No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:09:43 · Isaiah Taylor
Let's make the ERDA in charge of testing, and we'll have these two two separate agencies. And then two years later, congress said, actually, we're just gonna call the ERDA the Department of Energy, right, the DOE. But the origin of this agency is testing nuclear reactors. That's what it's for. And everyone sort of forgot this. It's just been sitting there in legislation for, like, forty years, and no one's really taken advantage of it except for one government program here or there where they wanna, you know, do a NASA space reactor or something like that. But it has, from a legal perspective, been waiting for an administration to say, hey. This might be a a way to accelerate nuclear r and d. And that's exactly what the Trump administration has done. So the reactor that's behind us here was turned on under an executive order. It was EO14301, which called for three advanced reactors to go critical on American soil by July 4. And and we built it under Department of Energy, authority under that executive order. So, mean, this is an incredibly exciting time in nuclear. This is really breaking that chicken and egg. Right? It's the first time where we've been able to to shortcut that, you know, problem of how do you get data, and and we have data now. We're currently, as we're sitting here, making a 100 kilowatts, splitting something like 10 to the 17 atoms per second in this reactor behind us. So this is the control room. There's two sections. This is the control half. This door is closed. We have to have senior reactor operator's permission to enter here, which we just got. Thank you, Brent. And out here is sort of our
00:11:11 · S0, Sarah Guo, Isaiah Taylor, S3
[00:11:11] S0: observation room. [00:11:12] S2: It looks like the control room in Hawthorne. [00:11:14] S1: It's it is the exact control room in Hawthorne. We literally picked this up, put it on an airplane, flew it here. So the entirety of the plant, including a controller, flew with us on the c seventeens. First time that's ever been done, which is pretty cool. [00:11:25] S2: How many people operate? [00:11:27] S3: We got one one operator at the controls who's the reactor operator who's controlling all of this. Then you've got a senior reactor operator who provides oversight and kind of ensures that we're staying within our safety limits and stuff. But we always have to have one person at the controls maintaining safety, maintaining the reactor.
00:11:47 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:11:47] S1: So in a couple of days here we're gonna do a scram. So we're gonna press that big red button right there. Big red button scrams the reactor so basically drops the rods, right? Dropping the control rods will introduce a lot of boron carbide into the core. When we scram that, rods will drop. Boron carbide enters the core. Boron is a strong neutron absorber, and so there will not be enough neutrons to maintain criticality because the neutron population gets absorbed into the into the rods. So that'll cause the reaction to stop. Now in a nuclear reactor, this is getting to the core of, like, what is Valor doing differently? Why do we really believe that the technology that we have here is gonna scale? Traditionally, when you scram the reactor in a light water reactor, your work is nowhere near done yet. Right? The next really day of operations is incredibly important because when you turn the reactor off in a traditional nuclear reactor, you still have a lot of heat produced. And you have a lot of heat produced because in a nuclear core, you still have about 5%, heat production from recently split atoms. So when a reactor is running, you have a bunch of atoms being split. They're producing a ton of energy. And even after the reaction shuts down, you you have recently split atoms that are continuing down their decay chains. Mhmm. So this is called decay heat. And decay heat's about five to 6% of what your continuous power was before you shut down. And in a traditional reactor, the the reactor would melt down if you wouldn't if you didn't continue to run the cooling pumps after turning the reactor off. So there's no more fission occurring. You don't have a a chain reaction anymore, but you do have this decay heat. And if you were to just sort of let it sit there, that heat would build up and you would have meltdown. That's exactly what happened in Fukushima and 3 Mile Island. And so the way
00:13:36 · S0, Isaiah Taylor
[00:13:36] S0: that they deal with this [00:13:37] S1: in traditional plants is they have very, very carefully built cooling systems that they continue to run for about twenty four hours after shutdown. [00:13:47] S0: And they try to build in
00:13:48 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:13:48] S1: all these redundancies and and make sure that in any circumstance, the cooling systems never ever ever fail. And that works pretty well. And nuclear is is the safest form of energy ever made. Even with sort of that caveat, 3 Mile Island, you know, even though it melted down, nobody died. Right? Fukushima, arguably, maybe one person died. It's sort of a debate among scientists whether that person died from radiation or not. So even as traditional nuclear is, it's very safe, but we wanna do even better. And we wanna do better because we are interested in scale. We wanna make thousands of reactors, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. And when you're doing that, you really just want it to never ever melt down for any reason. Right? And so the best way to do that is actually just to make active COE systems unnecessary altogether. And that's actually what we're going to demonstrate on Friday. We're going to scram this reactor. Immediately after we scram, we're actually going to turn off the entire electrical supply to the plant. We're going to turn off the circulator. We're going to turn off the RCCS pump. Every safety system in this plant, we're gonna shut off, and we're gonna watch what happens. Now we have a cheat code. We know it's gonna happen, because we did this in Hawthorne before we had, neutrons in it. We ran the the plant at full power with electrical simulators. We basically have these electrical resistors in the plant at Hawthorne. We put about 15 city blocks worth of LA power into this and got it up to full nuclear temperatures and pressures.
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?