11 ms·

Oklo’s Jacob DeWitte on Building a Nuclear Reactor People Want

35 points by ghosh 11y ago

nickpsecurity 11y ago
Let's certainly not let the risks or difficulties of operating nuclear reactors or disposing of their waste get in the way of nuclear startups. Fortunately, those from the West Coast only look at the upside of these things per DeWitte. An attitude that existed during the Manhattan Project and some reactors with serious issues. I can't wait to see what comes of this. Even the author of Learned Optimism that brought us Cognitive Therapy pointed out that pessimism made sense when we're talking risk management. The context here is nuclear materials. I have a hard time being optimistic given what past 60+ years have shown us about that.
- jfoutz 11y ago
  Nuclear was the first kind of energy production without externalized costs (mostly). Solar seems pretty good, but i think the manufacturing is pretty toxic. I guess the same could be said of the concrete in nuclear reactors. having a plan for dealing with waste and paying for that plan from the start is pretty cool. Even if the plan sucks, it's way way better than our plans for coal and oil. Which, as far as i can tell, is to just not worry about it. edit I guess there's no good plan, but it's not like the reactor operators wake up one Tuesday and wonder where their waste went. Unlike me when i drive. Carbon is much more dump it in the air and hope for the best. Nuclear waste is, as far as i know, logged, tracked, audited and generally completely accounted for.
  - legulere 11y ago
    Nuclear waste management is a partly externalized cost (nuclear waste will outlive the companies that produced them). Sometimes decomissioning is externalized (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300#Decommissioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300#Decommissioning). The effects of Uranium mining are externalized (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wismut_(mining_company)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wismut_(mining_company)#Histor...). The effects of Chernobyl and Fukushima were externalized. E.g. many boars are still too radioactive for human consumption in Germany.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    Are these things you're comparing nuclear to guaranteed to be a problem for thousands of years? Or are they just chemicals that we might recombine or destroy in various ways? I'm pretty sure they're the latter. I'm not aware of anything that turns radioactive waste into non-radioactive waste. Far as toxic waste, we could always build more of these maybe: http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/energy/plasma-converter.htm http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/energy/plasma... Even that article mentions a specific type of waste as an exception that can cause fire or explosions in the equipment. Even mighty plasma has trouble with it. What hope is there for other methods? ;)
    - pdkl95 11y ago
      > I'm not aware of anything that turns radioactive waste into non-radioactive waste. You use a breeder reactor. Some of the designs for thorium breeders, for example, can be used to process existing waste from other reactors. > guaranteed to be a problem for thousands of years? Note that it gets safer over time as it decays, and in general the radiation danger of an isotope goes down the longer the half-life. Once you get into the particularly long lived isotopes, the radiation danger becomes very small. Also, the amount of waste is trivial; nuclear power only makes a millionth the waste as traditional power, because of the vast difference in usable energy density. Even if you consider the waste that stays around for "thousands of years", that's a short time compared to some types of chemical waste that doesn't decay. How many Superfund sites already exist?[1] There are quite a few in Silicon Valley[2]. [1] http://toxmap-classic.nlm.nih.gov/toxmap/combo/mapControls.do http://toxmap-classic.nlm.nih.gov/toxmap/combo/mapControls.d... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites_in_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites_in_Cal...
      - nickpsecurity 11y ago
        "Even if you consider the waste that stays around for "thousands of years", that's a short time compared to some types of chemical waste that doesn't decay." I did mention a plasma converter and the possibility of chemical options coming up down the line. Not many possibilities like that for nuclear.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- vidarh 11y ago
  Even if we were to intentionally just scatter all the nuclear waste along road sides in urban areas, nuclear would likely still remain one of the safest power sources. Disposing the waste is largely a political problem. And that is with old designs producing nasty waste. There are newer designs that would be able to reuse some of that waste as fuels, and there are many newer designs that produces far less dangerous waste to begin with.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    "Even if we were to intentionally just scatter all the nuclear waste along road sides in urban areas, nuclear would likely still remain one of the safest power sources." It would be if you ignore the effects of radiation on biological and electronic systems. If you don't, the idea is as ridiculous as you may have intended. "Disposing the waste is largely a political problem." It's actually a problem of making a material non-radioactive or storing arbitrary amounts of it safely for longer than we've existed as a civilization. Neither is a political problem: one is impossible so far per science; other faces risks from logistics, environment, personnel, and politicians. I'd expect us to be able to build out CO2 capture systems at local power plants before we could successfully counter all the above for thousands of years straight given global issues. So, no, it is one of the least safe power sources if one considers the risks of operation or waste. Japan had a recent reminder of that.
9erdelta 11y ago
Even if people want it will they be able to get it because of regulations?
- pjc50 11y ago
  I don't really want my neighbours to be able to buy an unregulated nuclear reactor! They need to be sited away from built-up areas, water sources etc because the contamination from a potential failure is "forever", including areas rendered uninhabitable.
  - 9erdelta 11y ago
    In addition to your concern (definitely a good one!), I don't think the current political climate is such that we'll see progress in nuclear energy anytime soon.
exabrial 11y ago
I think 200 years in the future that's no way we will still be burning dinosaurs. We really need another nuclear age, one with safety and innovation.
basicplus2 11y ago
how absurd.. I should start a start up for a intragalactic mission to apha centauri
lispm 11y ago
> We’re building a brand new kind of nuclear reactor that can be used in places where power is unreliable, expensive, and dirty. Afghanistan. > It’s something that we know people want, and we can build it now, and here’s why Right. These 'people' are called 'Army', 'Airforce' and 'Navy': http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-03/mobile-nuclear-reactors-could-provide-power-and-jet-fuel-military-darpa-says http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-03/mobile-nucl...
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Also, people who have a higher bar for "unreliable" e.g. emergency services want power even after the storm-of-the-century.
  - hydrogen18 11y ago
    Don't forget about Waffle House. I'm sure there is a market for an under-the-sink reactor.
- donttrustatoms 11y ago
  Ha ha. Wrong. Actually the biggest demand is remote communities currently burning lots and lots of diesel. Military is way, way too slow moving.
MikeNomad 11y ago
The article content does not match the title. Lots of talk about how the guy grew up, what shaped his outlook, etc. I saw nothing about how he is building a "small, waste- and carbon-negative reactor." Is it even possible to build a reactor that meets those criteria, let alone be financially viable?
- sideshowb 11y ago
  I presume waste-negative means it can take existing waste as fuel, and make it less dangerous while making energy still (as current fast breeder reactors can, though not on a small scale afaik). Carbon negative presumably just means "uses less carbon per kwh over the whole lifecycle than the diesel generator it replaces" which shouldn't be too hard to achieve. "Small" presumably makes this harder. You're right though, some more technical details would be nice.
  - julie1 11y ago
    When nuclear was developed, it was foreseen the waste of the first generation could still be reused by a "next generation" reactor and maybe turned into non radioactive matter. Nuclear reaction and transmutation says that the most stable atomic number is around 49 so with N>100 for actual nuclear wastes there is still potential energy usable. Then oil went cheap investments were frozen. As everybody noticed the "most advanced" deployed IIIrd generation of nuclear reactor are not really a success (EPR). And the 5th?/4th supposed to come generation is promising a lot, but still has not delivered a lot. We are lagging way behind schedules, notably because cheap oil has been a curse. Oil is getting more and more costly to extract. PV and wind turbine activity do not follow our 9am/7pm seasonal activity. Eolian is so massively subsidized in USA Texas had negative prices this summer on their grid. So cheap and convenient (non subsidized) energy seems to be our past. Not the future we will live in. I guess some activity will slowly disappear ... And that the part of energy in Internet's price will have to be paid more fairly among users. Cheap energy is physically soon to be dead. The watt consumed per software use will matter as soon as government will stop subsidizing the market with public money. And Artificial Intelligence may not beat human intelligence and adaptive workforce when costs are fully supported by the software makers. Human have more value than what google and uber thinks, and their technological dystopia based on clean non human work force and cheap energy is a nightmare for both the workers and the ecosystem. IT industry is not sustainable in its actual trend to not care about efficiency. Agile is a symptom of it, and we need government to stop their politic to deregulate on one hand so that those who waste energy don't pay their bills and on the other hand subsidize the market in favor of those producing so called cheap energy (fracking, PV, eolian, batteries) that are polluting. Sorry, but sails, men, mechanical windmill and horses are some of the trivially cheap energies that will be available in the future.
sideshowb 11y ago
This is interesting to hear about somebody approaching nuclear with a start-up type approach. As a lay person I hear about reactor designs that can reduce nuclear waste and make a truck load more energy off it at the same time, which leaves me wondering why these things don't get made. Is it all institutional politics as this article makes out, or is there a safety/proliferation issue there as well? If the institutional inertia has a large part to play then a startup model would be very promising.
- pdkl95 11y ago
  Short answer: it's politics, NIMBY nonsense, and radiophobia. Longer answer: Yes, there are obviously safety and proliferation concerns with nuclear power, but a lot of these are solvable problems. Many industries solve difficult/dangerous problem all the time. Unfortunately, paranoia and misleading (or simply wrong) information about radiation made a lot of people treat the very idea of nuclear power as something that is "always bad". This, and the usual political stupidity, has kept nuclear power restricted to the same designs for decades. Imagine if the computer industry was was never able to move past the relay and vacuum tube designs made in the WW2 era; today we might have very good vacuum tubes instead of the integrated circuit. Newer reactors like the Westinghouse AP1000 are a nice improvement in safety and cost, but it's still basically the same solid uranium alloy fueled, pressurized light water reactor we've always used. Newer designs are never always considered "too risky" in either money or physics.
  - api 11y ago
    Monstrously capital intensive industries are conservative for obvious reasons. Computers were never as capital intensive as a large power plant, and transistors and ICs made them exponentially less. When a project that costs twenty billion dollars fails companies go bankrupt and politicians lose their careers. Lots of pressure to stick with what you know will work. Also everyone blames the hippies for nuclear stagnation but nobody looks at the fossil fuel industry. The latter has far more money and political influence and is more than happy for nukes to get stuck in the 50s.
    - 11y ago
jkot 11y ago
People want reactor which passes safety regulations and this article does not even touches the subject. Communist Czechoslovakia was working on something like that, civil reactor for small remote villages. They got stuck on cooling. BTW there is atomic reactor in center of Prague ;-)
cmancini 11y ago
I've met Jake and he gives one of the most inspiring and pragmatic pitches about the future of energy I've ever heard. What they're building sounds like magic--massive amounts of energy with incredible safety and portability. Super exciting stuff.
blacksmith_tb 11y ago
It's an exciting project, but having chosen Oklo [1] as their name makes them extremely difficult to search for (try 'oklo reactor' for example), which is a little problematic for a startup... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo
- donttrustatoms 11y ago
  Oklo.com. You can sign up for the mailing list there, for updates once info goes live.
pvorb 11y ago
It's 2016 and we still don't have a ultimate disposal place for nuclear waste. No one knows how much the whole process will cost in the end. At least in Germany law says whoever produces nuclear waste has to ensure it will be stored securely. I don't see how this is possible with a startup. Startups usually take high risk in most of their decisions. Most startups fail within few years. Who will be responsible for the waste produced by a startup that goes bankrupt? There's no other solution than to stop nuclear power now and investing all we can to care about reliably storing the waste forever (in human terms). And even if there were ways to store something reliably for 1,000,000 years, it's impossible to keep future civilizations from opening what shouldn't be. The pyramids weren't meant to be opened either. ;)

35 points by ghosh 11y ago

Let's certainly not let the risks or difficulties of operating nuclear reactors or disposing of their waste get in the way of nuclear startups. Fortunately, those from the West Coast only look at the upside of these things per DeWitte. An attitude that existed during the Manhattan Project and some reactors with serious issues. I can't wait to see what comes of this. Even the author of Learned Optimism that brought us Cognitive Therapy pointed out that pessimism made sense when we're talking risk management. The context here is nuclear materials. I have a hard time being optimistic given what past 60+ years have shown us about that.

jfoutz 11y ago
Nuclear was the first kind of energy production without externalized costs (mostly). Solar seems pretty good, but i think the manufacturing is pretty toxic. I guess the same could be said of the concrete in nuclear reactors. having a plan for dealing with waste and paying for that plan from the start is pretty cool. Even if the plan sucks, it's way way better than our plans for coal and oil. Which, as far as i can tell, is to just not worry about it. edit I guess there's no good plan, but it's not like the reactor operators wake up one Tuesday and wonder where their waste went. Unlike me when i drive. Carbon is much more dump it in the air and hope for the best. Nuclear waste is, as far as i know, logged, tracked, audited and generally completely accounted for.
- legulere 11y ago
  Nuclear waste management is a partly externalized cost (nuclear waste will outlive the companies that produced them). Sometimes decomissioning is externalized (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300#Decommissioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300#Decommissioning). The effects of Uranium mining are externalized (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wismut_(mining_company)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wismut_(mining_company)#Histor...). The effects of Chernobyl and Fukushima were externalized. E.g. many boars are still too radioactive for human consumption in Germany.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Are these things you're comparing nuclear to guaranteed to be a problem for thousands of years? Or are they just chemicals that we might recombine or destroy in various ways? I'm pretty sure they're the latter. I'm not aware of anything that turns radioactive waste into non-radioactive waste. Far as toxic waste, we could always build more of these maybe: http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/energy/plasma-converter.htm http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/energy/plasma... Even that article mentions a specific type of waste as an exception that can cause fire or explosions in the equipment. Even mighty plasma has trouble with it. What hope is there for other methods? ;)
  - pdkl95 11y ago
    > I'm not aware of anything that turns radioactive waste into non-radioactive waste. You use a breeder reactor. Some of the designs for thorium breeders, for example, can be used to process existing waste from other reactors. > guaranteed to be a problem for thousands of years? Note that it gets safer over time as it decays, and in general the radiation danger of an isotope goes down the longer the half-life. Once you get into the particularly long lived isotopes, the radiation danger becomes very small. Also, the amount of waste is trivial; nuclear power only makes a millionth the waste as traditional power, because of the vast difference in usable energy density. Even if you consider the waste that stays around for "thousands of years", that's a short time compared to some types of chemical waste that doesn't decay. How many Superfund sites already exist?[1] There are quite a few in Silicon Valley[2]. [1] http://toxmap-classic.nlm.nih.gov/toxmap/combo/mapControls.do http://toxmap-classic.nlm.nih.gov/toxmap/combo/mapControls.d... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites_in_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites_in_Cal...
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      "Even if you consider the waste that stays around for "thousands of years", that's a short time compared to some types of chemical waste that doesn't decay." I did mention a plasma converter and the possibility of chemical options coming up down the line. Not many possibilities like that for nuclear.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
vidarh 11y ago
Even if we were to intentionally just scatter all the nuclear waste along road sides in urban areas, nuclear would likely still remain one of the safest power sources. Disposing the waste is largely a political problem. And that is with old designs producing nasty waste. There are newer designs that would be able to reuse some of that waste as fuels, and there are many newer designs that produces far less dangerous waste to begin with.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  "Even if we were to intentionally just scatter all the nuclear waste along road sides in urban areas, nuclear would likely still remain one of the safest power sources." It would be if you ignore the effects of radiation on biological and electronic systems. If you don't, the idea is as ridiculous as you may have intended. "Disposing the waste is largely a political problem." It's actually a problem of making a material non-radioactive or storing arbitrary amounts of it safely for longer than we've existed as a civilization. Neither is a political problem: one is impossible so far per science; other faces risks from logistics, environment, personnel, and politicians. I'd expect us to be able to build out CO2 capture systems at local power plants before we could successfully counter all the above for thousands of years straight given global issues. So, no, it is one of the least safe power sources if one considers the risks of operation or waste. Japan had a recent reminder of that.

9erdelta 11y ago

Even if people want it will they be able to get it because of regulations?

pjc50 11y ago
I don't really want my neighbours to be able to buy an unregulated nuclear reactor! They need to be sited away from built-up areas, water sources etc because the contamination from a potential failure is "forever", including areas rendered uninhabitable.
- 9erdelta 11y ago
  In addition to your concern (definitely a good one!), I don't think the current political climate is such that we'll see progress in nuclear energy anytime soon.

exabrial 11y ago

I think 200 years in the future that's no way we will still be burning dinosaurs. We really need another nuclear age, one with safety and innovation.

basicplus2 11y ago

how absurd.. I should start a start up for a intragalactic mission to apha centauri

lispm 11y ago

> We’re building a brand new kind of nuclear reactor that can be used in places where power is unreliable, expensive, and dirty. Afghanistan. > It’s something that we know people want, and we can build it now, and here’s why Right. These 'people' are called 'Army', 'Airforce' and 'Navy': http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-03/mobile-nuclear-reactors-could-provide-power-and-jet-fuel-military-darpa-says http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-03/mobile-nucl...

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Also, people who have a higher bar for "unreliable" e.g. emergency services want power even after the storm-of-the-century.
- hydrogen18 11y ago
  Don't forget about Waffle House. I'm sure there is a market for an under-the-sink reactor.
donttrustatoms 11y ago
Ha ha. Wrong. Actually the biggest demand is remote communities currently burning lots and lots of diesel. Military is way, way too slow moving.

MikeNomad 11y ago

The article content does not match the title. Lots of talk about how the guy grew up, what shaped his outlook, etc. I saw nothing about how he is building a "small, waste- and carbon-negative reactor." Is it even possible to build a reactor that meets those criteria, let alone be financially viable?

sideshowb 11y ago
I presume waste-negative means it can take existing waste as fuel, and make it less dangerous while making energy still (as current fast breeder reactors can, though not on a small scale afaik). Carbon negative presumably just means "uses less carbon per kwh over the whole lifecycle than the diesel generator it replaces" which shouldn't be too hard to achieve. "Small" presumably makes this harder. You're right though, some more technical details would be nice.
- julie1 11y ago
  When nuclear was developed, it was foreseen the waste of the first generation could still be reused by a "next generation" reactor and maybe turned into non radioactive matter. Nuclear reaction and transmutation says that the most stable atomic number is around 49 so with N>100 for actual nuclear wastes there is still potential energy usable. Then oil went cheap investments were frozen. As everybody noticed the "most advanced" deployed IIIrd generation of nuclear reactor are not really a success (EPR). And the 5th?/4th supposed to come generation is promising a lot, but still has not delivered a lot. We are lagging way behind schedules, notably because cheap oil has been a curse. Oil is getting more and more costly to extract. PV and wind turbine activity do not follow our 9am/7pm seasonal activity. Eolian is so massively subsidized in USA Texas had negative prices this summer on their grid. So cheap and convenient (non subsidized) energy seems to be our past. Not the future we will live in. I guess some activity will slowly disappear ... And that the part of energy in Internet's price will have to be paid more fairly among users. Cheap energy is physically soon to be dead. The watt consumed per software use will matter as soon as government will stop subsidizing the market with public money. And Artificial Intelligence may not beat human intelligence and adaptive workforce when costs are fully supported by the software makers. Human have more value than what google and uber thinks, and their technological dystopia based on clean non human work force and cheap energy is a nightmare for both the workers and the ecosystem. IT industry is not sustainable in its actual trend to not care about efficiency. Agile is a symptom of it, and we need government to stop their politic to deregulate on one hand so that those who waste energy don't pay their bills and on the other hand subsidize the market in favor of those producing so called cheap energy (fracking, PV, eolian, batteries) that are polluting. Sorry, but sails, men, mechanical windmill and horses are some of the trivially cheap energies that will be available in the future.

sideshowb 11y ago

This is interesting to hear about somebody approaching nuclear with a start-up type approach. As a lay person I hear about reactor designs that can reduce nuclear waste and make a truck load more energy off it at the same time, which leaves me wondering why these things don't get made. Is it all institutional politics as this article makes out, or is there a safety/proliferation issue there as well? If the institutional inertia has a large part to play then a startup model would be very promising.

pdkl95 11y ago
Short answer: it's politics, NIMBY nonsense, and radiophobia. Longer answer: Yes, there are obviously safety and proliferation concerns with nuclear power, but a lot of these are solvable problems. Many industries solve difficult/dangerous problem all the time. Unfortunately, paranoia and misleading (or simply wrong) information about radiation made a lot of people treat the very idea of nuclear power as something that is "always bad". This, and the usual political stupidity, has kept nuclear power restricted to the same designs for decades. Imagine if the computer industry was was never able to move past the relay and vacuum tube designs made in the WW2 era; today we might have very good vacuum tubes instead of the integrated circuit. Newer reactors like the Westinghouse AP1000 are a nice improvement in safety and cost, but it's still basically the same solid uranium alloy fueled, pressurized light water reactor we've always used. Newer designs are never always considered "too risky" in either money or physics.
- api 11y ago
  Monstrously capital intensive industries are conservative for obvious reasons. Computers were never as capital intensive as a large power plant, and transistors and ICs made them exponentially less. When a project that costs twenty billion dollars fails companies go bankrupt and politicians lose their careers. Lots of pressure to stick with what you know will work. Also everyone blames the hippies for nuclear stagnation but nobody looks at the fossil fuel industry. The latter has far more money and political influence and is more than happy for nukes to get stuck in the 50s.
  - 11y ago

jkot 11y ago

People want reactor which passes safety regulations and this article does not even touches the subject. Communist Czechoslovakia was working on something like that, civil reactor for small remote villages. They got stuck on cooling. BTW there is atomic reactor in center of Prague ;-)

cmancini 11y ago

I've met Jake and he gives one of the most inspiring and pragmatic pitches about the future of energy I've ever heard. What they're building sounds like magic--massive amounts of energy with incredible safety and portability. Super exciting stuff.

blacksmith_tb 11y ago

It's an exciting project, but having chosen Oklo [1] as their name makes them extremely difficult to search for (try 'oklo reactor' for example), which is a little problematic for a startup... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo

donttrustatoms 11y ago
Oklo.com. You can sign up for the mailing list there, for updates once info goes live.

pvorb 11y ago

It's 2016 and we still don't have a ultimate disposal place for nuclear waste. No one knows how much the whole process will cost in the end. At least in Germany law says whoever produces nuclear waste has to ensure it will be stored securely. I don't see how this is possible with a startup. Startups usually take high risk in most of their decisions. Most startups fail within few years. Who will be responsible for the waste produced by a startup that goes bankrupt? There's no other solution than to stop nuclear power now and investing all we can to care about reliably storing the waste forever (in human terms). And even if there were ways to store something reliably for 1,000,000 years, it's impossible to keep future civilizations from opening what shouldn't be. The pyramids weren't meant to be opened either. ;)