Welcome everybody.
We know that there will be a few more people coming on in because this is Berkeley, and
we have what's called "Berkeley time," which means that everything starts somewhere exactly
between on the hour to ten minutes after the hour.
If we want to have as much time as possible for the discussion that we're going to have today
It's a real pleasure to welcome our panelists to UC Berkeley, and to be in a position to
hold a conversation that relates to the future of advanced nuclear energy, and ideas for
how it is we can accelerate the innovation development in this field of technology, and
reestablish leadership here in United States by innovation.
I'd like to thank people who've contributed to organizing this day.
It's filled with a bunch of different activities, which includes at 4 o'clock a talk that we're
gonna keep Dan very busy, a View from the Top talk.
I'd also like to thank the co-hosts for this panel session, the Third Way, the co-sponsor.
We have Susie Baker here, and Josh Freed has played an important role.
We will summarize results and discussion and we're recording this discussion because we
think that there will be a number of very important ideas that will come out of it
that can be summarized and made available and point in directions for future federal policy.
I'd also like to thank the College of Engineering for helping us to put together these events.
Jayne Anderson has worked very hard, and we have right here in the audience, Randy Swerigen, who has
also been an amazing supporter for the department.
I'd also like to thank the members of the department who help put these things together,
and in particular Sara Harmon and Christina Castellanos.
They've really done a lot of work with us here.
And finally, we have a set of students who've been escorting people around who will be conducting
open house tours of laboratories and stuff,
and I'd like to thank them for their service.
This is a panel session.
We're going to start with some brief remarks from our four panelists.
We've really collected an amazing set of people together to discuss the topic of how we can
accelerate the advancement of nuclear energy,
and moreover, to look at analogies between
NASA, SpaceX, and commercial space, and advanced nuclear as well.
It's an auspicious time.
Last week, for the first time in history, we had a company successfully re-use
a first stage rocket
saving about 60 million dollars worth of equipment.
Over this last decade, we have re-established
US predominance in commercial space launch,
which had essentially entirely exited the country.
This week, SpaceX announced that it's hiring 500 new engineers,
because they need them.
This is a success story that we should see
replicated across all fields of advanced technology including nuclear,
that's really the goal here.
So what I'd like to do is just briefly name and give affiliations for our panelists, and
we'll take about three to four minutes each for some comments,
and then we'll take some questions.
Dan Rasky is chief scientist for the NASA Ames and the Space Portal.
He's an amazing person.
He's got these great videos on YouTube.
I credit NASA for capturing that knowledge.
Rita Baranwal is the director of DOE's GAIN program,
Gateway for Accelerated for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear Energy
She has the same job as Dan, except she's 10 years later in this process.
And 10 years from now, when we bring her back, it should be entertaining.
Rachel Slaybaugh, our professor in our department, she is one of the people that envisioned and
created a bootcamp that we've held here on nuclear innovation, and we will be holding
again next summer.
She also might end up at a federal agency in DC at some point, if we continue to have
an ARPA-E program.
Jose Reyes is a co-founder of the startup company named NuScale.
He's a hero to anybody who works in thermal hydraulics.
Because he's proven that you can be innovative.
And his company has just recently submitted
design certification application for the NuScale power plant.
And then, Caroline Cochran.
She's also just a pretty amazing person.
COO of this company called Oklo, for developing micro reactors.
Extraordinarily innovative and exciting technology, and we want to welcome her.
And finally, Edward Blandford, he's one of my former doctoral students.
He's always nice to me.
[laughter]
He will question me on a routine basis. He's great.
He's now the chief technology officer for the youngest startup company
represented here in the room, which is Kairos Power
With that, we've introduced the panelists and I'd like to turn the floor over and ask Dan if he
could just give some introductory remarks and perspective,
and then we'll move down through the rest of the panel.
First, I'd like to thank professor Peterson for inviting me here today.
Briefly a little bit of my background.
I'm a space guy, I work on heat shields.
So what am I doing here?
And that's a valid question.
And, um, Professor Peterson mentioned these YouTube videos that are up online.
Actually NASA did as part of a knowledge capture project, and they really did do a good job
actually much better than I anticipated, and I have to say one funny thing.
The first time my millennial children found out something that I was doing from their
friends, because they saw these youtube videos from their friends and they said "is this your dad?"
It turns out it was their dad, and as a proud father, anyhow
But the reason that I'm here is that these YouTube videos apparently, Professor Peterson
and some of his colleagues came across them, and I was talking about my experiences with SpaceX,
and about essentially the disruption of the civilian aerospace industry that both SpaceX, and now Blue
Origin and even United Launch Alliance are undertaking, and the role that we played in
the Space Portal, myself and my colleague Bruce Pittman who's here, and others
helping make that happen, and so
So it's been quite an interesting experience.
We had a nice discussions looking at the overlap and similarities between the traditional aerospace
industry and the traditional nuclear power industry.
Civilian aerospace was really rife for disruption.
Elon made that happen, and there's elements or indications that nuclear power may be
rife for disruption. I guess
We'll see, in the 10 years that come.
Let me turn it over to Rita with that.
Let me just quickly note, because I neglected to mention that students are handing out cards.
Please go ahead - we're going to curate questions for the panel.
Please feel free to write down questions on the card, and we'll be collecting them in
a little while so that we can pose a set of questions to the panelists afterwards.
I'm Rita Baranwal, I'm the director of GAIN as Perr mentioned, thank you for having me.
Quick background on me, I have been in the nuclear industry for 20 years, doing innovative
research and development for almost all of it. Innovation is in my blood, doing things a little differently is very first nature to me.
So much so that many of my mad scientist hands-on type of experiments, I was relegated to conducting
them at midnight because they were risky, and actually one resulted in a four alarm fire
But also resulted in a start up company.
So I understand about innovating and doing things a little bit differently.
So about GAIN.
GAIN was launched in November of 2015 after receiving a lot of input from nuclear technology,
developers, industry, government and academia, and realized that there was a need to pair private
industry with the capabilities that were available at the United States National Laboratory complex.
There's a lot of unique capability, unique experience, and unique data that is housed
in this complex, that traditionally has not been accessible for various reasons.
So DOE launched the GAIN initiative over a year ago to make sure that those that wanted it
could gain access to technical expertise, get some financial assistance if needed, and
also to get some regulatory guidance to navigate their way through the nuclear regulatory commission
policies and licensing processes, which are actually trying to be tailored and streamlined a bit more
for the advanced reactor and advanced technologies that are coming up, because the
current regulations aren't going to be applicable to these new technologies.
So my job is to make sure that those that want it get introduced and get educated on the capabilities
that we have in the DOE complex, that we initiate relationships, that we provide some funding.
Some in the sense in the form of vouchers, which you'll hear hopefully about
in a moment, and make sure that we in the DOE complex help industry get to market faster.
So I'm Rachel Slaybaugh, an assistant professor here at Berkeley.
My technical area is computational methods for neutron transport.
I build tools that other people use for design and analysis.
But I'm here because I started the nuclear innovation bootcamp, and some of the people in this room
helped plan and run and execute the first one and we're in the process of doing the second
one, which will be at the end of July this year.
But that all started as a result of the creation of GAIN.
So, GAIN was started, and in a discussion about how do we ensure GAIN is successful, what
do we need to do to help these companies succeed and sort of backing that up, I kind of got
back to, we don't necessarily as educators have curriculum that really asks students to think
differently or innovatively or challenge the norms or be prepared to go to start ups or
really take new challenges.
And some places do that a little bit, but by and large across nuclear engineering, that
wasn't really what we were doing.
So I started the bootcamp as a way to start bringing those kinds of discussions and ideas to nuclear
engineering students, and ultimately young professionals.
This year, we're welcoming early to mid career professionals from companies as well, to come participate
The idea being, if we really are going to do things differently, we need to start
thinking differently, and not just plan to continue having the model that has
been working the way that it has been working, and really giving people the tools and the
opportunities and insights and connections to challenge how things have been done, so
we can actually gain some of these improvements that we really are looking for, so that's
most of why I'm here.
And as a result of that, I started talking to ARPA-e, which is an agency inside of DOE
an office inside of DOE, that does sort of moonshot clean energy research and they're interested
in starting a nuclear program.
And so if ARPA-E continues to exist, I will probably go run that program.
Very exciting.
I'm Jose Reyes, I'm the chief technology officer and co-founder of NuScale power
I started the company. Actually, it started as a project at Oregon State University in 2000,
to develop a small, modular multi-application small light reactor.
We did that work, and by 2003 we had a great design concept, and we're very excited about that.
I realized at one point, I was on a sabbatical in Vienna, that there was a real market for this.
There are many countries that had smaller grids, couldn't afford the thousand mega-watt
type reactors, and there's a big market for this.
So entered a commercialization program in 2005, and I tell people this all the time, I thought to myself, I'm going to take
it from the lab to the market.
How hard could that be? It was really hard.
It was a lot of work.
It's been amazing to see the company grow, and where we are today.
I think at the peak of our work on the design certification application, we had about 800
people working on a project.
We've expended over 550 million dollars to get to this point.
Our DCA was submitted here in January - 12,000 pages
We also submitted all of our topical reports and all of our technical reports.
All of the supporting information, and sometimes that's not done.
That's an important part of having a complete application.
Those were submitted.
There were, I think, over 14 topical reports and 70 technical reports.
We spent about 12 million dollars in pre-application with the NRC, and it cost us about 12 million
dollars in NRC fees to do that.
We expect that, well, we have been docketed now.
In 60 days, I think that's unusual, to be docketed in 60 days.
That's lightning speed.
What we expect to hear now is a letter from the NRC saying that it will probably take
about 40 months to complete the review.
We expect to spend another 40 or 50 million dollars associated with that review.
And in the meantime, we're working with customers.
The Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems is wanting to build a NuScale plant at the
Idaho National Laboratory, so DOE has been instrumental in getting the site use permit for that
facility, as well as the matching funds that have gotten us to this point, so DOE is providing
us with 217 million dollars in matching funds, and up to this date it's about 316 million
from FLOOR, our parent company, and about 116 million from DOE.
So this is the last year that we have on the DOE funding, so we are looking to see what
the next steps are with DOE, with the new administration, and we're also working with
our customers to see what we can do with our first plant to reduce risk, and I think
we'll can talk about that some on the panel.
Alright, I'm Caroline Cochran, so I'm from Oklo.
So a little bit about me, I was in mechanical engineering, I did entrepreneurship in the early 2000s
and throughout my undergraduate career and started my business development program.
So it was a little bit of a shock to me, when I went to MIT and grad school for nuclear
engineering, how different the perspectives were.
In underground mechanical, I had classmates that went to Tesla, SpaceX's kind of early
employees there, so it was very interesting to hear their stories versus where I was in
graduate school, in nuclear engineering, and how academic the field tended to be.
That is where I met my cofounder, Jacob Dewitt, who is here in the audience, and we cofounded
Oklo inc. first called UPower, our goal was to build a reactor that had a clear customer set
What we found was that people were very interested in micro grids.
So we developed a reactor that was between 100 megawatts in metric, and we've been working
with several interested customers.
And we're the first advanced reactor, non light water reactor, to begin formal pre-licensing process with the NRC
I think we can offer insights from a variety of perspectives.
We were one of the first GAIN small business voucher recipients, so we've
really enjoyed the GAIN process, and all of the results that we've gotten out of that.
And also, as a reactor company, we've been focused on being a leader within the licensing process,
so we've been the chair of the Fast Director Working Group.
We've also led the industry task force on stage licensing, and one of our goals, in
addition, obviously to building, is to help educate the community at large about what we've seen so far in the
licensing process.
So that's a little bit of the background about us.
My name is Ed Blandford, a bit of a background as well.
I'm actually from the nuclear industry working with speed generators.
I was a cognitive manager at for many years, decided that I very much enjoyed working with
nuclear reactors, and I really wanted to get more involved working on innovative design concepts.
So I went back, and as Perr mentioned I did my doctoral studies here
and got hooked on molten salts and molten salts as a coolant.
After doing a brief stint at a school across the bay which we won't name, I ended up at
The University of New Mexico, where I currently am an assistant professor.
Where I'm actually on leave, currently.
During that time period, I worked extensively on what we called fluoride salt cool tie temperature reactors,
and I'll talk a little bit about in a second.
A bit like what Jose was referring to earlier,
There's a time period for innovation in nuclear that can be done at the university scale, and there's
a lot of good ideas that come out of it, and actually DOE put a fair amount of money into developing FHR
technology, I think the number is almost 12 million dollars for university programs, which is quite substantial.
There was a recognition earlier this year that the point for continuing this work at the university probably had
met it's course. I think
There's still a lot of opportunities to help support this technology, but ultimately the work that can be done
to get it into a more mature design phase had sort of run it's course.
So Kairos Power, which was newly incorporated actually at the end of last year, we're located locally in
Oakland, in Jack London Square, we started a cofounder Mike Laufer and I'm the chief technology officer, the technology FHR
for those of you who don't know, combines high temperature co de particle fuel from the gas reactor community with molten
salt coolants which come from the NSR program from the old 1960s Oakridge days, and we're trying to drive high
temperature gas cycles, so we're
I know many of the students here and Perr talk about this extensively, but the goal
there is to effectively drive open air grade cycles.
The hope, the market opportunity for Kairos is to be able to deploy high temperature or high efficiency
base load power but also be able to address peaking demands, and to be able to provide effectively the ability to do higher efficiency peaking.
So that's the opportunity, and I'm excited for the conversation today.
I'm gonna make a super quick note that I forgot to say at the beginning.
If you are a twitter person, if you're tweeting, our hashtag is #acceleratingnuclear.
So, #acceleratingnuclear. Tweet it!
I tweet you all!
I just barely got on to Facebook.
This is wonderful.
Students are collecting questions, and we'll start organizing them.
I think I'd just like to start out with seeding some discussion.
Asking Dan Rasky if he could tell us a little bit about what some of the potential is for reducing cost for technologies
through this more innovative pathway in commercial development.
I think it may not be that widely understood why it's possible to disrupt technologies
by doing things differently.
Yeah, I can give actually a documented example that we have from our SpaceX development.
And there was actually a colleague of ours who ran the office of strategic formulation out of NASA headquarters
Dr. Rebecca -, and she wanted to do a cost comparison on what Elon spent to get through the second flight
of the Falcon 9 compared to a more traditional government contracting approach.
We actually have a costing model at NASA called NAFCM, that's NASA Air Force Costing Methodology, that's our formal tool for pricing
for pricing out the cost of doing developments.
And at the time that they were doing this assessment, we knew that Elon had spent a little under 400 million
on SpaceX up through the second flight of his Falcon 9, and so when they ran the numbers
through NAFCM, it came up with a number just shy of 4 billion. So a factor of 10.
They couldn't believe it.
So the first thing they did, they went back and said, hold it, how could a factor of ten difference, how can this be?
Well, Elon is actually using commercial practices, and not standard cost plus contracting.
In the model you can actually switch over from standard contracting to commercial practices. They did that, and
they got the number down to 1.6 billion.
There's still a factor of 4 off, so they actually sent a costing team to SpaceX to observe how they operate.
How are you operating, how are you managing to have so much productivity, and after watching how
they did their supply chain control, and their design process, they were able to go in and make
other changes to the costing model and get it down to 583 million.
It was just astonishing to a number of people, this cost differential.
We had one other example.
There was actually a commercial space activity that developed called Space Hab, this is a logistics model
a module that flew a space shuttle.
There, we documented a factor of 8 cost savings.
You're looking at large deltas of cost from standard government contracting and approaches
to effective public private partnerships. And I should stress that
For both the Space Hab and SpaceX, these were public private partnerships, in other words, the government
working effectively with private industry to produce a desired product.
But that will give us some of the range of numbers we've seen on the cost effectiveness on the
public private partnerships vs. government standard contracting.
Excellent.
I'd like to then pose another question, and then probably I should get the questions coming up here from the audience.
We'll ask James and Joey to go ahead and bring them on up here.
The other key set of questions that we face is how do we demonstrate new reactors actually in the
United States as opposed to ending up having them built elsewhere.
I'd like to ask our three executive level people from startup companies, if you were
to list one of the top challenges to being able to build reactors here, what would you ask us to focus
on in terms of trying to reduce the barriers and reduce the risk? Jose, if you could.
Yeah, I'd be glad to talk about that. We're working on some of those things right now.
So, NuScale is part of the SMR Start program.
The idea there is that when you're building the first of the kind, that first customer is looking
for some risk reduction, some guarantees.
You're trying to develop a model which allows your product to be competitive with other forms of power generators.
They're looking at natural gas, for example, and they're saying, how does NuScale power compare to the level
and cost of electricity from natural gas?
Well, those prices will fluctuate, and of course they can't get a guaranteed contract for a very long period of time on the
price of natural gas, and that's one of the reasons why they're looking at nuclear.
Where we are now is, we've submitted our application and now we're building that supply chain
and we're getting that manufacturing base established and we're working with the customer and with the government
well, what, how do we take this now past licensing and into commercial deployment?
So, that's going to require several things.
We want to see the 50/50 cost share that we've had with the Department of Energy continue past licensing into commercial deployment,
because that we think is what's needed for the first of a kind.
Production tax credits.
Some of the benefits have been provided to renewables,
That would be great to also see those also apply to nuclear.
The energy policy act of 2005 did allow for production tax credits.
We'd like to see that extended beyond 2020, further out to allow us to apply for those
Production tax credits. Power purchase agreements, that's a big one.
DOE did a great study, and I haven't gotten through all of it yet.
This is a -, and it's basically purchasing power produced small reactors.
Federal agency options. It's kind of a guide to federal agencies on how to develop PPAs for SMRs.
I'd encourage everyone to get a copy and read about it.
This is just the first few pages of the document.
That power purchase agreement, having a federal customer, is huge.
That would be a great benefit to us.
So when we talk to U amps, and because it's on the Idaho National Laboratory Site proper, potentially
there may be an opportunity to provide power to the lab as well.
How does that work, and what are the options there?
Loan guarantees, and those need to be extended to go out beyond where they are now, so that would be beneficial.
The states can also do things.
There's construction work in progress in which they're able to recover some of the cost while
construction is ongoing to reduce the interest rates for the loans so states can also get involved.
But I think it needs to be a holistic project, a holistic program that enables the first
movers and the first customers taking those risks to kind of reduce that risk in a way that's meaningful
I feel a lot of what Jose says.
If I had to pick two things, I'd pick two broad stroke items in a whole bunch of little ones.
The first of the two big things is really the market forces.
So, like Jose said, right now nuclear is competing against cheap natural gas.
It's no big secret that there's a lot of ways in which basically those sources are disadvantaged
against renewables or various intermittent sources exactly when we should be incentivizing
them, especially if we don't have the kind of backup sources deployed on the kind of scale that we need
to implement intermittent sources about our scale. The second big thing is the culture of nuclear power.
Due to decades and decades of history of waiting for the government to do something.
There's still a long legacy of that, where there's waiting for the government to develop something instead
of doing it on our own.
I think what we see here is a bunch of change starting.
It's still hard for us, for instance, to hire the right people who have the attitude of "Ok, I'm gonna figure this out, and I'm gonna
go research this.
I'm not just going to try to figure out what everyone else did before this."
I'm sure that that's is kind of similar to what Elon did with SpaceX, is they didn't necessarily
source the same parts from the same suppliers.
They didn't have long lead times and very expensive ways of doing things. They did it in new ways, and were very scrappy.
Finding hat scrappiness in nuclear, and just getting nuclear into this new mindset, is a huge battle, and that
ranges from the industry, academia, the government, DOE, and I know Rita is working on changing
that with GAIN, so that will be interesting to see how that kind of changes.
As far as getting into more of the nitty gritty of how the licensing process could change like that, we're hoping that the government instead of
basically pushing a certain technology, will create pull. What we're talking about here, is
Can DOE or GAIN help create a natural market that wants to buy these things instead of trying to dump billions of dollars
into technology without offers helping create the right market conditions, so that kind of pulls together both of the two big items.
The licensing processes, there's kind of a lot of little things, export controls, and all kinds of things that really hinder the process in
nuclear, it's very difficult to hire people in nuclear.
We're in silicon valley, for instance, our company is, there are people from all over the world come there.
For us as a nuclear company, we can't necessarily do that in the same way and it's hard to hire people from
certain countries, it's hard to source things from different countries, and it's difficult to
export from different countries.
Looking at the licensing process in new ways is another thing.
People are talking about different ways of doing that, but one of the biggest ways of
looking at that might be a quarter more of NuScale's process to get the ACR into review
and it might actually double our NRC review time to do the ACRs review, so looking at innovative ways of
doing that might also be really beneficial from the NRC side.
So those would be some big things we're looking at.
I don't know if I have too much to add, I would just say that in the spirit of today's
conversation, the role of demonstration is important, and many people like to start with
prototypes and work their way up, and in the context of regulatory space or for nuclear,
to do a test reactor basically requires you to go through what we would call a class 103
or a class 104 license, which for non power reactors, one path.
The sad thing is class 103 and class 104, refer to sections from the 1954 atomic
energy act, it's kind of crazy that we still use statues and laws from 1954 to enable new
technologies, and so while people will say there's a path forward for people doing that
type of a demonstration, there needs to be a fresh grubbing of the way that we interpret
how we can demonstrate small scale reactors, and unlike my two colleagues here who have trumped
the size of the technology, we still need to be able to demonstrate perhaps slightly
larger nuclear power plants at smaller scale and right now that framework is not realizable,
and it hasn't really been looked at very closely, and so I think revisiting those rules and understanding how
to practically implement them, I don't think any other high consequence energy system is regulated in that manner,
that would be an important place to start.
Excellent.
So I have an amazing set of questions here.
And I can promise that we could spend the entire afternoon in conversation.
So I'm going to try to hit some highlights, and I will apologize because it's not possible
to get all of them, but there's a question here actually for Rita that there's a couple
that I'd like to bring in.
One of them actually is kind of a sad question because we know that the big incumbent firms
have been struggling, and in fact Westinghouse just this last couple of weeks, entered into
bankruptcy because they've been put underwater by cost overruns and trying to build large
light water reactors.
The first part of the question is how, what's this going to do to impact the future of nuclear
energy in general?
I'd like to ask Dan also to speak a little bit and go back in history and think about
what it was like in 2006 when the space shuttle might have been your Westinghouse and there
was a question of what was the nation going to do, what would the future look like, and
then the other part of the question for Reed is, it would seem that GAIN became needed
because DOE lost interest in innovation and in discovery.
Do you agree, and if not
If so, should we seek to change this or let private industry continue to lead?
Those are the couple questions.
Dan, if you could maybe tell us what it was like in 2006.
In 2011, when we decomissioned the shuttle, and as a personal anecdote, I live in Palo
Alto, and at that time period I would go to a block party, and tell people I worked for
NASA, their response was, "so what are you gonna do now that NASA is shutting down?"
NASA's not shutting down, because the public knew we were shutting down space shuttles
so obviously you're shutting down.
Again, that had a big impact on the agency.
Actually, the emerging space industry really starting kicking up in 2005-2006, with this
program commercial orbital transportation services, COTS for short, that actually we
had a big hand at the space portal standing up.
So Elon was in ascendance, he got his first Falcon-9 flight off back in 2010, so we were
in the commercial space side kind of cheering, because the shuttle was out of the way, and now
we could kind of free run in space for these emerging space companies.
It's quite disruptive to established organizations going through a paradigm shift, which is what we're doing
in the aerospace industry.
These latest flights by Elon show this, and just wait for Jeff Bezos - Elon and Jeff Bezos
are in a race to show who is wonkier and more capable.
And I'm not sure whose gonna win on that, but they're both very capable people.
It looks like the next few years are just going to be amazing as far as the developments
in space.
By the way, one thing that they need is surface power for Mars and the moon, and the only
option there is really nuclear.
There's also some interest in nuclear powered propulsion, so I was wondering - does that
get around the NRC?
I don't know much about how you do qualifications, but there may be some opportunities there.
Yeah so - Dan just took care of a couple of those [laughter] At the time - yeah, times
of stress are actually times of opportunities.
I love to say a problem is really just an opportunity in disguise, and my colleagues
all moan when I say this.
But it really is true.
So when you have a difficulty, there's a chance to improve.
GM - GM, General Motors, when the Japanese were knocking the US automobile manufacturing
factories out of the park, and they were staring into the abyss of death, that's when they
finally had a chance to change.
That's kind of what we're hoping to pull off at NASA, we'll see in the nuclear power industry.
So the first part of the question was about Westinghouse?
Yeah, Westinghouse, and what is the future, given the problem of - So, I actually worked
for Westinghouse for nine years.
Left there in August of last year, and I was in their nuclear fuel and R and D areas
Now what I'm going to tell you is my very personal opinion.
It's not that of I and L or DOE, but they have a robust, Westinghouse I believe
still have a very robust fuel business, robust services business, and a design business.
What you're seeing in the news is their new plant construction segment, and my personal
opinion is that the first three areas are going to remain strong and remain robust and
will come out the other end of this just fine.
I had worked at the columbia fuel fabrication facility in South Carolina for Westinghouse.
That facility produces the fuel for 10 percent of the electricity in the United States.
So there will be dire consequences if something other than progress happens here, or work
for Westinghouse in the fuel area, so I personally am quite confident and calm about it, and
I encourage you to not extrapolate what's happening, what was a business decision for
Westinghouse.
I encourage you to not extrapolate that news to the entire nuclear industry.
I think that's hitting the panic button too soon.
So again, those were my personal thoughts, not that of DOE.
Now, the second question was about gain and private industry and should government stay
out of it essentially? Was that right, Perr?
Let me see.
Yes.
Basically.
Oh, loss of innovation.
You loss the card.
[laughter] Let me - I'll just provide some thoughts.
The numbers that I have here are substantial.
Ok, go ahead.
It seems like DOE lost the will, the desire to innovate and to discover.
It seems like they were content sit down and write boring journal articles all day.
Is that the case, is that why GAIN exists?
If that is the case, is that okay?
If it is the case, should we try to change it?
Ok, like I said, I work for Westinghouse. I was in private industry
And the reason I was hired into this role was to change the way things are done.
I was actually on the other side helping form - I didn't know it at the time - but helping form what GAIN was supposed to be.
So, DOE realized that they needed to change.
They realized, and it's a little bit different now with this different administration, but they realized the urgency with which we needed to develop more nuclear capability
because it was such a green energy source
and realize that the US was lagging behind China and other countries with their nuclear technology leadership.
So they came to this realization.
With the input from a lot of industry, academia, and government.
So GAIN was launched because of that.
GAIN, the DOE, DOENE (Nuclear Energy) has recognized that they need to let industry drive.
And DOE needs to be there to support that change.
So it's not how pushing out the technology, we're following what industry is pulling us towards.
So why the switch from the 50s when they start off a new reactor every month to this model?
So the climate in which we operate is very different,
and I often say that it's a stogy industry.
It is conservative.
Some may argue it's ultra conservative.
And we have muddled along for decades that way.
We can sit by the sidelines anymore. We're getting overtaken by other countries, right?
But the good news is that it's not too late to catch up.
To their credit, DOE recognizes that.
And they are trying to change the way in which they operate, change behaviors, and change culture within their systems as well.
I'm a big proponent of that, and a supporter of that, because I have been on the other side and have been a customer of DOE labs.
And so, I understand what some of my co-panelists have in terms of concerns of frustrations or requests.
And I do hope to make some changes that way.
Does that answer your question?
So a question here on the education side for Rachel.
After the success of bootcamp round one, what do you see as the next steps to moving the new wave of nuclear innovation forward?
And a little bit of context again from Dan's earlier discussion
pointing out that Jeff Bezos really was interested in rockets, but went out and earned some money first
so that he could pursue his interests,
pointing towards the value of education!
And instilling insights and stuff, right?
But Rachel, could you comment a little bit about nuclear innovation going forward?
Yeah, so I think it's a great question, and it's one that I think we're still sort of striving to answer.
Our first step was to expand the bootcamp beyond just students, because just echoing this need for cultural change,
if you just start having a subset of students thinking about things differently
It takes a really long time to change a whole workforce.
That's like - that is a pace that is too slow.
I'm really tired of hearing that the next generation is going to save whatever it is.
That's a long time.
So the first implementation was students just because that was the easiest way to start, really.
And so this time, we're hoping to start having mid and early career people so that you start having people who are already in the workforce
coming in and getting a little bit of this new cultural thinking.
And so, from the bootcamp level, that's the way to start expanding this.
It's to scale it up to have both knowledge transfer from industry to students to get a practical view, and an enthusiasm transfer from students into industry to help unstick things.
In a much broader sense
I don't know if I know what's next.
I think seeing actual successes start happening in some of the companies and some of the government programs
in having, getting real traction will expand the need
for some of the educational programs and will plausibly get faculty to start rethinking
what kinds of project they take on.
I think if we get the funding calls out of government,
which is where the faculty are used to getting their money from, to be more forward thinking
to be more challenging of norms, to be more integrated within the industry outset
I think that is start, that is where the pull to
change education really comes from.
It's because only so many people are going to come to the bootcamp.
But if you actually have people who are starting to work on projects that have a broader
view and a more impactful view, that percolates - now you have a much stronger incentive.
Can I add to that?
So, last July, we had some technology workshops
where we actually asked advanced nuclear technology developers to
come and talk to us about where RND needs work
and the reason why we had it in July
was because in August, there is a call for proposals that comes up
called CINR.
Consolidated Innovative Nuclear Research.
And so, what those needs did was
it influenced the nature of those CINR
calls that some of you or all of you
hopefully, can participate in
and it really crafts those challenge problems to be real world problems,
not just something esoteric or sexy to work on, but
but a real world problem that Jose or Caroline or Ed need to have resolved.
And so we plan to continue to do that with a series of workshops, and the timing of those workshops
are very, very intentional so we can start to inform those proposals that come out.
You might be familiar with any UP, those types of proposals.
So, there is a good connection there.
And correspondingly, the faculty need to be willing to change how they do research.
And the faculty need to not whine too much when the calls don't look exactly like how they've always looked.
And be willing to maybe take some risks themselves.
We can't whine anymore?
[laughter]
It's one of their favorite things!
You can!
Oh no!
There's a question here that relates to a part of the strategy for a startup.
And this really relates to developing an immediate product before you have say, a full blown reactor that you can sell.
Is it possible, desirable, to develop technologies compliments on the way to full reactors
so to establish revenue, reputation, et cetera
before banking everything on the L plans.
And, I thought maybe Dan might comment from the perspective of space?
And then get perspectives from our three startup companies.
Yeah, I guess the
If you take a look at the history of Space X,
it's probably one of the best,
they, Elon was starting with a small scale launch system, the Falcon-1
which he was actually trying to launch out of an island in the pacific, out of the quasi-atoll,
And, that was actually from the traditional aerospace industry, laughed at.
This is back in 2006, 2007, 2008.
This was a small rocket he's trying to launch out of an area that we knew there were logistics issues, it's tough to get things out the quadulant, ok
And, uh, but what he did, and the reason it turned out to serve him very well,
he learned so many important lessons on that smaller scale, of integrating all the key systems and trying to get the rocket to fly.
It took him four attempts
three failure, before he finally succeeded in flying his Falcon-1 successfully.
but in doing that, then, he learned
a tremendous amount that actually
let him be very successful with the Falcon-9
which is now just blowing the industry out.
So, yeah, it's very, I think, important
particularly if you're talking about very complex systems,
obviously for nuclear power, reactors are very complex
systems, to be able to do some type of scale,
and prove out your process, particularly when you're doing things
that are fundamentally new, before you go to full scale.
One thing I wanted to add onto that
there was a question that, what has Elon done to keep his cost down, I wanted to mention that
one of the things actually, he told me directly, when he first formed SpaceX
He actually intended it to be a system integration house.
He was going to get his major sub-systems from traditional aerospace providers
and then integrate them to fly his rockets.
He taught me, you know what happens if you ask a traditional aerospace company for a bid on a subsystem?
What you'll get is something that's obscene
in both cost and schedule
But if you agree to that, you're not done, because when it comes time for delivery, you're gonna be told
oops, the schedule has slipped, and the price has doubled or so
with the expectation that you just pass that along.
By the way, because that's how cost plus contracting works.
And so, he told me he found that the only way to maintain price control
he actually had to go to a much higher level of vertical integration than he had intended
where he could get all the way down to the component level
where he could get multiple bids, where he would not be held up
by traditional aerospace companies.
I found that fascinating.
That's one of the keys for him keeping his cost down.
Supply chain control.
All the way down to the commodity or the component level.
In terms of innovation, and product lines that are developed,
I started this company with the free base patents
we're at 350 patents, pending or granted in 20 countries.
Enormous amount of innovation
happening young and old alike.
Everybody's working together and they come up with these great ideas
and some of these are not
Some of these have broader applications than just NuScale.
So, potentially, one that comes to mind right now
is we have a very unique module protection system.
It's really a gorgeous piece of work in terms of
cyber protection, in terms of reliability, and really sets a whole new standard.
It was borne of necessity, because we had to be able to control twelve reactors,
we needed to do it in a simple way.
That's something that could be a separate product in and of itself.
So we're looking right now at not just those types of things
but also, what services NuScale might provide in the future
there's a whole range of things, now that we've kind of gotten past the first hurdle of the licensing part
in terms of the submittal, that we can start focusing on those things.
So I'm excited about that potential.
Yeah, so I had heard that anecdote that you talked about, Dan
we get a little bit of a sense of that, it was interesting to see that in real life
I don't know how many times we've come home at night and been like,
"You know what? I think we're going to have to be way more vertically integrated."
The supply chain is really important, and it's not necessarily the most sexy part or exciting part
Well, it is for me
[laughter]
But, you know, when we're talking about nuclear innovation, a lot of that is the supply chain, really
there's a lot of interesting things going on for even existing reactors
where they can really change in terms of how the supply chain goes.
So the need for parts is really going down,
and nuclear companies have to be able to forceful about how they deal with that.
As far as can we get revenue early on, that's a question we looked at like
is there ways of segmenting off, or getting revenue from different parts
of what we're developing before we actually build the power producing thing?
And, we keep coming back to
what's the goal of our company?
And so, what that really goes back to, is
each company needs to be very smart about how they build their milestones, right?
any company, the longer the timescale looks
for you and the bigger the dollar signs, the more innovative and
really thoughtful you need to be about
ok, this is the milestone, this is how we plan to raise, how we plan on achieving that milestone
these are the types of investors, partners, whatever, that you're gonna raise at that milestone
and then get to the next one and raise there
So typically, you're not looking at getting revenue before you produce your actual product, right
because that's what you're producing a product
but, there are ways your revenue looks like investment rounds
and you've got to be smart about how you schedule those
and be realistic about how long it will take and how much it will cost
Well, I'm last so I would add to a lot of what's already said
I think, it's true that if you focus on early revenue streams you can dilute the mission of the company,
which is crucial. So, you're always walking a fine line
between trying to keep your long term objectives but also
balance the other side of the ledger, and that's important.
So, absent revenues and look at the time horizons so
it's a major challenge to be able to do that march without external support.
I would say, in terms of revenue streams, I think it depends on
the focus of the company and the technology that's being developed.
I think if your focus on the core and working your way outwards, it can
be a little bit more challenging to develop certain revenue streams
but if you're taking on certain parts of the problem, that might be more of the balance of plans
side, power conversion, or other areas,
that does open up potential new revenues
but again, you walk that fine line of trying to dilute what you may be trying to do from a long-term mission.
So, it's a tough one to dance to.
We're getting close to the end of the hour.
As I had promised, there are plenty more questions
then we can cover in the remaining amount of time that we have.
But I would just point out that we've got quite a few young people who are here
who are interested in this topic
And so, what I'd like to ask each one of the panelists fairly quickly,
is to envision what the future might look like a decade from now.
And to ask this question
what should we be aiming for, and I know Dan's already
he's got this great success story
because he started ten years earlier than we did.
But what does that future look like?
On the space side, you know,
get ready for big changes.
And, one of the things I have seen, I actually noticed
this from my kids.
Kids don't develop just linearly. They go up more like a staircase.
You have periods of rapid development, and then kind of stasis, and rapid development and stasis.
I think that's where we've been, at least in the space industry .
We had rapid development in the 60s, incredible.
Going to the moon, and then we've kind of been in stasis for a while, and I think
we're at the verge of another rapid development cycle.
With SpaceX and Blue Origin, and ULA and others, and in ten years
we could be seeing significant human outposts off world.
Now, the cool thing about that is not just the transportation, but you need
power, you need communication, you need security
you need emergency services.
You need all these other things that go along with it.
Actually, it's been one of the things that we've been working for, is to open that door
to off world development.
What might that mean for the human condition. It could be just transformative.
And so, fasten your seat belts because it's going to be a wild ride, I think the next ten years.
And rapid fire.
So assuming I'm still living on Earth,
[laughter]
I think the fact that the DOE culture is changing and the NRC culture is also changing,
much in the favor of advanced nuclear technology development, I think,
again, my personal opinion, in 10 years, I will probably have
a reactor in my backyard powering my house.
That costs half as much as it does right now.
We definitely need to have multiple NuScale plants up and running in ten years.
That's for sure.
And the other part of it is that we, our mission is planet, people, prosperity.
I think that this year, and new year's come, we'll be pushing that to better our situation here on Earth.
Yeah, I think there'll be NuScales all around, there'll be Oklos all around
and hopefully with the first couple advanced reactors getting through the
regulatory process, it'll be very rapid for everybody else.
It could be very different in the future.
I would say in the 60s and the 70s, we thought we were gonna build a thousand plants, that didn't happen
In the 80s we thought we were going to build zero plants and they were all going to shut down, that didn't happen.
So I don't think anybody really knows what's going to happen.
In ten years, but it could be very different from what you think now.
Let's plan that everyone here is going to work on creating that future.
That we're going to take the insights that come from ingenuity and from working across broad ranging disciplines
and apply them to make these advances, and we will believe that we can be successful if we think outside the box.
So, I'd really like us to thank our panelists for their excellent insight.
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