Keep pulling the thread on Greg Piefer.
While fusion energy for heat is valued at approximately $0.05 per kilowatt-hour, certain testing applications value it at as much as $100,000 per kilowatt-hour.
Shine uses fusion-generated neutrons to transmute uranium into medical materials valued at between $100 million and $1 billion per gram.
Aetherflux plans to deploy its first data center in space in early 2027.
Aetherflux's technology uses large solar arrays in orbit to generate electricity, which is then converted into infrared lasers to beam power to receivers on the ground.
Shine expects to begin producing medical isotopes via fusion within two years, at an initial rate of approximately 20 million doses per year.
The facility Shine is currently building is expected to have an ultimate production capacity of approximately one billion doses of medicine.
Shine has improved the cost-efficiency of its fusion technology, measured in reactions per second per dollar, by a factor of 5,000 over its last seven product generations.
Shine projects that it will be able to deliver cost-competitive fusion energy to the electrical grid by 2040.
The current unit economics for fusion energy are not close to the target of five cents per kilowatt-hour needed to compete with terrestrial electricity generation.
Shine's business strategy is to commercialize near-term applications for fusion technology that serve customers with better unit economics than electricity producers, such as materials testing.
Shine's fusion technology is used to inspect mission-critical components, such as the explosive bolts in pilot ejection seats, for defects.
Shine's fusion technology has resolved a US production bottleneck for inspecting certain mission-critical components, which previously relied on a single university-run fission reactor.