YouSaid · the spoken record

Bill Brown

lines on the record: 15
first: 2020-05-27
most recent: 2020-05-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“All over the world, and you end up seeing people from Africa and India and different developing nations and say, you know, we don't just want solar, we want more integrated grids that can provide us power day and night. And we've had interns, for instance, from different African countries and really look into what does that require. So I think it's an exciting thing, but it's a cool thing to think about how all these tools could be used. Energy is, you know, the expenditures on energy per year globally is $6 trillion. So it's a huge market that needs a lot of all of the above.”
2020-05-27 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Future of Sustainable Nuclear Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We can be so insular here in the United States, and I think we do hear about like, okay, the world is developing, the world needs more power, and largely that's going to fossil fuels. I think people forget here too that nuclear is between 60 and 70% of our clean energy in the United States alone, with a lot of the rest of that being hydro, we really have to think about all the tools on deck as far as how do we not just grow population, grow energy use, and do it sustainably. I think it's, you know, when we get outside the United States, and Jake and I are various people on our team go to conferences”
2020-05-27 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Future of Sustainable Nuclear Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the end of the day, what we look at is the need for power is only going to increase across the world, especially when you think about the fact that there's about a billion people who don't really have access. We have to think about how we develop that out. And a key enabler to that are technologies that are going to be producing controlled, dispatchable power when you need it, and can scale. And Fission is going to have to be one of the heavy lifters here. And I think it will be. And I think it's a pretty kind of exciting time too when you look at the hard tech development going on in these other spaces in the energy sphere, because one is it validates that these things can be successful, that investments in technology development can work in these areas across a broad swath of different approaches. And that just helps draw more capital in the system and help us get more technologies and things deployed to market.”
2020-05-27 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Future of Sustainable Nuclear Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that we've heard from people and utilities or potential consumers is like, well, I'm interested in this, but is it like a 10-year timeline to go through the regulatory process? And how does that look as far as burden for me? One of the things we've been trying to really look at is with our application for this very first one, how can we ensure that the following ones are as simple as possible so we can use do as much encompassing analysis for this first one that we'll basically already encompass what could happen at the next one at a different site or this site. So for instance, we try to do extreme analyses for seismic. So if we're citing one area, do we have to redo all of our seismic analysis for another area? If we've already analyzed our design against really bad earthquake scenarios, right? And I'm kind of simplifying it, but then we can kind of say, okay, this analysis still holds for this next site. There are still maybe some really, really extreme sites that we'd have to do additional analysis. But what our goal was is try to make it more or less copy and paste. And one of the interesting things”
2020-05-27 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Future of Sustainable Nuclear Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nuclear energy already provides around 10% of the world's electricity and is the world's second largest source of low carbon power. As Oklo COO, Carolyn Cochrane leads the company's regulatory process, which has led to the Department of Energy approving Oaklo's plan to build their Aurora micromodular reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory.”
2020-05-27 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Future of Sustainable Nuclear Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going to be working with the Department of Energy's materials that they have from use fuel actually from that reactor that I just described and actually reusing that material as fuel in our reactor, actually doing that right kind of off the bat showing that this can be done. So it's a pretty elegant solution to what's considered one of the bigger problems. It's actually a pretty big opportunity. And to put some numbers on it, these are taken based on the US total amounts of the use fuel and also sort of the byproducts of uranium enrichment. There's generally enough energy content and all of those materials to provide for power for the United States for a thousand years, all of our power needs for a thousand years.”
2020-05-27 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Future of Sustainable Nuclear Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The ability for a reactor to recycle its own waste isn't unique to Oaklo. Between the 1960s to the 1990s, a reactor in Idaho was recycling its own waste fuels. What is unique, however, is Oklo's ability to reuse that exact material as a fuel source today.”
2020-05-27 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Future of Sustainable Nuclear Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What we end up discharging from a reactor, these fission products, the byproducts of fission, and they're still going to have a half-life on the order of about on average 30 years. But that's much better when you're talking than some of the things you're breaking apart to make those, which have half-lives sometimes in the order of hundreds of thousands of years”
2020-05-27 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Future of Sustainable Nuclear Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because uranium absorbs neutrons and over time transmutes. And those are the things that actually dictate the long lifetimes for nuclear waste. Use fuel today has long storage timelines, largely driven by those elements, those isotopes. Well, when you have fast neutrons, you can actually fission them, which is a really elegant way of breaking them into shorter-lived byproducts while also extracting a lot of energy in the process. So it's a really elegant way of basically managing kind of a situation and reducing effectively the waste half-lives and the waste lifetimes in there. So that's effective what we do, right? We're a fast reactor. And because we have the capability then to actually tap into the energy reserves and these actinides that you couldn't otherwise do, you're able to then reduce the half-lives of the effective byproducts at the end while extracting energy. What that looks like is by fissioning those things, those byproducts are much shorter, have much shorter half-lives. They still have still has a lifetime.”
2020-05-27 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Future of Sustainable Nuclear Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In our reactor, we are what's called a fast reactor. So we let those neutrons kind of run as they're born, which is fast. We do need more fuel to accommodate that. But the cool thing is they're pretty hard to catch, but that means that not many things other than the fuel catch them. So we can run for quite a bit longer before you end up sort of depleting the fuel and you're not poisoned or other things aren't really parasitically absorbing neutrons to slow the reactor, to stop the reaction in the same way it does in a slower neutron system. The other cool thing is because the neutrons are going fast, they carry energy with them. And that helps them actually cause fission in pretty much all of the actinides, which are, if you think about the periodic table, the very lower rows that stick out kind of separate from everything else, the things that go to the right over from uranium, things like Neptunium, plutonium, and rhesium, curium, those are the actinides. And the reason those matters, those build up over time in a reaction.”
2020-05-27 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Future of Sustainable Nuclear Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In other words, absorb. And that's useful because it helps us have less fuel. We need less fuel then to keep the reaction going because the neutrons are easier to catch. But when they're going slow, they're easier to catch. Just like if you throw a very lofted pass in football, it's a lot easier to intercept that pass.”
2020-05-27 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Future of Sustainable Nuclear Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the biggest concerns with nuclear power has always been the waste byproduct, but you actually recycle your fuel and convert that waste into energy. How have you achieved that and how applicable could that technology be to existing plants and their waste? Yeah, it's a great question. Something I've spent a decent amount of my time working on throughout my life. So if you don't mind, I'll get a little bit in the weeds. No, please do. We like the weeds. When you split an atom through vision, one of the things you do is you also release a couple neutrons, usually two to three, and those then can continue on and continue the chain reaction. When you do that, though, when they're born, those neutrons are emitted from the fission process with quite a bit of energy. So they're going really, really fast. And in today's reactors, we slow those neutrons down by bouncing them off of the light atoms, like lightweight atoms like hydrogen and water. The reason we do that is it slows the neutrons down and makes them easier to catch.”
2020-05-27 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Future of Sustainable Nuclear Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very good at expanding under temperature, and that's a really important characteristic because as it heats up, it expands, that actually shuts the reactor down. And then you combine that with effectively liquid metal cooling, something that's also really good at moving heat. And that opens up the door to have a system that's pretty simple, pretty small.”
2020-05-27 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Future of Sustainable Nuclear Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So walk us through the technology behind Oak Lowe's version of advanced fission and how does it compare to the large cooling tower dominated nuclear plant that most people probably envision when they think about it? Yeah, for sure. So today's reactors use water primarily as the coolant, and they're also very, very big, right? So you're talking about typically one gigawatt. That's a lot of power, right? And systems that like you described are pretty large physically. What we've done is kind of go in a route where we think going smaller and simplifying things is really one of the key factors here to realizing, I think, the promise that we have in the atom. And so we do that by building on a fuel form that's been demonstrated and proven. It's very robust in basically decades of operational experience in reactors, metallic fuels. They're very highly thermally conductive, so they're great at removing heat. They are pretty easily made, so it's good for fabrication and costs. And they're also...”
2020-05-27 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Future of Sustainable Nuclear Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If reactors could be made smaller, they could be far less costly to build, safer to operate, and easier to locate, particularly in places where other green technologies like solar and wind energy cannot efficiently provide power. Following some of the smartest venture investing in this space led us to Jacob DeWitt and Carolyn Cochrane, co-founders of Oaklow, an early advanced fission company developing small-scale nuclear power plants.”
2020-05-27 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · The Future of Sustainable Nuclear Energy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT