SHINE Technologies Secures $263 Million DOE Loan to Complete World's Largest Fusion-Powered Medical Isotope Facility
The DOE backs SHINE's Chrysalis plant in Wisconsin, which aims to end U.S. dependence on imported molybdenum-99 using fusion neutron generators.
Overview
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Dominance Financing has issued a conditional commitment for up to $263 million in loan support to SHINE Technologies, the Wisconsin-based company building what it calls the world’s largest medical isotope production facility. The Chrysalis plant in Janesville will use deuterium-tritium fusion neutron generators to produce molybdenum-99, a critical diagnostic isotope that the United States currently imports entirely from overseas, according to SHINE Technologies.
The announcement, made on April 9, marks a significant step toward establishing the first domestic commercial supply of Mo-99 and represents one of the earliest real-world applications of fusion technology outside of electricity generation.
What We Know
The 43,000-square-foot Chrysalis facility houses eight deuterium-tritium fusion neutron generator units that irradiate a low-enriched uranium target in aqueous form, inducing a subcritical fission reaction that produces Mo-99, according to SHINE Technologies. Unlike conventional reactor-based methods, the process uses a liquid uranium target that can be recycled, reducing waste volume and operating costs.
At full capacity, the facility is designed to produce up to 8,200 six-day curies of Mo-99 per week and could meet up to three-quarters of total U.S. demand, according to the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration. Mo-99 decays into technetium-99m, a radioactive tracer used in more than 40,000 diagnostic procedures daily across the country, primarily for detecting heart disease and cancer.
The facility is approximately 75 percent complete, with the DOE loan primarily earmarked for equipment installation. SHINE received its construction permit from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in February 2016 and broke ground in May 2019. Phase 1 commercial production is expected in 2027, with all four phases — covering Mo-99, xenon-133, and iodine-131 production — slated for completion by December 31, 2029, according to SHINE Technologies.
The project is expected to support approximately 200 construction jobs and 150 permanent operations positions, according to the NNSA.
Why It Matters
The United States has no domestic commercial source of Mo-99. The isotope is currently imported from facilities in Europe, South Africa, and Australia, and because it decays at roughly one percent per hour, it loses approximately one-third of its volume during cross-continental transport, according to SHINE Technologies. Supply disruptions at aging foreign reactors have periodically caused shortages that delayed patient diagnoses.
Congress addressed this vulnerability with the American Medical Isotope Production Act of 2012, which directed the DOE to establish a reliable domestic supply of Mo-99 produced without proliferation-sensitive highly enriched uranium. The NNSA subsequently awarded cooperative agreements to eight companies and funded the development of 14 different production technologies, according to the DOE. SHINE emerged from that effort after 16 years of partnership with the NNSA and technical support from national laboratories.
The loan also reflects the Trump administration’s reorientation of the DOE’s financing office, previously focused on clean energy under the Biden administration and now rebranded as the Office of Energy Dominance Financing with a mandate that includes nuclear energy projects, as reported by E&E News.
What We Don’t Know
The conditional commitment must still clear technical, legal, environmental, and financial conditions before the loan is finalized. SHINE has not disclosed a specific date for closing. It is also unclear how the company will manage the transition from NNSA cooperative funding — which ends once the loan is finalized — to a commercially self-sustaining operation.
The facility’s original completion deadline was December 31, 2025, and slippage to 2029 has been attributed to the first-of-a-kind nature of the plant. Whether the revised timeline holds will depend on equipment procurement and commissioning of the fusion neutron generators, neither of which has been tested at this production scale before.
Finally, while Chrysalis could supply up to 75 percent of U.S. Mo-99 demand, the remaining quarter would still rely on imports, leaving some residual supply-chain vulnerability unaddressed.