June 14, 2023
NextBeam founder Andrew Patton delivered a short talk at the National Nuclear Security Agency’s (NNSA) conference on Accelerators for America. The NNSA supports replacing legacy radiation technologies that involve the production and use of potentially dangerous radioactive materials, such as Gamma irradiation, with safer and more sustainable technologies such as Electron Beam (E-Beam) and X-ray irradiation.
Andrew spoke about the need for additional accelerators: “With a $2B+ market in the US for terminal sterilization services, and with Gamma and Ethylene Oxide [EO] technologies likely to experience little-to-no growth in the future, the construction of a network of safe & sustainable beam facilities is paramount to our supply chain security.”
The slide below further illustrates this point: with ~150 facilities in North America, we expect that E-Beam and X-ray technologies are the only reasonable mature solutions to supporting the medical device industry’s growth.