Oklo's Amazing Small Reactor That Can Reuse Nuclear Waste

so one thing that's really exciting about what you're doing with the reactor it's called aurora is that you guys actually can reuse existing nuclear fuel i guess we can take stuff that's in existing nuclear power plants it's been used from them and it's in its waste now and we could use that to power the united states for how many years yeah for over a hundred years we have over 100 years of ability of power united states just using the nuclear waste we already have yeah with no extra carbon output or anything none it's amazing right this is a vast energy reserve that we think of as a waste right now i'm joe lonzill welcome to american optimist we're really excited to welcome today jake dewitt the founder and ceo of aqua which is a nuclear energy company thank you for having me jake you grew up in new mexico let's talk a bit about your background to start i i remember hearing you you visited the national nuclear science museum as a kid what inspired you to get involved in nuclear power yeah um you know it's one of those things where i grew up like you said around this stuff and that's one of the cool things about growing up in new mexico and as a result of being around all of this technology all these kind of cool exhibits in these museums going to very frequently you become pretty captivated at least i did by this technology that seemed like it was out of science fiction but was actually used in the sense that like hey you know in the early part of the 20th century we discovered how to move from the electron shell to the nucleus of the atom in terms of harnessing the energy there and when you do that it's a multi-million-fold change um and you know it seems like you get this thing that should be in sci-fi but in practice we actually have and so i was just fascinated at a very young age and the thing that stuck with me is why aren't we doing more of this this seems like a natural step in technological progression we should be doing this so where did you go to school so yeah university of florida for undergrad and then mit for my master's in ph.d what was your phd in mit nuclear engineering awesome so you have a ph.d in nuclear engineering what's the conceptual gap in the market between what was going on in the nuclear world and what led you to want to found oclo like what weren't they doing yeah it's a really kind of interesting journey to think about retrospectively um you know the thing that got me was why didn't we have more of it that was the root question like why wasn't this the dominant source of energy we had given its superior advantages and when you back up at the highest level when you think about the amount of materials that are required to make energy levelized over its life cycle nuclear requires the least so it should be the cheapest and the most sustainable just because it uses the least materials but we weren't really realizing that with new plants and so that begged me to kind of drove me to really think about why and what's going on in this space and that led to kind of a realization that you know the industry had sort of locked in old ways of doing things kind of got stuck in a status quo and was really under-realizing the potential of the technology to the point where it's like hey there's so much opportunity to just think about this differently and try to approach this from a more modern angle because it was kind of stuck in the past when i spent more time growing up and working in the national labs working at different companies going to grad school i realized too how much things were sort of locked in a way of doing things because that's the way they had been done for decades and there was it feels really dangerous to change how things are done i guess in an area where there's nuclear meltdowns or something i think i think more of it is actually you know you think about what's going on the time there's kind of this brain drain in the field in the in the early 70s to late 70s early 80s we had some really smart people got into it we're really excited about the technology but then left because things were stagnating for various reasons on the regulatory side on on sort of the policy side on the technology my father used to tell me about the regulation he was a a raychem which is a big heat tracing company and they sold all sorts of industrial plants and in the 80s when you sold to nuclear plants they had to have binders and binders and binders of stuff that just didn't make any sense to him like it was definitely was not improving the safety but it was almost he said it was awesome if someone had purposely put in millions of pages regulation to try to hurt the technology that was his view that's exactly right that's exactly right and a lot of that honestly was oddly self-imposed by the industry because there's this tendency to be like oh well let's just keep doing what's been done before and add on more things it's just easier keep right now i guess the industry who are already there put in tons of rules it makes it really hard for anyone else this is something we talk about like if blackrock makes it so you'd have to pay lawyers 300 million dollars to do what they're doing no startup's gonna be able to pay the lawyers 300 million dollars they're not going to get challenged so it may have been actually a way to entrench themselves as well yeah in a weird way i don't think it was that deliberate i think it was more just like this passive response to a lack of thinking about i mean think about utilities they don't really have a big incentive to innovate they just want to work in the sort of world that that just keeps something running it's an operation just be very careful i guess the people running these companies are probably process driven bureaucrats yes and they want to just put more and more processes in because that's their job right exactly exactly as americans we kind of want there to be some process because again there's this fear of nuclear power and we say okay let's be really careful yeah let's have lots of processes there's obviously you you obviously want to be careful somewhat but then i guess there's an argument if you have so many ridiculous things you don't really think it then it could it makes it uneconomical yeah and and also locks in older less efficient and frankly not as safe technology so what was what was this gap between like what was less safe and what was less efficient and what are you doing now yeah so the big thing we saw was we've built this massive inertia of millions of pages of effectively regulatory guidance is what it's called basically recommendations on how to meet the regulations which minds you are maybe 100 pages or so um but you've built millions of pages all driven around the large existing power plants we have today because and it wasn't about it wasn't really built from a design side it was built on just continuing to operate these things the same way it's been done before with this creep of regulations and creep of process like like we were talking about um what we saw was there's in parallel to that going on sort of in the commercialization stages the us had been building and testing all sorts of different reactor types in showing some worked really really well but they hadn't they were behind the curve in commercialization although the technology was basically demonstrating so there are new reactors that worked so they couldn't commercialize well and was right is because the regulation was too hard because there's too much of the financing what was it yeah it was a mix of those things because these technologies were generally improvements uh and opened the door for more efficient you're talking about inherent passive safety mechanisms and that's a bad way of saying it's really putting safety into the design inherently and intrinsically so design would be such that it couldn't melt down as easily right and so you you make it so like it's self-stabilizing so it heats up it shuts itself down um it's always self-controlling you're able to move heat with natural forces so just the natural circulation of air other forces like convection and conduction and these new better safety ways more efficient safety things we're not getting into the designs they were in the designs but the problem was taking that getting it through the regulatory process and matching the business models to do this they weren't actually getting built right was it also because nothing was getting built or was it were there things being built in the old stupider way it was mostly not much getting built at all and things that were the old kind of things that were the old dumber ways and the thing that was hard was you have you had a mix of kind of an approach especially the industry level wanting to take these new technologies that are inherently different but then regulate them the same way these as these much bigger older plants this is this is this is a huge problem in lots of areas we talked we talked earlier to sell tourists investing in icon which is which is basically like trying to build houses with 3d printing and you have to have completely different regulatory infrastructure to build them that way versus building the other way so this is a similar case here yeah and and what was interesting to us was when we saw this we saw hey the regulations themselves actually give a pretty clear path to do this you have to just get out of the mindset of keeping doing things according to this guidance that had built up that was and i'll dive into that for a second what regulatory guidance is is the staff at the nuclear regulatory commission the permitting and licensing entity in the us um they wrote like millions of pages of guidance on how to meet the recommendation or regulations based on large existing power plants but in what we'd seen historically what kept these technologies on the shelf in many ways was these new technologies that were inherently different inherently simpler because they couldn't go along with millions of pages of guidance arguments they had a whole different solution for doing it right well and that was the thing is they kept trying to force that but there's no way it didn't make sense it was square pegged round holes and so and so so so what have you done here that's gotten around these million pages of misguided guidance documents yeah we looked and asked the question why don't we just do it differently why don't we just go straight to the regulations and realize that we should license this thing in a manner that's reflective of the actual safety characteristics of the system according to the regulatory requirements and you went and you can you convinced you i think you're the first advanced vision company to have a combined license application accepted by the u.s nuclear regulatory commission yes so you're you're here it's accepted like what is what what did they accept tell us tell us about the design what are the improvements yeah so starting the design level what it is is a it's what's called a liquid metal cooled fast reactor and what that means is we use liquid metal as the coolant uh which is phenomenally the metal sounds hot to me yeah it is hot um and it's also really really good at cooling uh like significantly better it's really hot but this thing's even hotter and it's cooling it down yeah basically you take fuel that's in metallic form so it's an alloy very named zirconium um and then the fuel heat is produced by fission let's let's there's an ally of what kind of zirconium uh just zirconium and uranium zirconium and uranium that the uranium obviously is a thing is this that's the fissile material yep and this it gets really hot when it's when it's going through fission yeah and so it uses liquid metal around it to cool it exactly so that heat produces in the fuel by fission which minds you a fission of reaction when you split an atom it releases about 50 million times more energy than when you combust for example fossil fuel i mean that's a ridiculous law this is a lot a lot more energy than coming out of an internal combustion engine yeah that's why you can take a golf ball of uranium and power your life with it that's what's so cool about this technology and so like you've got that in front of you and this what happens is you know you're able to split the atoms get the heat in the fuel the heat then is conducted out to the coolant which is then removed the coolant's this liquid metal and how big is the whole thing yeah so the whole plant is you know uh depending on the size range because you can go up to a couple you know a couple different size points and power output but on the order of you know a few thousand square feet to you know fifteen thousand square feet wow this is relatively small relatively small yeah so a few thousand square feet is and you would you bury this or what do you do with it yeah so you you dig a hole you basically put in the reactor module which we call where you have the react where we have the things we just talked about the fuel the vessel all those the tanks um and then next to that but on above the ground you put the stuff that actually makes electricity which is a you know turbine spinning a generator part of the reason we designed the building to look in a a different manner and look kind of cool and it changed kind of that paradigm is we want it to be inviting to folks i mean i would love to live on top of not just i'd love to live in in the building like i would love that if that was possible that's cool you'd have in your basement or yeah i mean it'd be big you need the right sizing for it but if i have a really big basement in texas where you have big basements can i put one of these in my basement it could yeah how many years until until we get to there honestly i don't think we're that far i don't think we're that far it depends where you live and the population inside my hoa might not allow but assuming the hoa allows it yeah maybe five years yeah it would take about that long yeah and then you can provide power to your neighbors in the hoa so they might like you a lot actually yeah that could be cool um let's talk a little bit about the aurora powerhouse this is what we're calling this uh cool looking reactor we'll put a picture on the screen uh so first of all how small is it compared to gigabot reactors you just a few thousand could be as small as a few thousand square feet but you might get yeah so if you think about what we're doing here we can build plants up to about 50 megawatts in size sorry 15 so we can build plants up to 15 megawatts in size um the aurora that we're building the first one is one and a half megawatts uh it's our first commercial plant going in idaho uh it's in a building about 4 500 square feet has an a-frame design and aesthetic around it um largely to you know reflect uh sort of a different approach and a different styling of the system in the building also functionally designed because it's actually pretty easy to build these things how much how much does the building cost if you're going to do 10 of these buildings what would it cost to scale to make these buildings oh i mean the you know if you put the reactor inside of it kind of depends a little bit on the exact sighting and how much work needs to go into it but somewhere between 30 and 40 million 30 and 40 million for 1.5 megawatt reactors so and how long does it does it operate after you build it yeah so you can run them for 10 to 20 years depending on you refuel it during that time or so if you'll one load of fuel can last a few years up to 20 years and so the effective cost over that 20 years is about three cents you said so those are that smaller range it's a little more expensive but if you move that to the 15 megawatt size range then yeah you can get the prices down to sort of below four four five cents a kilowatt hour um and uh tax carbon this could be especially efficient yeah even if you don't i mean i think the broad thing here is when you think about competitive advantages we're starting with a technology that's inherently millions of times better than the alternatives what do people pay in different places right now per kilowatt hour well here in california we have the lovely joy of paying at peak hours we i mean our last electric bill came in peak hours were 40 to 42 cents a kilowatt hour 42 cents a peak hours is insane this is basically when the wind's not blowing the windmills here or whatever they charge you a hell of a lot more yeah obviously it's even in the middle of the the late part of the day or when the sun is still shining when you need ac or people to come home and using it for over 40 cents so you could you could reliably at scale be doing something from the order of four cents for a tenth as much as the peaks yep wow and and this is i guess this is just like it's it's reliable it's just it's just run for 20 years or so without turning off i mean you'll turn it off uh occasionally for servicing different parts of it but it you're talking about a system that's going to be up and operational more than 98 of the time or at least has the potential to be so it's pretty much you could do a couple of these in a big area and every once in a while one would go off yeah when you have to do it so if you think about like a factory for example or data center that wants reliable power you probably build two of these so that way if you take one down for service the other still providing power that makes sense and so nuclear is really scary to a lot of people i'm not escaping nuclear but but i empathize with them given the stories we're told they're they're worried that like you know the simpsons fish is gonna swim by and have a third eye and their kids are gonna become you know mutants with x-men powers like like first of all like what's the radiation danger on these yeah when it's operating i mean that's one of the things you design it so that there's none right when you're when you're talking about what i mean there's none there's there's a there's a fission reaction going on it's atom splitting that's going to shoot out radiation where is it going to go it gets it gets blocked and shielded intentionally so can't so can't it can't get out of the concrete no so it's all shielded by materials you have in there things that absorb radiation all that very much you know intentionally and then the cool thing about that is in yeah you can like there's places you don't go because it's too hot and there's too much radiation you don't want to like stick your hand into the steel yeah you're not gonna like get into the liquid liquid metal there's a lot of barriers for you doing that anyways no of course but what if what if like a crazy terrorist these days we were supposed to talk about uh white male nationalists but if one of them comes i'm just joking sorry and he goes and he blows it up like like like what happens yeah well this is the interesting thing so if you put the physics of safety on your side what does that mean so really quickly that means you're able to keep things controlled keep things cooled and most importantly you really keep everything contained so all the stuff that's radioactive you keep contained and that's what you have to design a plan to do to get regulatory approval and that includes looking at these kinds of external threats or hazards and so you can build a system and design a system that has a lot of parts needed to do that or you can design a system that simplistically does that through kind of natural forces and natural means and that's what we did and the cool thing about that is that then trims all that paperwork that you're saying what's the natural meaning that makes this makes us not like how does something else go critical and this doesn't go critical yeah so what it really is is that the right word go critical kind of yeah so going critical means it's it's it's running right it's just that's the self-sustaining chain reaction yep okay um the thing that you and it's it's okay if a plant stays critical as it's supposed to while it's putting out electricity right and even if you lose things it's okay if it's critical as long as you can keep it cooled because critical ultimately ties to being able to produce some amount of heat although what's cool about nuclear stuff is you know you can be critical not producing heat or meaningless heat anyway typically what happens in a power reactor you're producing meaningful heat because that's how you that's what the main point is you're producing heat that helps you produce power right and then if something goes wrong the idea is that okay the system is able to basically keep cool and keep controlled by natural means so that nothing overheats and things stay contained and the way this really works is a pretty simple process we talked about what the fuel looks like and uh you know when things heat up they expand which is a cool you know natural phenomena that we kind of are used to seeing sometimes yep uh but what that does for a reactor system like ours that actually causes more neutrons right the things that are actually sustaining this this reaction that are causing fission more of them to leave the reactor fuel and get absorbed in those shielding around it that stops radiation well that means that the neutrons are not continuing the reaction so the way the reaction normally works when is that is that it gets going and these neutrons get shot out and then they keep the reaction going by adding any energy to it yeah so basically neutrons go they're born when you split an atom in fission you release two to three neutrons those go on some of them cause fission and other atoms nearby some just get absorbed in other things in the system but as long as you have one from each generation causing fission in the next that's a system being critical yeah and so in this case as things heat up fewer than one cause fission uh in the next generation so the power goes down it goes down quite quickly so you have a system that sort of automatically matches automatically adjusts itself naturally exactly so whereas what would the old system potentially do yeah in the old system you had a lot more parts to sort of realize that and the other part of it is it just naturally but it also keeps itself cool naturally so how's that basically what's really cool about this is is the natural forces of basically gravity and thermal expansion of the coolant and buoyancy right we know hot water hot air rises the same thing here hot liquid metal rises and then as it does so it pulls other coolant behind it and that coolant removes the heat because it's flowing so it's naturally pulling in coolant to cool it down if it gets to be too hot right and then the air is just and then then from there outside of the fuel that coolant while it gets hotter then transfers its heat through those vessels or those tanks i described where just not the natural flow this is basically a superior design just to naturally cut off any kind of runaway reactions right and then in today's plants you have a lot of extra systems that are in place to manage all that heat and in our case it's just the fact that the air flows naturally around the system and moves the heat and that allows you to simplify things tremendously and have you have you tested this out yet well that's the cool thing this has been built and done before so everything i'm talking about the physics of how this works has actually been proven so back in the 1960s they built a reactor called ebr2 not the best name but ebr2 in idaho it ran for 30 years and it demonstrated these amazing safety characteristics in fact on april 3rd 1986 they put it through these phenomenal like basically full-scale safety system tests where they challenged this thing in in crazy difficult ways they ran it at full power they locked the control rods out the things that go in and shut it down they locked them out of the reactor so they couldn't go in and then they shut off all the cooling to the system wow and the system naturally did what we expected it to it heated up it's expanded it shut itself down and it naturally established that sort of natural circulation and was able to remove all the heat so so why didn't they then just start using this more back then yeah so you have that amazing thing happen and then what happened was you kind of have that match of okay we know this stuff works and this is a phenomenal safety characteristic mind you it also did these really cool things where it was able to produce power at three cents kilowatt hour and uh it recycled its own waste so really cool you can do on that front but then you move this thing forward and say okay well i didn't get to market and that was one of the questions that really stuck with me looking at this field and there were a couple things that really stood out one was you know the regulatory side where you had a regulatory ins sort of infrastructure institution all built for older reactors you also had a business model an industry that was largely dependent on the government to fund it and needed to actually take and take the time to really develop a different regulatory approach and that appetite wasn't really there especially because the government funding had very little interest in sort of doing something new like so what have you done to improve on the design from almost 60 years ago now so what the trend line was was taking that design and sort of maximizing the amount of power you get from it what we did is say that doesn't the the you end up focusing on just a small part of the system to sort of make it as small as possible but then in turn you make all these other parts of the system a lot bigger so you kind of a big trade-off there that gets lost in the shuffle at times our thought was how do we think about this more globally from the whole building size the whole facility size and make it all as simple and sort of small as reasonably possible and in doing so we actually reduce that power density the amount of power we try to pack in the fuel and that allows us to simplify all these other things and that's what then allows us to say okay great we have a simpler design now we can go take that to the regulatory side and develop a regulatory methodology a way to meet the regulatory requirements uh that that basically reflects that sometimes big big part of being uh an entrepreneur in the nuclear area these days is what can work for regulatory and safety and to scale throughout the united states yeah and being willing to actually do something different in the regulatory side and that was a big thing for us nobody had done that we submitted we developed this license application um and we took it was interesting so when we started there was kind of this idea that people were increasingly recognizing the importance of nuclear so it was catching some attention and there was some realization oh like these advanced technologies are great but nobody can license them and our view was like no we can the question isn't about can we license immigrants but can we do it efficiently and effectively and what we saw was this tendency everyone wanted to just do things the same way had been done and we said no let's do it fundamentally differently and better so one thing that's really exciting about what you're doing with the reactor it's called aurora is that you guys actually can reuse existing nuclear fuel i guess we can take stuff that's in existing nuclear power plants it's been used from them and it's in its waste now and and we could use that to power the united states for how many years yeah for over a hundred years so we have over 100 years of ability of power united states just using the nuclear waste we already have yeah with no extra carbon output or anything none it's amazing right this is a vast energy reserve that we think of as a waste right now as something that's a liability is something that people are sometimes afraid of and in practice with these advanced technologies like what we're doing it's called a fast reactor the reason we call it a fast reactor is because when you when you split an atom the neutrons you release which typically are two to three each time that happens uh they're born going pretty fast a couple percent of the speed of light right um but in today's reactors we slow them down uh bouncing them off things like water the hydrogen and water and that makes them easier to be absorbed caught if you will buy atoms of fuel great you need less fuel as a result fast reactors you don't slow them down you let them run as they're born fast which means they're harder to catch you need a little more fuel but because they're going faster they're carrying more energy and that allows you to much more efficiently actually split atoms that form a significant part of the waste profile which are these things beyond uranium in the periodic table we call them transuranic actinides so there's transgenic actinides that can only be split by these fast neutrons so you're able to actually use waste more efficiently now yeah so what are the biggest objections to what you're doing a lot of people they're just a lot of people there's negative on nuclear and say oh it doesn't work and it's too expensive and it's too dangerous like but what what what what are the what do they steal me on the objections for me like what are the smart objections to what you're doing yeah well i think one of the interesting things you know is i mean the economic side and the timeline side are some things that people bring up the interesting thing to me is the people that bring those up are the people who also actively work to make those more expensive and harder the same people are trying to regulate this to make it impossible or saying oh you can't do it because it's it's so regulated and it takes so long yep and then they just try to keep they're like let's make the regulations really hard right where are they coming from on this you know it's it's an interesting background of i think old antiquated very outdated views of the technology that's that's often just tied to some cold war noble this is they think chernobyl and they're afraid yeah and i don't even you know i think it's yeah it's really tied to this kind of emotive response base and experiences from decades ago and i find what people are realizing more and more and i think what's really exciting is more and more people are realizing the importance that nuclear provides in terms of reliability of power which i think more and more people are recognizing but also clean which is reliable it's clean to me if someone believes that global warming is a big challenge and then they haven't look they don't believe in nuclear it seems like maybe they're not serious about the global warming right i mean it's and that's what's that's what's kind of encouraging right now is we've had a shift where you know i think you see some of the policy makers you know climate change gets treated as this this political football is always really weird when you have people who sometimes would talk about climate change as if uh it was the big existential threat but then be not supportive of nuclear plants or wanting to shut them down or you have people who who wouldn't recognize climate change really happening but then be big supporters of nuclear was very interesting dynamic but now that's kind of bridge across and i think this is one of those areas where there's huge bipartisan support right now which is really exciting what what are the polling numbers like what percentage of people support this technology right now and obviously if we educate that would probably go up but like but what is it right now you know i oh man the latest polling i i actually don't know if it's not my head it seems like it's the majority of these it is the majority which was not the case in the 70s people were freaked out about this stuff exactly it's really changed it is the majority i mean the information age to use a silly term has has really opened up the opportunity for people to learn one of the really interesting things i thought that happened and kind of anecdotally but but what we observed was after that show chernobyl came out i was worried at first because it was like oh man people are going to see this and then have all these misconceptions and it's probably going to be a horribly done show that was fully inaccurate and it was actually better than i thought there's still inaccuracies but um the thing that was interesting to me was a lot of people then took the takeaway from that as wow communism and the soviet union were awful yes uh and it's like yeah it's a good takeaway yeah and it was and then they were like in nuclear power like that thing was crazy i've been sure noble but that's really really cool what it does it's like really important because they're able to actually look up the facts right because that's available today in short summary chernobyl was people managing it screwing up in multiple crazy ways oh man yeah you have like a terrible system in place where you you know an autocratically dictatorial system on running the plants poor choices in technology that were old and rushed forward um ironically like quotas in place for before may day um to rush testing so that you had inexperienced staff running a test in a bad manner and that's when everything you know got out of control there's a lot of things combined that were wrong with systematic failures with an old design that was that was much more easily able to have trouble yeah and largely and if you think about it there were other plants like that that did operate fine so it was mostly a symptom of human error um largely although no one wants you and air to be able to lead something that crazy which is partially why you've designed this now that even if you even screw up this thing this thing shuts itself down yeah and it's interesting right when you design a system like that you minimize the things people can even do with it which is a great thing because human error typically has kind of a limit in terms of how you know it ends up being the problem especially when you put physics on your side things like gravity don't just randomly turn off so part of the reason we started american optimist is to push back against the cynicism and pessimism there's just all sorts of people saying oh i don't want to have kids because the future of the world is going to be dystopian and the environment is going to be broken and obviously aqlo as this like really exciting nuclear technology that could run the whole country for a hundred years just on waste power and is extremely safe it seems like it should be giving people some optimism like like like is how should we be like how should people be thinking about aqua and like what's possible for the future of our country yeah i mean it's amazing because we have this technology that's been done before and the question really is scaling this this is an inevitability like at the end of the day the shift towards clean energy the shift towards affordable and reliable power all of those things are happening for various reasons that are ultimately driving i think a better planet at the outcome because you combine cleaner air and water with energy abundance that's also affordable and reliable i mean that's everything right that's everything and you think about the fundamental determinant i can't say the fundamental but one of the main determinants in human quality of life is the access to energy and so if we can bring that forward in a way that's sustainable and clean which is what we're working to do with our technology like you fix those problems actually i was flying uh on the plane the other day and looked down and we saw one of those giant solar farms that was like the tower in the middle it looks really cool but it made me think you know there's a tremendous attention on renewable energy but it just takes a huge amount of land to have a low carbon future with winning with solar tell us a little bit about like how much space you need for power output you know for versus these other technologies yeah it's it's one of the really cool things about nuclear is you know by and large you can use 10 to 100 100 times less land uh to make the energy that you would otherwise get from other sources um which is pretty powerful an advanced vision only becomes even more sustainable so those numbers even go smaller so it's a it's a pretty phenomenal effective land use uh kind of sustainability perspective i think you gave us a chart i said 250 000 acres of winds the same 150 000 acres of solar is like is what it's like a thousand or less acres of nuclear yeah in some cases i think with advanced reactors that number drops you know maybe into the hundreds depends a little bit on specific sighting and configurations but yeah it's just a huge huge difference um and the other cool thing about it is is the material intensiveness like we think oftentimes you know about oh okay nuclear plants are these big systems that we see today and advanced systems are gonna be different and smaller but at the end of the day nuclear today and nuclear in the future even even more so uses the least materials yeah people don't realize to build this solar and these wind farms you're putting out ridiculous amounts of carbon tons of money yeah and you actually be a lot less intensive on the environment to build the nuclear plants yeah and people sometimes this is one of the interesting criticisms that people sometimes bring up is like oh well nuclear is not zero carbon in the life cycle well i think at the end of the day we're probably gonna be electrifying most equipment and mining and construction so yeah you'll get there but even before that when you're talking about a fuel source that's millions of times more energy dense than anything else that's gonna be the worst best way to be most efficient yeah the best way to be zero carbon if the least materials needed it's of course going to have at least the lowest carbon footprint and there's enough of this material to last us for thousands of years around the world yeah i mean you know there's a couple ways you can kind of do the math but but really thinking broadly from somewhat of a like a geo statistical perspective um and i think i maybe made that word up but the geologically statistical perspective there's enough uranium and thorium in the planet to power you know humankind at a 10 billion population a number using u.s per capita energy consumption right now for for millions if not billions of years wow so so there's there's no scarcity here of the zero carbon energy source we just have to be not dumb enough to regulate it out of existence right right and you know at the end of the day like this is one of those things where we have to think about the regulatory side to be efficient and effective in doing what it's supposed to do right it obviously plays a role in terms of ensuring adequate safety that's its primary function like adequate safety to the public but it has to recognize that sometimes regulatory systems lock in older less safe ways of doing things there's interesting examples in the faa about that i think some of the stories around some of the like the 737 and the max issues and all that you know why is it so expensive on the plane side to bring forward new why does it cost billions of dollars to bring a new plane into existence that's better so yeah you want regulation to to protect us but we also don't want to hurt us and especially given that we've taken climate change seriously we need to think seriously about allowing us to solve climate change in other ways too right regulation should not keep newer technologies away that are better and are objectively better and uh the interesting thing is you know the regulatory agency they're getting a lot better they're doing a lot of transformation modernization but there's still more work that needs to be done especially to realize that they have to approach these things differently and they can't fall back to keeping to doing this this is one of the biggest causes my wife and i work on is regulatory agencies and regulatory administrative state change so we're fully aligned yes thank you huge impact we're starting to see a lot more startups in the nuclear space are we entering a new age of nuclear energy yes i think we are because of those factors this is an inevitability and the thing we're working on is to accelerate it so that the future can be better sooner because why wait why wait for something that's inevitable like let's do this now and i think that's a big thing that's different about us sometimes than sort of the prevailing trends that have existed in this industry where there's also a lot of cynicism actually it's like oh well you can't license things so you can't do things like that and it's like well why can't we and there's not actually a fundamental reason why you can't you you just have to do it and you have to be willing to do things differently and that's really what we kind of rolled away what do you need to be even in a bigger spot and say in 2030 where are you going to be in 2030 and what can make it so it's even having a bigger impact yeah i mean you know we like to think of of what is an audacious goal that that we want to work towards and is it possible to build dozens of these reactors by that time frame you know what does it look like how fast can we get maybe 100 reactors out the door uh you know and i think those are goals that you think about the early 2030s those are things you can actually work towards and do you want to have dozens of reactors by the end of the decade what what can you do to make that go faster or what's your scarcity yeah right now i think our scarcity is uh is building out the supply chain to do it so a big thing we're doing when i say supply chain i really mean it's like our internal manufacturing fabrication capabilities so that's a big thing we're about to be growing where are you doing that manufacturing uh we're working and talking with folks where we should do that so it's it's open right now so if people want to have the future of energy in their states let us know i think we should we should make sure you come talk to texas yes that's something that's where we'd like to support that sort of thing there let me know and then obviously want to make sure you get as much capital as you need give us a sense you know if we fix how this regulation works because it seems like it's already getting better with you're approaching it the right way and we build nuclear plants in america what could our energy future look like by 2050 yeah i think you have an energy feature that's that's truly decarbonized um in a meaningful manner so not just like paying lip service to it and in a way that's increased the res is basically the grid's resilience reliability and affordability i think we can drive energy costs down and that's something that right now the trend lines are not moving towards but i think that's something that can happen and that's something that like in 2050 could this technology get to three cents could it get a kilowatt hour like yeah i think at the end of the day i mean you know that the cost of electricity coming out of these systems can be in that range and then the cost people are paying can become a lot more stabilized because right now you see places like like here in california right now i mean well it's not just in california but in a number of states you're seeing great deployment of clean technologies like solar like wind but energy prices are going up yeah even though the prices of those things are intermittent and they're expensive they're more expensive uh it seems to me that not only can we have you know entirely green network by 2050 with mostly nuclear but we can actually if we want to you'd be taking carbon out of the air very cheaply because you have all this extra power that could be being used for carbon sequestration when it's not being used by other people because these plants are just running all the time why not power you know power decarbonizing so i think you have a great system where you have a mix of you know different energy sources that are clean that are cheap that are reliably working together and nuclear is kind of one of the anchor pieces of that a foundational piece of that um i think when you look at what that means i mean by 2050 i think you can be in that spot in the us in a way that's like just really addresses sort of what people are really concerned about right now in terms of assuring a clean energy mix but bringing in reliability resilience and affordability to the play as well and sets us up for for centuries more growth like that and i think you know even thinking beyond just here one of the cool things about fission that's so neat is that we can obviously get a lot of energy out of something very small and you don't need air you don't need water the same thing opened up you know access to space in a different way so i think that by that time frame you're going to see uh basically nuclear systems powering you know human advancement spaces clean power throughout the united states throughout the world and in cheap energy in space yep and a very very green and prosperous future that's that's exciting stuff thanks so much jake for joining us yeah thank you so much i appreciate being here joe jake we had a great conversation earlier and we were getting ready to release the episode and the u.s nuclear regulatory commission the nrc announced it had denied your application for the fast reactor uh i think it's important to give the audience an update on what happened what'd they say and how are you guys responding yeah so we uh we were surprised to see that and and kind of disappointed in the way the process was handled but uh uh really the sort of rationale provided and their justification for was was ultimately rooted in them wanting to see some new information uh not new information sorry some more information that supported uh their review at the end of the day this is something that's new not just in technology but in uh application structure they said there was insufficient information concerning potential safety risks that was one of the things they said really yeah i mean if you think about what we're talking about here is when you do something new like this you have to define okay what's what are the credible events that can happen and challenge a plan um and we took a we took an approach that basically quantified and laid out how methodologically we approached that and how we selected those events and they just want to have more basically honest case studies and examples worked through on they want more case studies but how do you have a case study without having built the damn thing yeah i mean that's the thing right i mean this is one of the interesting challenges can you go build in another country or something it's more permissive and then show them it works let me how does this work you know that becomes increasingly likely i think fewer and fewer countries are willing to wait on the nrc and i think we see that actually it's been interesting we've had uh the biggest uptick in international interest since the denial actually can you give examples of countries that are interested or is that secret yeah just at a high level countries ranging from eastern europe uh to central and south america i hear in eastern europe they they might not want to use uh gas coming from their neighbor anymore yeah right they seem to be interested in energy independence in a whole new way i love it so it is it's it's creating an interesting environment there it's also motivated i think uh i think one of the interesting things that comes out of these kinds of things is it motivates more attention on the regulator in a positive way right i mean congress requested a gao audit on the readiness clearly people are paying attention on this well i mean you're talking about the regulator my understanding is the nrc it's been around its current form since the 70s and it's i understand that it's never approved like a new type of design is that correct yeah i mean the the talking point that is pretty crazy to think about is since the nrc was formed uh no plant that has submitted its initial original application to the nrc has ever come online all the plants that are operated today submitted their applications their initially uh their initial application sorry to the atomic so one one could be forgiven for thinking that they secretly were very against nuclear power which they're supposed to be regulating it but that one might think that they're actually secretly just don't want it to happen anymore yeah i mean when you bought zero percent for 40 plus years it raises those kinds of questions and you think you think congress is going to start looking and making some changes i mean is this who who appoints the head is the president a point the head of this or who does it work yeah so the commission has five uh presidentially appointed and senate confirmed spots right now there's two open ones that haven't been filled since uh since president biden took took office so we're looking forward to those getting filled and on top of that congress has passed bipartisan legislation driving modernization and transformation to the nrc starting back in 2018 i think there's a there's new bills that are circulating to continue to drive this forward i think what we're seeing is people people are watching and people care and they don't think that the status quo can continue right like things have to change you know and i think what we've seen with our denial has been we've gotten i think we've gotten pretty significant and improved engagement with the nrc since that um there are good staff there who definitely want to work and have a system so there are some people there who want to work they're working with you do you have other applications with them right now as well are you waiting to refile or how does that work yeah so right now we're going back to update the application work with them to resolve some of the items that that we can before we resubmit and we'll resubmit again later this year and then the nice thing is you know they've been pretty clear they've said it publicly too that their expectation is they'll be able to pick up the application where we left off so we're not starting over from scratch uh we can address some of the open items here build on the things we've already done one thing we have to also look at is while we were disappointed we accomplished quite a bit in retiring a lot of regulatory i would say risk and also uncertainty uh getting as far as we did we you know some people in the i mean the nuclear industry itself is also largely to blame on this stuff right typically speaking they take incremental approaches they take one step forward we took a hundred we took 100 steps forward right people said everything we were doing could be impossible like observers in the industry and yet we got you know we got a lot of steps for we made a lot of steps forward already uh and we're pretty close to the finish line i don't think we're actually that far apart so maybe the case you get done with some good stuff in the nrc it may be the case you simultaneously pursue other countries you want to work with jake uh well that's exactly what we're doing one one question i want to end on uh you know i'm hearing about lots of other nuclear power stuff going on around the world i hear there's thorium-based reactors in china i'm curious if you're bullish on nuclear power more broadly what else you're seeing that's happening that's interesting yeah i think yes i'm quite bullish broadly i think what we're seeing in in the last year and a half there's been a significant uptake especially in sort of europe as well as where we've seen it already growing throughout this is like in france or what other places are doing more there france other central europe the uk eastern europe there's just growing interest on this people recognize the importance of the technology people recognize that this is the future that it's going here and i think what we see is those countries are also moving forward independently right they're not waiting on anybody else they see this as important my understanding is that a lot of the people who are against nuclear may have been aided by russian propaganda i know russia russia paid a lot of money to stop fracking all around europe which is strongly in their interest and it seems like they give a lot of money to environmental groups that are also against nuclear is that something you've encountered at all yeah i mean there's some there's some interesting historical you know documentation that shows the soviet union and russia funding an anti-nuclear environmental like you know disinformation campaigns starting back in the 50s um there's some interesting stories there you know to dig into i'm not super familiar with all the details but the people who who've looked more into that it's pretty i mean what i found being from the intelligence world is that is that putin continues to do this kgb nonsense around the world in other contexts he's continues to fund far-left rallies in central and south america causing trouble i i wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the anti-nuclear stuffs coming from from from frankly rivals like him behind the scenes trying to trick people interesting well you think about it too right look at the international stage russia has had owned the international market they had a quarterback of hundreds of billions of dollars for new plants and and we saw countries that were working with them trying to come to us and be like hey we want to do things faster um but you know the us has kind of got some things that it's it's getting better at in terms of how we can export but the reality is yeah they've locked up a lot of orders and a lot of world demand that and back to our question on the thorium reactors is that like a smart thing for people to be doing how do you think of thorium versus what you guys are doing and the differences yeah i mean thorium is something we can ultimately use i think the big thing about thorium is where's the supply chain exists thorium is a fuel itself isn't directly usable you have to put it in a reactor to make it usable yeah um and then when you do that it becomes fuel uh and there's some interesting pathways there and for certain countries there's a lot more thorium available than uranium to them but right now thorium supply chain isn't really but that's not that's not that's not the essential question is the design of the small reactor which is what you're working on yeah and at the end of the day it's just it's one other form of fuel so here's here's the way i think about thorium between thorium and uranium reserves we could power the planet for well over 10 billion years i mean that there's your answer for energy solutions we have enough we have enough we have enough clean energy forever basically and this is yeah just got to get these things approved jake i really appreciate it good luck pushing us ahead with the nrc i look forward to staying updated thanks jeff [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: American Optimist

Views: 13,172

Keywords: Nuclear, nuclear power, nuclear energy, climate change, clean energy, Chernobyl, Oklo, Jacob DeWitte, uranium, fission, Nuclear Regulatory Commission

Id: tXbWC1mDrl4

Length: 41min 39sec (2499 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 06 2022