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?
00:11:42 · John Collison, Scott Nolan
[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? [00:12:11] S0: I think no and no. Has not impacted us specifically, so we, you know, a lot of the topics in nuclear today are all about SMRs and advanced nuclear. That's an important segment. I think it's going to grow tremendously over the next decade. But it's still a small market today. And as an enricher most of the contracting volume that we do is with the existing fleet. It's for low enriched uranium, it's with the utilities. So, as people think about how are they powering data centers in the next couple of years, you know we think that some of that will be SMRs as they contract that, but even if it's all natural gas that's fine because in the next few years most of our demand is from existing fleet utility customers. Now where does it go in five years? I think there will be more and more push to move off of natural gas, move to true baseload. [00:13:12] S1: Mhmm.
00:13:12 · John Collison, Scott Nolan
[00:13:12] S1: Mhmm. [00:13:13] S0: And I think that will be nuclear and then the question, the really big question I think is does that happen through more of the gigawatt scale reactors or does it happen through more SMRs and what's that balance? And I think if you look at, if you just take a big step back and say okay what type of baseload energy, what type of energy do we want to power these data centers? I think there's going to be a lot of pressure for it to be safe and for it to be clean and for it to be baseload. And so the biggest, you know, the thing that people forget is that nuclear is by far the cleanest and safest baseload. It's actually safer than wind power per terawatt hour. [00:13:49] S1: Sorry, how do people get hurt with wind power? Just the maintenance of the turbines? [00:13:53] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, if you look at all downstream mortality it's more dangerous than nuclear. And then if you look at all downstream CO2 emissions nuclear is actually the lowest lower than wind or solar. So if you think that those things matter and that baseload matters then it will have to be nuclear. The one thing nuclear has not done a good job of in beating everything else is on cost. And so I think that's actually what it all comes down to. So the question of do we deploy lots of gigawatt scale reactors or is the scaling handled by SMRs comes down to who is actually deploying more quickly and cheaply on a per megawatt scale basis.
00:13:53 · Scott Nolan, John Collison
[00:13:53] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, if you look at all downstream mortality it's more dangerous than nuclear. And then if you look at all downstream CO2 emissions nuclear is actually the lowest lower than wind or solar. So if you think that those things matter and that baseload matters then it will have to be nuclear. The one thing nuclear has not done a good job of in beating everything else is on cost. And so I think that's actually what it all comes down to. So the question of do we deploy lots of gigawatt scale reactors or is the scaling handled by SMRs comes down to who is actually deploying more quickly and cheaply on a per megawatt scale basis. [00:14:31] S1: Yeah. Isn't the true competitor for nuclear solar plus batteries? Because those are coming down this... Both for... Are coming down a very aggressive cost curve. And so you could just be cost competed by solar and batteries in a lot of use cases?