| By Tim Seeman, Big Radio News Staff |
Janesville’s SHINE Technologies receives federal funding to address one of the country’s most vexing problems.
Ross Radel, SHINE’s chief technology officer, says it will receive $4 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to aid in the development of technology to address the country’s 90,000-ton stockpile of spent nuclear fuel left behind by nuclear power reactors.
“Part of our program for this is to recycle that material and produce new fuel so you can make new energy with the next generation of nuclear reactors from that material,” Radel said.
“That can consume something like 90-plus percent of that waste volume and turn it back into new fuel.”
Such recycling technology is in use overseas, and SHINE hopes to be running a pilot facility to bring that process to the U.S. by the 2030’s. But SHINE wants to take the next step and mitigate the remainder of the spent fuel — the stuff that can’t be recycled.
“This REDUCE program we were just funded on is essentially a program to what’s called ‘transmute’ some of the remaining radioactive material and convert it from being a long-lived radioactive isotope to either a very short-lived isotope or potentially even a stable isotope.”
That would make that material less radioactive and therefore easier to store. Radel says SHINE plans to conduct some of the testing of its transmutation process at its Janesville campus in the next couple of years.
SHINE will be working in conjunction with national labs on this project.
“A lot of the testing and work that we’re doing, since we don’t have this material on hand here in Janesville, we’re actually partnering with national labs — Argonne National Lab, Idaho National Lab, places like that — that have those types of materials on site and can allow us to move more quickly to doing testing with them and some of their capabilities.”
With President Donald Trump’s return to the White House and the ensuing efforts of the administration to keep federal funding from going out the door, Radel said there’s no knowledge within the company that its latest batch of grant money could be withdrawn. He added that SHINE is monitoring the risk of federal programs it has worked with being targeted for funding cuts.
Decrees from the administration ordering funding halted have been stalled in court.
With the company’s medical isotope production and shipping operations fully off the ground, Radel says its researchers have been able to turn their attention to other projects, including the REDUCE initiative. Radel says shipments of lutetium-177 are going out around the globe on a weekly basis.
“It’s really gratifying and really exciting for the team around here. We are shipping material that’s saving lives all over the world, so that’s been a huge accomplishment over the last year or so.”
