--:-- Host (Steph Smith): What might surprise some people to learn is that nuclear energy accounts for 20% of the electricity in the United States. But what I think will surprise very few people is to learn that this carbon-free energy source has quite the storied history over the last few decades, resulting in new reactors slowing almost entirely to a halt.
--:-- However, the past few years have been what some people might call a comeback story. In 2023, we saw America's first newly built reactor come online in over three decades. But we're also seeing startups build entirely new types of reactors, public discourse shifting, and even the U.S. government itself recently announcing its intent to triple nuclear power production by 2050.
--:-- So in today's episode, originally recorded in the heart of Washington, D.C. back in January at A16Z's American Dynamism Summit, we talk about this truly unique moment in time for nuclear energy. A16Z General Partner David Yulovich joins forces with Doug Bernauer, CEO of microreactor company Radiant, and Dr. Katherine Huff, Assistant Secretary of the Office of Nuclear Energy, as they collectively discuss nuclear energy's role in our country's future.
--:-- Because remember, energy is vital to many of the industries that we talk about here. Energy powers the data centers that run our clouds, the electric cars that drive on our streets, and of course, is fuel for the factories that build our future. So if anything feels certain, it's that we're going to need more energy, not less. So tune in here as this group of policymakers, founders, and funders discuss why increasing our nuclear capacity should be a national priority and what it'll take to reverse this multi-decade trend.
--:-- Oh, and if you'd like to get an inside look into A16Z's American Dynamism Summit, you can watch several of the stage talks from the event featuring policymakers like Congressman Jake Ockencloss or Senator Todd Young, plus both founders and funders building toward American Dynamism. You can find all of the above at A16Z.com slash AD Summit. All right, let's get started.
--:-- [Disclaimer: The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. Please note that a16z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com slash disclosures.]
--:-- Host (Steph Smith): Nuclear has quite the storied history, and in the last 50 years in particular, progress has really slowed. I'd love to get your take, Dr. Huff, on the key factors that you really attribute to that.
--:-- Dr. Kathryn Huff: I think critically, the expense of different kinds of energy technology typically determine what utilities are going to select. There was a serious period of time where, for example, natural gas was an extremely cheap option to build quickly with low capital investment. That, I think, is the primary driver for a lot of reduction in the builds for nuclear. And then as you lose that muscle, it becomes more and more expensive to get it back, right? Much like if you stop working out.
--:-- Host (Steph Smith): Yeah. And I think there's a lot of public opinion around nuclear. Some people attribute that to that slowdown over the last few decades. Doug, is there anything you'd add there and maybe other misconceptions that you think the public holds?
--:-- Doug Bernauer: I think over the past 50 years, a lot has happened. Solar and wind technology really came about and was deployed kind of in the middle of this nuclear story we're telling. These are forms of low-cost energy, but they are not resilient forms of energy. By the time we deployed them significantly to the grid, we started to look for a source of power that you can scale, that you can throttle up and down on demand. And at the same time, scientists started to care about climate. And then I think the public really has come around to really care about climate. And not just to care, but to want to do something about it.
--:-- So I think nuclear has this really cool new role to fill instead of natural gas, which I agree with Dr. Huff. The low cost of it definitely caused us to adopt that to fill that need, rather than nuclear. But I think nuclear can leapfrog it.
--:-- Host (Steph Smith): Yeah. And I think we are seeing renewed interest, which is exciting, especially over the last few years. David, what's your take on that? Is there a really strong "why now"? And is it just climate? Or is there another series of factors at play?
--:-- David Yulovich: I think that we have this insatiable thirst for energy. We have so many things that power the way we live and the way we want to live and the way we want to work that require electricity. We need all forms of energy to be increased, I think. Some are better than others. Some have a longer future ahead of them than others.
--:-- For me, nuclear is this baseload energy. You don't need the wind to be blowing. You don't need the sun to be out. And it can be delivered in a lot of form factors. That makes it very exciting and really worth the investment in rebuilding the muscle, to use the analogy that Dr. Huff made earlier, to really rebuild the muscle of how do we build nuclear power plants and what kind of plants do we want to build and to power what kind of loads and in what kind of circumstances.
--:-- I think climate's a huge part of it. We recognize we have this insatiable need for energy. We're not going backwards in our energy consumption. That ship has sailed. So if we're going to have new energy generation, it has to be clean energy. I think there's also been a renewed interest in people getting reeducated as to what are the risks and opportunities with nuclear energy. That's come from a lot of different places, whether it's from government or from industry or from academia. Maybe nuclear energy is a lot safer than we actually originally realized and it's really worth the time spent there to see if that's a viable way to generate the kind of energy that we need in the future.
--:-- Host (Steph Smith): Yeah. It's been a long time. We're not in the same place as many decades ago. There are new reactor designs, which we will definitely get to. But Dr. Huff, I want to talk about your house testimony that you did recently, and you referred to our current approach to nuclear as, quote, "a national security vulnerability." You reinforced that the Office of Nuclear Energy is doing a few things: keeping the existing fleet of reactors operating and online, deploying new advanced reactor technologies, sustaining and securing the nuclear fuel cycle, and expanding nuclear energy cooperation. Something I'd love to get you to touch on is really that role of nuclear in America's global standing and security.
--:-- Dr. Kathryn Huff: Thanks for that. I think that "why now" question ties to this. In the testimony, the particular component of our approach that I think is an active vulnerability is the fuel cycle security. But an additional piece is the energy security and energy resilience that nuclear energy can provide to support those more variable sources, to be on no matter what day it is, what time it is, to not require refueling.
--:-- We've seen that deliveries of fuel are a clear vulnerability. Natural gas obviously can hold an entire nation hostage. Deliveries of those sorts of fuel, since they can be interrupted, really undermine the security of otherwise accessible and deployable sources. If you can't dispatch that power, then it's not useful to your resilience.
--:-- Nuclear power, on the other hand, even existing conventional plants, only need to be refueled once every 18 months, maybe two years. They can run alone as an island for quite a while. This really underpins what we can see as an energy security and energy resilience that, frankly, in today's geopolitical universe, represents our access to sovereignty as nations, our continued operation as independent states. The U.S. has a number of other features that make it a secure nation, but there are a lot of other countries that really can be threatened by another nation that would use energy as a weapon.
--:-- Host (Steph Smith): Yeah, and we have many technologists building towards these new reactors and improving that fuel cycle. But can you speak specifically to the government's role in that? What is the government's role in securing that fuel cycle and that global cooperation while also ensuring that we're getting these new reactors built in the U.S.?
--:-- Dr. Kathryn Huff: It takes a lot of pieces. With tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act and grant funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, we're able to do things like encourage subsequent license renewals to be economic for existing nuclear power. Or, in the case of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law dollars, advance demonstration programs.
--:-- But the Office of Nuclear Energy's focus has historically been on R&D programs, the kind of R&D that takes startups like Radiant and supports technological advancements. Through small grants, we've tried to expand our support of as many companies as possible. There are lots of them, more than we could possibly support, actually. It's a feature of many decades of working through the national laboratories, which we manage and operate from the Department of Energy, and ensuring that we have a strong technological capability to support the kinds of scientific explorations that we need to propel those technologies forward.
--:-- Host (Steph Smith): So let's talk about some of those new technologies. Doug, let's throw it over to you. Can you break down the different generations of reactors and also where we've come? As I said before, it's been several decades. Where are we now in that technology?
--:-- Doug Bernauer: I'm going to ask Dr. Huff to correct me on anything I get wrong here. I'm actually not an expert in all the history of nuclear and every kind of reactor. I'm really an expert in what I'm doing, which is portable, high-temperature gas reactor.
--:-- But the generations, roughly, people use these Gen 1, 2, 3, and 4 terms. Gen 1 are really the reactors we first figured out. They're kind of pre-enrichment. They're usually like a graphite moderated reactor. Generation 2 reactors were very different because we started to do enrichment with these big gas diffusion enrichment plants. In that time period, the U.S. was really at the forefront of everything. I think we had over 400 uranium mines operating in the U.S. We were the great developers and exporters of our technology to the rest of the world.
--:-- Gen 3 really are meant to be an advanced form of those Gen 2 reactors that can make use of enrichment. They have accident-tolerant fuels or the ability to recycle fuel. They're kind of these advanced features. Gen 4 is really meant to represent these things that are much farther away. They're a kind of future where they perfectly produce hydrogen, let's say, and make a hydrogen economy possible.
--:-- Dr. Kathryn Huff: That's pretty good. I would say there's one interesting nuance. A lot of the conventional reactors that are operating today are in that Gen 2, 3 space. But there's "Gen 3 Plus" that people sometimes introduce. What does that really mean? It's something in between Gen 3 and Gen 4 where you're incorporating modularity in the construction, but it's still a light water reactor, for example. We see a lot of different definitions, but I think you did a fine job.
--:-- Doug Bernauer: I have my own scale. So you have big reactors. They're a gigawatt. They're for a million homes. That's the right scale. Then we've got SMRs. The purpose of SMRs is really to take that big reactor and build it really fast. The typical construction timeline is really like 6 to 15 years on the big reactors right now, depending who makes them. Even for the exact same reactor, like an AP1000, built in the U.S. is very slow, built in Asia is very fast.
--:-- But you can make the reactor smaller, you can make it faster. The idea behind SMR is to make something that's maybe for about 250,000 homes, a quarter of the size, but be able to build it really quickly. If we could achieve that, it would be a great economic success. But the spectrum is getting longer and longer.
--:-- One of the interesting things happening now is people are looking smaller and smaller, looking at micro reactors. There's kind of two categories of micro reactors: portable and non-portable. If you do a fully portable micro reactor, this is around the scale of a thousand homes. So it's a thousand times smaller than the reactor all the way at the other end of the spectrum. You have microreactors which are not portable, which are 10 or 20 times larger, maybe like 10 or 20 megawatt electric.
--:-- The really exciting thing for me is that I'm really far into the scale of portable microreactors. We haven't really achieved that yet. You could actually produce these in a factory because they're portable. You could do mass production and then ship them around and very quickly deploy them in all these little areas where you have the equivalent of a thousand homes, which could also be a workplace that has 2,500 people, a mine, a military base, a hospital in some key remote region. I like this scale better than thinking about the advanced ones. It's more about deployment and how you can put them out in different areas.
--:-- Host (Steph Smith): Maybe we can talk about the use case. When we're talking about a military base, what is the current state? If we're not using these micro reactors, what is being used today and what's the trade-off there if we can't actually get to that future reactor?
--:-- Doug Bernauer: Current state of the military base is that they have backup generators. Any site has critical infrastructure. Those backup generators will have diesel storage tanks. There'll be 40,000 to 150,000 gallons of diesel on those sites, and they'll only use it in a backup scenario. It requires they put batteries all over the installation. If there is an outage, they're typically going to run out of that diesel, especially if there's something like the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack where we lost an ability to move fuel in a huge multi-state area. They were out of fuel before their timeframe, which is usually a 14-day resilience timeframe.
--:-- So they've got a problem, and they're looking for solutions. They're actually very interested in both categories of microreactor because those are around the scale of the base. All of the larger ones, an SMR or a gigawatt class reactor, would be too large.
--:-- Host (Steph Smith): David, let's bring you into this conversation. Obviously, we've invested in Radiant, and I want to get your sense of where you see capital being deployed in this new ecosystem as new reactors are coming online. What's the opportunity here, and where do you see some of those private dollars actually being deployed?
--:-- David Yulovich: Both Doug and Dr. Huff touched upon some really important points that relate to why having modular or just numerous points of energy generation spread across our grid and possibly amongst our allies is really an important concept. For people that are not spending all their time and energy on this, it may not be obvious why energy and defense or national security and sovereignty are really interrelated.
--:-- I'll give one example. Take an island country like Taiwan that does not have its own energy independence. You could imagine a blockade where coal, oil, or other fuel sources that are normally supposed to deliver fuel to the island are prevented from reaching their ports. At that point, a country like Taiwan may only have a week or two or three weeks of fuel on the island. Rather than having some kind of kinetic war on Taiwan, a blockade would be equally potentially as devastating. You can imagine hospitals running out of their generator supply, military bases not able to turn the lights on, runways having no runway lights. It cascades from there. All the infrastructure eventually just quickly starts to fall apart.
--:-- That same example actually applies to the U.S. We do have lots of geographic things that protect us as a country. We have two major oceans on both sides. We have lots of resources. We obviously have our own fuel supplies. But our grid is very brittle. There are multiple ways to make the grid more resilient. One way is just adding capacity in distributed fashions so that when there are power line issues or fuel transfer issues, you're not totally reliant on these major sources of power or fuel to power entire parts of our country.
--:-- It's critically important that we increase the resiliency of our grid by adding redundancies in lots of power generation. If we are able to do that by creating these more modular reactors, even if they're not mobile, one of the issues with nuclear historically is that it costs a lot of money to build, not just time, but a lot of money. One of the reasons it costs a lot of money is we don't actually make that much of it. If we made more of it and we developed that muscle, the idea would be we can make more reactors more cheaply. By doing that, we can place them in strategic places across the country, make sure they're close to our key Air Force bases and military bases, in places where we need really reliable and enduring energy. That's why it's so important for national defense and for security, and why our allies care about it as well. No country wants to be totally at the mercy of other countries for energy.
--:-- Host (Steph Smith): Did I say anything wrong there?
--:-- David Yulovich: Perfect. I think I got that right.
--:-- Dr. Kathryn Huff: I heard "deploy more." Deploy more energy. More power.
--:-- David Yulovich: We didn't even talk about data centers, but we're going through an AI revolution right now. It's going to bring lots of cool apps to our phones and our devices and our new vision goggles or whatever, and all kinds of new devices we don't even have yet. Our cars are becoming electric, and we've got to charge those things up. All those things need power. We just need way more resiliency and way more capacity on the grid. That's going to come from lots of ways, but nuclear is a really, really good way.
--:-- Host (Steph Smith): As we get these new reactor designs coming into this ecosystem, is there a new play? Is there a reason why now private dollars are interested?
--:-- David Yulovich: The national lab system is really a unique and special thing about America. Other countries try to replicate it, but there's nothing quite as robust. The national lab system has many roles, and Dr. Huff can speak to this better than I can since she helps oversee it. Not only do they provide research, but they're actually part of the supply chain of fuel for nuclear power plants. They provide grants and funding for private industry to work on nuclear reactor designs. There's a competition element that the National Lab System and the DOE fosters. That has been all wonderful.
--:-- But I think that we have noticed that there's an opportunity to be an accelerant to what's happening in the National Lab System, which is closely tied to academia. We said, "Hey, look, maybe there's a commercial opportunity. Maybe it's possible when we think about all these data centers that people want to build, and we think about the fact that a lot of utilities are private, even if they're regulated, they're private companies. Maybe there's an opportunity to really jumpstart a different kind of power industry." That's a bet that we're willing to make.
--:-- We think there's tailwinds from a regulatory standpoint. We think there's tailwinds from an economic standpoint of building reactors. There's a talent tailwind. Doug worked at SpaceX. When SpaceX first started, there was only one company that really reliably put things into space, and it was NASA. Now we have SpaceX doing it so often that it's almost a non-event when they launch satellites and rockets into space. We think the same thing could be true with nuclear.
--:-- It doesn't seem like the kind of market where only one company can win. As Doug mentioned, there's all kinds of different approaches to nuclear for different use cases. That's pretty exciting. Since our investment in Radiant, what I've discovered is that there's a huge amount of what I call downstream capital. Other investors who have larger pools of capital that are maybe not as risk tolerant as we are at Andreessen Horowitz, but who want to do project financing or who want to fund large scale capital projects, they're very interested. Companies like Microsoft have spun up nuclear energy teams to figure out how to procure energy that comes from a nuclear power plant.
--:-- That to me just says it's unclear exactly what the roadmap is going to look like. I think my two colleagues here will know better than I do. But there's just a lot of momentum and enthusiasm for something that we know is possible. There's no scientific risk. That's another important thing. We invest in all kinds of things. There's minimal scientific risk with nuclear energy. We know how it works. The science is understood. We can come up with better designs and better programs, and we need new kinds of fuels, but we know how it works. It's not science fiction. It's very real. It's science reality.
--:-- That's why I'm excited about it, and that's why I think there's a lot more capital and interest in it now. People recognize it's a predicate for everything else we want to do.
--:-- Host (Steph Smith): Something you mentioned several times there is the economics. You even talked about space and that whole industry being rethought due to the economics fundamentally shifting. Can we talk about that and the role of regulation in impacting some of these projects? I think a lot of people cite Vogtle as a project where the economics were far out of proportion, at least relative to the original project plan. A lot of people think that's an example of where people aren't willing to invest in nuclear. Dr. Huff, can you speak to how regulation plays a role in enabling some of these projects and whether any of that is changing, or whether Vogtle is an outlier? How do you think about that?
--:-- Dr. Kathryn Huff: Vogtle, in a very real sense, is a first-of-a-kind build. As was already mentioned, those AP1000s can be built faster in different environments. But those different environments aren't different just because of regulation. They are also different because of the workforce capacity available. If you look at a Chinese build of an AP1000 compared to Vogtle, they had real differences in workforce availability. I think that's one of the longer poles in the tent.
--:-- Not to divert from your question about regulation, but I do think the Nuclear Regulatory Commission does an incredibly good job keeping nuclear reactors operating safely. They have an incredible safety record here in the United States. The NRC makes sure that's true. It makes it easy for me to say nuclear power is safe. It's going to continue to be safe here in the U.S. U.S. nuclear technology is some of the safest in the world. People should import it rather than some different technology. We know how to do it well.
--:-- It can increase timelines. It can increase costs. But I think even more critical is going to be workforce and supply chain issues that can delay the deployment of megaprojects. Regardless of whether you're building a nuclear reactor or a bridge or a highway system or a rail line, these megaprojects in the billions of dollars take years. They sometimes take significantly more time than they should. Each day in a project like that is another day on which you are holding billions of dollars of capital and not making profit. The cost of capital then starts to play into the total cost of the project.
--:-- The timeline on which you can deploy a reactor depends on regulation, yes, but also workforce availability and supply chain issues and simple project management. Adding up all of these things, the U.S. has lost this muscle of being able to do this efficiently in big mega projects, whether it's an airport or a nuclear reactor.
--:-- By executing Vogtle, we have succeeded at getting there with some reactors. Vogtle Unit 4 will turn on in a few months. Vogtle Unit 3 has turned on and is providing clean power to the people in Georgia. In the course of doing so, it has ensured the availability of some supply chains around nuclear. It has trained thousands of workers that are otherwise excellent skilled crafts workers and are now nuclear trained skilled crafts workers: electricians, boilermakers, welders, and everyone else from all of the building trades. They had peaks of staff on site around 8,000 people. That's a huge number of people on site building a reactor. Union crafts workers from 48 states.
--:-- That is the thing that I would point to as something I would worry about in the longer term around the profitability of reactors. We've now shown that the AP1000 can be built. If you were to replicate that particular reactor, you should see some learnings because now you've got a bunch of workers you can draw on and some supply chains you can draw on. But so, too, can all the other reactor companies that are planning to build new technologies. They'll share some of the supply chain. They'll share some of the workers. If we don't do it tomorrow, a lot of those workers will go and build wind turbines. They have other things to do. This is a really tight environment to have enough skill set for the kinds of builds we need to do across the energy space, not just nuclear.
--:-- Host (Steph Smith): So is that what you would point to, that workforce? If we could accelerate this, all of it comes into play here, but it's not so much the regulation as ensuring that we have that workforce. Is there anything we can do to improve that outlook?
--:-- Dr. Kathryn Huff: I think a focus on trade schools instead of merely universities. I say this as a former and future university professor. It is absolutely important that trade schools and community colleges and union training programs all be stood up at the capacity we need for nuclear builds, wind turbine buildouts, solar panel buildouts, the kinds of transmission buildouts we're going to need. Regulation certainly can get faster, but I would focus on lowering the barriers and accelerating the process rather than lowering the standards.
--:-- Host (Steph Smith): Doug, obviously you're building in this space. How do you think about those relationships, whether it's with regulators or with the large workforces that are needed in some of these cases? How do you think of those relationships becoming productive?
--:-- Doug Bernauer: I want to connect a little further to what Dr. Huff was talking about. A really big plant that was built like that is amazing. It's awesome. All that workforce that we trained, I think that can apply across this entire spectrum of the different reactor sizes. Any successful project should be cross-pollinating that other project. Not just from a regulatory sense, but from just gaining that experience, that learning by doing, and getting the cost to be lower.
--:-- I'm excited to be part of that, way down at the tiny end of the spectrum where our reactors are 1,000 times smaller. But the regulatory environment does need to change. I think we are already working on it. There are a bunch of NRC modernization efforts coming by direction through Congress. We've been working on developing things like 10 CFR 53. That will be an ongoing and continuing effort. But I think for it to really succeed, we need reactors to get built, to get fueled, to demonstrate. The DOE, to a large degree, is already fully supporting that.
--:-- Host (Steph Smith): Just for the audience, can you break down what some of those changes are?
--:-- Host (Steph Smith): Well, I think some of the changes are really just broad spectrum. We don't have reactors that are this small that can be built in a factory. I'm just going to talk about portable micro-reactors only. For us to succeed at doing that, our timeline has not changed since we started the company in 2020. We want to do a fuel demonstration in 2026. We're going to go through DOE authorization licensing, this path that exists at the national labs to go faster than normal, to do a test reactor at a test facility where you've got all the national labs support, the expertise, the post-irradiation experiment labs. We're going to do that with our first unit. Our second unit, though, needs to go through NRC licensing. And so we've got to staff up in our little 45-person company these parallel paths to support going along both sets of regulations. And I think the two could be actually woven together in a really practical manner. I know that people have thought about this for a while, but we just haven't achieved it. So that's one of the things we could do.
--:-- But we've never sited a factory to mass-produce reactors. What's funny about that is the regulations actually exist. If you go look at the original code, 10 CFR 50 has a thing called a manufacturing license. It's in there and unused. How many manufacturing licenses are there currently? Zero. It's never been used. In the U.S., for a reactor factory, there exists no such thing.
--:-- David Yulovich: Sounds like a good idea, though.
--:-- Doug Bernauer: Yeah, yeah. This is the only way a microreactor is going to get to the economics, as if it's built more like airplanes than airplanes.
--:-- David Yulovich: Like an assembly line.
--:-- Doug Bernauer: Absolutely. So we've been looking at that code, learning about it, figuring out what our questions are, talking with the NRC. Actually, our Kaleidos microreactor is now officially in pre-application, only very recently. We're on the NRC's website. They're planning for us in their budget, so we can get that sorted out on time. So we'll be citing a reactor very quickly. We want to deploy a unit in 2028, but I think that's enough to unpack around regulations. We're going to build our unit with as much support as we can gather. We're not going to change our timeline. And we started to feel real support from the DOE. I want to say thanks for the support we have. We're working with Idaho National Laboratory. Radiant is committed to being ready in 2026 to go into the dome. There's an old experimental breeder reactor dome that was converted to now do these microreactor demonstration experiments. A lot of work and effort and funds have gone to build that structure. And we're still on target and ready to go use it as soon as it's available.
--:-- David Yulovich: It's so exciting, actually. This feed study that Radiant is doing. They're in the first set of three companies that are going to tell us exactly what they would do inside this former containment structure that housed one of the coolest reactors we've ever built out there in Idaho. That reactor's over, and now there's room for new reactors to try things out in a safe sandbox.
--:-- Host (Steph Smith): Yeah, and I know we're early stages, but this picture of an assembly line of reactors is one that a few years ago might have sounded outlandish, but now there are builders creating this. Where will we be, let's say, in a decade if this does come online? Can you just paint a picture, Doug, of where these reactors could be deployed and how broadly they might be deployed and the use cases for them?
--:-- Doug Bernauer: Yeah. So we'll start the 10 years in 2026. Ideally, we fuel and demonstrate at full power in the dome. Then by 2028, we have one commercial unit just a few years later. To do that we're really running two regulatory efforts in parallel, and then three units in 2029, eight units in 2030, scaling on up until we're at 2036, we should be making 50 units a year. A reactor a week coming off a line. The reactor we're developing is a heavy unit, but it can fit in a C-17 aircraft or on a truck, and you can move it around, get it wherever it needs to go in the world.
--:-- The optimal use case is really replacing some diesel generators. A reactor lasts for approximately five years out in the field, and then is shut down and we bring it back to that factory to refuel it. So it is not only a new reactor construction factory, but a line producing a bunch of new cores and a refueling facility, all co-located on the same 25-acre or so plot of land. What we would do is have a population of about a thousand of these out in the world because we're planning for a 20-year licensing timeframe. So you've got the 50 a year and about 20 years they last. There's kind of a thousand of them that we can go and put in the thousand most important places that there are.
--:-- These are like the North Slope in Alaska, these really remote communities that the ocean freezes up for them and they have to store huge amounts of diesel and they can't get new over the winter. You have to plan ahead and have enough. And even when they can get new, the price variability is incredibly unjust.
--:-- Host (Steph Smith): Give us a sense of that. How much can price vary?
--:-- Doug Bernauer: They can fluctuate by an order of magnitude and you can't plan ahead for your family's budget. If you have to be planning ahead for diesel power that changes on a day-to-day timeframe on the market, especially in a geopolitical situation, letting a town lease a reactor for 20 years is very doable.
--:-- Host (Steph Smith): Yeah. And it just dawned on me, as all of you were saying, you might imagine that people in the public might think, "Oh, I don't want a reactor in my backyard." But at the same time, in this scenario, you could imagine that this Alaskan town would beg for that, right? We don't want this variance. Please give us this reactor now.
--:-- Doug Bernauer: I think a lot of people would want a reactor near them. Maybe not in their literal backyard, but I think that's mostly because they'd rather have a pool, not for any safety-related reason. I think they want one near them. If you're in a natural disaster area and you're hoping that FEMA is going to come in, they might provide you some tents and shelters, but it's very hard to provide power in a real serious natural disaster, whether it's wildfires or hurricanes. The two things you need immediately after a disaster are clean water and power. You can't do clean water from a generator. It takes way too much fuel. But you can do clean water from a reactor. You can hook up a reactor to something that will clean water very easily and provide people with the water they need to survive and with energy. The fact that you can bring that in on an 18-wheeler is just supremely powerful. There's nothing like that today that exists in the world. The number of lives that it could change is tremendous.
--:-- So separate from all the defense-related, national security-related things, that's just one more example of many of where having the ability to quickly truck in or fly in reliable and enduring power is. You ask 10 years, where are we going to be? 10 or 15 years from now, the idea that we can't just immediately turn on a reliable and enduring power source for a community is going to be unimaginable. It will be a solved problem.
--:-- David Yulovich: Not only is it a mass-produced reactor you can truck in, but you can truck out. So this use in FEMA for temporary use is perfectly what the Kaleidos microreactor is designed to do. Reactors don't carry themselves away, and everything that was radioactive can be fully removed just on a normal truck. You leave a green field the day you leave. That's never been seen before in nuclear.
--:-- Doug Bernauer: Yeah, you can take it and move it somewhere else.
--:-- David Yulovich: Yeah. It's a brilliant application. People see these United Rentals trucks around, like when you go to a concert, there's the big United Rentals thing that's got this big generator and it makes all noise. Look, we can just have United Rental Reactors. Why not? That's actually what we ran when we did the Hyperloop project at SpaceX. I was in charge of all the electrical work for it. We rented a big diesel genset, and that ran this futuristic tube that we pumped down to vacuum and ran vehicles at 350 miles an hour in. But it could be every reactor.
--:-- Doug Bernauer: Talk about this Alaskan town. There's one more thing that really motivates me about what we're doing. In a lot of places, they use diesel generators only for prime power. The health implications of that are dramatic. A diesel genset operating will produce CO2, but more critically, it's producing carcinogens, fumes that people are breathing in that area. They're breathing carcinogens. If you look at what happens in a town over a 20-year span, if you pick a diesel genset instead of a reactor, there's something like 12 deaths that are going to occur prematurely from the use of diesel. Normal, natural measure just at a rate ending people's lives prematurely. So that's one of the things that really motivates me.
--:-- On the regulatory side, I think we've got to think about that case. We've got to make it possible at some point in the future for the decision makers in that town, this theoretical little town, to be able to pick the nuclear reactor, the clean technology that's going to save lives, and to have an equal bar for regulations so that they can pick it. One of the barriers right now will be the regulations for nuclear are very challenging to site these little reactors because they don't exist and we haven't planned for it yet. But that's what I think we need to start working on now so that 10 years from now that future is achievable.
--:-- Host (Steph Smith): When we think about these communities, just so we can attack this question head on, Dr. Huff, can you just speak to waste? That's something that comes up a lot from these reactors, old reactors. Do we have a way currently today to safely store nuclear waste?
--:-- Dr. Kathryn Huff: Yes. This is a technically solved problem. Right now, all the spent fuel is stored safely where it is. It's a solid. It's not a glowing green goo. It's ceramic. It's more like a teacup. Defense waste is a distinct thing, but the commercial nuclear fuel in this country has never caused any radiation harm to humans. It is stored safely in either pools or in dry cask storage. It is, however, at 70 locations across the country in places where the Department of Energy promised to take it off of their hands. They didn't intend to store it there for the long term. While it is safe for the long term as it currently stands, it is the Department of Energy's responsibility to take it and consolidate it into one or more consolidated interim storage sites to reduce the number of communities that live near those facilities that they didn't agree to in the long term.
--:-- We're working through a consent-based process to identify locations that would be amenable to this. It's a really exciting process that worked really successfully in Finland to site a whole final repository and is working in Canada. They're down to two sites for their final repository, which is much more complicated than an interim storage facility. So it's our responsibility to do. We're doing it. There's no technical question about whether it is possible to safely store spent nuclear fuel. We do it every day. We've continued to do it. We transport spent nuclear fuel safely across the United States successfully. No problem.
--:-- I will say, just to expand a little bit to going back to this sort of what does the future look like 10, 20, 30 years from now. In addition to micro-reactors saving the world at the sort of edge of accessibility to power, at the edge of viability of other options, right where diesel generators might sit, at the edge of that small size scale, we also see real opportunities to directly replace one-for-one coal facilities. Unabated fossil facilities across the country represent a real opportunity for those 100, 200, 300 megawatt units, even bigger. And they should be a real boon to the communities in them. Interestingly, the radiation exposure from living next to a coal plant is higher than the radiation exposure from living next to a nuclear power plant. We can reduce the radiation. There's no emissions from nuclear power, and the emissions from unabated fossils actually can really include a lot of heavy metals and whatnot.
--:-- We're in this place where I think it's really important that communities, especially communities around retiring and retired coal sites, can have better health outcomes. Just like what Doug was saying about microreactors and diesel, the same can be said about small modular reactors and larger scale fossil plants. That motivates me too. When we think about the 200,000 to 300,000 premature deaths every year caused by pollution, unnecessary pollution, most of which is from power generation, we can save those people.
--:-- David Yulovich: Yeah. So it needs to be addressed at every scale. It turns out that burning trace radioactive materials and releasing them and these other energy forms is much less safe than nuclear waste, which is kept in containers and shipped and moved safely and has caused no accidents.
--:-- Host (Steph Smith): Absolutely. Well, maybe to come full circle, Dr. Huff, in your recent testimony, you mentioned that recently at COP28, the U.S. and 24 other countries signed an agreement to triple nuclear power by 2050. That's very exciting, but it also sounds quite lofty. What do you really think needs to be in place? We touched on some of these things, whether it's regulation, the workforce, public opinion. A lot of these are shifting in terms of tides as well. So what's your take on how we actually achieve that goal and reverse this multi-year trend?
--:-- Dr. Kathryn Huff: Let me be clear. These 24 countries signed together to say we recognize that we need to get to tripling nuclear power. We didn't say we knew it would be possible. The agreement here is that we recognize that there's a gap that has to be filled by clean, firm power. That gap is gigantic. A huge fraction of that gigantic gap must be filled by nuclear power or else we're never going to get to net zero. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IAEA, etc., have all done a bunch of studies. Our individual countries have done studies about what it's going to take to get to net zero. It's going to take tripling nuclear power.
--:-- How do we get there? We are going to have to build new nuclear power at a rate unparalleled. Not so crazy dissimilar from the rates of gigawatts we added in the 70s and 80s, actually. It's been done before. It's been almost done before. If we don't start tomorrow building reactors, then the rate goes up. If we don't build any new reactors next year, then we're going to have to build slightly more every year between now and 2050. The slower we are at startup, the harder it's going to be to build out a supply chain appropriate for building the number of reactors we have to build. If you wait until the last minute to do all your homework, you have to write a whole essay in one hour. But if you spend the week ahead of time, then you only have to write a few words a day. That's the situation we're in. We have a little time, but we have to start tomorrow. We cannot wait until the last minute.
--:-- David Yulovich: I think there's a couple of points you brought up that I think about a lot. One, you mentioned the supply chain for nuclear energy. We need to be the source of fuel right now. America is a source of nuclear fuel, but there are other countries that make a lot of nuclear fuel. When I think about our American dynamism practices, investing in companies that support the national interest, one of the things that I think is in the national interest is to be the premier source for nuclear fuel for not just the U.S., but also our allies. That's something we can do and we certainly could do. Much like storing spent nuclear fuel or recycling nuclear fuel, some people have atmospherics around it, like PR atmospherics, and people are like, "Oh, I don't know if I want that." They ignore all these other things they have in their backyard. They're like, "Oh, but that sounds bad because I saw a commercial once where I saw The Simpsons." Exactly. They don't want the fish with three eyes, which is not a real thing.
--:-- I think we have an opportunity to really invest in the supply chain for nuclear resources and nuclear fuel. I think it'd be really cool to see something kind of like the CHIPS Act for nuclear. First of all, I think it would be a very bipartisan thing in this country. I also think it's something where we could really encourage investment abroad. There are a lot of countries that would love to have more nuclear energy, as Dr. Huff said. I think we have an obligation to be a leader there. There are things called 123 agreements that I believe the State Department oversees today that sort of regulate the amount of nuclear information and nuclear business that we can transact with certain countries. It's still an onerous agreement. There are different standards to that agreement. There could be a real national priority put on elevating those standards or making them more accessible or disseminating them more widely. Especially if we're the source of nuclear fuel for these countries, it still gives us the levers of control that we want to enable countries to have more nuclear power, but in a way that we think is safe and reliable and represents the interests of our country. So that's something I would love to see more of.
--:-- I do think there's some regulatory improvement that is gaining momentum here, and we want to see more of. I also think there can be a much larger international focus on America. America exports all kinds of technology. We export defense products. We export all kinds of things. There's no reason why we shouldn't be exporting more nuclear reactors. We do, like AP1000, but we could be doing much more. That to me is an exciting opportunity when you think about the commercial aspects. It's not just the US that has this insatiable need for energy, but it is a global opportunity.
--:-- Dr. Kathryn Huff: Absolutely. And if we don't do it, other countries will. That's the flip side of it. Right now, for instance, there's a country that very much would like nuclear reactors for energy, and the US is not allowed to sell into that country. Currently, the only other country bidding on a reactor is China. I just think it'd be better if we could bid in that country also.
--:-- Host (Steph Smith): Absolutely. Doug, anything you'd add there in terms of a wish list? You're building in this space, and there are so many different factors that come together. What do you hope to see, whether it's the supply chain, the workforce, the regulation?
--:-- Doug Bernauer: I'm thinking much more short term about my wish list because I have a very tight schedule. Operating the dome is just two years away, 23 months. I need to make sure I get access to fuel. Something David mentioned is really challenging and Outdrop has been helping. We talk about this regularly and I appreciate it. It's hard. It's still a challenge for us. I think a real microreactor demonstration program from the federal side would probably be the single biggest thing we could do to accelerate our efforts to commercialization. I think that would help cross-pollinate every other project that we have going on.
--:-- Host (Steph Smith): Dr. Huff, I'm going to close with you. Anything else you'd like to share with the folks in the room? But also, we have so many people listening who may have varying degrees of education on nuclear, the state of it in our country. What would you like to leave people with about the years ahead?
--:-- Dr. Kathryn Huff: I think there's an incredible amount of money to be made. There are lives to be saved. There is democracy to preserve, sovereignty to deploy abroad. We have, unquestionably, some of the best technology in the world. It's American design. It's an American invention. We are the first nation to ever sustain a fission chain reaction on purpose. We have the largest nuclear fleet in the world. We are poised to lead this as we transition into a cleaner energy system. But we have to see private industry step up and say, "I will be the first to sign a contract to build the next Radiant or whatever." I want to see as many contracts on the books as possible in the next couple of years, or else we are going to have a much bigger supply chain challenge in the next 20 years than we have today. Every few months that are delayed between now and the order books that we need to show that deployment, the harder it's going to be to build out as much as we need to get to net zero. We have to get to net zero. Full stop. Not only have we promised the world, we're leading the world. I intend to still be around in 2050, and I'd like to be able to breathe.
--:-- David Yulovich: Hear, hear.
--:-- Doug Bernauer: Hear, hear.
--:-- Host (Steph Smith): That's a great place to end off. Thank you so much. And we thank Dr. Huff for her efforts in DOE and really pushing forward a renewed and re-energized attitude towards nuclear policy. It's innovators like Radiant and others that are really leading the way and give us some good work to work with.
--:-- David Yulovich: Well, I think that's why we brought all three of you in, right? We have all sides of the equation. We have the funders, the builders, and the policymakers all in the room because that's all required for the future.
--:-- Host (Steph Smith): Now, if you have made it this far, don't forget that you can get an inside look into a16z's American Dynamism Summit at a16z.com slash AD Summit. There, you can catch several of the exclusive stage talks featuring policymakers like Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks or Governor Wes Moore of Maryland. Plus, founders from companies like Anduril and Coinbase and funders like Mark Cuban, all building toward American dynamism. Again, you can find all of the above at a16z.com slash AD Summit. We'll include a link in the show notes.
