www.forwardjanesville.com | 20 Fusion energy is going to be transformative, but making it affordable enough to actually change the world is going to take a lot of practice and investment. Instead of trying to leap straight to fusion power, we asked a different question: Where can fusion create real value right now? We can use fusion to inspect critical parts for the defense and aerospace industries. We can use it to produce medical isotopes that the world desperately needs. We can even use it to recycle nuclear waste and turn it into fuel for energy. Other technology companies have done this kind of thing before — computer chips, electric vehicles, and now even rocket ships. Companies start with a product they can sell now and use that to get better at building the next technology. As they get better, costs come down. As costs come down, they can take on bigger challenges. Balancing family life and work is a constant work in progress! Moments with family keep me grounded. I recently watched the Artemis II launch with our daughter. I was so glad to share that with her. When there’s time in the summer, I feel at peace on the lake with my family. There’s not a lot of time for hobbies right now, but that’s OK. The work matters, and we’re at an incredibly exciting point in the company’s journey. HOW DID I GET HERE? success • challenges • life lessons • education • career • family • inspirations In middle school, I was the kid skipping recess to read about particle accelerators in the library. I was fascinated by the idea that you could take physics and actually build machines that would change things for people. I grew up during a time when energy shortages were becoming a concern. Even to a kid, it seemed obvious that energy was a constraint on what humanity could do. When I started reading about nuclear fusion — about how the fuel supply is essentially unlimited, how it powers every star in the universe — I thought, well, that’s the thing that changes everything. I wanted to be a part of making that happen. A big early business lesson I learned is that you cannot outsource execution. We found that the traditional vendors in the nuclear space were comfortable with things taking a long time and costing a lot more than they should, which was unacceptable to us. So we built our own manufacturing capability. For anything that requires innovation, we make it ourselves. For standard parts, we found that working with modern commercial vendors and then qualifying their work for nuclear service ourselves was actually faster, cheaper, and often higher quality than relying on the old methods. That lesson — that you have to own the hard parts yourself if you want them done right — has shaped everything about how we operate today. • GREG PIEFER FOUNDER AND CEO, SHINE TECHNOLOGIES { WORK EXPERIENCE } 2005 – PRESENT Founder and CEO, SHINE Technologies 2005-2010 President, Phoenix Nuclear Labs, LLC 2004-2006 Chief Technology Officer, Gillware Data Recovery { EDUCATION} 2006 Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Nuclear Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison 1999 Bachelor’s degree, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison The U.S. Department of Energy’s recent $263 million commitment to SHINE is a big deal! The DOE has been a long-term partner of ours. This conditional commitment will fund the completion of our Chrysalis facility and help us scale up isotope production to meet the growing global demand for these medicines. For Janesville specifically, it means Chrysalis gets finished and becomes fully operational. That means more jobs, more economic activity, and a facility that’s going to be producing medicine for decades. Over its lifetime, Chrysalis has the capacity to produce a billion doses of medicine. It’s also a signal to the rest of the country that what we’re doing is a national priority. This investment will generate returns right here in southern Wisconsin. The infrastructure isn’t leaving. The talent isn’t leaving. And I believe the success of this company is going to help catalyze an even broader manufacturing and startup ecosystem in this region. • • UW-Madison changed the trajectory of my life. I took a class called Resources from Space that was taught by Gerry Kulcinski, who ran the Fusion Technology Institute at UW, and Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, an Apollo 17 astronaut, the only scientist to ever walk on the moon. They had this idea that you could go into space, bring resources back to Earth, and create tremendous value. The section of that class that really interested me was about nuclear fusion. Gerry invited me to work for him as a grad student. The Fusion Technology Institute’s whole mission was different from most fusion programs. Their assumption was, if the physics are figured out, how do you actually engineer a working machine? That engineering-first mindset is really what shaped SHINE’s entire approach.
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