The Atomic Show

Shine Technologies is a unique nuclear fusion company. The conventional path for nuclear fusion projects is to raise and spend billions of dollars and decades of research and development in efforts to successfully find a path over, around or through the technical barriers that have prevented nuclear fusion from becoming a large scale energy production source. Until relatively recently, that path was almost completely dependent on government grants. In cases like the ITER – International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor – the effort has involved tens of billions of dollars (current estimate is $25 B), thousands of scientists, engineers, constructors and technicians and a construction schedule that stretches out over 29 years. The funding partnership includes six individual countries plus the European Union, which is supplying approximately 45% of the budget. Parts and materials for the project are being supplied by 35 different countries. Greg Piefer, Shine Technologies CEO and Founder, chose a different path. He is a technical expert and fusion researcher who was inspired by the same dreams of unlimited fusion energy that drive others to study and work in the field, but he also has a commercial side that knows that investors, even governments, do not have the patience and the depth of resources needed to undertake and successfully complete projects whose characteristics are similar to ITER and don’t produce profits along the way. He knew several known ways to stimulate and control a nuclear fusion reaction. The equipment used to produce those reactions doesn’t work fast enough to produce the energy needed to sustain the reaction and have enough left over to capture and sell to a commercial energy market. They are useful devices for teaching researchers about fusion and they are precise and reliable neutron generators for valuable tasks like remote logging of the materials in oil and gas wells. Piefer’s valuable insight was that neutrons from fusion had special characteristics that could produce commercial value long before the equipment could produce energy at a competitive cost. He and the team that he inspired became convinced that they could create a sustainable path to commercial fusion energy by building, using and refining equipment and techniques that use fusion to produce neutrons for successively larger markets that require ever lower unit costs. They established a four phase development program that remains their guiding development strategy. The first phase sells precise testing and measuring services that use Shine neutron generators where the neutrons supply their material penetrating power. Unlike the gamma rays used in conventional radiography – X-rays for materials and equipment – neutrons penetrate dense materials and are scattered by light elements. The critical nature of the components that benefit from neutron imaging leads customers to pay extraordinary prices for Shine’s specialized services. The neutrons produced by Shine’s imaging fusion devices sell for $100,000 – $1,000,000 per kilowatt-hour of energy released – which is a calculated metric derived from fusion reactions per second per dollar. (Those numbers do not have any misplaced zeros.) The second phase, with a far larger Total Addressable Market (TAM), is medical radioisotope production. Using a process of continuous refinement and practice, Shine has been able to improve its devices to the point where they can profitably enter the market with neutrons that cost the equivalent of $100 per kWh (a factor of 1000 improvement over the first phase) that can be reduced to $20/kWh as the process is scaled up using their NRC licensed Chrysalis facility. That facility, located in Janesville, WI, was carefully sited next door to a regional airport that enables Shine’s medical isotopes to be rapidly delivered throughout the United States and competitively delivered almost anywhere. Chrysalis is expected to be completed within the next two years. As Piefer describes during our conversation, it will be the highest capacity isotope production facility in the world. Piefer also described the invested effort that gives Shine the ability to produce isotopes that meet the stringent purity requirements for medical applications. The company’s radio chemistry skills are being exercised every day as they are already shipping isotopes created in a smaller facility. The third step, which is still in the R&D phase is to use more capable Shine fusion devices that can produce neutrons for about $1/kWh to help recycle used nuclear fuel. During the conversation, we spent quite a bit of time talking about how this application will work. There are some nuances that are worth hearing. The fourth step in the plan is to produce clean energy with a target price for neutrons of about $0.01-$0.02/kWh. That is the dream and the application that unlocks a TAM measured in the trillions of dollars. Here is the company’s distillation of their four phase plan: The framework: value per kilowatt-hour of fusion outputSHINE force-ranks fusion markets by unit economics, not market size — starting with the customers who pay the most per unit of fusion output, and using each market as commercial practice to drive costs down for the next. The metric: fusion reactions per second per dollar, a proxy for cost per kilowatt-hour.The cost curve, by the numbers >$1,000,000 per kWh — what one deployed SHINE fusion system is worth to its customer: it scans every nuclear fuel rod the customer manufactures, and hasn’t skipped a beat since deployment. ~$100,000 per kWh — typical value in the testing market (e.g., neutron imaging of F-35 turbine blade cooling channels that only neutrons can see). ~$100 per kWh — where SHINE had to get costs to make medical isotope production work. ~$20 per kWh — expected for Chrysalis at full capacity, coming online in the next 18–24 months. ~$1 per kWh — the target for spent fuel recycling, feasible because the business stacks four revenue streams: recycling service fees, recycled uranium/plutonium fuel, separated isotopes, and electricity sold at market rates. 10–20¢ per kWh — typical value of electricity, the final market. From recycling, SHINE estimates roughly a factor of 10 remains to put pure fusion energy economically on the grid. Disclosure: Nucleation Capital, the sponsor of Atomic Insights, is an investor in Shine Technologies. We believe their vision and their execution elevates their commercial prospects above a number of companies whose primary selling point is an attractive, but distant dream.

Copenhagen Atomics is an ambitious Danish company with a bold, potentially world-changing vision. They’re driven by a goal of manufacturing one reactor per day from a high quality, certified factory. If they achieve that goal, they would be adding an additional 37 GW/year of heat to the global energy supply. They want to help make affordable, reliable, clean and abundant energy available to everyone on the planet. Thomas Jam Pedersen is a co-founder and the CEO of Copenhagen Atomics. He recently visited the Atomic Show to describe his company, its history, its vision and its technology. He provided a wealth of information during a lengthy conversation and also shared a brief about the company, its facilities, its potential markets and the physical fabrication and testing units. The company was founded by a group of four Danish engineers and businessmen with a complimentary set of valuable skills and experience. They were each “bitten by the thorium bug” through individual research starting in the late 2000s. They came to the decision to start a company about ten years ago through a series of meetings at Copenhagen bars and restaurants. Copenhagen Atomics is developing a molten salt reactor that uses a kickstarter actinide fuel (U-233, U-235 or Pu-239) along with a thorium blanket and heavy water moderator to produce 100 MW of heat. The nuclear heat source system – including pumps, tanks, pipes, valves and the proprietary “onion core” reactor – fits into a standard shipping container. After 5 years of operation, the molten salt contains almost as much fissile material as it did when it was initially loaded into the fuel. In the future, the fissile material inventory at the end of 5 years will be equal to, or slightly greater than it was at the beginning. The Waste Burner reactor will eventually become a thermal spectrum breeder reactor that adds to the world’s fissile material inventory. The container and its included systems would be fully manufactured and tested at the factory, but it would be shipped to its destination with no loaded fuel using conventional shipping methods. The destination facility could use heat for a conventional steam power plant or it could use the heat for an application like manufacturing fertilizer or desalinating water. In the current business model, the receiving facility would be erected by a customer that had contracted to purchase heat coming from the pre-fabricated reactor furnished by Copenhagen Atomics. The power plant design and construction would include a series of shielded “cocoons”, each with two meter thick walls and enough internal space for the container and a number of tanks and connections. Each reactor would be inserted into a cocoon, loaded with fuel from tanks in the cocoon and connected to the receiving heat system using welded connections. The welding would be done by an automated system that is already under development and testing at Copenhagen Atomics’s 9,000 m² fabrication and testing facility in Copenhagen. (See photos in the company presentation.) The containers and their included mechanical systems are fabricated out of conventional stainless steel and designed to be affordably replaced every five years. At the end of this operating life, they would be defueled and replaced with the fuel salt put into the new reactor. The old reactor would be stacked into a pre-existing storage facility at the power plant where it would remain for several decades to allow radioactive isotopes to decay. After the containers have sufficiently cooled – from a radioactivity perspective – they could be recycled into materials for new reactors or compacted for storage at low level waste facilities. Though Denmark does not allow the government to invest in nuclear power facilities, it has a respected regulator with many decades worth of experience in regulating radioactive materials and nuclear research facilities that include reactors. But Copenhagen Atomics’s current development path includes construction of an initial fissioning test reactor at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland. That facility is currently planned to be completed in 2028, but that date can vary depending on a number of factors, including the time required to arrange appropriate financing. Copenhagen Atomics is a company founded by practical engineers that know that real products require a vast amount of physical testing. They build parts – including tanks, pipes, valves, sensors and pumps – and assemble them into both partial and complete systems that allow them to test materials and performance at operating conditions. They started with non radioactive salts and are progressing to tests and demonstrations using non-fissile actinides and then to the actual fuel materials that will be used in commercial facilities. So far, the company has accumulated 100,000 hours of actual system testing. They have developed refined test loops that are good enough to have been sold to other researchers working on molten salts. They have developed large scale salt production systems and gradually increased their production rates. If all continues to progress, Copenhagen Atomics expects that its first commercial reactor unit will be operating in about 5 years. But Thomas Jam is a practical and patient man who realizes that there are lot of obstacles left to overcome. Disclosure – Nucleation Capital is an investor in Copenhagen Atomics. We believe that the company’s vision is important, visionary and potentially valuable. We appreciate the iterative approach to design and manufacture; it is vital for teams designing something new to build, test, redesign and rebuilt as often as needed to produce refined products. We think you will appreciate the opportunity to learn more about Copenhagen Atomics in a discussion that delves into some deeply technical issues.

The Nuclear Company (TNC) describes itself as “a fleet-scale American nuclear deployment company.” TNC is a young, visionary company driven by what business author Jim Collins describes as a BHAG – “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” – in his best-selling book titled Built To Last. TNC’s intermediate goal is to deploy 6 large nuclear reactors in the U.S. while developing a complete platform that enables repeated projects using a design once, build many approach. For a company that was just formed in 2023, that qualifies as an enormously audacious goal. One of the examples Collins used for a BHAG was Boeing’s 1952 decision to build the 707 as one of the world’s first commercial jet aircraft. But at the time, Boeing was an established, profitable company whose head count had reached over 50,000 employees during WWII and that was still producing several different bombers for the Air Force, including the large, jet powered B52. TNC’s leap seems to be substantially larger than the one that Boeing successfully made. But, with the right people forming the right teams and gathering the resources available, TNC’s goal might be possible. The Atomic Show first covered this intriguing company in August of 2024, about a month after the company exited a formative, quiet year, when Juliann Edwards, TNC’s Chief Development Officer, appeared as a guest on Atomic Show #319. TNC summarizes its strategy as follows: The Nuclear Company’s approach can be articulated through our four-pronged strategy: Fleet-Scale Deployment: We are building at fleet scale, not project scale, enabling us to capture significant efficiency gains and cost savings, and enabling the reshoring of American industry.  Broad Industry Coalition: Fleet scale requires a broad coalition of industry partners for successful project planning and execution. We build that coalition to scale. Comprehensive Program Management: We synergy-capture program management applicable across existing and new deployments. Public-Private Partnerships: We leverage federal, state, and local government engagement and support along with industry to re-establish a US commercial nuclear leadership position.  For this episode of the Atomic Show, I spoke with Joe Klecha, TNC’s Chief Nuclear Officer (CNO), to learn more about how the company plans to achieve its initial BHAG while establishing the foundation for future growth. Joe has a deep well of practical knowledge accumulated during a lengthy career as an on-site, walk-around manager. He told me how the most important job of management is to enable skilled subordinates to perform with as little friction as possible. (I’m paraphrasing here.). For a site-level, project manager that translates into ensuring that crafts people arrive on prepared work front with all of the necessary tools and documentation. A key focus for The Nuclear Company is to avoid paper processing. Most listeners will be amazed to hear Joe talk about the wagon loads of paper that accompanied much of the work done at Vogtle 3 & 4. We talked about the value of well crafted contracts that properly share risk among contributing entities while also establishing a system of progress payments and milestones that give all participants a shared goal. Joe told me about the exceptional team TNC is building and the way it is rapidly gathering interested and committed partners. Joe displayed his broad reach of technical knowledge during our conversation, providing a point of view that is rarely found in audio commentary by people whose expertise is mostly based on academic research, computer aide design or computational model simulations. We talked about concrete, steel, rebar, interfaces, managing multiple work fronts, the importance of addressing worker density, ways to improve workforce productivity, evaluating sites, finding and incentivizing capable suppliers, and building contractor teams. I’m still in the willing to be, but not yet convinced camp regarding TNC’s chances for success. Given where we are today, the chances are better than they were two years ago when the company founders were developing their BHAG. But they still have a very long road to travel and the competition is already heating up. Avoiding ending on a down note, my conversation with Joe Klecha left me more enthusiastic than I was before about their progress and their opportunities. Please listen to this show. It will provide a unique point of view regarding the lessons America has learned so far about building new nuclear plants in the 21st century.

Aalo Atomics is a two year old micro reactor company founded by Matt Loszak, a serial entrepreneur, and Yasir Arafat, a skilled nuclear engineer who previously lead the DOE’s MARVEL advanced micro-reactor demonstration project. Note: At Nucleation Capital, we were impressed enough with the company and the team to add it to our growing portfolio of advanced nuclear energy companies. Matt Loszak, Aalo’s CEO, visited the Atomic Show to discuss his company’s current plans, its evolved power plant design, its progress towards becoming a reactor manufacturing company and the process by which it selected its initial target customer base and devised a product aimed directly at serving their needs. The initial Aalo plan was to scale up and commercialize the MARVEL reactor concept, taking advantage of its rapid progress and projected early operation. A variety of circumstances have combined to delay the MARVEL project by at least 1-2 years. With that delay, the idea of using MARVEL data as part of the licensing basis for Aalo became less viable. As a result of additional market and supply chain influences, Aalo has made significant changes to the original, MARVEL-based design. Aalo’s has designed a sodium cooled thermal reactor with both a primary and a secondary sodium loop. The reactor fuel is uranium dioxide with enrichment of 5-10%, putting it into the category of LEU+. The fuel form will be as close to available commercial reactor fuel as possible. The secondary sodium loop will include a double tube heat steam generator that will produce steam at approximately 500℃. The optimized power plant design for Aalo’s initial customer base of large data centers is called the Aalo Pod. It will include 5 reactor steam generating systems each capable of supplying about 25 MWth. The output of all five steam supply systems will be combined to supply a single 50 MWe steam turbine. Activity inside Aalo’s Austin, TX factory (Mar 2025) The steam turbine selected for the system will be one that has a reasonably flat operating curve over a range of steam flows so that it can efficiently supply electricity even if one or more of the reactors is shutdown for maintenance/refueling. The company has focused on designing its system to be readily manufactured and efficiently assembled. Aalo moved into a 40,000 ft² industrial building in Austin, Texas in August of 2024 and it is now outfitting that building to be a pilot line manufacturing facility for its initial units. The company has scheduled a grand opening ceremony for the factory in early April 2025. Moving fast is a core part of its commercialization roadmap. Aalo has purchased a plot of land in or near Austin and plans to build a non-nuclear heated prototype facility where it can perform a number of sodium and heat transfer tests. It has obtained permission to follow a DOE authorization path to obtain permission to build and operate its nuclear prototype reactor on a site at the Idaho National Laboratory near the facilities that once were home to the Experimental Breeder Reactor II and are now the DOE’s DOME (Demonstration of Microreactors Experiments) test site. It is one of four reactor vendors (along with Terrestrial Energy, Natura and Kairos) selected to build a small and micro reactor hub on the Rellis Campus of Texas A&M. Eventually, the site owners envision that the total power generating capacity at the site will be approximately 1 GWe from a significant number of nuclear power plants. You can learn more details about Aalo Atomics and Matt Loszak by listening to the show. As always, comments are welcome, though the comment window will close in about 2 weeks. (A site that has been on the web as long as Atomic Insights attracts a lot of spam attempts.)