10 ms·

The First Nuclear Microreactor Company Listed in the USA

95 points by claytongulick 2y ago

FriedPickles 2y ago
Maybe it's the first to technically IPO, but it's not the first to be listed because OKLO just went public via merger with Sam Altman's SPAC AltC last week.
- owyn 2y ago
  Two in one week? What are the odds? First I've heard of it but Oklo is a fission company with zero revenue and their stock is already down %54. That seems promising. /s
  - ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
    Looks like Nano Nuclear Energy is already down 20%
  - bagels 2y ago
    54% from a post merger spike. It's basically even with the nominal $10 SPAC pre-merger price now.
  - defrost 2y ago
    There are many converging lines, climate change concerns have leveraged increased support for nuclear in general and modular nuclear in particular. On another front a loooong standing high level global 'plan' for nuclear waste storage in Australia has advanced. As a concept it's kicked about since the dawn of the atomic age, with Mark Oliphant, Tube Alloys, and beyond. It gained propasal status several times, eg. as Pangea in the late 1990s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangea_Resources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangea_Resources and more recently it's back on the table as a somewhat redacted clause of the AU-UK-US (AUKUS) partnership: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AUKUS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AUKUS https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/02/01/aukus-nuclear-waste-storage-australia/ https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/02/01/aukus-nuclear-waste-sto... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/poison-portal-us-and-uk-could-send-nuclear-waste-to-australia-under-aukus-inquiry-told https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/poison-portal-... with many rumours and little confirmed as to the extent of intended nuclear waste storage, whether just military waste from Australian submarines, or more general UK+US military waste, or even further.
    - ggm 2y ago
      As you can imagine, a cloud of NIMBY is breaking out about this, and with no site picked, and elections in states and federal level this has about as much chance of coming to fruition in the next electoral cycle as Fusion power has of delivering power to the public networks. I am not personally opposed to a dump. The income stream for what is basically passive income as rent would be astronomically beneficial to the location, and the economy. We have some obligation to take back the products of our uranium mining, and compared to other choices Australia is a good pick to store radionucleotides in. We're stable politically, economically, and geologically. I would be entirely happy for the dump to be dug underneath my house. I live on a floodplain with acid sulphate soils but I imagine at some depth, there's a good structural basis to do it. There are probably far better locations. it may be in AUKUS, but can I point out that the US has already refused to confirm if Australia will have sole control of the Virginia class subs we've been half-promised, nor has the promise been kept in any real sense because there is already a supply chain crisis behind the subs, we've paid the US to keep the factories alive, and we don't know what the AUKUS class will look like or who will actually make them or when.. yet. This deal is half-baked, at best.
      - defrost 2y ago
        > This deal is half-baked, at best. You're being generous. :-) To be clear I have no objection to the nuclear aspect if handly well, it's the entire debacle from start to end that's on the nose .. I don't accept the case for hugely expensive nuclear subs over the pre existing French order (which had other, albeit lesser, issues). In an entirely unrelated aside; see: https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/05/14/scott-morrison-memoir-review-plans-for-your-good/ https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/05/14/scott-morrison-memoir-r...
        XorNot 2y ago
        Strategically nuclear submarines are an excellent choice for Australia though - the problem is ScoMo was a terrible prime minister and I have no idea what the hell he was thinking with that surprise announcement and it's resultant costs. But it would make a lot of sense for Australia to get a fleet of ballistic-missile capable subs, put conventional warheads in them, but ensure they could become "nuclear capable" with a munition switch: these are 30+ year assets in most cases with long lead times. How comfortable we should feel about being under the US/NATO nuclear umbrella is a fluid thing over those timeframes.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    > Two in one week? What are the odds? Remarkably higher than intuition would suggest. Things happen for reasons, so when something happens there is an unusually good chance that it'll happen again quickly because events aren't happening independently. Like how if somebody is struck by lightening and don't seek shelter, there is a heightened chance it'll happen again shortly.
  - BrandonMarc 2y ago
    Fission company, eh? Wonder when we'll see the first stock split.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  Can someone tell me the name of a successful company that went public by means of a SPAC? Maybe Nucor (although I don't think they were called SPACs back then)?
  - mdorazio 2y ago
    The only one I can think of is DraftKings.
wmf 2y ago
Over and over we've seen that pre-revenue publicly traded companies are a recipe for volatility and disappointment.
- pydry 2y ago
  We've also seen micro nuclear reactor companies make promises and then fail to deliver because they can't make the economics work.
qwerty456127 2y ago
> integrated company across four business lines: (i) cutting edge portable microreactor technology, (ii) nuclear fuel fabrication, (iii) nuclear fuel transportation and (iv) nuclear industry consulting services. Why integrate four business lines? What's the point of this? This sounds counterintuitive. If I were even a 100% sole owner of four business lines I would rather separate them into four companies even if they began as one. What am I overlooking?
- oivey 2y ago
  There isn’t a market for any of those businesses individually, and they cannot survive alone.
  - dmurray 2y ago
    I would have said the opposite: if the ambitious microreactor part of their business plans fails, as is likely, it's more palatable to spin that as "we are concentrating on our nuclear fuel logistics and consulting arms" rather than a pivot. And in the energy industry in general, some level of horizontal integration is typical - the same company might drill the oil, refine it, and put its name over gas stations. The business may well be organised as multiple companies internally, but that's not what this is about.
roschdal 2y ago
[flagged]
- krasin 2y ago
  > Micro Chernobyl disaster generator. Nice. It's sad that some people would rather see the climate change than to accept that nuclear is not that dangerous. Not only Chernobyl had one of the worst designs, which would not be approved today, but its impact is also widely overstated. I grew up in the area affected by Chernobyl (Kaluga oblast) and I had classmates evacuated from Chernobyl itself. For the first 10 years, it was important to have geiger counters when you go shopping on farmer's market, but that's about it. Compare it to the billions affected by the heat today. Nuclear scare is a part of the reason these people suffer. That said - if solar & wind + batteries are cheaper and available in an area, that's a good way to go. Just don't claim that nuclear is bad. And hopefully microreactors are cheaper and faster to deploy than classic nuclear reactors, and they have a chance to be useful for the areas without large reserves of solar and wind.
  - madaxe_again 2y ago
    Also worth noting that orders of magnitude more radiation have been released into the environment from fly ash from coal than all nuclear disasters combined.
  - anovikov 2y ago
    It's a false dichotomy. Worldwide there are about 100 GW of nuclear reactors planned of them about 40 GW actually being constructed and about 10 GW are actually commissioned annually. This is barely sufficient to replacement of reactors that are being decommissioned and there is no growth of nuclear capacity worldwide - we have exactly as much as 15 years ago. Comparatively, renewables are set to add 800GW this year. Yes that will translate to "only" about 130GW of average power which is an energy equivalent of about 150GW of nuclear capacity, but that still means replacing all of the world nuclear (372GW) in 2.5 years. Wind already produces as much overall energy as nuclear (around 2550 TWh/y) and solar, 2/3 as much and will equal nuclear in probably 1 year. And almost all of this capacity has been built in the last 5 years for solar and last year 10 years for nuclear, with deployment speeds fast accelerating. There's simply no comparison. Nuclear has already lost.
l5870uoo9y 2y ago
How much power does their microreactors generate?
- ooterness 2y ago
  The "microreactors" page indicates 1 to 20 megawatts thermal. Electrical output isn't listed, my wild guess would be about a quarter of that figure. https://nanonuclearenergy.com/microreactors/ https://nanonuclearenergy.com/microreactors/
  - Y-bar 2y ago
    > 1 to 20 megawatts The page does indeed say that. At the same time that seems like very little, it's in the range of a single large wind turbine (e.g. https://www.vestas.com/en/products/offshore/V236-15MW https://www.vestas.com/en/products/offshore/V236-15MW). I'm not convinced this will be anything but a niche application for defence or other remote outposts which for some reason cannot rely on solar+wind+storage.
    - preisschild 2y ago
      You could also use the heat directly instead of converting it to electricity. Now you could retrofit towns and cities with district heating. Large companies with huge campuses could also use it for electricity + heating. Industry could also use the heat for chemical processes. There are also places with small grids, where a bigger reactor can't be easily integrated, like islands or remote villages. I think Canada wants to use their BWRX-300 SMR for remote grids.
      - aaomidi 2y ago
        The reason most places don’t do district heating isn’t “oh we don’t have nuclear power”. It’s a lot more “we don’t want to do district heating.”
      - mdorazio 2y ago
        Large companies with huge campuses have huge amounts of rooftop space that are usually perfect for solar arrays + storage. The only place this makes sense is remote areas at latitudes where solar is impractical. Or if it could be made small enough to fit on a few semi-trucks, pseudo-temporary military bases.
nurb 2y ago
How do you prevent such company to end up like Boeing?
- greenavocado 2y ago
  Failsafe design. Safe, reliable, automatic, unattended shutdown. Nothing more can be done because people are their own worst enemy. Incompetence and dissolution is the ultimate end product of every organization whose members not bound by ideology or harsh punishment as the incumbents grift away what remains on the inevitable way down and the incentive structures crumble or the money simply runs out.
  - kibwen 2y ago
    All failsafes are a result of redundancy. Profit motives are incompatible with redundancy. If left to private companies, the design of the reactor will not save you, because the design will be altered to extract the maximum profit.
    - greenavocado 2y ago
      The design still needs regulatory approval, and this is where a specific level of safety can be mandated.
DeathArrow 2y ago
But we still can't order a reactor on Amazon...
- surfingdino 2y ago
  And that's a good thing. Think about it, would like to watch that video of the delivery guy tossing one over the fence?
  - rl3 2y ago
    I prefer UPS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YrpmZFixp0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YrpmZFixp0
GolfPopper 2y ago
From Admiral Rickover's 'Paper Reactor' memo (1953)[1]: "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 (“omnibus reactor”) 7. Very little development is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components. 8. The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now." The whole paper is well worth reading, IMHO: [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html
- pydry 2y ago
  Nobody has ever made these things cheap though.
  - laverya 2y ago
    I think you missed point 8, "The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now."
  - mattkrause 2y ago
    The punchline is Point #8!
- preisschild 2y ago
  Does "small" and "light" really matter outside naval reactors? Nuclear power plants seem to be more economic the bigger they are. That's why PWRs, BWRs and CANDUs were initially far smaller than newer ones. You have the same overhead as with smaller reactors, but you produce more energy, which means the energy is cheaper.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    They take longer to build, which means the cost overruns are worse, and because you build so few of them the learning curve doesn't kick in to reduce costs. Similar philosophy to SpaceX raptor engines; build lots of them to drive down the per-unit cost. This has not yet worked for reactors.
surfingdino 2y ago
"How I make extra cash fixing my neighbours' nuclear reactors with a can of WD-40" YouTube short ready to be published in 3... 2... 1...
surfingdino 2y ago
I see two issues that have nothing to do with the objective safety of those reactors. First, people will not want microreactors in their neighbourhood because of fear of radiation. These fears may be irrational, but we should expect them to lead to protests. It's hard to tell if those fears will be confirmed, hopefully not. Nevertheless, property prices may go down in such areas. Second, based of past evidence from other industries, as soon as microreactors are available a community of "tinkerers" will emerge and I would fear those more than a properly designed, tested, and maintained microreactor that's reliably monitored 24x7.
- cornholio 2y ago
  Objectively speaking, the smallest reactor would require at least a few tens of kg of fissile material, due to the physics involved. So due to the proliferation and terrorism risks, even the smallest district nuclear would still need to be a large industrial facility with heavy security, owned by a powerful entity that can foot the insurance and legal costs etc. So it's not something any amateur tinkerer would touch any time soon.
  - surfingdino 2y ago
    What happens when the manufacturer of the reactors goes bust? Will the government take over monitoring and maintenance?
    - fnordian_slip 2y ago
      Good point. They'd have to, and this would mean the energy companies model of "privatise the profits, socialise the losses" might go into hyperdrive. On the other hand, nuclear energy is heavily subsidised already anyway, and its proponents seem to be very good at ignoring that, so maybe this does not matter to most.
  - Propelloni 2y ago
    > owned by a powerful entity that can foot the insurance and legal costs etc. This is not the case with current "large" reactors, why would it be different here? Those risks you mention are mutualized because no single entity but a state could bear them.
floppiplopp 2y ago
Bankruptcy in less than five years. Those small reactors are at best very expensive and have very limited usefulness. You would have to imagine a use case where there's no reliable power grid and no space or climate for solar and wind, which are both cheap, save and scalable. Even emergency systems run reliably on diesel generators and batteries. The reasonable use cases they describe have already been covered. They are competing in a market with better solutions, which is why they have to list "crypto" and "bitcoin" to advertise their own scam.
- cynicalsecurity 2y ago
  Like, a case of a potential war with Russia or China? Good luck using diesel when all of it will be prioritised for the military. Also, no one would care if it's green or not in case of a full-scale war. Your only priority would be to kill as many Russians as possible to survive.
  - hnbad 2y ago
    > Also, no one would care if it's green or not in case of a full-scale war. If you're a nuclear country in a full-scale war with Russia or China, you are dead. Your family is dead. Your friends are dead. Everyone you know or love or hate is dead. Everyone who isn't dead is dying or going to die. Those who survive will be holed up in bunkers built with the expectancy that the population will naturally thin out (i.e. die off) to make the scarce supplies last or they will be on the surface facing starvation if they don't die from disease, weather or lack of access to potable water first. I don't know at which point after the Cold War people forgot what "mutually assured destruction" means but as soon as you fire the first nuclear weapon, humanity ends. And it doesn't matter if the weapon is nuclear or not because most weapons systems that can deliver nuclear payloads can also deliver conventional payloads and all that matters is what your enemy thinks you're doing. This kind of rhetoric: > Your only priority would be to kill as many Russians as possible to survive. This will make your enemy err on the side of you intending nuclear annihilation and respond in kind. The only reason we haven't killed ourselves yet is that a couple of times some level-headed soldiers weren't myopic enough to fall for their country's nationalist fervor and instead refused to follow the orders they were given. If the US enters a full-scale war with Russia or China or any other serious nuclear threat, the bombs will fall before you have to worry about FEMA camps or the US national guard knocking on your barn door to confiscate your rusty diesel barrels.
louwrentius 2y ago
In The Netherlands, we have lots of days where electricity pricing is negative and there are even days where prices are so negative, it also covers taxes and you effectively get paid to use electricity. Try and imagine how a nuclear reactor makes any sense in this context? Unfortunately the right-wing government has plans to build 4 reactors, which will be an absolute disaster for the tax payers. No commercial entity will want to touch nuclear as it's impossible to make money with so much wind and solar. Try to imagine how many renewables + storage you can build for the price of just one nuclear reactor. It's not even a debate. And as we shore up our grids (especially on a European scale) we don't need new nuclear reactors.
- hnbad 2y ago
  Indeed, the problem right now is not production. We have overproduction in parts of Europe. The problem is storage and distribution. We need to improve the grids and invest in storage technologies to better time-shift renewable energy instead of shutting down wind parks when there's too much energy from solar on a day that's both very sunny and very windy.
noxer 2y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rndu2PYx0Sc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rndu2PYx0Sc Here is the looong interview with the guy behind this.
ThinkBeat 2y ago
Was there already a company that failed badly on this? Found that running them and maintaining them, and dealing with the increase of nuclear waste to be processed. (Not more in terms of total weight but as a function of power generated.
loufe 2y ago
I work at a remote mine just south of the Arctic Circle, the perfect place for this type of thing as diesel-fueled power generation is just about the only way all these remote sites have reliable power. The cost certainty any SMR company is going to need to sell a reactor is going to be extremely difficult for any company. The mines would be "happy" to go green, but even with carbon taxes, big up front CAPEX is going to be a hard sell for an unproven tech (SMR, not nuclear specifically). My guess is that offering selling the power (OPEX) as a fully managed and staffed service is the only way they're going to make this work. I'd love to see us switch over, I'd also love to see it be sustainable and realistic. Let's hope for all of our sakes' someone figures it out, be it Nano, Global First, whomever.
- rthnbgrredf 2y ago
  Many people may not recall that from 1962 to 1972, a small nuclear reactor was operational in a very remote location (Antarctica McMurdo Station). The cost of maintaining the reactor proved to be higher than using 1,500 gallons of diesel oil daily. Consequently, the reactor was discontinued, and diesel generators were reintroduced as the primary power source.
  - juliangamble 2y ago
    The health and environment effects of that one aren't great: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph241/reid2/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph241/reid2/
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
credit_guy 2y ago
This is more or less fraud. Not legal fraud, let's just call it "vaporware". Here's their IPO prospectus [1]. Whenever you hear about some new nuclear startup or reactor design or anything, in the US, you head to the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) website and see where they are in the approval process. Many are only at the stage of pre-approval, but you get an idea what the NRC thinks of them. These guys are completely absent from NRC's radar. It goes without saying that no reactor can be commercialized under any form without the NRC approval. How long does it take to get this approval, if everything goes well. In the case of NuScale, the application was filed in January 2017 [2], and the pre-application started in 2008. The approval was published in the Federal Register in February 2023. So, start to finish, 15 years. And this was for a pressurized water reactor design. These guys here don't even mention what their design is, but we can infer it does not use water as a coolant. Which means it's not one of the reactors that the NRC is familiar with (as it is the regulator of all the 96 commercial reactors in the US, all cooled by water). Good luck getting an approval in 15 years. Here's the thing: if you go to the webpage of any nuclear company, be it established or just a startup, you'll find at least 100 times more details on their design than what you'll find at Nano Nuclear. These guys give Nuclear a bad name. Shame on them. [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1923891/000149315224018288/form424b4.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1923891/000149315224... [2] https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/smr/licensing-activities/nuscale/review-schedule.html https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/smr/licensing-acti...

95 points by claytongulick 2y ago

Maybe it's the first to technically IPO, but it's not the first to be listed because OKLO just went public via merger with Sam Altman's SPAC AltC last week.

owyn 2y ago
Two in one week? What are the odds? First I've heard of it but Oklo is a fission company with zero revenue and their stock is already down %54. That seems promising. /s
- ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
  Looks like Nano Nuclear Energy is already down 20%
- bagels 2y ago
  54% from a post merger spike. It's basically even with the nominal $10 SPAC pre-merger price now.
- defrost 2y ago
  There are many converging lines, climate change concerns have leveraged increased support for nuclear in general and modular nuclear in particular. On another front a loooong standing high level global 'plan' for nuclear waste storage in Australia has advanced. As a concept it's kicked about since the dawn of the atomic age, with Mark Oliphant, Tube Alloys, and beyond. It gained propasal status several times, eg. as Pangea in the late 1990s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangea_Resources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangea_Resources and more recently it's back on the table as a somewhat redacted clause of the AU-UK-US (AUKUS) partnership: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AUKUS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AUKUS https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/02/01/aukus-nuclear-waste-storage-australia/ https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/02/01/aukus-nuclear-waste-sto... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/poison-portal-us-and-uk-could-send-nuclear-waste-to-australia-under-aukus-inquiry-told https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/poison-portal-... with many rumours and little confirmed as to the extent of intended nuclear waste storage, whether just military waste from Australian submarines, or more general UK+US military waste, or even further.
  - ggm 2y ago
    As you can imagine, a cloud of NIMBY is breaking out about this, and with no site picked, and elections in states and federal level this has about as much chance of coming to fruition in the next electoral cycle as Fusion power has of delivering power to the public networks. I am not personally opposed to a dump. The income stream for what is basically passive income as rent would be astronomically beneficial to the location, and the economy. We have some obligation to take back the products of our uranium mining, and compared to other choices Australia is a good pick to store radionucleotides in. We're stable politically, economically, and geologically. I would be entirely happy for the dump to be dug underneath my house. I live on a floodplain with acid sulphate soils but I imagine at some depth, there's a good structural basis to do it. There are probably far better locations. it may be in AUKUS, but can I point out that the US has already refused to confirm if Australia will have sole control of the Virginia class subs we've been half-promised, nor has the promise been kept in any real sense because there is already a supply chain crisis behind the subs, we've paid the US to keep the factories alive, and we don't know what the AUKUS class will look like or who will actually make them or when.. yet. This deal is half-baked, at best.
    - defrost 2y ago
      > This deal is half-baked, at best. You're being generous. :-) To be clear I have no objection to the nuclear aspect if handly well, it's the entire debacle from start to end that's on the nose .. I don't accept the case for hugely expensive nuclear subs over the pre existing French order (which had other, albeit lesser, issues). In an entirely unrelated aside; see: https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/05/14/scott-morrison-memoir-review-plans-for-your-good/ https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/05/14/scott-morrison-memoir-r...
      - XorNot 2y ago
        Strategically nuclear submarines are an excellent choice for Australia though - the problem is ScoMo was a terrible prime minister and I have no idea what the hell he was thinking with that surprise announcement and it's resultant costs. But it would make a lot of sense for Australia to get a fleet of ballistic-missile capable subs, put conventional warheads in them, but ensure they could become "nuclear capable" with a munition switch: these are 30+ year assets in most cases with long lead times. How comfortable we should feel about being under the US/NATO nuclear umbrella is a fluid thing over those timeframes.
- roenxi 2y ago
  > Two in one week? What are the odds? Remarkably higher than intuition would suggest. Things happen for reasons, so when something happens there is an unusually good chance that it'll happen again quickly because events aren't happening independently. Like how if somebody is struck by lightening and don't seek shelter, there is a heightened chance it'll happen again shortly.
- BrandonMarc 2y ago
  Fission company, eh? Wonder when we'll see the first stock split.
pfdietz 2y ago
Can someone tell me the name of a successful company that went public by means of a SPAC? Maybe Nucor (although I don't think they were called SPACs back then)?
- mdorazio 2y ago
  The only one I can think of is DraftKings.

wmf 2y ago

Over and over we've seen that pre-revenue publicly traded companies are a recipe for volatility and disappointment.

pydry 2y ago
We've also seen micro nuclear reactor companies make promises and then fail to deliver because they can't make the economics work.

qwerty456127 2y ago

> integrated company across four business lines: (i) cutting edge portable microreactor technology, (ii) nuclear fuel fabrication, (iii) nuclear fuel transportation and (iv) nuclear industry consulting services. Why integrate four business lines? What's the point of this? This sounds counterintuitive. If I were even a 100% sole owner of four business lines I would rather separate them into four companies even if they began as one. What am I overlooking?

oivey 2y ago
There isn’t a market for any of those businesses individually, and they cannot survive alone.
- dmurray 2y ago
  I would have said the opposite: if the ambitious microreactor part of their business plans fails, as is likely, it's more palatable to spin that as "we are concentrating on our nuclear fuel logistics and consulting arms" rather than a pivot. And in the energy industry in general, some level of horizontal integration is typical - the same company might drill the oil, refine it, and put its name over gas stations. The business may well be organised as multiple companies internally, but that's not what this is about.

roschdal 2y ago

[flagged]

krasin 2y ago
> Micro Chernobyl disaster generator. Nice. It's sad that some people would rather see the climate change than to accept that nuclear is not that dangerous. Not only Chernobyl had one of the worst designs, which would not be approved today, but its impact is also widely overstated. I grew up in the area affected by Chernobyl (Kaluga oblast) and I had classmates evacuated from Chernobyl itself. For the first 10 years, it was important to have geiger counters when you go shopping on farmer's market, but that's about it. Compare it to the billions affected by the heat today. Nuclear scare is a part of the reason these people suffer. That said - if solar & wind + batteries are cheaper and available in an area, that's a good way to go. Just don't claim that nuclear is bad. And hopefully microreactors are cheaper and faster to deploy than classic nuclear reactors, and they have a chance to be useful for the areas without large reserves of solar and wind.
- madaxe_again 2y ago
  Also worth noting that orders of magnitude more radiation have been released into the environment from fly ash from coal than all nuclear disasters combined.
- anovikov 2y ago
  It's a false dichotomy. Worldwide there are about 100 GW of nuclear reactors planned of them about 40 GW actually being constructed and about 10 GW are actually commissioned annually. This is barely sufficient to replacement of reactors that are being decommissioned and there is no growth of nuclear capacity worldwide - we have exactly as much as 15 years ago. Comparatively, renewables are set to add 800GW this year. Yes that will translate to "only" about 130GW of average power which is an energy equivalent of about 150GW of nuclear capacity, but that still means replacing all of the world nuclear (372GW) in 2.5 years. Wind already produces as much overall energy as nuclear (around 2550 TWh/y) and solar, 2/3 as much and will equal nuclear in probably 1 year. And almost all of this capacity has been built in the last 5 years for solar and last year 10 years for nuclear, with deployment speeds fast accelerating. There's simply no comparison. Nuclear has already lost.

l5870uoo9y 2y ago

How much power does their microreactors generate?

ooterness 2y ago
The "microreactors" page indicates 1 to 20 megawatts thermal. Electrical output isn't listed, my wild guess would be about a quarter of that figure. https://nanonuclearenergy.com/microreactors/ https://nanonuclearenergy.com/microreactors/
- Y-bar 2y ago
  > 1 to 20 megawatts The page does indeed say that. At the same time that seems like very little, it's in the range of a single large wind turbine (e.g. https://www.vestas.com/en/products/offshore/V236-15MW https://www.vestas.com/en/products/offshore/V236-15MW). I'm not convinced this will be anything but a niche application for defence or other remote outposts which for some reason cannot rely on solar+wind+storage.
  - preisschild 2y ago
    You could also use the heat directly instead of converting it to electricity. Now you could retrofit towns and cities with district heating. Large companies with huge campuses could also use it for electricity + heating. Industry could also use the heat for chemical processes. There are also places with small grids, where a bigger reactor can't be easily integrated, like islands or remote villages. I think Canada wants to use their BWRX-300 SMR for remote grids.
    - aaomidi 2y ago
      The reason most places don’t do district heating isn’t “oh we don’t have nuclear power”. It’s a lot more “we don’t want to do district heating.”
    - mdorazio 2y ago
      Large companies with huge campuses have huge amounts of rooftop space that are usually perfect for solar arrays + storage. The only place this makes sense is remote areas at latitudes where solar is impractical. Or if it could be made small enough to fit on a few semi-trucks, pseudo-temporary military bases.

nurb 2y ago

How do you prevent such company to end up like Boeing?

greenavocado 2y ago
Failsafe design. Safe, reliable, automatic, unattended shutdown. Nothing more can be done because people are their own worst enemy. Incompetence and dissolution is the ultimate end product of every organization whose members not bound by ideology or harsh punishment as the incumbents grift away what remains on the inevitable way down and the incentive structures crumble or the money simply runs out.
- kibwen 2y ago
  All failsafes are a result of redundancy. Profit motives are incompatible with redundancy. If left to private companies, the design of the reactor will not save you, because the design will be altered to extract the maximum profit.
  - greenavocado 2y ago
    The design still needs regulatory approval, and this is where a specific level of safety can be mandated.

DeathArrow 2y ago

But we still can't order a reactor on Amazon...

surfingdino 2y ago
And that's a good thing. Think about it, would like to watch that video of the delivery guy tossing one over the fence?
- rl3 2y ago
  I prefer UPS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YrpmZFixp0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YrpmZFixp0

GolfPopper 2y ago

From Admiral Rickover's 'Paper Reactor' memo (1953)[1]: "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 (“omnibus reactor”) 7. Very little development is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components. 8. The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now." The whole paper is well worth reading, IMHO: [1] https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html

pydry 2y ago
Nobody has ever made these things cheap though.
- laverya 2y ago
  I think you missed point 8, "The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now."
- mattkrause 2y ago
  The punchline is Point #8!
preisschild 2y ago
Does "small" and "light" really matter outside naval reactors? Nuclear power plants seem to be more economic the bigger they are. That's why PWRs, BWRs and CANDUs were initially far smaller than newer ones. You have the same overhead as with smaller reactors, but you produce more energy, which means the energy is cheaper.
- pjc50 2y ago
  They take longer to build, which means the cost overruns are worse, and because you build so few of them the learning curve doesn't kick in to reduce costs. Similar philosophy to SpaceX raptor engines; build lots of them to drive down the per-unit cost. This has not yet worked for reactors.

surfingdino 2y ago

"How I make extra cash fixing my neighbours' nuclear reactors with a can of WD-40" YouTube short ready to be published in 3... 2... 1...

surfingdino 2y ago

I see two issues that have nothing to do with the objective safety of those reactors. First, people will not want microreactors in their neighbourhood because of fear of radiation. These fears may be irrational, but we should expect them to lead to protests. It's hard to tell if those fears will be confirmed, hopefully not. Nevertheless, property prices may go down in such areas. Second, based of past evidence from other industries, as soon as microreactors are available a community of "tinkerers" will emerge and I would fear those more than a properly designed, tested, and maintained microreactor that's reliably monitored 24x7.

cornholio 2y ago
Objectively speaking, the smallest reactor would require at least a few tens of kg of fissile material, due to the physics involved. So due to the proliferation and terrorism risks, even the smallest district nuclear would still need to be a large industrial facility with heavy security, owned by a powerful entity that can foot the insurance and legal costs etc. So it's not something any amateur tinkerer would touch any time soon.
- surfingdino 2y ago
  What happens when the manufacturer of the reactors goes bust? Will the government take over monitoring and maintenance?
  - fnordian_slip 2y ago
    Good point. They'd have to, and this would mean the energy companies model of "privatise the profits, socialise the losses" might go into hyperdrive. On the other hand, nuclear energy is heavily subsidised already anyway, and its proponents seem to be very good at ignoring that, so maybe this does not matter to most.
- Propelloni 2y ago
  > owned by a powerful entity that can foot the insurance and legal costs etc. This is not the case with current "large" reactors, why would it be different here? Those risks you mention are mutualized because no single entity but a state could bear them.

floppiplopp 2y ago

Bankruptcy in less than five years. Those small reactors are at best very expensive and have very limited usefulness. You would have to imagine a use case where there's no reliable power grid and no space or climate for solar and wind, which are both cheap, save and scalable. Even emergency systems run reliably on diesel generators and batteries. The reasonable use cases they describe have already been covered. They are competing in a market with better solutions, which is why they have to list "crypto" and "bitcoin" to advertise their own scam.

cynicalsecurity 2y ago
Like, a case of a potential war with Russia or China? Good luck using diesel when all of it will be prioritised for the military. Also, no one would care if it's green or not in case of a full-scale war. Your only priority would be to kill as many Russians as possible to survive.
- hnbad 2y ago
  > Also, no one would care if it's green or not in case of a full-scale war. If you're a nuclear country in a full-scale war with Russia or China, you are dead. Your family is dead. Your friends are dead. Everyone you know or love or hate is dead. Everyone who isn't dead is dying or going to die. Those who survive will be holed up in bunkers built with the expectancy that the population will naturally thin out (i.e. die off) to make the scarce supplies last or they will be on the surface facing starvation if they don't die from disease, weather or lack of access to potable water first. I don't know at which point after the Cold War people forgot what "mutually assured destruction" means but as soon as you fire the first nuclear weapon, humanity ends. And it doesn't matter if the weapon is nuclear or not because most weapons systems that can deliver nuclear payloads can also deliver conventional payloads and all that matters is what your enemy thinks you're doing. This kind of rhetoric: > Your only priority would be to kill as many Russians as possible to survive. This will make your enemy err on the side of you intending nuclear annihilation and respond in kind. The only reason we haven't killed ourselves yet is that a couple of times some level-headed soldiers weren't myopic enough to fall for their country's nationalist fervor and instead refused to follow the orders they were given. If the US enters a full-scale war with Russia or China or any other serious nuclear threat, the bombs will fall before you have to worry about FEMA camps or the US national guard knocking on your barn door to confiscate your rusty diesel barrels.

louwrentius 2y ago

In The Netherlands, we have lots of days where electricity pricing is negative and there are even days where prices are so negative, it also covers taxes and you effectively get paid to use electricity. Try and imagine how a nuclear reactor makes any sense in this context? Unfortunately the right-wing government has plans to build 4 reactors, which will be an absolute disaster for the tax payers. No commercial entity will want to touch nuclear as it's impossible to make money with so much wind and solar. Try to imagine how many renewables + storage you can build for the price of just one nuclear reactor. It's not even a debate. And as we shore up our grids (especially on a European scale) we don't need new nuclear reactors.

hnbad 2y ago
Indeed, the problem right now is not production. We have overproduction in parts of Europe. The problem is storage and distribution. We need to improve the grids and invest in storage technologies to better time-shift renewable energy instead of shutting down wind parks when there's too much energy from solar on a day that's both very sunny and very windy.

noxer 2y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rndu2PYx0Sc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rndu2PYx0Sc Here is the looong interview with the guy behind this.

ThinkBeat 2y ago

Was there already a company that failed badly on this? Found that running them and maintaining them, and dealing with the increase of nuclear waste to be processed. (Not more in terms of total weight but as a function of power generated.

loufe 2y ago

I work at a remote mine just south of the Arctic Circle, the perfect place for this type of thing as diesel-fueled power generation is just about the only way all these remote sites have reliable power. The cost certainty any SMR company is going to need to sell a reactor is going to be extremely difficult for any company. The mines would be "happy" to go green, but even with carbon taxes, big up front CAPEX is going to be a hard sell for an unproven tech (SMR, not nuclear specifically). My guess is that offering selling the power (OPEX) as a fully managed and staffed service is the only way they're going to make this work. I'd love to see us switch over, I'd also love to see it be sustainable and realistic. Let's hope for all of our sakes' someone figures it out, be it Nano, Global First, whomever.

rthnbgrredf 2y ago
Many people may not recall that from 1962 to 1972, a small nuclear reactor was operational in a very remote location (Antarctica McMurdo Station). The cost of maintaining the reactor proved to be higher than using 1,500 gallons of diesel oil daily. Consequently, the reactor was discontinued, and diesel generators were reintroduced as the primary power source.
- juliangamble 2y ago
  The health and environment effects of that one aren't great: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph241/reid2/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph241/reid2/

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

credit_guy 2y ago

This is more or less fraud. Not legal fraud, let's just call it "vaporware". Here's their IPO prospectus [1]. Whenever you hear about some new nuclear startup or reactor design or anything, in the US, you head to the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) website and see where they are in the approval process. Many are only at the stage of pre-approval, but you get an idea what the NRC thinks of them. These guys are completely absent from NRC's radar. It goes without saying that no reactor can be commercialized under any form without the NRC approval. How long does it take to get this approval, if everything goes well. In the case of NuScale, the application was filed in January 2017 [2], and the pre-application started in 2008. The approval was published in the Federal Register in February 2023. So, start to finish, 15 years. And this was for a pressurized water reactor design. These guys here don't even mention what their design is, but we can infer it does not use water as a coolant. Which means it's not one of the reactors that the NRC is familiar with (as it is the regulator of all the 96 commercial reactors in the US, all cooled by water). Good luck getting an approval in 15 years. Here's the thing: if you go to the webpage of any nuclear company, be it established or just a startup, you'll find at least 100 times more details on their design than what you'll find at Nano Nuclear. These guys give Nuclear a bad name. Shame on them. [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1923891/000149315224018288/form424b4.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1923891/000149315224... [2] https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/smr/licensing-activities/nuscale/review-schedule.html https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/smr/licensing-acti...