- This is not a vacation rental, it's a nuclear power plant. - Sort of the typical ways
people perceive power plants: big, bulky, sort of
brutalist architecture systems. - And they come
with a lot of baggage. - But these new technologies
are fundamentally different. - Meet the husband/wife engineering duo that discovered a
game-changing technology buried in a
government lab in Idaho. - Here we go. Wow! - What they found is
sparking a renaissance of nuclear energy. - I see nuclear power as
the only efficient way to deeply decarbonize, and so, the stakes
couldn't be greater. - Their startup, Oklo, is setting up to build smaller, safer, and more efficient
nuclear reactors. - Building one's relatively easy. The fun part is thinking about how you build
hundreds of thousands. - Let's make an offer. - Right now, we're at a
precipice of a true transition to sort of what I think the
future of energy looks like. - And with global demand for
clean energy skyrocketing, the clock is ticking, but
if they're successful, they could pioneer the
next energy revolution. - 'You got yourself a front seat to something you're not
gonna forget so quick.' - Before going any further, it's probably worth addressing
the radioactive elephant in the room. Most of us hear nuclear
power and think of this— - 'Where radiation levels
were five times normal.' - 'I don't want any part of it!' - Not to mention
the radioactive waste which has to be buried
for thousands of years— but that's old nuclear. We're about to
meet 'new nuclear.' But first, what made the
idea of nuclear energy so intriguing in the first place? It's the power of the atom. When you split
an atom of uranium, it releases energy
millions of times greater than any other
source on the planet. - One of the
coolest stats to me is that a golf ball-sized piece
of uranium metal could power a person's entire lifetime. The fact that it could produce
so much energy from so little and can do so without
emitting greenhouse gases. - That's not smoke; it's steam. Don't worry, I didn't
know that either. And that's a big deal because the world needs
a lot more clean energy. - We're talking about
orders of magnitude— more energy needed,
electricity specifically. - But there are
serious questions about whether renewable sources
can generate enough power to meet the growing
demand on their own. While wind and solar only generate energy when the wind is blowing
or the sun is shining, nuclear is producing clean
power around the clock, plus it uses fewer resources. Just one nuclear power
plant can do the job of over 400 wind turbines,
or 3 million solar panels. - Which means it's
clearly lined up to be both the cheapest and
the most sustainable. Altogether, it creates just
this sort of, honestly, silver bullet-type solution. - Now what if I told you
we've already invented a new kind of nuclear reactor? One that can't melt down
the way old reactors did, and can actually recycle radioactive waste. Only problem is, it was
shut down 30 years ago, and the technology lies
buried in a government lab out in the middle of
the Idaho Desert. That's where Jake and
Caroline are headed. - So you've got this kind
of legendary reactor that, like, what it did is completely
and totally underappreciated and underrealized. We had the treasure map; it's just we looked and
a lot of people didn't. Here we are. - Yeah, this is where
so much of it happened. - This is the EBR-II: one of the nation's
first 'fast reactors.' And one thing that makes
fast reactors unique is they don't require a human
operator to stay safe. - This is the control panel
where they operated EBR-II. - Were you here when
they did the surge tests? - I was so- - That's amazing! - They essentially ran the
plant up to full power— reached over and shut
off the primary pumps. And then kind of sat back like this at the control panel. - You heard that right. They intentionally tried
to create a meltdown, and they couldn't. - Here we go. - Wow. - And the other thing
they discovered: this reactor can reuse
radioactive waste as fuel which means less waste
ends up in the ground. - You can get over 90%
of the energy content out, which makes the reactors
much more efficient but also able to
actually recycle waste. - This technology—
this is the treasure that Jake and Caroline found. But because of
accidents like Chernobyl, public support for
nuclear dried up and the government
pulled the plug. And this promising new
technology was put on a shelf. - But we can do things fundamentally quite a bit differently,
and quite a bit better. - Now, Jake and
Caroline are dusting off this fast-reactor blueprint,
and modernizing it to build the next generation
of nuclear reactors. - Couple big things that
we've done in the last month which are obviously
pretty exciting. We're talking about
systems that are smaller, that are simpler, that
are cheaper to build, that look fundamentally different— and that's so important because that changes
people's paradigm. - Meet the Aurora powerhouse:
a microreactor that kind of looks like
a European ski lodge, but it can power up to
15,000 homes for over a decade
without refueling, and it can run on
recycled nuclear waste. Because it uses that same
fast-reactor technology, it can run safely without
a human operator which means you can build
them just about anywhere. - You can really deploy
this on a global scale and help provide abundant,
clean, affordable power on a global basis that
really nothing else can do. - Jake and Caroline plan on
building their first reactor by 2025, out in the desert
where this all started. - And so we're gonna be
building it basically right back there behind us. - But they have an
uphill battle trying to convince regulators
to do things differently this time around. To give you an
idea of how hard it is to build nuclear
reactors in the U.S., the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission was established
way back in 1975, and not a single new power
plant that applied under the NRC has ever started operation. Oklo's first application
was recently denied, but they continue to
work with regulators in hopes of a landmark approval; one that would pave the way to bring new nuclear
into existence. - You get your
first one out there— well, what that does is
it just it opens the door, right? For everything that's next. - The question is: Should fears of
our nuclear past stand in the way of
innovative solutions? If Oklo succeeds, they
believe we could get a future where energy is not only
clean, but far more abundant. - Enough energy to power a
planet of 10 billion people for over 10 billion years. - And that could open the door to all kinds of possibilities.
