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?
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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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.
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, 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 or so, humanity really used combustion as their primary source of power for growth.
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.
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, 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. 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.
The NRC is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
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, 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.
And so that's basically like new construction of nuclear power plants more or less stops in the US after that, right.
Pretty much, that was the nail in the coffin for decades. It stopped, exactly.
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 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 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 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 thing with nuclear power that I haven't quite figured out. But I still have the emotional wariness, right can you bring me around?
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 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, 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 or power.
So dispatchable and base load basically means always available whenever you need it now, like solar and wind.
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 four went online this year, so you know, it's it's a big achievement for a nuclear after such a long lag.
So this is the project in Georgia, like the first new nuclear power plant in decades.
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, 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 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.
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.
So if you look at the infrastructure, right, we don't build big things anymore.
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.
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.
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.
That's correct.
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?
So microreactors are really defined very small transportable reactors that are between one to you know, ten or twenty megawatt electric.
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?
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. And you can also transport them using standard roadways or railways or or you know through the sea. Right, Okay, that's number one.
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 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.
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.
The industrial revolution. Like we've known this for hundreds of years. Literally, adamstraethroat about this in seventeen seventy six.
That's right.
If you build things in a factory, they get weight cheaper.
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.
So there's a cost. It doesn't just scale down in an elegant way. It gets worse on certain dimensions.
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.
One hundred different Like when you say systems, like, what's one of the hundred systems you're talking about?
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.
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.
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 look at a current large scale conventional power plant, you have hundreds of people working in the power plant to make sure.
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.
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.
It's capturing so that the Simpsons launched in the eighties, right, So it is capturing that sort of peak anti nuclear zeitgeist.
That's right, that's right, that's right.
So okay, so I apologize, I have derailed us.
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 human error, it kind of self regulates itself.
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. 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.
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, 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, 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?
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
And so what is the what is the challenge? What is the problem you're trying to avoid in that setting?
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 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.
I mean, an uncontrolled reaction is like a bomb. Right, It's like a terrible bomb.
That's exactly right.
Coming up after the break, the alser goes to Walmart winds up designing a new kind of nuclear reactor.
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, 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.
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.
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 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 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.
So what was the concept? What was the design?
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 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.
Why do you call it Marvel?
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.
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?
And that's right, that's right. And also like it's a.
Prometheus, don't call it perm Yeah, what's what's it an acronym for?
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.
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. 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 how how are you dealing with that as you're designing this reactor.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 it really is uraniums of coonium hydride Okay.
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 the chain reaction could get out of control or is it just way less likely?
It's way less likely.
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?
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.
Right okay.
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 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.
Right, there's more adding pressure raises the boiling point.
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 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 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 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 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 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.
And so what is going from one hundred engineered systems to twenty do for you?
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. 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 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 power output every year by making smaller reactors.
So how many reactors per year would one of these factories make.
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 a full factory. A full factor's anticipated to be between one hundred to two hundred reactors a year.
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?
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 in the electric sector as well as the industrial.
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 one site, Like how does it actually work?
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 five of those systems daisy change next to one another.
What do you think the first use case will be?
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, 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.
And I should ask do microreactors exist in the world now?
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 the scale we're talking about.
Yes, and that's a very particular use case.
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.
At some point, you got to build one.
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.
Why might it not work?
So if you look at nuclear fission.
The fund the fundamental thing, you're doing the.
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 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. 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 in years. Right.
That all sounds so hard.
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 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.
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?
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? 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.
Huh? And is that inherent in the physics? Like? How how do you know that?
Like?
How do you know that with certainty?
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 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 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.
You can kick it and throw things at it and whatever, stress test it exactly.
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 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 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 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 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.
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?
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 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.
And they're so safe that they let college students play.
With them pretty much.
And and did you say they used the same fuel as you were using.
That's correct.
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.
More random, sure.
Than the rest. What's the most underrated sub atomic particle?
Hmm, underrated subatomic particle the neutron?
Right? I thought you were going to go straight to neutron.
Don't fair.
No, it's very obvious. That's fair. Okay, Good, give me a better run, give me a better one.
Yeah, well, it is certainly the neutron. I have to figure out it.
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?
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 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 is happen and they balanced the charge.
They're just there to keep the electrons.
Have to keep the electrons around.
Yeah, what's your favorite fundamental force?
What's my favorite fundamental form?
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?
I think it's a great movie, even I hope you're talking about the movie itself, not the actual person.
I'm talking about the movie, not the actual person.
Yes, I think it was. It was really great.
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.
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 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.
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 in nuclear power. It's interesting how often it comes.
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.
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.