Radiant CEO Doug Bernauer on Portable Nuclear Microreactors & the Future of Clean Energy

what uh radiant's job is uh is to do is to deliver the future and to make commitments on what we can deliver so we have committed ourselves to being ready to do a fuel test in 2026 so just just a year and a half away to solve this 50 years of no reactor we are smaller than any of those we are down at one megawatt so enough power for 1,000 homes um and we can Mass produce these in a factory deliver them to a site and with no infrastructure uh just outside of a 35 ft fence line you can operate them and be at the NRC public dose limit for a reactor um so we're working on is this completely different technology uh right it's a small unit and when uh customer operates it they they can tell it to be on and tell it to be off all right you have control over your system because you're the end user um and if you want to you can turn it off and you can tell us can pick it up um which is kind of the coolest thing ever about this one megawatt portable scale is that you are not making a commitment to putting a bunch of heavy infrastructure you are not making a commitment to having nuclear waste stored on your site that gets sent away with the unit and I think this is the nuclear power that people want uh that we haven't really seen before that is mass producible right that can achieve these great economies of scale and be deployed out to anywhere in the world [Music] welcome to sorcery I'm Molly OA founder of sorcery a weekly Top BC deals newsletter highlighting top GPS Founders and deal announcements leading the next Innovation cycle today we have Doug bernauer founder and CEO of radiant radiant is a nuclear company developing portable nuclear reactors to replace traditional diesel generators they've raised over $50 million to date including a $40 million series B in April 2023 led by a16z with other notable funds like Founders fund and decisive point this is an inspiring conversation on the future of clean energy I hope you enjoy yeah hi Doug nice to have you on how's it going I know you've been traveling a bit and you're pretty busy right now in the phase of Radiance yeah pretty busy but I have to have infinite energy that's true okay so to start the conversation I just want to set the stage you have a remarkably accomplished background in career you pretty much touched every project with Elon at SpaceX and um I just think it would be great to go there and please don't hold back would love to know everything and what you've kind of learned along the way yeah well that it's very flattering but a lot of the projects I touched were the ones that nobody else wanted to touch uh at least early on that was definitely the case yeah I spent 12 years at SpaceX uh had joined when they had failed to rockets in a row um but I thought it was just a big and beautiful Mission um to lower the cost of launch to make life multiplanetary uh and that's why I did that for 12 years but I worked on all sorts of crazy projects so you know I started off working on Falcon 1 integration which is the only rocket we had it was everyone was working on it in some regard uh and then later I worked on Falcon 9 the first ground system for that uh the harbor and loop system for Falcon 9 uh and then I moved on to grass Hopper which is a flying test stand which was like a barely funded project and it seems like a pie in the sky um but it turned into you know all Rockets with legs and all being recoverable and a pretty important step in uh the revenue and success story of SpaceX and uh just American launch uh as well uh but I also worked on hyperloop and on the boring company kind of ideas that came from that um while I was there and on Mars systems which is how I started to look at new clear fantastic and what what exactly did you do with each of these projects what was your main role oh geez um sort of well I'm electrical engineer um but mainly it was kind of systems engineering work it was trying to really figure out what's really the mission uh and how do we get there the fastest we possibly can um and how do we get more resources than we've actually been given um right and we can do that by convincing people or by adopting things from other programs or finding the right Partners or location to test or excess Hardware that was being used for something else um so trying to basically like creatively make the future happen sooner and I know that you are now working with a couple of your previous colleagues from SpaceX at radiant I was fortunate enough to come by the new facilities in Elsa gundo I met Bob I met some of your team members I would love to learn and share more about your team uh to the audience what are their backgrounds let's talk talk about Bob who is Bob what's his background yeah as well as others on your team yeah so Bob uh helped found R he's a co-founder with me of radiant and uh Bob and I worked together actually on hyperloop at SpaceX which was uh one of these wild projects where basically the only answer was to go to like 2 am every day for like three months straight near the end there where we were all you know going to be going to be late and not delivering on time um this big event which is like hyper Loop was like a 4200 foot long tube it was 6 feet diameter we had to vacuum down and had to run a remotely controlled vehicle in there uh so Bob did literally all of the software and comm's work related to that thing and basically in the extra hours Beyond his day job which is sort of what I was doing as well um at that point so I think that you know there are others uh aside from Bob here as well but Bob really does a bunch of software and cyber security things way better than I ever could uh it's awesome and uh we just get along really well uh find interesting details and things and uh make each other laugh a lot which is important because we got to be having fun uh you know work is hard life is hard we can have a a really great beautiful mission that if we achieve it it's going to be spectacular uh for the world but um if it was a miserable grind 100% of the time that would be pretty awful also um I don't know there's some kind of fun and suffering together in projects and uh we do that well building hard things can really bring people together yeah and then there's a bunch of others here so there's some varied backgrounds we have uh some uh executive folks uh especially on operations team from master car which is very very cool company that all Engineers will know well um we have some folks from Naval reactors from that program uh some folks from National Labs from both Idaho National Lab and Oakridge National Lab uh primarily on the nuclear team but uh a whole bunch of people who also have come out of Aerospace who you know recognize the capability of nuclear technology and see as this this underutilized benefit for society and uh and for technology um a lot of just generally aerospace engineers who want to come work on climate essentially uh and you know get our heads out of the clouds maybe and get back down to earth uh and solve some challenges we've got here um and in doing so I think we'll actually evolve space later on yeah I believe so I think this will all help uh before we get too deep I'm sure I could ask you a ton more questions about the team let's go to the founding of radiant and what radiant is could you explain more on radiant nuclear how you founded the company um what your main product is and where you are in the stage of the business yeah that's that's a whole lot to remember uh so founding founding the company um you know way back in 2019 uh I was at SpaceX and looking at what was happening in the US the US military uh created a thing called the P program um where they said we want a one megawatt transportable air transportable uh reactor so something you can fly around in a c17 um and I was just Overjoyed because I recognized that if you could do that you could put that on a Starship which can take 100 tons to space um and so this could be the way we actually get nuclear Tech in space u and I had worked on these uh Mars system design I knew that that would be massive basically uh could really make making life multiplanetary way less challenging and remove all the Miracles uh in the way um so that's really the founding one of the founding moments was this like early 2019 where I saw the market was changing and this was even ahead of I think the new found public support for nuclear which has really started to Blossom in the last two years I would say um but I I realized the the potential there uh I had looked at these Mars studies I had done a lot of work at SpaceX I I believe that the mission of making life multiplanetary is actually still what I'm doing now and uh I realized that it would be a lot easier to leave SpaceX to go and do that than to try to convince the leadership there and turn it into a real program that could could exist on its own and it's kind of because nuclear is a very risky technology right it doesn't make sense to do that within a space company but to do it from the outside but I do feel like uh the mission of making life multiplanetary um it needs to have nuclear technology for that to really Blossom and to succeed and uh I think if we can develop uh a product for Earth that we can Mass produce that we completely change the game and nuclear technology so this is what radiant is working on nothing related to space I just had spent 12 years there um so that's the part of the founding story but uh you can make a one megawatt reactor that is Factory constructed 50 units a year so a reactor every week coming off the line and then you can transport that by land sea or air uh to any place in the world so you can put it in a location where people only have access to extremely expensive Diesel power uh for a variety of reasons um but you can give them an option to have a completely clean nuclear technology um it's five years of energy in a box and so it is way less expensive because of that because if you've got to take Diesel and move it really far it becomes expensive um and it pollutes the environment uh nobody likes smelling a diesel exhaust fumes if that's your only source of power it's not great living conditions so we can improve people's lives uh all over the world in these like really hard to- reach areas um and Mass produc producing a product it's how literally everything was made this headset screens we're seeing each other through uh literally everything in our world uh it's the right way to do economic production of something really reliable uh and that's what I'm excited about doing in nuclear forgive me if I botch this term but you're using Trio fuel yeah instead of the the typical nuclear fuel which is a uranium dioxide pellet um yeah so the fuel form is not really new um it is less often used but everything in nuclear has been done you know in the usually the 1950s or 60s is the answer as to when um and so people have actually put together reactors with um thorium fuel um with high andrich uranium with uh uh ceramic particle ceramic coated particles um we're focused on those because I want to put the reactors anywhere in the world and so I want them to be built with a really really high degree of safety against any sort of uh uh environmental damage or release of something radioactive so if you use a a ceramic coated fuel uh what we're doing is these Tiny popy Seed Siz kernels of fuel there are about 120 million of them for 100 kilograms of uranium uh and this is all in a core that's you know only four feet in diameter I could give it I could give it a hug it's a little a little core um but the reason you do that is so that uh the temperature limit of the fuel becomes this extremely high value and you can go to about 1,600 Celsius before there's an appreciable failure rate um of the ceramic coated fuel so what it means is you can't melt down the fuel uh right so you remove one of these big risks that is common amongst the reactors that use the uranium dioxide pellets and zirconium tubes that's the the standard for lightw reactor technology uh but not only that so we have a helium in the system we have a helium pump that we actually have uh behind me uh and we we've been doing a bunch of testing with it but it was two years in the making so it's very exciting now to be testing it uh we released a video recently on that um but anyway get to the point uh we use helium gas because it can't become radioactive either and it's a gas uh it can't actually absorb a neutron which is what makes something radioactive U when it starts out not being radioactive right uh and so if the unit ever leaks which it could you know it could get knocked over um you know by some environmental disaster or people uh or by whatever means uh if it the gas comes out you know the reactor can't operate anymore which is bad uh in a remote area you might really want your reactors function so but you could have more than one of them uh but the goal is to put so much safety in the design by having this more expensive form of fuel U this more expensive form of coolant helium is not as uh as cheap do as water obviously um but those two things allow you to have no leak of a radioactive liquid ever to the environment right so it's far more safe safer and uh just a completely different concept to what what most people would assume with nuclear energy yeah although it is a standard uh it's just it's called a high temperature gas reactor M um and so it's a type that's been around for a long time and the fuel form actually goes all the way back to the 60s Also let's let's draw this out more in terms of the history of nuclear energy there are a lot of misconceptions around it and it's kind of just dropped off in plateaued there's been like zero progress in the US and so could you just walk us through uh the history of nuclear energy and um why you kind of want to emphasize it now and what the process is like yeah um I'm definitely not an expert but I'll summarize the nuclear history uh so basically in the late 1930s the neutron is discovered and measured uh in the 1940s the Chicago pile reactor is put together outside of Chicago by enrio fery in the US and they get the pile to go critical um and then from there a weapons program is developed and I think a lot of people know that piece of the story but we we develop a weapon in the 40s uh in the uh early 1950s the US uh Eisenhower is president at the time and he uh wants to make use of nuclear technology to make power to make clean power to put that all over the world and that's the Adams for peace program uh that he sets into motion um and uh the way we develop that is that the the US developed uh submarine propulsion power reactors uh a guy named himman rickover does that work and he's amazing um there's one decent documentary on it I wish there were more um but it's a fun one to dig into but basically the the Navy commits to taking a reactor um making a reactor for the first time ever which means you've got to develop shielding so that people can be close by um none of that had been done before and they set up a bunch of materials and uh tested them you know took uh Gamma or Neutron sources and put them through the materials and found about how much they would need to attenuate it um and it was a lot of just root Force empirical build big data sets quickly um but they built the Nautilus this submarine that then went underneath the North Pole um and the polar ice gets larger and larger so it's like a UND Sea Mountain and they had to develop actually a sonar uh piece of equipment to act as an ultimeter so they knew how deep they would have to actually go um they set out to go do that mission and they did it uh almost immediately um and then right after that program a 5-year plan was anounced I'm going like two into detail now sorry but this is exciting part the 50s the 50s is the most exciting so there's a they put together a fiveyear plan under Strauss the atomic energy commissioner at the time and he said we uh the submarines work obviously this with this beautiful technology we can take these atoms that were for war and they're now for peace right and uh yeah we've seen it now everyone knows that you could do it with the submarine this amazing Voyage under this under the North Pole um and I want everybody to know that so I'm glad we're spending the time on it uh but we basically went well why don't we use this to make electric power and make huge amounts of clean power on our grids um and but the thing they didn't know was like exactly what that would look like because it's not the same thing as having a submarine right and having yourself surrounded by water and all that excess shielding makes it really really easy to do safely so The Five-Year Plan were five different reactor types and there was a sodium graphite reactor experiment an experimental breeder reactor a light waterer uh reactor um and and all these five reactors needed to be built within five years and they said whichever type gets built the quickest and looks the most scalable we're just going to take that one and we're just going to scale it and put it all over the US and make as many of them as we can and all five of them were done within five years the fastest was two and a half years shipping Port uh reactor was the quickest one done and it was a light waterer reactor and it ended up being the way that we wanted to scale and that's why today we have I think the number is about 93 operating gigawatt scale lightwater reactors they're all based on that one design from that moment in time way back when so uh anyway in the 60s we really um the 50s we build these few early reactors and they actually last a couple of decades too they're not like little experiments they're big successes built very very quickly I want to get back to that again uh in the 60s though we go and then deploy a whole bunch of reactors and this continuing development htgr is the high temperature gas reactor uh categories developed in the 60s a little bit it's kind of the last type of reactor uh developed that's where the ceramic CED fuel Trio comes from uh and in the 70s we continue to scale more and more more reactors and throughout the ' 80s we're building them still um but there's a sort of an an anti-nuclear sentiment that's building in the the US especially throughout the 60s and the 70s and eventually there's an energy crisis in the 70s and it leads to creation of the Department of energy um the ending of the atomic energy commission which there's a bunch of contributing factors to but it becomes the NRC in the mid1 1970s um and then from that point forward there are only the designs we had from before that point in the mids s getting built and then the rate drops dramatically and there's almost nothing built after the 90s in the US um that's a pretty pretty I I said it was going to be short and it was long but uh hopefully there's some some useful details there but I think things have now turned around completely um as far as public sentiment goes which actually is a huge factor in what's happened with the nuclear industry can you share more about that um absolutely so I think uh you know in the 80s we were just discovering that climate change was a thing that humans could impact the environment uh by the time we got into the 90s uh and Al Gore took up that cause amongst others uh we really it became Center Stage uh for the public in the US and I'm most of my history is very us-centric which uh apologies I just don't know the rest uh too well um and then by the 2000s it became a policy point and people were starting to think about what the future would look like if we priced things uh to try to make incentives for to be a clean World um and I think now like after the 2010s we got to a position where um the public were so in favor of uh nuclear technology again that in uh I want to get this right I think it is in I want to say in 2016 finally Advanced nuclear became a bipartisan supported issue in Congress which is a they're the representative right and so it's a really good sign and signal that hey everyone is actually getting behind nuclear um and now we've recently had uh things like the movie Oppenheimer um right and uh and other things start to happen in our world that make us recognize the importance of energy Independence uh and resilience um and I think people are really excited about nuclear technology again which is critically important the only bad part about this is uh people who are excited about nuclear who want to go and use it um the entrepreneurs and the technology development are way behind right we can't can't move as quickly as the public support for nuclear has is that what is the process like why are you behind um so many reasons um so you know there's no I like to say this line a lot there's no new nuclear design that has been fueled in the US in the last 50 years and that is true there's a lot of qualifiers there things have happened outside the US some new reactors have been built in the US um but they're not a new design they're a they're a new build of an old design so to a large degree because we haven't done it we've sort of lost that muscle right there there's just been atrophying of the system uh and there are a bunch of pieces parts to it so you know the the NRC don't really have rules that are perfectly tuned for Innovation um but they do think about it um they're pressed by by Congress um to to make sure that they're able to modernize there have been a bunch of modernization efforts um Nema uh the nuclear energy uh industry modernization act uh in 2019 is amongst those but they continue to to go down those paths and uh I think the NRC actually can easily still be an effective regulator um and can allow for Innovation uh because every discussion I've had with them has proven to me that there are very dedicated very intelligent individuals there um who want to see nuclear uh built and to make sure that it's safe which is their entire job um but for a very long time there haven't been customers and great products and the combination of those two things coming to the NRC and going look we want this and look we can build this so let's go now get through the approvals it just that hasn't happen so uh the way I see at the NRC are not really blocking things um yeah and how can you expect the regulator to regulate ahead of innovation happening they don't quite know exactly what people want and what entrepreneurs are going to deliver on and so they need us to to work together and just to to talk like uh uh about the future so they're focused on the right things would you say that because there was such a gap in research and time and resources uh for this category of energy that there is like a generational gap of expertise and education in these legislative uh more regulatory environments I mean absolutely there is a gap um uh because of such a long period time has passed of course and uh I think computers have gotten very good too so it is very easy to allow for analysis paralysis to set in where you can model something and you can model it in amazing detail you can run on supercomputers so you can get a fairly quick result um but it's easy to get lost in that world and to kind of play with every lever um and it's definitely true that in many Industries we've forgotten how to build it's not not just nuclear but in other areas also right that loss of manufacturing really impacts every industry and nuclear even more so um because there's a lot of rules around handling for nuclear material you know if you're making a rocket company you can go and you can find a a test site uh or someone else's old test site you can go buy and then you can get a rocket engine there and you can just start testing it it's got especially if you've already got environmental permits uh at the site right and so there's not really anything limiting you from learning by doing which is the only way and uh in nuclear we haven't done that very much although we do have an ability to do that and it's through our National Labs but there to date is not a really not a process developed you know there's not a a muscle there either um on the the regulatory side but there is this this really big gap and I think uh there are a lot of ways to get around I think having the public support uh is really important but that could fade if we don't deliver quickly and I think the expectations need to be set as to what's reasonably achievable uh for nuclear companies but what uh radiant's job is uh is to do is to deliver the future and to make commitments on what we can deliver so we have committed ourselves to being ready to do a fuel test in 2026 so just just a year and a half away to solve this 50 a no reactor uh and I think others are going to to do that same thing in that same year so it won't even be just us it'll be several different entities um and that should be happening pretty quickly but we should all make commitments as to what we think we can achieve and then go go and get things done and not allow schedules to slip not allow costs to increase because those are the things that caused a lot of the the failures of nuclear projects in the past right and within radiant you are building it vertically integrated while also using some third party uh systems you do have your software in house I was fortunate fortunate enough to play with it and uh cause a failure and the levels drop and rise and the heat go up uh so that was very very fun I appreciate that how do you think about building the business and building this playbook for the future of energy and for nuclear as you continue to kind of Shepherd this process and drive the F forward uh it's a I guess a complicated answer but I I'll try to not oversimplify um so you know we we I don't see our USS actually vertically integrated I mean we will build something if we have to but you know the best solution is you just someone else has made all the parts and you're just integrating uh and then getting the product out to the customer right and focused around delivering a reliable product that's where I start from um but uh we have found there are a lot of little pie is parts that don't make sense to to try to buy and integrate just because you know either there there's low availability not enough um you know enough Supply options um or some nothing in the market actually for the scale that we're at and we're at a totally different scale of nuclear so um a normal grid scale reactor is a th000 megawatts of power that's enough power for like a million homes in the US it's it's a huge amount of power uh a lot of nuclear companies are working on SMR or what they'll call call themselves and they're about 100 megawatts some are up to 300 but there's kind of a range that's around you know hundreds of megawatts and they're meant to be built faster which can be really good for project Finance uh and then you go down to another size range there's like 10 megawatt is reactors call you could call those micro reactors U those often still have a couple years worth of construction maybe maybe shorter um but still you got to dig a hole and have concrete and uh use the ground for shielding we are smaller than any of those we are down at one megawatt so enough power for 1,000 homes um and we can Mass produce these in Factory deliver them to a site and with no infrastructure uh just outside of a 35 foot fence line you can operate them and be at the NRC public dose limit for a reactor um so we're working on is this completely different technology uh right it's a small unit and when uh customer operates it they they can tell it to be on and tell it to off all right you have control over your system because you're the end user um and if you want to you can turn it off and you can tell us come pick it up um which is kind of the coolest thing ever about this one megawatt portable scale is that you are not making a commitment to putting a bunch of heavy infrastructure you are not making a commitment to having nuclear waste stored on your site that gets sent away with the unit and I think this is the nuclear power that people want uh that we haven't really seen before for that is mass producible right that can achieve these great economies of scale and be deployed out to anywhere in the world and I kind of got off on a rant so you have to remind me the other half of this question how are you going to build the playbook for additional companies follow or if that even is possible um so some of the things that we're doing are going to be generally helpful to nuclear industry so we are testing nuclear grade graphite right now we actually will make the results of that available to everyone so it will just qualify a US domestic americanmade nuclear great graphite supplier uh to a higher degree which is is just going to be beneficial um our fuel specification is open also uh we have just published the way that we're going to alter the particle of fuel to make it more economical for a micro reactor um which is really important to do um because someone will do it and you know you don't want to be beaten by that in the future if you you could do it now um but I I don't know that there will be A playbook maybe you know we'll build part of the playbook for the one megawatt category but we really when we're thinking about nuclear or even energy in general like it's used in such a variety of of cases at such a variety of scales that we we have to answer that question for a particular size range um but uh I should also mention the the dod's pay program from 2019 that I announced there's a lot of effort uh there are teams working on that um at National avator on the government side uh and at companies and they are making a ton of progress that is helping build the Playbook that we need also so we're not really totally out in front and all by ourselves um but we in intend to give back and try to do that uh wherever we can so there are some uh some helpful efforts and I think the the way that we work with the regulator at both the National Lab uh and with the NC is going to be very beneficial because we're going to put a lot of work and effort into educating uh the regulator and um educating the in the use of digital twin technology the sort of advanced software simulation that that you got to run uh that we're using it would be uh really interesting to kind of understand the scope of how much it takes to fund something like this um for you and the you know the smaller scale the micro um units that are only powering a thousand homes um what is the cost to build that versus let's say the really really large uh nuclear facilities that we all see on the internet and are kind of like the symbol yeah um so the I mean the the really big ones that we have now are on the order of a few billion dollars for reactor uh a tiny little one that I'm working on is on the order of tens of millions of dollars but you know everyone's design is uh quite a bit different but it's way easier to finance uh a much smaller unit like this of course uh so I think that's really exciting and there's no reason that uh the software Control Systems the digital twin the regulatory work that we do couldn't apply to the larger scale so I think micro reactors are in this really great place where they don't need a lot of fuel they don't need a big facility we can fit ours inside of the old ebr2 Dome at Idaho National Lab and in this hermetically sealed enclosure surrounded by these nuclear facilities and scientists we can operate it in the most safe place possible to test the technology uh and then have that technology apply to all the other sizes uh and scales of of reactors so it's awesome I'm super excited to be working on it given this is an investing show we got to talk about the fundraising and how you fuel this kind of uh business is it mostly Equity is it debt is it government grants how much have you raised to date and what was the composition of that yeah uh so we we uh raised our first first uh check in 2020 like a tiny check on a safe uh and then and did that for a while and then we raised a series a with Union Square Ventures uh in 2022 and then uh a little over a year ago we did a series B with andrees and raised a $45 million round so when you add all that up we've raised about 60 million in total Venture Capital um we have also won I want to say it's seven uh government contract cont racts at this point and that total is about 8.7 million uh and no other uh forms of financing to dial it back to uh what we were talking about earlier you've been traveling a bunch you were just in Alaska I would love to learn more about what you're doing there what you're doing with communities there and um how radiant is benefiting more remote communities yeah um so uh when you think about what you can do with one megawatt uh of nuclear power uh that lasts a long time uh and you go look at not not places that are on the grid but places that are very far that are remote uh Coastal Alaska or Inland uh locations where maybe there's some mine for critical minerals um these kinds of locations uh and often you'll find that diesel is fueling their operations and that is very expensive and that they basically have Banks of diesel generators uh that are often about a one megawatt size that's a very common size uh and so you know the the design of kidos is such that you can just go directly replace one megawatt diesel generators with nuclear reactors um and you could even do that on as many as you like they you know you could have two Diesel and two nuclear generators if that makes the most sense for what you're trying to achieve um but I think a lot of the customers that we talked to are really excited about going fully nuclear and replacing all the diesel generators um because you know there's no emissions related to nuclear no CO2 uh no exhaust fumes uh released and uh you and you can also just bring them to the site and operate them and ship them away just like you would with the diesel generator so it can make a huge amount of sense to do that uh you can also uh with a reactor like this that can be quickly moved and doesn't need a lot of infrastructure you can be operating it in about two days after getting it on a site which means you could use it for disaster relief which would be very cool uh nuclear power helping save lives during the recovery after some disaster um I think is is a really uh great vision for the future um it could also be power for refugees right you need to you have some population that's unfortunately relocated somewhere and you have no power source you'd like it to also be a clean power source if you could um but up in Alaska and talking to all these remote communities who they have a Alaska's a a gigantic place and so there are Island Coastal communities there's Inland communities um there are different resources um that are being extracted for Value um and this is you know not not only oil and gas but there's copper and gold and all sorts of uh of things um and people are using mixtures of power that are all over the place you know sometimes they have a lot of natural gas that's coming off of an oil well that they're using um but then you know you go 50 miles west of that site and it's a village that is got about a coastal transport of just 100% diesel um that fills up a tank uh and that tank has to last throughout the entire Frozen season which is it's like six months for them where the sea is frozen and you can't bring new diesel in and you got to have enough to survive um so anyway that's uh some of the customers U that we're talking to energy is not um there's not really a super simple way to convey who needs it and how they need it it's sort of the answer is like everyone needs it and they need it different every time but you can make a single design that literally works for everybody because you don't have to figure out how to bring in new materials constantly to these units so these last a really long time too it's not like you just you pop it in and then it's going to be done and you can't use it in three months like these are going to last a while right yeah you can last several Winters and um not only do you get electric power from the unit but you also get heat from it you know while you're generating about one megawatt electric you can get about megawatts of heat up to 80° so this could be like all the hot water that you need for like an entire Village or uh some huge facility or even maybe some production process um on oil and gas pipeline um so yeah it's uh if you can make use of the power and the heat then it's even better even better for the environment and uh you know there may be some version of it in the future we do uh to create steam which should be at a higher temperature than 80 Celsius but currently we do that because we we optimize for electric power production since this is super clean energy I don't think we emphasize this enough could you just drill down into um the ways in which you're educating people that this is cleaner energy yeah uh so the reactor is really uh pretty simple right it is you can picture a big uh steel pressure vessel that holds the pressure of the helium that we push into the core um and the helium flows up the a jacket and then down through a core block which is made of graphite uh and the graphite is a extremely strong material at high temperatures and then in that graphite block we have the tof fuel particles uh and so really um we move all these control uh control blades uh in the system to turn on on and to regulate power uh those are around the outside and then you're generating Power by nuclear fision which is uh uranium 235 splitting into these these two heavy products and they're making heat um by the momentum transfer so this just like the the two recoil products that are that are um slowing down and in that slowing down they're transferring energy making heat and there so a big block graphite just gets hot inside of the system and then we blow helium through that and the helium comes out hotter and then that is taken to go spin a turbine um and because the the helium is pushed in by an electric motor we can we can push as much or as little helium as you like into the system if that helium pump fails the the system will start to heat up and as it heats up it doesn't even need to heat up very much it heats up a little bit the reactor goes subcritical and shuts itself off and this is uh this is true for most reactor Technologies because this is this is the behavior of the uranium itself uh right you will get less fion when it heats up this called a a negative thermal coefficient of reactivity um and it makes the technology extremely simp and safe um there's a htgr reactor uh in Germany AVR where the operators would actually just leave the the operating room and and allow the system to overheat and they would leave it and leave it overnight in that state and then come back and then start operating the next day so it's a a really pretty pretty simple and benign thing but the nuclear uh nuclear reactor just puts heat into a Heats a block of graphite right and then separately you you pump as much helium through as you'd like to heat up and extract it out and use it to make power and if you stop that it turns itself off um so yeah it's a it's a really uh a really beautiful technology um when you've got ceramic Coatings and you can handle these really really high temperatures you just get away from the Meltdown risk uh and other risks uh of course it comes at the price of added cost all right and a lot of the technology that we have the goal is to get down to the bare bone like lowest possible cost you could get to right and that's some so what you see in the the fleet reactors we have today although I should say you know they are already safe enough which is very true um and the uh the couple of uh accidents and issues that happened in the past there's a whole bunch of reasons as to why those happened but we don't even use that technology type anymore and there were a lot of humans in the loop errors as well lunch breaks humans in the loop yeah all sorts of things just training every every person born not knowing and needs to go through all of life and Education and Training and certification and uh and stay healthy and fit which you know is not a guarantee either I appreciate you sharing more on that um the technical detail is super interesting and um not something that many people have been exposed to or actually understand so it's really helpful to get your your uh deeper insights on that just a couple more questions um are you guys currently hiring how are you building out your team yeah we're always hiring of course um now there's uh there's roles posted on our website and I mean there's some um you know interesting ones are like the project manager because we have actually a lot of these non-dilutive government Awards now but also lead nuclear Engineers um and several others um and they're they're constantly updated but you know what we really need are people who love the mission um who are selfmotivated who are super excited about the future of nuclear that we're talking about here um and I think uh you know attracting a lot of the right personality types is is one of the things a startup does really well by having this unique new worldview and message um and anyone who finds this an interesting problem who would love to work on it um you're you're the best way of us growing as a company you know come come talk to us um and we might find a fit that is how I found SpaceX a really long time ago I have the the email I wrote to them uh years ago and I was just like I love I love your mission here's what I know how to do let me know if you're interested and like very simple and straightforward um and I mean one of the great things about SpaceX I think was that it attracted the right sorts of people um and you know what you study in school is kind of important um not totally I think it's more important to be really dedicated and motivated and excited about the mission and to to work super hard for for this future to be possible because the public are more excited than ever about nuclear technology and uh the entrepreneurs the companies the the products the reactors are a bit behind um and we got to get building them yeah and you guys have an awesome uh office in elag gundo and you're right around the corner from every other major player so it's it's really fun to uh to be around and be yeah we we got a great new facility and we're doing a whole bunch of the testing here so our uh pressure vessel is coming pretty soon uh we've got nuclear great graphite that we're Machining and putting through thermal testing uh along with our our helium Loop um and all the software engineering that we're doing here in house and the the demo that you ran but it's a it's a a great location we found this empty warehouse and we've put a bunch of uh funding into it to turn it into the reactor headquarters well to close out what are you most looking forward to this year are there any other Milestones you guys are looking to hit or um yeah just or just general personal things you're excited about yeah well we are uh going to fund raise again pretty soon uh this summer um it'll be the last time to invest before the first reactor in 50 years gets fueled and tested so that's of course exciting but I think what's more exciting to me is that we're going to have a date where I can tell you with confidence I have actually ordered everything for the actual reactor um right and and when I can say that that was also a lot of stress relieved because there are a lot of things that are challenging to source and that delay over time and all that but uh we're getting very very close um and you know 2024 will be the last year that we're playing around with the analysis paralysis and the design and answering all the questions of the regulator and simulating things and the Twan and 2025 is going to be actually building the thing up and it should before the end of that that year ship out so exciting it's so exciting and um I'm really astonished and Amazed by all of the progress and how how much I got to see on my own like thank you very much for having me over it was an absolute pleasure and if you haven't checked out radiant website yet please check it out because I think you underratedly might have one of the best websites and I probably should have started the podcast because like is is a beautiful website and uh the way that it flows and like takes it from you know Factory to truck to location it's just it's amazing so wanted toout out yeah no it's better to mention at the end so that everyone listens this until this point go check out the website go uh apply for jobs and then tell your friends and uh support and let's build the future of nuclear technology together exactly well thank you so much Doug thanks Molly [Music]

Channel: Sourcery

Views: 5,513

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Id: CEwZzC0H-lA

Length: 45min 48sec (2748 seconds)

Published: Fri May 31 2024