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[music] >> Before we welcome Doug, we've got our partner at Giant, Will Dufton.
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He led the investment in Radiant.
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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.
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Will, over to you for a quick explainer.
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Why should people care about nuclear energy right now?
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Look, I think the primary reason is AI, like everything else in the news right now.
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But the rapid build-out of data centers by companies like OpenAI and Meta in pursuit of artificial intelligence is basically bottlenecked by energy.
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Um and and there's a very specific type of energy that is required. It's 24/7, 365 power. It's base load power.
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And the amount of energy is just almost unfathomable.
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So, the forecasts are saying that by 2030, we'll need about 950 terawatt hours of power for data centers globally.
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This is the same amount of power that Japan consumes annually. It's just enormous.
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So, you know, where is this power going to come from?
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What the US is doing today is mostly leveraging its kind of natural gas resources.
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But the supply chain for natural gas turbines is it is pretty pretty broken.
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And building this power and connectivity is is also really slow and and very expensive.
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So, actually, even though nuclear kind of has this reputation of being, you know, a very slow power source to build, a very expensive power source, it's actually like a very attractive solution for data centers.
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It's it's clean, carbon-free, base load power that can be built behind the meter to serve these monstrous data centers.
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So, yeah, really, nuclear is is is an AI trend.
1:44
Just to be really clear, we're talking about nuclear fission, not nuclear fusion.
1:47
So, nuclear fission is splitting atoms.
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We've been doing this for 80-90 years at scale.
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Nuclear fusion hasn't happened yet.
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Nuclear fusion, when it does happen, will basically break all other energy sources, but it's still probably a couple of decades out.
2:02
There's a lot of pressure on expanding energy resources for AI, but why nuclear?
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Yeah, look, it's not obvious why nuclear.
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Nuclear, as I said, has this reputation for being a very expensive and very slow to build power source.
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And obviously, the kind of overarching reputation of nuclear is nuclear bombs.
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It is Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, these horrific disasters.
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And so, there is this reputation that nuclear is an unsafe technology.
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You know, aside from AI being an incredibly power-hungry catalyst, a consumer of energy, kind of this demanding that humanity looks for more energy sources, there are other reasons why nuclear kind of looks more attractive now than ever before.
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Like the first is um it has been burdened with extreme regulatory, safety, and bureaucratic loads. It's understandable.
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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.
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We've been scared to build nuclear.
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And so, um as as a result of that, the supply chain, the talent has atrophied for the industry.
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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.
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Um it's it's it's pretty staggering.
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Uh nuclear was a cheap energy source in the '60s and '70s.
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And that was true in the US, in France, in Sweden.
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Um but in 2010 and beyond, it it's become one of the most expensive and troublesome power sources to build globally.
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Uh public sentiment for nuclear now is at like decade-long highs.
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And people realize that it's it's safe.
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There are a lot of active nuclear power plants in the West.
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And so, countries are kind of throwing their weight a slightly more behind nuclear.
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Kind of 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.
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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 ex- exercising a kind of life extension program uh to get more out of them.
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Um But you know, really like what is happening right now in nuclear, uh the the most aggressive uh regime change is in the US.
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Uh the Trump administration has been uh extremely bullish on nuclear power.
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And I think that was kind of captured most most clearly in some executive orders that were issued in spring this year, which basically put paid to the bureaucratic burden on on reactors.
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It said they were going to resupply the nuclear supply chain in the US, including fuel supplies.
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And they've been inking deals that are remarkable.
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I mean, just last week, uh the US government signed an $80 billion deal with Westinghouse to build uh more reactors in the USA.
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So, this is uh this is ultimately what has triggered some people to call for a nuclear renaissance.
5:00
And I'm very glad that nuclear is getting all of this positive attention.
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You statistically it is one of the safest power sources in the world.
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It's safer even than wind power. It's clean. It is base load energy.
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And it should be highly deployable.
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But we still have a long way to go, but we're moving in the right direction.
5:17
And what's got you excited about Radiant and Doug particularly as a founder?
5:22
Yeah, well, this is kind of a funny story.
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We were looking at nuclear power, and I was pretty convinced, candidly, that we we weren't going to invest in a reactor startup.
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You know, the shibboleths that I've talked about in nuclear loom very large.
5:33
Capital intensity, regulatory uncertainty, slow learning rates, a broken fuel supply chain, inferior levelized costs.
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Uh you know, it it it it it it it just felt too difficult.
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But then, I met Doug and and and his team at Radiant, and and everything changed.
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He completely changed my mind.
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You know, I'll let Doug himself tell you a bit more about what they're building.
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But there were two reasons basically that got me really excited and and and made me change my mind on on investing in reactors.
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The first is that rather than building a big piece of energy infrastructure, Doug and Radiant are building an energy product.
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And there's a subtle but important difference, which I'll just tell you a little bit about in my mind.
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Radiant has basically made design choices that are very attractive to a very specific customer base.
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These customers want rapidly deployable power.
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And in most cases, their only alternative is a diesel generator.
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So, diesel generators still expensive, still cumbersome, dirty, and you have to refuel them, you know, every so often.
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Um 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.
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So, Radiant's Kiloidos, a 1 megawatt portable meltdown-proof reactor that needs refueling once every three to five years, is an amazing product.
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And it can be offered at a competitive price to this niche market.
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Um So, in essence, they were kind of in in a way that no one else that I had seen in nuclear was doing, they were thinking about product market fit.
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And then, the second reason is [music] Doug himself and the team that he's built.
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You know, 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.
7:16
>> [music] >> Welcome, Doug.
7:18
We're here today to talk about your giant idea of building nuclear microreactors to give Earth clean power and eventually create a multiplanetary species.
7:27
I'm not sure there is a more giant idea than that.
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So, give us a bit of color on how you came to work on this giant idea, your background, your story, and what this giant idea is to you.
7:41
Yeah, thanks for having me on.
7:41
Uh so, yeah, how did I come to be working on a nuclear reactors that you can mass-produce in a little box?
7:49
Uh So, uh I was a SpaceX employee for about 12 years, uh electrical engineer.
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I joined when they had two rockets that had failed, and they had no successful ones.
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And I thought it was just a great opportunity, great company, something very cool to work on, just to completely remake rocketry essentially.
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Uh it wasn't working yet, but uh I didn't need didn't need that part.
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Uh so, I came there to make that happen.
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Uh I got to work on the first rocket with legs.
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Uh just four of us before I was reporting directly to Elon.
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And uh I went to work on first grid fins after that, and then Hyperloop and Boring Company and uh a Mars colony.
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Uh and in playing around with this Mars colony design, we were try- we were trying to really do is make a fueling station more than a colony initially.
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Uh because it's very expensive to take a Starship and land it on Mars.
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If you do that, what you want to do is refill it and bring it back.
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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.
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So, you really want to make it there.
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To do that, you need power.
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Uh we I was looking at solar power to do that.
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We had a solar power team.
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We knew what it would take to do it, but it looked like uh you know, maybe four or five miracles in sequence.
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You need multiple rockets, about four football fields worth of solar.
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You need little robots to go deploy those things and connect them.
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The ground is all dusty and rocky and mixed conditions.
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Uh so, it's very hard to go, "Yeah, this is an easy mission that's going to work."
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And so, I presented this information.
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Um Elon went, "That's too many miracles. Probably do nuclear."
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And I went, "Let me go look at that."
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Um and it turns out that when you look at nuclear, it's, you know, five miracles become one.
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And you go like, "Oh, wow, that actually works.
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That actually is Well, it's maybe that not only does it work, it's the only way you'll actually make life multiplanetary."
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Um And so, I took that with me, started to learn.
9:33
I knew not I knew almost nothing about nuclear, right?
9:35
I was an electrical engineer.
9:38
Uh yeah, knew almost nothing about it.
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I just I mean, knew it existed, but not nothing about the tech or could you package that.
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I knew, you know, reactors are very large.
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Um but as as I learned about it, I I found that, you know, there were space reactors.
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The US had launched one in the '60s. It's called SNAP-10A.
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Uh Russia had launched actually a huge quantity of them in the past uh into space.
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Um and so 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.
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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.
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There was nobody making anything.
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That all the exciting stuff happened before I was born.
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Uh but then about 3 years after this event where I'm where 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.
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Um you know, three three years later in the US this program came out called Pele program.
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Uh and it was the US military going, we need an under 100-ton C-17 transportable uh reactor.
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And so uh I just got I got really excited cuz they wanted something around a megawatt and I knew what that could do on on Mars.
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It was about the right size to to refill a rocket every 2 years, which is the that that's the interval you have between uh Earth and Mars.
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And uh so anyway, I start I tried to convince uh Elon and others there to to let me just like create nuclear at SpaceX.
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How was that conversation?
11:05
Uh more like a series of conversations.
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Like going going to people close going to people close to to Elon and going, how come we do this?
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And then we go, yeah, it'll never.
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It was not something we're going to touch. And it makes sense.
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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?
11:25
Um but I I talked to enough people that I met some folks who convinced me it was it was actually much easier than I imagined.
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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.
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I basically, you know, went and talked to people who were smart and started modeling reactors almost right away.
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Did that for about a year.
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Um put together a pitch deck and re you know, pivoted the idea to go, well, my really my customer is the military.
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Like I have this eventuality of of you know, I love I like space.
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I think it's very cool for humans to just dream beyond the planet we were we were born on.
11:58
You know, we're not stuck here.
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Um but the product uh idea really was, well, I want to make a tiny reactor.
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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.
12:14
Okay, we're going to get into that.
12:15
You make it sound so logical to just leave SpaceX and start a micro nuclear reactor company as [laughter] if it's uh going for a walk.
12:21
But was it was it a hard decision to to leave SpaceX and I mean, it's such an exciting company. It it uh it wasn't.
12:26
Uh it wasn't a hard decision at all.
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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.
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So not only would it help that mission more, but it would help the mission of humanity more.
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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.
12:55
Uh >> [snorts] >> and I thought, you know, maybe maybe it's on the order of a couple million.
12:57
If I can do you know, if I can raise more than that, I can make more of an impact.
13:00
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 get a sense of what that would be like. Uh I did.
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I did cuz I kind of I go all in on on every idea.
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So when I did uh when I say colony design, I really I did go above and beyond and I I figured out not only power, um but I figured out the number of missions you would have that you could take a a rocket, put on its side, cover it with regolith.
13:29
Uh you know, there's radiation on Mars, but if you were to go outside on Mars 1 hour every day and then go back inside of these pressurized structures like going in your house, right?
13:38
Uh the rest of the time that's the same radiation amount you'd have on Earth.
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And so it's not actually a challenge, not a problem.
13:45
So I went, okay, here's the radiation solution. I got that one.
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I went like, okay, now how do you actually make food?
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Like if you want to go from that just fuel producing base to then a real colony.
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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.
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Uh and you can get it from uh they have um USDA has this agricultural research the Dale Bumpers Agricultural Research uh Center.
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Uh and so I ordered this like controlled genome uh of wheat.
14:20
And I was playing around with spreadsheets, right?
14:22
I was going, well, if you have this much area, you have this much LED power on Mars from your reactor, you can grow this much food for this many people.
14:29
Uh and I was trying to go like, okay, here's a pressurized structure, you can hold that in.
14:32
Here's the mass of that, right?
14:33
It's just these these big uh Excel spreadsheet documents.
14:35
Um but I was at one point I went like, wait a minute.
14:38
I don't know how to farm.
14:38
I don't know I don't know I don't know what I'm talking about.
14:41
And so I went, I'm going to go become real and just in my little tiny like California front yard, like 15 by by 15 ft, I just dug up all the grass and I didn't ask my wife for permission and I planted all these seeds and I grew a wheat field just to to do a cycle of that. Just yeah.
15:01
Uh yeah, so I I don't know.
15:01
I I like I liked it and I like to try try to be real.
15:04
Go to do something, right?
15:04
Not be stuck in that spreadsheet. Yes. I'm incredible.
15:09
I mean, in some ways makes it sound like science fiction, but I 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.
15:21
I think the striking thing about Radiant is that it's happening very soon, right?
15:27
You've got this big test coming up next year which we're going to ask you about.
15:30
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.
15:36
What what is the actual idea for the first version of the Radiant uh reactor? Yeah, great question.
15:43
Uh so yeah, we are doing this test, um but that's a 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.
15:52
Um although we do actually have the option of using a a Department of Energy authorization.
15:58
So there these two different licensing pathways.
16:02
With the DOE authorization license, we can put this at a military base in the US.
16:05
We can put it at government on government land essentially um through this other pathway, which really only became available through these executive orders that came out.
16:13
There were uh four of them all targeting nuclear, different aspects of it.
16:15
Um and this is one of the one of the details in there.
16:20
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 does it 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.
16:33
Basically go and try to do the the maximum power and go, you know, switch it between being on and off um and and to do that many many times.
16:41
Uh and so I the ideal partner for us is a domestic military installation.
16:46
Um not only because they're well, of those reasons, right?
16:48
Those technical reasons, but there is uh security uh at that facility.
16:52
So we don't have to worry about someone coming up and doing something that they shouldn't be doing uh to the unit.
16:58
Um but so the early customers we uh we have actually signed an air force a contract with the air force earlier this year.
17:04
Uh there is a uh also a DoD program called Janus that was just announced.
17:08
Uh this is uh I think to the to the tune of a billion or a billion and a half size program.
17:17
Um we don't know how much will go to the developers, but there'll be likely three, maybe two um developers in that they'll downselect on later.
17:25
Uh so those are pretty exciting.
17:25
Those are the uh and our goal is really to, you know, make maybe 15 reactors to to put into those programs.
17:32
So the initial pull from the from the Department of Defense, um but yeah, I think you've had some some great traction with the likes of Equinix.
17:40
We'd love to hear about that. That's right.
17:43
Yeah, we have uh so we have a deal signed with Equinix.
17:44
This is great data center company.
17:47
Actually, they have a data center like right across the street.
17:49
Uh and they're they're in a ton of major cities.
17:53
Um and that's for 20 units.
17:53
We have signed a deal and it's a down payment.
17:57
Um it's I think one of the more real deals in nuclear.
17:59
Sometimes they're they're very handshake.
18:02
Um but we're really excited about working with them.
18:04
And you know, we didn't really understand the interest data centers would have.
18:08
We initially thought, you know, 1-megawatt reactors is fairly small, right?
18:12
That that you know, the 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.
18:20
And uh but they're actually extremely excited about a 1-megawatt size and it's because you know, our reactor can go in in about a 1,500 sq ft area.
18:27
So for one reactor and with more it's even better.
18:32
So it's you know, we can put 4 megawatts on 4,000 sq ft.
18:33
Is the kind of kind of easier thing to remember.
18:38
Um but their interest is in having power immediately.
18:41
Uh and in a lot of cases, you know, there's there's a lot of new technology. There's AI.
18:44
Uh all this new technology needs power.
18:47
It needs power immediately.
18:49
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.
18:59
And that line, depending where you are, it's 2 to 4 years in the US.
19:00
Those that's what's typical for a major power upgrade.
19:06
And you're working with the utility, so there's no competition, right?
19:07
You're just you have to do what they say.
19:11
And people are willing to do that and so you'll find buildings filled with diesel generators, you know, 10 or 20 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.
19:22
Uh and so that's the where the interest and excitement is in uh because our unit you can you put on a truck, you drive it to the customer site, you insert it into a docking bay, which is like a it's just big blocks of concrete that we set up ahead of time.
19:35
But you put that reactor in, it powers on the same day.
19:37
You're making full power the next day and then that power lasts for 5 years with no refueling.
19:44
Uh and if you don't have that, you need uh about 1,200 gallons of diesel per day per reactor.
19:50
At you know, at four reactors, that's a full 5,000 gallon fuel truck every single day at your facility. Okay.
19:54
So, in terms of cost, you guys have the advantage of competing against diesel as opposed to, you know, on-grid uh other power sources that are on-grid.
20:05
So, that's a major advantage.
20:05
Let Let's just maybe break down the the product into a few different areas.
20:09
So, size you've mentioned, it's 1 MW compared to, you know, traditional nuclear plants are about a gigawatt, right?
20:14
Powering millions of homes.
20:16
This is powering, you know, one remote data center or one uh military base, right?
20:22
So, it's it's it's small, it's portable.
20:23
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?
20:31
You You did something very clever on fuel, which uh as you said, allows it to be refueled every 5 years, so fuel costs are under control. And it's also safe.
20:39
We'd love to hear about the safety.
20:41
We'd love to hear about the smart things you've done on fuel to keep the cost down. Yeah. Uh great questions.
20:47
The The fuel is the largest proportion of cost at this really small scale.
20:51
Um and so uh there are some deals that we've signed.
20:55
We're actually working with the with the UK with the Urenco have signed a deal for enough fuel for five units.
20:58
Uh I think that is the first commercial HALEU deal ever signed uh also.
21:05
Uh so, it's pretty exciting.
21:07
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.
21:14
Um but the So, the smartest thing tech- technically going on is really not about the fuel, but about the nuclear core.
21:21
We use a a material called zirconium hydride, and we actually make that here uh in our facility.
21:27
Took us about 3 years to develop that.
21:28
Uh and what it does really um you have to We have enriched fuel, right?
21:34
We use this partially enriched.
21:36
So, it's not a high enriched, it's not a weapons grade material.
21:38
It's It's what you'd use in like a research reactor. So, 20% enrichment.
21:42
Um which is more than what you'd use in a normal reactor, which is about a 5% uh enrichment in one of those big uh gigawatt scale reactors.
21:51
Uh but we actually use this material zirconium hydride.
21:53
If you put that in a reactor, uh you can actually use less fuel then.
21:58
Uh and the reason you can do that is because uh when fission occurs, you've got neutrons moving at about 7% the speed of light.
22:03
They're They're They're They're They're extremely fast.
22:06
And when they're moving that fast, they don't interact.
22:08
They don't cause fission.
22:11
Um and so, you want to slow them down.
22:13
This zirconium hydride slows them down, and it does so over a really short distance inside the reactor.
22:16
So, you you can control the size of the reactor, and you can actually load less fuel and still get relatively high burn up. And why is it so safe? Two Two reasons.
22:26
Well, there's really three. Two main reasons.
22:28
So, uh we use a fuel called TRISO.
22:30
Uh and this this fuel is from the 1960s.
22:32
Um like like pretty much all nuclear tech.
22:36
Uh and you know, there's not really much that humans have not explored uh and gone and built.
22:40
So, it's a fuel that's been around for a while.
22:41
It It is tiny poppy seed sized kernels uh of nuclear fuel that is over-coated with ceramic layers.
22:49
Those ceramic layers prevent the fission gases from getting out.
22:51
Not only that, but those ceramics have a extremely high temperature rating, right?
22:56
They can go to almost 2,000° C.
23:00
So, uh what that means is you can't have a melt down.
23:02
It's a fuel form that just will not melt down.
23:04
So, that traditional typical problem, thing that occurred in the a couple of famous reactor incidents, um so, that that can't happen.
23:14
The other thing is uh helium gas is what we're using as the coolant, and helium uniquely does not become radioactive in the reactor.
23:23
Uh and if it leaks, it's gaseous, it will just dissipate into the atmosphere, and it's not radioactive.
23:27
Uh so, this is a really a really great thing to have, especially because you know, we know that our customers may need power off a grid.
23:34
They may be out in the middle of nowhere, right?
23:35
And so, you you want to have a reactor that is totally safe even if it's, you know, not in a in it's not babied, right?
23:41
If it's not in a a really it could be out in in the outdoors in a rugged environment.
23:47
Um and the third thing is is a passive safety.
23:49
Uh and part of that is just due to the size of the reactor.
23:51
If you make a reactor extremely small, uh it does when you turn the reactor off, it it keeps producing a little bit of heat, and then that slowly decays away.
24:00
Um and you need to cool it during that period normally.
24:01
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.
24:10
With a tiny reactor, you don't need that.
24:12
And it's because you just don't have much fuel.
24:13
Uh 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 that incident.
24:27
So, is this foolproof, Doug, or somewhat theoretical?
24:32
Um is there absolutely no chance of something like Chernobyl happening with the Radiant product?
24:39
In that reactor incident, they they removed 224 control rods to the maximum extension.
24:45
That is a thing which should not have even been possible by design.
24:49
So, there's a there's a bad design element here, and they talk about this in the that really great uh show uh HBO show Chernobyl, uh which I found awesome and fascinating.
24:57
Uh uh and I'm and I'm a pretty harsh critic.
25:00
But in uh the thing they don't tell you, they tell you they removed all the rods to the full extension.
25:04
They don't tell you it's 224 of them.
25:05
I feel like that's a missing detail.
25:07
This is important to hear.
25:08
Um but no, you you you can't really do that with a small reactor.
25:13
And we actually um we run these uh it you know, if you come to our office in LA, you can see uh run a little simulator.
25:21
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.
25:29
Um and in that event, what happens is it warms up.
25:31
As it warms up, that reduces reactivity.
25:34
That's a big part of your innovation and one of the ways you came to this design, correct?
25:37
It's through this this very novel digital twin you've built, which has allowed you to make design decisions at a faster pace than is typical of nuclear.
25:44
Maybe you could tell us a bit about that. Yeah, absolutely.
25:47
Uh yeah, so we um you know, a lot of us came from SpaceX.
25:49
One of One of the things uh you learn is that, you know, software is king.
25:55
And and you really must not only design some hardware, and you can't outsource it, right?
25:59
You must have a team that does the software engineering.
26:01
You must own every line of code.
26:05
Um and yeah, so we developed this digital twin, and it it actually uses existing nuclear codes.
26:10
The The novelty uh and it is actually based upon a thing done in aerospace very commonly, usually called hardware in the loop or or an iron bird in aerospace.
26:21
And uh we were doing this uh on rockets.
26:23
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.
26:28
Uh and so, it's really no different to for us, no different to do that for a reactor.
26:34
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.
26:42
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, um which is kind of unique.
26:54
Uh the one the code we run on our boards is the same as that code we run on our safety analysis.
26:59
And that's really what's unique about the digital twin that we're using is we're [snorts] uh we're not making the safety analysis as this separate package that just needs to be, you know, closely matched where you got to just check line by line and go look at the different models and show that the geometry is correct on both sides.
27:16
But it's truly the same code being checked.
27:18
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.
27:27
Um and it's it's so dependent on public mood, on political support.
27:29
For many years, nuclear was you had a pretty bad rap, and the oil and gas industry I think have done a very good job of doom-mongering and scare-mongering about nuclear.
27:39
I think the reality is many more people have died in the oil and gas industry and in the coal industry than they ever have in the nuclear industry, but because of one-off events like Chernobyl and others, uh people are scared, have been scared.
27:50
Uh we've seen in Germany pretty strange decisions made.
27:54
Having had a real advantage on nuclear, they shut down a lot of their reactors.
27:58
France have kept some of theirs, but haven't kept up the pace of adding new ones.
28:01
And I guess in the US, it's been interesting to see where so much of climate tech has been dismantled, support for it has evaporated because of the new administration on things like hydrogen and wind, but real support for nuclear.
28:15
And I guess you guys have been a beneficiaries of that.
28:16
You've got this test next year in Idaho um with the US government really supporting you and and accelerating the the speed at which you guys can get uh regulated and into market cuz that's been the big blocker, hasn't it, basically, and why we've seen so little innovation in 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.
28:38
And And it's been a a nightmare scenario for the innovators.
28:40
Just talk us through that a little bit and how much support you are getting from the US government.
28:46
>> And maybe just for our listeners, some context.
28:47
There's not been a new nuclear reactor design approved for 50 years.
28:51
Yeah, it's about It's a It's about right.
28:53
I mean, you have to add some qualifiers sometimes, but that's that's the truth of it.
28:56
We're actually we're we're going to Idaho National Laboratory.
29:00
Um it's a pretty huge piece of land.
29:02
It's the size of Rhode Island, which is a small state in the US.
29:03
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.
29:14
That's west of Idaho Falls City.
29:14
Um and um at that site in 1956, I think they started testing reactors uh just after the the first naval reactors were produced.
29:25
Uh and then they tested actually 52 react- different reactors have been designed, fueled, tested at Idaho National Lab.
29:31
The last of those was in 1977.
29:35
So, not only is it like it been that long, but they used to just test these like clockwork regularly. Right?
29:38
It would be uh several per year.
29:41
You'd almost go like, you know, what are we doing this fall? Uh another reactor.
29:47
Uh was kind of wild like a right a different world. Uh yeah.
29:51
Yeah, I mean it was before our time.
29:52
So, it's it's hard to say, but I think um you know that there is this big regulatory barrier.
29:58
Um and I think what you know that there been no there hasn't really been customer demand to drive things to happen.
30:04
And really the way the way that I see everything in nuclear is that um there are customers.
30:10
If those customers are excited about nuclear, uh then developers will take that customer excitement and and hopefully contracts, right?
30:17
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.
30:27
Uh and the the trouble here is that if you do a a really really large reactor, it can take a very long time to make this thing.
30:32
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.
30:40
And if that, you know, typically takes in the past that took typically 5 years.
30:44
It's it's basically 4 to 6 years depending on which country you are and kind of what era.
30:49
Uh the most recent reactor built in the US is something like like 15 years.
30:54
Uh the ones built in Georgia. Um which is pretty slow.
30:58
Um Uh yeah, way slower than it needs to be.
31:03
And then the issue with regulatory is that it just adds years in the schedule.
31:07
Uh and it's really it's actually intertwined with financing in a weird way that we probably don't need to go into, but basically it's in the two chunks, right?
31:14
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 of the commercial reactors uh to go and check this design out and review the design.
31:27
What you'll get is a design approval.
31:28
But to do that, it might take them 2 years, maybe 3 years even for the NRC to do that.
31:33
And you and the most recent one done by NuScale, I think was about 10,000 pages, I think is the public figure they shared.
31:40
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."
31:50
Uh and so at this point, what happens?
31:51
Well, you can get financing, right? Um but that's it.
31:54
You because you don't have you don't actually even have construction approval.
31:58
And that's another piece.
31:58
You got to go then permit that piece.
32:00
And so yeah, the the regulatory issue is that there's years usually.
32:03
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.
32:11
We're through our investors, uh you know, with you your support, we're building reactors.
32:17
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.
32:26
You know, in the past they were trying to they were supportive.
32:28
Uh that's is very different when the government is committed to making things happen more quickly, um right with quickly within reason.
32:34
You know, they're going they're still do we're still doing all of the same process.
32:39
We're going through all the same safety analysis and checks and it's the same technical experts.
32:43
Um but there's really like a drive now to get things done. It's really exciting.
32:48
You've got the the support of the US government behind you.
32:49
You've got us at Giant, you've got some other amazing investors, Founders Fund, Andreessen, DCVC, StepStone.
32:54
So, you're backed by some of the best.
32:58
I'd I'd love to hear maybe just as we close this episode out, what is the vision and the plan for Radiant over the next 2 or 3 years on Earth?
33:05
And maybe we can dream a little and come back to the the plan for Mars.
33:10
So, next year we will we actually have parts in our facility here for the reactor already.
33:14
The pressure vessel uh is actually here.
33:16
Uh it was a arrived a few weeks ago.
33:19
So, we will construct the Kalidos demonstration unit reactor.
33:26
Uh that will go in early part of the year around April.
33:29
That will go outside our national laboratory.
33:31
Our fuel comes from a separate location.
33:33
We'll do uh we'll insert that reactor into a dome, which is this big pressurized structure.
33:40
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. Uh right?
33:52
We'll make that a very big moment.
33:54
Uh we'll then continue testing that reactor, but we will be building the second uh reactor already in the background.
34:02
Um and that reactor will get to a customer and make electric power.
34:05
And ideally, that's in the early part of 2028.
34:10
So, it is not very far away at this point.
34:12
So, that's really the the most exciting things in the next couple of years.
34:16
Um and we we have a facility we just announced in Tennessee.
34:19
That's where we'll actually fuel reactors in the future.
34:22
Um for now, you know, we're able to build a reactor but not fuel it in this facility.
34:27
Where I'm where I'm talking to you from actually.
34:28
Uh But beyond that, you know, the space reactors will happen if there are customers.
34:34
And if there's a mass producible design out there, we Radiant doesn't have an interest really making one thing that's, you know, for off-world use that's not going to not going to help people.
34:44
Um but the reactor we make is pretty small.
34:46
It's only a megawatt, but we can make 50 a year.
34:47
We're going to be scaling up into that.
34:50
Um I'm not sure how many we'll be able to make by when, but the the general 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.
35:05
Uh and we don't know what people are going to do with power.
35:08
The point is, you know, we want to get diesel permit parity.
35:10
If you if you go, "I want a 1 megawatt."
35:12
and you call some rental company, you go, "We need a megawatt quick.
35:16
We were underpowered here."
35:18
And they they should tell you, "Hey, do you want the diesel or the nuclear one?" That is really the goal. Mhm.
35:24
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.
35:36
Uh that's just an enormous benefit compared to a diesel generator with huge tanks, multi-thousands of of uh gallons.
35:45
You know, 4x that for liters.
35:45
Uh it's a it's a ridiculous amount.
35:48
Can't picture having like 40,000 liter tanks added to your facility. What a vision. What a vision.
35:53
Well, we are very confident at Giant that Radiant's going to be one of the most important energy companies in the world uh very soon.
36:02
>> [snorts] >> Um and we're incredibly excited to be on board with you, Doug.
36:04
Um we end every episode by asking our guests what it is that has allowed them to succeed in their field and you've done a tremendous amount since you've left SpaceX.
36:11
Um maybe just a few words from you on what you think has made you so successful with this.
36:20
Uh I think it's just commitment and passion.
36:22
You know, I I get really excited by losing and winning.
36:24
If I get if I if I lose at something, I go, "What went wrong? How could I do this?"
36:30
I I I like you know, I feed on that.
36:31
I feast on that that that negative energy and I turn it into some some action, some positivity.
36:38
And then I also get really excited on wins, right?
36:40
And I go, "This is everybody needs to hear about this thing that's happening, how big this is."
36:46
Um and so I think it's that.
36:46
It just I I I tend to really enjoy working with other people also who are driven by passion and have a lot of energy.
36:53
And the team that we've got here now is uh you know, over 120 people full-time uh and amazing, really really talented great people to work with.
37:03
And uh that's definitely the key to success.
37:08
And I think that, you know, there my excitement brings their excitement and then get more done. It's infectious.
37:13
Your excitement is infectious and one little anecdote I love from from Will when he came to visit you guys in in in Los Angeles was it was the cleanest it was the cleanest sort of factory floor he'd ever seen.
37:25
And I thought I thought that was a that was a great little tidbit that that set the standard for the rest of the company. So.
37:30
That just means we're not doing enough yet.
37:32
That means we got to we got to turn we got to run the machines.
37:36
Got to make some more more noise and more mess. That is coming. Good stuff.
37:40
Well, thank you so much for joining us, Doug.
37:41
It's been a real pleasure.
37:42
Yeah, thanks for having me on. This has been great. >> [music]