West Valley City facility of Nusano, a nuclear technology company, working on radioisotopes during a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Aug. 21, 2025. (Alixel Cabrera/Utah News Dispatch)
Surrounded by a golf course, large offices and industrial buildings in West Valley City, researchers, physicists and engineers of Nusano, a nuclear technology company, are working on a radioactive form of elements that could become solutions in cancer therapies, aerospace, clean energy and the internet — radioisotopes.
In a ribbon cutting ceremony at that spot Thursday, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said it was “a momentous day,” one that would mark the beginning of an innovation hub where cures for cancer can emerge.
“We know they’re miraculous,” Cox said about radioisotopes. “We know they do incredible things like targeting cancer without destroying other parts of the body, which is the miracle that we all wanted. But they’re very expensive to produce at scale.”
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The facility, according to the company, will have a deep impact on domestic radioisotope production at scale by combining universities’ research and their own particle acceleration technology to build a safer and more efficient platform to manufacture multiple radioisotopes.
The new building has been under construction for about three years. It’s built to last 40 years and, with the help of almost 700 cement pillars that are about 70 feet deep, is projected to deviate less than one millimeter in the case of a 7.0 earthquake, Chris Lowe, CEO of Nusano said on Thursday.
John Dahlstrom, executive vice president of the Wasatch Group, the building’s developer, said he hopes the Nusano site becomes the core of a “medical innovation technology center,” attracting radioisotope users in their development of drugs against cancer.
“We’re already getting others who are going to be using radioisotopes in their drugs to locate here. We have three or four that have already committed, and we have several others who are looking at this opportunity and making the commitment,” Dahlstrom said. “This is really the start of what we see as a hub for innovation here in Utah, innovation around the production of radioisotopes.”
Nusano’s program for stable isotopes, which are non-radioactive forms of atoms, would also help the company to have a fully domestic supply chain at scale, Lowe said, diverting imports from Russia and other countries.
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The company also has technologies to separate matter without a lot of restrictions, Lowe said, which, among many uses, would allow a more efficient mining of rare earth minerals.
“I’ve been back and forth to D.C., to the State Department, to the White House, four times in the last 45 days,” he said. “I think they’re equally blown away by the technology and our ability to scale.”
The company is also planning to scale high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU fuel. But that will be done not off West Valley City’s Stonebridge golf course — where Nusano’s home is — but at Hill Air Force Base in northern Davis County.
“We will scale it in a manner that we can replenish, one, our national stockpile that was given away years ago,” Lowe said. “Two, all of these (small modular reactors) and various versions of different reactors that are coming online, their scale doesn’t happen without us, because our approach is actually about 200x more efficient than the Department of Energy at scale, apples to apples.”
Cox commended the company’s work, saying it will not only be an essential component of future generations of cancer drugs, but also reduce the country’s reliance on foreign suppliers, especially in the advanced processing of critical minerals.
“We would rather do it right here at home, and even the production of HALEU fuel, which is so critical to our ambitions to reinvigorate the nuclear industry here and the next generation of nuclear reactors here in the state to clean up our atmosphere and provide abundant energy resources,” Cox said.
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