Join Scott Shropshire and Katie Rittenhouse on an exclusive tour of SHINE Technologies' Systems and Manufacturing facility in Fitchburg, Wisconsin. This is where SHINE designs and builds systems for isotope production, neutron imaging and fusion neutron sources.
Hi. Welcome. My name is Katie and this is our VP of engineering, Scott Shropshire, and we're here to talk with you guys more about, SHINE Technologies’ Systems and Manufacturing up in Fitchburg, Wisconsin. This is where we design and build all of the fusion neutron sources that drive the phase one and phase two applications for neutrons, including, neutron imaging and medical isotope production.
We built systems for the diagnostics, isotope production, neutron imaging. This was very early stage systems. The companies that provide, fuel rods for nuclear generators or nuclear power plants need to test them before they actually ship to the power plants to make sure they have the right mix of uranium-235 versus 238. Traditionally that's been done with a manmade element called californium, which nowadays is far too expensive, for those companies.
And a couple of them contracted us to build machines that would test their fuel rods before shipping neutrons. One of our customers is running our machine. 24 hours a day. Five days a week. And, to keep up with demand. Wow. And that speaks to kind of like, the quality and reliability of these systems, which, is really important for isotope production as well, because those systems need to run for five and a half days straight in order to make the amount of isotopes necessary.
With that, I think let's go look at a system. So this is part of a neutron generator based on fusion, just like the one we have in building one, where we're going to be, selling radiation services to, places like the United States Army, Navy, etc.. This is really the heart of it. The whole machine is about 28ft tall once it's all assembled.
This is where we start the process. This actually will sit on top of the next stage, which we call the pumping and solenoid stage. And the beam will enter at the top of this stack here. And then this will sit on the floor of a bunker. And this will hang underneath that floor of the bunker. The beam continues down the middle of this barrel.
And then it goes through an aperture, which would be about floor level into a target chamber below where we have here in this facility, more deuterium gas at the actual Chrysalis facility and in building one, we're going to replace that deuterium with, man-made isotope of hydrogen called tritium. That's going to increase our neutron output by almost two orders of magnitude about 86 times.
And the neutrons produced will be much higher energy. The deuterium deuterium reaction, we get 2.45 mega electron volts. The deuterium tritium interaction. We get 14.1 mega electron volts. The group of these people here that can support, like the design, build and deployment of these fusion systems towards like specific applications, is, totally unique to this facility.
Yes we do have quite a team here. Yeah. It's incredible. Right above me is a 15 ton crane. And as you can see, it's quite high up so that we can actually assemble these monster machines that are 28ft tall. We could not do that at our last facility, and we had to just build the components, ship them to customer sites for these tritium based systems.
We have a lot of custom electronics up here that we designed ourselves to be radiation hardened so that they survive well while producing neutrons with tritium. So this is one of our high voltage domes that goes over all the electronics. And then over here, the big blue, pressure vessel goes over that. That's rated up to 100 p.s.i. We only, run it to 30 p.s.i. That's all the insulation we need to cut down on the arking. This is one of our 320,000 volt power supplies up to, 156 milliamps and it's, also key to the to making it all work. All in all told, there's, about 18,000 parts that we buy or make and assemble at this plant for one of these units.
Over here we have two bunkers where we actually fully assemble and test the machines before calling them factory accepted and before we're able to ship. So right now, there is a machine in this bunker, and that bunker is sealed up. You can see there's no machine in the second bunker at the moment, or at least no top parts of the machine.
Lower part may be in there. And, these cabinets here are used for, providing power to the various pieces within the machine, but they're outside the bunker because they do not need to be in that radiation area. We also have a water cooling cabinet with the red and blue hoses coming out. A lot of this stuff needs to be water cooled.
The turbo molecular pumps, magnets, the roots blowers, they all need to be cooled. So we've assembled over 80 engineers and scientists to design all this stuff. And as a matter of fact, you see all these machines that have been built that's a team of six in production with over 80 designers. So we have, software engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, process engineers, test engineers, systems engineers, physicists, nuclear engineers.
And of course, we have the support staff here as well. With all that capability, we don't just do neutron generation, we don't do just do fusion. We can turn these engineers on to other, projects such as the lutetium purification. I'll show you some of that stuff. But almost all the apparatuses that we've put together for that have already been shipped down to Janesville to the Cassiopeia facility.
Very unique, impressive capability about this team has here. you know, just with the long history of producing fusion systems for very specific applications that aren't necessarily fusion energy, but, you know, customer applications like neutron imaging, radiation effects testing, fuel scanning, all of which meet a need and allows us to kind of like reinvest back into the company.
All right. Thank you for joining us of this tour of SHINE Technologie’s Systems and manufacturing facility in Fitchburg, Wisconsin.
