Federal loan backs isotope plant

A hospital can’t stockpile many medical isotopes the way it stockpiles gloves or syringes, because one of the key ones, molybdenum-99, starts decaying almost as soon as it is made and loses about 1 percent of its volume and value every hour in transit. That is why a factory in Janesville just got a conditional federal loan commitment of up to $263 million to finish building a domestic source closer to U.S. patients. (energy.gov, wpr.org, wisbusiness.com) Molybdenum-99 is not usually the thing doctors inject into patients. It is the parent material that turns into technetium-99m, the workhorse tracer used in about 80 percent of nuclear medicine procedures worldwide and roughly 40,000 medical procedures each day in the United States. (nationalacademies.org, energy.gov) Technetium-99m works because it gives off a signal scanners can see while fading fast enough that patients are not radioactive for long. Hospitals use it for heart scans, bone scans, and other imaging that checks how organs are working instead of just what they look like. (nationalacademies.org, energy.gov) The problem is that the United States has spent decades depending on foreign reactors for most of its molybdenum-99 supply. The Department of Energy said in 2025 that the country had no domestic capability for molybdenum-99 production and was vulnerable to outages at aging facilities overseas. (energy.gov) That dependence has a second layer: older isotope production often relied on highly enriched uranium, which is the kind of material governments worry about from a weapons-proliferation standpoint. Congress told the National Nuclear Security Administration in the American Medical Isotopes Production Act of 2012 to help build a U.S. supply without using highly enriched uranium. (energy.gov) The Janesville plant is SHINE’s answer to that problem. The company says its Chrysalis facility uses a fusion-and-fission process, and the Department of Energy says the finished plant would become the only domestic commercial source of molybdenum-99. (energy.gov, shinefusion.com) This is not a blank check and it is not final yet. The April 9, 2026 announcement was a conditional commitment, which means SHINE still has to clear legal, environmental, and financial conditions before the loan closes. (energy.gov, wpr.org) The project is also far enough along that the loan is about finishing and scaling, not starting from scratch. SHINE told Wisconsin Public Radio that construction began in 2019, the facility is now 75 to 80 percent complete, and the main work left is installing equipment. (wpr.org) Federal officials are selling this as both a health-care and industrial project. The Department of Energy says the site will support hundreds of construction and operating jobs, while Wisconsin Public Radio reported about 200 construction jobs and about 150 full-time jobs once the plant is running. (energy.gov, wpr.org) The part hospitals will care about is steadier scheduling. The National Nuclear Security Administration says SHINE’s facility, once complete, is expected to have capacity exceeding 75 percent of U.S. molybdenum-99 demand, which would give nuclear medicine departments a much larger domestic buffer when overseas supply chains wobble. (energy.gov)