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It’s not the pipeline. It’s the power lines.
At first glance, the bipartisan deal to raise the debt ceiling seems pretty good for the climate.
Most importantly, it preserves the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s flagship climate law. That alone is a monumental victory, cementing Biden’s legacy (for now) and allowing his administration to continue its experiment with green industrial policy.
When climate advocates have spoken against the deal, they’ve focused their ire on the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a 304-mile conduit that will link West Virginia’s booming natural-gas fields to the rest of the country. The deal essentially approves the pipeline and exempts it from judicial oversight, all but ensuring its eventual completion. Senator Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, won the White House’s support for the pipeline when he agreed to the IRA last year.
Yet despite the chatter, the pipeline was not, in fact, the most important climate concession exacted in negotiations. The deal also made a number of changes to federal permitting law, especially the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. These changes have been described as relatively small, common-sense reforms to the federal process — and in some cases they are. But they also represented critical leverage that Democrats just lost.
Democrats might have secured many other objectives in the debt-ceiling talks, including minimal cuts to some federal programs and a potential expansion of food stamps. But the deal’s permitting reforms are an uneven trade in which Democrats gave up much more than they gained and made virtually no progress on one of their biggest goals: making it easier to build long-distance power lines. When Congress revisits permitting reform in the next few months — as Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy has promised – Democrats will find that they have little room to bargain.
The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, requires that the federal government conduct an environmental study before it does much of anything. It also sets the rules by which the government decides whether to approve large-scale infrastructure. If a state wants to build a new highway with federal funds, it must apply to the government, which then runs a “NEPA process” to determine whether to grant funding. Virtually every major government project — whether a new mass-transit hub or an offshore wind farm — requires a NEPA study and a NEPA process.
Republicans have long wanted to tinker with NEPA. But while NEPA was once widely understood by progressives as a bedrock of federal environmental law, some on the left have recently become more open to reforming it. Fighting climate change will require building a lot of new infrastructure, they have argued, and NEPA could slow down that process. At the same time, virtually all Democrats want to simplify the process of building new long-distance power lines, which will lower electricity prices while ushering more renewables onto the grid. If America doesn’t double its rate of new transmission construction, then 80% of the IRA’s carbon reductions will be squandered, according to Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton engineering professor.
So a trade of sorts took shape: Democrats would open up NEPA, accomplishing a long-sought GOP goal, in exchange for easing the path for new power lines. When Senator Manchin proposed a permitting-reform bill last year, that’s essentially what it did.
The debt-ceiling deal inherits many of the NEPA reforms first contemplated in Manchin’s bill. Today, the strictest type of NEPA review takes 4.5 years to complete, although some studies can take much longer. The deal will impose a one-year deadline for most environmental-review studies and a two-year deadline for the strictest types. If an agency overruns these deadlines, then a project’s sponsor can sue the agency to get an accelerated decision.
The deal also imposes new page limits on NEPA studies. Today, the most stringent NEPA studies run to more than 500 pages on average. The deal would cap most NEPA studies to 150 pages, and the most complicated reviews to 300 pages.
To be sure, these reforms don’t go as far as the GOP wanted. Under one Republican proposal, for instance, the penalty for overrunning a NEPA deadline would have been a project’s immediate and irrevocable approval. But the deal also declines to provide more funding for NEPA agencies to hire staff, which some progressives have argued is the most important driver of NEPA delays.
The deal also narrows some of NEPA’s most important language, reducing the number of federal actions that require the most elaborate kind of environmental-impact study. An agency will now get to determine whether a project requires the highest level of NEPA review. That is “really problematic” because it could let officials do an end-run around the NEPA process, Kym Meyer, the litigation director at the Southern Environmental Law Center, told me.
Some of the deal’s most important consequences may not be visible in the legal text. The deal, for instance, says that projects qualifying for certain federal small-business loans do not need NEPA approval. That could effectively exempt many factory farms from the NEPA process, Meyer said.
The deal repeatedly inserts the words “reasonable” in NEPA, at one point limiting the types of environmental impacts that agencies must study only to those that are “reasonably foreseeable.” That may all sound, well, reasonable, and it could ultimately work out alright for environmentalists. But the courts — and the sharply conservative Supreme Court — will get to decide exactly where the lines of that reasonableness fall. “One thing we know for sure is that we’re gonna see a lot of litigation out of this,” Meyer said.
Which is not to say that Democrats failed to win concessions. Every NEPA study must now consider the environmental consequences of a project not happening — a new tool against NIMBYs who fight clean-energy projects. And energy-storage facilities, such as big batteries that store renewable electricity on the power grid, now qualify for an accelerated approval process.
The bill enacts a lot of what has been “circling around as a bipartisan set of permitting ideas for a couple of years now,” Xan Fishman, the director of energy policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a moderate think tank, told me. “It’s a lot of stuff that people on both sides of the aisle have called for, a lot of common-sense stuff. But there’s still a lot of stuff to do.”
The problem is that the bill makes all these changes without altering transmission policy at all. It funds a study on whether the United States should expand its long-distance transmission — ironic given that building new power lines already requires too many studies — but makes no substantive changes.
I’m sympathetic to the case for permitting reform, and I would describe the law’s changes to NEPA as aggressive but acceptable under the right circumstances. There’s some good stuff, some bad stuff, and much in between. But looking at the package in the context of this deal, I am more worried. By acceding to these changes, Democrats have surrendered their greatest leverage in future permitting-reform talks. Achieving transmission reform will now require much more profound changes to NEPA than many progressives may be willing to accept.
“They took care of the low-hanging fruit and there may not be a ladder high enough to get to the rest,” Rob Gramlich, a political consultant and one of the nation’s foremost transmission experts, told me.
That’s because Republicans want three major changes to federal environmental law, all of which could empower fossil fuels. First, lawmakers want to ease the way for international oil and natural-gas pipelines, limiting a president’s ability to block them under federal law. Second, Republicans want to revise the Clean Water Act so states can’t use it to block pipelines for climate-related reasons.
Finally, Republicans want to impose even stricter time limits on NEPA, adding a statute of limitations and a deadline for how long a NEPA-related lawsuit can drag on. This would require the biggest gamble of all: By time-delimiting NEPA fights, Democrats would keep NIMBYs from fighting clean-energy and mass-transit infrastructure, allowing a rapid low-carbon buildout. (As Ezra Klein has argued, NEPA hobbles the government’s power to build big public projects more than it limits private companies’.) But in doing so, Democrats would deprive environmental litigators of the time-sapping tactics that they use to slow down fossil-fuel projects.
Democrats, meanwhile, have more modest goals in any future permitting fight: They want long-distance power lines to be as easy to build as natural-gas pipelines. Right now, an interstate power line must win approval from dozens of state and local governments before it can be built, while a natural-gas pipeline only needs to be approved by a single federal agency. Democrats want to give that agency authority over transmission. Pending that, Democrats would require the grid in each region of the country to connect with its neighbors, guaranteeing a minimum amount of transmission capacity nationwide.
Suffice it to say that these are not equal goals. Republicans now want much deeper changes to NEPA than Democrats seek for transmission law. This is going to make any dealmaking much harder. It would have been a fair trade, once, to link transmission reforms to some of the permitting changes in the debt-ceiling deal. It would have been a savvy trade to package the deal’s modest reforms with some of the more aggressive proposals from each party, so as to make the ultimate “winner” of the negotiations more obscure. With those easy trades off the table, only hard choices remain.
So Democrats will soon have to make a much weightier gamble: Should they accept Republicans’ significant changes to NEPA in exchange for transmission reform?
That might feel like trading “a Taylor Swift ticket for a high-school baseball ticket,” Gramlich told me. If Democrats accept it, they will be making a world-historic bet: that decarbonization is all but assured, and that no amount of preferential treatment for pipelines or fossil fuels could change the market’s embrace of a low-carbon future. They might decide that weakening NEPA’s judicial reforms would enable a green buildout, not a gray one, allowing new IRA-subsidized infrastructure to flourish across the country. Or more darkly, they might decide that only a massive transmission mandate can secure the IRA’s carbon-reduction benefits, and that such a prize is worth a few new pipelines.
But I’ll be honest that I don’t see it happening. The party does not seem ready to make such a cosmic gamble on the future of the American energy system. Climate advocates couldn’t accept the Mountain Valley Pipeline by itself; how could they accept making it easier to build any pipeline going forward? A miracle could happen, of course, but for now, the hope of transmission reform seems dead.
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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.”