8 October 2015 – SHINE Medical Technologies of Madison is moving ahead with an effort to make a vital medical isotope at a new plant in Janesville.

The isotope, molybdenum-99, is needed for about 20 million procedures annually in the United States alone. “Moly-99” quickly decays into a form, technetium-99, that is useful for medical scans used to detect cancer and assess blood supply to the heart.

The UW-Madison spinoff’s Janesville plant is slated to employ about 150.
Approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission could come early in 2016, says Shine CEO Greg Piefer, who began pursuing technology that can make the isotope while a UW- Madison graduate student in the 1990s.

Today, moly-99 is made from highly enriched uranium, a substance that can be diverted to make nuclear weapons. The federal government is supporting alternative tactics to supply moly-99.

That support has included $25 million to the Shine project, which includes Phoenix Nuclear Labs, a Madison startup that Piefer opened in 2006 to make a powerful neutron accelerator he invented.

That accelerator is at the core of Piefer’s plans to produce moly-99.

Piefer credits Gerald Kulcinski, leader of the UW’s fusion program, with suggesting the use of fusion to create neutrons that could transform isotopes. Nuclear fusion is best known for its potential to provide clean, practically limitless electricity. But that Holy Grail remains elusive, so in the 1990s, Kulcinski steered his students toward profitable, near-term applications of fusion, such as making moly-99.

The Phoenix neutron accelerators — the world’s most powerful commercial models — create a small fusion reaction that releases a cloud of neutrons that can, in turn, produce moly-99 by the fission of a uranium-based compound.

In 2008, Canada announced that it would close the old reactor it was using to make moly-99, closing off a significant fraction of the current U.S. supply. Other sources in Europe, South Africa and Australia are so distant that the one percent per hour decay drives a major increase in cost.

With the valuable moly-99 market suddenly in play, Piefer opened Shine in 2010 and began planning a safe, profitable and proliferation-proof method to make the necessary isotope.

Although Piefer has left Phoenix, he plans to use up to eight Phoenix accelerators to make moly-99.

A massive application to the NRC has been underway for years, and Piefer hopes for a favorable decision early in 2016.

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