The Honorable Dr. Kathryn Huff is an associate professor in the nuclear, plasma and radiological engineering department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is the director of the Advanced Reactor Fuels laboratory and currently specializes in nuclear reactor core neutronics and multi-physics modeling.

She served as the Assistant Secretary of Energy for Nuclear Energy from May of 2022 through May of 2024.

We talked about her tenure at the Department of Energy and the somewhat jarring transition from being a university professor with frequent contact with undergraduate students to running a bureaucratic agency inside the Washington beltway. We chatted about the Byzantine and somewhat plodding nature of the federal budgetary process and the reasons why the process was designed to insert a certain amount of deliberative reviews and second checks before making decisions, especially when they carried large monetary implications.

We paid a little extra attention to the process of implementing the Congressional appropriation of $2.72 B for the Domestic Low Enriched Uranium Supply Chain.

We discussed some of the more enjoyable aspects of her position, including the opportunities to teach both decision makers and staff members about the utility of nuclear energy and some of the reasons why it is such a fascinating and important scientific, technological and economic topic. We spoke about her visits to national labs, universities and international centers of nuclear energy research and development.

She mentioned that the opportunity to host students and other groups of young people was one of the most rewarding and enjoyable aspects of her job. She appreciated the opportunity to share some of her excitement about nuclear energy.

We also talked about several recent Executive Orders with the potential for significant impact on energy in general and nuclear energy more specifically.

One of the Executive Orders that we discussed does not include the word “energy” in its title or anywhere in its text, but it holds the potential to make an impact on the future of nuclear energy development. Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies addresses the independence of certain agencies, including the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, within the Executive Branch of the federal government. The NRC’s independence has often been described as a major component of its effectiveness as a regulatory body.

Dr. Huff joined with two colleagues to publish a commentary in Scientific American about the possible implications of reducing the NRC’s independence. On the Atomic Show, she offered her perspective and provided some concerns worth thinking about.

I hope you enjoy this episode. Please participate in the comment discussion, but be aware that comments will be closed sometime after they’ve been open for two weeks.

Aalo Atomics is a two year old micro reactor company founded by Matt Loszak, a serial entrepreneur, and Yasir Arafat, a skilled nuclear engineer who previously lead the DOE’s MARVEL advanced micro-reactor demonstration project.

Note: At Nucleation Capital, we were impressed enough with the company and the team to add it to our growing portfolio of advanced nuclear energy companies.

Matt Loszak, Aalo’s CEO, visited the Atomic Show to discuss his company’s current plans, its evolved power plant design, its progress towards becoming a reactor manufacturing company and the process by which it selected its initial target customer base and devised a product aimed directly at serving their needs.

The initial Aalo plan was to scale up and commercialize the MARVEL reactor concept, taking advantage of its rapid progress and projected early operation. A variety of circumstances have combined to delay the MARVEL project by at least 1-2 years. With that delay, the idea of using MARVEL data as part of the licensing basis for Aalo became less viable.

As a result of additional market and supply chain influences, Aalo has made significant changes to the original, MARVEL-based design.

Aalo’s has designed a sodium cooled thermal reactor with both a primary and a secondary sodium loop. The reactor fuel is uranium dioxide with enrichment of 5-10%, putting it into the category of LEU+. The fuel form will be as close to available commercial reactor fuel as possible.

The secondary sodium loop will include a double tube heat steam generator that will produce steam at approximately 500℃. The optimized power plant design for Aalo’s initial customer base of large data centers is called the Aalo Pod. It will include 5 reactor steam generating systems each capable of supplying about 25 MWth. The output of all five steam supply systems will be combined to supply a single 50 MWe steam turbine.

The steam turbine selected for the system will be one that has a reasonably flat operating curve over a range of steam flows so that it can efficiently supply electricity even if one or more of the reactors is shutdown for maintenance/refueling.

The company has focused on designing its system to be readily manufactured and efficiently assembled. Aalo moved into a 40,000 ft² industrial building in Austin, Texas in August of 2024 and it is now outfitting that building to be a pilot line manufacturing facility for its initial units. The company has scheduled a grand opening ceremony for the factory in early April 2025. Moving fast is a core part of its commercialization roadmap.

Aalo has purchased a plot of land in or near Austin and plans to build a non-nuclear heated prototype facility where it can perform a number of sodium and heat transfer tests.

It has obtained permission to follow a DOE authorization path to obtain permission to build and operate its nuclear prototype reactor on a site at the Idaho National Laboratory near the facilities that once were home to the Experimental Breeder Reactor II and are now the DOE’s DOME (Demonstration of Microreactors Experiments) test site.

It is one of four reactor vendors (along with Terrestrial Energy, Natura and Kairos) selected to build a small and micro reactor hub on the Rellis Campus of Texas A&M. Eventually, the site owners envision that the total power generating capacity at the site will be approximately 1 GWe from a significant number of nuclear power plants.

You can learn more details about Aalo Atomics and Matt Loszak by listening to the show. As always, comments are welcome, though the comment window will close in about 2 weeks. (A site that has been on the web as long as Atomic Insights attracts a lot of spam attempts.)

Deep Isolation is one of Nucleation Capital’s more impactful portfolio companies because its technology can enable greater success for most of the rest of the companies – and for the entire nuclear energy sector.

The company has been developing, testing and refining its systematic approach to nuclear waste disposal for a decade. Despite the fact that it is addressing one of the few remaining items that limits the acceptance of nuclear energy and its ability to rapidly expand to supply the clean firm power that our industrial society needs to thrive, few people have heard of the company. Even fewer include its technology in the discussions surrounding the inevitable question in nuclear energy discussions “What do we do with the waste?”

Deep Isolation is founded on a brilliant technical inspiration by Dr. Richard Muller. Recognized the commercial potential of the invention Muller teamed up with his daughter, Elizabeth Muller to transform the idea into a venture . They realized that deep geologic disposal is a nearly universally accepted – among scientific and technical experts – method to permanently dispose of high level radioactive materials.

Muller recognized that one significant challenge was the difficulty of siting and building conventional mined repositories. These repositories would need to meet completely different criteria that those that governed traditional materials and fuels mines, making reuse of existing mines difficult, if not impossible. Specially created mines producing no commercially valuable materials would be extraordinarily expensive to develop.

The cost of creating mined repositories stimulated most nations to plan for one or very few repositories, adding to the political cost and the transportation cost associated with siting and operating the repository.

Muller’s brilliant solution to these challenges was to take advantage of the fact that tens of thousands of very deep holes were being drilled every year by the established oil and gas industry. Not only were those holes being bored several thousand feet deep – well below all existing aquifers, but also the drillers had invented and refined techniques for gradually bending the holes into a horizontal direction.

These horizontal borings – often called “laterals” – are used in the hydrocarbon extraction business to gain access to far more extensive volumes of fuel-containing rock. For purposes of radioactive waste disposal, the laterals provide a large volume into which containers of high level waste – in a variety of forms – can be placed and isolated for millions of years.

As a result of drilling tens of thousands of wells in a highly competitive business, the drilling industry has become very skilled at creating high-quality, cost-effective tools and efficiently employing them. The resulting technology ecosystem can be efficiently used in a modular, distributed fashion, enabling multiple, strategically sited repositories. That allows waste to be permanently stored near where it was generated. This concept will lower transportation costs while addressing several legitimate political objections.

Rod Baltzer, the CEO of Deep Isolation, visited the Atomic Show for episode #327. We discussed the above in even greater detail. I believe you will find the show to be valuable and informative. Please use the comment section to ask questions or engage in discussion. Comments will close in 2 weeks.

Jigar Shah has had a lengthy career as an energy industry entrepreneur and strategic thinker. He founded Sun Edison and helped to create a new model for deploying solar power systems. He was part of the Carbon War Room and then founded Generate Capital to provide loans to proven technologies that had not yet achieved commercial scale. He was a member of the Energy Gang during its formative years as a podcast with a formidable listener base.

Following his success in the commercial sector, Jigar was appointed to be the Director of the Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office (LPO). He started at LPO in March of 2021, soon after the start of the Biden Administration, and served until January of 2025. During those years, the loan granting capacity of the LPO grew from $40 B to $400 B, primarily as a result of provisions included in the Inflation Reduction Act.

During our conversation, we focused on the efforts that the LPO made to improve the nuclear industry’s capability to develop and complete large, complex projects involving both public and private financing. We discussed how America seemed to have lost its ability to build big things and what could be done to regain that ability.

We talked about the DOE liftoff reports and other efforts to guide the nuclear industry towards a more sustainable and successful development model. We discussed the various sizes of reactors being developed and the ways that a variety of sizes can open new markets and also provide vital practice in building successful nuclear projects.

You’ll want to listen to the whole show if you are curious about Jigar’s next endeavors. An early reveal is that he has returned to podcasting at Open Circuit, joining Katherine Hamilton and Stephen Lacey, his former colleagues on The Energy Gang.

After many years as an independent journalist with an antinuclear bent, Marco Visscher began questioning his long-held beliefs. He realized that the accepted alternatives to fossil fuel were not actually reducing fossil fuel use so much as they were limiting the rate at which it was increasing. He began acknowledging that nuclear energy was a large source of CO2-free power that was worth a deeper look than he had been giving it.

As he moved past the information sources that had provided his animosity towards nuclear, he found out that there was a deeper, more interesting story to tell about the power source and its history.

He decided there was a book in what he was learning. That book, initially published in Dutch in 2022, is called The Power of Nuclear; The Rise, Fall and Return of Our Mightiest Energy Source. In late 2024, the book was published in English. As longtime readers might imagine, my favorite part of that subtile is the “Return” part.

Aside: Encouraging and participating in the return of nuclear energy growth is the focus of my professional life, both at Atomic Insights and in my role as a managing partner at Nucleation Capital. End Aside.

In some ways, the arc of Visscher’s book reminds me of the narrative arc of Oliver Stone’s Nuclear Now. It starts with the history of radiation and the development of the atomic bomb and ends in the modern era with the recognition that nuclear energy offers a clean and capable new energy source that might gradually displace fossil fuels and their dominance in our society.

During our discussion we talked about nuclear energy opposition, the role of nuclear fear, the inability of the nuclear industry to effectively communicate its positive story, other energy alternatives and the potential to achieve the tripling of nuclear capacity that has been envisioned by a growing group of countries led by the U.S. the UK, France, South Korea and Japan..

Aside: After reviewing the show, I realized that I should apologize to both listeners and to Mr. Visscher. I spent way too much time talking about the involvement of the Rockefeller Foundation in creating the basis for the “no safe dose” of radiation model and its effect on public fears. It’s an interesting part of nuclear energy’s history, but there are many other important stories worth telling. End Aside.

Jay Hakes, an accomplished author and historian, visited the Atomic Show to talk about his recently published book, Presidents and the Planet: Climate Change Science and Politics from Eisenhower to Bush. Sometimes referred to as “the untold story of climate change,” Hake’s book is an enlightening jaunt through a history discovered during long days in archives and Presidential libraries.

Though some of the most vocal proponents of climate change action tell a history story about a public and political understanding that begins sometime during the 1980s, with the actions of people like James Hansen, the truth that Hakes discovered was that presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Carter and their staffs knew there was a growing body of science indicating that increasing atmospheric concentration of CO2 was a significant problem.

Hakes and I talk about the period when scientists were actively trying to determine if the atmosphere was warming or cooling and the long term confusion, some of it purposeful, that has resulted from a debate that was generally resolved by the end of the 1970s.

We spoke about the odd period during the Carter Administration when there was both significant concern about the risks of atmospheric CO2 and an active program to increase coal consumption while slowing nuclear energy development to a crawl. Interestingly, Carter gave the power generation industry a chance to defend nuclear power before he produced his energy plan, but there is no evidence that the industry even mentioned nuclear’s lack of air pollution or greenhouse gas emissions.

Hakes’s research showed that much of the early science and political communications about climate change originated from the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). His research also showed that the AEC involvement led to a lengthy period when groups that classified themselves as part of the Environmental Movement took little or no interest in effectively addressing climate change. They believed it was something that only nuclear cheerleaders cared about.

Sadly, we now face a bit of an opposite problem. Some vocal nuclear proponents have come to the conclusion that climate change can’t be much of a problem since so many of its activists remain adamantly opposed to using nuclear energy as a powerful tool in the effort to limit the impact of climate change.

Like many nuclear energy supporters, I believe we lost a lot of time and added a much larger quantity of CO2 to the atmosphere than we would have if we had continued deploying nuclear power systems. The solution to that lost time, however, is to press forward.

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.