No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:15:11 · Sarah Guo, Isaiah Taylor
[00:15:11] S2: Right. I remember seeing the sim. [00:15:12] S1: Yeah. And so we we held it there, and then we did exactly what we're about to do, which is we turned off all safety systems at once, and we watched the plan for two days. And exactly what we had hoped happened, which is that the RCCS panels, which are these water jackets around the core, went into passive circulation mode, meaning the water boils, the steam leaves, it condenses, that removes heat, and you have natural circulation with no moving parts. So zero input from the operators, no moving parts in electrical control. It's just the geometry of that system that slowly just removes that decay heat over a period of two days. So we're about to demonstrate that right here starting on Friday after seventy two hours of full power. So that'll be really exciting demonstration, and it's really the basis of of scale. Right? If we're gonna do this, many times, we wanna make sure that just from the basic physics, this reactor doesn't melt down, not because of operator control, not because of really good engineering, but the physics of the plant make it safe for meltdown. [00:16:16] S2: One of the huge reasons for, the slowdown in investment in real r and d in this space has been concerns about the safety profile. You and your team are, you know, very respectful of, but not particularly concerned that this is an insurmountable problem. What do people outside nuclear misunderstand about safety of these SMRs and your design in particular?
00:16:39 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:16:39] S1: There's two big misunderstandings. One is that people, know, generally perceive nuclear as, like, stable, cheap baseload but kinda dangerous with downsides. I think that's just a complete misperception. Nuclear energy is the safest form of energy empirically. Mhmm. If you look at the amount of power generated versus the amount of amount of deaths, it's even safer than solar, which is very strange because how does someone die from solar? But, actually, most solar is installed on roofs, and people sometimes die falling off of a roof installing solar. And if you add those deaths up, it is actually a higher death per energy than the totality of nuclear energy in the world. So that's actually kind of crazy. Nuclear as it is today is already the safest form of energy. Now the only problem with existing nuclear is that I I think the the existing philosophy again, it's the safest in the world, but we can do better. And where we'd like to improve is the existing philosophy says, okay. There's if you look at risk, it's actually composed of two different things. Right? It's composed of the odds of the thing happening and the consequence if it does happen. And traditional nuclear has focused on risk reduction by reducing the odds. Right? So they say, okay. Yeah. A meltdown could have some bad consequence, so let's make sure that it never ever ever happens. And all of the effort into risk reduction goes into low odds of anything ever happening. The alternative way that you can reduce risk is actually just reducing consequence. Right? And we would argue that that's a much better way to reduce risk. Odds are stochastic. Right? Even if you do an enormous amount of risk reduction on odds and you do all this engineering, something's still gonna happen. Right? Like, just something's gonna come out of left field, and you can't predict everything. And so advanced reactors tend to focus on consequence more than odds. Now we still don't you know, we we we still try to protect against things like, you know, we have site security here, for example. Right? So someone can't come in and compromise the control room. But from an engineering perspective, we also say, well, what if someone did compromise the control room? How do we still make sure that it's perfectly safe? And so advanced reactors really focus on that that second thing.
00:18:48 · Isaiah Taylor, Sarah Guo
Our safety basis when we go to the regulator is everything in the plant has failed. Absolutely everything. Right? Everything We [00:18:55] S2: know what happens. [00:18:56] S1: Yeah. In fact, it is it is safe. Right? So we have regulatory limits where we say, okay, in an accident scenario, you can't dose the public with radiation. Right? That's really ultimately what a nuclear regulator is trying to prevent. You can't dose public and workers with radiation. And so our safety basis says, alright, let's look at the reactor design and pretend that everything in it has failed. Are we dosing the workers in the public with radiation? And the answer is no. And that's super, super important because even though we do still try to reduce the odds, we have site security, we make sure that our operators are well trained. We start with the worst case possible scenario where everything has failed, and we say, how do we make that that safe? And that's really a physics problem. It's really about the geometry of the core. It's about the materials that you use. Triso is a huge part of that, and and that's how we pursue safety. So I think that that people miss that, a, nuclear is already very safe, but, b, the new breed of root of nuclear is much more focused on just making sure that these plants are intrinsically and inherently safe regardless of odds, right, regardless of what crazy thing comes out of left field, and that's a much better way to scale. [00:20:06] S2: What are the major causes of, like, reliability issues for a reactor?
00:20:06 · Sarah Guo, Isaiah Taylor
[00:20:06] S2: What are the major causes of, like, reliability issues for a reactor? [00:20:11] S1: Of this design, let's see. Helium circulator is one area that people have had trouble with in the past. The heat exchanger between the main helium loop and the secondary power conversion loop is something that fourteen Brands has had issues with. I don't know, Jess, what do you think?
00:20:29 · Jess
[00:20:29] S4: Moisture as well. Fourteen Brands had problems with moisture. So graphite is hydrophilic, meaning that it loves to take moisture. Even in the hot desert air, hot dry desert air, it still sucks up moisture. So, we have mitigated that risk by having the helium purification system. And part of that is taking the moisture and trying to condense that moist air out of the system and then put it into some supply tanks or some to some storage tanks outside of that. We know it's it's a it's a known fact that for several hundred hours of operation, we'll be slowly leaching that moisture out of the graphite blocks as we keep keep them and maintain the temperature. So as you know, it's graphite ceramic, probably saw the block on the way in. So it's kinda difficult to migrate that moisture from the center of the block all the way out. That's why it takes so long. It's just keeping up to temperature and slowly migrates its way out in the blocks. But if you don't capture that moisture and remove it from the system, then you can imagine any carbon steel, which is in the system, will be in the rust. Then those rust particles will migrate and either cause a shortage in the motor or a blockage in the system somewhere. So anyway, that's one of the lessons learned from forcing brownness. You need to
00:21:31 · Isaiah Taylor, Sarah Guo
[00:21:31] S1: on the moisture. I will say that helium graphite systems have a lot of natural advantages. And you know there's basically no chemistry going on other than the bit of moisture that we need to pull out of the graphite blocks. Helium is inert, right? And unlike a water based reactor where you have you're very, very carefully trying to make sure you have dry steam if it's dry steam plant and wet steam is going to start just destroying all of your thermal machinery and everything, helium is, a very, very inert simple chemical to work as a working fluid. Now there are downsides to it. It's not very dense. You have to have more pumping power, these sorts of things. But the fundamentals are in our favor in terms of building a very simple plant. [00:22:13] S2: When we think about, you know, an abundance of nuclear power [00:22:16] S1: Yeah. [00:22:17] S2: I think a lot of interested listeners will have heard of a number of SMR startups and people building larger scale reactors. How do you how do you break out, like, the different use cases and the different designs here? Are are people aiming at different power levels and efficiencies? Is it just a completely different philosophy of company? How do you how do you look at that landscape?