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Nuclear startup Oklo gets thumbs-down from regulators

333 points by orangebanana1 5y ago

slaw 5y ago
Why Oklo doesn't try to build reactor in a country with less regulation burden? Mexico?
- yurtboy 5y ago
  Because this is American technology and we absolutely need to roll it out here before we export the technology and end energy poverty. This technology is a major foreign policy play.
philipkglass 5y ago
Here's the denial letter to Oklo directly from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2135/ML21357A034.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2135/ML21357A034.pdf All Oklo application documents linked to from this top level page: https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/col/aurora-oklo.html https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/col/aurora-oklo.ht... While searching World Nuclear News for background about Oklo I ran into this story: "Oklo to power bitcoin mining machines" https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Oklo-to-power-Bitcoin-mining-machines https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Oklo-to-power-Bi... This is dubious on a couple of levels. Micro-reactors like Oklo (1.5 megawatt electrical output per unit, compared to 1000+ megawatts for Generation III reactors currently being built) would be hard pressed to produce electricity suitable for an industry that seeks globally-cheapest prices. Announcing a "20-year commercial partnership" to supply 100 units to a mining firm, before they've built a single unit, is optimistic to the point of recklessness. The Oklo founders [1], Caroline Cochran and Jacob DeWitte, have no industrial experience, according to their LinkedIn profiles. They met at MIT while TA'ing and went straight from graduate school to founding Oklo. I just don't think that Oklo knows what they are doing. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/28/oklo-planning-nuclear-micro-reactors-that-run-off-nuclear-waste.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/28/oklo-planning-nuclear-micro-...
- Tarrosion 5y ago
  Ultimately I do not know whether Oklo and/or their founders know what they're doing, though I hope for the sake of the planet that they do and they succeed. But calling them out for having no nuclear industry experience seems somewhere between aggressive and wrong. Both founders have graduate degrees in nuclear science from MIT and have been in the nuclear industry _at Oklo_ for the better part of a decade. A quick LinkedIn search also shows that Oklo employs other people with nuclear industry experience, including at the NRC itself. If someone had a PhD from MIT in machine learning and then worked at Google doing machine learning for 8 years, would you say that person has no machine learning industry experience? At face value such a person would seem like a plausible expert!
  - philipkglass 5y ago
    I mean that they've never been at an organization that actually builds reactors or reactor components. Building working machines, at scale, at a price that customers can afford, is hard even if you're not in a heavily regulated industry. I'd also be skeptical of the chances for a pair of people to successfully move from graduate research in solar technology at MIT to commercializing a new solar cell design through their startup.
    - jjoonathan 5y ago
      Hah, it's the opposite of "you need 5 years of experience in a 3 year old technology": they need X years of experience in an industry that has been dead for the last 40.
      - rfdave 5y ago
        Looking at the number of failed kickstarters for physical objects that are multiple orders of magnitude less complicated than a nuclear power plant with new technology might be instructive.
      - sbierwagen 5y ago
        China's been building new reactors, poach some of those project managers.
hnburnsy 5y ago
> no nuclear plant that has submitted an application since the formation of the NRC in 1975 has yet commenced operation. Hasn't stopped the US Navy (including land-based ones), I wonder what their application\regulatory process is like... "All U.S. Navy submarines and supercarriers built since 1975 are nuclear-powered by such reactors." I think Oklo wanted to put their reactor at INL (Idaho National Laboratory), where the Navy has a land-based reactor.
- DennisP 5y ago
  The NRC doesn't regulate the Navy's reactors. For a while, Flibe Energy planned to work directly with the military, to bypass the NRC. And the Navy's ship-based reactors at least are classified.
- sbierwagen 5y ago
  Naval reactors always run on highly enriched uranium, to make the core lighter and more compact. It's easy to make a gun-type nuclear weapon out of HEU, though. Not a big problem on a military ship, problematic in a civilian context.
PaulHoule 5y ago
I don't think it's a bad reactor but I looked at the application and it wasn't a good application. (The NRC says the same) There was a large amount of hand-wringing about the risk of avalanches and other natural disasters that were extremely low probability. They were skimpy on interesting details about the reactor such as "What do you do if the sodium coolant catches on fire?" (e.g. sodium burns in water, sodium burns in air, sodium burns in carbon dioxide) There are good answers to that in the U.S. and Russian experience. They don't draw on that experience to show they can solve it. If they fix the application and submit it again it could get approved.
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  The NRC has never approved a new nuclear reactor (which ended up in production). The NRC says the same about every application. It also took two years for the NRC to provide this rejection. Please don't excuse incompetence on an issue this important to the future.
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    Applicants and the NRC have to figure out what the expectations are for a new reactor application to be considered a good application. Oklo is leading the way in that process, I hope they make it through.
    - hangonhn 5y ago
      I remember someone lecturing about the nuclear industry mentioned that there is an inherent second mover advantage in the industry because the first mover has to figure out all the new stuff and get it approved by regulators. The second mover just follows the template and has a much easier time. If this is truly the case, then it seems like it would be hard to innovate in this space. If so, how can we remedy that?
      - ryanSrich 5y ago
        Limit the regulations. That’s the only way.
hnburnsy 5y ago
Oklo's response... https://okloinc.medium.com/whats-next-566bb49b74dc https://okloinc.medium.com/whats-next-566bb49b74dc >We woke up a few days ago to incredibly surprising decisions by the NRC. Although Oklo responded to every request for information, and the last thing we heard from the NRC was that the information we submitted was helpful, the NRC has denied our first application on the basis of not having submitted information. The NRC has now gone from having one combined license under review to none.
- lvs 5y ago
  In reading over this, I honestly became more worried about the prospect of this company building nuclear reactors than before I read it. This is not a professional response that breeds confidence. It is... petulant.
- foofoo55 5y ago
  I find their public response unprofessional and immature. The Nuclear regulatory process is similar to other federal and international public-safety regulatory processes such as aviation, medical, and wireless: companies soon learn that it is best to work with the regulations and regulators and not fight them.
  - neuronic 5y ago
    A relative of mine with the background to have an opinion on it once told me about how companies were vaporizing millions and billions of dollars for not properly cooperating with regulators and it was just baffling to them.
- hitekker 5y ago
  > Oklo will respond to the NRC letter with a letter clarifying things that cannot be left the way they were characterized. So you will see that soon. But mostly, we want you to know that we are moving ahead. With your support, this will generate positive change. This is a distraction, but it may ultimately enable us to move ahead even faster. We look forward to continuing to share more about what is next for us as we move forward! Did they even run this article by a copy-editor? It's pretty poorly worded, like one of the founders stayed up until 3am to pen this post.
deleted 5y ago
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trixie_ 5y ago
I want to support this company, but their website is empty and finding any details on their reactor design is tough. Looking through their application and correspondence with the NRC https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/col/aurora-oklo/documents.html https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/col/aurora-oklo/do... I can't even find a diagram of their system.
- yurtboy 5y ago
  That’s the point. It’s ancient, well known tech that the NRC will pass in a future application cycle. This was a smart play by Oklo to reveal the issues so they can resubmit thoughtfully.
erdos4d 5y ago
This is one area where the normal Silicon Valley strategy of "fake it til you make it" just won't fly. I deeply hope NRC keeps shooting this down until they actually do it right. Sounds like this company doesn't really have the chops to play this game, but maybe they are just sloppy, we'll see.
- yurtboy 5y ago
  Oklo has the competency to pull this off. This is 50 year old tech and is not hard to build or operate.
Animats 5y ago
The classic Rickover quote, from the 1950s: An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap. (4) it is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose. (7) Very little development will be required. It will use off-the-shelf components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now. On the other hand a practical reactor can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It requires an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of its engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated. The tools of the academic designer are a piece of paper and a pencil with an eraser. If a mistake is made, it can always be erased and changed. If the practical-reactor designer errs, he wears the mistake around his neck; it cannot be erased. Everyone sees it. The academic-reactor designer is a dilettante. "Little that’s happened in the 60 years since suggests Rickover was wrong." -- Kennedy Maize, 12/30/2014, Power Magazine contributing editor.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  My favorite pithy quote is "In theory, it works in practice; in practice, it works in theory."
  - dropbear3 5y ago
    And the corollary, "In theory, theory and practice are the same thing. In practice..."
winphone1974 5y ago
The article is certainly bias towards the move fast and break things mentality being applied to these nuclear startups. It basically calls the NRC a dinosaur that's blocking any future nuclear capacity, which in my mind IS a big party of its mandate. Is this canary media and industry outlet? This reads like an editorial
- yurtboy 5y ago
  Thankfully, the situation is more nuanced and better researched than Canary implies. This is what forward progress looks like for clean energy
notananthem 5y ago
Literally says its a terrible application. Oklo more like inkomplete
- yurtboy 5y ago
  Did you see their application? I thought it was brilliant. It’s forcing the NRC to innovate and grow. This is amazing American innovation.
microdrum 5y ago
Real science investors with access to high level nuclear talent never seemed to think much of this company. Its financing seems to be Koch Industries, through a strange sort of PR/VC arm they have. The denial is substantive. I am pro fission but, erm, would rather go with Westinghouse.
- yurtboy 5y ago
  You don’t sound pro-fission. This is a novel 1MW micro-reactor with major policy implications that merits public support. Westinghouse and other large reactors have a totally different use case thank Oklo’s design for remote communities.
  - microdrum 5y ago
    No, Westinghouse has designs for small reactors too. One prob with oklo seems its amateurish funding and founding. The other is that maybe 1 mw isn’t so useful. 100mw makes a difference (with distribution), so does 50kw (without distribution.) What is 1 mw for? An airport, maybe?
blhack 5y ago
Can we please just take some remote area of Nevada, and let these people do whatever they want? We were literally blowing up nuclear weapons out there. If that doesn't work, howabout an oil platform (how symbolic!), or an old nuclear missile silo?
- bigbillheck 5y ago
  > oil platform (how symbolic!) I can think of no better place for stray radioactive contamination to end up than in the ocean.
- worik 5y ago
  > We were literally blowing up nuclear weapons out there. ...which resulted in some catastrophic health outcomes.
- ixtli 5y ago
  The solution to the energy crisis isn’t to relax risk tolerance when political will and capital allocation are all that is necessary.
worik 5y ago
There is nothing here that deals with the fundamental problems of nuclear power * Long term waste. Must be contained for hundreds of thousands of years * Decommissioning. Nothing lasts for ever. What do we do with an old reactor vessel and the land it stood on? There are many much better ways of producing energy. But unfortunately for the greed heads they are mostly decentralised (wind and solar are ready now) which means big industrial cash generators do not result from them. This is a boondoggle. I wish I could say it is the last gasp of the desperate, but it is the core of the military industrial complex heaving its weight around.
- yurtboy 5y ago
  Nuclear fuel can be reused in Oklo’s reactor. This will reduce the dangerous isotopes, which will decay in less than 1,000 years. Look under the bed again, no need to fear the boogeyman. We won’t decommission the site, we will upgrade it and ensure it remains valuable infrastructure for the remainder of civilization. There is no better way to generate 24/7 clean energy. To call this a boondoggle is to misunderstand the goal of ending energy poverty globally.
deleted 5y ago
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rexreed 5y ago
I don't get why the first response of the startup is to go on the attack and fight the NRC without responding to the substance of the claims. This is the part of startup behavior I really dislike. Fake it till you make it and be loud and boisterous and brash but still deflect and push vague promises. It's hard to put the required trust in these companies when they react like this. Don't they want people to trust their offering? Especially in a market where trust is everything? Calm down startup founders and stop blustering your way to "success".
- ixtli 5y ago
  This behavior is rewarded in the world of founders though. It’s always fun to watch people like this confront serious regulation. I once advised a startup that had to deal directly with HIPAA and the petulance of these MBAs was honestly kinda funny.
jollybean 5y ago
It's great to see more thinking, that said, the issue with Nuclear is 'proliferation' which greatly increases risk. I'm very skeptical of microreactors from that perspective: lower overhead, smaller businesses don't have the economies of scale to have all of risks mitigated. Surely most of them well, but it's the 1% 'cutting corners' that makes it a problem. A whole host of other problems arise in the more expansive categories, but at least at a certain scale, I think there can be more comprehensive oversight, down to having 1 or 2 regulators on site at all times. I think there are only 50 Nuclear reactors operational in the US, so that's limited scale. Especially in developing countries with weak oversight, it keeps the bar high. A large nuclear facility in Mexico that happened to be near Gang Turf ... if there was a problem the Federales could step in and worst case scenario literally US Marines. But 1000's of mini nuclear facilities all over North America ... that should give us pause to contemplate the systematic risk. And FYI spent nuclear fuel also sits at these installations for some time as well. How much security can be justified at a tiny, 'micro facility' vs. a more mainstream facility? I wonder if even this reactor design passes muster, if the actual construction and operation of such a facility would also pass muster ...
ixtli 5y ago
The history of nuclear administration in Japan should teach us that privatization of nuclear energy generation is a bad idea. I realize a lot of people will read this who have specialist knowledge on the subject but that’s not really relevant to my criticism: The purpose of the infrastructure should not be to profit but to power profit engines. This allows us to focus on safety and reliability in a way which has been shown to be difficult or impossible under private ownership. Also, before replying with examples of bad public ownership, I am in no way arguing that “government good.” Simply that the incentives set up by public ownership set projects like this up for failure in a way which public ownership can avoid. The consequences of failure here are too great to risk exposing it to the profit motive.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
They likely should follow the money by looking in to who actually made this decision. Likely it can be tracked back to someone in the dinosaur energy industry exerting pressure on members of the regulator to stop any promising new designs.
cromwellian 5y ago
My guess is the NRC likes PWRs and anyone outside of that design space has a huge hurdle, even though PWRs IMHO have inherently dangerous failure modes that other reactor types (molten salt, pebble bed, etc) don't have, they probably are run by aging regulators who are not willing to risk fundamentally new designs.
- trixie_ 5y ago
  Those better fail safe designs have still have a long way to go to be commercialized, regulatory approval is just one step. It would take a lot of R&D and investment to build a real fail safe plant. Unfortunately no one wants to put any money into it. Just stick with cheap aging risky designs.
yurtboy 5y ago
Oklo should proudly resubmit asap. This is clearly procedural to reset the NRC’s application timer. Oklo can go back and forth with the NRC 10 more times for all I care. A 1MW generator is disruptive microgrid tech, worth the wait. Oklo’s inventive application is stirring the pot. People are talking. Culture is shifting. NRC is working and being forced to grow.
alfor 5y ago
My prediction: no new nuclear plant will be build in the US. With the exception of a few companies, the US isn’t what is was in the 60’s The solar panels will come from China, unless Tesla start making solar cells in the US.
einpoklum 5y ago
The coverage is suspicious in that it doesn't describe what was supposedly missing from the Oklo proposal. @gloriana's brief post suggests that, indeed, the submission was quite flawed. The story reads like wrestling commentary, where people opine about the slurs and challenges the contestants lob at each other, making up baseless rationalizations and pop psychology about them.
barney54 5y ago
This is a huge issue for nuclear power generally. It is incredibly expensive to navigate the regulations. Oklo thought they were good and now they need to spend millions and millions more to apply again. (I’m assuming good faith on Oklo’s part). I really think there needs to be serious reform at the NRC.
- voz_ 5y ago
  You call it an issue, I call it a boon. I do not want nuclear power approved quickly, or easily. I want it to be burdensome, difficult, and with a massive requirement for proving out safety in even the most unlikely of scenarios. This area does not need Silicon Valley style disruption at the cost of endangering lives and destroying the earth.
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - losvedir 5y ago
    This is very much "status quo" bias, as if the current state of the world were not endangering lives and destroying the earth. People talk about climate change in apocalyptic terms until it actually matters in real world decisions for things other than the things they wanted to do anyway.
  - blhack 5y ago
    >This area does not need Silicon Valley style disruption at the cost of endangering lives and destroying the earth. We are currently destroying the earth because we are stuck using technology from the 1800s to power our 21st century society. Yes we do need silicon valley style disruption. Give them a pacific atoll, or an old oil drilling platform, and let them do whatever they want.
    - worik 5y ago
      We have the tools we need, already, to avert the catastrophe. Problem is it will cost the rich and powerful a little opportunity cost and a bit of wealth. The looming climate catastrophe has political and social solutions. Not technical ones.
jjoonathan 5y ago
> no nuclear plant that has submitted an application since the formation of the NRC in 1975 has yet commenced operation. Wait, what? I knew that reactor construction stopped around then. I hear it alluded to often enough, e.g. "US grid could have been 100% low-CO2 power by now if we had just kept up the pace of deploying nuclear instead of stopping in the 80s." Still, I thought the story was a messy mix of regulations hitting at the same time as city growth was topping off and interest rates were skyrocketing. If the NRC just says "no" to everything, that's a big deal. Is there more to the story?
- barney54 5y ago
  No worries. That’s only 47 years. Not too long in terms of new energy technologies.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  Below your quote, it says that NuScale has gotten approval. It’s not that nobody has gotten approved, it’s that nobody has commenced operation.
  - donttrustatoms 5y ago
    NuScale will, after about 15 years of engagement, receive a design certification later in 2022. After that- they will still need to apply with a combined license application like Oklo did.
- philipkglass 5y ago
  The NRC said "yes" to 4 new AP1000 reactors in Georgia and South Carolina more than 10 years ago. They were all supposed to be completed years ago. The South Carolina project was abandoned after cost and schedule blowouts. The Georgia project continues to chug forward despite similar cost and schedule blowouts. Here's a brief synopsis of the Georgia project: On August 26, 2009, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued an Early Site Permit and a Limited Work Authorization. Limited construction at the new reactor sites began, with Unit 3 then expected to be operational in 2016, followed by Unit 4 in 2017, pending final issuance of the Combined Construction and Operating License by the NRC. These dates have since slipped to 2022 and 2023 for Units 3 and 4, respectively. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant#Units_3_and_4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...

333 points by orangebanana1 5y ago

slaw 5y ago

Why Oklo doesn't try to build reactor in a country with less regulation burden? Mexico?

yurtboy 5y ago
Because this is American technology and we absolutely need to roll it out here before we export the technology and end energy poverty. This technology is a major foreign policy play.

philipkglass 5y ago

Here's the denial letter to Oklo directly from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2135/ML21357A034.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2135/ML21357A034.pdf All Oklo application documents linked to from this top level page: https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/col/aurora-oklo.html https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/col/aurora-oklo.ht... While searching World Nuclear News for background about Oklo I ran into this story: "Oklo to power bitcoin mining machines" https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Oklo-to-power-Bitcoin-mining-machines https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Oklo-to-power-Bi... This is dubious on a couple of levels. Micro-reactors like Oklo (1.5 megawatt electrical output per unit, compared to 1000+ megawatts for Generation III reactors currently being built) would be hard pressed to produce electricity suitable for an industry that seeks globally-cheapest prices. Announcing a "20-year commercial partnership" to supply 100 units to a mining firm, before they've built a single unit, is optimistic to the point of recklessness. The Oklo founders [1], Caroline Cochran and Jacob DeWitte, have no industrial experience, according to their LinkedIn profiles. They met at MIT while TA'ing and went straight from graduate school to founding Oklo. I just don't think that Oklo knows what they are doing. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/28/oklo-planning-nuclear-micro-reactors-that-run-off-nuclear-waste.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/28/oklo-planning-nuclear-micro-...

Tarrosion 5y ago
Ultimately I do not know whether Oklo and/or their founders know what they're doing, though I hope for the sake of the planet that they do and they succeed. But calling them out for having no nuclear industry experience seems somewhere between aggressive and wrong. Both founders have graduate degrees in nuclear science from MIT and have been in the nuclear industry _at Oklo_ for the better part of a decade. A quick LinkedIn search also shows that Oklo employs other people with nuclear industry experience, including at the NRC itself. If someone had a PhD from MIT in machine learning and then worked at Google doing machine learning for 8 years, would you say that person has no machine learning industry experience? At face value such a person would seem like a plausible expert!
- philipkglass 5y ago
  I mean that they've never been at an organization that actually builds reactors or reactor components. Building working machines, at scale, at a price that customers can afford, is hard even if you're not in a heavily regulated industry. I'd also be skeptical of the chances for a pair of people to successfully move from graduate research in solar technology at MIT to commercializing a new solar cell design through their startup.
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    Hah, it's the opposite of "you need 5 years of experience in a 3 year old technology": they need X years of experience in an industry that has been dead for the last 40.
    - rfdave 5y ago
      Looking at the number of failed kickstarters for physical objects that are multiple orders of magnitude less complicated than a nuclear power plant with new technology might be instructive.
    - sbierwagen 5y ago
      China's been building new reactors, poach some of those project managers.

hnburnsy 5y ago

> no nuclear plant that has submitted an application since the formation of the NRC in 1975 has yet commenced operation. Hasn't stopped the US Navy (including land-based ones), I wonder what their application\regulatory process is like... "All U.S. Navy submarines and supercarriers built since 1975 are nuclear-powered by such reactors." I think Oklo wanted to put their reactor at INL (Idaho National Laboratory), where the Navy has a land-based reactor.

DennisP 5y ago
The NRC doesn't regulate the Navy's reactors. For a while, Flibe Energy planned to work directly with the military, to bypass the NRC. And the Navy's ship-based reactors at least are classified.
sbierwagen 5y ago
Naval reactors always run on highly enriched uranium, to make the core lighter and more compact. It's easy to make a gun-type nuclear weapon out of HEU, though. Not a big problem on a military ship, problematic in a civilian context.

PaulHoule 5y ago

I don't think it's a bad reactor but I looked at the application and it wasn't a good application. (The NRC says the same) There was a large amount of hand-wringing about the risk of avalanches and other natural disasters that were extremely low probability. They were skimpy on interesting details about the reactor such as "What do you do if the sodium coolant catches on fire?" (e.g. sodium burns in water, sodium burns in air, sodium burns in carbon dioxide) There are good answers to that in the U.S. and Russian experience. They don't draw on that experience to show they can solve it. If they fix the application and submit it again it could get approved.

bpodgursky 5y ago
The NRC has never approved a new nuclear reactor (which ended up in production). The NRC says the same about every application. It also took two years for the NRC to provide this rejection. Please don't excuse incompetence on an issue this important to the future.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  Applicants and the NRC have to figure out what the expectations are for a new reactor application to be considered a good application. Oklo is leading the way in that process, I hope they make it through.
  - hangonhn 5y ago
    I remember someone lecturing about the nuclear industry mentioned that there is an inherent second mover advantage in the industry because the first mover has to figure out all the new stuff and get it approved by regulators. The second mover just follows the template and has a much easier time. If this is truly the case, then it seems like it would be hard to innovate in this space. If so, how can we remedy that?
    - ryanSrich 5y ago
      Limit the regulations. That’s the only way.

hnburnsy 5y ago

Oklo's response... https://okloinc.medium.com/whats-next-566bb49b74dc https://okloinc.medium.com/whats-next-566bb49b74dc >We woke up a few days ago to incredibly surprising decisions by the NRC. Although Oklo responded to every request for information, and the last thing we heard from the NRC was that the information we submitted was helpful, the NRC has denied our first application on the basis of not having submitted information. The NRC has now gone from having one combined license under review to none.

lvs 5y ago
In reading over this, I honestly became more worried about the prospect of this company building nuclear reactors than before I read it. This is not a professional response that breeds confidence. It is... petulant.
foofoo55 5y ago
I find their public response unprofessional and immature. The Nuclear regulatory process is similar to other federal and international public-safety regulatory processes such as aviation, medical, and wireless: companies soon learn that it is best to work with the regulations and regulators and not fight them.
- neuronic 5y ago
  A relative of mine with the background to have an opinion on it once told me about how companies were vaporizing millions and billions of dollars for not properly cooperating with regulators and it was just baffling to them.
hitekker 5y ago
> Oklo will respond to the NRC letter with a letter clarifying things that cannot be left the way they were characterized. So you will see that soon. But mostly, we want you to know that we are moving ahead. With your support, this will generate positive change. This is a distraction, but it may ultimately enable us to move ahead even faster. We look forward to continuing to share more about what is next for us as we move forward! Did they even run this article by a copy-editor? It's pretty poorly worded, like one of the founders stayed up until 3am to pen this post.

deleted 5y ago

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trixie_ 5y ago

I want to support this company, but their website is empty and finding any details on their reactor design is tough. Looking through their application and correspondence with the NRC https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/col/aurora-oklo/documents.html https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/col/aurora-oklo/do... I can't even find a diagram of their system.

yurtboy 5y ago
That’s the point. It’s ancient, well known tech that the NRC will pass in a future application cycle. This was a smart play by Oklo to reveal the issues so they can resubmit thoughtfully.

erdos4d 5y ago

This is one area where the normal Silicon Valley strategy of "fake it til you make it" just won't fly. I deeply hope NRC keeps shooting this down until they actually do it right. Sounds like this company doesn't really have the chops to play this game, but maybe they are just sloppy, we'll see.

yurtboy 5y ago
Oklo has the competency to pull this off. This is 50 year old tech and is not hard to build or operate.

Animats 5y ago

The classic Rickover quote, from the 1950s: An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap. (4) it is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose. (7) Very little development will be required. It will use off-the-shelf components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now. On the other hand a practical reactor can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It requires an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of its engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated. The tools of the academic designer are a piece of paper and a pencil with an eraser. If a mistake is made, it can always be erased and changed. If the practical-reactor designer errs, he wears the mistake around his neck; it cannot be erased. Everyone sees it. The academic-reactor designer is a dilettante. "Little that’s happened in the 60 years since suggests Rickover was wrong." -- Kennedy Maize, 12/30/2014, Power Magazine contributing editor.

bobthepanda 5y ago
My favorite pithy quote is "In theory, it works in practice; in practice, it works in theory."
- dropbear3 5y ago
  And the corollary, "In theory, theory and practice are the same thing. In practice..."

winphone1974 5y ago

The article is certainly bias towards the move fast and break things mentality being applied to these nuclear startups. It basically calls the NRC a dinosaur that's blocking any future nuclear capacity, which in my mind IS a big party of its mandate. Is this canary media and industry outlet? This reads like an editorial

yurtboy 5y ago
Thankfully, the situation is more nuanced and better researched than Canary implies. This is what forward progress looks like for clean energy

notananthem 5y ago

Literally says its a terrible application. Oklo more like inkomplete

yurtboy 5y ago
Did you see their application? I thought it was brilliant. It’s forcing the NRC to innovate and grow. This is amazing American innovation.

microdrum 5y ago

Real science investors with access to high level nuclear talent never seemed to think much of this company. Its financing seems to be Koch Industries, through a strange sort of PR/VC arm they have. The denial is substantive. I am pro fission but, erm, would rather go with Westinghouse.

yurtboy 5y ago
You don’t sound pro-fission. This is a novel 1MW micro-reactor with major policy implications that merits public support. Westinghouse and other large reactors have a totally different use case thank Oklo’s design for remote communities.
- microdrum 5y ago
  No, Westinghouse has designs for small reactors too. One prob with oklo seems its amateurish funding and founding. The other is that maybe 1 mw isn’t so useful. 100mw makes a difference (with distribution), so does 50kw (without distribution.) What is 1 mw for? An airport, maybe?

blhack 5y ago

Can we please just take some remote area of Nevada, and let these people do whatever they want? We were literally blowing up nuclear weapons out there. If that doesn't work, howabout an oil platform (how symbolic!), or an old nuclear missile silo?

bigbillheck 5y ago
> oil platform (how symbolic!) I can think of no better place for stray radioactive contamination to end up than in the ocean.
worik 5y ago
> We were literally blowing up nuclear weapons out there. ...which resulted in some catastrophic health outcomes.
ixtli 5y ago
The solution to the energy crisis isn’t to relax risk tolerance when political will and capital allocation are all that is necessary.

worik 5y ago

There is nothing here that deals with the fundamental problems of nuclear power * Long term waste. Must be contained for hundreds of thousands of years * Decommissioning. Nothing lasts for ever. What do we do with an old reactor vessel and the land it stood on? There are many much better ways of producing energy. But unfortunately for the greed heads they are mostly decentralised (wind and solar are ready now) which means big industrial cash generators do not result from them. This is a boondoggle. I wish I could say it is the last gasp of the desperate, but it is the core of the military industrial complex heaving its weight around.

yurtboy 5y ago
Nuclear fuel can be reused in Oklo’s reactor. This will reduce the dangerous isotopes, which will decay in less than 1,000 years. Look under the bed again, no need to fear the boogeyman. We won’t decommission the site, we will upgrade it and ensure it remains valuable infrastructure for the remainder of civilization. There is no better way to generate 24/7 clean energy. To call this a boondoggle is to misunderstand the goal of ending energy poverty globally.

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rexreed 5y ago

I don't get why the first response of the startup is to go on the attack and fight the NRC without responding to the substance of the claims. This is the part of startup behavior I really dislike. Fake it till you make it and be loud and boisterous and brash but still deflect and push vague promises. It's hard to put the required trust in these companies when they react like this. Don't they want people to trust their offering? Especially in a market where trust is everything? Calm down startup founders and stop blustering your way to "success".

ixtli 5y ago
This behavior is rewarded in the world of founders though. It’s always fun to watch people like this confront serious regulation. I once advised a startup that had to deal directly with HIPAA and the petulance of these MBAs was honestly kinda funny.

jollybean 5y ago

It's great to see more thinking, that said, the issue with Nuclear is 'proliferation' which greatly increases risk. I'm very skeptical of microreactors from that perspective: lower overhead, smaller businesses don't have the economies of scale to have all of risks mitigated. Surely most of them well, but it's the 1% 'cutting corners' that makes it a problem. A whole host of other problems arise in the more expansive categories, but at least at a certain scale, I think there can be more comprehensive oversight, down to having 1 or 2 regulators on site at all times. I think there are only 50 Nuclear reactors operational in the US, so that's limited scale. Especially in developing countries with weak oversight, it keeps the bar high. A large nuclear facility in Mexico that happened to be near Gang Turf ... if there was a problem the Federales could step in and worst case scenario literally US Marines. But 1000's of mini nuclear facilities all over North America ... that should give us pause to contemplate the systematic risk. And FYI spent nuclear fuel also sits at these installations for some time as well. How much security can be justified at a tiny, 'micro facility' vs. a more mainstream facility? I wonder if even this reactor design passes muster, if the actual construction and operation of such a facility would also pass muster ...

ixtli 5y ago

The history of nuclear administration in Japan should teach us that privatization of nuclear energy generation is a bad idea. I realize a lot of people will read this who have specialist knowledge on the subject but that’s not really relevant to my criticism: The purpose of the infrastructure should not be to profit but to power profit engines. This allows us to focus on safety and reliability in a way which has been shown to be difficult or impossible under private ownership. Also, before replying with examples of bad public ownership, I am in no way arguing that “government good.” Simply that the incentives set up by public ownership set projects like this up for failure in a way which public ownership can avoid. The consequences of failure here are too great to risk exposing it to the profit motive.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

They likely should follow the money by looking in to who actually made this decision. Likely it can be tracked back to someone in the dinosaur energy industry exerting pressure on members of the regulator to stop any promising new designs.

cromwellian 5y ago

My guess is the NRC likes PWRs and anyone outside of that design space has a huge hurdle, even though PWRs IMHO have inherently dangerous failure modes that other reactor types (molten salt, pebble bed, etc) don't have, they probably are run by aging regulators who are not willing to risk fundamentally new designs.

trixie_ 5y ago
Those better fail safe designs have still have a long way to go to be commercialized, regulatory approval is just one step. It would take a lot of R&D and investment to build a real fail safe plant. Unfortunately no one wants to put any money into it. Just stick with cheap aging risky designs.

yurtboy 5y ago

Oklo should proudly resubmit asap. This is clearly procedural to reset the NRC’s application timer. Oklo can go back and forth with the NRC 10 more times for all I care. A 1MW generator is disruptive microgrid tech, worth the wait. Oklo’s inventive application is stirring the pot. People are talking. Culture is shifting. NRC is working and being forced to grow.

alfor 5y ago

My prediction: no new nuclear plant will be build in the US. With the exception of a few companies, the US isn’t what is was in the 60’s The solar panels will come from China, unless Tesla start making solar cells in the US.

einpoklum 5y ago

The coverage is suspicious in that it doesn't describe what was supposedly missing from the Oklo proposal. @gloriana's brief post suggests that, indeed, the submission was quite flawed. The story reads like wrestling commentary, where people opine about the slurs and challenges the contestants lob at each other, making up baseless rationalizations and pop psychology about them.

barney54 5y ago

This is a huge issue for nuclear power generally. It is incredibly expensive to navigate the regulations. Oklo thought they were good and now they need to spend millions and millions more to apply again. (I’m assuming good faith on Oklo’s part). I really think there needs to be serious reform at the NRC.

voz_ 5y ago
You call it an issue, I call it a boon. I do not want nuclear power approved quickly, or easily. I want it to be burdensome, difficult, and with a massive requirement for proving out safety in even the most unlikely of scenarios. This area does not need Silicon Valley style disruption at the cost of endangering lives and destroying the earth.
- deleted 5y ago
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- losvedir 5y ago
  This is very much "status quo" bias, as if the current state of the world were not endangering lives and destroying the earth. People talk about climate change in apocalyptic terms until it actually matters in real world decisions for things other than the things they wanted to do anyway.
- blhack 5y ago
  >This area does not need Silicon Valley style disruption at the cost of endangering lives and destroying the earth. We are currently destroying the earth because we are stuck using technology from the 1800s to power our 21st century society. Yes we do need silicon valley style disruption. Give them a pacific atoll, or an old oil drilling platform, and let them do whatever they want.
  - worik 5y ago
    We have the tools we need, already, to avert the catastrophe. Problem is it will cost the rich and powerful a little opportunity cost and a bit of wealth. The looming climate catastrophe has political and social solutions. Not technical ones.

jjoonathan 5y ago

> no nuclear plant that has submitted an application since the formation of the NRC in 1975 has yet commenced operation. Wait, what? I knew that reactor construction stopped around then. I hear it alluded to often enough, e.g. "US grid could have been 100% low-CO2 power by now if we had just kept up the pace of deploying nuclear instead of stopping in the 80s." Still, I thought the story was a messy mix of regulations hitting at the same time as city growth was topping off and interest rates were skyrocketing. If the NRC just says "no" to everything, that's a big deal. Is there more to the story?

barney54 5y ago
No worries. That’s only 47 years. Not too long in terms of new energy technologies.
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
Below your quote, it says that NuScale has gotten approval. It’s not that nobody has gotten approved, it’s that nobody has commenced operation.
- donttrustatoms 5y ago
  NuScale will, after about 15 years of engagement, receive a design certification later in 2022. After that- they will still need to apply with a combined license application like Oklo did.
philipkglass 5y ago
The NRC said "yes" to 4 new AP1000 reactors in Georgia and South Carolina more than 10 years ago. They were all supposed to be completed years ago. The South Carolina project was abandoned after cost and schedule blowouts. The Georgia project continues to chug forward despite similar cost and schedule blowouts. Here's a brief synopsis of the Georgia project: On August 26, 2009, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued an Early Site Permit and a Limited Work Authorization. Limited construction at the new reactor sites began, with Unit 3 then expected to be operational in 2016, followed by Unit 4 in 2017, pending final issuance of the Combined Construction and Operating License by the NRC. These dates have since slipped to 2022 and 2023 for Units 3 and 4, respectively. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant#Units_3_and_4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...