The future of Nuclear = Small, Mobile, Microreactors | Radiant

the fastest path to getting us off of fossil fuels and expanding our capability is fishion power we're trying to build a new reactor here something that nobody's never done before but to me it's actually just minimum viable product we're building the smallest nuclear reactor it's super hard scaling a company is challenging this is a superpower to have on Earth all of that is led to this moment we now we're just 18 months away from having the real deal so where are we and what does radiant do we're in Els gundo at radiant's headquarters and we are designing a portable micro reactor that can replace a 1 megawatt diesel generator and can be mass-produced radiant is a company I've wanted to shoot with since I started filming the S3 series nearly 50 weeks ago and finally in elsona California we got the time to document where they're at today after their recent test success on their helium circulator test Loop radiant is pioneering min nzed mobile nuclear reactors to provide Power in rough terrains and to reinspection that doesn't involve nuclear whether that be fision or Fusion I really want either technology to succeed and right now I think the most practical one and the fastest path to getting us off of fossil fuels and expanding our capability is fishion power and in particular portable fishion power also enables a longer term civilization sustainability which is something that Doug likes to talk about which is space travel right and that's originally how we got into this in the first place um this is a a superpower to have on Earth if you want to you know have cities at the bottoms of oceans you could do that with a nuclear fuel if you want to have power up on top of Mount Everest or in the Arctic really anywhere on the earth this is the best form of fuel that there is if it's a challenge to get to that location um you can think about space as just an extension just a more remote and farther forward operating location over 55% of US soldier casualties in the two Iraqi conflicts are from ambushed convoys and convoys move ammo water and fuel and so if you could put a reactor in one of these locations then you completely remove all those fuel shipments you save tens of thousands of lives nuclear power saves lives I don't think we hear that very often medical Isotopes save way more lives than that and uh Medical Diagnostic Imaging is probably the single greatest thing that nuclear power does and and people don't recognize it it's natural that we need to be looking at nuclear technology both on Earth in challenging locations and to save lives but also in space typically nuclear reactors are very large uh you see like big gwatt size things that massive undertak billions of dollars many many years for something to come to fruition uh and that sort of has led to a stall in the nuclear industry of new reactors just because it takes so much upfront capital and then so much time to actually gain the reward from that project nuclear's a story told in decades so in the 60s we developed everything nuclear reactors were made for submarines in the' 70s we started to deploy power reactors based off of those uh submarine reactors in the 80s we really had nuclear reach its peak scale in the US but then we also had Chernobyl a huge International disaster and then in the '90s you know we had a turnaround where states banned nuclear I think throughout all this there was this growing uh you environmental outrage and concern and then uh climate change and then a eventually an acceptance of climate change and I think we're now in the 2000s in this era where we have solar and we have wind and we have all these Renewables uh and everyone is excited about having a cleaner planet and they've come back to recognize that that nuclear from 50 years ago is not the nuclear of today we're trying to build a new reactor here something that nobody's never done before big part of our culture is to just iterate as quickly as possible the only way to do that is to make a lot of reactors that's sort of one of the big cornerstones of radiant is to make small reactors things that we can actually make quickly and make a lot of uh and progressively make the design a lot better obviously radiant is developing kaleidos which is a portable nuclear reactor which is meant to replace diesel gen sets but to me it's actually just minimum viable product we're building the smallest nuclear reactor because uh smaller is cheaper it's super hard do what we're doing right now which is basically building our Falcon one but for a nuclear reactor the reason why it's hard is because there's a ton of uh regulatory hurdle uh against it uh and we don't get to do it multiple times we have to build this thing and it's got to turn on we have to go through a series of tests and uh by the time we're done we need to have demonstrated several key characteristics uh of the reactor simultaneously that needs to align with our production unit which is going to replace uh diesel generators so that that's the challenge um so I would say what radiant is doing right now is actually developing the capability to design produce and build nuclear reactors we know how to build nuclear reactors the problem is that they tend to be really big expensive and difficult to construct radiant solution to this problem is to miniaturize these reactors demonstrating their safety step by step with the first reactor set to be turned on in 18 months but before we talk about that let's learn how a nuclear reactor works and how Radiance is a little different how does a nuclear reactor work there's two ways that nuclear reactors work one is fusion and one is fion Fusion is like the sun that's where you take two atoms and you shove them together and it releases a lot of energy vision is the exact opposite it takes one atom and it splits in half into two or more atoms and that also releases a lot of energy it also has a chain reaction to it because when you have that fion process uh to start it it doesn't just Vision on its own usually you need to sort of excite it and you do that by hitting it with with a neutron uh fision is uh an atom ripping apart and when when that happens the products are moving very fast and they actually smash into their neighbors and just make heat through friction so it's really funny actually that Nuclear Physics when you explain it in layman's terms it all sounds like we're playing billiard balls and that's sort of the truth when something fions it will release a few neutrons in that process as well and then those can go on and hit other atoms and cause them to fision as well so in a nuclear reactor you only really need two things something that Visions uh it's like a f material that's like uranium 235 and then some way to slow neutrons down you have fuel which is has uranium 235 in it ours has of almost 20% enrichment level uh that is encapsulated in tiny little poppy seed sized particles called Trio particle fuel there's actually over 100 million of those tiny little particles of fuel in the core and what happens is in our core we have these control blades that move and when those blades they move away from the core they actually connect the graphite reflector to the core and it goes critical what I mean by critical is that uh fion occurs and enough fion occurs that every Neutron uh that comes out of that fision leads to one other fision and the other neutrons are lost either due to absorption or leakage from the system neutrons only cause fions typically when they're thermal uh so that's when they're in the slower energy range so you want something that scatters neutrons well but doesn't absorb them something like carbon or water and then when you want to make it actually practical you need something to cool the reactor because you make a lot of heat you need to get that heat out of there and move it to like a turbine eventually a lot of big reactors will just use water for this as well but we use helium helium doesn't become Radioactive on its own uh it has very little of a neutron cross-section so neutrons don't interact with the helium at all that's nice because there is you a hypothetical situation where you have an accident and you release your coolant to the atmosphere if that happens to us we're not releasing anything that's radioactive so this is what we're working on uh by 2028 we should be able to deliver one of these portable nuclear micro reactors to a customer site and then ramp production as soon as possible up to 50 units a year you can put uh up to 4 megaw that's four kaleidos reactors inside of this shielding box which it's just pre-fabricated concrete uh and you need that so that you can use about a tennis cord of space for 4 megaw of power just outside that fence it is the NRC public dose limit so you could have a sidewalk or McDonald's or you name it right next to this so here is a cad model of the reactor Barrel section of the pressure vessel with the upper Dome taken off and you can see in here the the reflector ring on the outside that's where the control blades are that turn on and off the reactor inside the Reactor Core consists of these 37 fuel monoliths which are made up of a reflector and then six fuel spacers and a lower reflector here we have a whole bunch of machine graphite graphite is a moderator in a nuclear reactor you have to have fuel and you have moderator and the combination of those two things you can slow down neutrons from a fision reaction and then create heat which is what we use to then make power so this is a big hunk of graphite uh graphite is like what we make our core out of uh so inside of each of these little channels here on the top we would be putting fuel and then the bigger holes are they would put hydrides and then also coolant channels uh so our coolant would flow through there to keep the rest of the system cold but this was like a really big step for us cuz it was the first time we were comfortable enough in a core design that we could actually take the time to find somebody who could like try to cut it and actually start bringing it to life uh and we learned a lot through the process too because you can see a lot of like mistakes here and imperfection there's a big blowout over here I chip through the top and we very quickly realiz that nobody could drill channels long and straight like we needed them to to do this design so yeah that that was like a big move for the company to go through that iteration process of Designing something trying to build it and then realizing that it had a lot of flaws and um having to sort of go back on it so here's our helium test Loop the whole point of that test Loop is to test the helium circulator which is sitting right here right now so this is the first prototype for uh basically the heart of the helium Loop uh which is the primary Loop coolant helium is there to basically carry heat from the reactor and dump it into our power generation Loop so this is kind of the intermediary the power generation Loop converts heat into electricity all of the complexity of that Loop basically lives in the circulator it's by far the most complex piece of the entire puzzle this is the helium turbo pump what this does is take helium and push it into the core it goes up and cools the pressure vessel and then comes down and picks up heat from the core it actually comes out at about 700 C it then goes through a heat exchanger cools down and goes back back into this machine so there's a closed loop of helium it's a foil bearing machine it's designed for a lot of cycles and it's pretty bulletproof we've been getting operational experience with it we took it all the way up to 450c uh which is its design temperature it was right here a moment ago it's undergoing an upgrade right now on a graphite foil bearing so that we can go up to full power on it this is a lot bigger than what we're actually going to have in kidos the whole point was to test the helium circulator and so we have heater we have some valves that let us play with the back pressure on the circulators so we can test the entirety of its operational map and what we're doing is we are pretending like this pump is attached to the reactor it doesn't really know but uh it thinks it's attached to a reactor so that we understand everything about the pump before we put nuclear fuel in our system this will go in a Kido system but all the rest of this is just for test for convenience uh we left it actually on the weld stands so when it heats up it grows and it rolls on those Wheels uh this is Radiance method we take our Hardware we test it in the envelope we expect to use and then we go a little bit outside that envelope in the test scenario and then we put that into code and then we run a digital twin of a reactor to develop our control systems we've built a systems model of the entire nuclear reactor so this covers all of the different aspects of the system that we want to be able to capture about its performance about its characteristics and about its safety and so what we're showing on the screen here is a model of the reactor's performance running in real time it has internal temperatures of the reactor itself shown as well as different cross-sections of the temperatures inside the reactor up the height of it and then along here we show the current uh state of the nuclear reaction the state of the heat coming out of the reactor system and then the state of the cooling motor that is moving helium through the reactor so one of the interesting things we can do with the system is we can introduce system failures where we can cause the heat sink which is the primary motor that pushes helium through the reactor to fail as well we click a button here it commands it to go into a failed State and then we'll see the uh the mass flow of the pump drop to zero and the reactors start to heat up as a result um once it does this it triggers a fault condition and the reactor starts trying to Safe itself and you see that here with the control surfaces of the reactor rotating inward to turn it off it allows us to capture the Dynamics of the system estimate the performance of the system and estimate the safety of the system so we will use use this in the future to drive our Hardware in the loop testing where we have all of the sensors about uh that would be actually on the reactor system and the control computer that's actually running in the reactor system running our real Control software running through different emergency scenarios and showing how our Control software responds with this simulator producing faked sensor values to the software so it thinks it's driving a real reactor planning to get there about halfway through this year and then start doing integrated testing with the final reactor controls next big milestone is what what we call the passive cooldown test there won't be any nuclear fuel it just be electrically heated uh but it's a a big undertaking for us because it it's going to look like a nuclear reactor would we're assembling a full core worth of graphite the pressure vessel for the reactor system and integrating our cooling Loop demonstration into that system so actually cooling a reactor core with our passive cooling air jacket as we call it around the outside so this is our air jacket flow test um this enables us to get the science to prove exactly how much sheat will be able to reject passively from the pressure vessel if there's any kind of accident scenario with the reactor that airspace opens and then cold air comes in picks up some heat and rejects it to the environment the fuel stays cold the pressure vessel stays cold and the reactor safely shuts down and basically this enables us to get a set of correlations which we can then put into our digital twin models exactly predict how much heat will be um rejected to the environment the idea here is that we can demonstrate the shutdown profile of the reactor system in the case of an emergency and show that as the nuclear fuel continues to produce heat that we remain passively safe we'll go through the entire assembly process work out how we're going to do Machining and all the Assembly of of of all the parts in there and then actually get you know the experience doing that I'm learning a lot about about the design through that process so when we get to National Lab we want to do a fuel test of the first reactor in 50 years in the beginning begin of 2026 uh that is only about 18 months away right now so we have to test everything that we can so that fuel is the only variable left when we're at the lab so we got a building that's nine times bigger we had an old crane that was one ton this is a 10 ton crane so it's just the crane this right size for this building is it it's it's it's it's almost it's almost touching the roof it's almost too big but that's how we like it uh uh it's actually lined up with this door right here uh which is a custom door we actually knocked out the wall and we have a 14t reactor size door so we'll build the reactor right here using this crane assemble it along with all the shielding and with no fuel in it it will ship out this store and go to Idaho National Lab it's been years in the making cuz we started in 2020 uh and I left SpaceX where I had been for 12 years and I didn't hadn't run a company before never really intended to and I feel like we have to build a nuclear technology company just because it's required for space and it's required for Earth and no one's mass-produced it before learning how to build teams and to lobby and to talk to investors and to do the actual design work back in 2020 I would have told myself go and Lobby don't try to build something um and then have that proof that you can build uh Drive things just go and talk to people way ahead of it I would say hype more interesting yeah scaling a company is challenging getting people aligned and working on the same thing together is is fundamentally difficult um and hiring is fundamentally difficult all of that has led to this moment where now we're just 18 months away from having the real deal this was a very special episode for me to film I've been wanting to shoot with radiant for so long and Doug showed me so many interesting things while filming like the United States entire reserve of nuclear grid graphite they very Scrappy cooling tub and a crane that's just barely the right size I actually think that crane is a great representation of where radiant is at the crane like their vision is almost too big for where they are but these are experienced engineers and Builders with a clear plan to turn on their first reactor in 18 months and after getting to capture where radiant is at today I think they and their crane will be ready when the time comes in 18 months to go critical [Music]

Channel: S3

Views: 181,052

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Id: LTgS7tOOzsE

Length: 17min 30sec (1050 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 17 2024