A casual chat with Terry Grimm, of the Lansing-based, high-tech company,
Niowave, can induce a state of technological whiplash.
Death-rays,
free electron lasers,
proton cancer therapy. It’s a time-traveling experience not unlike what one might experience riding near the speed of light on one of Grimm’s charged particles, through a subatomic world where time has warped and anything sounds plausible.
Admittedly, it can all sound a little like hyperbole at first: “…and we’ll retrain machinists from the auto industry to use surplus equipment to make components for superconducting nuclear accelerators! And we’ll do it in an abandoned school right here in Lansing!”
But Grimm has been building his dream for decades. And what seems to us mortals to be unbelievable science fiction is real, and its happening in the here and now.
Neutrons For SaleGrimm's company is
fabricating niobium components—the element that puts the “nio-” in Niowave—for nuclear accelerators being constructed and used throughout the world. And he's doing it from a converted space in the recently decommissioned Walnut Street School, near Lansing’s Old Town neighborhood.
Niowave’s customer-base seems limited only by Grimm’s imagination:
“We can make neutron sources without a nuclear reactor, and use those neutrons in research to study other materials, such as isotope production for the medical community, high energy x-rays, or a free-electron laser for the Navy that will create a beam that can zap anything that comes within 10 miles.”
“Now, instead of
screening cargo containers, we can scan an entire ship at one time to see if there are nuclear materials smuggled aboard.” He adds with an entrepreneurial grin: “The Department of Homeland Security is very interested in that application.”
These are not pipe dreams. The school has turned out to be an ideal fabricating facility for a reasonable priced. “The high ceiling in the gym is ideal for our clean room”—an environment that is dust and particle-free for fabrication and assembling
processes—“and the two-foot thick floor provides a solid base for our heavy equipment.”
Thanks to these low start-up cost—and its 400 percent growth in the last year—Niowave plans to recoup all its start-up investment this year, and double its workforce to a total of 50 employees by the end of 2008.
Their business plan involves manufacturing and shipping turn-key, office-size nuclear accelerators—the nuclear physicist’s version of a laptop—from the same facility within a few years.
Outside the Black BoxAn Indiana native and graduate of
Purdue University, Grimm was at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1990s, doing post-graduate work on a
gyrotron—a small nuclear accelerator that he built from scratch. This research gave him valuable basic training, building a superconducting magnet and designing critical component parts.
When he completed his
thesis work in 1992, he did research at the U. S. Department of Energy’s superconducting supercollider in Texas, until the federal government cancelled funding for his project.
During his time in Texas, however, he developed professional relationships with colleagues at the
MSU cyclotron, which was looking to upgrade and do research and development on new accelerators.
Grimm joined the faculty at
MSU, and for more than a decade he worked with the team doing pure research—“why the atom holds together like it does, how the atoms formed when the stars exploded, how all the parts got here”—and supporting their continuing quest for the billion dollar grant that would fund the next step in their quest to unlock the universe’s deepest secrets.
“Meanwhile," says Grimm, "technology was advancing and creating other business opportunities.” His understanding of the materials and technologies grew. He began to project that costs could drop to the point where he could forecast commercially feasible applications.
The notion that there might be a business model here—“customers” for this kind of activity—was so far outside the pure research paradigm as to approach heresy. Grimm was thinking way outside the black box; but to him, the next steps were both obvious and compelling.
To develop practical applications for this technology, he needed to reduce the cost of speeding up atoms. Since much of the energy it takes is lost generating heat, reducing resistance would reduce heat, much the way that fluorescent light bulbs are more efficient than incandescent. The answer was an elementary element:
niobium.
Niobium Nation
Grimm casually drops a silvery object on his desk at Niowave’s offices in Lansing. It looks like a simple scrap, about an inch wide, fabricated into a ring three to four inches in diameter. It’s more than 99.99-percent pure niobium.
“It comes from a mine in Brazil,” he says. “It looks like steel, weighs like copper, and costs like silver.”
Tucked into the periodic table at an inconspicuous number 41, niobium has one characteristic that suits it uniquely for Grimm’s purposes—it becomes superconducting at a relatively balmy 452 degrees below zero, a full eight degrees above absolute zero.
While that’s still cold enough to give your chuck roast a pretty serious case of freezer burn, it’s “warm enough” to make commercially feasible refrigeration possible. And niobium’s superconductivity permits acceleration of sub-atomic particles to near the speed of light, without the generation of heat.
It’s this efficient creation of a superconducting environment that really gets Grimm’s juices flowing.
“Now, instead of requiring a huge installation costing hundreds of millions of dollars,” he says, “we can build a superconducting accelerator the size of a small office for $10 million or less—basically the cost of a high-end electron microscope. Instead of re-routing electric lines, we can plug it into a wall socket. And with it, we can accelerate any kind of substance or any part of an atom to any speed the customer wants.”
Machinists and PhDsAll that remained was to learn better methods of testing, milling, rolling and turning niobium.
“Niobium is not easy to work with,” says Grimm. And since he probably knows more about fabricating niobium components than anyone in the world, he smiles when he says it.
Niowave’s COO, Jerry Hollister, notes the ready availability of machine tools and a skilled work force in the Lansing area. Niowave obtained surplus
computer numerically controlled (CNC) machining equipment from local tool-and-die shops at a fraction of its original cost.
And Lansing has the perfect labor force: “We have hired experienced machinists from the auto industry, recent grads in CNC machining from
Lansing Community College, and grad students and nuclear engineers from MSU.”
And while they note that some retraining has been needed to show their machinists how to work with niobium, Grimm acknowledges that the training benefits are mutual.
“Every day, they teach me skills I wish I had when I was building that gyrotron back at MIT.”
Rick Ballard took a seminar in relativity and particle physics in college in 1968. Six months later he changed his major to religious studies.
Dave Trumpie is the managing photographer for Capital Gains. He is a freelance photographer and owner of Trumpie Photography.
Photos:
Cleanroom tech Marcques Pruitt
Engineer Chandra Romel adjusts testing equipment
NioWave parts
CNC machinist Mike DeRosia
Dr. Terry Grimm
NioWaves's cleanroom
Wayne Daniel operates a lathe
All Photographs © Dave Trumpie