00:05:26 · John Collison, Scott Nolan
[00:05:26] S1: How is this regulated? Can you give us the map of enriched uranium? Where does weapons grade uranium start to happen? And, yeah, who do you have to work with as regulator for all this? [00:05:36] S0: Yeah, so if you're doing commercial sales of nuclear power or fuel that's going to go through the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In The US that's your regulator. If you are selling to the government there's potential Department of Energy paths or if you're an R and D reactor you could go through a DOE path. But it's primarily NRC if you're doing commercial operations. [00:05:58] S1: How have they been to deal with? Great, [00:06:00] S0: great. So the, you know, like I said, I think the investment community, the startup community, the whole tech community historically has just heard, Oh, the NRC is really difficult, or something. [00:06:12] S1: Yeah, the NRC is a bad brand. [00:06:13] S0: Yeah, that would be the blame is often placed in the NRC. I actually don't think it's deserved. They've been great to work with. Ultimately they care about two things, safety and security and then there's an environmental consideration as well and so all their licensing focuses on those things. This was the answer we got from the SMR company that I knew. We asked them Hey, how hard is it to get the NRC licensing? And they said, It's pretty straightforward. You do the safety analysis, you do the security analysis, you show low environmental impact and it's a straightforward process. It's it's a lot of paperwork and analysis, but it's doable.
00:06:13 · Scott Nolan, John Collison
[00:06:13] S0: Yeah, that would be the blame is often placed in the NRC. I actually don't think it's deserved. They've been great to work with. Ultimately they care about two things, safety and security and then there's an environmental consideration as well and so all their licensing focuses on those things. This was the answer we got from the SMR company that I knew. We asked them Hey, how hard is it to get the NRC licensing? And they said, It's pretty straightforward. You do the safety analysis, you do the security analysis, you show low environmental impact and it's a straightforward process. It's it's a lot of paperwork and analysis, but it's doable. [00:06:51] S1: Can you give us a bit of a map of nuclear reactor designs? So the traditional designs, installed in plants operating today, and then you're talking about these newer startups that are pursuing SMR type approaches. And I presume, like, there are a bunch of different technical approaches there. But can you just ground us in what And everyone's trying to presumably, there's some even that don't use uranium as a fuel, so they're outside of the scope for you, but are maybe relevant to this discussion.
00:06:51 · John Collison, Scott Nolan
[00:06:51] S1: Can you give us a bit of a map of nuclear reactor designs? So the traditional designs, installed in plants operating today, and then you're talking about these newer startups that are pursuing SMR type approaches. And I presume, like, there are a bunch of different technical approaches there. But can you just ground us in what And everyone's trying to presumably, there's some even that don't use uranium as a fuel, so they're outside of the scope for you, but are maybe relevant to this discussion. [00:07:19] S0: Yep, so most of The US grid, virtually all of it runs on light water reactors. These are reactors with uranium enriched to low enriched uranium levels, LEU levels three to 5% enrichment. That goes into the core and your moderator and your coolant is water, just regular water. And so that's most reactors on the grid. You end up with a pressurized steam line, large dome covering the reactor that's part of the large construction project that leads to the billions in cost per reactor. [00:07:55] S1: Is the large dome covering the... [00:07:58] S0: That's a containment dome. [00:07:59] S1: I see, Yeah. [00:08:00] S0: Yeah. So in the case of an accident, in the case of loss of cooling, that's meant to do containment of any radiological material. [00:08:06] S1: I see. [00:08:06] S0: Yeah. Yeah. So the reactor is not actually that large. It's it's a much larger dome covering the reactor. [00:08:12] S1: Why does the containment dome need to be so big?
00:08:12 · John Collison, Scott Nolan
[00:08:12] S1: Why does the containment dome need to be so big? [00:08:15] S0: Mostly for the most extreme accident scenarios. Just making sure the thickness is there, the internal volumes are there. [00:08:23] S1: I see. Yeah. Yeah. It's small on the inside. It's just very thick. [00:08:26] S0: Smaller. Yeah. Smaller. Yeah. [00:08:28] S1: Okay, so that's a traditional light water reactor design. Yeah. How about the startups? [00:08:33] S0: Nearly all of them are focused on going modular, bringing the size down, bringing your core size down. So let's go to stranded demand centers and let's serve those demand centers and let's go containerized or even smaller than that. You're going to be using HALEU in that very small format. Again, that's the 19.75% enriched. Smaller core, smaller format. So now we're talking about fuel formats but they often go hand in hand with the reactor design. [00:08:57] S1: But why do those two things go together? Which pieces? The smaller core and highly enriched uranium.
00:08:57 · John Collison, Scott Nolan
[00:08:57] S1: But why do those two things go together? Which pieces? The smaller core and highly enriched uranium. [00:09:04] S0: To unlock a smaller core design that could be built in a factory, you want your fuel to be higher octane so to speak, higher enrichment level. The reason you care about your fuel being at a higher enrichment level is because at some point as it is burnt, as it's consumed, as it reacts, that enrichment level will drop. And at some point you can think of it as the power going out, the reactor fizzling out. If you have a stationary one gigawatt reactor, you're running three to 5% enriched uranium, you're probably doing refueling every eighteen months, twenty four months, and so that's an acceptable thing. You have a very big reactor, your core will stay critical for quite a while, and the refueling every eighteen, twenty four months is not such a big deal. If you have a very small core, think of it as you need more higher octane fuel. As it burns up, it's less likely to, it will pass through. Acceptable power production down to not even being critical more quickly and some of these reactors also want to have like five year, ten year refueling cycles because they're out somewhere remote not somewhere central. So it's a combination of you want to unlock a smaller core that will remain critical for a longer period. [00:10:19] S1: Yep. Okay, that makes sense. Can you talk about the passive safety advantages of Highly enriched uranium that you mentioned? [00:10:28] S0: Not Highly, but HALEU. [00:10:30] S1: Oh, sorry, yeah yeah yeah.
00:10:30 · John Collison, Scott Nolan
[00:10:30] S1: Oh, sorry, yeah yeah yeah. [00:10:31] S0: Yeah, so the enrichment level itself does not lead to safety advantages, but people's reactor formats do. And so some of these reactors are passively safe. So a classically well known version of this was like molten salt reactors. You know the molten salt has thermal properties that cause it to self regulate. And then if somehow it were overheated you could put a plug in the bottom of the reservoir and then the plug would melt and then everything drains out and criticality stops. That's kind of the idea of a molten salt reactor. You have other ones like helium cooled where the helium can't be activated. The helium cannot become radioactive. So even if you had a cooling release you're not releasing any radioactive material. And in general these newer designs just have either passive safety features or modern architectures around active safety. [00:11:24] S1: Got it. So it's a... You can design into the reactor some kind of self correcting mechanism, like a fuse plug type thing where the act of starting to run away from you causes the safety mechanisms kick in. Right. [00:11:40] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Well stated. [00:11:42] S1: The AI scale up and power up has been powered significantly by, you know, turbines and other forms of electricity that you can bring online very quickly, generators in some cases. Has it affected your market at all or really the market for your customers? Or are the timelines for nuclear power too long?