From the quaint neighborhood streets that run alongside its perimeter, Niowave, Inc. appears as unassuming as the converted local elementary school from which it operates. But inside, where water fountains and toilets still perch low to the ground and footsteps echo off hallway lockers, its employees have assumed the once impenetrable goal of adopting superconducting accelerator technology to a range of challenges from homeland security to health care.

Projects under development include facilities for sterilization and advanced manufacturing; radiography and active interrogation systems to detect contraband and shielded nuclear materials in truck and train cargo; and isotope fabrication from non-weapons-grade uranium, including sodium molybdate, volatile radioisotopes like Xe-133 and cancer treatments such as the alpha emitter Ac-225.

The workhorse behind the company’s projects is its innovative superconducting electron linac. The machine, illustrated in Figure 1, accelerates a high-powered electron beam through a magnetic arc, back through the accelerator and then into a target. The design reduces costs for the system’s cryomodule and refrigerator and has allowed the company’s engineering team to scale the machine down to a tractor trailer-sized footprint.

The Niowave team worked with Linde Cryogenics (CSA CSM) to develop a range of cooling options for the linac, using either the NW-HR50 or NW-HR110 helium refrigerators. Figure 2 shows a comparison of the two units. The higher capacity NW-HR110 benefits from a nitrogen pre-cool, while the smaller capacity unit delivers nitrogen-free operation at low input power.

Most of the other parts for the linac are machined in-house. To that end, the company has constructed a state-of-the-art clean room in the former school gymnasium, classrooms have been converted to workshops and the principal’s office is now occupied by Dr. Terry Grimm, his fraternity paddle and a swarm of whiteboard scribbles tracking ideas and progress.

Grimm founded Niowave in 2005, serving as its president and senior scientist. He earned his doctorate from MIT in 1992, was attached to the Department of Energy’s Superconducting Super Collider Laboratory outside Dallas and later worked as a senior physicist and adjunct professor at Michigan State University’s National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory for 13 years. In 2004, CSA awarded him the Roger W. Boom Award and in 2010 he accepted the IEEE Carl Rosner Award for Entrepreneurship in Applied Superconductivity. He currently serves as a director on the CSA Board.

Getting the company off the ground was a challenge, Grimm says, as he focused initially on delivering materials to outside projects, from building SRF cavities for research laboratories to providing free electron laser systems to the US Navy. But he was always watching for markets and applications where Niowave could establish itself as a provider of services with its superconducting technology. “Before we even started the company, we were already starting to see these markets,” says Grimm. “And to some extent they weren’t new directions. As we advanced the technology they were ready and waiting.”

One of those markets was adopting a superconducting linac and X-ray collider for active interrogation, detecting contraband and shielded nuclear materials. Grimm says the process is both affordable and necessary, and can be installed and used at ports with minimal delays to commerce. The solution is also realtime, an advantage, he stresses, over competing plans for border security.

Niowave’s active interrogation research is funded in part by the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office at the US Department of Homeland Security, but the agency is also funding research from competitors. “It’s a race,” Grimm says. The main competitor, according to Grimm, is attempting to scale up the X-ray technology currently used for cancer therapy, hoping to boost the electron intensity to levels necessary for large-scale scanning. It’s established technology, he says, but the challenge of bringing electrons to higher energy necessitates higher electric cost. Niowave’s solution isn’t cheap either, reliant as it is on liquid helium refrigeration, but Grimm is cautiously optimistic. “It’s not even clear which one will win out…but we’re confident they’ll never get there on the cost.”

Grimm and his team are also focused on the medical isotope market, leveraging the linac’s power to create isotopes used in medical imaging from depleted, natural or low enriched uranium (LEU). The Niowave process also has advantages over conventional methods, according to Grimm. He says using the Niowave technology in a domestic facility curtails the risks involved in shipping weapons grade uranium to nuclear reactor labs overseas, controls costs better and reduces the delivery time of isotopes with short half-lives to destinations in the US.

The challenge of developing the fission technique was not only getting the electrons to high enough energy to split the uranium atom but also acquiring a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to possess LEU in the first place. “Up until a year ago there was no company in the country with a license for possessing the enriched uranium for isotope production,” says Grimm. “And until we had that license, everyone could easily point and say ‘you’re never going to get there; here’s the example, there isn’t anybody.’”

But Niowave has quietly gone about the process of acquiring the necessary licensing and has begun testing its system. It has also established the infrastructure necessary for all of these new projects to bridge the gap from development to commercialization, opening a brand new building on property at the Capitol Region International Airport in Lansing MI.

The facility includes full-sized restrooms and drinking fountains, but more importantly houses multiple linac tunnels—mirroring those initially constructed inside Niowave’s electron research and development (NERD) building, a test facility adjacent to the elementary school home base.

“The airport facility is all set for demonstration at the next level,” Grimm says. “Either dealing with lots of cargo coming in and out or dealing with radioactive materials to make isotopes. It’s all set up to be added on to, and it’s not in the middle of a neighborhood.” http://www.niowaveinc.com