Over at the Gazette, there’s a story that, ever so tentatively, lets readers know that the public-money-sucking SHINE project (to produce the molybdenum-99 isotope for nuclear medicine) isn’t faring so well in the marketplace.
SHINE is, after all, the centerpiece of big-government conservatism in Rock County, having received millions in public money to fund a tech venture for about a hundred highly-compensated workers as a supposed replacement for thousands of Janesville jobs lost during the Great Recession. (See, subscription req’d, SHINE regulatory process going smoothly; funding not so.)
The paper offers a lemonade-from-lemons headline if ever there were one: a smooth regulatory process should be a given (as millions in taxpayer dollars have been sunk into SHINE), a mere prelude to the truly important work of convincing private investors to sink almost another hundred-million into the project.
Thinking that private capital investment is secondary, after the regulatory process, is risibly short-sighted. This project will feast or starve in private markets.
SHINE is starving:
Katrina Pitas, SHINE spokeswoman and business development coordinator, said the company has pushed back its plant opening timetable to mid- to late 2018.
Pitas said the delay is because SHINE has not landed major private funding sources for the Janesville facility. She said private investors and venture capitalists have showed a trend of initial interest but then have cooled toward the project.
Having been pushed back again & again, they’ve now set a timetable of “mid-to-late 2018.”
Meanwhile, a competitor is moving forward faster, with a different process that won’t require uranium:
NorthStar, a Beloit-based radioisotope producer that says it could begin handling and shipping Mo-99 this summer, and in 2017 or 2018 could begin producing in Beloit without using uranium [as SHINE’s process will require].
Private markets aren’t secondary, except among an ignorant class of self-promoters who think that they’ve discovered a new way of business.
No, they’ve not: this is the old way of the well-fed, grabbing what they can from common residents, and hoping others won’t notice, or won’t object.