YouSaid · the spoken record

Dr. Huff

lines on the record
19
first
2024-03-15
most recent
2024-03-15
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Thinking, we talk very long term. I'm thinking much more short term about my wish list because I have a very tight schedule. Operating the dome is just two years away, 23 months. I need to make sure I get access to fuel. Something David mentioned is really challenging. And Outdrafa has been helping. We talk about this regularly and I appreciate it. It's hard. But it's still a challenge for us. I think a real micro reactor demonstration program from the federal side would probably be the single biggest thing we could do to accelerate our efforts to commercialization. And I think that would help cross-pollinate every other project that we have going on.”

    2024-03-15 · a16z Podcast · A Nuclear Comeback: Are New Reactors the Answer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “So it needs to be addressed at every scale. Out that burning trace radioactive materials and releasing them and these other energy forms is much less safe than nuclear waste, which is kept in containers and shipped and moved safely. Has caused no accents. Absolutely. Well, maybe to come full circle, Dr. Huff, in your recent testimony, you mentioned that recently at COP28, The US and 24 other countries signed an agreement to triple nuclear power by 2050. That's very exciting, but it also sounds quite lofty. And so what do you really think needs to be in place? We touched on some of these things, whether it's regulation, the workforce, et cetera, public opinion. A lot of these are shifting in terms of tides as well, I should say. So what's your take on how we actually achieve that goal and reverse this multi-year trend?”

    2024-03-15 · a16z Podcast · A Nuclear Comeback: Are New Reactors the Answer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “The nuclear reactor, the clean technology that's going to save lives and to have an equal bar for regulations so that they can pick it. Because one of the barriers right now will be the regulations for nuclear very challenging to cite these little reactors. And it's because they don't exist and we haven't planned for it yet, but that's what I think we need to start working on now so that 10 years from now, that future is achievable.”

    2024-03-15 · a16z Podcast · A Nuclear Comeback: Are New Reactors the Answer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Talk about this Alaskan town. There's one more thing that really motivates me about what we're doing in a lot of places. They use diesel generators only for prime power. The health implications of that are dramatic, right? A diesel gen set operating of, of course, will produce CO2, but more critically, more importantly, it's producing carcinogens, fumes that people are breathing in that area. They're breathing carcinogens. And if you look at what happens in a town over 20 years span, if you pick a diesel gen set instead of a reactor, there's something like 12 deaths that are going to occur prematurely from the use of diesel. Normal, natural, measured just at a rate, ending people's lives prematurely. So that's one of the things that really motivates me. And on the regulatory side, I think we've got to think about that case. We've got to make it possible at some point in the future for the decision makers in the town, this theoretical little town, to be able to pick”

    2024-03-15 · a16z Podcast · A Nuclear Comeback: Are New Reactors the Answer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “That's actually what we ran when we did the Hyperloop project at SpaceX. I was in charge of all the electrical work for it. We rented a big diesel jens and that ran this futuristic tube that we pumped down to vacuum and ran vehicles at 350 miles an hour in. It could be every reaction.”

    2024-03-15 · a16z Podcast · A Nuclear Comeback: Are New Reactors the Answer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Not only is it a mass produced reactor you can truck in, but you can truck out. This use in FEMA for temporary use is perfectly what the Kaleidos microactor is designed to do. Reactors don't carry themselves away and everything that was radioactive can be fully removed just on a normal truck and you leave a green field the day you leave. That's never been seen before in nuclear. I wanted to share that point.”

    2024-03-15 · a16z Podcast · A Nuclear Comeback: Are New Reactors the Answer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “So you've got the 50 a year and about 20 years they last. And so this kind of a thousand of them that we can go and put in the thousand most important places that there are. So these are like North Slope in Alaska, these really remote communities. The ocean freezes up for them and they have to store a huge amount of diesel and they can't get new over the winter. So you've got to plan ahead and have enough.”

    2024-03-15 · a16z Podcast · A Nuclear Comeback: Are New Reactors the Answer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah, so we'll start the 10 years in 2026. So ideally, And then by 2028, we have one commercial unit, just a few years later. To do that, we're really running two regulatory efforts in parallel and then three units in 2029, eight units in 2030, scaling on up until we're at 2036. We should be making 50 units a year, a reactor a week coming off a line. And the reactor we're developing, it's a heavy unit, but it can fit in a C-17 aircraft or on a truck, and you can move it around, get it wherever it needs to go in the world. The optimal use case is really replacing some diesel generators. And then a reactor lasts for five years, approximately out in the field, and then is shut down, and then we bring it back to that factory to refuel it. So it is not only a new reactor construction factory, but a line producing a bunch of new cores and a refueling facility, all co-located on the same 25 acre or so plot of land. And so what we would do is have a population of about a thousand of these out in the world because we're planning for a 20-year licensing time.”

    2024-03-15 · a16z Podcast · A Nuclear Comeback: Are New Reactors the Answer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Absolutely. So we've been looking at that code, learning about it, figuring out what our questions are, talking with the NRC. Actually, our kaleidos microreactor is now officially in pre-application, only very recently. We're on the NRC's website. They're planning for us in their budget so we can get that sorted out on time. So we'll be setting a reactor very quickly. We want to deploy a unit in 2028. But I think that's enough to unpack around regulations. We're going to build our unit with as much support as we can gather. We're not going to change our timeline. And we started to feel real support from the DOE. I want to say thanks for the support we have. We're working with Idaho National Laboratory. Radio is committed to being ready in 2026 to go into the dome. There's an old experimental breeder reactor dome that was converted to now do these microreactor demonstration experiments. A lot of work and effort and funds have gone to build that structure and we're still on target and ready to go use it as soon as it's available.”

    2024-03-15 · a16z Podcast · A Nuclear Comeback: Are New Reactors the Answer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Well, I think some of the changes are really just broad spectrum. We don't have reactors that are this small that can be built in a factory. I'm just going to talk about portable microreactors only. For us to succeed at doing that, our timeline has not changed since we started a company in 2020. We want to do a fuel demonstration in 2026. We're going to go through DOE authorization licensing, this path that exists at the national labs to go faster than normal, to do a test reactor at a test facility where you've got all the national labs support, the expertise, the poster radiation experiment labs. We're going to do that with our first unit. Our second unit, though, needs to go through NRC licensing. And so we've got to staff up in our little 45-person company these parallel paths to support going along both sets of regulations. And I think the two could be actually woven together in a really practical manner. And I know that people have thought about this for a while, but we just haven't achieved it. So it's one of the things we could do. But we've never cited a factory to mass-produce reactors. What's funny about that is the regulations actually exist. If you go look at the original code, 10CFR50 has a thing called a manufacturer.”

    2024-03-15 · a16z Podcast · A Nuclear Comeback: Are New Reactors the Answer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “So I think what Dr. Huff was talking about, I want to connect a little further. So, a really big plant that was built like that is amazing. It's awesome. And all that workforce that we trained. And I think that can apply across this entire spectrum of the different reactor sizes that any successful project should be cross-pollinating that other project. And it's not just from regulatory sense, but from just gaining that experience that learning by doing and getting the cost to be lower. So I'm excited to be part of that way down at the tiny end of the spectrum where our reactors are 1,000 times smaller. But the regulatory environment does need to change. And I think we were already working on it. There are a bunch of NRC modernization efforts coming by direction through Congress. We've been working on developing things like 10 CFR 53, and that will be an ongoing and continuing effort. But I think for it to really succeed, we need reactors to get built, to get fueled, to demonstrate. And the DOE.”

    2024-03-15 · a16z Podcast · A Nuclear Comeback: Are New Reactors the Answer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Current state at a literary base is that they have backup generators. Any site that has critical infrastructure, those backup generators will have diesel storage tanks. There'll be 40,000 to 150,000 gallons of diesel on those sites. And they'll only use it in a backup scenario. So it requires they put batteries all over the installation. And if there is an outage, they're typically going to run out of that diesel. Especially if there's something like the colonial pipeline ransomware attack where we lost an ability to move fuel in a huge multi-state area. And they were on a fuel before their time frame, which is usually a 14-day resilience time frame. So they've got a problem and they're looking for solutions and they're actually very interested in both categories of microreactor because those are around the scale of the base. All of the larger ones in SMR or a gigawatt class reactor would be too large.”

    2024-03-15 · a16z Podcast · A Nuclear Comeback: Are New Reactors the Answer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Actually, produce these in a factory because they're portable. You can do mass production and then ship them around and very quickly deploy them in all these little areas where you have equivalent of a thousand homes, which could also be like a workplace that has 2,500 people, a mine, a military base, a hospital in some key kind of remote region. So I like this scale better than thinking about the advanced ones, more about deployment and like how can you...”

    2024-03-15 · a16z Podcast · A Nuclear Comeback: Are New Reactors the Answer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Built in the US is very slow, built in Asia is very fast. But you can make the reactor smaller, you can make it faster. The idea behind SMR is to make something that's maybe for about not a million homes, but maybe about 250,000 homes, right? A quarter of the size, but be able to build it really quickly. And if we could achieve that, it would be a great economic success. But the spectrum is getting longer and longer. I think one of the interesting things happening out of people are looking smaller and smaller and looking at micro reactors. And there's kind of two categories of microreactors, portable and non-portable. And if you do a fully portable microreactor, this is around the scale of a thousand homes. So it's a thousand times smaller than the reactor all the way at the other end of the spectrum. And you have microagers which are not portable, which are 10 or 20 times larger, maybe 10 or 20 megawatt electric, something like that. The really exciting thing for me is that really far into the scale that portal microreactors, we haven't really achieved that yet. And you could...”

    2024-03-15 · a16z Podcast · A Nuclear Comeback: Are New Reactors the Answer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “On my own scale, I look kind of interesting. So you have like big reactors, right? They're a gigawatt, they're for a million people, or a million homes, let's say. So it's more than a million people. This is kind of the right scale. And then we've got SMRs, and the purpose of SMRs is really to take that big reactor and build it really fast And the typical construction timeline is really six to 15 years on the big reactors right now, depending who makes them, even for the exact same reactor, like an AP1000.”

    2024-03-15 · a16z Podcast · A Nuclear Comeback: Are New Reactors the Answer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “The generations roughly people use these Gen 1, 2, 3, and 4 terms. Gen 1 are really the reactors we first figured out. They're kind of pre-enrichment. They're usually like a graphite moderated reactor. And then Generation 2 reactors were very different because we started to do enrichment with these big gas diffusion enrichment plant. And in that time period, the US was really at the forefront of everything. I think we had over 400 uranium mines operating in the US. And really, we were the great developers and exporters of our technology to the rest of the world. And then Gen 3 really are meant to be an advanced form of those Gen 2 reactors that can make use of enrichment. And they're like accident tolerant fuels or ability to recycle fuel. They're kind of these advanced features. And then Gen 4 is really meant to represent these things that are much farther away, that are kind of future that they perfectly produce hydrogen, let's say, and make a hydrogen economy possible.”

    2024-03-15 · a16z Podcast · A Nuclear Comeback: Are New Reactors the Answer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I'm going to ask Dr. Huff to correct me on anything I get wrong here. I'm actually not an expert in all the history of nuclear and every kind of reactor that there is. I'm really an expert in what I'm doing, which is portable high temperature gas reactor.”

    2024-03-15 · a16z Podcast · A Nuclear Comeback: Are New Reactors the Answer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Think over the past 50 years, a lot has happened, solar and wind technology really came about and was deployed. Of the middle of this nuclear story we're telling. And these forms of low cost energy, but that are not resilient forms of energy. And by the time we deployed them significantly to the grid, we started to look for a source of power that you can scale, that you can throttle up and down on demand. And at the same time, scientists started to care about climate. And then I think the public really has come around to really care about climate and not just to care, but to want to do something about it. And so I think nuclear has this really cool new role to fill instead of natural gas, which I agree with Dr. Huff. The low cost of it definitely causes us to adopt that, to fill that need rather than nuclear. But I think nuclear can leapfrog it.”

    2024-03-15 · a16z Podcast · A Nuclear Comeback: Are New Reactors the Answer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “The really exciting thing for me is that really far into the scale of portal microreactors, we haven't really achieved that yet. And you could actually produce these in a factory because they're portable. You could do mass production.”

    2024-03-15 · a16z Podcast · A Nuclear Comeback: Are New Reactors the Answer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source