June 20, 2024 • 45 mins
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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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. When I was a kid in the nineteen eighties,
I lived about forty miles from a nuclear power plant.
It's called Santa No Frey was right by the freeway,
and whenever we drove past it, me and my family,
we would all hold our breath, like, you know, to
protect ourselves from the radiation or whatever. So one of
(00:38):
those ritual family jokes, those things you do a million times,
not really because they're funny, but because they're just what
you do. I'm telling you this, because that joke, that ritual,
that holding our breath, it speaks to what the vibes
were in the eighties about nuclear power, right. That was
a moment of like peak nuclear fear. There had been
(01:02):
the three Mile Island nuclear accident in nineteen seventy nine. Yeah,
the Simpsons with Homer Simpson always most causing a meltdown,
and then more seriously in the eighties you had the
Chernobyl nuclear disaster. So we were very scared of nuclear
power at the time. But looking back, looking back from today,
(01:23):
I wonder if maybe we were scared of the wrong thing,
because today it looks increasingly likely that we may need
more nuclear power alongside more renewables. In order to stop
burning fossil fuel and contain the risk of climate change.
So looking back, maybe instead of being afraid of a
(01:46):
world with nuclear power, we should have been afraid of
a world without nuclear power. I'm Jacob Goldstein and this
is What's Your Problem, the show where I talk to
people who are trying to make technological progress. My guest
today is Yasser Arafat. He's the chief Technology office at
(02:09):
Hollo Atomics. Earlier in his career he worked for the
federal government at the Idaho National Lab, where he designed
a nuclear microreactor that he called Marvel. Now at Allo,
Yasser is trying to commercialize a version of that reactor.
His problem is this, how can you mass produce nuclear
reactors in a factory in a way that's safe, scalable,
(02:33):
and cheap. We mostly talked about the reactor that Yaser
has designed to be mass produced in a factory, but
to start we talked about the on again, off again
history of nuclear power in the United States.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Yeah, I mean, the sort of nuclear really starts from
the especially in the US in the fifties, right, we've
had the Atomic Energy ec was amended right to allow
nuclear industry to be privatized in nineteen fifty four, and
that kind of you know was you know, that paved
the way to the construction off the first commercial power plant,
(03:10):
I should say, in shipping Port, Pennsylvania, which began operations
like fifties, I think fifty eight and fifty eight, and
shipping Port really symbolized this beginning of this new dawn
of the what we called the first atomic Age. And
if you post there for a second, up until then,
if you think about it, for the last million years
(03:32):
or so, humanity really used combustion as their primary source
of power for growth.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
For you know, for most of that time, we burned wood,
and then for like a brief moment of one hundred
two hundred years, three hundred years, we burned cold, a
little bit of natural gas, a little bit oil. But
you're always burning something.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
What's burning something, it's always combustion, right, So that was
really a pivotal moment, and really humanity first unlocked that
amazing new modern way of creating energy by splitting atoms.
It was a big pivot moment and then entered the
seven sixties and mid seventies. So from the sixties to
seven mid seventies, we call this the golden age of nuclear, right,
(04:19):
and that's when really like, we built a ton of
reactors commercially in the United States, about fifty five of thems.
You know, up until mid seventies, there was a lot
of optimism about nuclear and a lot of the investments
went in there. However, when you when you started approaching
the mid seventies and if all these nuclear problems around,
it also invoked the creation of a regulatory body, right.
(04:43):
The NRC was formed in the mid seventies, and you know,
new regulations started getting imposed on plants and automatically things.
You know, the cost went out when regulations became tighter.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
The NRC is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
That's correct, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And then right after,
you know, just a few years later, nineteen seventy nine,
that's when Three Mile Island happened, right. I was in Slovenia.
We had a partial meltdown of a reactor and there
was a widespread public concern of fear. Sure nobody died
from that accident directly, but it really like you know,
(05:20):
shook the public quite a bit and really put a
lot of emphasis on the potential safety risks, and that
in turn made the regulatory activities even stricter.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
And so that's basically like new construction of nuclear power
plants more or less stops in the US after that, right.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Pretty much, that was the nail in the coffin for decades.
It stopped, exactly.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
And so you know, it's interesting for me personally because
so I was growing up in the nineteen eighties, right,
and that was definitely a time when what we would
now call the vibes were like anti nuclear basically, right,
Like nuclear power was this scary thing, and nuclear waste
(06:06):
was this scary thing that lasted forever. And you have
Chernobyl in there somewhere, which is like very bad and
very scary, right, and people did die, right and and
what and so so you know, that was what I
grew up with. And then just in the last few
years there has been this shift, right, Like, intellectually I
(06:31):
get now why nuclear power is good. I get intellectually
in fact that certainly coal fired power plants are super
dangerous and literally thousands of people die every year from them.
They just die in a way that is invisible, right,
because it's not like there's some accident, it's just that
(06:52):
coal fired power plants, emit pollutants that clearly are in
the aggregate killing people. We just don't know which people
and when, right, Like that seems pretty unambiguous. So I'm
at this point now where like, intellectually I think I'm
pro nuclear. I'm pro nuclear, So I do have this
question about tail risk, right, tail risk seems like a
(07:13):
thing with nuclear power that I haven't quite figured out.
But I still have the emotional wariness, right can you
bring me around?
Speaker 2 (07:23):
Sure? And rightfully, So, when you've gone through that era,
that stigma, that feeling, that fear kind of like lags.
It stays there for a very long time. And so
you know, if you kind of fast forward, that had
a real implication as how the energy infrastructure ecosystem kind
(07:44):
of shape in the United States. Right, So you see
a big lag after Chernobyl obviously TMI and Chernobyl, and
then in nineteen nineties and then two thousands is where
we started like seeing you know, some murmurs about like hey,
you know, is there you know, renewed interest And really
in the two thousands, you know, when people are talking
about climate change and they start looking around and see, okay,
(08:06):
what can really what can we do? About it, the
concerns about climate change and the need for low carbon
energy sources. It renews some of those interests. Yes, we've
seen a lot of growth in solar and other renewables,
but really, at the end of the day, you know,
you chilled the customers the new back in their head.
They need something dispatchable. They wanted some real clean base
(08:27):
or power.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
So dispatchable and base load basically means always available whenever
you need it now, like solar and wind.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
That's correct, that's great. So in two thousand and five,
you see some policy changes, right, you see the Energy
Policy Act that providers some incentive to revive the industry. Okay,
and so that kind of like sparked. You know, you've
seen like you know, after many decades, we've built Plan
Vogel that just Unit three one operational last year. Unit
(08:56):
four went online this year, so you know, it's it's
a big achievement for a nuclear after such a long lag.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
So this is the project in Georgia, like the first
new nuclear power plant in decades.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
That's correct, that's correct. The two units, I think there
were originally two other units being pursued in summer, but
then those projects stalled, but these two have continued and
then Unit three and four just came online and now
millions of homes are being powered from this clean source
of energy. However, these are first of a kind units,
(09:30):
and there's a lot of first of a kind of
risk that went along with it. So it's a mix
of optimism on one side that hey, we just built
new power plants after so many decades, But on the
other hand, oh, you know, the cost went off, it
took longer to build it. You know, it's really the
first of a kind, and that kind of challenge is
what we are living through right now, right it's really
(09:53):
the project costs are high. There's a lot of risks
and uncertainties around how long can we actually take to
build one of these? But the good news is, hopefully
we built two of these units, we'll learn from it
and we can do it faster and better and and cheaper.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
I mean, is it's sort of like we never, at
least in this country, learned how to build a modern
nuclear plant, Like we build nuclear plants like literally fifty
years ago, and then we kind of stopped and now
we got to start from not quite zero but kind
of scratch again.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
So if you look at the infrastructure, right, we don't
build big things anymore.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Much less nuclear power plants. Like even the tunnel. Right,
they're building a tunnel from New Jersey to New York
under the Hudson River. It's gonna cost I don't know,
fifteen billion dollars or something. That's just a tube under
the river.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
And it's it's it's all common across the board. It
is because when you build something bespoke and a very
giant complex project, we lost that muscle to really execute
such ginomics projects in this kind.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Of Well, so you were walking us very elegantly toward
the dream of micro reactors, right, like, away from giant
bespoke projects and toward the dream of a sort of
factory built put it on the back of a truck
nuclear reactor, which is in fact what you're working on.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
That's correct.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
So tell me about microreactors, right. Microreactor is this word
that I've heard, like smart people say for a few years,
and I get from the name that it is a
reactor that is small. But like to start telling me, like,
what is the dream of microreactors? Why is this what
smart people talk about when they talk about nuclear power?
Speaker 2 (11:33):
So microreactors are really defined very small transportable reactors that
are between one to you know, ten or twenty megawatt electric.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
So that's maybe whatever, less than a tenth the size
maybe one hundredth the size of a of a power plant.
Truly micro truly Okay, so they're micro, Like, why is
that appealing? Like, what's the rationale there?
Speaker 2 (11:59):
So there are three key features that makes these small
reactors attractive microreactors in general. First, there, because of their
small size, they're in envision to be fully factory built, ah,
not smaller components or modules. And then bring to site.
You build a whole thing in a factory. That's number one.
(12:21):
And you can also transport them using standard roadways or
railways or or you know through the sea. Right, Okay,
that's number one.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
So you build it in a factory and put it
on the back of a truck, and that is going
to be, in theory, wildly cheaper than building a bespoke
power plant every time. I mean, it's just like like
a building a car, right, Like if you had to
build a car from scratch every time somebody wanted a car,
it would literally cost millions of dollars. But if you
(12:51):
make a thousand of the same car in a factory
or one hundred thousand of the same car in factory,
it gets wildly cheaper. That's the that's part one of the.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
Dream, and that's really the main idea. Right when you
do repetition of the same thing over and over again,
you can learn how to bring the cost down faster
you learn it. You're building in a controlled environment, meant
you're bringing.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
The industrial revolution. Like we've known this for hundreds of years. Literally,
adamstraethroat about this in seventeen seventy six.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
If you build things in a factory, they get weight cheaper.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Okay, However, yeah, there are some downsides of a small reactor.
From a physics perspective. You have higher leakage and the
economies of scales against you, so you have filtified other
ways to offset the costs.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
So there's a cost. It doesn't just scale down in
an elegant way. It gets worse on certain dimensions.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
Like for example, if you look at a current power plant,
a water water cooled power plants that are basically the
infrastructure you know, that's the basis of all of the
nuclear power plants, commercially found today in the US. So
if you look at those, you have around one hundred
systems that that's around the nuclear reactor to keep it happy,
to make it work functionally, operationally, safer. One hundred systems, right.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
One hundred different Like when you say systems, like, what's
one of the hundred systems you're talking about?
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Chemical and volume control system? Are you know, a high
pressure injection system for safety? There are various systems that
ensure that the reactor runs properly, right, huh.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
And so for a microreactor, you cannot build one hundred
systems for every microreactor because then you lose all the
cost benefits you have gained.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
And now all of a sudden you have to think like, Okay,
is that the right technology to scale down? Because if
I scale it down, I still in one hundred systems
even I'm beyond. They might be smaller, but it's not
going to help me on economics of scale. Yeah, so
you have to kind of rethink the problem a little bit.
So that's number one is factory made, second is transportation.
The third one is it's self regulating. Right, if you
(14:47):
look at a current large scale conventional power plant, you
have hundreds of people working in the power plant to
make sure.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
It works well, Homer Simpson famously, Well, let's not go there.
I apologize. Is that an annoying How do you? Are
you tired of that? I'm sorry. It's lazy on my part.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Yeah, no, I mean it is. It does portray I
mean Simpsons. My whole entire generation grew up watching Simpsons, right,
and so it portrayed some things about nuclear power plants
that its not necessarily painting the right picture.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
It's capturing so that the Simpsons launched in the eighties, right,
So it is capturing that sort of peak anti nuclear zeitgeist.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
That's right, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
So okay, so I apologize, I have derailed us.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
So factor that makes a microaractor unique is the ability
to self regulate. So instead of needing hundreds of people,
you need one or two operators to run the system.
That means the machine itself must be able to ensure
safe operations without relying on people or if there's a
(16:00):
human error, it kind of self regulates itself.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
So you actually came up with an idea for you
came up with a design for a microreactor, right, You
were you were. It was your previous job. You were
working for the federal government right as a as a
researcher at a lab dedicated to to figuring out microreactors.
(16:25):
And as I understand that there was actually like a
particular moment when you had an idea, which seems like
it never actually happens, but I always love it when
it happens, So tell me about this moment.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Sure, So after a month I joined Idaho National Laboratory
and they really hired me in to establish or to
help them establish the DOV Department of Energy microreactive program. Okay,
and very soon after I helped kind of establish the program,
I realized, instead of having smaller projects and specific problem areas,
(16:59):
we need to put them together into a test reactor.
We have to build a prototype, a real test reactor
that shows everyone what a microreactor is, How does it operate?
How many people do we need to operate it? Can
it be co located in a neighborhood, for example, and
operate safely? Now, right after, after about a month or softer,
(17:20):
I joined iron L. I realized, let me go ahead
and pitch this to the Department of Energy, And I
did that to the lab leadership. They liked the idea.
I went to Department of Energy. They thought it was
an important thing to do. And so the question becomes, okay,
what size, what should be the technology?
Speaker 1 (17:38):
And now you got to design it right. Everybody's like, yeah, great,
go do it. Now you gotta do it right. What
is the most basic, like plane vanilla explanation of what
is going on in the core of a nuclear power plant,
just generically any nuclear power plant.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
So what you're really looking for is, you know, you're
you're splitting larger heavy atoms. In our case, it is
mostly uranium, right, and there's a specific isotope called urinium
two thirty five. It's a fecile material. If you hit
it with the neutron, it splits and into you know,
fragments of you know, other nuclei and some neutrons and
(18:17):
some energy. But you also release other neutron as part
of that splitting. So what you want a nuclear reactor
is for that secondary neutron to go hit another nuclear
nucleus and then continue on that and that perpetuates into
a chain reaction, right, and the process of fission splitting
(18:39):
up the nucleus releases large amount of energy, and that's
the energy we want to essentially take out of the
fuel through a coolant into and dump it into a turbin.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
You capture the energy as heat and then it's just
like any other power plant, but instead of burning fossil
fuel to get the heat, you're splitting uranium atoms.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
To get precisely so after you take the heat away
and send it to a secondary system, to a turbine,
it's no different than a coal power lane or a
natural gas.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
And so what is the what is the challenge? What
is the problem you're trying to avoid in that setting?
Speaker 2 (19:19):
So, I mean from a reactor physics perspective, you want
to make sure that when you when you want heat
and you can generate a chain reaction to to emit
this heat and capture it and use it in a
useful way. You want to be able to control it effectively, right,
that's what involves you know, the whole reactor. If you're
(19:39):
able to control this chain reaction, then you are functioning
you know, power reactor. You don't want an uncontrolled reaction.
You want to be able to control it so you
can you can ensure that you can safely remove this
heat without breaking anything. That's the whole premise of a
nuclear reactor, right.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
I mean, an uncontrolled reaction is like a bomb. Right,
It's like a terrible bomb.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
That's exactly right.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
Coming up after the break, the alser goes to Walmart
winds up designing a new kind of nuclear reactor.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
So these ideas were You know, when you're a reactor designer,
you're then I thinking about all the various iterations and
permutations and combinations of what makes a nuclear technology feasible. Right,
And if you look into it, mostly the combination of
fuel and coolant used in a reactor defines a nuclear technology,
(20:42):
and there's like, you know, about one hundred, one hundred
and twenty combinations out there. Mostly we've tried almost every
combination in tests in the past, right.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
So you basically you got to make the fission reaction happen.
You need some fuel to do that, and then it's
going to generate a crazy amount of heat, so you
got to keep that from getting out of hand with
the coolant. Like, those are the two things you got
to do.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
That's every reactor designers to pick that. You're then I
thinking about different technologies, right, It's not really fully formulated
is in your subconscious mind. So the moment I was
thinking about let's go build a reactor in i n
L for the microreactor program, I started thinking about what
should be the technology and then it really happened in
(21:24):
a suddenly overnight I woke up and I said, okay,
you know what I think. I know what it is,
but I really have to put that on paper. I
did go to Walmark, got some colored pencils and a
big paper and started sketching it up how that system
is going to look like. Now, that's just an idea.
Obviously we took that idea and really started making the
(21:47):
requirements to build a reactor. Some things evolved, but fundamentally
it was the same concept that I sketched up a
few days before Christmas in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
So what was the concept? What was the design?
Speaker 2 (22:01):
So really looked at all those different iterations and came
down with what's called a sodium thermal reactor. Right. It
is basically using uranium or coonium hydrite, the same fuel
that we use in a lot of research reactors around
the globe. We have a lot of data on it.
If we understand it very well, if you couple that
(22:21):
with a very high conductive coolant like sodium liquid sodium
in our case, all of a sudden you can have
a low pressured h nuclear reactor with a high power
density and low enrichment need. So that really was the
basis the fundamental technology choice for Marvel.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
Why do you call it Marvel?
Speaker 2 (22:47):
Huh? Well, that's because I wanted to name that people
can remember easily, and that does not sound like a
scary Greek god. Smart and and and it can it
can shine the light.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
You know, you don't want to call it. You don't
want to call it Icarus, right, you know what to
call it? Nuclear actor Icarus?
Speaker 2 (23:07):
And that's right, that's right. And also like it's a.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
Prometheus, don't call it perm Yeah, what's what's it an
acronym for?
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Oh god, it has a very long name, so it's
just just do it. And it's Microreactor Applications Research and
microature Applications Research, Validation and Evaluation project. And it's very
it's a very districtive name if you think about it.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
It could be anything, right, right, right? Yeah, your acronym
it was mine. Unfortunately, Well it was sort of peak Marvel, right,
you said it was twenty nineteen. It really sticks it
in time as like a peak Marvel moment. So okay,
so you have designed this thing, you get approval for it.
(23:51):
Let's let's talk about safety, because you've talked about, you know,
wanting to engineer it in a way that is both
economically sensible, right, to engineer it in a way that
some company is going to pay to build it, and
that it makes sense to build it and safely run it.
And that's complicated, right, It's complicated for a microreactor. So
(24:13):
how how are you dealing with that as you're designing
this reactor.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
If you look at what is and ask the question
what is an ideal nuclear reactor, it would be what
is the simplest reactor that can have the highest level
of safety without having to add a ton of systems
to ensure that it is safe?
Speaker 1 (24:35):
Right? I mean the dream is just like whatever, a
pile of dirt or something. Right, The dream is that
it's a glass of water that you could somehow magically
get power out of. It's like, what's the worst that
could happen?
Speaker 2 (24:46):
Right? That's right. So there's engineered safety, which really is
you know, you have to do have a lot of
engineered man made systems. It's like pressing a brake in
a car. If you're designing the system, breaks can fail.
Sometimes you have to kind of have backups for that.
So there's a lot of additional things that go into it.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
And to be clear, that is sort of the model
for big utility scale NUC power plants, right. They're full
of highly engineered systems and backups for those systems and
lots of people there to make sure that all those
systems are functioning so that you don't have some terrible
nuclear accident.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
That is correct. And you're really engineered those systems to
make sure they're reliable, and you go through all years
of qualification tends to achieve that.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
And like, that's just not going to work for a microreactor, right,
Like you can't have all that because it'll be too
expensive for too little power.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
That's correct. So you to really achieve that high safety
with fewer amount of systems, you want what is called
inherent safety, right, it is baked into the material physics
of the fuel. And so we looked around and we said, okay,
what is the highest inherent safety fuel out there? And
(25:57):
it really is uraniums of coonium hydride Okay.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
So you choose a fuel that has this elegant property,
which is if the chain reactions starts to get out
of control, the hydrogen that is mixed in with the
fuel tends to bring it back under control. Is that
a fair okay? So is it the case that with
the fuel you're using, like there is physically no way
(26:23):
the chain reaction could get out of control or is
it just way less likely?
Speaker 2 (26:27):
It's way less likely.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
Okay. So in addition to choosing this particular fuel, that
was one of the things you did to bring this
higher level of inherent safety. It's clearly not going to
be enough. Like, what else do you have to do
in designing this reactor?
Speaker 2 (26:41):
Well, there's a lot, But the second choice is the coolant,
right okay. Coolant is the fluid that takes the heat
from the core and transfers it to the secondary system
where you want to make use of this heat.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
Right okay.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
And if you look at water today, most existing power
plants are built with water. Water will be known very much,
you know, all the properties we've known. We've designed other
power plants before nuclears, We're very familiar with water. So
the industry kind of more toward that direction. But if
you if you take a step back and you look
at water. It has some benefits because it's familiar, but
it has some cons as well, so some some some
(27:19):
challenges because you want a system to be hot to
extract that heat. But with water, as soon as you
exceed one hundred degrees celsias, what does it want to do.
It wants to boil off. Right, We're just not a
good thing. So to prevent from boiling, you pressurize the system.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
Right, there's more adding pressure raises the boiling point.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
That's correct. Now you can now all of a sudden,
you need something that is thick our vessel. You want
to make sure the you know, you can keep it
at at the pressurized level. You need a pressurizer. You
need a sick containment building in case there's a pipe
break or something. You still have a you know, sick
steel and concrete line containment to hold everything together. It's
(28:02):
part of the safety case, right, and it also protects
you from external hazards like a tornado or a missile
or something else. Right, So it's really all of these
combining makes up the overall safety case. So when it
came for us to choose the coolant we use sodium.
Sodium is many times more thermally conductive than water, and
(28:25):
when you heat it up, it does not really boil away.
At one hundred degrees celsius. Right, the boiling point of
sodium is hundreds of degrees, much higher than what we
need for the power generation. Right. So it really gives
you a non pressurized system, so your vessel walls does
(28:45):
not have to be this thick forged component that are
extremely expensive or difficult to make. You can now make
them with thin walled vessels by simpler manufacturing methods, or
your costs can go down because you're no longer pressurized.
You don't need this and you don't have a large
amount of fuel radiactive material in the core all of
(29:06):
a sudden. With the microreactor using sodium, you can make
the case to the regulator that you don't need a
traditional containment. Okay, you still need a confinement, but it
doesn't need to be like you know, extremely you know,
several feet of concrete and thick, large steel lined containment.
So there's a lot of other symptoms that you can
(29:28):
simplify and what you end up seeing by just making
those two choices and the way you design the reactor.
From one hundred systems like a traditional plant, you can
bring that down to about twenty.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
And so what is going from one hundred engineered systems
to twenty do for you?
Speaker 2 (29:46):
So it really reduces the amount of capital expenditure you
need initially to build a plant with fewer systems, you need,
smaller footprint, you need less civil structure. You're paying for
less components and pipes and vessels and form work and concrete.
(30:06):
So your cost per kilowatt initially can go down if
you simplify your plant. And that's really what we're you know,
that's one of one big piece of the puzzle. The
other big piece of the puzzle, which is really our
main thesis in ALLO is you know, there's one model,
which is you spend six to ten years to build
(30:27):
a gigawat scale plant. If you get really good at it,
you can bring it down to like five, Right, so
you spend five years or six years optimistically, and you
build a gigawat scale plant. What we're doing instead is
instead of building a single gigawat scale plant, we're focusing
on building factories that can produce at least a gigawat
(30:50):
power output every year by making smaller reactors.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
So how many reactors per year would one of these
factories make.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
So we're trying to build our first pilot scale facility
here in Austin, Texas and we're establishing that by end
of next year, and that is going to be just
designed to build twenty of these reactors per year and
if demand outgrows that, which we believe it will. Uh,
the idea is the learning from that, we're going to
(31:20):
a full factory. A full factor's anticipated to be between
one hundred to two hundred reactors a year.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
So tell me about what the world looks like if
it works. Like if this idea you have of building
a factory to build whatever a nuclear power plant every
two days or something like, how does that work in
the world and what is it? What does what does
it look like looking around America in that world?
Speaker 2 (31:47):
You know, we believe that we can actually usher in
the second atomic age like we can we can grow
nuclear much more rapidly. So this whole entire energy transition
we're just not only fueled by you know, wanting to
have you know, lower carbon or no carbon energy source,
but also this massive demand and role that we're seeing
(32:11):
in the electric sector as well as the industrial.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
Sector electrification plus AI plus AI. Right, it seems like, yes,
there's a lot of demand, so right, so so sure
it means lots of nuclear power plants. I mean specifically,
is it like there's a little nuclear power plant in
every neighborhood. Is it like people are buying kind of
you know, utilities will buy ten or twenty of these
microreactors and sort of put them all, you know, on
(32:35):
one site, Like how does it actually work?
Speaker 2 (32:38):
The idea is, you know, the way we're designing these
systems that if you want a single reactor, you can
have a single reactor, but if you want two, they
don't share any infrastructures. You can daisy chain them as
many as you want. So if a customer wants, hey,
give me five hundred megalots, we would provide you know,
fifty of these Allo one reactors. Or in the near future,
when we build our one hundred megawot system, it'll be
(33:00):
five of those systems daisy change next to one another.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
What do you think the first use case will be?
Speaker 2 (33:10):
So so one of microreactors first came into being right
many years ago in the mid twenty fourteen when we
were really trying to figure out what the market was,
it really was the remote communities, remote mindes, islands. Those
are areas where energy cost of energy is really really high.
So when you deploy a first product into the market,
(33:31):
normally it's high cost, and then you try to lower
it down and then try to penetrate a broader market.
That was the entire idea for first generation microreactors.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
And I should ask do microreactors exist in the world now?
Speaker 2 (33:46):
Well, not in the modern definition, it doesn't. We have
a lot of small reactors, but they're not designed to
stay small or being mass manufactured. If you look around
right now, you don't see a factory as mass manufacturing
you a bunch of small reactors. The most we see
is in the nuclear submarine site, where you can make
maybe one or two reactors a year, but not at
(34:08):
the scale we're talking about.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Yes, and that's a very particular use case.
Speaker 2 (34:13):
Yeah, But to come back to your question, where are
these first applications. The first reactor we're going to build
from our company is going to be at Idaho National Laboratory.
It's going to be a single unit, and it's mostly
because you know, we want to learn how this thing operates.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
At some point, you got to build one.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
We're going to show the world that we can validate
the cost. We can you know, validate the deployment model,
which we're trying to do onset construction less than sixty days.
These are very challenging targets.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
Why might it not work?
Speaker 2 (34:47):
So if you look at nuclear fission.
Speaker 1 (34:51):
The fund the fundamental thing, you're doing the.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
Fundamental thing right. We know the physics work, we know
nuclear fission works, we operate them today. It's not a
matter of proving the technology if it works or not. Right,
We've built other advanced reactors before. That's there's a lot
of challe just getting there. But the true challenge, in
my opinion, is in the scaling of the technology. Can
(35:18):
we make hundreds of these a year? Can we build
a factory that can effectively reduced down the cost. Can
we make fuel in large quantities enough to fuel all
of these reactors? And this is not a traditional fuel type,
this is an advanced reactor fuel. I mean it's slightly
higher enrichment than traditional nuclear reactors. These a different chemical form.
(35:43):
So we have to establish infrastructure to build fuel to
build these reactors as well as the expertise to deploy them,
like in a K model, Right, you get the instruction,
you get all the modules a flat pack, that's right,
You get all the modules onside and be able to
quickly assemble that together in a matter of days, not
(36:05):
in years. Right.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
That all sounds so hard.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
It is hot. And so we believe you have a
very strong team. And we're assembling strong team not just
from nuclear but from other industries like automotive and aerospace
and chip manufacturing to understand how, you know, what are
the lessons learned can bring from those industries that worked
that have been successful into a nuclear trying to not
(36:31):
reinvent the wheel all over again. But there's a lot
of challenges, there's a lot of unknowns, and we're trying
to diligently solve them, focusing on the most important question
at a time.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
So I want to just return briefly to the idea
of tail risk, like because it is, it does, it's
I don't know how to parse it at some level
with nuclear power, right, like you tell me, Like one
version of the question is what's the worst thing that
could happen with one of these reactors?
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Okay, So when you go through the regulatory process, this
is the very question that they ask you. What is
the what is the worst thing that can happen, even
if it's the very very low probability, what happens? What
do you do in the in the scenario, what does
the recovery look like? What is the consequence of that?
(37:25):
And the way we are designing our reactors. And I
can't speak for everyone out there, and the most companies
are doing very similar things is even in the worst
worst case scenario, we don't have any release of any
radiactive material from the reactor to the outside.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Huh? And is that inherent in the physics? Like? How
how do you know that?
Speaker 2 (37:47):
Like?
Speaker 1 (37:48):
How do you know that with certainty?
Speaker 2 (37:50):
It's a it's a so a question is how do
we know? The second question is how can we prove it? So?
How do we know? Is mostly by the data that
we have on the physics side, as well as the engineering,
the way we design our reactor. How do we prove it?
So the proving goes in several stages. Right the first
(38:12):
stage is we're building a full scale non nuclear prototype
of the reactor starting this year. It's going to be
you know, turning on next year. The purpose of that
is to collect the data so we can validate some
of our safety claims. But it's not going to be
a nuclear fuel. But apart from that, that little disclaimer
(38:34):
that we don't have nuclear fuel, everything else that that
ensures the performance of the system, the safety of the system.
We can collect data on so.
Speaker 1 (38:43):
You can kick it and throw things at it and whatever,
stress test it exactly.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
So that's the first stage. The second stage is, you know,
when you have a reactor, a full blown you know,
physics based reactor, you have fuel insert into it and
you're going to you know, turn it. What a nuclear term,
it's called going critical, meaning you first turn on the
machine and then you slow ramp up power level from
(39:11):
ten percent power, twenty percent power thirty. So you don't
go like, you know, yeah, I've got a reactor and
I put fuel in and here it goes one hundred
percent power. You don't necessarily do that. You do a
very step wise increment and that is extremely crucial to
validate the safety characteristics of your reactor. And once we
(39:33):
have validated those, we do some other tests to ensure
our safety systems work. And when all of those are done,
that's when you go full power. Right, So that's really
how you prove that whatever you've designed has the right
level of safety that you've designed too. Now, having all
that said, there's alsoknown unknowns, Yeah, and that exists in
(39:57):
almost every technologies and that's something we hope to learn
more as we have more of these systems operational. But
going back to the question, what is the worst thing
that can happen? Because us we have designed this reactor
with enough margin built into it. In the worst case scenario,
we shut it down and no bad things happen, nothing releases,
nothing breaks down, And that's a level of safety pedigree
(40:20):
that we have to brain the way we see in
research reactors and universities, right, you know, they try to
pull the control rod as fast as they can and
you don't see any braking, you don't see any boiling
of coolant.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
Yeah, So you're alluding to research reactors in universities, which
I didn't know about until I was preparing for this interview. So, like,
is it right there are nuclear reactors at what colleges
around the country? Like, what is the story with that?
Speaker 2 (40:45):
That's right? I mean research reactors were really built to
collect data to measure nuclear physics data. And if you
look around all the major engineering schools around the United
States and also even beyond, you have research reactors. They're
called non power reactors. You've got coolant, you've got fuel,
you've got all the various instrumentation in place. But it
(41:05):
does not really go high temperature because you're not really
trying to make electricity city out of them. You try
to generate a chain reaction and measure physics data. Right.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
And they're so safe that they let college students play.
Speaker 2 (41:17):
With them pretty much.
Speaker 1 (41:19):
And and did you say they used the same fuel
as you were using.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
That's correct.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
So now we're just going to finish with the lightning round,
which could be quick. It can be a little.
Speaker 2 (41:44):
More random, sure.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
Than the rest. What's the most underrated sub atomic particle?
Speaker 2 (41:53):
Hmm, underrated subatomic particle the neutron?
Speaker 1 (41:59):
Right? I thought you were going to go straight to neutron.
Speaker 2 (42:02):
Don't fair.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
No, it's very obvious. That's fair. Okay, Good, give me
a better run, give me a better one.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
Yeah, well, it is certainly the neutron. I have to
figure out it.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Because like you don't even think of it if you don't, right,
the positiveative. Okay, Well, what's the most overrated subatomic particle?
Speaker 2 (42:26):
I think it's uh uh it's a what was that proton? Okay, yeah,
it's it's really not okay. And here's why I say it, Right,
if you look into I mean, I'm an energy guy,
I look at you know how you can I'm not
a you know, a reactor physicist per se. But if
(42:47):
I look on a high level on the application side,
what gives me energy? Chemical reactions like combustion, where you
have exchange of electrons giving energy. So electrons have some
prominence in the world of energy. Sure when it comes
to you know, splitting a nucleus, neutrons play a massive role.
But protons they're just there to make sure the world
(43:08):
is happen and they balanced the charge.
Speaker 1 (43:11):
They're just there to keep the electrons.
Speaker 2 (43:14):
Have to keep the electrons around.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
Yeah, what's your favorite fundamental force?
Speaker 2 (43:23):
What's my favorite fundamental form?
Speaker 1 (43:26):
Tired of stupid physical questions, I can ask you other
stupid questions. You ready, what'd you think of? What? What
did you think of? Oppenheimer?
Speaker 2 (43:34):
I think it's a great movie, even I hope you're
talking about the movie itself, not the actual person.
Speaker 1 (43:39):
I'm talking about the movie, not the actual person.
Speaker 2 (43:42):
Yes, I think it was. It was really great.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
I've seen you mention that you have that that a
couple of your favorite books are by authors who started
out anti nuclear and became pro nuclear, and so I'm curious,
what is something that you have changed your mind about.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
One of my earliest mentors in Westinghouse, who hired me
in the first place, he said, Yeah, sir, you can
be a techie as much as you want, but unless
you understand the economic side of engineering, you truly would
not appreciate the value of what you're building. So don't
ignore the economic side. Make sure you keep it right
(44:21):
next to the technology. So that really opened my eyes
in this whole area of not as advanced reactors, but
also the economic side of things to make sure that
whatever I'm doing should have a relevance to society.
Speaker 1 (44:34):
Yeah, I feel like the story of the economics transition
at this point is basically a technoeconomic story, right. I
feel like in many domains, the fundamental technological problems have
largely been solved, and it's so it's a question of technoeconomics,
and I mean people talk about that in like green cement,
they talk about it in batteries, you're talking about it
(44:56):
in nuclear power. It's interesting how often it comes.
Speaker 2 (44:59):
Up right, and there's so many technologies out there to
solve problems. But at the end of the day, if
it's not economical, it's hard to convince people. Why did
you adopt it versus something else.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
Yasir Arafat is the chief technology officer at alo Atomics.
Today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang. It was
edited by Lyddy Jean Kott and engineered by Sarah Bruguer.
You can email us at problem at Pushkin dot FM.
I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with
another episode of What's Your Problem.
Pushkin. When I was a kid in the nineteen eighties,
I lived about forty miles from a nuclear power plant.
It's called Santa No Frey was right by the freeway,
and whenever we drove past it, me and my family,
we would all hold our breath, like, you know, to
protect ourselves from the radiation or whatever. So one of
(00:38):
those ritual family jokes, those things you do a million times,
not really because they're funny, but because they're just what
you do. I'm telling you this, because that joke, that ritual,
that holding our breath, it speaks to what the vibes
were in the eighties about nuclear power, right. That was
a moment of like peak nuclear fear. There had been
(01:02):
the three Mile Island nuclear accident in nineteen seventy nine. Yeah,
the Simpsons with Homer Simpson always most causing a meltdown,
and then more seriously in the eighties you had the
Chernobyl nuclear disaster. So we were very scared of nuclear
power at the time. But looking back, looking back from today,
(01:23):
I wonder if maybe we were scared of the wrong thing,
because today it looks increasingly likely that we may need
more nuclear power alongside more renewables. In order to stop
burning fossil fuel and contain the risk of climate change.
So looking back, maybe instead of being afraid of a
(01:46):
world with nuclear power, we should have been afraid of
a world without nuclear power. I'm Jacob Goldstein and this
is What's Your Problem, the show where I talk to
people who are trying to make technological progress. My guest
today is Yasser Arafat. He's the chief Technology office at
(02:09):
Hollo Atomics. Earlier in his career he worked for the
federal government at the Idaho National Lab, where he designed
a nuclear microreactor that he called Marvel. Now at Allo,
Yasser is trying to commercialize a version of that reactor.
His problem is this, how can you mass produce nuclear
reactors in a factory in a way that's safe, scalable,
(02:33):
and cheap. We mostly talked about the reactor that Yaser
has designed to be mass produced in a factory, but
to start we talked about the on again, off again
history of nuclear power in the United States.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Yeah, I mean, the sort of nuclear really starts from
the especially in the US in the fifties, right, we've
had the Atomic Energy ec was amended right to allow
nuclear industry to be privatized in nineteen fifty four, and
that kind of you know was you know, that paved
the way to the construction off the first commercial power plant,
(03:10):
I should say, in shipping Port, Pennsylvania, which began operations
like fifties, I think fifty eight and fifty eight, and
shipping Port really symbolized this beginning of this new dawn
of the what we called the first atomic Age. And
if you post there for a second, up until then,
if you think about it, for the last million years
(03:32):
or so, humanity really used combustion as their primary source
of power for growth.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
For you know, for most of that time, we burned wood,
and then for like a brief moment of one hundred
two hundred years, three hundred years, we burned cold, a
little bit of natural gas, a little bit oil. But
you're always burning something.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
What's burning something, it's always combustion, right, So that was
really a pivotal moment, and really humanity first unlocked that
amazing new modern way of creating energy by splitting atoms.
It was a big pivot moment and then entered the
seven sixties and mid seventies. So from the sixties to
seven mid seventies, we call this the golden age of nuclear, right,
(04:19):
and that's when really like, we built a ton of
reactors commercially in the United States, about fifty five of thems.
You know, up until mid seventies, there was a lot
of optimism about nuclear and a lot of the investments
went in there. However, when you when you started approaching
the mid seventies and if all these nuclear problems around,
it also invoked the creation of a regulatory body, right.
(04:43):
The NRC was formed in the mid seventies, and you know,
new regulations started getting imposed on plants and automatically things.
You know, the cost went out when regulations became tighter.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
The NRC is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
That's correct, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And then right after,
you know, just a few years later, nineteen seventy nine,
that's when Three Mile Island happened, right. I was in Slovenia.
We had a partial meltdown of a reactor and there
was a widespread public concern of fear. Sure nobody died
from that accident directly, but it really like you know,
(05:20):
shook the public quite a bit and really put a
lot of emphasis on the potential safety risks, and that
in turn made the regulatory activities even stricter.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
And so that's basically like new construction of nuclear power
plants more or less stops in the US after that, right.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Pretty much, that was the nail in the coffin for decades.
It stopped, exactly.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
And so you know, it's interesting for me personally because
so I was growing up in the nineteen eighties, right,
and that was definitely a time when what we would
now call the vibes were like anti nuclear basically, right,
Like nuclear power was this scary thing, and nuclear waste
(06:06):
was this scary thing that lasted forever. And you have
Chernobyl in there somewhere, which is like very bad and
very scary, right, and people did die, right and and
what and so so you know, that was what I
grew up with. And then just in the last few
years there has been this shift, right, Like, intellectually I
(06:31):
get now why nuclear power is good. I get intellectually
in fact that certainly coal fired power plants are super
dangerous and literally thousands of people die every year from them.
They just die in a way that is invisible, right,
because it's not like there's some accident, it's just that
(06:52):
coal fired power plants, emit pollutants that clearly are in
the aggregate killing people. We just don't know which people
and when, right, Like that seems pretty unambiguous. So I'm
at this point now where like, intellectually I think I'm
pro nuclear. I'm pro nuclear, So I do have this
question about tail risk, right, tail risk seems like a
(07:13):
thing with nuclear power that I haven't quite figured out.
But I still have the emotional wariness, right can you
bring me around?
Speaker 2 (07:23):
Sure? And rightfully, So, when you've gone through that era,
that stigma, that feeling, that fear kind of like lags.
It stays there for a very long time. And so
you know, if you kind of fast forward, that had
a real implication as how the energy infrastructure ecosystem kind
(07:44):
of shape in the United States. Right, So you see
a big lag after Chernobyl obviously TMI and Chernobyl, and
then in nineteen nineties and then two thousands is where
we started like seeing you know, some murmurs about like hey,
you know, is there you know, renewed interest And really
in the two thousands, you know, when people are talking
about climate change and they start looking around and see, okay,
(08:06):
what can really what can we do? About it, the
concerns about climate change and the need for low carbon
energy sources. It renews some of those interests. Yes, we've
seen a lot of growth in solar and other renewables,
but really, at the end of the day, you know,
you chilled the customers the new back in their head.
They need something dispatchable. They wanted some real clean base
(08:27):
or power.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
So dispatchable and base load basically means always available whenever
you need it now, like solar and wind.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
That's correct, that's great. So in two thousand and five,
you see some policy changes, right, you see the Energy
Policy Act that providers some incentive to revive the industry. Okay,
and so that kind of like sparked. You know, you've
seen like you know, after many decades, we've built Plan
Vogel that just Unit three one operational last year. Unit
(08:56):
four went online this year, so you know, it's it's
a big achievement for a nuclear after such a long lag.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
So this is the project in Georgia, like the first
new nuclear power plant in decades.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
That's correct, that's correct. The two units, I think there
were originally two other units being pursued in summer, but
then those projects stalled, but these two have continued and
then Unit three and four just came online and now
millions of homes are being powered from this clean source
of energy. However, these are first of a kind units,
(09:30):
and there's a lot of first of a kind of
risk that went along with it. So it's a mix
of optimism on one side that hey, we just built
new power plants after so many decades, But on the
other hand, oh, you know, the cost went off, it
took longer to build it. You know, it's really the
first of a kind, and that kind of challenge is
what we are living through right now, right it's really
(09:53):
the project costs are high. There's a lot of risks
and uncertainties around how long can we actually take to
build one of these? But the good news is, hopefully
we built two of these units, we'll learn from it
and we can do it faster and better and and cheaper.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
I mean, is it's sort of like we never, at
least in this country, learned how to build a modern
nuclear plant, Like we build nuclear plants like literally fifty
years ago, and then we kind of stopped and now
we got to start from not quite zero but kind
of scratch again.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
So if you look at the infrastructure, right, we don't
build big things anymore.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Much less nuclear power plants. Like even the tunnel. Right,
they're building a tunnel from New Jersey to New York
under the Hudson River. It's gonna cost I don't know,
fifteen billion dollars or something. That's just a tube under
the river.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
And it's it's it's all common across the board. It
is because when you build something bespoke and a very
giant complex project, we lost that muscle to really execute
such ginomics projects in this kind.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Of Well, so you were walking us very elegantly toward
the dream of micro reactors, right, like, away from giant
bespoke projects and toward the dream of a sort of
factory built put it on the back of a truck
nuclear reactor, which is in fact what you're working on.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
That's correct.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
So tell me about microreactors, right. Microreactor is this word
that I've heard, like smart people say for a few years,
and I get from the name that it is a
reactor that is small. But like to start telling me, like,
what is the dream of microreactors? Why is this what
smart people talk about when they talk about nuclear power?
Speaker 2 (11:33):
So microreactors are really defined very small transportable reactors that
are between one to you know, ten or twenty megawatt electric.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
So that's maybe whatever, less than a tenth the size
maybe one hundredth the size of a of a power plant.
Truly micro truly Okay, so they're micro, Like, why is
that appealing? Like, what's the rationale there?
Speaker 2 (11:59):
So there are three key features that makes these small
reactors attractive microreactors in general. First, there, because of their
small size, they're in envision to be fully factory built, ah,
not smaller components or modules. And then bring to site.
You build a whole thing in a factory. That's number one.
(12:21):
And you can also transport them using standard roadways or
railways or or you know through the sea. Right, Okay,
that's number one.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
So you build it in a factory and put it
on the back of a truck, and that is going
to be, in theory, wildly cheaper than building a bespoke
power plant every time. I mean, it's just like like
a building a car, right, Like if you had to
build a car from scratch every time somebody wanted a car,
it would literally cost millions of dollars. But if you
(12:51):
make a thousand of the same car in a factory
or one hundred thousand of the same car in factory,
it gets wildly cheaper. That's the that's part one of the.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
Dream, and that's really the main idea. Right when you
do repetition of the same thing over and over again,
you can learn how to bring the cost down faster
you learn it. You're building in a controlled environment, meant
you're bringing.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
The industrial revolution. Like we've known this for hundreds of years. Literally,
adamstraethroat about this in seventeen seventy six.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
If you build things in a factory, they get weight cheaper.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Okay, However, yeah, there are some downsides of a small reactor.
From a physics perspective. You have higher leakage and the
economies of scales against you, so you have filtified other
ways to offset the costs.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
So there's a cost. It doesn't just scale down in
an elegant way. It gets worse on certain dimensions.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
Like for example, if you look at a current power plant,
a water water cooled power plants that are basically the
infrastructure you know, that's the basis of all of the
nuclear power plants, commercially found today in the US. So
if you look at those, you have around one hundred
systems that that's around the nuclear reactor to keep it happy,
to make it work functionally, operationally, safer. One hundred systems, right.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
One hundred different Like when you say systems, like, what's
one of the hundred systems you're talking about?
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Chemical and volume control system? Are you know, a high
pressure injection system for safety? There are various systems that
ensure that the reactor runs properly, right, huh.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
And so for a microreactor, you cannot build one hundred
systems for every microreactor because then you lose all the
cost benefits you have gained.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
And now all of a sudden you have to think like, Okay,
is that the right technology to scale down? Because if
I scale it down, I still in one hundred systems
even I'm beyond. They might be smaller, but it's not
going to help me on economics of scale. Yeah, so
you have to kind of rethink the problem a little bit.
So that's number one is factory made, second is transportation.
The third one is it's self regulating. Right, if you
(14:47):
look at a current large scale conventional power plant, you
have hundreds of people working in the power plant to
make sure.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
It works well, Homer Simpson famously, Well, let's not go there.
I apologize. Is that an annoying How do you? Are
you tired of that? I'm sorry. It's lazy on my part.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Yeah, no, I mean it is. It does portray I
mean Simpsons. My whole entire generation grew up watching Simpsons, right,
and so it portrayed some things about nuclear power plants
that its not necessarily painting the right picture.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
It's capturing so that the Simpsons launched in the eighties, right,
So it is capturing that sort of peak anti nuclear zeitgeist.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
That's right, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
So okay, so I apologize, I have derailed us.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
So factor that makes a microaractor unique is the ability
to self regulate. So instead of needing hundreds of people,
you need one or two operators to run the system.
That means the machine itself must be able to ensure
safe operations without relying on people or if there's a
(16:00):
human error, it kind of self regulates itself.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
So you actually came up with an idea for you
came up with a design for a microreactor, right, You
were you were. It was your previous job. You were
working for the federal government right as a as a
researcher at a lab dedicated to to figuring out microreactors.
(16:25):
And as I understand that there was actually like a
particular moment when you had an idea, which seems like
it never actually happens, but I always love it when
it happens, So tell me about this moment.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Sure, So after a month I joined Idaho National Laboratory
and they really hired me in to establish or to
help them establish the DOV Department of Energy microreactive program. Okay,
and very soon after I helped kind of establish the program,
I realized, instead of having smaller projects and specific problem areas,
(16:59):
we need to put them together into a test reactor.
We have to build a prototype, a real test reactor
that shows everyone what a microreactor is, How does it operate?
How many people do we need to operate it? Can
it be co located in a neighborhood, for example, and
operate safely? Now, right after, after about a month or softer,
(17:20):
I joined iron L. I realized, let me go ahead
and pitch this to the Department of Energy, And I
did that to the lab leadership. They liked the idea.
I went to Department of Energy. They thought it was
an important thing to do. And so the question becomes, okay,
what size, what should be the technology?
Speaker 1 (17:38):
And now you got to design it right. Everybody's like, yeah, great,
go do it. Now you gotta do it right. What
is the most basic, like plane vanilla explanation of what
is going on in the core of a nuclear power plant,
just generically any nuclear power plant.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
So what you're really looking for is, you know, you're
you're splitting larger heavy atoms. In our case, it is
mostly uranium, right, and there's a specific isotope called urinium
two thirty five. It's a fecile material. If you hit
it with the neutron, it splits and into you know,
fragments of you know, other nuclei and some neutrons and
(18:17):
some energy. But you also release other neutron as part
of that splitting. So what you want a nuclear reactor
is for that secondary neutron to go hit another nuclear
nucleus and then continue on that and that perpetuates into
a chain reaction, right, and the process of fission splitting
(18:39):
up the nucleus releases large amount of energy, and that's
the energy we want to essentially take out of the
fuel through a coolant into and dump it into a turbin.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
You capture the energy as heat and then it's just
like any other power plant, but instead of burning fossil
fuel to get the heat, you're splitting uranium atoms.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
To get precisely so after you take the heat away
and send it to a secondary system, to a turbine,
it's no different than a coal power lane or a
natural gas.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
And so what is the what is the challenge? What
is the problem you're trying to avoid in that setting?
Speaker 2 (19:19):
So, I mean from a reactor physics perspective, you want
to make sure that when you when you want heat
and you can generate a chain reaction to to emit
this heat and capture it and use it in a
useful way. You want to be able to control it effectively, right,
that's what involves you know, the whole reactor. If you're
(19:39):
able to control this chain reaction, then you are functioning
you know, power reactor. You don't want an uncontrolled reaction.
You want to be able to control it so you
can you can ensure that you can safely remove this
heat without breaking anything. That's the whole premise of a
nuclear reactor, right.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
I mean, an uncontrolled reaction is like a bomb. Right,
It's like a terrible bomb.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
That's exactly right.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
Coming up after the break, the alser goes to Walmart
winds up designing a new kind of nuclear reactor.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
So these ideas were You know, when you're a reactor designer,
you're then I thinking about all the various iterations and
permutations and combinations of what makes a nuclear technology feasible. Right,
And if you look into it, mostly the combination of
fuel and coolant used in a reactor defines a nuclear technology,
(20:42):
and there's like, you know, about one hundred, one hundred
and twenty combinations out there. Mostly we've tried almost every
combination in tests in the past, right.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
So you basically you got to make the fission reaction happen.
You need some fuel to do that, and then it's
going to generate a crazy amount of heat, so you
got to keep that from getting out of hand with
the coolant. Like, those are the two things you got
to do.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
That's every reactor designers to pick that. You're then I
thinking about different technologies, right, It's not really fully formulated
is in your subconscious mind. So the moment I was
thinking about let's go build a reactor in i n
L for the microreactor program, I started thinking about what
should be the technology and then it really happened in
(21:24):
a suddenly overnight I woke up and I said, okay,
you know what I think. I know what it is,
but I really have to put that on paper. I
did go to Walmark, got some colored pencils and a
big paper and started sketching it up how that system
is going to look like. Now, that's just an idea.
Obviously we took that idea and really started making the
(21:47):
requirements to build a reactor. Some things evolved, but fundamentally
it was the same concept that I sketched up a
few days before Christmas in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
So what was the concept? What was the design?
Speaker 2 (22:01):
So really looked at all those different iterations and came
down with what's called a sodium thermal reactor. Right. It
is basically using uranium or coonium hydrite, the same fuel
that we use in a lot of research reactors around
the globe. We have a lot of data on it.
If we understand it very well, if you couple that
(22:21):
with a very high conductive coolant like sodium liquid sodium
in our case, all of a sudden you can have
a low pressured h nuclear reactor with a high power
density and low enrichment need. So that really was the
basis the fundamental technology choice for Marvel.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
Why do you call it Marvel?
Speaker 2 (22:47):
Huh? Well, that's because I wanted to name that people
can remember easily, and that does not sound like a
scary Greek god. Smart and and and it can it
can shine the light.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
You know, you don't want to call it. You don't
want to call it Icarus, right, you know what to
call it? Nuclear actor Icarus?
Speaker 2 (23:07):
And that's right, that's right. And also like it's a.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
Prometheus, don't call it perm Yeah, what's what's it an
acronym for?
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Oh god, it has a very long name, so it's
just just do it. And it's Microreactor Applications Research and
microature Applications Research, Validation and Evaluation project. And it's very
it's a very districtive name if you think about it.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
It could be anything, right, right, right? Yeah, your acronym
it was mine. Unfortunately, Well it was sort of peak Marvel, right,
you said it was twenty nineteen. It really sticks it
in time as like a peak Marvel moment. So okay,
so you have designed this thing, you get approval for it.
(23:51):
Let's let's talk about safety, because you've talked about, you know,
wanting to engineer it in a way that is both
economically sensible, right, to engineer it in a way that
some company is going to pay to build it, and
that it makes sense to build it and safely run it.
And that's complicated, right, It's complicated for a microreactor. So
(24:13):
how how are you dealing with that as you're designing
this reactor.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
If you look at what is and ask the question
what is an ideal nuclear reactor, it would be what
is the simplest reactor that can have the highest level
of safety without having to add a ton of systems
to ensure that it is safe?
Speaker 1 (24:35):
Right? I mean the dream is just like whatever, a
pile of dirt or something. Right, The dream is that
it's a glass of water that you could somehow magically
get power out of. It's like, what's the worst that
could happen?
Speaker 2 (24:46):
Right? That's right. So there's engineered safety, which really is
you know, you have to do have a lot of
engineered man made systems. It's like pressing a brake in
a car. If you're designing the system, breaks can fail.
Sometimes you have to kind of have backups for that.
So there's a lot of additional things that go into it.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
And to be clear, that is sort of the model
for big utility scale NUC power plants, right. They're full
of highly engineered systems and backups for those systems and
lots of people there to make sure that all those
systems are functioning so that you don't have some terrible
nuclear accident.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
That is correct. And you're really engineered those systems to
make sure they're reliable, and you go through all years
of qualification tends to achieve that.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
And like, that's just not going to work for a microreactor, right,
Like you can't have all that because it'll be too
expensive for too little power.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
That's correct. So you to really achieve that high safety
with fewer amount of systems, you want what is called
inherent safety, right, it is baked into the material physics
of the fuel. And so we looked around and we said, okay,
what is the highest inherent safety fuel out there? And
(25:57):
it really is uraniums of coonium hydride Okay.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
So you choose a fuel that has this elegant property,
which is if the chain reactions starts to get out
of control, the hydrogen that is mixed in with the
fuel tends to bring it back under control. Is that
a fair okay? So is it the case that with
the fuel you're using, like there is physically no way
(26:23):
the chain reaction could get out of control or is
it just way less likely?
Speaker 2 (26:27):
It's way less likely.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
Okay. So in addition to choosing this particular fuel, that
was one of the things you did to bring this
higher level of inherent safety. It's clearly not going to
be enough. Like, what else do you have to do
in designing this reactor?
Speaker 2 (26:41):
Well, there's a lot, But the second choice is the coolant,
right okay. Coolant is the fluid that takes the heat
from the core and transfers it to the secondary system
where you want to make use of this heat.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
Right okay.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
And if you look at water today, most existing power
plants are built with water. Water will be known very much,
you know, all the properties we've known. We've designed other
power plants before nuclears, We're very familiar with water. So
the industry kind of more toward that direction. But if
you if you take a step back and you look
at water. It has some benefits because it's familiar, but
it has some cons as well, so some some some
(27:19):
challenges because you want a system to be hot to
extract that heat. But with water, as soon as you
exceed one hundred degrees celsias, what does it want to do.
It wants to boil off. Right, We're just not a
good thing. So to prevent from boiling, you pressurize the system.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
Right, there's more adding pressure raises the boiling point.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
That's correct. Now you can now all of a sudden,
you need something that is thick our vessel. You want
to make sure the you know, you can keep it
at at the pressurized level. You need a pressurizer. You
need a sick containment building in case there's a pipe
break or something. You still have a you know, sick
steel and concrete line containment to hold everything together. It's
(28:02):
part of the safety case, right, and it also protects
you from external hazards like a tornado or a missile
or something else. Right, So it's really all of these
combining makes up the overall safety case. So when it
came for us to choose the coolant we use sodium.
Sodium is many times more thermally conductive than water, and
(28:25):
when you heat it up, it does not really boil away.
At one hundred degrees celsius. Right, the boiling point of
sodium is hundreds of degrees, much higher than what we
need for the power generation. Right. So it really gives
you a non pressurized system, so your vessel walls does
(28:45):
not have to be this thick forged component that are
extremely expensive or difficult to make. You can now make
them with thin walled vessels by simpler manufacturing methods, or
your costs can go down because you're no longer pressurized.
You don't need this and you don't have a large
amount of fuel radiactive material in the core all of
(29:06):
a sudden. With the microreactor using sodium, you can make
the case to the regulator that you don't need a
traditional containment. Okay, you still need a confinement, but it
doesn't need to be like you know, extremely you know,
several feet of concrete and thick, large steel lined containment.
So there's a lot of other symptoms that you can
(29:28):
simplify and what you end up seeing by just making
those two choices and the way you design the reactor.
From one hundred systems like a traditional plant, you can
bring that down to about twenty.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
And so what is going from one hundred engineered systems
to twenty do for you?
Speaker 2 (29:46):
So it really reduces the amount of capital expenditure you
need initially to build a plant with fewer systems, you need,
smaller footprint, you need less civil structure. You're paying for
less components and pipes and vessels and form work and concrete.
(30:06):
So your cost per kilowatt initially can go down if
you simplify your plant. And that's really what we're you know,
that's one of one big piece of the puzzle. The
other big piece of the puzzle, which is really our
main thesis in ALLO is you know, there's one model,
which is you spend six to ten years to build
(30:27):
a gigawat scale plant. If you get really good at it,
you can bring it down to like five, Right, so
you spend five years or six years optimistically, and you
build a gigawat scale plant. What we're doing instead is
instead of building a single gigawat scale plant, we're focusing
on building factories that can produce at least a gigawat
(30:50):
power output every year by making smaller reactors.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
So how many reactors per year would one of these
factories make.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
So we're trying to build our first pilot scale facility
here in Austin, Texas and we're establishing that by end
of next year, and that is going to be just
designed to build twenty of these reactors per year and
if demand outgrows that, which we believe it will. Uh,
the idea is the learning from that, we're going to
(31:20):
a full factory. A full factor's anticipated to be between
one hundred to two hundred reactors a year.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
So tell me about what the world looks like if
it works. Like if this idea you have of building
a factory to build whatever a nuclear power plant every
two days or something like, how does that work in
the world and what is it? What does what does
it look like looking around America in that world?
Speaker 2 (31:47):
You know, we believe that we can actually usher in
the second atomic age like we can we can grow
nuclear much more rapidly. So this whole entire energy transition
we're just not only fueled by you know, wanting to
have you know, lower carbon or no carbon energy source,
but also this massive demand and role that we're seeing
(32:11):
in the electric sector as well as the industrial.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
Sector electrification plus AI plus AI. Right, it seems like, yes,
there's a lot of demand, so right, so so sure
it means lots of nuclear power plants. I mean specifically,
is it like there's a little nuclear power plant in
every neighborhood. Is it like people are buying kind of
you know, utilities will buy ten or twenty of these
microreactors and sort of put them all, you know, on
(32:35):
one site, Like how does it actually work?
Speaker 2 (32:38):
The idea is, you know, the way we're designing these
systems that if you want a single reactor, you can
have a single reactor, but if you want two, they
don't share any infrastructures. You can daisy chain them as
many as you want. So if a customer wants, hey,
give me five hundred megalots, we would provide you know,
fifty of these Allo one reactors. Or in the near future,
when we build our one hundred megawot system, it'll be
(33:00):
five of those systems daisy change next to one another.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
What do you think the first use case will be?
Speaker 2 (33:10):
So so one of microreactors first came into being right
many years ago in the mid twenty fourteen when we
were really trying to figure out what the market was,
it really was the remote communities, remote mindes, islands. Those
are areas where energy cost of energy is really really high.
So when you deploy a first product into the market,
(33:31):
normally it's high cost, and then you try to lower
it down and then try to penetrate a broader market.
That was the entire idea for first generation microreactors.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
And I should ask do microreactors exist in the world now?
Speaker 2 (33:46):
Well, not in the modern definition, it doesn't. We have
a lot of small reactors, but they're not designed to
stay small or being mass manufactured. If you look around
right now, you don't see a factory as mass manufacturing
you a bunch of small reactors. The most we see
is in the nuclear submarine site, where you can make
maybe one or two reactors a year, but not at
(34:08):
the scale we're talking about.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Yes, and that's a very particular use case.
Speaker 2 (34:13):
Yeah, But to come back to your question, where are
these first applications. The first reactor we're going to build
from our company is going to be at Idaho National Laboratory.
It's going to be a single unit, and it's mostly
because you know, we want to learn how this thing operates.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
At some point, you got to build one.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
We're going to show the world that we can validate
the cost. We can you know, validate the deployment model,
which we're trying to do onset construction less than sixty days.
These are very challenging targets.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
Why might it not work?
Speaker 2 (34:47):
So if you look at nuclear fission.
Speaker 1 (34:51):
The fund the fundamental thing, you're doing the.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
Fundamental thing right. We know the physics work, we know
nuclear fission works, we operate them today. It's not a
matter of proving the technology if it works or not. Right,
We've built other advanced reactors before. That's there's a lot
of challe just getting there. But the true challenge, in
my opinion, is in the scaling of the technology. Can
(35:18):
we make hundreds of these a year? Can we build
a factory that can effectively reduced down the cost. Can
we make fuel in large quantities enough to fuel all
of these reactors? And this is not a traditional fuel type,
this is an advanced reactor fuel. I mean it's slightly
higher enrichment than traditional nuclear reactors. These a different chemical form.
(35:43):
So we have to establish infrastructure to build fuel to
build these reactors as well as the expertise to deploy them,
like in a K model, Right, you get the instruction,
you get all the modules a flat pack, that's right,
You get all the modules onside and be able to
quickly assemble that together in a matter of days, not
(36:05):
in years. Right.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
That all sounds so hard.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
It is hot. And so we believe you have a
very strong team. And we're assembling strong team not just
from nuclear but from other industries like automotive and aerospace
and chip manufacturing to understand how, you know, what are
the lessons learned can bring from those industries that worked
that have been successful into a nuclear trying to not
(36:31):
reinvent the wheel all over again. But there's a lot
of challenges, there's a lot of unknowns, and we're trying
to diligently solve them, focusing on the most important question
at a time.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
So I want to just return briefly to the idea
of tail risk, like because it is, it does, it's
I don't know how to parse it at some level
with nuclear power, right, like you tell me, Like one
version of the question is what's the worst thing that
could happen with one of these reactors?
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Okay, So when you go through the regulatory process, this
is the very question that they ask you. What is
the what is the worst thing that can happen, even
if it's the very very low probability, what happens? What
do you do in the in the scenario, what does
the recovery look like? What is the consequence of that?
(37:25):
And the way we are designing our reactors. And I
can't speak for everyone out there, and the most companies
are doing very similar things is even in the worst
worst case scenario, we don't have any release of any
radiactive material from the reactor to the outside.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Huh? And is that inherent in the physics? Like? How
how do you know that?
Speaker 2 (37:47):
Like?
Speaker 1 (37:48):
How do you know that with certainty?
Speaker 2 (37:50):
It's a it's a so a question is how do
we know? The second question is how can we prove it? So?
How do we know? Is mostly by the data that
we have on the physics side, as well as the engineering,
the way we design our reactor. How do we prove it?
So the proving goes in several stages. Right the first
(38:12):
stage is we're building a full scale non nuclear prototype
of the reactor starting this year. It's going to be
you know, turning on next year. The purpose of that
is to collect the data so we can validate some
of our safety claims. But it's not going to be
a nuclear fuel. But apart from that, that little disclaimer
(38:34):
that we don't have nuclear fuel, everything else that that
ensures the performance of the system, the safety of the system.
We can collect data on so.
Speaker 1 (38:43):
You can kick it and throw things at it and whatever,
stress test it exactly.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
So that's the first stage. The second stage is, you know,
when you have a reactor, a full blown you know,
physics based reactor, you have fuel insert into it and
you're going to you know, turn it. What a nuclear term,
it's called going critical, meaning you first turn on the
machine and then you slow ramp up power level from
(39:11):
ten percent power, twenty percent power thirty. So you don't
go like, you know, yeah, I've got a reactor and
I put fuel in and here it goes one hundred
percent power. You don't necessarily do that. You do a
very step wise increment and that is extremely crucial to
validate the safety characteristics of your reactor. And once we
(39:33):
have validated those, we do some other tests to ensure
our safety systems work. And when all of those are done,
that's when you go full power. Right, So that's really
how you prove that whatever you've designed has the right
level of safety that you've designed too. Now, having all
that said, there's alsoknown unknowns, Yeah, and that exists in
(39:57):
almost every technologies and that's something we hope to learn
more as we have more of these systems operational. But
going back to the question, what is the worst thing
that can happen? Because us we have designed this reactor
with enough margin built into it. In the worst case scenario,
we shut it down and no bad things happen, nothing releases,
nothing breaks down, And that's a level of safety pedigree
(40:20):
that we have to brain the way we see in
research reactors and universities, right, you know, they try to
pull the control rod as fast as they can and
you don't see any braking, you don't see any boiling
of coolant.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
Yeah, So you're alluding to research reactors in universities, which
I didn't know about until I was preparing for this interview. So, like,
is it right there are nuclear reactors at what colleges
around the country? Like, what is the story with that?
Speaker 2 (40:45):
That's right? I mean research reactors were really built to
collect data to measure nuclear physics data. And if you
look around all the major engineering schools around the United
States and also even beyond, you have research reactors. They're
called non power reactors. You've got coolant, you've got fuel,
you've got all the various instrumentation in place. But it
(41:05):
does not really go high temperature because you're not really
trying to make electricity city out of them. You try
to generate a chain reaction and measure physics data. Right.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
And they're so safe that they let college students play.
Speaker 2 (41:17):
With them pretty much.
Speaker 1 (41:19):
And and did you say they used the same fuel
as you were using.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
That's correct.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
So now we're just going to finish with the lightning round,
which could be quick. It can be a little.
Speaker 2 (41:44):
More random, sure.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
Than the rest. What's the most underrated sub atomic particle?
Speaker 2 (41:53):
Hmm, underrated subatomic particle the neutron?
Speaker 1 (41:59):
Right? I thought you were going to go straight to neutron.
Speaker 2 (42:02):
Don't fair.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
No, it's very obvious. That's fair. Okay, Good, give me
a better run, give me a better one.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
Yeah, well, it is certainly the neutron. I have to
figure out it.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Because like you don't even think of it if you don't, right,
the positiveative. Okay, Well, what's the most overrated subatomic particle?
Speaker 2 (42:26):
I think it's uh uh it's a what was that proton? Okay, yeah,
it's it's really not okay. And here's why I say it, Right,
if you look into I mean, I'm an energy guy,
I look at you know how you can I'm not
a you know, a reactor physicist per se. But if
(42:47):
I look on a high level on the application side,
what gives me energy? Chemical reactions like combustion, where you
have exchange of electrons giving energy. So electrons have some
prominence in the world of energy. Sure when it comes
to you know, splitting a nucleus, neutrons play a massive role.
But protons they're just there to make sure the world
(43:08):
is happen and they balanced the charge.
Speaker 1 (43:11):
They're just there to keep the electrons.
Speaker 2 (43:14):
Have to keep the electrons around.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
Yeah, what's your favorite fundamental force?
Speaker 2 (43:23):
What's my favorite fundamental form?
Speaker 1 (43:26):
Tired of stupid physical questions, I can ask you other
stupid questions. You ready, what'd you think of? What? What
did you think of? Oppenheimer?
Speaker 2 (43:34):
I think it's a great movie, even I hope you're
talking about the movie itself, not the actual person.
Speaker 1 (43:39):
I'm talking about the movie, not the actual person.
Speaker 2 (43:42):
Yes, I think it was. It was really great.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
I've seen you mention that you have that that a
couple of your favorite books are by authors who started
out anti nuclear and became pro nuclear, and so I'm curious,
what is something that you have changed your mind about.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
One of my earliest mentors in Westinghouse, who hired me
in the first place, he said, Yeah, sir, you can
be a techie as much as you want, but unless
you understand the economic side of engineering, you truly would
not appreciate the value of what you're building. So don't
ignore the economic side. Make sure you keep it right
(44:21):
next to the technology. So that really opened my eyes
in this whole area of not as advanced reactors, but
also the economic side of things to make sure that
whatever I'm doing should have a relevance to society.
Speaker 1 (44:34):
Yeah, I feel like the story of the economics transition
at this point is basically a technoeconomic story, right. I
feel like in many domains, the fundamental technological problems have
largely been solved, and it's so it's a question of technoeconomics,
and I mean people talk about that in like green cement,
they talk about it in batteries, you're talking about it
(44:56):
in nuclear power. It's interesting how often it comes.
Speaker 2 (44:59):
Up right, and there's so many technologies out there to
solve problems. But at the end of the day, if
it's not economical, it's hard to convince people. Why did
you adopt it versus something else.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
Yasir Arafat is the chief technology officer at alo Atomics.
Today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang. It was
edited by Lyddy Jean Kott and engineered by Sarah Bruguer.
You can email us at problem at Pushkin dot FM.
I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with
another episode of What's Your Problem.
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