The Atomic Show

Julie Kozeracki was the lead author for a U.S. Department of Energy strategy document titled Pathways to Commercial Liftoff: Advanced Nuclear published in September 2024. The document was the result of a multi-agency, multi-lab effort to update a previously issued report.

During our conversation, Kozeracki described how the report was informed by changes in the market, by a study of experiences from other countries and other industries, and by a growing recognition of the importance of design completion in enabling cost and schedule adherence.

We talked about the utility of an expanding catalog of nuclear fission power systems that can meet the needs of a more diverse customer base and also the relatively new trend of increasing electricity demand led most prominently by data center expansion but also by electrification efforts for heating, transportation and industrial uses.

As others have noted, this edition of the advanced nuclear liftoff report makes a clear and compelling case for including large modern light water reactors – including, but not limited to the AP1000 – in the definition of “advanced nuclear”. But clear and compelling does not equal exclusive; the report also makes a good case for the fact that the market has room for a variety of reactor sizes and capabilities to meet the wide range of power demands of a diverse universe of customers.

Note for readers: We are breaking a long tradition at Atomic Insights. Bot activity has convinced us to disable comments.

Westinghouse’s eVinci is a 15 MWth, 5 MWe micro reactor. Westinghouse often refers to it as a nuclear battery.

Unlike conventional nuclear power plants, eVinci uses no water and doesn’t produce steam. The eVinci is not “just another way to boil water.”

There are no pumps in the system that moves heat out of the reactor. Instead, the system uses ~24′ long heat pipes to transfer fission heat to a heat exchanger.

That device serves the same function as a combustor (burner) in a fossil fuel heated Brayton cycle gas turbine. Atmospheric air is compressed and sent through the heat exchanger where it gets hotter and more energetic. That hot, compressed gas gets expanded through a turbine, causing it to rotate. The rotating turbine is connected to a generator that produces electricity with an efficiency of about 33%.

An eVinci will use an open air Brayton cycle gas turbine like those that are in a wide range of commercial applications. Gas turbines are not only well-understood devices, but they have a diverse supply chain and an experienced workforce with tens of thousands of builders, operators and maintainers. They are often manufactured by the thousands.

In another departure from the conventional way of doing things, eVinci uses rotating control drums instead of insertable control rods to adjust core reactivity and operating temperature. Shutdown rods are used during transport and to provide a secondary means of shutdown.

The fuel is TRISO coated particle fuel with high assay, low enriched uranium in the particles. The reactor operates in the thermal neutron spectrum with graphite as the moderator. The core isn’t in a pressurized fluid.

With its simple controls, small size and passive safety case, the eVinci is designed to be able to operate autonomously. Each core will last eight years or more.

Leah Crider, Westinghouse’s Vice President of Commercial Operations to the eVinci micro reactor, visited the Atomic Show to provide a system overview and to answer questions about the reactor, its history, its future, its applications and its potential impact on the energy market.

I think you’ll learn something from this show. Please participate in the comments and let us know what you think, especially if you have questions that were not addressed during the show.

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued a construction permit on September 16, 2024 to Abilene Christian University (ACU) to build a molten salt research reactor. This marked the first university research reactor approval in 30 years. It is the first liquid fuel reactor ever approved for construction by the NRC and only the second advanced reactor approved since the NRC was created in 1974.

Aside: The first advanced reactor construction permit was issued to Kairos for its Hermes in December 2023. End Aside

Natura Resources is the technology supplier for the important new facility. Andrew Harmon, Natura Resources Vice President of Operations and Business Development visited the Atomic Show to fill in some of the backstory about the project origins, the decision to pursue a research reactor as a step towards their ultimate goal of supplying a large number of factory-produced 100 MWe molten salt reactors, some of the major successes and challenges along the way and the level of community support that the project has attracted.

Developing a major new technology in a heavily regulated industry takes more time and resources than many might imagine. In this case, it involved a consortium that includes four major university partners, an enthusiastic group of local donors, a driven energy entrepreneur with a career spent moving expeditiously and safely, a supportive Department of Energy and a growing team of innovative engineers and developers. It also required significant cooperation and engagement with the NRC.

I’ll stop there and let Andrew fill in the details. I think you will enjoy this show. Please participate in the comment section. Respectful discussion and debate are welcome.

Urenco is one of the few companies in the world that enriches uranium. It’s one of an even smaller group of enrichers that aren’t owned by the Russian, Chinese or Iranian governments. It plays a key role in the western world’s nuclear fuel cycle.

That role became even more important after February, 2022.

With the increasingly firm prospects of a long term increase in demand for its foundational product of low enriched uranium (LEU) and a looming demand for new enrichment products like LEU+ (low enriched uranium that has greater than 5% and less than 10% U-235 content) and HALEU (high assay, low enriched uranium with U-236 concentration of 10-20%) Urenco has embarked on a program to expand its capacity.

Like most other nuclear industry participants, Urenco is a conservative company that carefully considers its investments before adding capacity that might not be needed. The nature of its production technology – incredibly sophisticated centrifuges that can spin continuously for decades if not excessively cycled – encourages even more caution in the direction of ensuring that there is demand before investing many millions into new production capacity.

Magnus Mori, Urenco’s head of marketing and technical sales, visited the Atomic Show to provide greater insights and details about Urenco’s history and unusual ownership structure, the factors that influence its investment decisions and the prospects that the company sees for future demand for its products. He explained the material flows into an out of an enrichment facility, including the actual compound that are handled at various stages of the process.

We spoke about the UK government’s support for new production capacity and its decision to invest in a new enrichment plant to produce HALEU. We even spoke about new businesses that use centrifuges to produce valuable medical, research and industrial materials that are not part of the nuclear energy fuel cycle.

I think you’ll enjoy this show. You might even learn some new details about the nuclear fuel cycle. Please participate in the comments.

The Nuclear Company exited a period of operating in “stealth mode” about a month ago. That exit was sufficiently well planned and executed that it is likely that Atomic Insights readers have already heard of the company.

The Nuclear Company was incorporated a year ago. Its founding team has been working diligently to build the relationships and agreements needed to accomplish their self-assigned task. The company has a goal to build an initial fleet of reactors with a capacity of 6 GWe. Those reactors will be built by a consistent team, financed using a structure whose outline will be disclosed in the coming months and using a design that has successfully completed an NRC design certification review AND has been built at least once somewhere in the world.

The company is also focused on sites that have already been through the early site permit process. Their project regulatory path is close to what was initially envisioned for an entity using the one-step Part 52 process. Choose a design that has been reviewed and approved, match it with a site that has been permitted and obtain a COL based on those two development steps.

The company also recognizes the acceleration opportunity associated with using existing COLs.

Juliann Edwards is the company’s chief development officer. She has extensive experience and contacts within the nuclear industry and currently serves as the US chairman for Women in Nuclear. I first met her when we were both working for B&W on the mPower reactor project more than a decade ago.

Juliann visited this show to tell us more about The Nuclear Company, focusing on its history, people, vision and accomplishments so far.

The vision and goals are aggressive and ambitious. But they don’t require any new scientific discoveries or technological inventions. That feature doesn’t guarantee success, but it makes it a little more achievable in a realistically chosen time frame. Sufficient resources – time, talent and treasure – must be invested, but the end result seems valuable enough to attract a starting critical mass.

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.