Catalyst with Shayle Kann - Will advanced reactors solve nuclear's problems?

Episode Date: February 25, 2022

Traditional nuclear power is bogged down by cost overruns and concerns about safety and waste. But does it have to be that way? Could we deploy scaleable reactors that are cheaper, safer, and that produce less waste? Advanced nuclear startups in the U.S. certainly think so.  In this episode, guest host Lara Pierpoint speaks with Jake DeWitte, co-founder and CEO of Oklo, one of many advanced nuclear companies that have emerged in recent years. Lara and Jake survey the polarized landscape of nuclear development, with many countries shutting down plants and others planning to open new ones. They discuss the main problems with traditional nuclear, and examine some new ways companies are attempting to solve them.  They focus on the technologies that Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and microreactors could use, including liquid metal, liquid salt, and gas-cooled options, as well as fast reactors. They also talk about nuclear waste recycling, safer self-cooling designs, and nuclear direct heating. Lara asks: Can advanced nuclear reactors scale in time to make a dent in global emissions? Jake says, in the medium term, yes. To get there, he says we need to build reactors like we build cars, planes, and wind turbines: by simplifying designs, pre-fabricating modules and taking advantage of existing supply chains. This modular approach could open up new business models, like nuclear as a service, and new financing options, like the power purchase agreements common in renewable energy.  But how will regulators respond? Just recently the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission rejected Oklo’s application to build and operate the company’s Aurora compact fast reactor in Idaho. Lara and Jake break down the decision and what it means for the future of advanced nuclear in the US.  Catalyst is supported by Antenna Group. For 25 years, Antenna has partnered with leading clean-economy innovators to build their brands and accelerate business growth. If you're a startup, investor, enterprise, or innovation ecosystem that's creating positive change, Antenna is ready to power your impact. Visit antennagroup.com to learn more. Catalyst is supported by Nextracker. Nextracker’s technology platform has delivered more than 50 gigawatts of zero-emission solar power plants across the globe. Nextracker is developing a data-driven framework to become the most sustainable solar tracker company in the world – with a focus on a truly transparent supply chain. Visit nextracker.com/sustainability to learn more.

from the studios of PostScript Media and Canary Media. I'm Laura Pierpoint, and this is Catalyst. If you're repeating these things at an assembly line process, you just get better and better and better at it, right? I mean, the simplest and crude analogy is, if you've ever bought three IKEA bookcases, think how much faster you are building the third one than you were the first one.

It's a similar thing. That sounds like a terrible Saturday, Jake. It also is a terrible Saturday. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Today's nuclear energy is not the nuclear energy of the past. technology innovations are making reactors smaller, safer, and more cost-effective. But nuclear is also one of those very polarizing and simultaneously unifying technologies in the climate tech space. It polarizes climate advocates. It forges surprising political alliances,

and currently it's spawning a new generation of supporters on social media. So where should we stand on nuclear as a solution to climate change? When utilities need flexible capacity they can count on, they turn to Energy Hub. Energy Hub works with more than 170 utilities, coordinating over 2.5 million devices to manage 3.4 gigawatts of flexibility, built for the moments when utilities can't afford uncertainty. Energy Hub builds and operates virtual power plants that utilities actually stake their grid planning on, coordinating EVs, batteries, batteries, thermostats, and more through a single platform built for utility scale. Predictive, verifiable, and designed to perform when it counts. Learn more at energyhub.com. Trillions of dollars are flowing into clean and critical infrastructure, but those investments aren't driven by technology alone. They're shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, and host of a brand new podcast, Critical Capital. Each episode, I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy and building the clean economy. Tune in as we unpack how progress is actually made. Listen to Critical Capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lara Pierpoint, filling in for Shale Khan while he's on family leave.

Congrats to Shale. I'm the director of Climate at Actuate, a nonprofit focused on systems innovation to accelerate greenhouse gas emissions reduction. Just a few episodes ago, Shale and Scott Sue from RPE unpacked the exciting developments in nuclear fusion. One of the many reasons that fusion is awesome is that it offers clean power at exceptionally high energy density. But there's another technology.

that offers emissions-free electricity at huge scale and high density, and it's already commercially available. That's nuclear fission. Take a look at the last segment of your pinky finger. It's about the size of a uranium palette and used today in a U.S. commercial nuclear reactor. Each one of those pallets holds the energy equivalent of a ton of coal or 149 gallons of oil.

A stack of 18 of them will power your house for six years. So why aren't we building lots of new nuclear power plants in the U.S.? One reason is cost. The only two nuclear reactors currently under construction in the U.S. are in Georgia. They were estimated to collectively cost $14.1 billion in 2009. As of fall 2021, they're still under construction, and the cost has ballooned to $32 billion. Meanwhile, safety, waste, and security concerns are derailing formerly stalwart nuclear industries in Japan and Germany. I've wondered for a long time, does it have to be this way? Can we deploy at scale nuclear reactors that are cheaper, safer, and that produce less waste?

The 40 or so advanced nuclear reactor startups in the U.S. certainly think so. Today, I spoke to Jake DeWitt, the co-founder and CEO of Oklo. Oaklo is a trailblazing microreactor company, and they've got deep technical chops, solid funding, and a clear vision for how they're breaking away from traditional nuclear models in order to deploy megawatts of nuclear power at a time. I think you'll like it. So here's my conversation with Jake. All right, Jake, it is great having you here today.

Likewise. Let's talk a little bit about nuclear fission. Why do we talk about nuclear fission? Let's go ahead and put this in the context of climate tech. What are some of just the basic benefits and challenges associated with nuclear power? Yeah, I think one of the great benefits is the fact that it can produce a lot of energy from a relatively small amount of material. And it does so without emitting greenhouse gases, right? It's a very clean source of energy.

And it works very favorably with respect to how you can have. actually have, you know, a clean power source that's also quite scalable. You know, on average, it makes about 9% of the world's energy. In the U.S., it makes just under 20% and does make the majority of the U.S. is clean power, which is a pretty important piece of it. Obviously, it has some concerns and considerations that root back to sort of its origination largely, you know, from a military application and sort of the early stages of the technology that then led to some, I would say, you know, public concerns and fears about it based on, you know, the fact that it does involve radioactive materials, something that's hard for people to understand because we can't directly sense it,

you know, it's just an interesting phenomena. Like if we could taste or, well, I guess, anyway, if you could taste or see radiation, then I think people would be a lot more comfortable. But since you can, it feels a lot scarier, you know, it feels pervasive. It feels very, very dangerous. And on top of that, you know, it is something, too, that in general it has a history that, that, you know, sort of pre-the-information age as I like to think about it. it. There was a lot more uncertainty about it. People felt a lot more distanced from the

technology. It's complex, but it's not terribly complex to understand. And one of the things I'm really excited about is the fact, you know, sort of in the modern information age, where materials so much more available, folks can actually learn and understand the details on the technology a little more readily, which I think helps sort of accelerate that. But anyway, sorry, I kind of got distracted there going back. No, that's great. I mean, so let's dig in on actually exactly that point. Let's start breaking down some of the elements of nuclear to help folks kind of navigate what exists in this space. So we're going to get pretty deep today into advanced nuclear, which is to say some really

cool things that are happening from a technical perspective to solve some of nuclear's challenges. But let's start by baselining where we are now. So you mentioned that 9% of global electricity is produced by nuclear power plants. These are generally big power plants that are, you know, kind of known as traditional nuclear. So let's characterize this. What's a traditional nuclear power plant? What are some of the basic features? And then let's get into kind of where we are with deploying traditional nuclear? What does the trajectory look like for traditional nuclear plants? Yeah. You know, at its simplest form, it's basically a way to make steam, to make electricity, right? And you do that by splitting atoms, capturing the heat from that. Today's reactor is run

using water as the coolant. It operates at pretty high pressures and therefore pretty high temperatures. And then basically that water flows through, cools these nuclear fuel pins that are these cylinders of basically, you know, metal containing these ceramic fuel pellets. And the fission process produces heat in those pellets that then ultimately is carried by that water over to a boiler, where you basically boil water to make steam to drive a turbine and make electricity. They typically, you know, on average are about 1,000 megawatts in their electric output derived from about 3,000 megawatts in thermal power. So pretty big systems. And, you know, they run for typically a year and a half before they refuel.

And on average, you know, each reactor refueles about one-third of its core every, you know, one and a half years. So it's kind of neat in the sense you have a lot of energy sort of contained in a relatively small amount. You don't have to refuel it constantly. You don't need trains going there every day. You don't need big pipelines powering it. So you have some resilience baked into that. And yeah, you know, they operate at high pressures, so they have pretty big components. And that can, that's kind of, you know, part of the aspects you see why they've gotten really big because of economies of scale have driven that largely. And I think one other point just to add to your list, which I think was great. I think that was a good characterization of what it's like.

they also have really high capacity factors. So yeah, nuclear, we use our nuclear plants really a lot of the time. And I know that at least in the United States, that refueling outage where you have to change out the nuclear fuel, we've managed to shorten that down to six. And in some cases, like four weeks. And so then pretty much the rest of the time, the nuclear plant is operating, which is pretty cool. Yeah. When you can hit 90 plus percent capacity factors, it makes a big difference, you know, and they can, they, it's a nice firm, fixed sort of asset, right, that can make power that's clean and run for a long time. and be very available. So theoretically, some, you know, a great source of potential power for the world, particularly in a moment where we're really concerned about climate change. So what's happening right now? I know we're building reactors in some parts of the world. There are some countries that are actually pulling back from their nuclear power plans.

Can you characterize a little bit of what's going on globally with respect to sort of the traditional nuclear trajectory? Yeah. So right now, there are about 440 reactors worldwide. Mostly of the nature I described, there's some variations on that, but mostly of the nature I described. There's about 55 new plants being built around the world right now, including two in the United States down in Georgia. And there's a lot of interest going on, driving new ones, as well as a few countries that are driving to retire their plants. You know, on the sort of

retiring front, Germany is an example. Austria has made it clear they aren't interested in their nuclear plants. They're retiring them. There's a few other countries in parts of Western Europe that have sort of been on the spectrum of looking at shutting down their existing plants, Switzerland and Belgium. some possibly leaving the door open for new plants though over time. And then over, you know, sort of around the world over in Asia, Japan's kind of continually evaluating how they're going to be approaching nuclear power going forward, kind of with a mix of retiring some plants, keeping some operating, and kind of keeping an eye on what these new technologies might be able to bring.

So you kind of have a mix of some countries that are looking at this, of saying, you know, not really interested in keeping our plants running, looking at ultimately phasing those out. some other countries, you know, have started to look at this more of saying, hey, we either don't have nuclear and we want it or we have some and we want a lot more of it. I think, interestingly, this has been driven over the last maybe 10 to 20 years, largely in countries in East Asia. China has been kind of leading that. China recently announced they're going to be building at least 150 new nuclear power plants.

And then similarly, you have countries sort of basically spanning the globe that are, announcing interest in building either a few plants or building a lot of plants. Notably of interest, I think, is sort of the surge going on in an interest in Europe as a whole, ranging from west to eastern Europe. Just in the last year, it's been an interest. It's a fascinating, honestly, dynamic about how they're looking at energy security and also decarbonization, driving them to realize, hey, these new nuclear plants really provide the answer that we want here. And there's a big push right now, ranging from countries like Poland with a recent announcement, to Romania, to even France, who just recently announced, you know, one of the world leaders in

nuclear power that they're going to be building at least 14 new plants, which is pretty exciting to see. And then, of course, back in the Americas in the U.S., there's this whole new surge of advanced reactor development and innovation that's happening that I think is a pretty exciting sort of opportunity space for the technology as a whole because it starts to migrate towards, you know, newer, different technologies that open up totally different markets, totally different business models, totally different operating potential. Yeah, no, I think that's a great sort of overview and characterization of what's happening globally. And I think to sum it up, what I would say is that, you know, it really sounds like there are some countries out there that are really bullish that are going to build a lot of new nuclear power plants and some that are really bearish and are literally shutting nuclear plants down now as we speak and looking to keep some of their, you know, existing plants shuttered.

So it's really clear that, you know, nuclear has some potential benefits, but also some pretty serious drawbacks that in some cases are really, you know, forcing these dramatic, you know, pivot. away from nuclear power. And generally, we talk about sort of four dimensions, right? We talk about the cost of nuclear, which is pretty high. It's expensive to build a plant, at least from an upfront perspective. We talk about safety, which is certainly driving a lot of the concerns in Japan, particularly after the Fukushima disaster. We talk about proliferation risks. So there are security implications associated with some of the activities around, you know, nuclear. And so this really gets into this question of, you know, can you make weapons from some of the material that you're using, for example? And then the waste problem. You've got long-lived

radioactive waste that comes out of nuclear power plants at the end, which is another big concern that folks have. So, you know, one of the things that I think is interesting about the advanced reactor community is they're not out there just to build new technology for the sake of new technology. There's some really cool things that they're doing, but really, I know you guys are all actively working to solve those four problems. So let's talk about that a little bit. What are some of the potential advantages just in general that advanced reactors can bring to the table across those challenges? Yeah. Yeah. You, You know, it's a great list of the main points to work on solving.

In other words, one of the things I like to think about and why I work in this space is sort of at the highest level, right? If you have something that's clean, cost competitive, and safe, that's a pretty good combo. And that's what you strive to do. And when you look at kind of the fundamental drivers in nuclear technology, I just like to start here before I dive into these because it kind of frames the overall potential that is what is driving this interest in these activities. You know, it's one of my favorite metrics is the actual material intensiveness of different power sources. I think that's one of the best sort of fundamental, I would say, metrics by which you can analyze the true cost potential of a system. In other words, what's the total amount of materials required to make each gigawatt hour of energy produced over the lifetime of different power sources? And when you look at that, nuclear by far requires the least of all energy sources available to us today.

and it's a significant difference in advantage. And that's mostly afforded by the energy density to fuel. One of the coolest things about nuclear power is, you know, when you split an atom, you're releasing almost 50 million times more energy than when you're doing sort of a combustion reaction with, like, you know, a fossil fuel. That's a huge amount. That number is actually so big, it's hard to fathom. One of the ways I like to think about it is it's basically the average difference between the sort of the, the speed at which an average human can kind of jog and the speed of light, right?

So it's a massive, like, change. Like, it's just huge. So that's why it has such a great advantage on that front. And so when you need the least materials, you should be also able to be really the most sustainable, the most scalable, and the cheapest. So that was one of the big drivers, I think, that's caused a lot of people in this flurry of sort of advancement and innovation in the space to look at, well, why aren't we realizing that?

Because the data points haven't borne that out, right? The challenges with new builds, especially in Western countries, with these big light water-cooled, in other words, just water-cooled power plants that produce like 1,000 megawatts. You know, they're years behind schedule, billions of dollars over budget on projects that already cost billions of dollars. And a lot of that ties back to some of the fundamental aspects on the design

and how that ties over, you know, into sort of how you integrate the needed features and capabilities of the plant to achieve the safety goals as well as, you know, have a system that operates reliably. And at the end of the day, like this is where you see these really exciting advantages coming, right? So from kind of a baseline level, today's plants, building new plants like that are very big construction projects, right? You're talking about a big high-pressure system that needs, you know, big heavy components, and it turns into big infrastructure

projects. And infrastructure projects, you know, are not things that necessarily, I would say, the West excels at as of late. I think we're getting better in certain areas, but it's definitely not nearly as effective as we've seen smaller, you know, power projects that sort of de-infrasture structure it, which is a weird way of, it's kind of a made-up word, but like make it simpler to build, right? So like gas turbines, what we've seen there in terms of how modular they've gotten, look at how renewables have been built out. And on kind of small piece by small piece, but at the aggregate can be quite large and are much more approachable in those senses. So I think what you see is, is there's some interesting drives, you know, towards simplicity and scale. And then that ties in

with some of these sort of inherent advantages. So that's my big preamble to basically look at this going through cost, safety, proliferation, risk, and, and, and, and, and it's a very end. and waste. So basically on the cost side, driving to simple, smaller designs at the end of the day allows for a lot more, I would say, centralized manufacturing and fabrication. So you get rid of some of the stick built, in other words, big infrastructure, heavy construction aspects of a plant. You simplify it. And you combine those attributes of how you design the plant for buildability or constructability perspective with also the safety features. One of the things that's also, so it kind of segues into that aspect. One of the neat things about this new wave of technology is they're really centered largely

around putting the physics that drive safe performance sort of naturally on your side. In other words, these plants take advantage of characteristics that make them self-stabilizing, self-cooling, so they only rely on natural forces to drive those processes. Therefore, you don't need these big extra systems that are redundant upon redundant and independent, and you know, you have to have basically a bunch of these things on hand for these kind of systems you have to rely on. to turn on in parts to actuate, motors to turn on, pumps to work, all this stuff to remove sort of all the extra heat and keep it going. In other words, you put the physics of safety on your side to remove that through inherent and passive means.

So it's really enhanced safety that also at the same time helps to reduce costs. So you're getting simplicity. And I know in some cases you're also helping to take the humans out of the loop, right, which can be a safety enhancement. Exactly. Yeah. People sometimes forget, but like the weakest link often is human error for most systems, not just nuclear, but for most systems, right? So what you can do by simplifying what needs to be done just makes plants safer and also cheaper. And on that, I think it's just kind of an interesting thread to pull on from sort of an abstracted, abstracted viewpoint.

But when we think about nuclear sort of technology development arc, in many ways, sort of the first macroscopic iteration for the first, I don't know, maybe 50 years of the technology was, I would say somewhat focused on taking, you know, the reactor fuel and maximizing the amount of power you get out of it without regard to all the downstream effects. And I think what this new wave is is saying, no, no, no, let's look at it instead of saying, hey, actually, let's take sort of the boundaries at which you can have all of the safety aspects you need of a plant to keep it cool, to keep it stable, just defined by basically

the natural flow of air, for example, over parts of a system. And then, you know, effectively optimize against that. So, you know, maximize power against that. That leads to smaller plants, but it also leads to much, much simpler designs. So just like you said, it ties safety actually to the cost benefit. which is a big advantage. Yeah, and let's pause on that for a sec, because I think this is starting to get into

some of the technology classifications around particularly advanced reactors. And so folks may have heard, for example, we've been talking about traditional big light water reactors at the beginning, which is what we've built over the past couple of decades. A lot of folks come to me and ask me questions about small modular reactors and say,

hey, those sound cool. Why aren't we building more of those? And then there's a whole other class, which we call microreactors, and that's where Oaklow fits in. So, you know, you may, mentioned that these big traditional reactors we have, they're built that way because of the economies of scale. You know, by the time you're putting together a reactor pressure vessel and all the safety

systems you need to operate that plant, you want to get as much energy out of it as possible. So just say a little bit more about, like, what defines a small modular reactor versus a microreactor? And, you know, and then you've mentioned some of this, some of the ways in which safety systems are simplified, but how else are you going to get the kinds of economies of scale you might need to make these costs competitive? Yeah. Yeah. So one of the things that comes out of driving the simplification often leads to smaller plants that are easier to build and cheaper. And that's led to these kind of differentiations. And typically people think about small modular reactors as being reactors that produce up to 300 megawatts of electric power. So about one-third the size or smaller of today's existing plants. And it allows you to have simpler parts, smaller parts that are much easier to fabricate and ship together and sort of reduce the amount of on-site construction. needed and take advantage of all the things we can do very efficiently, manufacturing and

fabricating things in a controlled environment. And then it also allows for just smaller total project sizes and therefore total capital costs and total capital needs, which can really help, right? Financing a $30 billion project is a lot harder than a $1 billion project, right? But then even further kind of size reduction goes into microreactors, which are, you know, I'd say on average people typically think of it as 50 megawatts of electric power or less. systems that are suited to be sort of generate, or basically operated and generate power in a more decentralized

or even distributed fashion, closer to points of use, even often to microgrid applications or behind-the-meter applications, and open up the door for some interesting opportunities that are quite different markets of service than just, I would say, the big centralized plants. Both SMRs and microreactors also allow for some interesting industrial integrations, including direct use of heat, which is a big way to help tackle decarbonization. At the end of the day, nuclear systems fundamentally produce heat that we then do things with.

And so they actually produce heat much more cheaply than they even produce electricity. So there's a lot of opportunities that can come with those for decarbonizing industrial processes with both the heat and the power. And I think one of the interesting things, too, on the size range is that also ties in with different modes of financing that become accessible at these different cost points, right? when you're talking about a $30 billion project versus a billion dollar project versus a hundred million dollar project, right? There's a lot of different levers you can pull for each one. But the smaller you get,

the more commoditized that those mechanisms become and a lot more suitable for a wide array of customers and also basically business models. Okay, so let's dive into some of the technology, you know, differentiators here. And one of the things that you mentioned was that, you know, around some of the uses of nuclear, that it's not just electricity, it's actually heat.

And so there are, you know, and for example, you can actually use the heat directly from a traditional nuclear reactor, and that was something that I spent some time exploring when I was at Exelon. But it's not very high heat. It's about 300 degrees C. It's about the most you're going to get out of a traditional nuclear reactor. And some of these advanced technologies can go a lot higher. But let's talk about some of the general categories that people tend to apply to new kinds of advanced reactor technologies. Maybe starting with what we call liquid metal cooled reactors. What does that mean? What's a liquid metal cooled reactor? And what are some of the big advantages

of those kinds of reactors over traditional reactors. Yeah. As I think about it, these different technology types ultimately have different benefits, which is why they're being pursued compared to today's reactors. And you mentioned temperature, and that's a big one. Temperature capabilities, operating at higher temperatures mean more markets for heat, high efficiencies and electricity.

So that's one of the ways liquid metals come into play. So liquid metals use literally what it sounds like, liquid metals, kind of like that transformer robot do, but not sentient coolants. But, you know, just like, you know, we don't see liquid metals too often in, like, our daily lives. That's one of the most common, I think, data points we have is seeing, like, you know, from whatever that was. Did I say Transformers? I meant Terminator, too. Sorry, Terminator. Anyway, now I got you. Yeah, I don't know why. Sorry. So it's like that, you know, liquid metal thing.

Anyway, the reason liquid metals are interesting, and they're often either sodium or a combination of sodium and potassium or lead or an alloy of lead and Bismith. Those are the primary coolants, but there are other ones, too. People are looking at those are the ones, I would say, have most experienced behind them. The reason people are often interested in them is because they're very good at moving heat. We all know metals are very thermally conductive. We buy pans that have, you know, sort of cooking pans that have, you know, metallic properties that are favorable to thermal conduction. Well, liquid metals are just really great, right? Much better than water at moving heat.

And they can operate at high temperatures, which is valuable, but they can also operate at high temperatures without needing to be pressurized. so you can use smaller, simpler components and simpler systems to do that. So that's a big driver why people look at them. They allow for systems to be smaller, simpler, and they also have some very favorable characteristics in terms of their operating aspects for economic reasons and for safety reasons because they're so good at moving heat. Great.

And what about the disadvantages? I mean, one that I know someone pointed out to me once is a really simple one, which is you can't see through liquid metal, which isn't really that big of a problem, but it makes some of your sort of instrumentation and some of the ways in which you might be able to otherwise perform maintenance on the reactor and things like that, it makes things a little bit trickier.

Yeah, I mean, it is. You can't see through it. Some of them are very heavy, so they're a little more difficult to pump. So some of those technologies are just pretty different than what we're used to doing. Some of them can be somewhat reactive or quite reactive with air or water,

so you just have to design the system. So, you ensure that those are either mitigated or protected against or just avoid it altogether. Thankfully, a lot of these technologies, we have a lot of experience managing, but it does introduce some different operational challenges, I think one of the things that sometimes gets forgotten is we as humans kind of operate either in air or in water. Those are our context for most things we deal with.

And that's not just because of how we feel it, but also how we see through it or how we see it or how we feel it. Liquid metals are quite different. So yeah, you can't see through them. You have to use some interesting things like ultrasonic sensors and things like that, which granted we've gotten pretty good at, but it does change some aspects around the operational and handling approaches. So some folks look at, you know, how you design around that, how do you design for that, how do you accommodate that, how do you try to build practice to make that more commoditized? But those are some areas where they have some disadvantages in terms of how you can approach ultimately the design of a system and the operation of a system. Virtual power plants are becoming a reliable

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Okay, so we've talked a little bit about liquid metal cold reactors. Let's move elsewhere on the periodic table and talk about salt cold reactors. How are they different? And what sort of advantages or disadvantages do they have? Yeah, liquid salt reactors have some pretty neat capabilities that kind of build on what liquid metals can do. but add in some other aspects similar to what gas-cooled reactors can do, and also some entirely new aspects. So liquid salts are literally what they sound like, salts that are liquid.

So think of, you know, it's not exactly. Well, in some cases, it's your table salt just melted. So they operate at very high temperatures, typically well above 500 degrees centigrade. So sort of that 500 to 800-800-degree Celsius range, similar to gas-cooled reactors can do. But also they operate not at pressure, unlike gas-cooled reactors, but similar to liquid metal reactors.

So that can be a simpler components. They also have the ability to store quite a bit of heat, so you can take advantage of that. The drawback being they maybe don't transfer that heat quite as efficiently as they store it, but that's easy to manage, right? You just design for that. And similarly, they open up a door that's quite different than the other designs where you're typically talking about a coolant separated from the fuel. One thing you can do is liquid salt is in some designs, they also dissolve that fuel up into the salt.

And that has some advantages in sort of how you can design and build the system and sort of what you can do on the fuel efficiency side. So there's some interesting attributes that liquid salts provide us. So let's talk about a completely different kind of technology. We've talked about liquid metal and salt. Let's talk about an option that doesn't involve liquid at all. Let's talk about gas-cooled reactors. So these are reactors where you're actually using the gas

both to cool the reactor and to move the heat around. Tell us about those. Yeah. So primarily looking at systems that operate at higher temperatures, and gases tend to live well in those higher temperatures. What I mean by higher temperatures, too, is even hotter than liquid metals get to. Just to go provide some reference,

liquid metal reactors often are sort of in the 500 to 600 degrees Celsius output. Gas-cooled reactors are often 600 to maybe over 800 and beyond degrees Celsius in output. They often use helium as the coolant. It flows through, remove heat from the fuel, and then goes, and at the end of the day, can either directly spin a turbine itself or can go heat up another.

working fluid like, you know, boil water and have that water, the steam go spin a turbine and make electricity. They are typically slightly pressurized, more so than some of these liquid coolants that operate not at pressure, but less so than today's large reactors. And have some of the benefits that come with sort of using very benign inert materials. So you can kind of simplify some of your material selections despite, you know, you just need to make sure they operate at higher temperatures. And it's got some significant. interesting interest based on some technology experience we have here too. Some of the reactors in the UK that are operating today are gas-cooled reactors that use carbon dioxide. And so you see some,

you know, experienced successfully on how you can navigate using gases to remove heat and manage that accordingly. And then those experiences playing forward into some of these new designs. Awesome. Okay. So we've kind of talked about a couple of categories based on the differences in the coolants and really the things that are used to transfer heat ultimately to the application that you want. But there's also a class of reactors called fast reactors, and some of these can be used with different kinds of coolants. But when folks are fast reactors, what exactly does that mean? What's the advantage that those provide? Yeah.

So that's, you know, one of the aspects about how we think about reactors is also the neutrons that are sustaining the chain reaction, right? Because at the end of the day, the way a reactor works is you basically fission a nucleus of uranium on average. And typically you spit out two to three neutrons each time, and you need one. one of those to go on and cause another fission event, and that's how you sort of sustain that reaction. In today's reactors, well, sorry, in that process, those neutrons are born going really, really fast, typically about like three or so percent the speed of light or something like 10 or 15,000 kilometers per second, so really fast. So we often slow those down to make it easier to manage that, which is what we do in today's reactors, and we do that by bouncing them off of water. Literally,

the hydrogen and water is quite good at slowing them down. Other reactors use other materials like graphite. There's a number of things that are decently good at slowing neuter. down. Fast reactors, in the other hand, and those are called slow neutron reactors or thermal reactors. Fast reactors, on the other hand, though, they let those neutrons run as they were born fast. And so that opens up some different aspects to how they can operate. At the end of the day, fast neutrons, so they don't have a moderator, the neutrons are going quite fast. That makes them, most materials pretty transparent to them because faster neutrons are harder to catch, just like if you try to catch a fastball from a major,

the pitcher. It's a lot harder to do that than just a nice underhanded toss. Similar kind of physics actually at play a lot, a lot harder for a lot of materials to sort of interfere with those neutrons and absorb them, which can open up more common materials to be used. So it's easier to use things like some of these liquid metals or some of these stainless steel materials or other materials. It also means you need a little more fuel, but it also means you're much more efficient with the fuel because now the byproducts of the process of fission itself don't poison the reaction because, again, the neutrons are harder to absorb, so they're less likely. These byproducts are less likely to absorb them.

And that's one of the attributes that people get excited about is you get much higher fuel efficiencies. It opens the door for better coolant usage, more available, cheaper, better material usage. And it opens the door on the fuel side, not just to be more fuel efficient, but also in some cases, it becomes pretty viable and attractive to even recycle that fuel. So not just the fuel from fast reactors themselves that can be recycled, but even the used fuel or the waste from other reactors, too. And those are all sort of some of the attributes and dynamics about why people look at them and why people are pretty interested in them.

Yeah. So again, really interesting class of technologies where there are certainly some challenges around how you actually like manage the reaction when you're dealing with a lot of fast neutrons, but a really cool advantage in that there's the potential to recycle fuel and actually take what we think of as nuclear waste from traditional reactors or other kinds of reactors and use those as fuel in these kinds of reactors. That's great. So that brings us then to microreactors. What are microreactors and what? What's Oaklow? Yeah, so microreactors are power plants typically on the very small side, still making megawatts of power, usually on the order of sort of sub-basically below one megawatt all the way up to possibly 50 megawatts of electric power. And often use some combination of these kind of different coolants and fuel forms we talked about, as well as neutron spectrum, to sort of help you miniaturize these systems favorably. One of the things that's kind of interesting about microreactors is at the end of the day,

they typically are systems that are, you know, because of their size, they're relying on pretty simplified physics, all sort of very natural and passive phenomena to move heat, to remove heat, and to keep systems controlled and contained. And they also need a lot less overall material, right, to work with. So they just become much smaller footprints of plants. They can be manufactured off-site. They can be shipped to where they're used. and you have very little actually, you know, site footprint effects.

You don't need a lot of, you know, I would say deep construction and integration to go on on a specific site. That said, one of the aspects, too, that come from these kind of technologies is also just a very different business case, right? All of a sudden, you can cite these things right next to or even in factories or data centers or communities or villages or off-grade and remote areas that allow you to basically provide power specifically to them. One of the ways I think that's kind of an interesting, somebody said that it kind of fits with how you can think about micro reactors. If you think about putting solar on your rooftops at like a neighborhood level, one way to complement that is put, you know, micro reactors sort of off to the side of the community, sort of like, you know, park or pool or center that can help sort of, you know, underground, right? So like in the community center basement, basically is what they said. I butcher that. But basically, you know, at the neighborhood level, if you think about that, that's kind of what microreactors can open up for some interesting aspects.

And you can use them to, you know, produce both heat and electricity. But I think some of the most interesting things about these systems is they allow you to get a lot closer to the actual energy user. And they also allow you to pretty flexibly integrate, you know, with what they actually want in terms of heat and power. And open the door for some significantly different financing. Yeah. So some communities might choose community solar and maybe in the future there will be an option to choose community nuclear. that could also, by the way, provide your district heating if that was something you wanted to build. Which is pretty cool.

Yeah. That's great. Okay. Well, that's a really helpful overview, I think, of some of the technology characteristics. And we certainly didn't exhaust that space. There are a lot of other kinds of technologies and sort of interesting things that various companies are thinking about doing. But I want to, you know, take some time to really talk about the question I'm most passionate about, which is really scale. Like, in my mind, you know, I'm all about saving the climate.

And so that means we really don't have time to waste and getting, you know, of technologies like this and other kinds of clean tech to the point where they're really making a difference. So let's talk about the pathway for nuclear because it's not a super straightforward, you know, we're ready to deploy all of this stuff tomorrow. There are some hurdles that need to be overcome and some timelines that we have to think about. But some interesting ways that advanced reactor companies are trying to tackle all of that as well. So maybe we can start with cost. So at the end of the day, nuclear is only going to scale if it's cost competitive with other technologies. So what are some things that advanced reactor companies are thinking about

to try to make them especially cost competitive. And I know we've talked a little bit about, you know, safety systems and making them as simple as possible. But how ultimately are you going to get lots of these on the grid, not just a few safe ones? Yeah, it's a great question. I think it takes a fundamental rethinking in many ways across the whole sort of nuclear enterprise about how this is actually delivered. It's a fundamental different paradigm where it's not thinking about one z-to-sies. It's rather thinking about how we build these things and deploy these things like we do, you know, automobiles, airplanes, and, you know, even ships, right? And I use those analogies on purpose because they're quite different scales, and that reflects the diversity of scales on hand here.

I think one of the cool things here, a lot of these systems leverage actually pretty, I would say, available supply chains that are commonly seen in other industries, particularly in like the chemical processing industries. You know, in other words, pretty common materials, pretty common form factors, nothing hyper exotic that's needed. Sort of the biggest supply chain constraint is on the fuel side. And that's largely just because, you know, the demand for new reactors is going to be much larger, I think, than what the current demand is. So that's going to really strain sort of the existing infrastructure capacity for making fuel. But I'm pretty confident that that's a very solvable problem. There's not a fundamental resource limitation here. That's significant.

It's mostly just building out the capacity to do that. I think similarly, too, when you think about that, it turns into leveraging different aspects about how we actually assemble these things, right? And how you sort of mix dynamically in different companies and different technologies and different technologies. Classes are taking different approaches here that sort of look at how much do you fabricate in a central setting? What parts fall into that? How much do you integrate there before you ship it up together? One end being sort of maybe micro reactors where everything is put together all on site altogether and shipped out to bigger SMRs, still, you know, small plants, but bigger, where maybe the reactor vessel that has all these internals and all these other sort of some quasi-complex aspects built into it all fabricated together. So then you just ship it out and stick into the ground and then load the fuel in. and then connect it to the rest of the plant to make electricity. So there's kind of a spectrum between those, right, for how you can put these things together and ultimately realize some pretty significant cost savings.

But I go back to sort of that one point of, you know, at the end of the day, nuclear is a very low material intensive, like, or intensity footprint. So it should scale phenomenally well, but it does involve thinking differently about these things. And that's going to be setting up new factories, new facilities, new capabilities and infrastructure to realize this. Or in some cases,

is leveraging existing capacity that's underutilized at sort of fabrication, you know, well, you know, in the fabrication space. So in other words, you know, underutilized factories or even shipyards or things like that that can really help leverage how we can build these things quickly and at scale. But it also ties in, and I'll just make this segue here on the regulatory side, which is a big one, right, in terms of how we match that. Well, actually, wait, before you go too much into the regulatory piece, because I think, I think it was really great what you said there.

there was one piece I wanted to add, which is just on the topic of should. Nuclear should scale phenomenally well. And I think we have to also, you know, I'll be honest with ourselves about the history of nuclear here. And the truth is that when you look at the United States and you look at France, two of the places that have built the most reactors in the world, you see reverse learning curves, actually, when it comes to the cost of nuclear power. It actually increased over time, got more difficult to build an economically efficient nuclear power plant. However, in South Korea, you see something different. They were actually able to follow a learning curve that involved actually reducing the cost of their plants. But I think it's an

important thing for us all to keep in mind that it's not just about the cost estimate of that first plant. It really is about what do you see as kind of the ultimate, you know, scaling equation for these plants and what are the costs that they're going to get to? And that's one of the reasons for what it's worth that I'm really kind of bullish on microreactors, like above some other things, because you really see this opportunity to, you know, build these in a lot of different contexts and ultimately to have something that looks a lot more like a real learning curve where the cost come down, which I think is really important. Yeah, I think that's a great point.

Like, there's an institutional sort of learning curve on cost that is almost always favorable in factory settings, right? If you're repeating these things in an assembly line process, you just get better and better and better at it, right? I mean, the simplest and crude analogy is if you've ever bought three IKEA bookcases, think how much faster, you know, you are building the third one than you were the first one. It's a similar thing. Sounds like a terrible Saturday, Jake. It also is a terrible Saturday. So we've been talking a little bit about some of the cost. aspects and specifically about how some of the supply chain advantages, you know, that really

advanced reactors may confer could make a difference here. But let's talk for just a sec about financing, which is an aspect of cost and certainly relates to the discussion last week. So, you know, one challenge with a traditional nuclear reactor is that financing one of those basically requires, you know, betting the entire balance sheet of a utility if they're going to do it themselves, right? This is a huge thing. So already, if you've got smaller nuclear reactors, you've got some advantages potentially from a financing perspective. But say a bit more about advanced nuclear reactors. Are there certain things that advanced nuclear reactor companies are doing or innovating

on to try to find ways to get better financing terms going forward? I think it turns into a diversification of both size and in actual product. In other words, it can be about heat and electricity or just heat, right? Or just electricity. And those together open up the door for some pretty, I would say, creative, but also well-exercised mechanisms by which you can finance these plants. And they come with, generally speaking, significantly lower total costs, especially at smaller sizes. And that affords some different business models that are being developed, where instead

of, for example, just trying to sell the power plants to utilities, maybe instead you're actually just selling the power to the utility and or other off-takers, including straight to consumers, whether that be industrial users or even, you know, actual individuals, through power purchase agreements or similar vehicles. And that's been so well, I would say, exercised, right, that it's become fairly commoditized in the space for how we look at solar projects and wind projects in many cases.

And that's great because if financing a nuclear plant that's a 10 plus billion dollar build or bigger, it's a pretty complex financing transaction, right? And not a lot of people really want to jump to do that. But when you're talking about building on something that there's a lot of providers for and it's well understood in terms of an energy project, it just looks a little bit different

because now you're selling power that is sort of a firm, fixed output and can be dispatchable and has some capacity benefits available to it. That can be a pretty attractive thing for not just the financial community, but also obviously for customers. So together, that makes a really attractive mechanism

by which you can finance these things. And the size of these kinds of projects look more similar to different grid-scale renewable projects, right? If you're talking about building like $100 million or less, plant that produces tens of megawatts of power, that becomes something that looks pretty similar to what's done out there. And then you can also bring in mechanisms like insurance into play, right?

Like project finance insurance. And that can really help manage risk on these, basically on these deployment cases, especially for early deployments. So you can afford to buy yourself down through that curve, sort of the learning curve and the cost curve on that, especially with these smaller plants where you can largely, you know, assemble these things in factories and sort of forward finance against that to your inventory, if you will, that you can build out. So there's some really different ways in which we think about financing here. Different to nuclear, the old ways of doing things, but very familiar to the rest of the energy

finance world. And I think that's a really powerful combination. That's awesome. I cannot wait to see Oaklo pioneer the nuclear energy as a service model. This is going to be amazing. Silicon Valley is not ready. We're excited about that. No, I love it. I think it's a really cool idea. Yeah, but now let's get back into this point about the regulatory side of things. And this is another piece where, you know, venture capitalists, I think historically, although much less so now, excitingly enough, have been really scared of the nuclear space, in part because of how heavily regulated it is. And you guys within Oaklo are really on the front lines here.

I kind of think of you honestly as like, like there's this regulatory jungle, and you guys are like literally the vanguard out there, like cutting through this with some successes and some setbacks. So let's hear your perspective on this. How is the regulatory environment? How well suited is it for advanced reactors? And what do you think is the future here? Can we have a regulatory system that really protects the public,

but also enables us to do what we need to do to build carbon-free technologies? Yeah, this is, I mean, this is a great question because of how significantly important it is when we talk about what the potential is here and also those pathways to scaling. It's a fundamental function on the regulatory side, right? And I'll just say, I think to answer your question, you know, can, like, how ready, like, how capable is this to happen? I think at the end of the day, it should be very, very minimal because you're bringing forward

technologies that have these, these natural safety characteristics that really scale well for what, you know, enabling the regulators to do what their job is, right, which is to protect and ensure, you know, public safety. That said, they look different than what's been done to date. And that's where it becomes challenging. And in many ways, I would say, like, there's been great strides made in sort of the Western regulatory world. But their record has been abysmal. So just to point at a high level, I think it's a data point that I think is interesting. You know, there have been very few successes

in the last 40 years where plants that have submitted their initial applications to not just the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but any Western regulator and had those plants actually built and operated. Now, that's not all the regulators' fault, right? Part of that's economic conditions and market conditions and all those things. However, there's a definite aspect there that suggests that there's, I would say, some degree of even being out of practice in the regulatory space. So thankfully, I would say at a level of, you know, at a policy level, there's been a significant bipartisan commitment and even to maybe mix terms here a little, but even somewhat of a significant like grassroots and environmentally centered approach to sort of drive the regulator in the United

States specifically to be. more modern in terms of how they can be prepared to look at these new technologies. In other words, push them to modernize and transform, right, from how they've been doing things before. And what's been encouraging is there's been a lot of great progress made. If you think about what the NRC is, fundamentally, you know, it's a pretty technocratic agency with a lot of engineers and staff, and they know how to look at these technologies and generally understand them. And what the key, though, is preparing them so that they can also look at these technologies and understand them through sort of the right lens and not necessarily through the lens of the

past. In other words, these are not, as you say, your grandmother's reactors, these are not big light water power plants. So they fundamentally look different and different attributes and meet and achieve safety in different ways. So what does that look like in practice? When I talk about natural safety characteristics, sometimes people say, or I say the terms even, and other people say, oh, they're passive or they're inherently safe. What those ultimately mean is they rely on natural phenomena to keep the plants safe, right? So in other words, if you lose the ability to, like, if all the sort of similar to happen at Fukushima, and this actually can be referenced exactly to a real reactor that was built and operated and tested through this.

If you lose the ability to remove, to actively drive cooling trains, so you lose power to the site, you know, well, it doesn't matter because just the natural circulation of air just around the system actually removes all the heat you need to remove to keep everything cool. Well, and that's fundamentally just a function of, you know, the natural properties of air, which don't really change and gravity, right, which similarly doesn't really change. So those things are pretty favorable attributes to have on your hand. or on your side. However, that's a little different to look at, right? So you have to think about how do possible pathways for heat transfer, right, degrade or change, and how do you characterize that and have confidence in that? Well, it's very readily doable, but those are some of the questions that are somewhat hard to approach in the regulatory space. Now, the NRC has made great strides, but again, you have to look at these things sort of towards their actual safety attributes.

There's also process challenges, right, on the regulatory side. In other words, the system has been built for the plants that are operating today. And if you think about the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, it largely was stood up after sort of the, its predecessor agency, the Atomic Energy Commission, was the one that was sort of pioneering a lot of the new ways of, or not new ways, but pioneering the technology development and the regulation of it.

And so it got stood up more in an operating culture regime than sort of a new design and build regime. So so much of the energy is focused on sort of regulating the existing operating plans that when you come in with new designs and new things, there's a lot of, I would say, like, inertia and process that has to sort of be rewound or just discarded and built anew. So the innercy has done some good things in that space. They've implemented some good lessons learned, but there's still bumps on the road. And our approach fundamentally is if we take these advanced reactors and try to license them

like today's reactors, we fail, right? Because they're going to be, it's a square peg round hole problem. You can't, you know, your apple orange problem, right? You can't make an apple into an orange or an orange into an apple. So don't try. Instead, focus on the fundamental drivers for public safety. And the regulations themselves are actually fairly generic. They're not entirely, but they're fairly generic. So you can meet them. They're pathways to do that.

But you're going to have to try new things. And that's what we did. So, you know, we became the first company to formally engage in pre-application with the NRC, which is where you familiarize them with your technology and socialize how you're doing it. And then also start iterating on regulatory approaches based on feedback from them. And that led us to piloting an entirely new application structure and process. that then we got feedback on to turn into a real application that we submitted in March 2020. And then we got that accepted for review in June of 2020.

And what was important about that was it looks radically different. So it's also not your grandmother's license application. Instead of being a 10,000-plus page document, it was, you know, 600 pages. It was, which, by the way, I mind you, is actually still a higher page per megawatt count than other plants. So it doesn't scale perfectly like that, but still significantly more efficient. And it presented the safety case in what I would call a more like a more logical and narrative case. In other words, it wasn't sort of checking this disparate set of boxes based on sort of the stove piping of previous sort of regulatory experience based on the operating plant. It's instead sort of weaving the whole story together and presenting it there.

And the NRC was able to accept that and review it. I mean, people thought that was impossible even weeks before we submitted the application. So that was great. Very exciting to see that progress. But of course, then, you know, early this year, so a couple months ago, in, well, I guess a month and a half ago, so June of 2022, the NRC punted it back to us. They denied it initially and said, hey, we need some more information on this to actually review it fully.

So, you know, come back, you fill it in and come back to us and resume. At the end of the day, being a first mover, everyone pays attention to that. It's like, oh, man, what is all this? In practice, you know, that's what it is. Hey, the NRC made a lot of good progress on this. There's still work to be done by them and by us. Some of this has to also, you know, when you're doing something fundamentally new, you're going to, like you said, you're in the jungle, you're going to come up, you hack your way through it, and all of a sudden you're up against the cliff. You can't go up it, right? You've got to now double back and figure out where you're going ahead. I would even say it's that extreme. It's more just like, okay, we came across the stream. Our initial pathway to cross it wasn't really doable. So we're going to go a different way. But what I mean by a different way is, like, we're just going to build a rope bridge. This is a really bad analogy. And while that was a little bump in the road, we think these are fundamentally important.

Because if we tried to do this the typical way, maybe we'd be on a clear path to get a license, but it would be so inefficient that at the end of the day, the end product would be a very, very, like, convoluted license that tries to mix attributes of different technologies together, and it just would not be efficient. So I think this is also where the culture of the industry has to adapt correspondingly with the NRC. There have to be more efforts to push and change things. And when you're doing that with a regulator, you're inherently going to face challenges. But the regulator's shown they can be adaptable, right?

They've done new things in the past, and they can do new things here. And if anything, what we've shown in the past few months or past really almost two years, they can do things radically different in ways people never thought possible, which is great. And again, these aren't trying to come up

with totally different things like, oh, we're just not meeting the regulations. No, here's how we're meeting the regulations. It's just different approaches on how we actually map that and show we do that. And then commit to that and how the plant would actually be operated and maintained. So, yeah, anyway, that was my soapbox.

No, I think that's really helpful to kind of understand the regulatory landscape. I think part of what some people may not fully realize is that really what we're called to do, what the regulator is called to do for advanced reactors is a paradigm shift. And, like, to give an example of what I mean by that, you know, really originally, when the NRC was regulating traditional nuclear reactors, they had a philosophy that they called defense in depth. And so that meant you have to put basically as much. concrete as like, you know, the walls of this nuclear reactor will bear in order to protect the public. And over time, folks started realizing this is actually not the most productive way to do

the regulation. And so the philosophy shifted to one of performance and where you're, you know, regulating the performance of the reactor and saying you need to meet certain things. And now, of course, we're in this world where the advanced reactors don't really fit all of those, you know, performance regulations perfectly because there are just some fundamental differences about how they operate that they can't quite comply with the, with the regulations as written. And so I think what you're pointing out here is that there are folks who could look at some headlines and say Oaklo's nuclear reactor application was denied at the beginning of this year and say that sounds like a really big, scary, awful thing. But it's actually really part of this conversation and part of this healthy tension between advanced reactor companies and the nuclear regulatory commission.

And we obviously all need to move as fast as possible for the sake of the planet, but it's really important to get this right and to basically have a regime that is going to protect the public in all the ways that we absolutely have to. in addition to figuring out what's the right way to enable some of these reactors that bring advantages in that regard to kind of come to the table. You're absolutely right. I mean, even what you said before, before they're talking about scale, because scale is everything here, right? This is what comes here. And this is where I think it's, this is why we're doing what we're doing. Because I can tell you with a microreactor, there's such a low, like, overall hazard and threat that you could go in with a really, really kind of conservative approach and just, you know, make your day a little easier in the regulatory space because you're sort of going into. So even going back in time, like you said,

just these kind of ludicrous defense in-depth kind of models and approaches, it's not a hard thing to do that and ensure safety and have a pathway there. But that doesn't scale. That does not scale, right? And I think fundamentally, the current regulatory framework and processes as approached for light water reactors do not scale for these advanced technologies. So we fundamentally have to try new things. So I think that's where there's also a challenge more so on the industry than just the

NRC, I would contend to bring those forward and to really push, on those with the NRC, right? You have an industry that's pretty averse to doing new things often. And this is an area where there's a really good chance, really important, I would say, opportunity and chance to try that. And the NRC is shown they can work in those areas. But you're going to fall down a little bit. When you learn to write a bike, you don't write it perfectly the first time. You're going to fall and scrap your knee right now. It's okay. That happens. And that's what has to happen. And that's what has to happen. Progress is marked by that. And that's what I think we've seen happen in our experience. I mean, in a way, we've gotten through so

much already that now we know how to approach sort of closing this out quite successfully and similarly for the NRC. So, you know, I wouldn't say they operate as a completely capricious regulator at all. But definitely, you know, obviously they have their opportunities to learn from this and how they can improve. And a lot of it focuses on things like project management and communications. It's not really about can they fundamentally do this or not. It's just how do this efficiently? That's what it gets back to. Well, and again, yeah, I mean, the way I tend to characterize it is kind of this notion of healthy tension, which is what I tried to, you know, communicate to my team working inside a utility and doing innovation is like, you know, the fact that

you run up against challenges, it's not because, you know, people don't like you. It's because fundamentally we got to keep the lights on here. And in this case, fundamentally, we've got to protect the public. So there are some good reasons to kind of have this tension within the regulatory sphere. Okay, so we've talked about what I think are kind of like two of the biggest issues that we tend to confront within, you know, scaling questions, cost and regulatory. But I want to touch on just one or two more before we let you go. One is, let's talk for a second about grid flexibility. So you mentioned, you know, and it's true that nuclear reactors in some ways could be said to have an advantage because they're really kind of always on. They're always supplying

electricity to the grid. But as we have more and more variable renewables on the grid, which is, of course, one of our other really great options for getting carbon-free power, how does this work? How does the system look? Can nuclear play well with renewables fundamentally? Yeah, the answer is yes. I think they play, I'm sorry, can they play yes, then they can play well. I think what's kind of cool is when you combine what renewables do quite well, which is distributed, largely decentralized, clean, and quite affordable scale out of power production, that's great. And then you have to manage their intermittency, which obviously advances in storage help with, but so does flexible generation. And nuclear definitely can do that, especially these advanced

reactor types where you can actually design them to be very responsive and flexible, sort of by default. And when you talk about the fundamental cost attributes of these systems, it enables them to do that even better than sort of today's plants. And today's plants can still do that. But then you have some really cool innovations going on as well, not just on the reactor side, but on sort of how the reactor integrates with the actual power generation side, including integrating capabilities like, you know, heat thermal energy storage, heat storage that can allow you to peak for hours at a time and match, you know, really match sort of the mismatch where they may exist in demand and generation, especially in sort of those, you know, sort of the like five to 8 p.m. windows and

things like that. So it's a really neat capability set. So if you think about it, right, like, Nuclear is really good at making heat, and then you can do a lot of things with it, including storing it. And that opens the door for a lot of flexibility options. That can be quite accommodating. So I think it's actually like they integrate really naturally and really favorably. Right. And what you're alluding to is potentially some ways in which nuclear can help, not just with electricity, but potentially with industrial decarbonization, right, by supplying really carbon-free heat. Okay.

And then the last one, of course, let's talk for a sec about waste management. obviously folks are a little bit nervous about the fact that nuclear waste is something that is really long-lived, and we have to figure out something to do with it. How are advanced reactors approaching that as a challenge? What are some of the ways in which they can maybe do better than conventional reactors in terms of alleviating our waste burden? Yeah. So I think that's one of the cool things about these advanced reactors is they often implement ways to basically have higher fuel efficiencies, and therefore associated less waste coming out of the plant.

So that has a pretty significant upside. And that's afforded by them being more efficient. You operate at higher temperatures, you make electricity more efficiently. And also on the fact that at the end of the day, some of these fuel forms, and that's one of the cool things here, right, is there's a couple different fuel forms. Some use metal fuel, some use these coated ceramics. Some use even fuel dissolved in liquid. All of those have different attributes that can really enhance sort of what the actual fuel utilization efficient. looks like. And therefore, you know, if you use your fuel more efficiently, it means you have

less waste coming out of it, which is a great carryover. And then the other aspect that's really attractive was we kind of mentioned before is some of these reactors have the ability to recycle and recycle economically. So fast reactors in particular have some neat attributes where they can not just use this fuel efficiently, but they can use waste from other reactors and themselves quite efficiently and economically so, right? That's been one of the big hang-ups and hold-ups for recycling with today's reactors. It's just economically pretty hard. But some of these other technologies, it's a pretty significant paradigm shift thanks to the fundamental physics of the plants because they just use fuel in a much more efficient manner. And so you have a potential for radically simplified and reduced waste stream that can open the door for disposing the waste in coated glasses and metal forms that then you reduce the sort of storage times and disposal timeframes from perhaps hundreds of thousands or millions of years to maybe hundreds or thousands of years, right?

it becomes a much more manageable approach. Plus, there's some really interesting innovations in the waste disposal side of things, like Deep Borhole disposal, that are really flexible for these kind of, actually really accommodating for these kind of flexible waste forms. So you can dispose of this stuff in areas, and you can really secure and effectively ensure its long-term disposal until it decays away. One interesting weird paradigm of nuclear,

especially when you talk about fundamentally recycling, is it changes the life cycle and lifetime of these waste, So it's no longer about things running for, like, well, it just decays away. In other words, you get the benefit of the fact that while it's radioactive, that also means it's decaying away. So at the end of the day, it actually does go away. Now, when you're talking about hundreds of thousands or millions of years, people don't care about that. But when you can reduce the timeframes to, like, hundreds or even thousands of years, then people care, right? That becomes a lot more approachable.

Yeah, I think that makes sense. And I think, you know, even though hundreds or thousands of years, that's still a pretty long time. I think part of what I commonly come back to is, you know, if, you know, if you're a lot of, my choice is to manage nuclear waste for hundreds or thousands of years or manage a whole lot of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, I'll pick managing nuclear waste every single day of the week. I mean, it's just, I think that's an easier engineering challenge, frankly, for us to approach. Yeah, and I'll just quickly say that, like, the waste produced from generating enough power, basically in the United States, nuclear powers produced, you know, a lot of energy for decades,

um, right, producing 20% of our energy for, I don't, 30 plus, 40 plus years. and then before that as well. And the amount of waste it's produced would fit on a football field being like, you know, 30 or 40 feet high. So that energy density also means a pretty much smaller volume of material to actually have to manage, right? So like you said, while you still have to manage it, it becomes a much smaller volume than the huge amounts of greenhouses that we obviously don't manage. So it becomes a very different paradigm about that. Okay. So Jake, we just had, you know, a wide-ranging conversation about all of the, you know,

implications of nuclear power, where things are today, where advanced reactors are going to go. Sum it all up for us. How bullish should we be about nuclear energy as a solution to our climate challenges? I think very bullish and very optimistic about the role it can play in helping us decarbonize. At the end of the day, these new technologies afford significant benefits across the board in terms of their design, their capabilities, their economics, how they can integrate with the sort of evolving and dynamic grid that we're seeing emerge, as well as playing a big role in decarbonizing heat, heat usage, which is going to play a massive, like, I think, role in industrial decarbonization. And on top of that, you're building on technology that has

significant R&D already behind it. In other words, investments made over decades by sort of national entities has helped mature these technologies to be ready for the prime time they're entering into. So a couple that with also, you know, I would say a very attractive proposition that these smaller types of systems can afford in terms of cost and in financeability and in deployment timeframes. I think it can really make a big difference. It's going to take a significant, I would say, paradigm and culture shift around fission. But that's happening. That's what we're doing. We're working on our end of that.

And I think others are too. And at the end of the day, you know, progress will bear that out over time. So it's a pretty exciting time, I think, to be in the space, to coming into the space. It's going to play a really important role in terms of coupling in with sort of our broad efforts to decarbonize. And it opens up different ways of thinking about how we can actually use the atom than what we've thought about before. And I think that's going to be a pretty significant benefit for humankind. Okay, so Jay, I just got to say one thing, which is for me personally, again, with my obsession with scale and my obsession for getting points on the board with respected greenhouse gas emissions, we've got these emissions curve trajectories, and we need to drag them down immediately. So there's a set of things that we're going to have to do in the next five years to really meaningfully reduce our greenhouse gas emissions globally.

Nuclear is probably a partial answer to that, given some of the bullishness in other countries for building new nuclear reactors. But advanced nuclear reactors in particular are probably a little bit further out. So just wanted to see, do you kind of agree with that? What do you think is the actual time frame in which we can expect to see, you know, wide-scale deployment of some advanced nuclear reactors? Yeah, I think you're right on the timeframes for what? what that looks like in that five-year window. I think we start to see deployments happen in smaller scales in that time frame, but you're still talking about just a couple of plans here and there.

Ideally, that's setting the stage for a really great growth trajectory that really helps sort of into the future. But I think that's kind of where that transition starts to occur for nuclear. So in that timeframe in the near future, it's, you know, I mean, it is going to be something where it plays a role, but it's mostly finding its footing. I think there's some areas where perhaps if we as a sort of, I would say, society looked at that problem and said, how do we try to accelerate that? There might be some levers you can turn, but at the end of the day, you know, it still takes time to forge and cut steel, and there's only so much you can get done in a five-year window there. I would love to see us

try to be aggressive and set some targets on that at a policy level for how we can leverage existing technologies more efficiently. In other words, you know, there's some interesting things you can do building these plants, including bigger established plants in just slightly more innovative ways, as well as how we can help finance those things to get a couple of those going. But at the end of the day, it's really just, yeah, I mean, you can make some dense, but it's really going to play a bigger role

in the time frame after that. I actually think the five years after that becomes really exciting for advanced reactors, looking forward for the next couple decades, for sure, on the growth trajectory there. But yeah, it is a reality about what that window looks like over the next few years. Right.

So hopefully a really interesting couple of years to come and a really exciting couple of years following that if we really can do what we need to do, to help deploy nuclear as a solution to climate change. Jake, thank you so much for joining. Really, really appreciate it. It's been a really fun conversation. Thank you.

Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Jake is the co-founder and CEO of Oaklo. Catalyst is normally hosted by Shale Khan. I'm filling in until he returns from family leave. The show is a co-production of PostScript Media and Canary Media. Find me on LinkedIn and Canary and PostScript on Twitter. Tag us if you want to provide feedback on this episode or want to suggest

just future topics. You can find links for this episode's topic and guest in the show notes, or go to canarymedia.com. Our producers are Daniel Waldorf and Stephen Lacey. Sean Marquand composed our theme song. I'm Lyra Pierpoint, and this is Catalyst.