The Atomic Show

Brian Gitt, the Business Development lead at Oklo, visited the Atomic Show to describe his employer’s business model and current prospects.

Oklo is an advanced fission and fuel recycling company with an expansive vision for becoming a competitive clean energy supplier. It plans to provide heat and/or electricity as a service from a fleet of small fission power plants that it owns, operates and maintains.

Oklo recently became a public company through a SPAC merger with AltC, a special purpose acquisition company led by Sam Altman, a venture capital investor and the founder and CEO at OpenAI.

Oklo was founded in 2013 by Jake DeWitt and Caroline Cochran, two MIT nuclear engineering graduates with a vision for building a company that could manufacture and operate smaller, simpler reactors.

Recognizing that nuclear engineering skills are not the only ingredient needed to build a company, Oklo founders made an early decision to participate in an entrepreneurial immersion training program at Y Combinator, a start-up accelerator and seed stage venture capital funder.

Their unique business proposition for clean energy development was compelling enough to attract serious interest from Sam Altman, who was then serving as the president at Y Combinator. He became one of the company’s earliest investors and began serving as the company Chairman.

As Gitt describes, Oklo has spent the past decade preparing for the growth in clean energy demand that is coming from both the energy transition and the growing use of energy for applications like high performance data centers for applications like artificial intelligence (AI). The company also sees huge opportunities in clean energy for materials production, mining and increased manufacturing in places outside of China.

For more details, you’re going to have to listen to the show. Please participate in the comment section discussion. I expect that many listeners will find this to be a valuable use of their time.

Disclosure: I have a long position in Oklo’s publicly traded stock in my personal portfolio.

Atomic Canyon is a six month old company that is developing AI tools to improve the efficiency of routine tasks associated with developing, licensing, building, owning and operating nuclear plants. Their first product, called Neutron, uses AI to modernize searching the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s 52 million page collection of publicly available documents that are currently accessible through the somewhat cumbersome Agencywide Documents Access and Management System (ADAMS).

Trey Lauderdale, Atomic Canyon’s founder, spent the first 15 years of his career in the digital medicine field. At an inflection point in his career, with the freedom to live anywhere, he created a decision matrix to help him and his wife choose a place to live and raise their two young sons. San Luis Obispo, CA earned the highest score, with an excellent public education system as one of the contributing factors.

After finding their home and moving towards closing the purchase, Trey and his wife learned via real estate disclosure documents that they would be living within 10 miles of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. As members of a generation who learned most of what they new about nuclear energy from The Simpsons, they were initially leery.

But they quickly realized that the plant’s skilled, dedicated and well compensated employees and its property tax payments were major reasons that the schools and other aspects of the community had earned such high scores on the “place to raise our children” decision matrix.

After becoming a member of the community and conversing with local nuclear professionals, Trey decided to learn as much as he could about nuclear energy and the nuclear industry. He recognized that he and his skilled colleagues could build tools that could address obstacles that slowed work and added costs.

Atomic Canyon has just announced a cooperative project with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) that will train ORNL’s Frontier – currently the world’s fastest supercomputer, capable of more than a quintillion calculations per second – how to understand nuclear terminology. The resulting model will not be trained on proprietary or safety related information on the design and operation of nuclear power, but it will help analyzing the deep library of regulatory guides, inspection reports, and other publicly available documents to assist in increasing safety and accountability.

The products (models) created by the partnership will be open source and available to become part of the toolbox for other developers.

Trey and I had a fascinating conversation. I think you will agree.

Left to right in photo: Trey Lauderdale, Atomic Canyon CEO Kristian Kielhofner, Atomic Canyon CTO Richard Klafter, Atomic Canyon Lead AI Architect Tom Evans, ORNL Research Scientist Photo Credit: Genevieve Martin, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Knox News provides a local perspective on Atomic Canyon’s project using Frontier: AI for nuclear plants? ORNL supercomputer’s new task is no sci-fi – it’s a clean energy win

Emmet Penney is an unlikely, but effective pronuclear advocate. He earned his degrees in fine arts and great books and worked for several years as a professional poet – along with working in a bookstore as a way to keep paying the bills.

He gradually transitioned from poetry into writing thoughtful essays on a variety of topics. One of those pieces caught the attention of Michael Shellenberger and began the process of converting Emmet into a passionate, erudite pronuclear advocate who reads voraciously about all topics that interest him. That attribute has given him a remarkable depth of understanding about the nuclear industry, its history and its prospects that is not complicated by the detailed engineering education that often leads to confusing public communications.

Emmet and I engaged in a wide-ranging conversation that touched on such diverse topics as why the Environmental Movement chose to take action that was harmful to the environment by focusing its attentions against nuclear energy and how the republican notion of an economy of small holders conflicted with the liberal notion of rapid technological progress and corporate management. (Notice that words like “environment”, “republican” and “liberal” that are written with lower case letters do not mean the same thing as when written with capital letters.)

I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation and expect that you will find it engaging as well.

Doug Sandridge is a lifelong oil and gas guy whose father was a geological engineer. While he was growing up, Doug lived a significant portion of his life overseas as his father’s job took the family to several different locations. When it was time to go to college, Doug returned to the United State to attend the University of Oklahoma. He took a brief detour into architecture, but by his second year he shifted his focus to engineering and petroleum-related topics.

During the past 40 years, he has pursued a career as a land man, which requires a blend of technical skills, specific legal acumen, negotiating expertise and real estate development. His career was inspired by his father, but he has also been dedicated to the task of finding and producing the affordable fuels that power our modern way of life.

In recent years he has begun advocating for nuclear energy after realizing that the industry was in trouble and closing plants that he had passively assumed would operate through their natural end of life. Although he had briefly declared his major to be nuclear engineering when transitioning away from architecture, he had spent his career not really thinking much about nuclear one way or another.

He linked up with the Save Diablo Canyon movement as a way to continue his education and do something positive. When he learned that other nuclear advocates were a bit wary of an oil and gas executive and heard some stating that the oil and gas industry had been working against nuclear for many years, he started an effort to mobilize other oil and gas leaders to declare their support of nuclear power.

The first result of his effort was the publication of a letter titled Declaration of Oil and Gas Executives for Nuclear Power. That letter was initially published on March 28, 2023. That date is probably not accidental; it was the 44th anniversary of the Three Mile Island event.

As you might notice, Atomic Insights is a little late to the response party for this important step forward. Mr. Sandridge has already appeared on several podcasts to discuss his letter, including Robert Bryce’s Power Hungry and Emmet Penny’s Nuclear Barbarians. Perhaps the first podcast to notice Doug’s intriguing background for a pro-nuclear advocate was Irina Slav on Energy. That interview was published more than two years ago.

Unlike those terrific podcasts, Atomic Insights has a long established reputation as a reference for instances in which fossil fuel interests – a term that is far broader than the term “oil and gas companies” – have worked openly or behind the scenes to slow or stop nuclear energy development.

We acknowledge that the vast majority of the people that work in oil and gas are not antinuclear, the term “fossil fuel interests” largely refers to people at the very top of organizations, the ones that create strategies and take market-focused actions. It also refers to people like Vladimir Putin and other global leaders that are almost completely dependent on the wealth and power provided by controlling fossil fuels and who consistently seek to adjust the energy supply-demand balance to provide outsized financial returns and other geopolitical goals.

Doug and I had a terrific conversation. I think you will enjoy the opportunity to learn more about the petroleum industry and the ways that it has recently begun making tangible steps towards nuclear energy as a source of power for their energy intensive production processes and as a technology that offers them a path for profitably transitioning to a clean energy economy.

Doug publishes a Substack called Energy Ruminations. Please visit to find his unique perspective on energy issues.

James Krellenstein is a physicist, consultant and nuclear energy historian. He is currently employed as a senior advisor to Global Health Strategies. He started up their decarbonization practice with an emphasis on nuclear energy along with renewables. He was the lead author on GEH’s report on ways to reduce global dependence on Russia for necessary supplies of enriched uranium.

He had the unusual and fortunate experience of growing up with a father who was a nuclear engineer turned nuclear financial specialist and a grandfather who ran a custom manufacturing machinery production facility. Both were the kind of professionals that enjoyed their work enough to “bring it home” for discussions around the dinner table and while engaging in bonding activities like fishing and camping.

(I know what that is like from both sides of the parent/grandparent/child relationship.)

James has become a bit of an “overnight sensation” in the world of pronuclear podcasting most notably with repeat appearances on Dr. Chris Keefer’s Decouple Podcast and Age of Miracles, hosted by Packy McCormick and Julia DeWahl. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the US nuclear industry and a unique perspective on current and future actions needed to restore its prominence.

I was motivated to invite him for a chat after listening to his thoughts on the relationship between reactor size and the cost of produced electricity.

We talked about the need for a larger catalog of options that can meet the needs of a wider variety of customers, the advantages of larger sizes in producing bulk electricity in grids and markets that can accommodate the output, and the differences between seeing reactors as a product that might be manufactured or seeing them as a “stick-built” factory that produces a bulk commodity.

Though our emphasis and perspectives are different, we hold similar points of view. Our conclusions for prioritization vary considerably.

I think you will learn something from this show and hope that you will take the time to share your thoughts on the topics discussed. Though there are many who dismiss the importance of conversation and discussion compared to concrete action that gets things done, it’s hard to successfully complete the latter without responsible and involved people engaging in the former.

Stefano Buono is a physicist and the successful founder of Advanced Accelerator Applications, a multibillion dollar company that pioneered the use of several therapeutic medical isotopes. After making several people very rich, including himself, he sold the medical isotope business and returned to his early 1990s field of study – nuclear fission reactors using molten lead as a coolant.

About two years ago, Stefano Buono and some of his colleagues and associates founded newcleo, a company with Italian roots based in the UK. Last year, newcleo ran two successful rounds of start-up funding that netted the company a total of €400 M. After passing through several important milestones, it is raising a subsequent round with a target of €1 B for continued development and for a state-of-the-art fuel manufacturing plant.

Dr. Buono visited the Atomic Show to share his insights on the paths to success as an entrepreneur in a deeply technical and undervalued field and on the role that timing – both planned and fortunate – plays in business success. He is convinced that it is a good time to be building a nuclear fission energy company.

Lead cooling for reactors has a long history with some demonstrated success. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet Union operated a class of submarines called the Alfa class, which were famously the fastest and deepest diving submarines in the world at the time. Seven subs were completed and operated with both impressive performance and technical issues that limited their reliability and service life.

The reactors in those submarines were metal cooled thermal reactors using lead-bismuth eutectic for cooling and beryllium for moderation.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent economic conditions halted most lead cooled reactor development in Russia, but it resulted in a diaspora of Soviet scientists and engineers that stimulated research and development of the technology in Europe, especially in Italy and Sweden.

For several reasons, the lead cooled reactor community moved from lead-bismuth towards pure lead and away from beryllium moderation.

Compared to water, lead is virtually invisible to neutrons, letting fission neutrons remain in the fast spectrum. Fast neutrons will fission all actinide materials, allowing reactors to advantageously consume the long-lived components of used nuclear fuel and to breed new fuel from fertile materials like Uranium 238.

Lead remains in liquid form at temperatures far above reactor operating temperatures, eliminating the need to pressurize the coolant system. Compared to sodium, the molten metal that has been used more frequently by reactor designers, lead is not subject to explosive or flammable reactions if it comes in contact with water or air. Though sodium-cooled reactor designers have devised ways to ensure safe use of their chosen fuel, the techniques require additional systems and components that add cost.

One disadvantage of lead has limited its attractiveness as a coolant. At the temperatures of interest for a reactor, corrosion rates in contact with stainless steel can cause operational problems. For the Alfa class submarines, corrosion products created some clogging issues – mainly in small diameter piping like that found in steam generators.

newcleo, Stefano’s company, is taking advantage of research and development conducted during the 40+ years since the Alfa’s were designed and operated. That research and testing has proven several different techniques that can be used to limit the effects of corrosion and that also offer the opportunity for future improvements that will enable even higher operating temperatures in subsequent reactor models.

During Atomic Show #313, we talked about advantages and challenges of lead cooling, the use of mixed oxide (MOX) fuel, the company’s phased technology development program, its licensing strategy, its options for initial deployment and the reasons that now is a great time to be developing nuclear fission power systems in Europe.

This show should provide plenty of food for thought. Please participate in the discussion using the comment features here.

Zeno Power makes cost-effective radioisotope power systems (RPS) for some of the most challenging environments in the solar system. Its systems use a proprietary package that allows a wider variety of isotopes to perform functions previously reserved for Pu-238, a rare isotope that is slowly produced at great expense.

RPS’s produce power and/or heat by usefully capturing the energy released when radioactive materials decay. Diminishing quantities of heat are produced as the materials release their alpha, beta and/or gamma emissions, with the production rate being governed by the half life of the isotope. It is a power source that is predictable as time; it can neither be accelerated nor decelerated.

By continuously producing useful power for decades at a time without a break, radioisotopes have enabled exploration of the most distant reaches of our solar system while remaining capable of relaying their findings back to Earth. It is a well established technology that has been used since the very beginning of the Atomic Age.

The majority of the radioisotope power supplies that have powered past space missions have used Pu-238, a marvelously capable isotope. It has an 87-year half life and decays with a pure, easily shielded, high-energy alpha particle. Unfortunately, it is slowly produced in specialized reactors and needs expensive processing and refinement. As a result, Pu-238 costs tens of millions of dollars per kilogram. It is only available for the most carefully screened mission applications.

Strontium-90 has good characteristics as a heat source for RPS. It has a 28.1-year half life and it decays with an energetic beta emission that is reasonably easy to shield.

With its relatively high specific heat generation, Sr-90 has been used in the past for terrestrial applications, but its decay produces occasional gamma radiation in addition to the dominant, heat-producing beta emission. Additionally, as the high energy beta interacts with conventional shielding materials, it produces bremsstrahlung radiations that must also be shielded. As a result Sr-90-based power systems require enough shielding to make them too heavy to launch into space.

Sr-90 RPS have been used to power remote light houses, underwater sensors, navigational buoys and remote weather monitors. Alternative, lower-cost power sources have gradually replaced Sr-90 RPS for each of those applications.

By the 1990s, the US had stopped producing Sr-90 RPS and was decommissioning the systems that had been deployed. A 2009 paper titled End of an Era and Closing the Circle – Disposal of Strontium-90 Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators contains a statement that almost sounds like a eulogy. “This unique and creative use of nuclear technology is fading into obscurity and soon will be forever a thing of the past.”

Times have changed. With a dramatically growing business of satellites plus lunar and planetary exploration, there is a crying need for reliable power supplies that are more affordable and more available than the ones that need Pu-238. Sr-90 is still available and it still has the physical properties that attracted early developers, but the technology for capturing the energy needed improvement before it could be considered a solution for the growing market.

During the 2016-2018 period, a trio of Vanderbilt students joined with a professor to find a useful product meeting the needs of identified customers. They wanted to be entrepreneurs and all of them loved science, engineering and creating cool things. They realized early that successful companies produced products that met customer needs at a price they were willing to pay. Any other creations were mere science projects.

Their market research led them to a decision to develop mission-capable radioisotope power systems that could take advantage of isotopes that were more available and more affordable than Pu-238. Strontium-90 (Sr-90), an isotope with a track record as a viable source material for RPS was an obvious starting point. Sr-90 is much more available than Pu-238; it is near the top of the yield curve of radioactive by-products produced in all fission reactors.

Zeno Power’s innovation is a proprietary shielding system that substantially reduces the system weight of an RPS that uses isotopes with a significant gamma component associated with their decay. There are other isotopes with differing characteristics that might eventually be useful in an expanding universe of applications.

Tyler Bernstein, CEO of Zeno Power, visited the Atomic Show to describe his company’s history, products, ethos and mission.

During the relatively short period since its founding, Zeno Power has captured the attention of the space industry and the Department of Energy. With concrete evidence of that interest is has convinced investors that has a clear line of sight to being a growing, profitable company. It has made a few contract announcements already. Tyler promised us that there are more to come in the near future. When the time is right, he will return to provide additional information.

I’m sure you will enjoy this episode. Please participate in the comment section. Questions are always welcome. If you like what you hear, please provide a review on your podcast application(s) of choice.

Mary Jo Rogers is a trained clinical psychologist who developed her interest workforce safety cultures and leadership in the nuclear power sector while consulting and working for ComEd (later Exelon). At the time she began her work, ComEd was a perennially under-performing utility with new leaders that were committed to turning it into the best nuclear plant operator in the United States. That leadership team included Oliver Kingsley and Chris Crane at the operating level and John Rowe at the corporate level.

Dr. Rogers learned many lessons in leadership, and safety culture and observed the way that implementing strong programs that protected workers also helped to improve operational performance. She took those lessons with her to a major consulting group that served the entire nuclear industry. She wrote a book titled Nuclear Energy Leadership: Lessons Learned from U.S. Operators and founded Rogers Leadership Group which provides safety culture and leadership consulting to organizations in a variety of potentially hazardous industries.

Mary Jo visited the Atomic Show to share her perspectives on the importance of leadership in creating a high performance organization. We talked about the relationship between safety culture and operational excellence along with the question of whether one has to make tradeoffs between safety culture and cost culture.

You will enjoy this episode. Please participate in the comment section.

In the past few years, there has been a strong revival of interest in using nuclear fission energy to power space travel and planetary exploration. There have also been new developments in radioisotope thermal generators that will make them more widely available with greater energy density. Though there has been interest in using nuclear energy in space since the earliest days of the Atomic Age, financial support has waxed and waned with changing program priorities. George Bush was president the last time there was this much investment in space nuclear power.

Members of the US Nuclear Industry Council that have an interest in developing and deploying space nuclear energy systems created a working group to help them cooperate in ways that further their common interests.

Ron Faibish, chair of US NIC’s Space and Emerging Technologies Working Group visited the Atomic Show to talk about the nuclear systems being developed for space power and propulsion. We discussed propulsion options including nuclear thermal rockets and nuclear powered electric propulsion. We talked about the power requirements for early applications and about the materials technology improvement that will enable better performance.

You should enjoy the visionary nature of this episode and the way space explorers are planning to use technologies that are well advanced on the TRL (technical readiness level) scale.

Please take the time to share your thoughts in the comment section. Reader contributions add significant value here.

Matt Huber is a professor of geography at Syracuse University. He writes about energy, economies and the way that energy sources have influenced modern societies and economies.

One of his first books was Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (2013) which is very briefly described as follows:

Looking beyond the usual culprits, “Lifeblood” finds a deeper and more complex explanation in everyday practices of oil consumption in American culture. Matthew Huber, associate professor of geography and the environment, uses oil to retell American political history from the triumph of New Deal liberalism to the rise of the New Right, from oil’s celebration as the lifeblood of postwar capitalism to increasing anxieties over oil addiction.

In April 2022, Huber published a significant piece in Jacobin with Fred Stafford that explains how his research has revealed that most of the financial benefits associated with renewable power system development and electricity production “deregulation” have been captured by entities that the Left is supposed to dislike.

When we look at the actually existing decentralized renewable energy industry, we see many things the Left should abhor — deregulated markets, tax shelters for corporations, a rentier development model, and an anti-union industry dependent upon a transient and insecure workforce.

Though the environmental left may not want to accept it, the small-is-beautiful approach of decentralized energy provides ideological cover for a ruthless form of renewable energy capitalism. And even worse, it threatens our fight to halt climate change in its tracks.

Huber believes that large, capital intensive power plants have been valuable investments as anchors in our electricity grid. Contrary to the characterizations offered by critics and advocates of radical transformation, he believes that the grid is one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century and that we should add to its capabilities instead of seeking to completely rebuild it with a different generation model.

He notes that emission-free nuclear power plants provide many of the same benefits for workforces, local economies, and grid stability as large coal plants. He is strongly supportive of the coal-nuclear path that is gaining favor with the government and utilities.

Huber and I share strong negative feelings about the work (damage) done by a couple of influential renewable energy gurus – Amory Lovins and Mark Z. Jacobson. We also share deep respect for the work that Meredith Angwin is doing on educating the public and government leaders about the way our electrical grid is trending to a greater state of disfunction and fragility. (We both recommend that people buy her book Shorting the Grid, The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid.)

I hope you enjoy the show, even if Huber’s self-description as a Marxist gives you an immediate sense of discomfort.

Please participate in the conversation. Comments sections on Atomic Insights are often at least as enlightening as the original posts.