Latest / Giant Ideas / Nuclear Reactors In A Box (Radiant Founder, Doug Bernauer)

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Nuclear Reactors In A Box (Radiant Founder, Doug Bernauer) · Giant Ideas

0:00
SPEAKER_00: How much resources do I have command of to put towards this thing that I know absolutely is the most important thing for SpaceX to eventually have is that power source to do fueling.
0:10
SPEAKER_00: So not only would it help that mission more, but it would help the mission of humanity more.
0:15
SPEAKER_02: Hello, and welcome to Giant Ideas with me, Cameron McLean, and me, Tommy Stadlin.
0:20
SPEAKER_02: We're co-founders of Giant Ventures, which builds and backs purpose-driven companies.
0:24
SPEAKER_03: At Giant, we're lucky to meet extraordinary people with giant ideas that are changing the world.
0:29
SPEAKER_03: This podcast brings you behind-the-scenes access to those ideas and the inspiring stories of the people behind them.
0:35
SPEAKER_02: We explore how one giant idea can kickstart a billion-dollar company, shape culture, and transform life as we know it.
0:45
SPEAKER_03: Today we are joined by Doug Bernauer, founder of Radiant, one of Giant's most exciting growth investments.
0:50
SPEAKER_03: We backed Radiant in their Series C round.
0:53
SPEAKER_03: Their vision is to mass produce portable nuclear reactors.
0:57
SPEAKER_03: But their vision goes far beyond this.
0:59
SPEAKER_03: They want to first manufacture nuclear reactors for Earth, giving clean energy to remote areas.
1:04
SPEAKER_03: It's a giant idea, both on this planet and beyond.
1:07
SPEAKER_02: The founder Doug worked with Elon Musk for 12 years at SpaceX.
1:10
SPEAKER_02: He worked on their reusable rocket and the Mars colonization project.
1:15
SPEAKER_02: In this episode, we talk about why nuclear's time has finally come, how Radiant's approach is unique, and their long-term vision to deploy nuclear power on Mars.
1:24
SPEAKER_02: Before we welcome Doug, we've got our partner at Giant, Will Dufton.
1:28
SPEAKER_02: He led the investment in Radiant.
1:29
SPEAKER_02: He's going to give you an insight into what he saw in Doug, why he believes we're on the brink of a nuclear renaissance.
1:35
SPEAKER_02: Will, over to you for a quick explainer.
1:37
SPEAKER_02: Why should people care about nuclear energy right now?
1:40
SPEAKER_01: Look, I think the primary reason is AI, like everything else in the news right now.
1:46
SPEAKER_01: But the rapid build-out of data centers by companies like OpenAI and Meta in pursuit of our artificial intelligence is basically bottlenecked by energy.
1:56
SPEAKER_01: There's a very specific type of energy that is required.
1:58
SPEAKER_01: It's 24-7, 365 power.
2:01
SPEAKER_01: It's base load power.
2:02
SPEAKER_01: And the amount of energy is just almost unfathomable.
2:06
SPEAKER_01: So the forecasts are saying that by 2030 we'll need about 950 terawatt hours of power for data centers globally.
2:13
SPEAKER_01: This is the same amount of power that Japan consumes annually.
2:17
SPEAKER_01: It's just enormous.
2:18
SPEAKER_01: So you know, where is this power going to come from?
2:21
SPEAKER_01: What the US is doing today is mostly leveraging its kind of natural gas resources.
2:26
SPEAKER_01: But the supply chain for natural gas turbines is pretty pretty broken.
2:31
SPEAKER_01: And building this power and connectivity is also really slow and very expensive.
2:36
SPEAKER_01: So actually, even though nuclear kind of has this reputation of being a very slow power source to build and a very expensive power source, it is actually like a very attractive solution for data centers.
2:47
SPEAKER_01: It's clean, carbon-free, baseload power that can be built behind the meter to serve these monstrous data centers.
2:55
SPEAKER_01: So yeah, really uh nuclear is is is is an AI trend.
2:59
SPEAKER_01: Just to be really clear, we're talking about nuclear fission, not nuclear fusion.
3:03
SPEAKER_01: So nuclear fission is splitting atoms.
3:05
SPEAKER_01: We've been doing this for 80, 90 years at scale.
3:08
SPEAKER_01: Nuclear fusion hasn't happened yet.
3:10
SPEAKER_01: Nuclear fusion, when it does happen, will basically break all other energy sources, but it's still probably a couple of decades out.
3:17
SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of pressure on expanding energy resources for AI, but why nuclear?
3:22
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, look, it's not obvious why nuclear.
3:24
SPEAKER_01: Nuclear, as I said, has this reputation for being a very expensive and very slow to build power source.
3:30
SPEAKER_01: And obviously, the kind of overarching reputation of nuclear is nuclear bombs, it is Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, these horrific disasters.
3:39
SPEAKER_01: And so there is this reputation that nuclear is an unsafe technology.
3:43
SPEAKER_01: Aside from AI being an incredibly power-hungry catalyst, a consumer of energy, kind of just demanding that humanity looks for more energy sources, there are other reasons why nuclear kind of looks more attractive now than ever before.
3:56
SPEAKER_01: The first is um it has been burdened with extreme regulatory safety and bureaucratic loads.
4:03
SPEAKER_01: It's understandable.
4:03
SPEAKER_01: Like obviously, we've just come out of a 30, 40 year period in the advent of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl especially, where we have not been building nuclear.
4:12
SPEAKER_01: We've been scared to build nuclear.
4:14
SPEAKER_01: And so as as a result of that, the supply chain, the talent has atrophied for the industry.
4:19
SPEAKER_01: And so what was costing about a thousand dollars per kilowatt electric to build in the US in the 60s uh is now costing like 10x that much.
4:31
SPEAKER_01: Um it's it's it's pretty staggering.
4:34
SPEAKER_01: Uh, nuclear was a cheap energy source in the 60s and 70s, and that was true in the US, in France, in Sweden, but in 2010 and beyond, it it's become one of the most expensive and troublesome power sources to build globally.
4:47
SPEAKER_01: Public sentiment for nuclear now is at like decade-long highs, and people realize that it's safe.
4:53
SPEAKER_01: There are a lot of active nuclear power plants in the West, and so countries are kind of throwing their weight at slightly more behind nuclear.
5:00
SPEAKER_01: And what has also been a catalyst in Europe, especially, is the the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the knock-on effect of energy security that that had.
5:09
SPEAKER_01: And so countries like the UK and France, having said originally they were going to kind of uh decommission a lot of their active nuclear power plants, are now exercising a kind of life extension program uh to get more out of them.
5:23
SPEAKER_01: Um but you know, really like what is happening right now in nuclear, the the most aggressive uh uh uh regime change is in the US.
5:32
SPEAKER_01: Uh, the Trump administration has been uh extremely bullish on nuclear power, and I think that was kind of captured most uh most clearly in some executive orders that were issued in spring this year, which basically uh put paid uh the bureaucratic burden on reactors.
5:49
SPEAKER_01: It said they were going to resupply the nuclear supply chain in the US, including fuel supplies.
5:54
SPEAKER_01: And they've been inking deals that are remarkable.
5:57
SPEAKER_01: I mean, just last week the US government signed an$80 billion deal with Westinghouse to build uh more reactors in the USA.
6:05
SPEAKER_01: So this is uh this is ultimately what has triggered some people to call for a nuclear renaissance, and I'm very glad that nuclear is getting all of this positive attention.
6:14
SPEAKER_01: You know, statistically, it is one of the safest power sources in the world.
6:18
SPEAKER_01: It's safer even than wind power.
6:19
SPEAKER_01: It's clean, it is baseload energy, and it should be highly deployable, but we still have a long way to go, but we're moving in the right direction.
6:27
SPEAKER_02: And what's got you excited about Radiant and Doug, particularly as a founder?
6:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well this is kind of a funny story.
6:33
SPEAKER_01: We were looking at nuclear power, and I was pretty convinced candidly that we we weren't going to invest in a reactor startup.
6:40
SPEAKER_01: You know, the shibbolith that I've talked about in nuclear loomed very large: capital intensity, regulatory uncertainty, slow learning rates, a broken fuel supply chain, inferior levelized costs.
6:51
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, it's it's it just felt too difficult.
6:53
SPEAKER_01: But then I met Doug and and his team at Radiant and and everything changed.
6:58
SPEAKER_01: He completely changed my mind.
7:00
SPEAKER_01: You know, I'll let Doug himself tell you a bit more about what they're building, but there were two reasons basically that got me really excited and made me change my mind on investing in reactors.
7:09
SPEAKER_01: The first is that rather than building a big piece of energy infrastructure, Doug and Radiant are building uh an energy product.
7:17
SPEAKER_01: You know, there's a subtle but important difference, which I'll just tell you a little bit about in my mind.
7:22
SPEAKER_01: Radiant has basically made design choices that are very attractive to a very specific customer base.
7:28
SPEAKER_01: These customers want rapidly deployable power, and in most cases, their only alternative is a diesel generator.
7:34
SPEAKER_01: So diesel generators are still expensive, still cumbersome, dirty, and you have to refuel them, you know, uh every so often.
7:42
SPEAKER_01: Radiant's end customers in some cases are paying like hundreds of dollars per gallon to get diesel to these remote locations where they need power.
7:50
SPEAKER_01: So Radiance Kaleidos, a one megawatt portable meltdown proof reactor that needs refueling once every three to five years, is an amazing product and it can be offered at a competitive price to this niche market.
8:02
SPEAKER_01: So in essence, they were kind of in a way that no one else that I had seen in nuclear was doing, they were thinking about product market fit.
8:10
SPEAKER_01: And then the second reason is Doug himself and the team that he's built.
8:14
SPEAKER_01: And I'll leave our listeners to form their own opinions, but in my view, Doug is one of the most special founders I've had the privilege of working with in my career.
8:25
SPEAKER_03: Welcome Doug.
8:26
SPEAKER_03: We're here today to talk about your giant idea of building nuclear micro reactors to give Earth clean power and eventually create a multiplanetary species.
8:36
SPEAKER_03: I'm not sure there is a more giant idea than that.
8:39
SPEAKER_03: So give us a bit of colour on how you came to work on this giant idea, your background, your story, and what this giant idea is to you.
8:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thanks for having me on.
8:50
SPEAKER_00: Uh so yeah, how did I come to be working on a nuclear reactor is that you can mass produce in in a little box?
8:57
SPEAKER_00: Uh so uh I was a SpaceX employee for about 12 years, uh electrical engineer.
9:03
SPEAKER_00: I joined when they had two rockets that had failed and they had no successful ones, and I thought it was just a great opportunity, great company, something very cool to work on, just to completely remake rocketry, essentially.
9:14
SPEAKER_00: Uh it wasn't working yet, but uh I didn't need didn't need that part.
9:17
SPEAKER_00: Uh so I came there to make that happen.
9:19
SPEAKER_00: Uh got to work on the first rocket with legs, uh just four of us report I was reporting directly to Elon.
9:25
SPEAKER_00: And uh I went to work on the first grid fins after that, and then Hyperloop and Boring Company and uh a Mars colony.
9:33
SPEAKER_00: Uh and then playing around with this Mars colony design, we were trying we were trying to really do is make a refueling station more than a colony initially.
9:40
SPEAKER_00: Uh because it's very expensive to take a starship and land it on Mars.
9:43
SPEAKER_00: And if you do that, what you want to do is refill it and bring it back.
9:46
SPEAKER_00: So you're not wasting a ship and wasting all that fuel every time and needing to bring in a fuel with you to then try to return.
9:52
SPEAKER_00: So you really want to make it there.
9:53
SPEAKER_00: To do that, you need power.
9:55
SPEAKER_00: Uh we're I was looking at solar power to do that.
9:57
SPEAKER_00: We had a uh solar power team, we knew what it would take to do it, but it looked like uh you know maybe four or five miracles in sequence.
10:04
SPEAKER_00: You need multiple rockets, about four football fields worth of solar, you need little robots to go deploy those things and connect them.
10:11
SPEAKER_00: The ground is all dusty and rocky and mixed conditions.
10:14
SPEAKER_00: Uh so it's very hard to go, yeah, this is an easy mission that's gonna work.
10:18
SPEAKER_00: And so I presented this information.
10:20
SPEAKER_00: Um, Elon went, that's too many miracles, probably do nuclear, and I went, let me go look at that.
10:26
SPEAKER_00: Um and it turns out that when you look at nuclear, uh it's you know, five miracles become one, and you go like, oh wow, that actually works.
10:32
SPEAKER_00: That actually is well well, it's maybe that not only does it work, it's the only way you'll actually make life multiplanetary.
10:38
SPEAKER_00: Um and so I took that with me, started to learn.
10:41
SPEAKER_00: I knew not I knew almost nothing about nuclear, right?
10:43
SPEAKER_00: I was an electrical engineer.
10:45
SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, knew almost nothing about it.
10:47
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I knew it existed, but n nothing about the tech, or could you package that?
10:51
SPEAKER_00: I knew you know reactors are very large.
10:53
SPEAKER_00: Um but as as I learned about it, I I found that you know there were space reactors.
10:57
SPEAKER_00: The US had launched one in the 60s, it's called Snap 10A.
11:00
SPEAKER_00: Uh Russia had launched actually a huge quantity of them in the past into space.
11:05
SPEAKER_00: Um I started to look around, okay, who can make this reactor so we can put it on a rocket, so we can go get this mission done.
11:11
SPEAKER_00: Uh and as I looked around and learned about the companies and national labs in the US and other entities, I found there were really no good options.
11:18
SPEAKER_00: There was nobody making anything, that all the exciting stuff happened before I was born.
11:22
SPEAKER_00: Uh but then about three years after this event, where I'm I became nuclear aware and I went, well, that's the only way you colonize, and that's the the whole point of me uh joining SpaceX was that was my mission.
11:33
SPEAKER_00: Um, three three years later in the US this program came out called Pele Program.
11:38
SPEAKER_00: Uh and it was the US military going, we need uh an under hundred ton C-17 transportable uh reactor.
11:47
SPEAKER_00: And so uh I just got I got really excited because they wanted something around a megawatt, and I knew what that could do on on Mars.
11:53
SPEAKER_00: It's about the right size to to refill a rocket every two years, which is the that that's the interval you have between uh Earth and Mars.
12:02
SPEAKER_00: And uh so anyway, I started I tried to convince uh Elon and others there to to let me just like create nuclear at SpaceX.
12:10
SPEAKER_03: How was that conversation?
12:12
SPEAKER_00: Uh more like a series of conversations of like going going to people close going to people close to to Elon and going uh how can we do this?
12:19
SPEAKER_00: And then we go, yeah, it'll never.
12:21
SPEAKER_00: It was not something we're gonna touch.
12:23
SPEAKER_00: And it makes sense.
12:23
SPEAKER_00: I mean uh SpaceX at the time was working on um on Starship and on Starlink also on a bunch of other giant ideas, arguably, right?
12:32
SPEAKER_00: So um but I I talked to enough people that I met some folks who convinced me it was real it was actually much easier than I imagined.
12:39
SPEAKER_00: Uh and so I jumped out of that company, founded Radiant, uh, and started to I I went and learned how to become a nuclear engineer.
12:47
SPEAKER_00: I basically you know went and talked to people who were smart and started modeling reactors almost right away.
12:52
SPEAKER_00: Did that for about a year, um put together a pitch deck and re you know, pivoted the idea to go, well, my really my customer is the military.
13:00
SPEAKER_00: Like I have this eventuality of you know, I like I like space.
13:03
SPEAKER_00: I think it's very cool for humans to just dream beyond the planet we were we were born on.
13:07
SPEAKER_00: You know, we're not stuck here.
13:09
SPEAKER_00: Um But the product uh idea really was well, I want to make a tiny reactor, I want to pick the smallest the military would accept, and I want to mass produce it because mass production is the the story of how things become cheap and reliable.
13:22
SPEAKER_03: Okay, we're gonna get into that.
13:23
SPEAKER_03: You make it sound so logical to just leave SpaceX and start a micronuclear reactor company as if it's uh going for a walk.
13:29
SPEAKER_03: But was it a was it a hard decision to to leave SpaceX?
13:32
SPEAKER_03: And I mean it's such an exciting company.
13:34
SPEAKER_00: It it uh it wasn't.
13:36
SPEAKER_00: Uh it wasn't a hard decision at all.
13:38
SPEAKER_00: I uh I was immediately convinced that you know the mission that I was going to do actually would benefit SpaceX more than me staying at SpaceX.
13:44
SPEAKER_00: So not only would it help that mission more, but it would help the mission of humanity more.
13:49
SPEAKER_00: And it is sort of a simple calculus of like, well, how much how much resources do I have command of to put towards this thing that I know absolutely is the most important thing for SpaceX to eventually have is right that power source to do refueling.
14:02
SPEAKER_00: Uh and I thought, you know, maybe maybe it's on the order of a couple million.
14:05
SPEAKER_00: If I can do, you know, if I can raise more than that, I can make more of an impact.
14:08
SPEAKER_03: I read a story that uh when you were doing kind of your early research, you you started uh pretending as if you were farming land on Mars in your back garden just to get a sense of what that would be like.
14:21
SPEAKER_00: I did.
14:21
SPEAKER_00: I did, because I kind of I go all in on that on every idea.
14:25
SPEAKER_00: So when I did uh when I say colony design, I really I did go above and beyond it.
14:29
SPEAKER_00: I I figured out not only power, uh, but I figured out you know number of missions you would have that you could take a rocket, put on its side, cover it with regolith, uh you know, there's radiation on Mars, but if you were to go outside on Mars one hour every day and then go back inside of these pressurized structures, like going in your house, right?
14:46
SPEAKER_00: Uh the rest of the time, that's the same radiation amount you'd have on Earth.
14:50
SPEAKER_00: And so it's not actually a challenge, not a problem.
14:53
SPEAKER_00: So I went, okay, here's the radiation solution.
14:55
SPEAKER_00: I got that one.
14:55
SPEAKER_00: I went, like, okay, now how do you actually make food?
14:58
SPEAKER_00: Like if you want to go from that just fuel producing base to then a real colony.
15:02
SPEAKER_00: Uh and I had the spreadsheets, and I went and identified like the plant that grows the most food, which is this variety of wheat, uh, where it doesn't grow very tall, so it doesn't waste a lot of its energy growing a stalk or growing these leaves, but it just grows lots and lots of edible content.
15:16
SPEAKER_00: Uh and you can get it from uh they have uh USDA has this agricultural research, you know, the mission that I was going to do actually would benefit SpaceX more than me staying at SpaceX.
15:26
SPEAKER_00: So not only would it help that mission more, but it would help the mission of humanity more.
15:31
SPEAKER_00: And it is sort of a simple calculus of like, well, how much how much resources do I have command of to put towards this thing that I know absolutely is the most important thing for SpaceX to eventually have is right that power source to do refueling.
15:44
SPEAKER_00: But I was at one point I went, like, wait a minute, I don't know how to farm.
15:48
SPEAKER_00: I don't know, I don't know, I don't know what I'm talking about.
15:50
SPEAKER_00: And so I went, I'm gonna go become real, and just in my little tiny like California front yard, like 15 by 15 feet, I just dug up all the grass and I didn't ask my wife for permission.
16:00
SPEAKER_00: And I planted all these seeds and I grew a wheat field just to to do a cycle of that.
16:06
SPEAKER_00: Just yeah.
16:08
SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, so I I don't know.
16:09
SPEAKER_00: I I like I liked it.
16:10
SPEAKER_00: And I like to try try to be real, go to do something, right?
16:13
SPEAKER_00: Not be stuck in that spreadsheet.
16:15
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
16:16
SPEAKER_02: I mean incredible.
16:17
SPEAKER_02: I mean, in some ways makes it sound like science fiction, but actually I think the thing that really strikes me about Radiant is that of all the work that's been on done on nuclear, so much of it feels like it is a distant future, whether it's on Earth or Mars.
16:31
SPEAKER_02: I think the striking thing about Radiant is that it's happening very soon, right?
16:34
SPEAKER_02: You've got this big test coming up next year, which we're gonna ask you about.
16:37
SPEAKER_02: Could you maybe talk just about the initial go-to-market, very much grounded on Earth, working with the US military and with data center companies?
16:44
SPEAKER_02: What what is the actual idea for the first version of the Radiant uh reactor?
16:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, great question.
16:51
SPEAKER_00: Uh so yeah, we are doing this test, um, but that's a test unit, and then by 2028 we want to have one unit out to a customer, which would be likely licensed through the NRC.
17:01
SPEAKER_00: Um, although we do have actually have the option of using a uh Department of Energy authorization.
17:06
SPEAKER_00: So there are these two different licensing pathways.
17:09
SPEAKER_00: With a DOE authorization license, we can put this at a military base in the US.
17:13
SPEAKER_00: We can put it at government on government land essentially, uh, through this other pathway, which really only became available through these executive orders that came out.
17:20
SPEAKER_00: There are uh four of them, all uh targeting nuclear, different aspects of it.
17:24
SPEAKER_00: Um this is one of the one of the details in there.
17:27
SPEAKER_00: But uh so the idea really for the first one is you know, we want a partner who uh knows how to operate these units, who doesn't who likes that it's mobile but doesn't need it to be mobile, um, and where we can we can do testing on it, basically go and try to do the the maximum power and go, you know, switch it between being on and off and and to do that many, many times.
17:48
SPEAKER_00: Uh and so uh the ideal partner for us is a domestic military installation.
17:53
SPEAKER_00: Um not only because they're the well of the those reasons, right, those technical reasons, but there is uh security uh at that facility, so we don't have to worry about someone coming up and doing something that they shouldn't be doing uh to the unit.
18:06
SPEAKER_00: Um but so the early customers, we uh we have actually signed an air for uh a contract with the Air Force earlier this year.
18:12
SPEAKER_00: Uh there is uh uh also a DOD program called Janus that was just announced.
18:18
SPEAKER_00: Uh this is uh I think to the to the tune of a billion, a billion and a half sized program.
18:24
SPEAKER_00: Um we don't know how much will go to the developers, but there'll be likely three, maybe two um developers in that that will down select on later.
18:32
SPEAKER_00: Uh so those are pretty exciting.
18:34
SPEAKER_00: Those are the uh and our goal is really to you know make maybe 15 reactors to to put into those programs.
18:42
SPEAKER_03: So the initial poll from the from the Department of the Defense, um, but yeah, I think you've had some some great traction with the likes of uh Equinix.
18:49
SPEAKER_03: We'd love to hear about that.
18:50
SPEAKER_00: That's right, yeah.
18:51
SPEAKER_00: We have uh so we have a deal signed with uh Equinix, this is uh great data center company.
18:55
SPEAKER_00: Actually, they have a data center like right across the street.
18:57
SPEAKER_00: Uh and they're they're in a ton of major cities.
19:00
SPEAKER_00: Um and that's for 20 units.
19:02
SPEAKER_00: So we have signed a deal and there's a down payment.
19:04
SPEAKER_00: Um it's uh I think one of the more real deals in nuclear.
19:07
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes they're they're very handshake.
19:10
SPEAKER_00: Um but we're really excited about working with them.
19:13
SPEAKER_00: And you know, we didn't really understand the interest data centers would have.
19:16
SPEAKER_00: We initially thought, you know, a one megawatt reactor is is fairly small, right?
19:20
SPEAKER_00: That that you know, the data people are talking about data centers that are very large today, that are you know, 30 megawatts or 100 megawatts even for a single building.
19:27
SPEAKER_00: And uh but they're actually extremely excited about a one megawatt size, and it's because you know our reactor can go in in about a 1,500 square foot area for one reactor, and with more it's even better.
19:39
SPEAKER_00: So it's you know, we can put four megawatts on 4,000 square feet is the kind of the kind of easier thing to remember.
19:45
SPEAKER_00: Um But their interest is in having power immediately.
19:49
SPEAKER_00: Uh and in a lot of cases, you know, there's there's a lot of new technology, there's AI, uh all this new technology needs power, it needs power immediately.
19:57
SPEAKER_00: You know, you can't uh go to the utility, and when you do that, you go to the utility and say, I need more megawatts, or I need even one more megawatt, and they'll say, get in line.
20:06
SPEAKER_00: And let that line, depending where you are, it's two to four years in the US.
20:09
SPEAKER_00: Those that's what's typical for a major power upgrade.
20:13
SPEAKER_00: Um and you're working with the utility, so there's no competition.
20:16
SPEAKER_00: Right?
20:16
SPEAKER_00: You're just you have to do what they say.
20:18
SPEAKER_00: And people are willing to do that, and so you'll find buildings filled with diesel generators, you know, ten or twenty of them, or however many they need, to go and make that power that they need immediately to power their business to compete against their peers.
20:29
SPEAKER_00: Uh and so that's the where the interest and excitement is in uh because our unit, you can put you put on a truck, you drive it at the customer site, you insert it into a docking bay, which is like uh it's just big blocks of concrete that we set up ahead of time.
20:42
SPEAKER_00: But you put that reactor in, it powers on the same day, you're making full power the next day, and then that power lasts for five years with no refueling.
20:51
SPEAKER_00: Uh and if you don't have that, you need uh about 1200 gallons of diesel per day per reactor.
20:58
SPEAKER_00: You know, four reactors, that's a full 5,000 gallon fuel truck every single day at your facility.
21:03
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
21:04
SPEAKER_02: So in terms of cost, you guys have the advantage of competing against diesel as opposed to you know on-grid uh other other power sources that are on grid.
21:13
SPEAKER_02: So that's a major advantage.
21:14
SPEAKER_02: Let's just maybe break down the product into a few different areas.
21:17
SPEAKER_02: So size, you've mentioned it's one megawatt compared to you know traditional nuclear plants that are about a gigawatt, right?
21:23
SPEAKER_02: They're powering millions of homes.
21:25
SPEAKER_02: This is powering, you know, one remote data center or one uh uh military base, right?
21:30
SPEAKER_02: So it's it's it's small, it's portable.
21:32
SPEAKER_02: How how have you managed to make the economics of that work where fuel costs for such a small reactor would be normally a massive proportion of the cost?
21:40
SPEAKER_02: You you do something very clever on a fuel which uh, as you said, allows it to be refueled every five years, so fuel costs are under control.
21:47
SPEAKER_02: And it's also safe.
21:48
SPEAKER_02: We'd love to hear about the safety.
21:49
SPEAKER_02: We would love to hear about the smart things you've done on fuel to keep the cost down.
21:53
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
21:53
SPEAKER_00: Uh great question.
21:54
SPEAKER_00: So the the fuel is the largest proportion of cost at this really small scale.
21:58
SPEAKER_00: Um and so Uh y uh there are some deals that we've signed.
22:02
SPEAKER_00: We are actually working with uh with the UK with uh Yorenko have signed a deal for enough fuel for five units.
22:08
SPEAKER_00: Um I think that is the first commercial Halo deal ever signed, uh also.
22:13
SPEAKER_00: Uh so it's pretty exciting.
22:15
SPEAKER_00: And so uh securing the where the supply is going to be coming from before uh everybody's out there trying to get fuel is important to help control costs.
22:24
SPEAKER_00: Um but the so the smartest thing technically going on is really not about the fuel but about the nuclear core.
22:30
SPEAKER_00: We use uh a material called zirconium hydride, and we actually make that here uh in our facility.
22:35
SPEAKER_00: Took us about three years to develop that.
22:37
SPEAKER_00: Uh and and what it does really um you you have to we have enriched fuel, right?
22:42
SPEAKER_00: We use this partially enriched.
22:44
SPEAKER_00: So it's not a high enriched, it's not a weapons grade material, it's it's what you'd use in like a research reactor.
22:49
SPEAKER_00: So 20% enrichment, um, which is more than what you'd use in a normal reactor, which is about a five percent uh enrichment in one of those big uh gigawatt scale reactors.
22:58
SPEAKER_00: Um but we actually uh use this material zirconium hydride.
23:02
SPEAKER_00: If you put that in a reactor, uh you can actually use less fuel then.
23:05
SPEAKER_00: Uh and the reason you can do that is because uh when the fission occurs, you've got neutrons moving at about seven percent the speed of light.
23:12
SPEAKER_00: They're they're they're they're they're extremely fast.
23:14
SPEAKER_00: And when they're moving that fast, they don't interact, they don't cause fission.
23:18
SPEAKER_00: Um and so you want to slow them down.
23:20
SPEAKER_00: This zirconium hydride slows them down, and it does so over a really short distance inside the reactor.
23:25
SPEAKER_00: So you you can control the size of the reactor and you can actually load less fuel and still get a relatively high burn-up.
23:31
SPEAKER_02: And why is it so safe?
23:33
SPEAKER_00: Two two reasons.
23:34
SPEAKER_00: Well, there's really three.
23:35
SPEAKER_00: Two main reasons.
23:36
SPEAKER_00: So uh we use a fuel called Triso, uh, and this this fuel is from the 1960s, um, like like pretty much all nuclear tech.
23:43
SPEAKER_00: Uh and you know, there's not really much that humans have not explored uh and gone and built.
23:48
SPEAKER_00: So it's a fuel that's been around for a while.
23:50
SPEAKER_00: It are uh it is tiny poppy seed-sized kernels uh of nuclear fuel that is overcoated with ceramic layers.
23:57
SPEAKER_00: Those ceramic layers prevent the fission gases from getting out.
24:00
SPEAKER_00: Not only that, but those ceramics have an extremely high temperature rating, right?
24:04
SPEAKER_00: They can go to almost 2,000 degrees Celsius.
24:07
SPEAKER_00: So uh what that means is you can't have a meltdown.
24:10
SPEAKER_00: It's a fuel form that just will not melt down.
24:13
SPEAKER_00: So that traditional typical problem thing that occurred in uh a couple of famous reactor incidents.
24:19
SPEAKER_00: Um so that that can happen.
24:22
SPEAKER_00: The other thing is uh helium uh gas is what we're using as the coolant, and helium uniquely does not become radioactive in the reactor.
24:30
SPEAKER_00: Uh and if it leaks, it's gaseous, it will just dissipate into the atmosphere and it's not radioactive.
24:35
SPEAKER_00: Uh so this is a really great thing to have, especially because you know we know that our customers may need power off a grid.
24:41
SPEAKER_00: They may be out in the middle of nowhere, right?
24:43
SPEAKER_00: And so you you want to have a reactor that is totally safe, even if it's you know not in a and it's not babied, right?
24:50
SPEAKER_00: If it's not in a really it can be out in in the outdoors in a rugged environment.
24:54
SPEAKER_00: Um and the third thing is there's a passive safety.
24:57
SPEAKER_00: Uh and part of that is just due to the size of the reactor.
24:59
SPEAKER_00: If you make a reactor extremely small, uh it does when you turn a reactor off, it it keeps producing a little bit of heat, and then that slowly decays away.
25:07
SPEAKER_00: Um and you need to cool it during that period normally.
25:09
SPEAKER_00: So for a big reactor, they run these cooling water pumps, uh, and they have to have redundant cooling water pumps, and they have to have a backup generator to run those things.
25:17
SPEAKER_00: With a tiny reactor, you don't need that.
25:20
SPEAKER_00: And it's because you just don't have much fuel.
25:22
SPEAKER_00: And and what we do is the air, just outdoor ambient air at whatever temperature, even if you're out in the middle of the Sahara, that will flow up along the wall of the pressure vessel on the outside of it, and that carries away enough heat to prevent uh any overheat that the incident.
25:37
SPEAKER_03: So is this foolproof, Doug, or somewhat theoretical?
25:40
SPEAKER_03: Um, is there absolutely no chance of something like Chernobyl happening with the radiant product?
25:46
SPEAKER_00: In that reactor incident, they they removed 224 control rods to the maximum extension.
25:52
SPEAKER_00: That is a thing which should not have even been possible by design.
25:56
SPEAKER_00: So there's a there's a bad design element here, and they talk about this in the that really great uh show, uh the HBO show, Chernobyl, uh, which I found awesome, uh fascinating.
26:05
SPEAKER_00: Uh uh and I'm and I'm a pretty harsh critic.
26:08
SPEAKER_00: But in uh the thing they don't tell you, they tell you they removed all the rods to the full extension.
26:12
SPEAKER_00: They don't tell you it's 224 of them.
26:14
SPEAKER_00: I feel like that's a missing detail.
26:15
SPEAKER_00: This is important to hear.
26:17
SPEAKER_00: Um but no, you you you can't really do that with a small reactor.
26:21
SPEAKER_00: And we actually um we run these um i i you know if you cut come to our office in uh LA, you can see uh run a little simulator, and in this demonstration, we actually remove all the safeties from the system and we go try to try to make it into something dangerous.
26:36
SPEAKER_00: Um and in that event what happens is it warms up.
26:39
SPEAKER_00: As it warms up, that reduces reactivity.
26:42
SPEAKER_03: That's a big part of your innovation, and one of the ways you came to this design, correct, is through this this very novel digital twin you've built, which has allowed you to make design decisions at a faster pace than this typical of nuclear.
26:52
SPEAKER_03: Maybe you could tell us a bit about that.
26:54
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
26:55
SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, so we um, you know, a lot of us came from SpaceX.
26:58
SPEAKER_00: One of one of the things uh you learn is that, you know, software is king.
27:02
SPEAKER_00: And and you really must not only design some hardware and you you can't outsource it, right?
27:07
SPEAKER_00: You must have a team that does the software engineering, you must own every line of code.
27:12
SPEAKER_00: Um and yeah, so we developed this digital twin, and it it actually uses existing nuclear codes.
27:18
SPEAKER_00: The the novelty uh, and it is actually based upon a thing done in aerospace very commonly, usually called hardware in the loop, or uh or uh an iron bird in aerospace.
27:28
SPEAKER_00: And uh we were doing this uh on rockets.
27:30
SPEAKER_00: You go and simulate missions, and you go and you simulate a bunch of potential failure modes, and then you show that all your safeties function.
27:36
SPEAKER_00: Uh and so it's really no different to for us, no different to do that for a reactor.
27:41
SPEAKER_00: Um in the nuclear industry, what's different is that usually they're running these kind of simulations as just safety analysis codes that are independent from the real system.
27:50
SPEAKER_00: Uh and the novelty and the the innovation that we that we have, I think, in the nuclear industry, is really that our control software that we run on the actual boards, uh which we also uh design and produce, uh, which is kind of unique.
28:03
SPEAKER_00: Uh but we'll the one the code we run on our boards is the same as that code we run on our safety analysis.
28:07
SPEAKER_00: And that's really what's unique about the digital twin that we're using, is we're uh we're not making the safety analysis as this separate package that just needs to be you know closely matched, where you gotta just check line by line and go look at the different models and show that the geometry is correct on both sides.
28:23
SPEAKER_00: But it's truly the same code being checked.
28:26
SPEAKER_02: So, Doug, maybe if we zoom out a little bit and just talk about the the wider landscape, and it really feels like the moment for nuclear has has come again.
28:34
SPEAKER_02: Um and it's it's so dependent on public mood, on political support.
28:39
SPEAKER_02: For many years, nuclear was uh had a pretty bad rap, and the oil and gas industry I think have done a very good job of uh doom mongering and scaremongering about nuclear.
28:47
SPEAKER_02: I think the reality is many more people have died in the oil and gas industry and the coal industry than they ever have in the nuclear industry.
28:53
SPEAKER_02: But because of one-off events like Chernobyl and others, uh people are scared, have been scared.
28:59
SPEAKER_02: Uh we've seen in Germany where pretty strange decisions made, having had a real advantage on nuclear, they've shut down a lot of their reactors.
29:06
SPEAKER_02: France have kept some of theirs, but haven't kept it at the pace of adding new ones.
29:10
SPEAKER_02: And I guess in the US it's been interesting to see where so much of climate tech has been dismantled, the support for it has evaporated because of the new administration on things like hydrogen and wind, but real support for nuclear.
29:22
SPEAKER_02: And I guess you guys have been the beneficiaries of that.
29:24
SPEAKER_02: You've got this test next year in Idaho with the US government really supporting you and accelerating the speed at which you guys can get uh regulated and into market.
29:35
SPEAKER_02: Because that that's been the big blocker, hasn't it, basically, and why we've seen so little innovation for 50 years because you have to have so many proof points of safety, but you're not allowed to get those proof points without launching, and it's been a nightmare scenario for the innovators.
29:48
SPEAKER_02: Just talk us through that a little bit and how much support you are getting from the US government.
29:53
SPEAKER_03: And maybe just for our listeners, some context, if there's not been a new nuclear reactor design approved for 50 years.
29:58
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's about it's a it's about right.
30:00
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you have to add some qualifiers sometimes, but that's that's the truth of it.
30:04
SPEAKER_00: We are actually we're we're going to Idaho National Laboratory.
30:07
SPEAKER_00: Um it's a pretty huge piece of land.
30:09
SPEAKER_00: It's the size of Rhode Island, which is a small state in the US.
30:12
SPEAKER_00: Uh, but it's uh it's a giant high desert zone, and they they use it basically as a reactor test site because it's this high desert kind of you know almost out in the middle of nowhere.
30:21
SPEAKER_00: Uh it's west of Idaho Falls City.
30:23
SPEAKER_00: Um and um at that site in 1956, I think they started testing reactors uh just after the the first naval reactors were produced.
30:33
SPEAKER_00: Uh and then they tested actually fifty-two react different reactors have been designed, fueled, tested at Idaho National Lab.
30:39
SPEAKER_00: The last of those was in 1977.
30:42
SPEAKER_00: So not only has it like it been that long, but they used to just test these like clockwork regularly, right?
30:48
SPEAKER_00: It would be uh several per year.
30:50
SPEAKER_00: You'd almost go like, you know, what are we doing this fall?
30:52
SPEAKER_00: Ah, another reactor.
30:54
SPEAKER_00: It's kind of wild, like a right, a a different world.
30:58
SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, yeah.
30:59
SPEAKER_00: I mean it was before our time, so it's it's hard to say.
31:01
SPEAKER_00: But I think um, you know, that there is this big regulatory barrier.
31:05
SPEAKER_00: Um and I think what you know that there have been no there hasn't really been customer demand to drive things to happen.
31:12
SPEAKER_00: And really the way the way that I see everything in Nuclear is that uh there are customers, if those customers are excited about nuclear, uh then developers will take that customer excitement and and uh and hopefully contracts, right?
31:25
SPEAKER_00: Uh and then go and make a design and then actually deliver on it on a schedule and at a cost that is palatable to that customer.
31:34
SPEAKER_00: Uh and the the trouble here is that if you do a really, really large reactor, it can take a very long time to make this thing.
31:40
SPEAKER_00: And you and you you need to take a you need to get a lot of financing early on so you can build and you're you're making no revenue until it turns on.
31:47
SPEAKER_00: And if that, you know, typically takes in the past that took typically five years.
31:51
SPEAKER_00: It's it's basically four to six years, depending on which country you are and kind of what era.
31:56
SPEAKER_00: Uh the most recent reactor built in the US is something like like fifteen years.
32:01
SPEAKER_00: Uh the ones built in Georgia.
32:03
SPEAKER_00: Um which is pretty slow.
32:06
SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, w way slower than it needs to be.
32:10
SPEAKER_00: And then the the issue with regulatory is that it just adds years in the schedule.
32:14
SPEAKER_00: Uh and it's really uh it it's actually intertwined with financing in a weird way that we probably don't need to go into, but basically it's done in two chunks, right?
32:22
SPEAKER_00: For a big reactor, you go, hey, I want to uh I want the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the United States, which licenses all the commercial reactors, uh, to go and check this design out and review the design.
32:34
SPEAKER_00: And what you'll get is a design approval.
32:36
SPEAKER_00: But to do that, it might take them two years, maybe three years even, for the NRC to do that.
32:41
SPEAKER_00: And you and the most recent one done by NewScale, I think, was about 10,000 pages, I think is the public figure they shared.
32:47
SPEAKER_00: And so you make 10,000 pages and you and you take that giant, you know, all those however many volumes that's broken into and you and you ship them those books and then years later they tell you, yeah, the design is good.
32:57
SPEAKER_00: Uh and so at this point what happens?
32:59
SPEAKER_00: Well, you can get financing, right?
33:01
SPEAKER_00: And but that's it.
33:02
SPEAKER_00: You because you don't have you don't actually even have construction approval.
33:05
SPEAKER_00: And that's another piece.
33:06
SPEAKER_00: You've got to go then permit that piece.
33:08
SPEAKER_00: And so yeah, the the regulatory issue is that there's years usually.
33:11
SPEAKER_00: So so the difference when we're a thousand times smaller, we're three orders of magnitude smaller, it doesn't take a lot of capital to put together.
33:18
SPEAKER_00: We're through our investors, uh, you know, with your your support, we're building reactors.
33:24
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and and luckily the government have have switched position to really, really favor nuclear with these executive orders, and they're driving for schedule.
33:33
SPEAKER_00: You know, in the past they were trying to they were supportive.
33:36
SPEAKER_00: Uh that's it's very different when the government is committed to making things happen more quickly, um, right with quickly within reason.
33:43
SPEAKER_00: You know, they're going they're still doing we're still doing all of the same process.
33:46
SPEAKER_00: We're going through all the same safety analysis and checks, and it's the same technical experts.
33:50
SPEAKER_00: Um, but there's really like a drive now to get things done.
33:54
SPEAKER_02: It's really exciting.
33:55
SPEAKER_02: You've got the support of the US government behind you, you've got us a giant, you've got some other amazing investors, Founders Fund, Andreessen, DCBC, Stepstone.
34:03
SPEAKER_02: So you're you're backed by some of the best.
34:05
SPEAKER_02: I'd I'd love to hear, maybe just as we close this uh episode out, what is the vision and the plan for Radiant over the next two or three years on Earth?
34:14
SPEAKER_02: And maybe we can dream a little and come back to the plan for Mars.
34:18
SPEAKER_00: So next year we will uh we actually have parts in our facility here for the reactor already.
34:23
SPEAKER_00: The pressure vessel uh is actually here, uh was arrived a few weeks ago.
34:28
SPEAKER_00: So we will construct the Kaleidos demonstration unit reactor uh that will go in uh early part of the year, around April, that will go out to Idaho National Laboratory.
34:40
SPEAKER_00: Our fuel comes from a separate location.
34:42
SPEAKER_00: We'll do uh we'll insert that reactor into a dome, which is this big pressurized structure.
34:47
SPEAKER_00: Uh we'll put the fuel inside of it in there, and then we will go to zero power critical and we'll turn that on and we'll make that into a really big and exciting event because that will mean this 50 years without reactors is over.
34:59
SPEAKER_00: Uh, right, and we'll make that a very big moment.
35:02
SPEAKER_00: Uh we'll then continue testing that reactor, but we will be building the second uh reactor already in the background.
35:09
SPEAKER_00: Um and that reactor will get to a customer uh and make electric power.
35:14
SPEAKER_00: And ideally that's in the early part of 2028.
35:17
SPEAKER_00: So it is not very far away at this point.
35:20
SPEAKER_00: So that's really the the most exciting things in the next couple of years.
35:23
SPEAKER_00: Um and we we have a facility we just announced uh in Tennessee.
35:27
SPEAKER_00: That's where we'll actually fuel reactors in the future.
35:30
SPEAKER_00: Um for now, you know, we're able to build a reactor but not fuel it uh in this facility.
35:34
SPEAKER_00: Where I'm talking to you from, actually.
35:36
SPEAKER_00: Uh but uh beyond that, you know, the space reactors will happen if there are customers.
35:42
SPEAKER_00: And if there's a mass producible design out there, we uh radiant doesn't have an interest really making one thing that's you know for off-world use, that's not gonna not gonna help people.
35:51
SPEAKER_00: Um but the the reactor we make is pretty small.
35:53
SPEAKER_00: It's only a megawatt, but we can make 50 a year.
35:56
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna be scaling up into that.
35:58
SPEAKER_00: Um I'm not sure how many we'll be able to make by when, but the the general s scale is like, you know, by 2030s we want to be making 10, 10 or more per year, and then maybe 2033 or so, maybe be at that 50 a year sort of figure.
36:13
SPEAKER_00: Uh and we don't know what people are gonna do with power.
36:15
SPEAKER_00: The point is, you know, we want to get diesel permit parity.
36:18
SPEAKER_00: If you if you go, I want a one megawatt, and you call some rental company, you go, we need a megawatt, quick, we were underpowered here, and they they should tell you, hey, do you want the diesel or the nuclear one?
36:31
SPEAKER_00: That's really the goal.
36:33
SPEAKER_00: And to make it so that you can just use this really great, safe technology that's really beneficial, and and you need, you know, a thousand square feet uh to put one in.
36:43
SPEAKER_00: Uh that's just a an enormous benefit compared to a diesel generator with huge tanks, multi-thousands of of uh gallons.
36:52
SPEAKER_00: You know, t 4x that for liters.
36:54
SPEAKER_00: Uh it's a it's a ridiculous amount.
36:55
SPEAKER_00: I can't picture having like 40,000 liter tanks uh added to your facility.
37:00
SPEAKER_03: What a vision.
37:01
SPEAKER_03: What a vision.
37:02
SPEAKER_03: Well, we are very confident, a giant, that Radiant's gonna be one of the most important energy companies in the world uh very soon.
37:09
SPEAKER_03: And we're incredibly excited to be on board with you, Doug.
37:11
SPEAKER_03: Um we end every episode by asking our guests what it is that has allowed them to succeed in the field, and you've done a tremendous amount since you've left SpaceX.
37:20
SPEAKER_03: Um maybe just a few words from you on what you think has uh made you uh so successful at this.
37:26
SPEAKER_00: Uh I think it's just commitment and passion.
37:29
SPEAKER_00: You know, I get really excited by losing and winning.
37:33
SPEAKER_00: If I get if I if I lose at something, I go, what went wrong?
37:37
SPEAKER_00: How could I do this?
37:37
SPEAKER_00: I I I like uh you know, I fiend on that.
37:39
SPEAKER_00: I feast on that that that negative energy and I turn it into some some action, some positivity.
37:45
SPEAKER_00: And then I also get really excited on wins, right?
37:48
SPEAKER_00: And I go, this is everybody needs to hear about this thing that's happening, how big this is.
37:52
SPEAKER_00: Um and so I think it's that.
37:54
SPEAKER_00: It just uh I I I tend to really enjoy working with other people also who are driven by passion and have a lot of energy.
38:01
SPEAKER_00: And the team that we've got here now is uh you know, over 120 people full-time uh and amazing, really, really talented and great people to work with.
38:11
SPEAKER_00: And uh that's definitely the key to success.
38:14
SPEAKER_00: And I think that you know, their my excitement brings their excitement and then get more done.
38:20
SPEAKER_03: It's infectious.
38:21
SPEAKER_03: Your excitement is infectious.
38:22
SPEAKER_03: And one little anecdote I love from from Will when he came to visit you guys in uh in in Los Angeles was uh it was the cleanest it was the cleanest sort of factory floor he'd ever seen, and I thought I thought that was a that was a great little tidbit that's that set the standard for the rest of the company.
38:37
SPEAKER_00: That just means we're not doing enough yet.
38:39
SPEAKER_00: That means we gotta we gotta turn we gotta run the machines.
38:42
SPEAKER_00: We've gotta make some more more noise and more mess.
38:45
SPEAKER_00: That is coming.
38:46
SPEAKER_00: Good stuff.
38:47
SPEAKER_03: Well, thank you so much for joining us, Doug.
38:48
SPEAKER_03: It's been a real pleasure.
38:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thanks for having me on.
38:51
SPEAKER_00: This is great.
38:57
SPEAKER_02: If you like the episode, don't forget to like, subscribe, and follow the show, and you can find many more giant ideas wherever you get your podcasts.