Speaker 1: Pushkin. When I was a kid in the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: I lived about forty miles from a nuclear power plant.
Speaker 1: It's called Santa No Frey was right by the freeway,
Speaker 1: and whenever we drove past it, me and my family,
Speaker 1: we would all hold our breath, like, you know, to
Speaker 1: protect ourselves from the radiation or whatever. So one of
Speaker 1: those ritual family jokes, those things you do a million times,
Speaker 1: not really because they're funny, but because they're just what
Speaker 1: you do. I'm telling you this, because that joke, that ritual,
Speaker 1: that holding our breath, it speaks to what the vibes
Speaker 1: were in the eighties about nuclear power, right. That was
Speaker 1: a moment of like peak nuclear fear. There had been
Speaker 1: the three Mile Island nuclear accident in nineteen seventy nine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Simpsons with Homer Simpson always most causing a meltdown,
Speaker 1: and then more seriously in the eighties you had the
Speaker 1: Chernobyl nuclear disaster. So we were very scared of nuclear
Speaker 1: power at the time. But looking back, looking back from today,
Speaker 1: I wonder if maybe we were scared of the wrong thing,
Speaker 1: because today it looks increasingly likely that we may need
Speaker 1: more nuclear power alongside more renewables. In order to stop
Speaker 1: burning fossil fuel and contain the risk of climate change.
Speaker 1: So looking back, maybe instead of being afraid of a
Speaker 1: world with nuclear power, we should have been afraid of
Speaker 1: a world without nuclear power. I'm Jacob Goldstein and this
Speaker 1: is What's Your Problem, the show where I talk to
Speaker 1: people who are trying to make technological progress. My guest
Speaker 1: today is Yasser Arafat. He's the chief Technology office at
Speaker 1: Hollo Atomics. Earlier in his career he worked for the
Speaker 1: federal government at the Idaho National Lab, where he designed
Speaker 1: a nuclear microreactor that he called Marvel. Now at Allo,
Speaker 1: Yasser is trying to commercialize a version of that reactor.
Speaker 1: His problem is this, how can you mass produce nuclear
Speaker 1: reactors in a factory in a way that's safe, scalable,
Speaker 1: and cheap. We mostly talked about the reactor that Yaser
Speaker 1: has designed to be mass produced in a factory, but
Speaker 1: to start we talked about the on again, off again
Speaker 1: history of nuclear power in the United States.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, the sort of nuclear really starts from
Speaker 2: the especially in the US in the fifties, right, we've
Speaker 2: had the Atomic Energy ec was amended right to allow
Speaker 2: nuclear industry to be privatized in nineteen fifty four, and
Speaker 2: that kind of you know was you know, that paved
Speaker 2: the way to the construction off the first commercial power plant,
Speaker 2: I should say, in shipping Port, Pennsylvania, which began operations
Speaker 2: like fifties, I think fifty eight and fifty eight, and
Speaker 2: shipping Port really symbolized this beginning of this new dawn
Speaker 2: of the what we called the first atomic Age. And
Speaker 2: if you post there for a second, up until then,
Speaker 2: if you think about it, for the last million years
Speaker 2: or so, humanity really used combustion as their primary source
Speaker 2: of power for growth.
Speaker 1: For you know, for most of that time, we burned wood,
Speaker 1: and then for like a brief moment of one hundred
Speaker 1: two hundred years, three hundred years, we burned cold, a
Speaker 1: little bit of natural gas, a little bit oil. But
Speaker 1: you're always burning something.
Speaker 2: What's burning something, it's always combustion, right, So that was
Speaker 2: really a pivotal moment, and really humanity first unlocked that
Speaker 2: amazing new modern way of creating energy by splitting atoms.
Speaker 2: It was a big pivot moment and then entered the
Speaker 2: seven sixties and mid seventies. So from the sixties to
Speaker 2: seven mid seventies, we call this the golden age of nuclear, right,
Speaker 2: and that's when really like, we built a ton of
Speaker 2: reactors commercially in the United States, about fifty five of thems.
Speaker 2: You know, up until mid seventies, there was a lot
Speaker 2: of optimism about nuclear and a lot of the investments
Speaker 2: went in there. However, when you when you started approaching
Speaker 2: the mid seventies and if all these nuclear problems around,
Speaker 2: it also invoked the creation of a regulatory body, right.
Speaker 2: The NRC was formed in the mid seventies, and you know,
Speaker 2: new regulations started getting imposed on plants and automatically things.
Speaker 2: You know, the cost went out when regulations became tighter.
Speaker 1: The NRC is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Speaker 2: That's correct, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And then right after,
Speaker 2: you know, just a few years later, nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 2: that's when Three Mile Island happened, right. I was in Slovenia.
Speaker 2: We had a partial meltdown of a reactor and there
Speaker 2: was a widespread public concern of fear. Sure nobody died
Speaker 2: from that accident directly, but it really like you know,
Speaker 2: shook the public quite a bit and really put a
Speaker 2: lot of emphasis on the potential safety risks, and that
Speaker 2: in turn made the regulatory activities even stricter.
Speaker 1: And so that's basically like new construction of nuclear power
Speaker 1: plants more or less stops in the US after that, right.
Speaker 2: Pretty much, that was the nail in the coffin for decades.
Speaker 2: It stopped, exactly.
Speaker 1: And so you know, it's interesting for me personally because
Speaker 1: so I was growing up in the nineteen eighties, right,
Speaker 1: and that was definitely a time when what we would
Speaker 1: now call the vibes were like anti nuclear basically, right,
Speaker 1: Like nuclear power was this scary thing, and nuclear waste
Speaker 1: was this scary thing that lasted forever. And you have
Speaker 1: Chernobyl in there somewhere, which is like very bad and
Speaker 1: very scary, right, and people did die, right and and
Speaker 1: what and so so you know, that was what I
Speaker 1: grew up with. And then just in the last few
Speaker 1: years there has been this shift, right, Like, intellectually I
Speaker 1: get now why nuclear power is good. I get intellectually
Speaker 1: in fact that certainly coal fired power plants are super
Speaker 1: dangerous and literally thousands of people die every year from them.
Speaker 1: They just die in a way that is invisible, right,
Speaker 1: because it's not like there's some accident, it's just that
Speaker 1: coal fired power plants, emit pollutants that clearly are in
Speaker 1: the aggregate killing people. We just don't know which people
Speaker 1: and when, right, Like that seems pretty unambiguous. So I'm
Speaker 1: at this point now where like, intellectually I think I'm
Speaker 1: pro nuclear. I'm pro nuclear, So I do have this
Speaker 1: question about tail risk, right, tail risk seems like a
Speaker 1: thing with nuclear power that I haven't quite figured out.
Speaker 1: But I still have the emotional wariness, right can you
Speaker 1: bring me around?
Speaker 2: Sure? And rightfully, So, when you've gone through that era,
Speaker 2: that stigma, that feeling, that fear kind of like lags.
Speaker 2: It stays there for a very long time. And so
Speaker 2: you know, if you kind of fast forward, that had
Speaker 2: a real implication as how the energy infrastructure ecosystem kind
Speaker 2: of shape in the United States. Right, So you see
Speaker 2: a big lag after Chernobyl obviously TMI and Chernobyl, and
Speaker 2: then in nineteen nineties and then two thousands is where
Speaker 2: we started like seeing you know, some murmurs about like hey,
Speaker 2: you know, is there you know, renewed interest And really
Speaker 2: in the two thousands, you know, when people are talking
Speaker 2: about climate change and they start looking around and see, okay,
Speaker 2: what can really what can we do? About it, the
Speaker 2: concerns about climate change and the need for low carbon
Speaker 2: energy sources. It renews some of those interests. Yes, we've
Speaker 2: seen a lot of growth in solar and other renewables,
Speaker 2: but really, at the end of the day, you know,
Speaker 2: you chilled the customers the new back in their head.
Speaker 2: They need something dispatchable. They wanted some real clean base
Speaker 2: or power.
Speaker 1: So dispatchable and base load basically means always available whenever
Speaker 1: you need it now, like solar and wind.
Speaker 2: That's correct, that's great. So in two thousand and five,
Speaker 2: you see some policy changes, right, you see the Energy
Speaker 2: Policy Act that providers some incentive to revive the industry. Okay,
Speaker 2: and so that kind of like sparked. You know, you've
Speaker 2: seen like you know, after many decades, we've built Plan
Speaker 2: Vogel that just Unit three one operational last year. Unit
Speaker 2: four went online this year, so you know, it's it's
Speaker 2: a big achievement for a nuclear after such a long lag.
Speaker 1: So this is the project in Georgia, like the first
Speaker 1: new nuclear power plant in decades.
Speaker 2: That's correct, that's correct. The two units, I think there
Speaker 2: were originally two other units being pursued in summer, but
Speaker 2: then those projects stalled, but these two have continued and
Speaker 2: then Unit three and four just came online and now
Speaker 2: millions of homes are being powered from this clean source
Speaker 2: of energy. However, these are first of a kind units,
Speaker 2: and there's a lot of first of a kind of
Speaker 2: risk that went along with it. So it's a mix
Speaker 2: of optimism on one side that hey, we just built
Speaker 2: new power plants after so many decades, But on the
Speaker 2: other hand, oh, you know, the cost went off, it
Speaker 2: took longer to build it. You know, it's really the
Speaker 2: first of a kind, and that kind of challenge is
Speaker 2: what we are living through right now, right it's really
Speaker 2: the project costs are high. There's a lot of risks
Speaker 2: and uncertainties around how long can we actually take to
Speaker 2: build one of these? But the good news is, hopefully
Speaker 2: we built two of these units, we'll learn from it
Speaker 2: and we can do it faster and better and and cheaper.
Speaker 1: I mean, is it's sort of like we never, at
Speaker 1: least in this country, learned how to build a modern
Speaker 1: nuclear plant, Like we build nuclear plants like literally fifty
Speaker 1: years ago, and then we kind of stopped and now
Speaker 1: we got to start from not quite zero but kind
Speaker 1: of scratch again.
Speaker 2: So if you look at the infrastructure, right, we don't
Speaker 2: build big things anymore.
Speaker 1: Much less nuclear power plants. Like even the tunnel. Right,
Speaker 1: they're building a tunnel from New Jersey to New York
Speaker 1: under the Hudson River. It's gonna cost I don't know,
Speaker 1: fifteen billion dollars or something. That's just a tube under
Speaker 1: the river.
Speaker 2: And it's it's it's all common across the board. It
Speaker 2: is because when you build something bespoke and a very
Speaker 2: giant complex project, we lost that muscle to really execute
Speaker 2: such ginomics projects in this kind.
Speaker 1: Of Well, so you were walking us very elegantly toward
Speaker 1: the dream of micro reactors, right, like, away from giant
Speaker 1: bespoke projects and toward the dream of a sort of
Speaker 1: factory built put it on the back of a truck
Speaker 1: nuclear reactor, which is in fact what you're working on.
Speaker 2: That's correct.
Speaker 1: So tell me about microreactors, right. Microreactor is this word
Speaker 1: that I've heard, like smart people say for a few years,
Speaker 1: and I get from the name that it is a
Speaker 1: reactor that is small. But like to start telling me, like,
Speaker 1: what is the dream of microreactors? Why is this what
Speaker 1: smart people talk about when they talk about nuclear power?
Speaker 2: So microreactors are really defined very small transportable reactors that
Speaker 2: are between one to you know, ten or twenty megawatt electric.
Speaker 1: So that's maybe whatever, less than a tenth the size
Speaker 1: maybe one hundredth the size of a of a power plant.
Speaker 1: Truly micro truly Okay, so they're micro, Like, why is
Speaker 1: that appealing? Like, what's the rationale there?
Speaker 2: So there are three key features that makes these small
Speaker 2: reactors attractive microreactors in general. First, there, because of their
Speaker 2: small size, they're in envision to be fully factory built, ah,
Speaker 2: not smaller components or modules. And then bring to site.
Speaker 2: You build a whole thing in a factory. That's number one.
Speaker 2: And you can also transport them using standard roadways or
Speaker 2: railways or or you know through the sea. Right, Okay,
Speaker 2: that's number one.
Speaker 1: So you build it in a factory and put it
Speaker 1: on the back of a truck, and that is going
Speaker 1: to be, in theory, wildly cheaper than building a bespoke
Speaker 1: power plant every time. I mean, it's just like like
Speaker 1: a building a car, right, Like if you had to
Speaker 1: build a car from scratch every time somebody wanted a car,
Speaker 1: it would literally cost millions of dollars. But if you
Speaker 1: make a thousand of the same car in a factory
Speaker 1: or one hundred thousand of the same car in factory,
Speaker 1: it gets wildly cheaper. That's the that's part one of the.
Speaker 2: Dream, and that's really the main idea. Right when you
Speaker 2: do repetition of the same thing over and over again,
Speaker 2: you can learn how to bring the cost down faster
Speaker 2: you learn it. You're building in a controlled environment, meant
Speaker 2: you're bringing.
Speaker 1: The industrial revolution. Like we've known this for hundreds of years. Literally,
Speaker 1: adamstraethroat about this in seventeen seventy six.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 1: If you build things in a factory, they get weight cheaper.
Speaker 2: Okay, However, yeah, there are some downsides of a small reactor.
Speaker 2: From a physics perspective. You have higher leakage and the
Speaker 2: economies of scales against you, so you have filtified other
Speaker 2: ways to offset the costs.
Speaker 1: So there's a cost. It doesn't just scale down in
Speaker 1: an elegant way. It gets worse on certain dimensions.
Speaker 2: Like for example, if you look at a current power plant,
Speaker 2: a water water cooled power plants that are basically the
Speaker 2: infrastructure you know, that's the basis of all of the
Speaker 2: nuclear power plants, commercially found today in the US. So
Speaker 2: if you look at those, you have around one hundred
Speaker 2: systems that that's around the nuclear reactor to keep it happy,
Speaker 2: to make it work functionally, operationally, safer. One hundred systems, right.
Speaker 1: One hundred different Like when you say systems, like, what's
Speaker 1: one of the hundred systems you're talking about?
Speaker 2: Chemical and volume control system? Are you know, a high
Speaker 2: pressure injection system for safety? There are various systems that
Speaker 2: ensure that the reactor runs properly, right, huh.
Speaker 1: And so for a microreactor, you cannot build one hundred
Speaker 1: systems for every microreactor because then you lose all the
Speaker 1: cost benefits you have gained.
Speaker 2: And now all of a sudden you have to think like, Okay,
Speaker 2: is that the right technology to scale down? Because if
Speaker 2: I scale it down, I still in one hundred systems
Speaker 2: even I'm beyond. They might be smaller, but it's not
Speaker 2: going to help me on economics of scale. Yeah, so
Speaker 2: you have to kind of rethink the problem a little bit.
Speaker 2: So that's number one is factory made, second is transportation.
Speaker 2: The third one is it's self regulating. Right, if you
Speaker 2: look at a current large scale conventional power plant, you
Speaker 2: have hundreds of people working in the power plant to
Speaker 2: make sure.
Speaker 1: It works well, Homer Simpson famously, Well, let's not go there.
Speaker 1: I apologize. Is that an annoying How do you? Are
Speaker 1: you tired of that? I'm sorry. It's lazy on my part.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I mean it is. It does portray I
Speaker 2: mean Simpsons. My whole entire generation grew up watching Simpsons, right,
Speaker 2: and so it portrayed some things about nuclear power plants
Speaker 2: that its not necessarily painting the right picture.
Speaker 1: It's capturing so that the Simpsons launched in the eighties, right,
Speaker 1: So it is capturing that sort of peak anti nuclear zeitgeist.
Speaker 2: That's right, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 1: So okay, so I apologize, I have derailed us.
Speaker 2: So factor that makes a microaractor unique is the ability
Speaker 2: to self regulate. So instead of needing hundreds of people,
Speaker 2: you need one or two operators to run the system.
Speaker 2: That means the machine itself must be able to ensure
Speaker 2: safe operations without relying on people or if there's a
Speaker 2: human error, it kind of self regulates itself.
Speaker 1: So you actually came up with an idea for you
Speaker 1: came up with a design for a microreactor, right, You
Speaker 1: were you were. It was your previous job. You were
Speaker 1: working for the federal government right as a as a
Speaker 1: researcher at a lab dedicated to to figuring out microreactors.
Speaker 1: And as I understand that there was actually like a
Speaker 1: particular moment when you had an idea, which seems like
Speaker 1: it never actually happens, but I always love it when
Speaker 1: it happens, So tell me about this moment.
Speaker 2: Sure, So after a month I joined Idaho National Laboratory
Speaker 2: and they really hired me in to establish or to
Speaker 2: help them establish the DOV Department of Energy microreactive program. Okay,
Speaker 2: and very soon after I helped kind of establish the program,
Speaker 2: I realized, instead of having smaller projects and specific problem areas,
Speaker 2: we need to put them together into a test reactor.
Speaker 2: We have to build a prototype, a real test reactor
Speaker 2: that shows everyone what a microreactor is, How does it operate?
Speaker 2: How many people do we need to operate it? Can
Speaker 2: it be co located in a neighborhood, for example, and
Speaker 2: operate safely? Now, right after, after about a month or softer,
Speaker 2: I joined iron L. I realized, let me go ahead
Speaker 2: and pitch this to the Department of Energy, And I
Speaker 2: did that to the lab leadership. They liked the idea.
Speaker 2: I went to Department of Energy. They thought it was
Speaker 2: an important thing to do. And so the question becomes, okay,
Speaker 2: what size, what should be the technology?
Speaker 1: And now you got to design it right. Everybody's like, yeah, great,
Speaker 1: go do it. Now you gotta do it right. What
Speaker 1: is the most basic, like plane vanilla explanation of what
Speaker 1: is going on in the core of a nuclear power plant,
Speaker 1: just generically any nuclear power plant.
Speaker 2: So what you're really looking for is, you know, you're
Speaker 2: you're splitting larger heavy atoms. In our case, it is
Speaker 2: mostly uranium, right, and there's a specific isotope called urinium
Speaker 2: two thirty five. It's a fecile material. If you hit
Speaker 2: it with the neutron, it splits and into you know,
Speaker 2: fragments of you know, other nuclei and some neutrons and
Speaker 2: some energy. But you also release other neutron as part
Speaker 2: of that splitting. So what you want a nuclear reactor
Speaker 2: is for that secondary neutron to go hit another nuclear
Speaker 2: nucleus and then continue on that and that perpetuates into
Speaker 2: a chain reaction, right, and the process of fission splitting
Speaker 2: up the nucleus releases large amount of energy, and that's
Speaker 2: the energy we want to essentially take out of the
Speaker 2: fuel through a coolant into and dump it into a turbin.
Speaker 1: You capture the energy as heat and then it's just
Speaker 1: like any other power plant, but instead of burning fossil
Speaker 1: fuel to get the heat, you're splitting uranium atoms.
Speaker 2: To get precisely so after you take the heat away
Speaker 2: and send it to a secondary system, to a turbine,
Speaker 2: it's no different than a coal power lane or a
Speaker 2: natural gas.
Speaker 1: And so what is the what is the challenge? What
Speaker 1: is the problem you're trying to avoid in that setting?
Speaker 2: So, I mean from a reactor physics perspective, you want
Speaker 2: to make sure that when you when you want heat
Speaker 2: and you can generate a chain reaction to to emit
Speaker 2: this heat and capture it and use it in a
Speaker 2: useful way. You want to be able to control it effectively, right,
Speaker 2: that's what involves you know, the whole reactor. If you're
Speaker 2: able to control this chain reaction, then you are functioning
Speaker 2: you know, power reactor. You don't want an uncontrolled reaction.
Speaker 2: You want to be able to control it so you
Speaker 2: can you can ensure that you can safely remove this
Speaker 2: heat without breaking anything. That's the whole premise of a
Speaker 2: nuclear reactor, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, an uncontrolled reaction is like a bomb. Right,
Speaker 1: It's like a terrible bomb.
Speaker 2: That's exactly right.
Speaker 1: Coming up after the break, the alser goes to Walmart
Speaker 1: winds up designing a new kind of nuclear reactor.
Speaker 2: So these ideas were You know, when you're a reactor designer,
Speaker 2: you're then I thinking about all the various iterations and
Speaker 2: permutations and combinations of what makes a nuclear technology feasible. Right,
Speaker 2: And if you look into it, mostly the combination of
Speaker 2: fuel and coolant used in a reactor defines a nuclear technology,
Speaker 2: and there's like, you know, about one hundred, one hundred
Speaker 2: and twenty combinations out there. Mostly we've tried almost every
Speaker 2: combination in tests in the past, right.
Speaker 1: So you basically you got to make the fission reaction happen.
Speaker 1: You need some fuel to do that, and then it's
Speaker 1: going to generate a crazy amount of heat, so you
Speaker 1: got to keep that from getting out of hand with
Speaker 1: the coolant. Like, those are the two things you got
Speaker 1: to do.
Speaker 2: That's every reactor designers to pick that. You're then I
Speaker 2: thinking about different technologies, right, It's not really fully formulated
Speaker 2: is in your subconscious mind. So the moment I was
Speaker 2: thinking about let's go build a reactor in i n
Speaker 2: L for the microreactor program, I started thinking about what
Speaker 2: should be the technology and then it really happened in
Speaker 2: a suddenly overnight I woke up and I said, okay,
Speaker 2: you know what I think. I know what it is,
Speaker 2: but I really have to put that on paper. I
Speaker 2: did go to Walmark, got some colored pencils and a
Speaker 2: big paper and started sketching it up how that system
Speaker 2: is going to look like. Now, that's just an idea.
Speaker 2: Obviously we took that idea and really started making the
Speaker 2: requirements to build a reactor. Some things evolved, but fundamentally
Speaker 2: it was the same concept that I sketched up a
Speaker 2: few days before Christmas in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1: So what was the concept? What was the design?
Speaker 2: So really looked at all those different iterations and came
Speaker 2: down with what's called a sodium thermal reactor. Right. It
Speaker 2: is basically using uranium or coonium hydrite, the same fuel
Speaker 2: that we use in a lot of research reactors around
Speaker 2: the globe. We have a lot of data on it.
Speaker 2: If we understand it very well, if you couple that
Speaker 2: with a very high conductive coolant like sodium liquid sodium
Speaker 2: in our case, all of a sudden you can have
Speaker 2: a low pressured h nuclear reactor with a high power
Speaker 2: density and low enrichment need. So that really was the
Speaker 2: basis the fundamental technology choice for Marvel.
Speaker 1: Why do you call it Marvel?
Speaker 2: Huh? Well, that's because I wanted to name that people
Speaker 2: can remember easily, and that does not sound like a
Speaker 2: scary Greek god. Smart and and and it can it
Speaker 2: can shine the light.
Speaker 1: You know, you don't want to call it. You don't
Speaker 1: want to call it Icarus, right, you know what to
Speaker 1: call it? Nuclear actor Icarus?
Speaker 2: And that's right, that's right. And also like it's a.
Speaker 1: Prometheus, don't call it perm Yeah, what's what's it an
Speaker 1: acronym for?
Speaker 2: Oh god, it has a very long name, so it's
Speaker 2: just just do it. And it's Microreactor Applications Research and
Speaker 2: microature Applications Research, Validation and Evaluation project. And it's very
Speaker 2: it's a very districtive name if you think about it.
Speaker 1: It could be anything, right, right, right? Yeah, your acronym
Speaker 1: it was mine. Unfortunately, Well it was sort of peak Marvel, right,
Speaker 1: you said it was twenty nineteen. It really sticks it
Speaker 1: in time as like a peak Marvel moment. So okay,
Speaker 1: so you have designed this thing, you get approval for it.
Speaker 1: Let's let's talk about safety, because you've talked about, you know,
Speaker 1: wanting to engineer it in a way that is both
Speaker 1: economically sensible, right, to engineer it in a way that
Speaker 1: some company is going to pay to build it, and
Speaker 1: that it makes sense to build it and safely run it.
Speaker 1: And that's complicated, right, It's complicated for a microreactor. So
Speaker 1: how how are you dealing with that as you're designing
Speaker 1: this reactor.
Speaker 2: If you look at what is and ask the question
Speaker 2: what is an ideal nuclear reactor, it would be what
Speaker 2: is the simplest reactor that can have the highest level
Speaker 2: of safety without having to add a ton of systems
Speaker 2: to ensure that it is safe?
Speaker 1: Right? I mean the dream is just like whatever, a
Speaker 1: pile of dirt or something. Right, The dream is that
Speaker 1: it's a glass of water that you could somehow magically
Speaker 1: get power out of. It's like, what's the worst that
Speaker 1: could happen?
Speaker 2: Right? That's right. So there's engineered safety, which really is
Speaker 2: you know, you have to do have a lot of
Speaker 2: engineered man made systems. It's like pressing a brake in
Speaker 2: a car. If you're designing the system, breaks can fail.
Speaker 2: Sometimes you have to kind of have backups for that.
Speaker 2: So there's a lot of additional things that go into it.
Speaker 1: And to be clear, that is sort of the model
Speaker 1: for big utility scale NUC power plants, right. They're full
Speaker 1: of highly engineered systems and backups for those systems and
Speaker 1: lots of people there to make sure that all those
Speaker 1: systems are functioning so that you don't have some terrible
Speaker 1: nuclear accident.
Speaker 2: That is correct. And you're really engineered those systems to
Speaker 2: make sure they're reliable, and you go through all years
Speaker 2: of qualification tends to achieve that.
Speaker 1: And like, that's just not going to work for a microreactor, right,
Speaker 1: Like you can't have all that because it'll be too
Speaker 1: expensive for too little power.
Speaker 2: That's correct. So you to really achieve that high safety
Speaker 2: with fewer amount of systems, you want what is called
Speaker 2: inherent safety, right, it is baked into the material physics
Speaker 2: of the fuel. And so we looked around and we said, okay,
Speaker 2: what is the highest inherent safety fuel out there? And
Speaker 2: it really is uraniums of coonium hydride Okay.
Speaker 1: So you choose a fuel that has this elegant property,
Speaker 1: which is if the chain reactions starts to get out
Speaker 1: of control, the hydrogen that is mixed in with the
Speaker 1: fuel tends to bring it back under control. Is that
Speaker 1: a fair okay? So is it the case that with
Speaker 1: the fuel you're using, like there is physically no way
Speaker 1: the chain reaction could get out of control or is
Speaker 1: it just way less likely?
Speaker 2: It's way less likely.
Speaker 1: Okay. So in addition to choosing this particular fuel, that
Speaker 1: was one of the things you did to bring this
Speaker 1: higher level of inherent safety. It's clearly not going to
Speaker 1: be enough. Like, what else do you have to do
Speaker 1: in designing this reactor?
Speaker 2: Well, there's a lot, But the second choice is the coolant,
Speaker 2: right okay. Coolant is the fluid that takes the heat
Speaker 2: from the core and transfers it to the secondary system
Speaker 2: where you want to make use of this heat.
Speaker 1: Right okay.
Speaker 2: And if you look at water today, most existing power
Speaker 2: plants are built with water. Water will be known very much,
Speaker 2: you know, all the properties we've known. We've designed other
Speaker 2: power plants before nuclears, We're very familiar with water. So
Speaker 2: the industry kind of more toward that direction. But if
Speaker 2: you if you take a step back and you look
Speaker 2: at water. It has some benefits because it's familiar, but
Speaker 2: it has some cons as well, so some some some
Speaker 2: challenges because you want a system to be hot to
Speaker 2: extract that heat. But with water, as soon as you
Speaker 2: exceed one hundred degrees celsias, what does it want to do.
Speaker 2: It wants to boil off. Right, We're just not a
Speaker 2: good thing. So to prevent from boiling, you pressurize the system.
Speaker 1: Right, there's more adding pressure raises the boiling point.
Speaker 2: That's correct. Now you can now all of a sudden,
Speaker 2: you need something that is thick our vessel. You want
Speaker 2: to make sure the you know, you can keep it
Speaker 2: at at the pressurized level. You need a pressurizer. You
Speaker 2: need a sick containment building in case there's a pipe
Speaker 2: break or something. You still have a you know, sick
Speaker 2: steel and concrete line containment to hold everything together. It's
Speaker 2: part of the safety case, right, and it also protects
Speaker 2: you from external hazards like a tornado or a missile
Speaker 2: or something else. Right, So it's really all of these
Speaker 2: combining makes up the overall safety case. So when it
Speaker 2: came for us to choose the coolant we use sodium.
Speaker 2: Sodium is many times more thermally conductive than water, and
Speaker 2: when you heat it up, it does not really boil away.
Speaker 2: At one hundred degrees celsius. Right, the boiling point of
Speaker 2: sodium is hundreds of degrees, much higher than what we
Speaker 2: need for the power generation. Right. So it really gives
Speaker 2: you a non pressurized system, so your vessel walls does
Speaker 2: not have to be this thick forged component that are
Speaker 2: extremely expensive or difficult to make. You can now make
Speaker 2: them with thin walled vessels by simpler manufacturing methods, or
Speaker 2: your costs can go down because you're no longer pressurized.
Speaker 2: You don't need this and you don't have a large
Speaker 2: amount of fuel radiactive material in the core all of
Speaker 2: a sudden. With the microreactor using sodium, you can make
Speaker 2: the case to the regulator that you don't need a
Speaker 2: traditional containment. Okay, you still need a confinement, but it
Speaker 2: doesn't need to be like you know, extremely you know,
Speaker 2: several feet of concrete and thick, large steel lined containment.
Speaker 2: So there's a lot of other symptoms that you can
Speaker 2: simplify and what you end up seeing by just making
Speaker 2: those two choices and the way you design the reactor.
Speaker 2: From one hundred systems like a traditional plant, you can
Speaker 2: bring that down to about twenty.
Speaker 1: And so what is going from one hundred engineered systems
Speaker 1: to twenty do for you?
Speaker 2: So it really reduces the amount of capital expenditure you
Speaker 2: need initially to build a plant with fewer systems, you need,
Speaker 2: smaller footprint, you need less civil structure. You're paying for
Speaker 2: less components and pipes and vessels and form work and concrete.
Speaker 2: So your cost per kilowatt initially can go down if
Speaker 2: you simplify your plant. And that's really what we're you know,
Speaker 2: that's one of one big piece of the puzzle. The
Speaker 2: other big piece of the puzzle, which is really our
Speaker 2: main thesis in ALLO is you know, there's one model,
Speaker 2: which is you spend six to ten years to build
Speaker 2: a gigawat scale plant. If you get really good at it,
Speaker 2: you can bring it down to like five, Right, so
Speaker 2: you spend five years or six years optimistically, and you
Speaker 2: build a gigawat scale plant. What we're doing instead is
Speaker 2: instead of building a single gigawat scale plant, we're focusing
Speaker 2: on building factories that can produce at least a gigawat
Speaker 2: power output every year by making smaller reactors.
Speaker 1: So how many reactors per year would one of these
Speaker 1: factories make.
Speaker 2: So we're trying to build our first pilot scale facility
Speaker 2: here in Austin, Texas and we're establishing that by end
Speaker 2: of next year, and that is going to be just
Speaker 2: designed to build twenty of these reactors per year and
Speaker 2: if demand outgrows that, which we believe it will. Uh,
Speaker 2: the idea is the learning from that, we're going to
Speaker 2: a full factory. A full factor's anticipated to be between
Speaker 2: one hundred to two hundred reactors a year.
Speaker 1: So tell me about what the world looks like if
Speaker 1: it works. Like if this idea you have of building
Speaker 1: a factory to build whatever a nuclear power plant every
Speaker 1: two days or something like, how does that work in
Speaker 1: the world and what is it? What does what does
Speaker 1: it look like looking around America in that world?
Speaker 2: You know, we believe that we can actually usher in
Speaker 2: the second atomic age like we can we can grow
Speaker 2: nuclear much more rapidly. So this whole entire energy transition
Speaker 2: we're just not only fueled by you know, wanting to
Speaker 2: have you know, lower carbon or no carbon energy source,
Speaker 2: but also this massive demand and role that we're seeing
Speaker 2: in the electric sector as well as the industrial.
Speaker 1: Sector electrification plus AI plus AI. Right, it seems like, yes,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of demand, so right, so so sure
Speaker 1: it means lots of nuclear power plants. I mean specifically,
Speaker 1: is it like there's a little nuclear power plant in
Speaker 1: every neighborhood. Is it like people are buying kind of
Speaker 1: you know, utilities will buy ten or twenty of these
Speaker 1: microreactors and sort of put them all, you know, on
Speaker 1: one site, Like how does it actually work?
Speaker 2: The idea is, you know, the way we're designing these
Speaker 2: systems that if you want a single reactor, you can
Speaker 2: have a single reactor, but if you want two, they
Speaker 2: don't share any infrastructures. You can daisy chain them as
Speaker 2: many as you want. So if a customer wants, hey,
Speaker 2: give me five hundred megalots, we would provide you know,
Speaker 2: fifty of these Allo one reactors. Or in the near future,
Speaker 2: when we build our one hundred megawot system, it'll be
Speaker 2: five of those systems daisy change next to one another.
Speaker 1: What do you think the first use case will be?
Speaker 2: So so one of microreactors first came into being right
Speaker 2: many years ago in the mid twenty fourteen when we
Speaker 2: were really trying to figure out what the market was,
Speaker 2: it really was the remote communities, remote mindes, islands. Those
Speaker 2: are areas where energy cost of energy is really really high.
Speaker 2: So when you deploy a first product into the market,
Speaker 2: normally it's high cost, and then you try to lower
Speaker 2: it down and then try to penetrate a broader market.
Speaker 2: That was the entire idea for first generation microreactors.
Speaker 1: And I should ask do microreactors exist in the world now?
Speaker 2: Well, not in the modern definition, it doesn't. We have
Speaker 2: a lot of small reactors, but they're not designed to
Speaker 2: stay small or being mass manufactured. If you look around
Speaker 2: right now, you don't see a factory as mass manufacturing
Speaker 2: you a bunch of small reactors. The most we see
Speaker 2: is in the nuclear submarine site, where you can make
Speaker 2: maybe one or two reactors a year, but not at
Speaker 2: the scale we're talking about.
Speaker 1: Yes, and that's a very particular use case.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But to come back to your question, where are
Speaker 2: these first applications. The first reactor we're going to build
Speaker 2: from our company is going to be at Idaho National Laboratory.
Speaker 2: It's going to be a single unit, and it's mostly
Speaker 2: because you know, we want to learn how this thing operates.
Speaker 1: At some point, you got to build one.
Speaker 2: We're going to show the world that we can validate
Speaker 2: the cost. We can you know, validate the deployment model,
Speaker 2: which we're trying to do onset construction less than sixty days.
Speaker 2: These are very challenging targets.
Speaker 1: Why might it not work?
Speaker 2: So if you look at nuclear fission.
Speaker 1: The fund the fundamental thing, you're doing the.
Speaker 2: Fundamental thing right. We know the physics work, we know
Speaker 2: nuclear fission works, we operate them today. It's not a
Speaker 2: matter of proving the technology if it works or not. Right,
Speaker 2: We've built other advanced reactors before. That's there's a lot
Speaker 2: of challe just getting there. But the true challenge, in
Speaker 2: my opinion, is in the scaling of the technology. Can
Speaker 2: we make hundreds of these a year? Can we build
Speaker 2: a factory that can effectively reduced down the cost. Can
Speaker 2: we make fuel in large quantities enough to fuel all
Speaker 2: of these reactors? And this is not a traditional fuel type,
Speaker 2: this is an advanced reactor fuel. I mean it's slightly
Speaker 2: higher enrichment than traditional nuclear reactors. These a different chemical form.
Speaker 2: So we have to establish infrastructure to build fuel to
Speaker 2: build these reactors as well as the expertise to deploy them,
Speaker 2: like in a K model, Right, you get the instruction,
Speaker 2: you get all the modules a flat pack, that's right,
Speaker 2: You get all the modules onside and be able to
Speaker 2: quickly assemble that together in a matter of days, not
Speaker 2: in years. Right.
Speaker 1: That all sounds so hard.
Speaker 2: It is hot. And so we believe you have a
Speaker 2: very strong team. And we're assembling strong team not just
Speaker 2: from nuclear but from other industries like automotive and aerospace
Speaker 2: and chip manufacturing to understand how, you know, what are
Speaker 2: the lessons learned can bring from those industries that worked
Speaker 2: that have been successful into a nuclear trying to not
Speaker 2: reinvent the wheel all over again. But there's a lot
Speaker 2: of challenges, there's a lot of unknowns, and we're trying
Speaker 2: to diligently solve them, focusing on the most important question
Speaker 2: at a time.
Speaker 1: So I want to just return briefly to the idea
Speaker 1: of tail risk, like because it is, it does, it's
Speaker 1: I don't know how to parse it at some level
Speaker 1: with nuclear power, right, like you tell me, Like one
Speaker 1: version of the question is what's the worst thing that
Speaker 1: could happen with one of these reactors?
Speaker 2: Okay, So when you go through the regulatory process, this
Speaker 2: is the very question that they ask you. What is
Speaker 2: the what is the worst thing that can happen, even
Speaker 2: if it's the very very low probability, what happens? What
Speaker 2: do you do in the in the scenario, what does
Speaker 2: the recovery look like? What is the consequence of that?
Speaker 2: And the way we are designing our reactors. And I
Speaker 2: can't speak for everyone out there, and the most companies
Speaker 2: are doing very similar things is even in the worst
Speaker 2: worst case scenario, we don't have any release of any
Speaker 2: radiactive material from the reactor to the outside.
Speaker 1: Huh? And is that inherent in the physics? Like? How
Speaker 1: how do you know that?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 1: How do you know that with certainty?
Speaker 2: It's a it's a so a question is how do
Speaker 2: we know? The second question is how can we prove it? So?
Speaker 2: How do we know? Is mostly by the data that
Speaker 2: we have on the physics side, as well as the engineering,
Speaker 2: the way we design our reactor. How do we prove it?
Speaker 2: So the proving goes in several stages. Right the first
Speaker 2: stage is we're building a full scale non nuclear prototype
Speaker 2: of the reactor starting this year. It's going to be
Speaker 2: you know, turning on next year. The purpose of that
Speaker 2: is to collect the data so we can validate some
Speaker 2: of our safety claims. But it's not going to be
Speaker 2: a nuclear fuel. But apart from that, that little disclaimer
Speaker 2: that we don't have nuclear fuel, everything else that that
Speaker 2: ensures the performance of the system, the safety of the system.
Speaker 2: We can collect data on so.
Speaker 1: You can kick it and throw things at it and whatever,
Speaker 1: stress test it exactly.
Speaker 2: So that's the first stage. The second stage is, you know,
Speaker 2: when you have a reactor, a full blown you know,
Speaker 2: physics based reactor, you have fuel insert into it and
Speaker 2: you're going to you know, turn it. What a nuclear term,
Speaker 2: it's called going critical, meaning you first turn on the
Speaker 2: machine and then you slow ramp up power level from
Speaker 2: ten percent power, twenty percent power thirty. So you don't
Speaker 2: go like, you know, yeah, I've got a reactor and
Speaker 2: I put fuel in and here it goes one hundred
Speaker 2: percent power. You don't necessarily do that. You do a
Speaker 2: very step wise increment and that is extremely crucial to
Speaker 2: validate the safety characteristics of your reactor. And once we
Speaker 2: have validated those, we do some other tests to ensure
Speaker 2: our safety systems work. And when all of those are done,
Speaker 2: that's when you go full power. Right, So that's really
Speaker 2: how you prove that whatever you've designed has the right
Speaker 2: level of safety that you've designed too. Now, having all
Speaker 2: that said, there's alsoknown unknowns, Yeah, and that exists in
Speaker 2: almost every technologies and that's something we hope to learn
Speaker 2: more as we have more of these systems operational. But
Speaker 2: going back to the question, what is the worst thing
Speaker 2: that can happen? Because us we have designed this reactor
Speaker 2: with enough margin built into it. In the worst case scenario,
Speaker 2: we shut it down and no bad things happen, nothing releases,
Speaker 2: nothing breaks down, And that's a level of safety pedigree
Speaker 2: that we have to brain the way we see in
Speaker 2: research reactors and universities, right, you know, they try to
Speaker 2: pull the control rod as fast as they can and
Speaker 2: you don't see any braking, you don't see any boiling
Speaker 2: of coolant.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So you're alluding to research reactors in universities, which
Speaker 1: I didn't know about until I was preparing for this interview. So, like,
Speaker 1: is it right there are nuclear reactors at what colleges
Speaker 1: around the country? Like, what is the story with that?
Speaker 2: That's right? I mean research reactors were really built to
Speaker 2: collect data to measure nuclear physics data. And if you
Speaker 2: look around all the major engineering schools around the United
Speaker 2: States and also even beyond, you have research reactors. They're
Speaker 2: called non power reactors. You've got coolant, you've got fuel,
Speaker 2: you've got all the various instrumentation in place. But it
Speaker 2: does not really go high temperature because you're not really
Speaker 2: trying to make electricity city out of them. You try
Speaker 2: to generate a chain reaction and measure physics data. Right.
Speaker 1: And they're so safe that they let college students play.
Speaker 2: With them pretty much.
Speaker 1: And and did you say they used the same fuel
Speaker 1: as you were using.
Speaker 2: That's correct.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
Speaker 1: So now we're just going to finish with the lightning round,
Speaker 1: which could be quick. It can be a little.
Speaker 2: More random, sure.
Speaker 1: Than the rest. What's the most underrated sub atomic particle?
Speaker 2: Hmm, underrated subatomic particle the neutron?
Speaker 1: Right? I thought you were going to go straight to neutron.
Speaker 2: Don't fair.
Speaker 1: No, it's very obvious. That's fair. Okay, Good, give me
Speaker 1: a better run, give me a better one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, it is certainly the neutron. I have to
Speaker 2: figure out it.
Speaker 1: Because like you don't even think of it if you don't, right,
Speaker 1: the positiveative. Okay, Well, what's the most overrated subatomic particle?
Speaker 2: I think it's uh uh it's a what was that proton? Okay, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's it's really not okay. And here's why I say it, Right,
Speaker 2: if you look into I mean, I'm an energy guy,
Speaker 2: I look at you know how you can I'm not
Speaker 2: a you know, a reactor physicist per se. But if
Speaker 2: I look on a high level on the application side,
Speaker 2: what gives me energy? Chemical reactions like combustion, where you
Speaker 2: have exchange of electrons giving energy. So electrons have some
Speaker 2: prominence in the world of energy. Sure when it comes
Speaker 2: to you know, splitting a nucleus, neutrons play a massive role.
Speaker 2: But protons they're just there to make sure the world
Speaker 2: is happen and they balanced the charge.
Speaker 1: They're just there to keep the electrons.
Speaker 2: Have to keep the electrons around.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what's your favorite fundamental force?
Speaker 2: What's my favorite fundamental form?
Speaker 1: Tired of stupid physical questions, I can ask you other
Speaker 1: stupid questions. You ready, what'd you think of? What? What
Speaker 1: did you think of? Oppenheimer?
Speaker 2: I think it's a great movie, even I hope you're
Speaker 2: talking about the movie itself, not the actual person.
Speaker 1: I'm talking about the movie, not the actual person.
Speaker 2: Yes, I think it was. It was really great.
Speaker 1: I've seen you mention that you have that that a
Speaker 1: couple of your favorite books are by authors who started
Speaker 1: out anti nuclear and became pro nuclear, and so I'm curious,
Speaker 1: what is something that you have changed your mind about.
Speaker 2: One of my earliest mentors in Westinghouse, who hired me
Speaker 2: in the first place, he said, Yeah, sir, you can
Speaker 2: be a techie as much as you want, but unless
Speaker 2: you understand the economic side of engineering, you truly would
Speaker 2: not appreciate the value of what you're building. So don't
Speaker 2: ignore the economic side. Make sure you keep it right
Speaker 2: next to the technology. So that really opened my eyes
Speaker 2: in this whole area of not as advanced reactors, but
Speaker 2: also the economic side of things to make sure that
Speaker 2: whatever I'm doing should have a relevance to society.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel like the story of the economics transition
Speaker 1: at this point is basically a technoeconomic story, right. I
Speaker 1: feel like in many domains, the fundamental technological problems have
Speaker 1: largely been solved, and it's so it's a question of technoeconomics,
Speaker 1: and I mean people talk about that in like green cement,
Speaker 1: they talk about it in batteries, you're talking about it
Speaker 1: in nuclear power. It's interesting how often it comes.
Speaker 2: Up right, and there's so many technologies out there to
Speaker 2: solve problems. But at the end of the day, if
Speaker 2: it's not economical, it's hard to convince people. Why did
Speaker 2: you adopt it versus something else.
Speaker 1: Yasir Arafat is the chief technology officer at alo Atomics.
Speaker 1: Today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang. It was
Speaker 1: edited by Lyddy Jean Kott and engineered by Sarah Bruguer.
Speaker 1: You can email us at problem at Pushkin dot FM.
Speaker 1: I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with
Speaker 1: another episode of What's Your Problem.