— SHINE Technologies is participating as a subcontractor in two federally funded projects aimed at improving aspects of nuclear fuel recycling.
The Janesville nuclear technology company yesterday rolled out details for both projects, which are getting funding from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E program.
One project, spearheaded by Case Western Reserve University and involving the DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory, is focused on developing chemical processing equipment for use in repurposing spent nuclear fuel.
The Argonne lab is working on machines called PaCERS — which stands for Packed Centrifugal Equipment for Radiochemical Separation — that can spin fast enough to boost the efficiency of the chemical separation process.
SHINE will apply this technology to multiple processes, including those that separate the radioisotopes strontium-90 and americium-241 for applications in medicine, manufacturing and energy. The company says this approach “multiple stages of nuclear fuel recycling more economical,” noting spent nuclear fuel still contains 90% of its energy potential as well as other valuable materials for recycling.
Ross Radel, the company’s chief technology officer, says the project is part of a broader effort by SHINE to make nuclear energy effectively renewable.
“We already separate radioactive materials to produce medical isotopes today, and we’re applying that same expertise to help push PaCERS toward practical use,” Radel said in the announcement.
Meanwhile, SHINE yesterday also announced its working as a subcontractor for GE Vernova on a separate project applying AI to nuclear fuel recycling. By using the technology to “optimize” tracking of spent nuclear fuel and measurement at recycling sites, partners in the effort aim to make them “more cost-effective” with less downtime, according to Radel.
Through the second project, called Monochromatic Assays Yielding Enhanced Reliability, or MAYER, the company is working on how to improve the process of tracking the flow of material through this process. The current status quo involves “redundant” instrumentation as well as repeated manual sampling and facility shutdowns for inventory checks, according to a release.
By taking facility data and using it to create a “virtual digital twin,” SHINE says it can improve security measures while cutting operating costs.
See more in a recent story.
— The Senate Health Committee chair questioned the value of providing tax credits to encourage graduate nursing clinical placements after various stakeholders proposed the idea during a hearing.
Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara, R-Fox Crossing, convened yesterday’s committee hearing after hearing about numerous graduate nurse practitioner students struggling to find clinical placements, both in Wisconsin and nationally.
“What is happening is, student after student is asked to find clinical placement spots, and they are not able to find these spots,” she said. “I have students contacting me that are dropping out of the program; I have students that are one, two, three semesters sometimes not being able to find a spot.”
In some cases, students are being directed to contact third-party organizations that charge thousands of dollars per semester to match them with a supervisor known as a preceptor, Cabral-Guevara said.
“This is ridiculous,” she said. “I feel that if a school is asking students to find these hours, then they should be assisting.”
Gina Dennik-Champion, executive director of the Wisconsin Nurses Association, noted serving as a preceptor takes a lot of time. Their responsibilities include observing students and providing feedback, completing official evaluations and communicating with nursing faculty.
“All of those common barriers that we hear … the scheduling constraints, insufficient organizational recognition, inconsistent financial support,” she said, also pointing to differing requirements between programs as an issue.
The association has backed a tax credit for nurses who serve as preceptors for students, Dennik-Champion said.
“We do have the data to show what tax incentives, a tax credit does,” she said. “It incentivizes participation, especially if the amount that’s available for a tax credit will catch the ears and the eyes and maybe the checking account … it enhances education and training.”
Meanwhile, UW-Milwaukee School of Nursing Dean Kim Litwack noted the university has committed to finding preceptors for its students, and it turns away students if it’s not able to place them in a clinical preceptor.
“It becomes a challenge, how do you make that balancing act where we want to meet workforce needs but we also have to meet our ethical obligations to students?” she said yesterday.
Litwack referenced the possibility of tax credits as an immediate solution, noting 25 states currently provide tax credits for preceptors — though just 18 of those are for nurse practitioners.
“We have to find a way to incentivize that,” she said. “We need those nurse practitioners, we need them desperately for primary care, even more desperately for psychiatric mental health, and that’s one of the hardest ones to find preceptors for.”
Cabral-Guevara noted even with a tax credit in place, many restrictions are placed on nurse practitioners for taking on students. In response to her concern, Litwack called for greater coordination between academic and practice partnerships.
“Many of our providers in both nurse practitioners and physicians are incentivized to bring up their volume, and if their volume decreases because they’ve got students, the tax credit offsets that a little bit, but you have to have an organization that’s willing to do it,” Litwack said.
Still, Cabral-Guevara said tax credits are only helpful “if we have nurse practitioners that can actually take students,” and that needs to be addressed somehow.
“I know everybody has brought up tax credits, but I challenge it a little,” she said, adding, “There are many nurse practitioners or people to precept that would do it without getting a tax credit. I mean, they’ve been doing it already, and I think that they would. So would a little tax credit actually incentivize that? I’m not completely sure.”
She argued tax credits wouldn’t address the broader issues driving this trend, questioning if facilities aren’t making enough spots and if schools are taking on too many students to be able to place them all.
— A recent poll from the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network found 81% of likely voters in Wisconsin say it’s important that all Americans should have access to nearby, affordable cancer screening regardless of health insurance.
Of that percentage, 54% said it’s extremely important and 27% said it’s very important, according to a polling memo distributed yesterday.
The poll also found 64% of likely voters said they’d be more likely to vote for an official who was “a leader in ensuring healthcare is affordable and accessible,” while 57% said they’d be more likely to vote for an official who advocates for access to Medicaid insurance coverage.
And while 59% of respondents said they’re concerned about young people in their community using tobacco products, 63% said they support increasing tobacco taxes and using the revenue for prevention programs. The poll also found 67% would be less likely to elect someone who had gotten large donations from tobacco companies.
Sara Sahli, the group’s Wisconsin government relations director, notes more than 42,000 Wisconsin residents are expected to be diagnosed with cancer this year.
“Cancer touches everyone and voters want cancer issues to be a top priority this election season,” she said in the release.
The poll was conducted for the group by Lake Research Partners and the Tarrance Group for its national Cancer Votes campaign. It was done between June 30 and July 12 through phone interviews and text messages with links to the online survey, reaching 518 likely voters in the state. The margin of error was plus or minus 4.2 percentage points.
See the polling memo and release.
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— Representatives from Wisconsin’s banking lobby and the Department of Financial Institutions told a legislative panel examining crypto staking that they oppose deregulating the practice.
DFI Assistant Chief Legal Counsel Mike Gavigan said applying state securities laws to innovative financial products was “nothing new,” and lawmakers should not remove existing protections by exempting crypto staking from securities law.
“Enacting carve-outs based on the novelty or complexity of a product is not consistent with the goals, history or spirit of laws aimed at protecting the investing public,” Gavigan told the Legislative Council Study Committee on Cryptocurrency.
At issue is whether to allow Wisconsinites to participate in what’s known as staking-as-a-service, wherein customers use a third-party service to lock or commit their cryptocurrency to a blockchain and potentially collect rewards in a manner akin to earning interest on a savings account or receiving a stock dividend.
No representatives from the cryptocurrency industry testified at yesterday’s hearing.
DFI considers staking-as-a-service a form of unregistered – and thus unauthorized – securities trading. Wisconsinites can engage in staking themselves, but that process requires considerable financial and computing resources.
Legislation introduced last session would have exempted staking-as-a-service, or digital asset staking, from state securities law.
Gavigan noted that cryptocurrency is widely used in high-yield investment scams, where victims are persuaded to invest funds into a purported investment portfolio – like a crypto wallet – where the funds are then taken.
Wisconsin residents lost $43 million to high-yield investment scams in 2024, out of over $92 million lost to all investment scams, according to FBI data shared by DFI officials. Some $46 million of those transactions involved cryptocurrency.
DFI Securities Attorney Supervisor Robin Jacobs noted crypto is a popular transaction medium for scammers because it offers anonymity. Transactions also can’t be reversed and take minutes versus the hours or days it can take for a wire transfer or a check to clear.
Chris Borgerding of the Wisconsin Bankers Association said that if the committee were to find state securities law an impractical framework to regulate crypto staking, it needed to find other ways to implement the fraud protections present in securities law.
“If securities law is an imperfect fit, the natural next question is what does fit, and we would ask that the answer not be nothing,” Borgerding said. “Whatever else changes, we must preserve the state’s ability to address fraud.”
Credit union representatives also said they wanted their members to be protected from fraud.
But Dave Groshek of the Wisconsin Credit Union League also told the committee that the member-owned cooperatives want to offer digital currency services to their members if such practices are authorized.
Committee Chair Sen. Rob Stafsholt, R-New Richmond, said the hearing was for informational purposes and that lawmakers would discuss potential legislative action at their next meeting in October.
He stressed he wanted any legislation to come out of the committee to come without “unintended consequences” or pick winners and losers in the crypto market.
— Novig has filed a federal lawsuit seeking to prevent the Wisconsin Department of Justice from enforcing state gaming laws against the prediction market platform.
The state agency has already sued Kalshi, Robinhood, Coinbase, Polymarket, Crypto.com and their affiliates, arguing the services offered by those prediction markets are the equivalent of a bet and are banned under Wisconsin law.
In a federal lawsuit filed Friday, Novig argued Congress gave the Commodity Futures Trading Commission exclusive jurisdiction over the transactions it offers, and Wisconsin is pre-empted from trying to enforce its gaming law against the platform.
The lawsuit is the latest legal salvo over prediction markets. Along with the state DOJ suing the three platforms, the Trump administration has sued the state arguing Wisconsin is trying to interfere with federally regulated markets.
A DOJ spokesperson referred to AG Josh Kaul’s comment in April when the first suits were filed that, “Thinly disguising unlawful conduct doesn’t make it lawful.”
The suit argues the transactions aren’t bets, but “swaps,” defined as “an arrangement under which two parties exchange payments measured by the value or performance of some underlying reference, whether an interest rate, a commodity price, or a real-world contingency.”
“The field here is not gambling,” the suit argues. “It is the regulation of trading on federally designated contract markets—the discrete activity over which Congress conferred exclusive jurisdiction.”
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