model of economic growth and clean energy adoption that other states can follow," Rehr contended. "We can really lead here, especially in the face of federal rollbacks. You can have economic growth and a growth of the clean energy industry here in Maryland at the same time. These go hand in glove."

Energy costs for many Maryland households have recently gone up 50% for gas and 30% for electricity.

Clean energy advocates in the state are also playing defense. Top Democratic leaders in the General Assembly introduced the Next Generation Energy Act, to build new natural gas plants. Rehr argued it would impede progress the state has made in the clean energy transition.

"If this bill moves forward as it was introduced, it not only seeks to build new gas in Maryland," Rehr pointed out. "It seeks to fast-track new gas in Maryland, which could have consequences and again sort of flies in the face of any environmental justice provisions in state law."

The state also has goals to produce 8.5 gigawatts of wind power by 2031.

Texas would be one of five states to suffer the most if the Trump administration repeals the Inflation Reduction Act, according to a report from the think tank Energy Innovation.

Since the legislation was enacted in 2022, more than $17 billion in clean energy and transportation projects have been announced statewide.

Robbie Orvis, senior director for modeling and analysis at Energy Innovation, said ending the tax credits and reducing clean energy projects would negatively affect the Texas economy and environment.

"What the IRA does is, it creates an incentive for developers to build even more clean electricity," Orvis explained. "When those clean electricity plants come online, they help to lower the cost of electricity and bring down rates. That means that Americans pay less for their electricity every year."

The report showed ending the programs would increase the average annual household energy costs in Texas by more than $90 a year in 2030, and more than $370 a year by 2035. Some Republican lawmakers support keeping the IRA tax credits in place but the Trump administration said renewables make energy more expensive.

Orvis noted the nationwide study showed what would happen to energy projects and jobs between 2025 and 2035 if cuts are made.

"When we compared the top 10 states for each of those, there were five states that were in the top 10 in both of those categories: Texas, Florida, California, Pennsylvania and Georgia," Orvis reported.

The results mirror analysis from financial services company Moody's, which analyzed President Donald Trump's campaign policy platform in August 2024 and found it would increase inflation and weaken economic growth, causing a recession as soon as mid-2025.