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It’s not early phase-out. These 3 changes could overhaul the law’s clean electricity supports.
On Monday, the Republican-led House Ways and Means Committee released the first draft of its rewrite of America’s clean energy tax credits.
The proposal might look, at first, like a cautious paring back of the tax credits. But the proposal amounts to a backdoor repeal of the policies, according to energy system and tax analysts.
“The bill is written to come across as reasonable, but the devil is in the details,” Robbie Orvis, a senior analyst at Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan energy and climate think tank, told me. “It may not be literally the worst text we envisioned seeing, but it’s probably close.”
The proposal would strangle new energy development so quickly that it could raise power costs by as much as 7% over the next decade, according to the Rhodium Group, an energy and policy analysis firm.
Senate Republicans have already indicated that the proposal is unworkable. But to understand why, it’s worth diving into the specific requirements that render the proposal so destructive.
The clean energy tax credits are one of the centerpieces of American energy policy. They’re meant to spur companies to deploy new forms of energy technology, such as nuclear fusion or advanced geothermal wells, and simultaneously to cut carbon pollution from the American power grid.
The U.S. government has long used the tax code to encourage the build-out of wind turbines or solar panels. But when Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, they rewrote a pair of key tax credits so that any technology that generates clean electricity would receive financial support.
Under the law as enacted, these clean electricity tax credits provide 10 years of support to any electricity project — no matter how it generates power — for the foreseeable future. But the new Republican proposal would begin phasing down the value of the credit starting in 2029, and end the program entirely in 2032.
That might sound like a slow and even reasonable phase-out. But a series of smaller changes to the law’s text introduce significant uncertainty about which projects would continue to qualify for the tax credit in the interim. Taken together, these new requirements would kill most, if not all, of the tax credits’ value.
Here are three reasons why the Republican proposal would prove so devastating to the American clean electricity industry.
The new Ways and Means proposal begins to phase out the clean energy tax credits immediately. The proposal cuts the value of the tax credit by 20% per year starting in 2029, and ends the credit entirely in 2032.
But the GOP proposal changes a key phrase that helps financiers invest confidently in a given project.
Under the law as it stands today, developers can’t claim a tax credit until a project is “placed in service” — meaning that it is generating electricity and selling it to the grid. But a project qualifies for a tax credit in the year that construction on that project begins.
For example, imagine a utility that begins building a new geothermal power plant this year, but doesn’t finish construction and connect it to the grid until 2029. Under current law, that company could qualify for the value of the credit as it stands today, but it wouldn’t begin to get money back on its taxes until 2029.
But the GOP proposal would change this language. Under the House Republican text, projects only qualify for a tax credit when they are “placed in service,” regardless of when construction begins. This means that the new geothermal power plant in the earlier example could only get tax credits as set at the 2029 value — regardless of when construction begins.
What’s more, if work on the project were delayed, say by a natural disaster or unexpected equipment shortage, and the power plant’s completion date was pushed into the following year, then the project would only qualify for credits as set at the 2030 value.
In other words, companies and utilities would have no certainty about a tax credit’s value until a project is completed and placed in service. Any postponement or slowdown at any part of the process — even if for a reason totally outside of a developer’s control — could reduce a tax credit’s value.
This makes the tax credits far less dependable than they are today. Generally, companies have more ability to plan around when construction on a power plant begins than they do over when it is placed in service.
This change will significantly raise financing costs for new energy projects of all types because it means that companies won’t be able to finalize their capital stack until a project is completed and turned on. The most complicated and adventurous projects — such as new geothermal, nuclear, or fusion power plants — could face the highest cost inflation.
The Inflation Reduction Act as it stands today attaches a “foreign entity of concern” rule to its $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicle buyers.
In order to qualify for that EV tax credit, automakers had to cut the percentage of Chinese-processed minerals and battery components that appear in their electric models every year. This phased in gradually over time — the idea being that while China dominates the EV and battery supply chain today, the requirement would provide a consistent spur to reshore production.
Somewhat ironically, the GOP proposal ditches the EV tax credit and its accompanying foreign sourcing rules. But it applies a strict version of the foreign entity of concern rule to every other tax credit in the law, including the clean electricity tax credits.
Under the House proposal, no project can qualify for the tax credits unless it receives no “material support” from a Chinese-linked entity. The language defines “material support” aggressively and expansively — it means any “any component, subcomponent, or applicable critical mineral” that is “extracted, processed, recycled, manufactured, or assembled.”
This provision, in other words, would essentially disqualify the use of any Chinese-made part, subcomponent, or metal in the construction of a clean electricity project, although the rule includes a partial and narrow carve-out for some components that are bought from a third-party. Even a mistakenly Chinese-sourced bolt could result in a project losing millions of dollars of tax credits.
Technically, the law also disqualifies the use of goods from other “foreign entities of concern” as defined under U.S. law, which include Russia, Iran, and North Korea. But China is the United States’ third largest trading partner, and it is the only manufacturer of the type of goods that matter to the law.
Solar projects would face immediate challenges under the new rule. China and its domestic companies command more than 80% of the market share for all stages of the solar panel manufacturing process, according to the International Energy Agency.
But then again, the proposal would be an issue for virtually all energy projects. Copper wiring, steel frames, grams of key metals — even geothermal plants rely on individual Chinese-made industrial components, according to Seaver Wang, an analyst at the Breakthrough Institute. These parts also intermingle on the global market, meaning that companies can’t be certain where a given part was made or where it comes from.
These new and stricter rules would kick in two years after the reconciliation bill passes, which likely means 2027.
This provision by itself would be unworkable. But it is made even worse by being coupled to the tax credit’s change to a “placed in service” standard. That’s because projects that are already under construction today might not meet these new foreign entity rules, essentially stripping them of tax credits that companies had already been banking on.
These projects have assumed that they will qualify for the tax credits’ full value, no matter when their power plant is completed, because they have already begun construction. But the GOP proposal would change this retroactively, possibly threatening the financial viability of energy projects that grid managers have been assuming will come online in the next few years.
In some ways, these two changes taken together are “worse than repeal,” Mike O’Boyle, an Energy Innovation analyst, told me. “A number of projects under construction now will lose eligibility."
It is also made worse by the House GOP plan to phase out the tax credits. If companies could plan on the tax credits remaining on the books long-term then the foreign entity rules might spur the creation of a larger domestic — or at least non-Chinese — supply chain for some clean energy inputs. But because the credits will phase out by 2032 regardless, fewer projects will qualify, and it won’t be worth it for companies to invest in alternative supply chains.
Finally, the House Republican proposal would end companies’ ability to sell the value of tax credits to other firms. The IRA had made it easier for utilities and developers to transfer the value of tax credits to other companies — essentially allowing companies with a lot of tax liability, such as banks, to acquire the rights to renewable developers’ credits.
The GOP proposal ends that right for every tax credit, even those that Republicans have historically looked on more favorably, such as the tax credit that rewards companies for capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
This change — coupled with the foreign entity and placed-in-service rules — will have an impact today on power markets by further gumming up the pipeline of new energy projects planned across the country, according to Advait Arun, an analyst at the Center for Public Enterprise.
The end to transferability “functionally imposes higher marginal tax rates on all of these projects,” Arun told me. “The prices that developers will get for their tax credits on the tax equity market today will be a lot lower than normal.”
That could significantly raise the cost of any new energy projects that get planned. And that will lead in the medium term to a further slowdown in the growth of electricity supply, just as turbine shortages have made it more difficult than ever to build a new natural gas power plant.
While many of these changes may seem academic, they will hit energy consumers faster than legislators might realize. Natural gas prices in the U.S. have been unusually high in 2025. A slowdown in the growth of non-fossil energy will further stress natural gas supplies, raising power prices.
Taken together, Orvis told me, these changes to the IRA “will increase the price of the vast majority of new capacity coming online next year,” Orvis said. “It’s an immediate price hike for new energy, and you can’t replace that with new gas.”
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A new list of grant cancellations obtained by Heatmap includes Climeworks and Heirloom projects funded by 2021 infrastructure law.
Trump’s Department of Energy is planning to terminate awards for the two major Direct Air Capture Hubs funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in Louisiana and Texas, Heatmap has learned.
An internal agency project list shared with Heatmap names nearly $24 billion worth of grants with their status designated as “terminated,” including the Occidental Petroleum’s South Texas DAC Hub as well as Project Cypress, a joint venture between DAC startups Heirloom and Climeworks.
Christoph Gebald, the CEO of Climeworks, acknowledged “market rumors” in an email, but said that the company is “prepared for all scenarios.”
“Demand for removals is increasing significantly, with momentum set to build as governments set their long-term targets,” he said. “The need for DAC is growing as the world falls short of its climate goals and we’re working to achieve the gigaton capacity that will be needed.”
Heirloom’s head of global policy, Vikrum Aiyer, said that the company was not aware of any decision from the DOE and continued “to productively engage with the administration in a project review.” He added that Heirloom remains “incredibly proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with Louisiana energy majors, workforce groups, non-profits, state leaders, the governor and economic development organizations who have strongly advocated for this project.”
Much of the rest of the list overlaps with the project terminations the agency announced last week as part of a spate of retributive actions against Democrats during the government shutdown. “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being canceled,” White House Budget Director Russ Vought wrote on social media ahead of the announcement.
DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich told me by email that the department was “unable to verify” the new list of canceled grants, and that “no further determinations have been made at this time other than those previously announced.”
“As [Secretary of Energy Chris Wright] made clear last week, the Department continues to conduct an individualized and thorough review of financial awards made by the previous administration,” Dietderich said.
Direct air capture is a nascent technology that sucks carbon, as the name suggests, directly from the air, and is one of several carbon removal solutions with potential to slow global warming in the near term, and even reverse it in the long run. The $3.5 billion DAC Hubs program, created by Congress in the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, promised to “establish a new sector of the American economy and remake another one, while providing the world with an important tool to fight climate change,” as my colleague Robinson Meyer put it.
After a competitive application process, the Biden administration selected two projects that would receive up to $600 million each to build DAC projects capable of removing more than 1 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere per year and storing it permanently underground. Occidental, which first partnered with and later acquired a Canadian DAC startup called Carbon Engineering, would build its hub in South Texas, near Corpus Christi. Two other leading DAC startups, the California-based Heirloom Carbon and Swiss company Climeworks, would work together to build a hub in Louisiana. After the selections were announced, both projects received an initial $50 million award for their next phase of development, which was set to be matched by private investment.
"These hubs were selected through a rigorous and competitive process designed to identify projects capable of advancing U.S. leadership in carbon removal and industrial decarbonization,” Jennifer Wilcox, the former principal deputy assistant secretary for the DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, told me in an email. “The burden should be on DOE to clearly demonstrate why that process is being overturned.”
All three companies already have demonstration plants that are either operating or under construction. Climeworks began operating the world’s first commercial DAC plant in Iceland in 2021, designed to capture about 4,000 tons per year, and has since scaled up to a larger plant more than eight times that size. Heirloom opened the first DAC plant in the U.S. in November 2023, in Tracy, California, capable of capturing 1,000 tons per year. Occidental’s first DAC project, Stratos, in West Texas, will be the largest of the bunch, designed to capture 500,000 tons per year. It is set to be completed in the next few months.
Removing carbon from the air with one of these facilities is currently extremely expensive and energy-intensive. Today, companies pre-sell carbon credits to airlines and tech companies to raise money for the projects, but will likely require government support to continue to innovate and bring the cost down. While both Climeworks and Heirloom announced the sale of credits that would support their DAC hub projects, it’s not clear whether those credits were meant to be fulfilled by the projects themselves.
The DOE grants would have helped prove the viability of the technology at a scale that will make a measurable difference for the climate, while also demonstrating a potential off-ramp for oil companies and the economies they support. Both projects said they expected to create more than 2,000 local jobs in construction, operations, and maintenance.
“The United States, up to this point, was the direct air capture leader and the place where top innovators in the field were choosing to build facilities as well as manufacture the actual components of the units themselves,” Jack Andreasen Cavanaugh, a global fellow at the Columbia University’s Carbon Management Research Initiative, told me. “The cancellation of these grants to high-quality projects ensures that these American jobs will be shipped overseas and cede our broader economic advantage.”
That’s already happening. On the same day last week that the DOE announced it was terminating an award for CarbonCapture Inc., another California-based DAC company, the startup said it would move its first commercial pilot from Arizona to Alberta, Canada. Gebald, of Climeworks, said the company has “a pipeline of other DAC projects around the world,” including opportunities in Canada, the U.K., and Saudi Arabia.
Cavanaugh also pointed out there was a disconnect between the terminations, Congress’ recent actions, and even actions under the first Trump administration. Trump’s DOE revised the 45Q tax credit for carbon capture in 2018 to allow direct air capture projects to qualify. In July, the reconciliation bill preserved that credit and strengthened it. “These were bipartisan-supported projects, and it goes expressly against congressional intent.”
As the DAC hubs program was congressionally mandated and the awards were under contract, the companies may have legal recourse to fight the terminations. The press release from the DOE announcing last week’s terminations said that award recipients had 30 days to appeal the decision. “That process must be meaningful and transparent,” Wilcox said. “If DOE is invoking financial-viability criteria, companies and communities deserve to see the underlying metrics, thresholds, and justification — and to understand whether those criteria are being applied consistently across projects.”
While this isn’t a death knell for DAC in general, it will be a “massive setback for American climate and industrial policy”, Erin Burns, executive director of the carbon removal advocacy group Carbon 180, told me. “The need for carbon removal hasn’t changed. The science hasn’t changed. What’s changed is our political will, and we’ll feel the consequences for years to come.”
Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to add comment from the Department of Energy and to correct the total value of canceled grants.
On Trump’s metal nationalization spree, Tesla’s big pitch, and fusion’s challenges
Current conditions: King tides are raising ocean levels near Charleston, South Carolina, as much as eight feet above low water averages • A blizzard on Mount Everest has trapped hundreds of hikers and killed at least one • A depression that could form into Tropical Storm Jerry is strengthening in the Atlantic as it barrels northward with an unclear path.
Solar and wind outpaced the growth of global electricity demand in the first half of 2025, vaulting renewables toward overtaking coal worldwide for the first time on record, according to analysis published Tuesday by the research outfit Ember. This year’s growth resulted in a small overall decline in both coal and gas-fired power generation, with India and China seeing the most notable reductions, despite the United States and Europe ratcheting up fossil fuel usage. “We are seeing the first signs of a crucial turning point,” Malgorzata Wiatros-Motyka, a senior electricity analyst at Ember, said in a statement. “Solar and wind are now growing fast enough to meet the world’s growing appetite for electricity. This marks the beginning of a shift where clean power is keeping pace with demand growth.”
Wind and solar installations matched 109% of new global demand for power in the first half of 2025.Ember
That growth is projected to continue. Later on Tuesday morning, the International Energy Agency released its own report forecasting that renewable capacity will double over the next five years. Solar is predicted to make up 80% of that growth. But, factoring in the Trump administration’s policies, the forecast roughly cut in half previous projections for U.S. growth. Domestic opposition to renewables runs beyond the White House, too. Exclusive data gathered by Heatmap Pro and published in July showed that a fifth of U.S. counties now restrict development of renewables.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday directing federal agencies to push forward with a controversial 211-mile mining road in Alaska designed to facilitate production of copper, zinc, gallium, and other critical minerals. The project, which the Biden administration halted last year over concerns for permafrost in the fast-warming region, has been at the center of a decadeslong legal battle. As part of the deal, the U.S. government will invest $35.6 million in Alaska’s Ambler Mining District, including taking a 10% stake in the main developer, Trilogy Metals, that includes warrants to buy an additional 7.5% of the company. The road itself will be jointly owned by the state, the federal government, and Alaska Native villages. “It’s a very, very big deal from the standpoint of minerals and energy,” Trump said in the Oval Office.
It’s just the latest stake the Trump administration has taken in a mineral company. In July, the Department of Defense became the largest shareholder of MP Materials, the company producing rare earths in the U.S. at its Mountain Pass mine in California. The move, The Economist noted at the time, marked the biggest American experiment in direct government ownership since the nationalization of the railroads in World War I. Last week, the Department of Energy renegotiated a loan to Lithium Americas’ Thacker Pass project in Nevada to take a stake in what’s set to become the largest lithium mine in the Western Hemisphere when it comes online in the next few years. The White House’s mineral shopping spree isn’t over. On Friday, Reuters reported that the administration is considering buying shares in Critical Metals, the company looking to develop rare earths production in Greenland. In response to the news, shares in the Nasdaq-traded miner surged 62% on Monday. Partial nationalization isn’t the only approach the administration is taking to challenging China’s grip over global mineral supplies. Last month, as I reported for Heatmap, the Defense Logistics Agency awarded money to Xerion, an Ohio startup devising a novel way to process cobalt and gallium.
Tesla looks poised to unveil a cheaper, stripped-down version of its Model Y as early as today. In one of two short videos posted to CEO Elon Musk’s X social media site, the electric automaker showed the midsize SUV’s signature lights beaming through the dark. The design matches what InsideEVs noted were likely images of the prototype spotted on a test drive in Texas. The second teaser video showed what appears to be a fast-spinning, Tesla-branded fan. “Your guess is as good as ours as to what will be revealed,” InsideEVs’ Andrei Nedelea wrote Monday. “Our money is on the Roadster or a new vacuum cleaner design to take on Dyson.”
The new products come amid an historic slump for Tesla. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported, the company’s share of the U.S. electric vehicle sales sank to their lowest-ever level in August despite the surge in purchases as Americans rushed to use the federal tax credits before they expired thanks to Trump’s landmark One Big Beautiful Bill Act law. Yet Musk has managed to steer the automaker’s financial fate through an attention-grabbing maneuver. Last month, the world’s richest man bought $1 billion in Tesla shares in a show of self confidence that managed to rebound the company’s stock price. But Andrew Moseman argued in Heatmap that “the bullish stock market performance is divorced not only from the reality of the company’s electric car sales, but also from, well, everything else that’s happened lately.”
On Monday, Trump warned that medium and heavy-duty trucks imported to the U.S. will face a 25% tariff starting on November 1. The president announced the trade levies in a post on Truth Social on the eve of a White House visit by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, whose country would feel the pinch of tariffs on imported trucks. As the Financial Times noted, Trump had threatened to impose 25% tariffs on some trucks in late September but “failed to implement them, raising questions about his commitment to the policy.”
Fusion startups make a lot of bold claims about how soon a technology long dismissed as the energy source of tomorrow will be able to produce commercial electrons. Though investors are betting that, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last year, “it is finally, possibly, almost time for fusion,” a new report from the University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy shows that supply chain challenges threaten to hold back the nascent industry even if it can bring laboratory breakthroughs to market. Tritium, one of two main fusion fuels, has a half life of just 12.3 years, meaning it does not exist in significant quantities in nature. Today, tritium is primarily produced by 30 pressurized heavy water fission reactors globally, but only at a total of 4 kilograms per year. As a result, “tritium availability could throttle fusion development,” the report found. That’s not the only bottleneck. “The fusion industry will require specialized components that don’t yet have well-established supply chains, like superconducting cables and the aforementioned advanced materials, and shortages of these components would delay development and inflate costs.”
Scientists mapped the RNA — the molecules that carry out DNA’s instructions — of wheat and, for the first time, identified when certain genes are active. The discovery promises to accelerate plant breeders’ efforts to develop more resilient varieties of the world’s most widely cultivated crop that use less fertilizer, resist higher temperatures, and survive with less water as the climate changes. “We discovered how groups of genes work together as regulatory networks to control gene expression,” Rachel Rusholme-Pilcher, the study’s lead author and a researcher at Britain’s Earlham Institute, said in a statement. “Our research allowed us to look at how these network connections differ between wheat varieties, revealing new sources of genetic diversity that could be critical in boosting the resilience of wheat.”
Shine Technologies is getting close to breakeven — on operations, at least — by selling neutrons and isotopes.
Amidst the frenzied investment in fusion and the race to get a commercial reactor on the grid by the 2030s, one under-the-radar fusion company has been making money for years. That’s Shine Technologies, which has been operating in some form or another since 2005, making neutrons for materials testing and nuclear isotopes for medical imaging, all while working toward an eventual energy-generating reactor of its own.
“I think we can moonshot ourselves to net energy,” Greg Piefer, founder and CEO of Shine, told me, referring to the point at which the energy produced from a fusion reaction exceeds the energy required to sustain it. “But I don’t think we can moonshot ourselves to break even costwise.”
Rather than trying to build a full-scale reactor that can produce net energy via a self-sustaining fusion reaction right off the bat, Shine uses a particle accelerator to drive a series of small-scale fusion reactions. When high-energy ions connect with fuels, such as tritium or deuterium, they undergo a fusion reaction that produces high-energy neutrons and specialized isotopes more often generated for use in industry via fission.
Piefer, who has a PhD in nuclear engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, started up his company by making neutrons for materials testing in the aerospace and defense industries. Unlike other forms of radiation, such as X-rays, neutrons can penetrate dense materials such as metals, hydrogen-containing fuels, or ceramics, making it possible to spot hidden flaws. An otherwise invisible crack in a turbine blade, for example, could still block or scatter neutrons, while contamination from water or oil would absorb neutrons — making these faults clear in a radiographic image.
Scientists also use neutrons to test nuclear fission fuel by identifying contamination and verifying uranium enrichment levels. According to Piefer, Shine produces the neutrons used to test half of all fission fuel today. “Fusion actually already enables the production of 50% of the fission fuel in this country,” he told me.
My mind was blown. I didn’t understand how fusion — a famously expensive endeavor — could be an economically viable option for these applications.
Piefer understood. “I’ll sit here in one breath and I’ll tell you fusion is way too expensive to compete making electricity, and in another breath that it’s much cheaper than fission for making isotopes and doing testing,” he said. As Piefer went on to explain, if the goal isn’t net energy, you can strip the fusion reactor of a good deal of complexity — no superconducting magnets, complicated structures to produce tritium fuel, or control systems to keep the burning fusion plasma contained.
With a simplified system, Piefer told me, it’s much easier to produce a fusion reaction than a fission reaction. The latter, he explained, “operates on the razor’s edge of something called criticality” — a self-sustaining reaction that must be precisely balanced. If a fission reaction accelerates too quickly, power surges dangerously and you get a disaster like Chernobyl. If it slows, there’s simply no reaction at all. Plus, even after a fission reactor shuts down, it keeps producing heat, and thus must be actively cooled. But when it comes to fusion, there’s no danger of an out of control power surge, because, unlike fission, it’s not a chain reaction — if the input conditions change, fusion stops immediately. Furthermore, fusion produces no heat after the reaction stops.
Some of Shine’s customers include manufacturers of turbine blades and explosives such as the U.S. Army and GE Hitachi, as well as the biopharmaceutical companies Blue Earth Therapeutics and Telix Pharmaceuticals. Piefer told me that the company is now “on the verge of essentially breakeven” — no fusion pun intended — when it comes to its operating expenses. These days, it’s reinvesting much of its revenue to build out what Piefer says will be the largest isotope production facility in the world in Wisconsin. Isotopes are created when high energy neutrons strike stable elements, causing the nuclei to absorb the neutron and become radioactive. The isotope’s radioactive properties make them useful for targeting particular tissues, cells, or organs in medical imaging or focused therapies..
Shine’s in-progress facility will primarily produce molybdenum‑99, the most commonly used isotope for medical imaging. The company already operates one smaller isotope facility producing lutetium-177, which features in cutting-edge cancer therapies.
Compared to materials testing, producing medical isotopes has required Shine to increase the temperature and thus the efficiency of its fusion target. Subsequent applications will require greater efficiency still. The idea is that as Shine applies its tech to increasingly challenging and energy-intensive tasks, it will also move step by step toward a commercially viable, net-energy-generating fusion reactor. Piefer just doesn’t know what exactly those incremental improvements will look like.
The company hasn’t committed to any specific reactor design for its fusion energy device yet, and Piefer told me that at this stage, he doesn’t think it’s necessary to pick winners. “We don’t have to, and don’t want to,” he said. “We’ve got this flexible manufacturing platform that’s doing all the things you need to do to get really good at making fusion systems, regardless of technology.”
Fusion energy aside, the company doesn’t even know how it’s going to reach the heat and efficiency requirements needed to achieve its next target — recycling spent fission fuel. But Piefer told me that if Shine can get there, scientists do already understand the chemistry. First, Shine would separate out the long-lived, highly radioactive waste products from the spent fuel using much the same approach it uses for isolating medical isotopes, no fusion reaction needed. Then, Piefer told me, “fusion can turn those long-lived wastes into short-lived waste” by using high-energy fusion neutrons to alter the radioactive nuclei in ways that make them decay faster.
If the company pulls that off — a big if indeed — it would then move on to building an energy-generating reactor. Overall, Piefer guesses this final stage will wind up taking the fusion industry “more time and money than most people predict.” Perhaps, he said, investors will prove willing to bankroll buzzy fusion startups far longer than their ambitious timelines currently imply. But perhaps not. And in the meantime, he thinks many companies will end up turning to the very markets that Shine has been exploring for decades now.
“So we’re well positioned to work with them, well positioned to help create mutual success, or well positioned to use our position to move ourselves forward,” Piefer told me, hinting that the company would be interested in making acquisitions.
Indeed, some fusion companies are already following Shine’s lead, eyeing isotopes as an early — or primary — revenue generating opportunity. Microreactor company Avalanche Energy eventually wants to replace diesel generators, but in the meantime plans to produce radioisotopes for medical and energy applications. U.K.-based fusion company Astral Systems is also making desktop-sized reactors, but with the central aim of selling medical isotopes.
If too many companies break their promises or extend their timelines interminably, as Piefer thinks is likely, more and more will come around to the pragmatism of Shine’s approach, he said. “Near term applications are increasingly talked about,” Piefer told me. “They’re not the highlight of the show yet, but I’d say the voice is getting louder.”
So while he still doesn’t have any idea what the final form for Shine’s hypothetical fusion power plant will take, in his mind the company is leading the race. “I believe we’re actually on the fastest path to fusion commercialization for energy of anybody out there,” Piefer told me. “Because commercial is important to us, and it always has been.”