AI transcript
0:00:00 (upbeat music)
0:00:02 Pushkin.
0:00:07 – You may know Jackson Pollock,
0:00:11 the painter famous for his iconic drip paintings.
0:00:14 But what do you know about his wife, artist Lee Krasner?
0:00:18 On “Death of an Artist,” Krasner and Pollock,
0:00:20 the story of the artist who reset the market
0:00:23 for American abstract painting,
0:00:26 just maybe not the one you’re thinking of.
0:00:28 Listen to “Death of an Artist,” Krasner and Pollock
0:00:31 on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
0:00:34 or wherever you listen to podcasts.
0:00:36 – When I was a kid in the 1980s,
0:00:43 I lived about 40 miles from a nuclear power plant.
0:00:47 It was called Sanonofre, it was right by the freeway.
0:00:49 And whenever we drove past it, me and my family,
0:00:52 we would all hold our breath, like, you know,
0:00:55 to protect ourselves from the radiation or whatever.
0:00:58 It’s one of those ritual family jokes,
0:01:01 those things you do a million times,
0:01:03 not really because they’re funny,
0:01:05 but because they’re just what you do.
0:01:07 I’m telling you this because that joke,
0:01:11 that ritual, that holding our breath,
0:01:13 it speaks to what the vibes were
0:01:16 in the ’80s about nuclear power, right?
0:01:18 That was a moment of, like, peak nuclear fear.
0:01:23 There had been the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979.
0:01:27 You had the Simpsons with Homer Simpson,
0:01:29 always almost causing a meltdown.
0:01:31 And then more seriously, in the ’80s,
0:01:33 you had the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
0:01:37 So we were very scared of nuclear power at the time.
0:01:41 But looking back, looking back from today,
0:01:44 I wonder if maybe we were scared of the wrong thing.
0:01:48 Because today, it looks increasingly likely
0:01:52 that we may need more nuclear power,
0:01:56 alongside more renewables,
0:01:58 in order to stop burning fossil fuel
0:02:00 and contain the risk of climate change.
0:02:04 So looking back, maybe instead of being afraid
0:02:07 of a world with nuclear power,
0:02:09 we should have been afraid of a world without nuclear power.
0:02:13 (upbeat music)
0:02:16 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and this is What’s Your Problem,
0:02:21 the show where I talk to people
0:02:23 who are trying to make technological progress.
0:02:26 My guest today is Yasser Arafat.
0:02:28 He is the chief technology officer at Aolo Atomics.
0:02:32 Earlier in his career, he worked for the federal government
0:02:34 at the Idaho National Lab,
0:02:37 where he designed a nuclear microreactor
0:02:39 that he called Marvel.
0:02:41 Now at Aolo, Yasser is trying to commercialize
0:02:44 a version of that reactor.
0:02:46 His problem is this.
0:02:48 How can you mass produce nuclear reactors
0:02:50 in a factory in a way that’s safe, scalable, and cheap?
0:02:55 We mostly talked about the reactor
0:02:57 that Yasser has designed to be mass produced in a factory.
0:03:00 But to start, we talked about the on-again-off-again history
0:03:04 of nuclear power in the United States.
0:03:07 Yeah, in Minnesota, nuclear really starts from the,
0:03:13 especially in the U.S. in the ’50s, right?
0:03:16 We’ve had the Atomic Energy Act was amended, right?
0:03:19 To allow nuclear industry to be privatized in 1954.
0:03:24 And that kind of, you know, that paved the way
0:03:27 to the construction of the first commercial power plant,
0:03:31 I should say, in Shippingport, Pennsylvania,
0:03:34 which began operations late ’50s, I think ’58 and ’58.
0:03:38 And Shippingport really symbolized
0:03:40 this beginning of this new dawn of the,
0:03:43 what we called the first atomic age.
0:03:47 And if you pause there for a second,
0:03:49 up until then, if you think about it,
0:03:51 for the last million years or so,
0:03:54 humanity really used combustion
0:03:58 as their primary source of power for growth,
0:04:01 for, you know, evolving civilization.
0:04:03 For most of that time, we burned wood.
0:04:05 And then for like a brief moment of 100, 200 years,
0:04:09 300 years, we burned coal.
0:04:11 Little bit of natural gas, a little bit of oil,
0:04:13 but you’re always burning something.
0:04:14 We’re always burning something.
0:04:16 It’s always combustion, right?
0:04:18 So that was really a pivotal moment
0:04:20 and really humanity first unlocked that.
0:04:23 This amazing new modern way of creating energy
0:04:27 by splitting atoms.
0:04:29 There was a big pivotal moment.
0:04:30 And then entered the ’60s and mid ’70s.
0:04:33 So from the ’60s to mid ’70s,
0:04:36 we called this the golden age of nuclear, right?
0:04:40 And that’s when really, like,
0:04:41 we built a ton of reactors commercially in the United States,
0:04:45 about 55 of them, you know, up until mid ’70s.
0:04:48 There was a lot of optimism about nuclear
0:04:51 and a lot of investments went in there.
0:04:53 However, when you started approaching the mid ’70s
0:04:57 and all these nuclear problems around,
0:04:59 it also invoked the creation of a regulatory body, right?
0:05:04 NRC was formed in the mid ’70s
0:05:07 and, you know, new regulations started
0:05:10 getting imposed on plants
0:05:12 and automatically things, you know,
0:05:14 the cost went up when regulations became tighter.
0:05:18 – The NRC is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
0:05:21 – That’s correct, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
0:05:23 And then right after, you know,
0:05:24 just a few years later, 1979,
0:05:27 that’s when Femile Island happened, right?
0:05:29 I was in Pennsylvania.
0:05:31 We had a partial meltdown of a reactor
0:05:33 and there was a widespread public concern of fear.
0:05:37 Sure, nobody died from that accident directly,
0:05:39 but it really, like, you know, shook the public quite a bit
0:05:42 and really put a lot of emphasis
0:05:44 on the potential safety risks.
0:05:46 And that, in turn,
0:05:49 made the regulatory activities even stricter.
0:05:53 – And so that’s basically like
0:05:55 new construction of nuclear power plants
0:06:00 more or less stops in the U.S. after that, right?
0:06:03 – Really much.
0:06:03 That was the nail in the coffin.
0:06:05 For decades, it stopped, exactly.
0:06:07 And so, you know, it’s interesting for me personally,
0:06:10 ’cause so I was growing up in the 1980s, right?
0:06:14 And that was definitely a time
0:06:16 when what we would now call the vibes
0:06:19 were like anti-nuclear, basically, right?
0:06:23 Like nuclear power was this scary thing
0:06:26 and nuclear waste was this scary thing
0:06:28 that lasted forever.
0:06:30 And you have Chernobyl right there somewhere,
0:06:32 which is like very bad and very scary.
0:06:36 And people did die, and what?
0:06:41 And so, you know, that was what I grew up with.
0:06:44 And then just in the last few years,
0:06:47 there has been this shift, right?
0:06:49 Like, intellectually, I get now why nuclear power is good.
0:06:54 I get intellectually, in fact,
0:06:59 that certainly coal-fired power plants are super dangerous
0:07:04 and literally thousands of people die every year from them.
0:07:08 They just die in a way that is invisible, right?
0:07:10 ‘Cause it’s not like there’s some accident.
0:07:12 It’s just that coal-fired power plants emit pollutants
0:07:15 that clearly are in the aggregate killing people.
0:07:18 We just don’t know which people and when, right?
0:07:19 Like that seems pretty unambiguous.
0:07:22 So I’m at this point now where like intellectually,
0:07:27 I think I’m pro-nuclear, I’m pro-nuclear.
0:07:29 Although I do have this question about tail risk, right?
0:07:32 Tail risk seems like a thing with nuclear power
0:07:36 that I haven’t quite figured out.
0:07:39 But I still have the emotional wariness, right?
0:07:42 Can you bring me around?
0:07:44 – Sure.
0:07:45 And rightfully so, when you’ve gone through that era,
0:07:48 that stigma, that feeling, that fear kind of like lags.
0:07:52 It stays there for a very long time.
0:07:54 And so, you know, if you kind of fast forward,
0:07:58 that had a real implication as how the energy infrastructure
0:08:03 ecosystem kind of shaped in the United States, right?
0:08:08 So you see a big lag after Chernobyl,
0:08:11 obviously TMI and Chernobyl and then 1990s.
0:08:14 And then 2000s is where we started like seeing, you know,
0:08:18 some murmurs about like, hey, you know,
0:08:20 is there, you know, renewed interest?
0:08:22 And really in the 2000s, you know,
0:08:24 when people are talking about climate change
0:08:26 and they started looking around and see,
0:08:27 okay, what can really, what can we do about it, right?
0:08:30 The concerns about climate change
0:08:32 and the need for low carbon energy sources,
0:08:35 it renewed some of those interests.
0:08:36 Yes, we’ve seen a lot of growth in solar
0:08:38 and other renewables, but really at the end of the day,
0:08:41 you know, utility customers, they knew back in their head,
0:08:44 they need something dispatchable.
0:08:46 They wanted some real clean base load power.
0:08:49 – So dispatchable and base load basically means
0:08:52 always available whenever you need it.
0:08:54 – That’s right. – On straight solar
0:08:54 and wind, yeah. – That’s correct.
0:08:56 That’s correct.
0:08:56 So in 2005, you see some policy changes, right?
0:08:59 You see the Energy Policy Act
0:09:02 that provided some incentive to revive the industry.
0:09:05 – Okay.
0:09:06 – And so that kind of like sparked, you know,
0:09:09 you’ve seen like, you know, after many decades
0:09:11 we’ve built Plan Fogle that just unit three
0:09:14 when operational last year, unit four went online this year.
0:09:18 So, you know, it’s a big achievement for nuclear
0:09:22 after such a long lag.
0:09:23 – So this is the project in Georgia,
0:09:25 like the first new nuclear power plant in decades in the U.S.
0:09:30 – That’s correct.
0:09:31 That’s correct.
0:09:32 There are two units.
0:09:32 I think there were originally two other units
0:09:34 being pursued in summer, but then those projects stalled
0:09:39 but these two have continued and then unit three and four
0:09:43 just came online and now millions of homes
0:09:45 are being powered from this clean source of energy.
0:09:48 However, these are first-of-the-kind units
0:09:51 and there’s a lot of first-of-the-kind risks
0:09:53 that went along with it.
0:09:55 So it’s a mix of optimism on one side
0:09:58 that, hey, we just built new power plants
0:10:00 after so many decades, but on the other hand,
0:10:02 oh, oops, you know, the cost went up,
0:10:05 it took longer to build it.
0:10:06 You know, it’s really the first-of-the-kind
0:10:09 and that kind of challenge
0:10:11 is what we are living through right now, right?
0:10:13 It’s really the project costs are high.
0:10:17 There’s a lot of risks and uncertainties around
0:10:21 how long can we actually take to build one of these.
0:10:23 But the good news is hopefully we built two of these units,
0:10:27 we learned from it and we can do it faster
0:10:29 and better and cheaper.
0:10:30 – I mean, is it sort of like we never,
0:10:32 at least in this country, learned how to build
0:10:35 a modern nuclear plant?
0:10:36 Like we built nuclear plants like literally 50 years ago
0:10:39 and then we kind of stopped and now we got to start
0:10:42 from not quite zero, but kind of scratch again.
0:10:45 – So if you look at the infrastructure, right,
0:10:47 we don’t build big things anymore.
0:10:50 – Yeah, much less nuclear power plants.
0:10:51 Like even a tunnel, right?
0:10:53 They’re building a tunnel from New Jersey to New York
0:10:55 under the Hudson River.
0:10:56 It’s gonna cost, I don’t know, $15 billion or something.
0:10:59 That’s just a tube under the river.
0:11:02 – And it’s all common across the board.
0:11:04 It’s because when you build something bespoke
0:11:08 and a very giant complex project,
0:11:11 we lost that muscle to really execute
0:11:13 such ginormous projects in this country.
0:11:16 – Well, so you were walking us very elegantly
0:11:19 toward the dream of micro-reactors, right?
0:11:21 Like away from giant bespoke projects
0:11:24 and toward the dream of a sort of factory built,
0:11:28 put it on the back of a truck nuclear reactor,
0:11:31 which is in fact what you’re working on.
0:11:33 – That’s correct.
0:11:34 – So tell me about micro-reactors, right?
0:11:36 Micro-reactor is this word that I’ve heard
0:11:39 like smart people say for a few years
0:11:42 and I get from the name that it is a reactor that is small.
0:11:46 But like to start, tell me like,
0:11:48 what is the dream of micro-reactors?
0:11:50 Why is this what smart people talk about
0:11:52 when they talk about nuclear power?
0:11:53 – So micro-reactors are really defined
0:11:55 as very small transportable reactors
0:11:59 that are between one to 10 or 20 megawatt electric.
0:12:04 – So that’s maybe whatever, less than a tenth the size,
0:12:08 maybe a hundredth the size of a power plant.
0:12:13 Truly micro.
0:12:14 – Truly micro.
0:12:14 – Okay, so they’re micro, like why is that appealing?
0:12:18 Like what’s the rationale there?
0:12:20 So there are three key features
0:12:22 that makes these small reactors attractive,
0:12:25 micro-reactors in general.
0:12:26 First, because of their smaller size,
0:12:30 they’re envisioned to be fully factory-built,
0:12:34 not smaller components or modules,
0:12:38 and then bring to side,
0:12:39 you build a whole thing in a factory.
0:12:41 That’s number one.
0:12:42 And you can also transport them using standard roadways
0:12:46 or railways or to the city, right?
0:12:50 – Okay, that’s number one.
0:12:52 – So you build it in a factory
0:12:53 and put it on the back of a truck
0:12:55 and that is gonna be, in theory, wildly cheaper
0:12:59 than building a bespoke power plant every time.
0:13:03 I mean, it’s just like building a car, right?
0:13:06 Like if you had to build a car from scratch
0:13:08 every time somebody wanted a car,
0:13:10 it would literally cost millions of dollars.
0:13:12 But if you make a thousand of the same car in a factory
0:13:14 or a hundred thousand of the same car in a factory,
0:13:16 it gets wildly cheaper.
0:13:17 That’s part one of the dream.
0:13:19 – And that’s really the main idea, right?
0:13:20 When you do repetition of the same thing over and over again,
0:13:25 you can learn how to bring the cost down faster.
0:13:28 You build it in a controlled environment.
0:13:30 – You’re bringing the industrial revolution.
0:13:32 Like we’ve known this for hundreds of years.
0:13:34 Literally Adam Smith wrote about this in 1776.
0:13:38 If you build things in a factory, they get way cheaper, okay?
0:13:41 – However, there are some downsides
0:13:44 of a small reactor from a physics perspective.
0:13:46 You have higher leakage and the economies of scale
0:13:48 is against you.
0:13:50 So you have to find other ways to offset the cost.
0:13:54 – So there’s a cost.
0:13:55 It doesn’t just scale down in an elegant way.
0:13:58 It gets worse on certain dimensions.
0:14:01 – Like for example, if you look at a current power plant,
0:14:04 a water cooled power plant that are basically
0:14:07 the infrastructure, that’s the basis
0:14:09 of all of the nuclear power plants
0:14:10 commercially found today in the US.
0:14:12 So if you look at those, you have around 100 systems
0:14:16 that’s around the nuclear reactor to keep it happy,
0:14:19 to make it work functionally, operationally safer.
0:14:23 100 systems, right?
0:14:24 – 100 different, like when you say systems,
0:14:27 like what’s one of the 100 systems?
0:14:28 – What are you talking about?
0:14:29 – Chemical and volume control system
0:14:31 or a high pressure injection system for safety.
0:14:35 There are various systems that ensures
0:14:37 that the reactor runs properly, right?
0:14:40 – And so for a microreactor,
0:14:41 you cannot build 100 systems for every microreactor
0:14:44 because then you lose all the cost benefits
0:14:47 you have gained.
0:14:47 – So now all of a sudden you have to think like,
0:14:49 okay, is that the right technology to scale down?
0:14:51 Because if I scale it down, I still need 100 systems.
0:14:54 They might be smaller,
0:14:55 but it’s not gonna help me on economic scale.
0:14:59 So you have to kind of rethink the problem a little bit.
0:15:01 So that’s number one is factory made,
0:15:03 second is transportation.
0:15:04 The third one is itself regulating, right?
0:15:08 If you look at a current large scale conventional power plant,
0:15:12 you have hundreds of people working in the power plant
0:15:15 to make sure it works well.
0:15:17 – Homer Simpson, perhaps most famously.
0:15:20 – Well, let’s not go there.
0:15:21 – Do you hate that?
0:15:22 I apologize.
0:15:23 Is that an annoying, are you tired of that?
0:15:27 I’m sorry, it’s lazy on my part.
0:15:28 – Yeah, no, I mean, it does portray,
0:15:32 I mean, Simpsons, a whole entire generation grew up
0:15:34 watching Simpsons, right?
0:15:36 And so it portrays some things about nuclear power plants
0:15:39 that it’s not necessarily painting the right picture.
0:15:43 – Right, it’s capturing.
0:15:44 So the Simpsons launched in the 80s, right?
0:15:47 So it is capturing that sort of peak anti-nuclear zeitgeist.
0:15:52 – That’s right, that’s right, that’s right.
0:15:55 – So, okay, so I apologize, I have derailed us.
0:15:58 – The third factor that makes a microrector unique
0:16:02 is the ability to self-regulate.
0:16:05 So instead of needing hundreds of people,
0:16:07 you need one or two operators to run the system.
0:16:12 That means the machine itself must be able
0:16:15 to ensure safe operations without relying on people
0:16:20 or if there’s a human error, it kind of self-regulates itself.
0:16:25 – So, you actually came up with an idea for,
0:16:32 you came up with a design for a microreactor, right?
0:16:37 You were, it was your previous job,
0:16:39 you were working for the federal government as a researcher
0:16:42 at a lab dedicated to figuring out microreactors.
0:16:46 And as I understand it, there was actually like
0:16:48 a particular moment when you had an idea,
0:16:50 which seems like it never actually happens,
0:16:53 but I always love it when it happens.
0:16:54 So tell me about this moment.
0:16:56 – Sure, so after a month, I joined Idaho National Laboratory
0:17:02 and they really hired me to help them establish
0:17:05 the DOV Department of Energy Microreactor Program.
0:17:10 And very soon after I helped kind of establish the program,
0:17:14 I realized instead of having smaller projects
0:17:18 in specific problem areas,
0:17:20 we need to put them together into a test reactor.
0:17:23 We have to build a prototype, a real test reactor
0:17:27 that shows everyone what a microreactor is,
0:17:30 how does it operate?
0:17:31 How many people do we need to operate it?
0:17:34 Can it be co-located in a neighborhood, for example,
0:17:37 and operate safely?
0:17:38 And right after about a month or so after I joined INL,
0:17:42 I realized, let me go ahead and pitch this
0:17:44 to the Department of Energy.
0:17:46 And I did that to the lab leadership.
0:17:48 They liked the idea, went to Department of Energy.
0:17:51 They thought it was an important thing to do.
0:17:53 And so the question becomes, okay, what size?
0:17:57 What should be the technology?
0:17:59 And now you got to design it, right?
0:18:00 Everybody’s like, yeah, great, go do it.
0:18:02 Now you got to do it.
0:18:04 What is the most basic like plain vanilla explanation
0:18:08 of what is going on in the core of a nuclear power plant,
0:18:12 just generically any nuclear power plant?
0:18:15 So what you’re really looking for is,
0:18:17 you’re splitting larger, heavy atoms.
0:18:21 In our case, it’s mostly uranium, right?
0:18:24 And there’s a specific isotope called uranium-235.
0:18:28 It’s a fissile material.
0:18:29 If you hit it with a neutron, it splits into fragments
0:18:35 of other nuclei and some neutrons and some energy.
0:18:39 But you also release other neutrons
0:18:41 as part of that splitting.
0:18:44 So what you want a nuclear reactor
0:18:46 is for that secondary neutron to go hit another nucleus
0:18:51 and then continue on that.
0:18:52 And that perpetuates into a chain reaction, right?
0:18:57 And the process of fission splitting
0:19:00 of the nucleus releases a large amount of energy.
0:19:03 And that’s the energy we want to essentially take out
0:19:06 of the fuel through a coolant and dump it into a turbine.
0:19:11 You capture the energy as heat.
0:19:14 And then it’s just like any other power plant.
0:19:16 But instead of burning fossil fuel to get the heat,
0:19:19 you’re splitting uranium atoms to get the heat.
0:19:21 Precisely.
0:19:22 So after you take the heat away and send it
0:19:25 into a secondary system to a turbine,
0:19:28 it’s no different than a coal power plant or a natural gas,
0:19:31 for example.
0:19:32 And so what is the challenge?
0:19:36 What is the problem you’re trying to avoid in that setting?
0:19:40 So I mean, from a reactor physics perspective,
0:19:42 you want to make sure that when you want heat
0:19:46 and you can generate a chain reaction to emit this heat
0:19:50 and capture it and use it in a useful way,
0:19:53 you want to be able to control it effectively.
0:19:56 That’s what involves the whole reactor.
0:20:00 If you are able to control this chain reaction,
0:20:03 then you have a functioning power reactor.
0:20:06 You don’t want an uncontrolled reaction.
0:20:08 You want to be able to control it.
0:20:09 So you can ensure that you can safely remove this heat
0:20:13 without breaking anything.
0:20:15 That’s the whole premise of a nuclear reactor.
0:20:18 I mean, an uncontrolled reaction is like a bomb.
0:20:21 It’s like a terrible bomb.
0:20:23 That’s exactly right.
0:20:26 Coming up after the break, Yasser goes to Walmart
0:20:29 and winds up designing a new kind of nuclear reactor.
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0:21:22 Can you hear me now?
0:21:23 I’m Dr. Laurie Santos, and I’m devoting the new season
0:21:25 of my podcast, “The Happiness Lab,”
0:21:27 to topics that are dear to my heart,
0:21:29 with people dear to my heart, like my mom.
0:21:31 Wait a minute, let me put the TV off.
0:21:33 I’ll be finding out why I personally struggle so badly
0:21:35 with perfectionism, stress, and even sitting still
0:21:38 and doing nothing.
0:21:39 But I feel like I’m bad at boredom because you’re
0:21:41 bad at boredom.
0:21:42 Yeah, no, I didn’t do well with doing nothing.
0:21:44 And once I find out why these things affect me so badly,
0:21:47 I’m hoping to do something about it.
0:21:49 So join me on my journey wherever you get your podcasts.
0:21:51 So these ideas were–
0:21:58 when you’re a reactor designer, you’re there
0:22:00 and I’m thinking about all the various iterations
0:22:02 and permutations and combinations of what
0:22:05 makes a nuclear technology feasible.
0:22:08 And if you look into it, mostly the combination of fuel
0:22:12 and coolant used in a reactor defines a nuclear technology.
0:22:17 And there’s about 100 or 120 combinations out there.
0:22:21 Mostly we’ve tried almost every combination
0:22:23 in tests in the past.
0:22:25 So you basically, you’ve got to make the fission reaction happen.
0:22:28 You need some fuel to do that.
0:22:29 And then it’s going to generate a crazy amount of heat.
0:22:32 So you’ve got to keep that from getting out of hand
0:22:34 with the coolant.
0:22:35 Those are the two things you’ve got to do.
0:22:37 That’s every reactor designer to pick that.
0:22:40 You’re there and I’m thinking about different technologies.
0:22:42 It’s not really fully formulated.
0:22:44 It’s in your subconscious mind.
0:22:46 So the moment I was thinking about,
0:22:48 let’s go build a reactor in INL for the microreactor program,
0:22:53 I started thinking about what should be the technology.
0:22:57 And then it really happened suddenly overnight.
0:23:01 I woke up and I said, OK, you know what?
0:23:03 I think I know what it is.
0:23:05 But I really have to put that on paper.
0:23:08 I did go to Walmart, got some color pencils and a big paper
0:23:12 and started sketching it out how that system’s
0:23:15 going to look like.
0:23:17 Now, that’s just an idea, obviously.
0:23:19 We took that idea and really started
0:23:21 making the requirements to build a reactor.
0:23:24 Some things evolved, but fundamentally,
0:23:26 it was the same concept that I sketched up a few days
0:23:30 before Christmas in 2019.
0:23:32 So what was the concept?
0:23:34 What was the design?
0:23:35 So I really looked at all those different iterations
0:23:38 and came down with what is called a sodium thermal reactor.
0:23:44 It is basically using uranium zirconium hydride,
0:23:47 the same fuel that we use in a lot of research reactors
0:23:51 around the globe.
0:23:52 We have a lot of data on it.
0:23:53 We understand it very well.
0:23:55 If you couple that with a very high conductive coolant,
0:23:59 like sodium, liquid sodium, in our case,
0:24:02 all of a sudden you can have a low-pressured nuclear reactor
0:24:07 with a high power density and low enrichment need.
0:24:11 So that really was the basis, the fundamental technology
0:24:15 choice for Marvel.
0:24:17 Why’d you call it Marvel?
0:24:23 Well, that’s because I wanted a name
0:24:26 that people can remember easily and that does not
0:24:31 sound like a scary Greek god.
0:24:34 Smart.
0:24:35 And it can shine the light of coolness.
0:24:38 You don’t want to call it Icarus, right?
0:24:40 You know what we’ll call a nuclear reactor Icarus.
0:24:42 That’s right.
0:24:43 And also, it’s an acronym.
0:24:45 Prometheus.
0:24:45 Don’t call it Prometheus.
0:24:46 Yeah, what’s it an acronym for?
0:24:48 Oh, god.
0:24:49 It has a very long name.
0:24:50 So it’s–
0:24:51 Just do it.
0:24:51 It’s Micro Reactor Applications Research and–
0:24:57 Micro Reactor Applications Research Validation
0:24:59 and Evaluation Project.
0:25:01 And it’s a very–
0:25:01 That’s not bad.
0:25:02 It’s a very descriptive name, if you think about it.
0:25:04 Yeah, it could be anything, right?
0:25:05 Right, right, right.
0:25:06 Yeah.
0:25:07 Your acronym?
0:25:09 It was mine, unfortunately.
0:25:11 Well, it was sort of peak Marvel, right?
0:25:13 You said it was 2019.
0:25:14 It really sticks it in time as like a peak Marvel moment.
0:25:19 So OK, so you have designed this thing.
0:25:22 You get approval for it.
0:25:26 Let’s talk about safety, because you’ve
0:25:28 talked about wanting to engineer it in a way that
0:25:30 is both economically sensible to engineer it in a way that
0:25:38 some company is going to pay to build it
0:25:40 and that it makes sense to build it and safely run it.
0:25:44 And that’s complicated, right?
0:25:46 It’s complicated for Micro Reactor.
0:25:47 So how are you dealing with that as you’re
0:25:50 designing this reactor?
0:25:52 If you look at what is– and ask the question–
0:25:55 what is an ideal nuclear reactor?
0:25:59 It would be what is the simplest reactor that
0:26:04 can have the highest level of safety
0:26:05 without having to add a ton of systems
0:26:08 to ensure that it is safe.
0:26:10 Right.
0:26:11 I mean, the dream is just like whatever, a pile of dirt
0:26:14 or something, right?
0:26:15 The dream is that it’s a glass of water
0:26:17 that you could somehow magically get power out of.
0:26:20 It’s like, what source it could happen, right?
0:26:21 That’s right.
0:26:22 So there’s engineered safety, which really is–
0:26:26 you have to have a lot of engineered, man-made systems.
0:26:30 It’s like pressing a brake in a car
0:26:32 if you design the system.
0:26:33 Brakes can fail.
0:26:35 Sometimes you have to kind of have backups for that.
0:26:37 So there’s a lot of additional things that go into it.
0:26:40 And to be clear, that is sort of the model
0:26:42 for big utility-scale nuclear power plants, right?
0:26:44 They’re full of highly engineered systems and backups
0:26:48 for those systems and lots of people
0:26:50 there to make sure that all those systems are
0:26:52 functioning so that you don’t have some terrible nuclear
0:26:56 accident.
0:26:57 That is correct.
0:26:58 And you really engineered those systems
0:27:00 to make sure they’re reliable.
0:27:01 And you go through a years of qualification
0:27:03 test to achieve that.
0:27:04 And that’s just not going to work for a microreactor, right?
0:27:07 Like, you can’t have all that because it’ll
0:27:09 be too expensive for too little power.
0:27:11 That’s correct.
0:27:11 So to really achieve that high safety
0:27:15 with fewer amount of systems, you
0:27:18 want what is called inherent safety.
0:27:21 It is baked into the material physics of the fuel.
0:27:26 And so we looked around and we said, OK,
0:27:28 what is the highest inherent safety fuel out there?
0:27:32 And it really is uranium zirconium hydride.
0:27:34 OK.
0:27:35 So you choose a fuel that has this elegant property, which
0:27:42 is if the chain reaction starts to get out of control,
0:27:45 the hydrogen that is mixed in with the fuel
0:27:48 tends to bring it back under control.
0:27:51 Is that a fair–
0:27:52 OK.
0:27:52 So is it the case that with the fuel you’re using,
0:27:56 like there is physically no way the chain reaction could
0:27:59 get out of control, or is it just way less likely?
0:28:02 It’s way less likely.
0:28:04 OK.
0:28:04 So in addition to choosing this particular fuel,
0:28:07 that was one of the things you did to bring
0:28:09 this higher level of inherent safety.
0:28:11 It’s clearly not going to be enough.
0:28:13 Like, what else do you have to do in designing this reactor?
0:28:16 Well, there’s a lot.
0:28:17 But the second choice is the coolant, right?
0:28:19 OK.
0:28:20 Coolant is the fluid that takes the heat from the core
0:28:23 and transfers it to the secondary system
0:28:27 where you want to make use of this heat, right?
0:28:30 OK.
0:28:30 And if you look at water today, most existing power plants
0:28:34 are built with water.
0:28:35 Water will be known very much.
0:28:37 All the properties we’ve known, we’ve designed other power
0:28:40 plants before nuclear.
0:28:41 So we’re very familiar with water.
0:28:42 So the industry kind of moved towards that direction.
0:28:45 But if you take a step back and you look at water,
0:28:47 it has some benefits because it’s familiar.
0:28:50 But it has some cons as well, some challenges.
0:28:54 Because you want the system to be hot to extract that heat.
0:28:58 But with water, as soon as you exceed 100 degrees Celsius,
0:29:02 what does it want to do?
0:29:04 It wants to boil off, right?
0:29:05 We’re just not a good thing.
0:29:07 So to prevent from boiling, you pressurize the system, right?
0:29:12 Because adding pressure raises the boiling point.
0:29:15 That’s correct.
0:29:15 Now, all of a sudden, you need something
0:29:19 that is thicker vessel.
0:29:21 You want to make sure you can keep it at the pressurized level.
0:29:26 You need a pressurizer.
0:29:27 You need a sick containment building
0:29:29 in case there is a pipe break or something.
0:29:31 You still have a sick steel and concrete line
0:29:34 containment to hold everything together.
0:29:36 It’s part of the safety case, right?
0:29:38 And it also protects you from external hazards,
0:29:40 like a tornado or a missile or something else, right?
0:29:45 So it’s really– all of these combined
0:29:47 makes up the overall safety case.
0:29:49 So when it came for us to choose the coolant,
0:29:52 we used sodium.
0:29:53 Sodium is many times more thermally
0:29:57 conductive than water.
0:29:59 And when you heat it up, it does not really boil away
0:30:03 at 100 degrees Celsius, right?
0:30:04 The boiling point of sodium is hundreds of degrees
0:30:07 much higher than what we need for the power generation, right?
0:30:13 So it really gives you a non-pressurized system.
0:30:18 So your vessel walls does not have
0:30:20 to be this thick forged component that
0:30:24 are extremely expensive or difficult to make.
0:30:26 You can now make them with thin walled vessels
0:30:29 by simpler manufacturing methods so your costs can go down.
0:30:33 Because you’re no longer pressurized,
0:30:35 you don’t need this– and you don’t
0:30:36 have a large amount of fuel, radioactive material in the core.
0:30:41 All of a sudden, with the microreactor using sodium,
0:30:44 you can make the case to the regulator
0:30:46 that you don’t need a traditional containment.
0:30:51 You still need a confinement, but it
0:30:52 doesn’t need to be extremely–
0:30:55 several feet of concrete and thick, large, steel-lined
0:30:58 containment.
0:31:00 So there’s a lot of other systems that you can simplify.
0:31:03 And what you end up seeing by just making those two choices
0:31:07 and the way you design the reactor from 100 systems,
0:31:12 like a traditional plant, you can bring that down to about 20.
0:31:15 And so what does going from 100 engineered systems to 20
0:31:19 do for you?
0:31:20 So it really reduces the amount of capital expenditure
0:31:26 you need initially to build a plant.
0:31:29 With fewer systems, you need smaller footprint.
0:31:33 You need less civil structure.
0:31:35 You’re paying for less components and pipes and vessels
0:31:38 and formwork and concrete.
0:31:41 So your cost per kilowatt initially
0:31:44 can go down if you simplify your plant.
0:31:48 And that’s really what we are–
0:31:50 that’s one big piece of the puzzle.
0:31:53 The other big piece of the puzzle,
0:31:54 which is really our main thesis in AOLO,
0:31:57 is there’s one model which is you spend six to 10 years
0:32:01 to build a gigawatt scale plant.
0:32:03 If you get really good at it, you can bring it down to like five.
0:32:06 So you spend five years or 60 years optimistically
0:32:10 and you build a gigawatt scale plant.
0:32:12 What we’re doing instead is instead
0:32:14 of building a single gigawatt scale plant,
0:32:17 we’re focusing on building factories that
0:32:21 can produce at least a gigawatt power output every year
0:32:27 by making smaller reactors.
0:32:29 So how many reactors per year would one of these factories
0:32:32 make?
0:32:32 So we’re trying to build our first pilot scale facility
0:32:36 here in Austin, Texas.
0:32:38 And we’re establishing that by end of next year.
0:32:42 And that is going to be designed to build 20
0:32:45 of these reactors per year.
0:32:47 And if demand outgrows that, which we believe it will,
0:32:52 the idea is the learning from that
0:32:54 we’re going to a full factory, a full factory
0:32:56 is anticipated to be between 100 to 200 reactors a year.
0:33:01 So tell me about what the world looks like if it works.
0:33:06 Like if this idea you have of building a factory
0:33:08 to build whatever, a nuclear power plant every two days
0:33:14 or something, how does that work in the world?
0:33:18 And what does it look like looking around America
0:33:20 in that world?
0:33:21 You know, we believe that we can actually usher
0:33:24 in the second atomic age.
0:33:26 Like we can grow nuclear much more rapidly.
0:33:31 So this whole entire energy transition,
0:33:34 which is not only fueled by wanting
0:33:37 to have lower carbon or no carbon energy source,
0:33:41 but also this massive demand and growth
0:33:44 that we’re seeing in the electric sector
0:33:47 as well as the industrial sector.
0:33:48 Electrification plus AI.
0:33:51 Plus AI.
0:33:52 Right, seems like, yes, there’s a lot of demand.
0:33:54 So right, so sure, it means lots of nuclear power plants.
0:33:58 I mean, specifically, is it like there’s
0:34:00 a little nuclear power plant in every neighborhood?
0:34:02 Is it like people are buying kind of, you know,
0:34:04 utilities will buy 10 or 20 of these microreactors
0:34:07 and sort of put them all, you know, on one site?
0:34:10 Like, how does it actually work?
0:34:13 The idea is, you know, the way we’re designing these systems
0:34:16 that if you want a single reactor,
0:34:17 you can have a single reactor.
0:34:19 But if you want two, they don’t share any infrastructures.
0:34:22 You can daisy chain them as many as you want.
0:34:25 So if a customer wants, hey, give me 500 megawatts,
0:34:28 we would provide, you know, 50 of these,
0:34:30 all the one reactors, or in the near future,
0:34:32 when we build our 100 megawatt system,
0:34:35 it’ll be five of those systems,
0:34:37 daisy chain next to one another.
0:34:39 – What do you think the first use cases will be?
0:34:44 – So one microreactors first came into being, right?
0:34:48 Many years ago, in the mid 2014s,
0:34:51 when we were really trying to figure out
0:34:52 what the market was, it really was the remote communities,
0:34:56 remote mines, islands, those are areas
0:34:59 where energy, cost of energy is really, really high.
0:35:02 So when you deploy a first product into the market,
0:35:06 normally it’s high cost, and then you try to lower it down
0:35:09 and then try to penetrate a broader market.
0:35:12 That was the entire idea
0:35:14 for first generation microreactors.
0:35:16 – And I should ask, do microreactors exist in the world now?
0:35:21 – Well, not in the modern definition, it doesn’t.
0:35:24 We have a lot of small reactors,
0:35:26 but they’re not designed to stay small
0:35:29 or being mass manufactured.
0:35:31 If you look around right now,
0:35:32 you don’t see a factory as mass manufacturing,
0:35:35 a bunch of small reactors.
0:35:37 The most we see is in the nuclear submarine site,
0:35:40 where you can make maybe one or two reactors a year,
0:35:42 but not at the scale we’re talking about.
0:35:44 – Yes, and that’s a very particular use case.
0:35:48 – Yeah, but to come back to your question,
0:35:49 where are these first applications?
0:35:52 The first reactor we’re gonna build from our company
0:35:55 is going to be at Idaho National Laboratory.
0:35:57 It’s gonna be a single unit.
0:35:59 And it’s mostly because we wanna learn
0:36:02 how this thing operates, collect data.
0:36:05 – You gotta build one, at some point you gotta build one.
0:36:07 – We wanna show the world that we can validate the cost.
0:36:10 We can validate the deployment model,
0:36:12 which we’re trying to do on set construction less than 60 days.
0:36:16 These are very challenging targets.
0:36:19 – Why might it not work?
0:36:22 – So, if you look at nuclear fission.
0:36:25 – The fundamental thing you’re doing.
0:36:28 – The fundamental thing, right?
0:36:30 We know the physics work.
0:36:32 We know nuclear fission works, we operate them today.
0:36:36 It’s not a matter of proving the technology
0:36:37 if it works or not, right?
0:36:38 We build other advanced reactors before.
0:36:42 That’s, there’s a lot of challenges getting there,
0:36:45 but the true challenge, in my opinion,
0:36:48 is in the scaling of the technology.
0:36:53 Can we make hundreds of these a year?
0:36:55 Can we build a factory that can effectively
0:36:58 reduce down the cost?
0:37:00 Can we make fuel in large quantities
0:37:04 enough to fuel all of these reactors?
0:37:07 And this is not a traditional fuel type.
0:37:09 This is an advanced reactor fuel.
0:37:11 I mean, it’s slightly higher enrichment
0:37:13 than traditional nuclear reactors.
0:37:16 This is a different chemical form.
0:37:18 So we have to establish infrastructure to build fuel,
0:37:22 to build these reactors, as well as the expertise
0:37:26 to deploy them like an IKEA model, right?
0:37:28 You get the instruction, you get all the modules.
0:37:31 – The flat pack nuclear power plant?
0:37:34 – That’s right.
0:37:35 You get all the modules on site
0:37:36 and be able to quickly assemble them together
0:37:38 in a matter of days, not in years, right?
0:37:41 – That all sounds so hard.
0:37:43 – It is hard.
0:37:44 And so we believe we have a very strong team
0:37:47 and we’re assembling strong team,
0:37:48 not just from nuclear, but from other industries
0:37:51 like automotive and aerospace and chip manufacturing
0:37:56 to understand what are the lessons to learn
0:37:58 we can bring from those industries that worked,
0:38:01 that have been successful into nuclear,
0:38:04 trying to not reinvent the wheel all over again.
0:38:08 But there’s a lot of challenges.
0:38:10 There’s a lot of unknowns
0:38:11 and we’re trying to diligently solve them,
0:38:13 focusing on the most important question at a time.
0:38:17 – So I wanna just return briefly to the idea of tail risk.
0:38:22 Like, because it is, it does,
0:38:27 it’s, I don’t know how to parse it at some level
0:38:29 with nuclear power, right?
0:38:31 Like you tell me, like one version of the question is,
0:38:35 what’s the worst thing that could happen
0:38:38 with one of these reactors?
0:38:39 – Okay, so when you go through the regulatory process,
0:38:44 this is the very question that they ask you.
0:38:47 What is the worst thing that can happen
0:38:51 even if it’s the very, very low probability?
0:38:54 What happens?
0:38:55 What do you do in the scenario?
0:38:56 What does the recovery look like?
0:38:58 What is the consequence of that?
0:39:00 And the way we are designing our reactors,
0:39:03 and I can’t speak for everyone out there,
0:39:04 and most companies are doing very similar things,
0:39:07 is even in the worst, worst case scenario,
0:39:10 we don’t have any release of any radioactive material
0:39:15 from the reactor to the outside.
0:39:17 – And is that inherent in the physics?
0:39:20 Like, how do you know that?
0:39:22 Like, how do you know that with certainty?
0:39:24 – It’s a, so a question is, how do we know?
0:39:28 The second question is, how can we prove it, right?
0:39:32 So how do we know is mostly by the data that we have
0:39:36 on the physics side, as well as the engineering,
0:39:39 the way we design our reactor?
0:39:41 How do we prove it?
0:39:42 So the proving goes in several stages, right?
0:39:46 The first stage is we’re building a full-scale,
0:39:49 non-nuclear prototype of the reactor starting this year.
0:39:53 It’s gonna be, you know, turning on next year.
0:39:56 The purpose of that is to collect the data
0:39:59 so we can validate some of our safety claims, right?
0:40:02 But it’s not gonna be a nuclear fuel.
0:40:05 But apart from that little disclaimer
0:40:08 that we don’t have nuclear fuel,
0:40:10 everything else that ensures the performance of the system,
0:40:15 the safety of the system, we can collect data on.
0:40:17 – So you can kick it and throw things at it
0:40:20 and whatever, stress test it, essentially.
0:40:21 – Right, exactly.
0:40:23 So that’s the first stage.
0:40:25 The second stage is, you know, when you have a reactor,
0:40:29 a full-blown, you know, physics-based reactor,
0:40:31 you have fuel inserted into it,
0:40:34 and you’re going to, you know, turn it,
0:40:37 what in a nuclear term it’s called going critical,
0:40:40 meaning you first turn on the machine
0:40:43 and then you slowly ramp up power level
0:40:45 from 10% power, 20% power, 30%.
0:40:48 So you don’t go like, you know,
0:40:49 yeah, I’ve got a reactor and I put fuel in
0:40:52 and here it goes, 100% power.
0:40:55 You don’t necessarily do that.
0:40:56 You do a very step-wise increment.
0:40:59 And that is extremely crucial
0:41:02 to validate the safety characteristics of your reactor.
0:41:07 And once we have validated those,
0:41:09 we do some other tests to ensure our safety systems work.
0:41:12 And when all of those are done,
0:41:14 that’s when you go full power, right?
0:41:16 So that’s really how you prove
0:41:19 that whatever you’ve designed
0:41:21 has the right level of safety that you’ve designed to.
0:41:24 Now, having all that said, there’s also unknown unknowns.
0:41:29 – Yeah, yeah.
0:41:31 – And that exists in almost every technologies.
0:41:33 And that’s something we hope to learn more
0:41:37 as we have more of these systems operational.
0:41:40 But going back to the question,
0:41:41 what is the worst thing that can happen?
0:41:43 Because we have designed this reactor
0:41:45 with enough margin built into it.
0:41:47 In the worst case scenario, we shut it down
0:41:49 and no bad things happen.
0:41:51 Nothing releases, nothing breaks down.
0:41:53 And that’s a level of safety pedigree
0:41:55 that we have to bring the way we see
0:41:56 in research reactors and universities, right?
0:42:00 You know, they’re trying to pull the control rod
0:42:02 as fast as they can.
0:42:03 And you don’t see any breaking.
0:42:05 You don’t see any boiling of coolant.
0:42:07 – Yeah, so you’re alluding to research reactors
0:42:10 and universities, which I didn’t know about
0:42:11 until I was preparing for this interview.
0:42:13 So like, is it right there nuclear reactors
0:42:16 at what, colleges around the country?
0:42:17 Like, what is the story with that?
0:42:20 – That’s right.
0:42:20 I mean, research reactors were really built to collect data,
0:42:24 to measure nuclear physics data.
0:42:26 And if you look around all the major engineering schools
0:42:28 around the United States and also even beyond,
0:42:31 you have research reactors.
0:42:32 They’re called non-power reactors.
0:42:35 You’ve got coolant, you’ve got fuel,
0:42:37 you’ve got all the various instrumentation in place,
0:42:40 but it does not really go high temperature
0:42:42 because you’re not really trying
0:42:43 to make electricity out of them.
0:42:44 You’re trying to generate a chain reaction
0:42:47 and measure physics data, right?
0:42:50 – And they’re so safe
0:42:50 that they let college students play with them.
0:42:53 – Pretty much.
0:42:54 – And did you say they used the same fuel
0:42:56 as you were using?
0:42:58 – That’s correct.
0:42:58 (upbeat music)
0:43:01 – We’ll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
0:43:05 – Can you hear me now?
0:43:13 I’m Dr. Laurie Santos
0:43:14 and I’m devoting the new season of my podcast,
0:43:16 The Happiness Lab, to topics that are dear to my heart
0:43:19 with people dear to my heart, like my mom.
0:43:21 – Right, I mean, I mean, with the TV.
0:43:23 – I’ll be finding out why I personally struggle so badly
0:43:25 with perfectionism, stress,
0:43:27 and even sitting still and doing nothing.
0:43:29 – But I feel like I’m bad at boredom
0:43:30 because you’re bad at boredom.
0:43:32 – Yeah, no, I didn’t do well with doing nothing.
0:43:34 – And once I find out why these things
0:43:36 affect me so badly,
0:43:37 I’m hoping to do something about it.
0:43:39 So join me on my journey, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:43:42 – So now we’re just gonna finish with the lightning round,
0:43:48 which can be quick.
0:43:49 – Okay.
0:43:50 – It can be a little more random.
0:43:51 – Sure.
0:43:52 – Than the rest.
0:43:54 What’s the most underrated subatomic particle?
0:43:57 – Underrated subatomic particle.
0:44:04 – The neutron, right?
0:44:06 I thought you were gonna go straight to the neutron.
0:44:07 – It’s so obvious, I don’t wanna say it’s not loud.
0:44:09 – It’s fair, no, it’s very obvious, that’s fair.
0:44:11 Okay, good, give me a better one.
0:44:13 Give me a better one.
0:44:14 – Well, it is certainly the neutron,
0:44:17 I have to think about it.
0:44:18 – ‘Cause like, you don’t even think of it.
0:44:21 – No, no.
0:44:23 – It’s a positive, it’s not negative, no.
0:44:25 – That’s right, no.
0:44:27 – Okay, well, what’s the most overrated subatomic particle?
0:44:30 – I think it’s a proton.
0:44:37 – Okay.
0:44:40 – Yeah, it’s not, okay, and here’s why I say it, right?
0:44:45 If you’re looking to, I mean, I’m an energy guy,
0:44:47 I look at how we can, I’m not a reactive physicist per se.
0:44:53 But if I look on a high level on the application side,
0:44:57 what gives me energy, chemical reactions like combustion,
0:45:00 where you have exchange of electrons giving energy.
0:45:03 So electrons have some prominence in the world of energy.
0:45:06 – Sure.
0:45:07 – When it comes to splitting a nucleus,
0:45:09 neutrons play a massive role.
0:45:12 But protons, they’re just there to make sure
0:45:14 the world is happy and they balance the charge.
0:45:18 – They’re just there to keep the electrons around?
0:45:20 – They’re just there to keep the electrons around.
0:45:22 – Yeah.
0:45:23 – Yeah, anyways.
0:45:25 – What’s your favorite fundamental force?
0:45:27 – What’s my favorite fundamental force?
0:45:33 – You’re tired of stupid physics questions.
0:45:34 I can ask you other stupid questions.
0:45:36 You ready?
0:45:37 What did you think of Oppenheimer?
0:45:39 – I think it was a great movie.
0:45:41 I hope you’re talking about the movie itself
0:45:45 and not the actual person.
0:45:46 – I’m talking about the movie, not the actual person.
0:45:48 – Yes, but I think it was really great.
0:45:51 – I’ve seen you mention that you have,
0:45:54 that a couple of your favorite books are by authors
0:45:56 who started out anti-nuclear and became pro-nuclear.
0:46:01 And so I’m curious,
0:46:02 what is something that you have changed your mind about?
0:46:06 – One of my earlier mentors in Westinghouse
0:46:09 who hired me in the first place, he said,
0:46:11 “Yes sir, you can be a techie as much as you want,
0:46:14 “but unless you understand the economic side of engineering,
0:46:19 “you truly would not appreciate the value
0:46:22 “of what you’re building.”
0:46:24 So don’t ignore the economic side.
0:46:26 Make sure you keep it right next to the technology.
0:46:29 So that really opened my eyes in this whole area
0:46:32 of not just advanced reactors,
0:46:33 but also the economic side of things.
0:46:36 To make sure that whatever I’m doing
0:46:38 should have a relevance to society.
0:46:41 – Yeah, I feel like the story of the economic transition
0:46:44 at this point is basically a techno-economic story, right?
0:46:48 I feel like in many domains,
0:46:50 the fundamental technological problems
0:46:52 have largely been solved.
0:46:55 And it’s a question of techno-economics.
0:46:57 I mean, people talk about that in like green cement,
0:47:00 they talk about it in batteries,
0:47:01 you’re talking about it in nuclear power.
0:47:03 It’s interesting how often it comes up.
0:47:06 – Right, and there’s so many technologies
0:47:08 out there to solve problems.
0:47:10 But at the end of the day, if it’s not economical,
0:47:12 it’s hard to convince people
0:47:14 why they should adopt it versus something else.
0:47:16 (upbeat music)
0:47:19 – Yasser Arafat is the chief technology officer
0:47:24 at Aloe Atomics.
0:47:26 Today’s show was produced by Gabriel Hunter-Chang.
0:47:29 It was edited by Lydia Jean-Cott
0:47:31 and engineered by Sarah Brugger.
0:47:33 You can email us at problem@pushkin.fm.
0:47:38 I’m Jacob Goldstein and we’ll be back next week
0:47:40 with another episode of “What’s Your Problem?”
0:47:42 (upbeat music)
0:47:45 – You may know Jackson Pollock,
0:47:51 the painter famous for his iconic drip paintings.
0:47:55 But what do you know about his wife, artist Lee Krasner?
0:47:59 On “Death of an Artist,” Krasner and Pollock,
0:48:01 the story of the artist who reset the market
0:48:04 for American abstract painting,
0:48:06 just maybe not the one you’re thinking of.
0:48:09 Listen to “Death of an Artist,” Krasner and Pollock
0:48:12 on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
0:48:15 or wherever you listen to podcasts.
0:48:17 (upbeat music)
0:00:02 Pushkin.
0:00:07 – You may know Jackson Pollock,
0:00:11 the painter famous for his iconic drip paintings.
0:00:14 But what do you know about his wife, artist Lee Krasner?
0:00:18 On “Death of an Artist,” Krasner and Pollock,
0:00:20 the story of the artist who reset the market
0:00:23 for American abstract painting,
0:00:26 just maybe not the one you’re thinking of.
0:00:28 Listen to “Death of an Artist,” Krasner and Pollock
0:00:31 on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
0:00:34 or wherever you listen to podcasts.
0:00:36 – When I was a kid in the 1980s,
0:00:43 I lived about 40 miles from a nuclear power plant.
0:00:47 It was called Sanonofre, it was right by the freeway.
0:00:49 And whenever we drove past it, me and my family,
0:00:52 we would all hold our breath, like, you know,
0:00:55 to protect ourselves from the radiation or whatever.
0:00:58 It’s one of those ritual family jokes,
0:01:01 those things you do a million times,
0:01:03 not really because they’re funny,
0:01:05 but because they’re just what you do.
0:01:07 I’m telling you this because that joke,
0:01:11 that ritual, that holding our breath,
0:01:13 it speaks to what the vibes were
0:01:16 in the ’80s about nuclear power, right?
0:01:18 That was a moment of, like, peak nuclear fear.
0:01:23 There had been the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979.
0:01:27 You had the Simpsons with Homer Simpson,
0:01:29 always almost causing a meltdown.
0:01:31 And then more seriously, in the ’80s,
0:01:33 you had the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
0:01:37 So we were very scared of nuclear power at the time.
0:01:41 But looking back, looking back from today,
0:01:44 I wonder if maybe we were scared of the wrong thing.
0:01:48 Because today, it looks increasingly likely
0:01:52 that we may need more nuclear power,
0:01:56 alongside more renewables,
0:01:58 in order to stop burning fossil fuel
0:02:00 and contain the risk of climate change.
0:02:04 So looking back, maybe instead of being afraid
0:02:07 of a world with nuclear power,
0:02:09 we should have been afraid of a world without nuclear power.
0:02:13 (upbeat music)
0:02:16 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and this is What’s Your Problem,
0:02:21 the show where I talk to people
0:02:23 who are trying to make technological progress.
0:02:26 My guest today is Yasser Arafat.
0:02:28 He is the chief technology officer at Aolo Atomics.
0:02:32 Earlier in his career, he worked for the federal government
0:02:34 at the Idaho National Lab,
0:02:37 where he designed a nuclear microreactor
0:02:39 that he called Marvel.
0:02:41 Now at Aolo, Yasser is trying to commercialize
0:02:44 a version of that reactor.
0:02:46 His problem is this.
0:02:48 How can you mass produce nuclear reactors
0:02:50 in a factory in a way that’s safe, scalable, and cheap?
0:02:55 We mostly talked about the reactor
0:02:57 that Yasser has designed to be mass produced in a factory.
0:03:00 But to start, we talked about the on-again-off-again history
0:03:04 of nuclear power in the United States.
0:03:07 Yeah, in Minnesota, nuclear really starts from the,
0:03:13 especially in the U.S. in the ’50s, right?
0:03:16 We’ve had the Atomic Energy Act was amended, right?
0:03:19 To allow nuclear industry to be privatized in 1954.
0:03:24 And that kind of, you know, that paved the way
0:03:27 to the construction of the first commercial power plant,
0:03:31 I should say, in Shippingport, Pennsylvania,
0:03:34 which began operations late ’50s, I think ’58 and ’58.
0:03:38 And Shippingport really symbolized
0:03:40 this beginning of this new dawn of the,
0:03:43 what we called the first atomic age.
0:03:47 And if you pause there for a second,
0:03:49 up until then, if you think about it,
0:03:51 for the last million years or so,
0:03:54 humanity really used combustion
0:03:58 as their primary source of power for growth,
0:04:01 for, you know, evolving civilization.
0:04:03 For most of that time, we burned wood.
0:04:05 And then for like a brief moment of 100, 200 years,
0:04:09 300 years, we burned coal.
0:04:11 Little bit of natural gas, a little bit of oil,
0:04:13 but you’re always burning something.
0:04:14 We’re always burning something.
0:04:16 It’s always combustion, right?
0:04:18 So that was really a pivotal moment
0:04:20 and really humanity first unlocked that.
0:04:23 This amazing new modern way of creating energy
0:04:27 by splitting atoms.
0:04:29 There was a big pivotal moment.
0:04:30 And then entered the ’60s and mid ’70s.
0:04:33 So from the ’60s to mid ’70s,
0:04:36 we called this the golden age of nuclear, right?
0:04:40 And that’s when really, like,
0:04:41 we built a ton of reactors commercially in the United States,
0:04:45 about 55 of them, you know, up until mid ’70s.
0:04:48 There was a lot of optimism about nuclear
0:04:51 and a lot of investments went in there.
0:04:53 However, when you started approaching the mid ’70s
0:04:57 and all these nuclear problems around,
0:04:59 it also invoked the creation of a regulatory body, right?
0:05:04 NRC was formed in the mid ’70s
0:05:07 and, you know, new regulations started
0:05:10 getting imposed on plants
0:05:12 and automatically things, you know,
0:05:14 the cost went up when regulations became tighter.
0:05:18 – The NRC is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
0:05:21 – That’s correct, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
0:05:23 And then right after, you know,
0:05:24 just a few years later, 1979,
0:05:27 that’s when Femile Island happened, right?
0:05:29 I was in Pennsylvania.
0:05:31 We had a partial meltdown of a reactor
0:05:33 and there was a widespread public concern of fear.
0:05:37 Sure, nobody died from that accident directly,
0:05:39 but it really, like, you know, shook the public quite a bit
0:05:42 and really put a lot of emphasis
0:05:44 on the potential safety risks.
0:05:46 And that, in turn,
0:05:49 made the regulatory activities even stricter.
0:05:53 – And so that’s basically like
0:05:55 new construction of nuclear power plants
0:06:00 more or less stops in the U.S. after that, right?
0:06:03 – Really much.
0:06:03 That was the nail in the coffin.
0:06:05 For decades, it stopped, exactly.
0:06:07 And so, you know, it’s interesting for me personally,
0:06:10 ’cause so I was growing up in the 1980s, right?
0:06:14 And that was definitely a time
0:06:16 when what we would now call the vibes
0:06:19 were like anti-nuclear, basically, right?
0:06:23 Like nuclear power was this scary thing
0:06:26 and nuclear waste was this scary thing
0:06:28 that lasted forever.
0:06:30 And you have Chernobyl right there somewhere,
0:06:32 which is like very bad and very scary.
0:06:36 And people did die, and what?
0:06:41 And so, you know, that was what I grew up with.
0:06:44 And then just in the last few years,
0:06:47 there has been this shift, right?
0:06:49 Like, intellectually, I get now why nuclear power is good.
0:06:54 I get intellectually, in fact,
0:06:59 that certainly coal-fired power plants are super dangerous
0:07:04 and literally thousands of people die every year from them.
0:07:08 They just die in a way that is invisible, right?
0:07:10 ‘Cause it’s not like there’s some accident.
0:07:12 It’s just that coal-fired power plants emit pollutants
0:07:15 that clearly are in the aggregate killing people.
0:07:18 We just don’t know which people and when, right?
0:07:19 Like that seems pretty unambiguous.
0:07:22 So I’m at this point now where like intellectually,
0:07:27 I think I’m pro-nuclear, I’m pro-nuclear.
0:07:29 Although I do have this question about tail risk, right?
0:07:32 Tail risk seems like a thing with nuclear power
0:07:36 that I haven’t quite figured out.
0:07:39 But I still have the emotional wariness, right?
0:07:42 Can you bring me around?
0:07:44 – Sure.
0:07:45 And rightfully so, when you’ve gone through that era,
0:07:48 that stigma, that feeling, that fear kind of like lags.
0:07:52 It stays there for a very long time.
0:07:54 And so, you know, if you kind of fast forward,
0:07:58 that had a real implication as how the energy infrastructure
0:08:03 ecosystem kind of shaped in the United States, right?
0:08:08 So you see a big lag after Chernobyl,
0:08:11 obviously TMI and Chernobyl and then 1990s.
0:08:14 And then 2000s is where we started like seeing, you know,
0:08:18 some murmurs about like, hey, you know,
0:08:20 is there, you know, renewed interest?
0:08:22 And really in the 2000s, you know,
0:08:24 when people are talking about climate change
0:08:26 and they started looking around and see,
0:08:27 okay, what can really, what can we do about it, right?
0:08:30 The concerns about climate change
0:08:32 and the need for low carbon energy sources,
0:08:35 it renewed some of those interests.
0:08:36 Yes, we’ve seen a lot of growth in solar
0:08:38 and other renewables, but really at the end of the day,
0:08:41 you know, utility customers, they knew back in their head,
0:08:44 they need something dispatchable.
0:08:46 They wanted some real clean base load power.
0:08:49 – So dispatchable and base load basically means
0:08:52 always available whenever you need it.
0:08:54 – That’s right. – On straight solar
0:08:54 and wind, yeah. – That’s correct.
0:08:56 That’s correct.
0:08:56 So in 2005, you see some policy changes, right?
0:08:59 You see the Energy Policy Act
0:09:02 that provided some incentive to revive the industry.
0:09:05 – Okay.
0:09:06 – And so that kind of like sparked, you know,
0:09:09 you’ve seen like, you know, after many decades
0:09:11 we’ve built Plan Fogle that just unit three
0:09:14 when operational last year, unit four went online this year.
0:09:18 So, you know, it’s a big achievement for nuclear
0:09:22 after such a long lag.
0:09:23 – So this is the project in Georgia,
0:09:25 like the first new nuclear power plant in decades in the U.S.
0:09:30 – That’s correct.
0:09:31 That’s correct.
0:09:32 There are two units.
0:09:32 I think there were originally two other units
0:09:34 being pursued in summer, but then those projects stalled
0:09:39 but these two have continued and then unit three and four
0:09:43 just came online and now millions of homes
0:09:45 are being powered from this clean source of energy.
0:09:48 However, these are first-of-the-kind units
0:09:51 and there’s a lot of first-of-the-kind risks
0:09:53 that went along with it.
0:09:55 So it’s a mix of optimism on one side
0:09:58 that, hey, we just built new power plants
0:10:00 after so many decades, but on the other hand,
0:10:02 oh, oops, you know, the cost went up,
0:10:05 it took longer to build it.
0:10:06 You know, it’s really the first-of-the-kind
0:10:09 and that kind of challenge
0:10:11 is what we are living through right now, right?
0:10:13 It’s really the project costs are high.
0:10:17 There’s a lot of risks and uncertainties around
0:10:21 how long can we actually take to build one of these.
0:10:23 But the good news is hopefully we built two of these units,
0:10:27 we learned from it and we can do it faster
0:10:29 and better and cheaper.
0:10:30 – I mean, is it sort of like we never,
0:10:32 at least in this country, learned how to build
0:10:35 a modern nuclear plant?
0:10:36 Like we built nuclear plants like literally 50 years ago
0:10:39 and then we kind of stopped and now we got to start
0:10:42 from not quite zero, but kind of scratch again.
0:10:45 – So if you look at the infrastructure, right,
0:10:47 we don’t build big things anymore.
0:10:50 – Yeah, much less nuclear power plants.
0:10:51 Like even a tunnel, right?
0:10:53 They’re building a tunnel from New Jersey to New York
0:10:55 under the Hudson River.
0:10:56 It’s gonna cost, I don’t know, $15 billion or something.
0:10:59 That’s just a tube under the river.
0:11:02 – And it’s all common across the board.
0:11:04 It’s because when you build something bespoke
0:11:08 and a very giant complex project,
0:11:11 we lost that muscle to really execute
0:11:13 such ginormous projects in this country.
0:11:16 – Well, so you were walking us very elegantly
0:11:19 toward the dream of micro-reactors, right?
0:11:21 Like away from giant bespoke projects
0:11:24 and toward the dream of a sort of factory built,
0:11:28 put it on the back of a truck nuclear reactor,
0:11:31 which is in fact what you’re working on.
0:11:33 – That’s correct.
0:11:34 – So tell me about micro-reactors, right?
0:11:36 Micro-reactor is this word that I’ve heard
0:11:39 like smart people say for a few years
0:11:42 and I get from the name that it is a reactor that is small.
0:11:46 But like to start, tell me like,
0:11:48 what is the dream of micro-reactors?
0:11:50 Why is this what smart people talk about
0:11:52 when they talk about nuclear power?
0:11:53 – So micro-reactors are really defined
0:11:55 as very small transportable reactors
0:11:59 that are between one to 10 or 20 megawatt electric.
0:12:04 – So that’s maybe whatever, less than a tenth the size,
0:12:08 maybe a hundredth the size of a power plant.
0:12:13 Truly micro.
0:12:14 – Truly micro.
0:12:14 – Okay, so they’re micro, like why is that appealing?
0:12:18 Like what’s the rationale there?
0:12:20 So there are three key features
0:12:22 that makes these small reactors attractive,
0:12:25 micro-reactors in general.
0:12:26 First, because of their smaller size,
0:12:30 they’re envisioned to be fully factory-built,
0:12:34 not smaller components or modules,
0:12:38 and then bring to side,
0:12:39 you build a whole thing in a factory.
0:12:41 That’s number one.
0:12:42 And you can also transport them using standard roadways
0:12:46 or railways or to the city, right?
0:12:50 – Okay, that’s number one.
0:12:52 – So you build it in a factory
0:12:53 and put it on the back of a truck
0:12:55 and that is gonna be, in theory, wildly cheaper
0:12:59 than building a bespoke power plant every time.
0:13:03 I mean, it’s just like building a car, right?
0:13:06 Like if you had to build a car from scratch
0:13:08 every time somebody wanted a car,
0:13:10 it would literally cost millions of dollars.
0:13:12 But if you make a thousand of the same car in a factory
0:13:14 or a hundred thousand of the same car in a factory,
0:13:16 it gets wildly cheaper.
0:13:17 That’s part one of the dream.
0:13:19 – And that’s really the main idea, right?
0:13:20 When you do repetition of the same thing over and over again,
0:13:25 you can learn how to bring the cost down faster.
0:13:28 You build it in a controlled environment.
0:13:30 – You’re bringing the industrial revolution.
0:13:32 Like we’ve known this for hundreds of years.
0:13:34 Literally Adam Smith wrote about this in 1776.
0:13:38 If you build things in a factory, they get way cheaper, okay?
0:13:41 – However, there are some downsides
0:13:44 of a small reactor from a physics perspective.
0:13:46 You have higher leakage and the economies of scale
0:13:48 is against you.
0:13:50 So you have to find other ways to offset the cost.
0:13:54 – So there’s a cost.
0:13:55 It doesn’t just scale down in an elegant way.
0:13:58 It gets worse on certain dimensions.
0:14:01 – Like for example, if you look at a current power plant,
0:14:04 a water cooled power plant that are basically
0:14:07 the infrastructure, that’s the basis
0:14:09 of all of the nuclear power plants
0:14:10 commercially found today in the US.
0:14:12 So if you look at those, you have around 100 systems
0:14:16 that’s around the nuclear reactor to keep it happy,
0:14:19 to make it work functionally, operationally safer.
0:14:23 100 systems, right?
0:14:24 – 100 different, like when you say systems,
0:14:27 like what’s one of the 100 systems?
0:14:28 – What are you talking about?
0:14:29 – Chemical and volume control system
0:14:31 or a high pressure injection system for safety.
0:14:35 There are various systems that ensures
0:14:37 that the reactor runs properly, right?
0:14:40 – And so for a microreactor,
0:14:41 you cannot build 100 systems for every microreactor
0:14:44 because then you lose all the cost benefits
0:14:47 you have gained.
0:14:47 – So now all of a sudden you have to think like,
0:14:49 okay, is that the right technology to scale down?
0:14:51 Because if I scale it down, I still need 100 systems.
0:14:54 They might be smaller,
0:14:55 but it’s not gonna help me on economic scale.
0:14:59 So you have to kind of rethink the problem a little bit.
0:15:01 So that’s number one is factory made,
0:15:03 second is transportation.
0:15:04 The third one is itself regulating, right?
0:15:08 If you look at a current large scale conventional power plant,
0:15:12 you have hundreds of people working in the power plant
0:15:15 to make sure it works well.
0:15:17 – Homer Simpson, perhaps most famously.
0:15:20 – Well, let’s not go there.
0:15:21 – Do you hate that?
0:15:22 I apologize.
0:15:23 Is that an annoying, are you tired of that?
0:15:27 I’m sorry, it’s lazy on my part.
0:15:28 – Yeah, no, I mean, it does portray,
0:15:32 I mean, Simpsons, a whole entire generation grew up
0:15:34 watching Simpsons, right?
0:15:36 And so it portrays some things about nuclear power plants
0:15:39 that it’s not necessarily painting the right picture.
0:15:43 – Right, it’s capturing.
0:15:44 So the Simpsons launched in the 80s, right?
0:15:47 So it is capturing that sort of peak anti-nuclear zeitgeist.
0:15:52 – That’s right, that’s right, that’s right.
0:15:55 – So, okay, so I apologize, I have derailed us.
0:15:58 – The third factor that makes a microrector unique
0:16:02 is the ability to self-regulate.
0:16:05 So instead of needing hundreds of people,
0:16:07 you need one or two operators to run the system.
0:16:12 That means the machine itself must be able
0:16:15 to ensure safe operations without relying on people
0:16:20 or if there’s a human error, it kind of self-regulates itself.
0:16:25 – So, you actually came up with an idea for,
0:16:32 you came up with a design for a microreactor, right?
0:16:37 You were, it was your previous job,
0:16:39 you were working for the federal government as a researcher
0:16:42 at a lab dedicated to figuring out microreactors.
0:16:46 And as I understand it, there was actually like
0:16:48 a particular moment when you had an idea,
0:16:50 which seems like it never actually happens,
0:16:53 but I always love it when it happens.
0:16:54 So tell me about this moment.
0:16:56 – Sure, so after a month, I joined Idaho National Laboratory
0:17:02 and they really hired me to help them establish
0:17:05 the DOV Department of Energy Microreactor Program.
0:17:10 And very soon after I helped kind of establish the program,
0:17:14 I realized instead of having smaller projects
0:17:18 in specific problem areas,
0:17:20 we need to put them together into a test reactor.
0:17:23 We have to build a prototype, a real test reactor
0:17:27 that shows everyone what a microreactor is,
0:17:30 how does it operate?
0:17:31 How many people do we need to operate it?
0:17:34 Can it be co-located in a neighborhood, for example,
0:17:37 and operate safely?
0:17:38 And right after about a month or so after I joined INL,
0:17:42 I realized, let me go ahead and pitch this
0:17:44 to the Department of Energy.
0:17:46 And I did that to the lab leadership.
0:17:48 They liked the idea, went to Department of Energy.
0:17:51 They thought it was an important thing to do.
0:17:53 And so the question becomes, okay, what size?
0:17:57 What should be the technology?
0:17:59 And now you got to design it, right?
0:18:00 Everybody’s like, yeah, great, go do it.
0:18:02 Now you got to do it.
0:18:04 What is the most basic like plain vanilla explanation
0:18:08 of what is going on in the core of a nuclear power plant,
0:18:12 just generically any nuclear power plant?
0:18:15 So what you’re really looking for is,
0:18:17 you’re splitting larger, heavy atoms.
0:18:21 In our case, it’s mostly uranium, right?
0:18:24 And there’s a specific isotope called uranium-235.
0:18:28 It’s a fissile material.
0:18:29 If you hit it with a neutron, it splits into fragments
0:18:35 of other nuclei and some neutrons and some energy.
0:18:39 But you also release other neutrons
0:18:41 as part of that splitting.
0:18:44 So what you want a nuclear reactor
0:18:46 is for that secondary neutron to go hit another nucleus
0:18:51 and then continue on that.
0:18:52 And that perpetuates into a chain reaction, right?
0:18:57 And the process of fission splitting
0:19:00 of the nucleus releases a large amount of energy.
0:19:03 And that’s the energy we want to essentially take out
0:19:06 of the fuel through a coolant and dump it into a turbine.
0:19:11 You capture the energy as heat.
0:19:14 And then it’s just like any other power plant.
0:19:16 But instead of burning fossil fuel to get the heat,
0:19:19 you’re splitting uranium atoms to get the heat.
0:19:21 Precisely.
0:19:22 So after you take the heat away and send it
0:19:25 into a secondary system to a turbine,
0:19:28 it’s no different than a coal power plant or a natural gas,
0:19:31 for example.
0:19:32 And so what is the challenge?
0:19:36 What is the problem you’re trying to avoid in that setting?
0:19:40 So I mean, from a reactor physics perspective,
0:19:42 you want to make sure that when you want heat
0:19:46 and you can generate a chain reaction to emit this heat
0:19:50 and capture it and use it in a useful way,
0:19:53 you want to be able to control it effectively.
0:19:56 That’s what involves the whole reactor.
0:20:00 If you are able to control this chain reaction,
0:20:03 then you have a functioning power reactor.
0:20:06 You don’t want an uncontrolled reaction.
0:20:08 You want to be able to control it.
0:20:09 So you can ensure that you can safely remove this heat
0:20:13 without breaking anything.
0:20:15 That’s the whole premise of a nuclear reactor.
0:20:18 I mean, an uncontrolled reaction is like a bomb.
0:20:21 It’s like a terrible bomb.
0:20:23 That’s exactly right.
0:20:26 Coming up after the break, Yasser goes to Walmart
0:20:29 and winds up designing a new kind of nuclear reactor.
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0:21:22 Can you hear me now?
0:21:23 I’m Dr. Laurie Santos, and I’m devoting the new season
0:21:25 of my podcast, “The Happiness Lab,”
0:21:27 to topics that are dear to my heart,
0:21:29 with people dear to my heart, like my mom.
0:21:31 Wait a minute, let me put the TV off.
0:21:33 I’ll be finding out why I personally struggle so badly
0:21:35 with perfectionism, stress, and even sitting still
0:21:38 and doing nothing.
0:21:39 But I feel like I’m bad at boredom because you’re
0:21:41 bad at boredom.
0:21:42 Yeah, no, I didn’t do well with doing nothing.
0:21:44 And once I find out why these things affect me so badly,
0:21:47 I’m hoping to do something about it.
0:21:49 So join me on my journey wherever you get your podcasts.
0:21:51 So these ideas were–
0:21:58 when you’re a reactor designer, you’re there
0:22:00 and I’m thinking about all the various iterations
0:22:02 and permutations and combinations of what
0:22:05 makes a nuclear technology feasible.
0:22:08 And if you look into it, mostly the combination of fuel
0:22:12 and coolant used in a reactor defines a nuclear technology.
0:22:17 And there’s about 100 or 120 combinations out there.
0:22:21 Mostly we’ve tried almost every combination
0:22:23 in tests in the past.
0:22:25 So you basically, you’ve got to make the fission reaction happen.
0:22:28 You need some fuel to do that.
0:22:29 And then it’s going to generate a crazy amount of heat.
0:22:32 So you’ve got to keep that from getting out of hand
0:22:34 with the coolant.
0:22:35 Those are the two things you’ve got to do.
0:22:37 That’s every reactor designer to pick that.
0:22:40 You’re there and I’m thinking about different technologies.
0:22:42 It’s not really fully formulated.
0:22:44 It’s in your subconscious mind.
0:22:46 So the moment I was thinking about,
0:22:48 let’s go build a reactor in INL for the microreactor program,
0:22:53 I started thinking about what should be the technology.
0:22:57 And then it really happened suddenly overnight.
0:23:01 I woke up and I said, OK, you know what?
0:23:03 I think I know what it is.
0:23:05 But I really have to put that on paper.
0:23:08 I did go to Walmart, got some color pencils and a big paper
0:23:12 and started sketching it out how that system’s
0:23:15 going to look like.
0:23:17 Now, that’s just an idea, obviously.
0:23:19 We took that idea and really started
0:23:21 making the requirements to build a reactor.
0:23:24 Some things evolved, but fundamentally,
0:23:26 it was the same concept that I sketched up a few days
0:23:30 before Christmas in 2019.
0:23:32 So what was the concept?
0:23:34 What was the design?
0:23:35 So I really looked at all those different iterations
0:23:38 and came down with what is called a sodium thermal reactor.
0:23:44 It is basically using uranium zirconium hydride,
0:23:47 the same fuel that we use in a lot of research reactors
0:23:51 around the globe.
0:23:52 We have a lot of data on it.
0:23:53 We understand it very well.
0:23:55 If you couple that with a very high conductive coolant,
0:23:59 like sodium, liquid sodium, in our case,
0:24:02 all of a sudden you can have a low-pressured nuclear reactor
0:24:07 with a high power density and low enrichment need.
0:24:11 So that really was the basis, the fundamental technology
0:24:15 choice for Marvel.
0:24:17 Why’d you call it Marvel?
0:24:23 Well, that’s because I wanted a name
0:24:26 that people can remember easily and that does not
0:24:31 sound like a scary Greek god.
0:24:34 Smart.
0:24:35 And it can shine the light of coolness.
0:24:38 You don’t want to call it Icarus, right?
0:24:40 You know what we’ll call a nuclear reactor Icarus.
0:24:42 That’s right.
0:24:43 And also, it’s an acronym.
0:24:45 Prometheus.
0:24:45 Don’t call it Prometheus.
0:24:46 Yeah, what’s it an acronym for?
0:24:48 Oh, god.
0:24:49 It has a very long name.
0:24:50 So it’s–
0:24:51 Just do it.
0:24:51 It’s Micro Reactor Applications Research and–
0:24:57 Micro Reactor Applications Research Validation
0:24:59 and Evaluation Project.
0:25:01 And it’s a very–
0:25:01 That’s not bad.
0:25:02 It’s a very descriptive name, if you think about it.
0:25:04 Yeah, it could be anything, right?
0:25:05 Right, right, right.
0:25:06 Yeah.
0:25:07 Your acronym?
0:25:09 It was mine, unfortunately.
0:25:11 Well, it was sort of peak Marvel, right?
0:25:13 You said it was 2019.
0:25:14 It really sticks it in time as like a peak Marvel moment.
0:25:19 So OK, so you have designed this thing.
0:25:22 You get approval for it.
0:25:26 Let’s talk about safety, because you’ve
0:25:28 talked about wanting to engineer it in a way that
0:25:30 is both economically sensible to engineer it in a way that
0:25:38 some company is going to pay to build it
0:25:40 and that it makes sense to build it and safely run it.
0:25:44 And that’s complicated, right?
0:25:46 It’s complicated for Micro Reactor.
0:25:47 So how are you dealing with that as you’re
0:25:50 designing this reactor?
0:25:52 If you look at what is– and ask the question–
0:25:55 what is an ideal nuclear reactor?
0:25:59 It would be what is the simplest reactor that
0:26:04 can have the highest level of safety
0:26:05 without having to add a ton of systems
0:26:08 to ensure that it is safe.
0:26:10 Right.
0:26:11 I mean, the dream is just like whatever, a pile of dirt
0:26:14 or something, right?
0:26:15 The dream is that it’s a glass of water
0:26:17 that you could somehow magically get power out of.
0:26:20 It’s like, what source it could happen, right?
0:26:21 That’s right.
0:26:22 So there’s engineered safety, which really is–
0:26:26 you have to have a lot of engineered, man-made systems.
0:26:30 It’s like pressing a brake in a car
0:26:32 if you design the system.
0:26:33 Brakes can fail.
0:26:35 Sometimes you have to kind of have backups for that.
0:26:37 So there’s a lot of additional things that go into it.
0:26:40 And to be clear, that is sort of the model
0:26:42 for big utility-scale nuclear power plants, right?
0:26:44 They’re full of highly engineered systems and backups
0:26:48 for those systems and lots of people
0:26:50 there to make sure that all those systems are
0:26:52 functioning so that you don’t have some terrible nuclear
0:26:56 accident.
0:26:57 That is correct.
0:26:58 And you really engineered those systems
0:27:00 to make sure they’re reliable.
0:27:01 And you go through a years of qualification
0:27:03 test to achieve that.
0:27:04 And that’s just not going to work for a microreactor, right?
0:27:07 Like, you can’t have all that because it’ll
0:27:09 be too expensive for too little power.
0:27:11 That’s correct.
0:27:11 So to really achieve that high safety
0:27:15 with fewer amount of systems, you
0:27:18 want what is called inherent safety.
0:27:21 It is baked into the material physics of the fuel.
0:27:26 And so we looked around and we said, OK,
0:27:28 what is the highest inherent safety fuel out there?
0:27:32 And it really is uranium zirconium hydride.
0:27:34 OK.
0:27:35 So you choose a fuel that has this elegant property, which
0:27:42 is if the chain reaction starts to get out of control,
0:27:45 the hydrogen that is mixed in with the fuel
0:27:48 tends to bring it back under control.
0:27:51 Is that a fair–
0:27:52 OK.
0:27:52 So is it the case that with the fuel you’re using,
0:27:56 like there is physically no way the chain reaction could
0:27:59 get out of control, or is it just way less likely?
0:28:02 It’s way less likely.
0:28:04 OK.
0:28:04 So in addition to choosing this particular fuel,
0:28:07 that was one of the things you did to bring
0:28:09 this higher level of inherent safety.
0:28:11 It’s clearly not going to be enough.
0:28:13 Like, what else do you have to do in designing this reactor?
0:28:16 Well, there’s a lot.
0:28:17 But the second choice is the coolant, right?
0:28:19 OK.
0:28:20 Coolant is the fluid that takes the heat from the core
0:28:23 and transfers it to the secondary system
0:28:27 where you want to make use of this heat, right?
0:28:30 OK.
0:28:30 And if you look at water today, most existing power plants
0:28:34 are built with water.
0:28:35 Water will be known very much.
0:28:37 All the properties we’ve known, we’ve designed other power
0:28:40 plants before nuclear.
0:28:41 So we’re very familiar with water.
0:28:42 So the industry kind of moved towards that direction.
0:28:45 But if you take a step back and you look at water,
0:28:47 it has some benefits because it’s familiar.
0:28:50 But it has some cons as well, some challenges.
0:28:54 Because you want the system to be hot to extract that heat.
0:28:58 But with water, as soon as you exceed 100 degrees Celsius,
0:29:02 what does it want to do?
0:29:04 It wants to boil off, right?
0:29:05 We’re just not a good thing.
0:29:07 So to prevent from boiling, you pressurize the system, right?
0:29:12 Because adding pressure raises the boiling point.
0:29:15 That’s correct.
0:29:15 Now, all of a sudden, you need something
0:29:19 that is thicker vessel.
0:29:21 You want to make sure you can keep it at the pressurized level.
0:29:26 You need a pressurizer.
0:29:27 You need a sick containment building
0:29:29 in case there is a pipe break or something.
0:29:31 You still have a sick steel and concrete line
0:29:34 containment to hold everything together.
0:29:36 It’s part of the safety case, right?
0:29:38 And it also protects you from external hazards,
0:29:40 like a tornado or a missile or something else, right?
0:29:45 So it’s really– all of these combined
0:29:47 makes up the overall safety case.
0:29:49 So when it came for us to choose the coolant,
0:29:52 we used sodium.
0:29:53 Sodium is many times more thermally
0:29:57 conductive than water.
0:29:59 And when you heat it up, it does not really boil away
0:30:03 at 100 degrees Celsius, right?
0:30:04 The boiling point of sodium is hundreds of degrees
0:30:07 much higher than what we need for the power generation, right?
0:30:13 So it really gives you a non-pressurized system.
0:30:18 So your vessel walls does not have
0:30:20 to be this thick forged component that
0:30:24 are extremely expensive or difficult to make.
0:30:26 You can now make them with thin walled vessels
0:30:29 by simpler manufacturing methods so your costs can go down.
0:30:33 Because you’re no longer pressurized,
0:30:35 you don’t need this– and you don’t
0:30:36 have a large amount of fuel, radioactive material in the core.
0:30:41 All of a sudden, with the microreactor using sodium,
0:30:44 you can make the case to the regulator
0:30:46 that you don’t need a traditional containment.
0:30:51 You still need a confinement, but it
0:30:52 doesn’t need to be extremely–
0:30:55 several feet of concrete and thick, large, steel-lined
0:30:58 containment.
0:31:00 So there’s a lot of other systems that you can simplify.
0:31:03 And what you end up seeing by just making those two choices
0:31:07 and the way you design the reactor from 100 systems,
0:31:12 like a traditional plant, you can bring that down to about 20.
0:31:15 And so what does going from 100 engineered systems to 20
0:31:19 do for you?
0:31:20 So it really reduces the amount of capital expenditure
0:31:26 you need initially to build a plant.
0:31:29 With fewer systems, you need smaller footprint.
0:31:33 You need less civil structure.
0:31:35 You’re paying for less components and pipes and vessels
0:31:38 and formwork and concrete.
0:31:41 So your cost per kilowatt initially
0:31:44 can go down if you simplify your plant.
0:31:48 And that’s really what we are–
0:31:50 that’s one big piece of the puzzle.
0:31:53 The other big piece of the puzzle,
0:31:54 which is really our main thesis in AOLO,
0:31:57 is there’s one model which is you spend six to 10 years
0:32:01 to build a gigawatt scale plant.
0:32:03 If you get really good at it, you can bring it down to like five.
0:32:06 So you spend five years or 60 years optimistically
0:32:10 and you build a gigawatt scale plant.
0:32:12 What we’re doing instead is instead
0:32:14 of building a single gigawatt scale plant,
0:32:17 we’re focusing on building factories that
0:32:21 can produce at least a gigawatt power output every year
0:32:27 by making smaller reactors.
0:32:29 So how many reactors per year would one of these factories
0:32:32 make?
0:32:32 So we’re trying to build our first pilot scale facility
0:32:36 here in Austin, Texas.
0:32:38 And we’re establishing that by end of next year.
0:32:42 And that is going to be designed to build 20
0:32:45 of these reactors per year.
0:32:47 And if demand outgrows that, which we believe it will,
0:32:52 the idea is the learning from that
0:32:54 we’re going to a full factory, a full factory
0:32:56 is anticipated to be between 100 to 200 reactors a year.
0:33:01 So tell me about what the world looks like if it works.
0:33:06 Like if this idea you have of building a factory
0:33:08 to build whatever, a nuclear power plant every two days
0:33:14 or something, how does that work in the world?
0:33:18 And what does it look like looking around America
0:33:20 in that world?
0:33:21 You know, we believe that we can actually usher
0:33:24 in the second atomic age.
0:33:26 Like we can grow nuclear much more rapidly.
0:33:31 So this whole entire energy transition,
0:33:34 which is not only fueled by wanting
0:33:37 to have lower carbon or no carbon energy source,
0:33:41 but also this massive demand and growth
0:33:44 that we’re seeing in the electric sector
0:33:47 as well as the industrial sector.
0:33:48 Electrification plus AI.
0:33:51 Plus AI.
0:33:52 Right, seems like, yes, there’s a lot of demand.
0:33:54 So right, so sure, it means lots of nuclear power plants.
0:33:58 I mean, specifically, is it like there’s
0:34:00 a little nuclear power plant in every neighborhood?
0:34:02 Is it like people are buying kind of, you know,
0:34:04 utilities will buy 10 or 20 of these microreactors
0:34:07 and sort of put them all, you know, on one site?
0:34:10 Like, how does it actually work?
0:34:13 The idea is, you know, the way we’re designing these systems
0:34:16 that if you want a single reactor,
0:34:17 you can have a single reactor.
0:34:19 But if you want two, they don’t share any infrastructures.
0:34:22 You can daisy chain them as many as you want.
0:34:25 So if a customer wants, hey, give me 500 megawatts,
0:34:28 we would provide, you know, 50 of these,
0:34:30 all the one reactors, or in the near future,
0:34:32 when we build our 100 megawatt system,
0:34:35 it’ll be five of those systems,
0:34:37 daisy chain next to one another.
0:34:39 – What do you think the first use cases will be?
0:34:44 – So one microreactors first came into being, right?
0:34:48 Many years ago, in the mid 2014s,
0:34:51 when we were really trying to figure out
0:34:52 what the market was, it really was the remote communities,
0:34:56 remote mines, islands, those are areas
0:34:59 where energy, cost of energy is really, really high.
0:35:02 So when you deploy a first product into the market,
0:35:06 normally it’s high cost, and then you try to lower it down
0:35:09 and then try to penetrate a broader market.
0:35:12 That was the entire idea
0:35:14 for first generation microreactors.
0:35:16 – And I should ask, do microreactors exist in the world now?
0:35:21 – Well, not in the modern definition, it doesn’t.
0:35:24 We have a lot of small reactors,
0:35:26 but they’re not designed to stay small
0:35:29 or being mass manufactured.
0:35:31 If you look around right now,
0:35:32 you don’t see a factory as mass manufacturing,
0:35:35 a bunch of small reactors.
0:35:37 The most we see is in the nuclear submarine site,
0:35:40 where you can make maybe one or two reactors a year,
0:35:42 but not at the scale we’re talking about.
0:35:44 – Yes, and that’s a very particular use case.
0:35:48 – Yeah, but to come back to your question,
0:35:49 where are these first applications?
0:35:52 The first reactor we’re gonna build from our company
0:35:55 is going to be at Idaho National Laboratory.
0:35:57 It’s gonna be a single unit.
0:35:59 And it’s mostly because we wanna learn
0:36:02 how this thing operates, collect data.
0:36:05 – You gotta build one, at some point you gotta build one.
0:36:07 – We wanna show the world that we can validate the cost.
0:36:10 We can validate the deployment model,
0:36:12 which we’re trying to do on set construction less than 60 days.
0:36:16 These are very challenging targets.
0:36:19 – Why might it not work?
0:36:22 – So, if you look at nuclear fission.
0:36:25 – The fundamental thing you’re doing.
0:36:28 – The fundamental thing, right?
0:36:30 We know the physics work.
0:36:32 We know nuclear fission works, we operate them today.
0:36:36 It’s not a matter of proving the technology
0:36:37 if it works or not, right?
0:36:38 We build other advanced reactors before.
0:36:42 That’s, there’s a lot of challenges getting there,
0:36:45 but the true challenge, in my opinion,
0:36:48 is in the scaling of the technology.
0:36:53 Can we make hundreds of these a year?
0:36:55 Can we build a factory that can effectively
0:36:58 reduce down the cost?
0:37:00 Can we make fuel in large quantities
0:37:04 enough to fuel all of these reactors?
0:37:07 And this is not a traditional fuel type.
0:37:09 This is an advanced reactor fuel.
0:37:11 I mean, it’s slightly higher enrichment
0:37:13 than traditional nuclear reactors.
0:37:16 This is a different chemical form.
0:37:18 So we have to establish infrastructure to build fuel,
0:37:22 to build these reactors, as well as the expertise
0:37:26 to deploy them like an IKEA model, right?
0:37:28 You get the instruction, you get all the modules.
0:37:31 – The flat pack nuclear power plant?
0:37:34 – That’s right.
0:37:35 You get all the modules on site
0:37:36 and be able to quickly assemble them together
0:37:38 in a matter of days, not in years, right?
0:37:41 – That all sounds so hard.
0:37:43 – It is hard.
0:37:44 And so we believe we have a very strong team
0:37:47 and we’re assembling strong team,
0:37:48 not just from nuclear, but from other industries
0:37:51 like automotive and aerospace and chip manufacturing
0:37:56 to understand what are the lessons to learn
0:37:58 we can bring from those industries that worked,
0:38:01 that have been successful into nuclear,
0:38:04 trying to not reinvent the wheel all over again.
0:38:08 But there’s a lot of challenges.
0:38:10 There’s a lot of unknowns
0:38:11 and we’re trying to diligently solve them,
0:38:13 focusing on the most important question at a time.
0:38:17 – So I wanna just return briefly to the idea of tail risk.
0:38:22 Like, because it is, it does,
0:38:27 it’s, I don’t know how to parse it at some level
0:38:29 with nuclear power, right?
0:38:31 Like you tell me, like one version of the question is,
0:38:35 what’s the worst thing that could happen
0:38:38 with one of these reactors?
0:38:39 – Okay, so when you go through the regulatory process,
0:38:44 this is the very question that they ask you.
0:38:47 What is the worst thing that can happen
0:38:51 even if it’s the very, very low probability?
0:38:54 What happens?
0:38:55 What do you do in the scenario?
0:38:56 What does the recovery look like?
0:38:58 What is the consequence of that?
0:39:00 And the way we are designing our reactors,
0:39:03 and I can’t speak for everyone out there,
0:39:04 and most companies are doing very similar things,
0:39:07 is even in the worst, worst case scenario,
0:39:10 we don’t have any release of any radioactive material
0:39:15 from the reactor to the outside.
0:39:17 – And is that inherent in the physics?
0:39:20 Like, how do you know that?
0:39:22 Like, how do you know that with certainty?
0:39:24 – It’s a, so a question is, how do we know?
0:39:28 The second question is, how can we prove it, right?
0:39:32 So how do we know is mostly by the data that we have
0:39:36 on the physics side, as well as the engineering,
0:39:39 the way we design our reactor?
0:39:41 How do we prove it?
0:39:42 So the proving goes in several stages, right?
0:39:46 The first stage is we’re building a full-scale,
0:39:49 non-nuclear prototype of the reactor starting this year.
0:39:53 It’s gonna be, you know, turning on next year.
0:39:56 The purpose of that is to collect the data
0:39:59 so we can validate some of our safety claims, right?
0:40:02 But it’s not gonna be a nuclear fuel.
0:40:05 But apart from that little disclaimer
0:40:08 that we don’t have nuclear fuel,
0:40:10 everything else that ensures the performance of the system,
0:40:15 the safety of the system, we can collect data on.
0:40:17 – So you can kick it and throw things at it
0:40:20 and whatever, stress test it, essentially.
0:40:21 – Right, exactly.
0:40:23 So that’s the first stage.
0:40:25 The second stage is, you know, when you have a reactor,
0:40:29 a full-blown, you know, physics-based reactor,
0:40:31 you have fuel inserted into it,
0:40:34 and you’re going to, you know, turn it,
0:40:37 what in a nuclear term it’s called going critical,
0:40:40 meaning you first turn on the machine
0:40:43 and then you slowly ramp up power level
0:40:45 from 10% power, 20% power, 30%.
0:40:48 So you don’t go like, you know,
0:40:49 yeah, I’ve got a reactor and I put fuel in
0:40:52 and here it goes, 100% power.
0:40:55 You don’t necessarily do that.
0:40:56 You do a very step-wise increment.
0:40:59 And that is extremely crucial
0:41:02 to validate the safety characteristics of your reactor.
0:41:07 And once we have validated those,
0:41:09 we do some other tests to ensure our safety systems work.
0:41:12 And when all of those are done,
0:41:14 that’s when you go full power, right?
0:41:16 So that’s really how you prove
0:41:19 that whatever you’ve designed
0:41:21 has the right level of safety that you’ve designed to.
0:41:24 Now, having all that said, there’s also unknown unknowns.
0:41:29 – Yeah, yeah.
0:41:31 – And that exists in almost every technologies.
0:41:33 And that’s something we hope to learn more
0:41:37 as we have more of these systems operational.
0:41:40 But going back to the question,
0:41:41 what is the worst thing that can happen?
0:41:43 Because we have designed this reactor
0:41:45 with enough margin built into it.
0:41:47 In the worst case scenario, we shut it down
0:41:49 and no bad things happen.
0:41:51 Nothing releases, nothing breaks down.
0:41:53 And that’s a level of safety pedigree
0:41:55 that we have to bring the way we see
0:41:56 in research reactors and universities, right?
0:42:00 You know, they’re trying to pull the control rod
0:42:02 as fast as they can.
0:42:03 And you don’t see any breaking.
0:42:05 You don’t see any boiling of coolant.
0:42:07 – Yeah, so you’re alluding to research reactors
0:42:10 and universities, which I didn’t know about
0:42:11 until I was preparing for this interview.
0:42:13 So like, is it right there nuclear reactors
0:42:16 at what, colleges around the country?
0:42:17 Like, what is the story with that?
0:42:20 – That’s right.
0:42:20 I mean, research reactors were really built to collect data,
0:42:24 to measure nuclear physics data.
0:42:26 And if you look around all the major engineering schools
0:42:28 around the United States and also even beyond,
0:42:31 you have research reactors.
0:42:32 They’re called non-power reactors.
0:42:35 You’ve got coolant, you’ve got fuel,
0:42:37 you’ve got all the various instrumentation in place,
0:42:40 but it does not really go high temperature
0:42:42 because you’re not really trying
0:42:43 to make electricity out of them.
0:42:44 You’re trying to generate a chain reaction
0:42:47 and measure physics data, right?
0:42:50 – And they’re so safe
0:42:50 that they let college students play with them.
0:42:53 – Pretty much.
0:42:54 – And did you say they used the same fuel
0:42:56 as you were using?
0:42:58 – That’s correct.
0:42:58 (upbeat music)
0:43:01 – We’ll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
0:43:05 – Can you hear me now?
0:43:13 I’m Dr. Laurie Santos
0:43:14 and I’m devoting the new season of my podcast,
0:43:16 The Happiness Lab, to topics that are dear to my heart
0:43:19 with people dear to my heart, like my mom.
0:43:21 – Right, I mean, I mean, with the TV.
0:43:23 – I’ll be finding out why I personally struggle so badly
0:43:25 with perfectionism, stress,
0:43:27 and even sitting still and doing nothing.
0:43:29 – But I feel like I’m bad at boredom
0:43:30 because you’re bad at boredom.
0:43:32 – Yeah, no, I didn’t do well with doing nothing.
0:43:34 – And once I find out why these things
0:43:36 affect me so badly,
0:43:37 I’m hoping to do something about it.
0:43:39 So join me on my journey, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:43:42 – So now we’re just gonna finish with the lightning round,
0:43:48 which can be quick.
0:43:49 – Okay.
0:43:50 – It can be a little more random.
0:43:51 – Sure.
0:43:52 – Than the rest.
0:43:54 What’s the most underrated subatomic particle?
0:43:57 – Underrated subatomic particle.
0:44:04 – The neutron, right?
0:44:06 I thought you were gonna go straight to the neutron.
0:44:07 – It’s so obvious, I don’t wanna say it’s not loud.
0:44:09 – It’s fair, no, it’s very obvious, that’s fair.
0:44:11 Okay, good, give me a better one.
0:44:13 Give me a better one.
0:44:14 – Well, it is certainly the neutron,
0:44:17 I have to think about it.
0:44:18 – ‘Cause like, you don’t even think of it.
0:44:21 – No, no.
0:44:23 – It’s a positive, it’s not negative, no.
0:44:25 – That’s right, no.
0:44:27 – Okay, well, what’s the most overrated subatomic particle?
0:44:30 – I think it’s a proton.
0:44:37 – Okay.
0:44:40 – Yeah, it’s not, okay, and here’s why I say it, right?
0:44:45 If you’re looking to, I mean, I’m an energy guy,
0:44:47 I look at how we can, I’m not a reactive physicist per se.
0:44:53 But if I look on a high level on the application side,
0:44:57 what gives me energy, chemical reactions like combustion,
0:45:00 where you have exchange of electrons giving energy.
0:45:03 So electrons have some prominence in the world of energy.
0:45:06 – Sure.
0:45:07 – When it comes to splitting a nucleus,
0:45:09 neutrons play a massive role.
0:45:12 But protons, they’re just there to make sure
0:45:14 the world is happy and they balance the charge.
0:45:18 – They’re just there to keep the electrons around?
0:45:20 – They’re just there to keep the electrons around.
0:45:22 – Yeah.
0:45:23 – Yeah, anyways.
0:45:25 – What’s your favorite fundamental force?
0:45:27 – What’s my favorite fundamental force?
0:45:33 – You’re tired of stupid physics questions.
0:45:34 I can ask you other stupid questions.
0:45:36 You ready?
0:45:37 What did you think of Oppenheimer?
0:45:39 – I think it was a great movie.
0:45:41 I hope you’re talking about the movie itself
0:45:45 and not the actual person.
0:45:46 – I’m talking about the movie, not the actual person.
0:45:48 – Yes, but I think it was really great.
0:45:51 – I’ve seen you mention that you have,
0:45:54 that a couple of your favorite books are by authors
0:45:56 who started out anti-nuclear and became pro-nuclear.
0:46:01 And so I’m curious,
0:46:02 what is something that you have changed your mind about?
0:46:06 – One of my earlier mentors in Westinghouse
0:46:09 who hired me in the first place, he said,
0:46:11 “Yes sir, you can be a techie as much as you want,
0:46:14 “but unless you understand the economic side of engineering,
0:46:19 “you truly would not appreciate the value
0:46:22 “of what you’re building.”
0:46:24 So don’t ignore the economic side.
0:46:26 Make sure you keep it right next to the technology.
0:46:29 So that really opened my eyes in this whole area
0:46:32 of not just advanced reactors,
0:46:33 but also the economic side of things.
0:46:36 To make sure that whatever I’m doing
0:46:38 should have a relevance to society.
0:46:41 – Yeah, I feel like the story of the economic transition
0:46:44 at this point is basically a techno-economic story, right?
0:46:48 I feel like in many domains,
0:46:50 the fundamental technological problems
0:46:52 have largely been solved.
0:46:55 And it’s a question of techno-economics.
0:46:57 I mean, people talk about that in like green cement,
0:47:00 they talk about it in batteries,
0:47:01 you’re talking about it in nuclear power.
0:47:03 It’s interesting how often it comes up.
0:47:06 – Right, and there’s so many technologies
0:47:08 out there to solve problems.
0:47:10 But at the end of the day, if it’s not economical,
0:47:12 it’s hard to convince people
0:47:14 why they should adopt it versus something else.
0:47:16 (upbeat music)
0:47:19 – Yasser Arafat is the chief technology officer
0:47:24 at Aloe Atomics.
0:47:26 Today’s show was produced by Gabriel Hunter-Chang.
0:47:29 It was edited by Lydia Jean-Cott
0:47:31 and engineered by Sarah Brugger.
0:47:33 You can email us at problem@pushkin.fm.
0:47:38 I’m Jacob Goldstein and we’ll be back next week
0:47:40 with another episode of “What’s Your Problem?”
0:47:42 (upbeat music)
0:47:45 – You may know Jackson Pollock,
0:47:51 the painter famous for his iconic drip paintings.
0:47:55 But what do you know about his wife, artist Lee Krasner?
0:47:59 On “Death of an Artist,” Krasner and Pollock,
0:48:01 the story of the artist who reset the market
0:48:04 for American abstract painting,
0:48:06 just maybe not the one you’re thinking of.
0:48:09 Listen to “Death of an Artist,” Krasner and Pollock
0:48:12 on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
0:48:15 or wherever you listen to podcasts.
0:48:17 (upbeat music)
As demand for clean energy grows, engineers around the U.S. are working on a new generation of nuclear reactors. These designs reflect how nuclear energy could fit into the power grid – and our lives – in new ways. Yasir Arafat is the Chief Technology Officer at Aalo Atomics. Yasir’s problem is this: How do you mass produce nuclear reactors that are safe, scalable, and cheap?
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