YouSaid · the spoken record

Mark Nelson

lines on the record: 68
first: 2026-03-31
most recent: 2026-03-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah. And I think there's concern about the power side. Oh, well, there'll be enough power. But I think what we've seen, and actually last year, the US had one of the highest power additions to the grid ever in this year. It's by far going to be the highest capacity addition to the grid ever. So new power is not the problem. Delivery is the problem. And data centers increasing the utilization of the delivery system make delivery more affordable. So I think NetNet, they will actually drive rates down.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More loads we have like data centers, like factories that are steady, constant loads, the cost of serving electricity to everybody will go down because they are increasing that denominator, right? Yeah, the utilization is just going up, right?”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And rectifiers in the data. With a little bit of energy storage and actually stabilize the grid rather than destabilize it. So that is like a solvable one. But it is a problem that is real. Like it happened in Washington State, just happened in Virginia, and needs to be resolved as these data centers keep becoming bigger and larger percentages of the grid.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a solvable one, yeah. And I'm really motivated by these how much these supply chains have scaled up to support electric vehicles. And electric vehicle growth is slowing down, which means we can take that momentum and bring it into a new prom statement, which is power for data centers, power for industrialization, power for economic growth and prosperity, and for sustainable energy. So, yeah, it's an exciting time, I would say. Let's talk a bit Yeah, it's a, there's two sides to this one. But I think in general, like if you zoom out, data centers are overall going to be really good for the grid. And I'll kind of explain maybe why they get a bad rap and how that's going to change.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Along the way, right? You have it, you have some power conversion going on at the generating facility to go from some lower voltage to a medium voltage like 34,000 volts. And then you have another power conversion system going from that intermediate voltage 34 KV, let's say, to the main transmission voltage, hundreds of kilovolts. And then you have to do it again on the other side when you get into the community. So you might have an 80 gigawatt peak grid in Texas, but you actually have like probably 800 gigawatts of power electronics actually supporting that grid. So I'm excited. I guess what I'm saying is while, and this is a useful piece of context, last year about three terawatts, these are big numbers of power semiconductors went into electric vehicles. And the peak grid power is less than a terawatt in the US. So these are really like on the same scale kind of opportunities.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sardin' got it. So, yeah, those are, I think, the critical aspects of power electronics. Everything else is already very abundant and easily disforced in the United States. So you're plastics, your sheet metals, your loom castings, boss bars and things. So because of that, we can really focus on those three key commodities. And we do have plans for each to both near shore and onshore if they're not already. And like I'm excited about that because I see power electronics really moving from the device skill I was describing of, you know, charging your laptop or where it's largely been stuck more recently, like in EVs and solar and storage to the grid itself. And when you do that, you're like, oh, 40 gigawatts. That's the state of Texas. But it's actually not like that because you have power conversion all the way.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Working with those same vendors to bring it closer. No rare earth materials there, you know, mostly polymers and thin copper or thin aluminum conductors. We already have a pretty well-established copper and aluminum supply chain. You're just saying like a”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for sure. So I mentioned there's ferrite is a pretty important ingredient in these high frequency transformers. It's only, it's basically just iron oxide, so it doesn't have maybe a little sprinkling of manganese. So there's no rare earth in the ferrite, but the world's largest ferrite companies are in Asia, right? It's like every other complex supplied good. There have been ferrite manufacturing facilities in the US before. I'm working to bring them back. In fact, one of them is nearby and in Georgia and it could be brought back with some coaxing and I'm working on it with the parent company. Another is thin film caps capacitors. There's a decent amount of, they call it power electronics, but they should really call it like power capacitors because the things you mostly see are the capacitors. And the same sort of thing, you know, supply-based largely in Asia.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of reactors, and we can always expand and do more. The nuclear waste has got high reactivity elements that last like 100 years. And after that, it's pretty benign. We already have a waste isolation pilot plan in New Mexico, which is like this deep borehole down inside of a salt structure. So it's like a salt dome. This is where defense waste already goes. And they just said they were going to build it and they built it. And meanwhile, we struggle still on the DOE side to build a repository for big nuclear plants. And because of that, these gigawatt scale plants are operating, generating nuclear waste. And they have to store it at the same site where they're making power. And in California, this is like coastal regions that are risky where you can have a tsunami or something instead of taking it and putting it in a salt dome structure in the high desert where there's no water, no risk of like certain natural disasters. So it's just a smarter, safer, better idea, and we don't do it. And actually, it's a huge cost. It's a commitment as well.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a couple of things. So we could have access to nuclear fuel and enrichment that are like incompletely competitive free markets where there are innovative startups fixing and solving those challenges. We should have a waste storage facility that's some centralized repository, which is way safer for the existing nuclear fleet that's operated since the 60s. That's an unsolved problem. And that would those things alone would cause everything else to flourish because we already have this like middle layer of me and a bunch of other startups trying to get fuel and operate reactors. And then if we're able to, as a country, really have a better system to deal with nuclear waste, which actually radiant doesn't need. Like our uniquely at this really small size, we can just put it into dry cask on about 10 acres of our 80 acre site. And that works for like 60 years worth.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, islands. Absolutely. I mean, Hawaii is pretty high electricity cost and it's, I think, 80% diesel powered, actually. It's got wind and solar that make up the remainder. But yeah, you could have a cleaner form of power, right? No emissions. The nuclear reactor operates and then rain it takes it and we handle all the complexity. But the amount of power people need, right, need in the gigawatts for the grid. And so we don't really do that. We have the niche customers on the edge and we don't want to make thousands and thousands of reactors at 50 a year we'll have something in the range of like a thousand or two at the most but we don't consider we don't look at it and go hey could we make it work for ten thousand there's different products and we can do it at better economies and there's a couple of ways to do it but we're radiant doesn't want to dig a hole in the ground and solve that other miracle it's too many”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they're definitely an off grid product. So they don't at all compete with larger reactors. Really, if you can build, if you have time to dig a big hole in the ground and put a reactor in that way, then you can do a larger reactor, maybe five or ten times as big as the one megawatt size that we're looking at. And it's going to win on economics. It definitely should. We're already using one of the fanciest forms of fuel, and that's so that we can set it up anywhere and have it not be a risk to people or facilities nearby. And so we don't compete at all with those things. One of the ways I like to talk about this is you could run a diesel generator or you can run a nuclear reactor and you're really deciding between those two things. We don't be like super cheap diesel. Like we beat diesel at like 650 a gallon. That kind of a number. So that's where our initial customers need to be. But if you go start looking at what people pay for diesel and what they pay on the edges, not on like the center.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're doing the same thing, right? Like we're building our first prototypes largely by hands in our engineering facilities. We're doing about 10 of those this year. We'll do another like 30 to 50 prototype systems this time in our factory location, which we hope to announce next quarter. And then only from the learnings of those two builds will we go and automate from there. And that's the, you just got to get the reps.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course. Yeah. So, yeah, we're just building and learning what is actually the factory look like. But parts of the production line that can be automated and should be will then go in those newer buildings.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But in Tennessee, we have an 80 acre site. We have the first building going up, which is made for just fuel handling because that's the tricky bit. And so we're working the regulatory permit path right now on that. You should be able to put fuel reactors there. And so we'll initially be building everywhere we can possibly find a building with enough power, right? And then moving all the parts to Tennessee to then get the fuel loaded there, to then take it up to the customer site. It's nice that it's mobile so we can actually do all of that. But the factory itself is a bunch of other buildings on that site and most of it is like normal assembly work. Like you've got ig structures that you're welding, holting things together, right? Putting wire harnesses and things on the unit. But the factory will have to evolve multiple times also. A factory before gigafactory, right? It's a different thing.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we have right now. We have two buildings. We had to get a second one in November because we filled up the first building because we start doing a little bit more vertical integration, a little more of the machining in-house and all that's happened to us already. But we'll be able to build up to 10 reactors in those facilities that we have. We both know ALA will operate out of a 10. So this is like quite a bit fancier to have real walls.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the permit. Yeah, just like land a cabinet. In fact, we even work past the pad like we got rid of the concrete, wherever the seismic would allow. It's awesome. It just did soil nails. Because again, you're disturbing less dirt. There's less concern about like, you know, how much you need to grade or what are you going to do with civil and architectural type scope. The local community, especially in your case, if it's like a temporary installation, they're going to feel less concerned about it. And the fact that you can just pick it up and remove it for whatever reason it needs to be, which you can also do with Megapax, it eases this. Transmit this transition into these new technologies and consider that, compare that to like a giant nuclear cooling tower visible for miles around.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think there's another thing that you're not stressing enough about that infield work content being really low. So when I was a Tesla, I was responsible for the Mega Pack product development and then manufacturing and the business of selling them. And the less involved the on-site project is, just the faster everything about it will go. The show showed.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't let it turn into radon and other stuff that is actually harmful to someone's health. It's like it's more dangerous from a mouth perspective. And there's a bunch of cool ideas like this, and a new way of really seeing nuclear that I've written a thing called Adams for Prosperity that's on our website. I've released it about a year ago, but it has this and like, how should you think about radiation and waste and reactors and what's possible”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And use all of the free energy that's out there because the sunlight is free. You put up a panel, you're getting it. It's very cool, but also uranium is free. It's in the ground. It's not flying through the air. It's there. If we take it and we use it before it spontaneously undergoes fission, it just goes away, which it's been doing. So like when the earth formed four billion years ago, we had like 128 times as much uranium-235. So we better get a lot of it. Yeah, the same way as like you'd put up a panel and catch some sun. take it up the ground and use it.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. Yeah. So it's really we're doing nuclear reactors as products for the first time ever. And it's so that you can just say, yeah, I want nuclear power and we deliver it. It operates. And then when it's done operating, we take it away. And there's no waste or other tricky consideration you have to make. It's totally safe on the customer site. We actually use a meltdown proof fuel. And it makes this completely new way, I think, of thinking about nuclear power. It's just, it's in the options list. And I think it wasn't even before. Not only is it there, but it can look better than almost every other form of power. And I don't like to imagine that it's the only thing you want to do. I really like the idea of solar and battery and nuclear and put that whole block somewhere.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You think it was such a huge scale. I definitely 100% agree with the less like, I think you said stick building. And it's like the opposite of that is mass production. About doing it all in a factory, and that's our entire approach a new director.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Between 500 gigawatts and a Turo watt, depending on how you think about it. So, yeah, 40 gigawatts a year is, I mean, it's significant in the overall U.S. And why 40 gigawatts? One, you know, looking at it from a market sizing perspective. But the other is, hey, like right around 60 second tact time is where you maximize that capital efficiency of building a factory. And if you look at our module size and you look at 60 second tact time, it sort of works out to 40 gigawatt spot. And we're going to ramp that factory. I hope I expect us to exceed the demand for that factory. You get so much quality and cost benefits going for full on as much automation as you can, not too much, but as much automation as you can. Yeah, it's more than just that, but that's the first two things that come to my mind. Quality and cost.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, 40 gigawatts a year. So it's about 10 to 15% of the ex China market for our product category. And it's equivalent to half the state of Texas in peak power if you want to think about it in that term. I think it's kind of useful.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I find that there's this sweet spot between capital investment and like manufacturing cost of goods sold. And you're always trying to find that with any product, right? And if you just compare stick building, a power plant in the field versus fully integrating like on a highly automated line, that same function, the total cost will always win if you can do it on a highly automated line. And so, you know, we're building for our first factor, we're building a 40 gigawatt factory. And people are like, wow, that's a lot.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“SMR can represent like a hundred megawatt thing. It's not necessarily going to run. It has to run faster than 60 hertz for it to be DC source, right? Actually, I make AC because every heat engine, you spin something We do it at such a high speed that we then use active rectifiers to convert to DC as the first step.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, all DC micronuclear. Like it. I think I've talked to other folks about what is a modular reactor, right? Like you hear SMRs. And it's like this is, in my mind, is like the definition of SMR one megawatt versus like you've heard about this 100 megawatt SMR. Yeah.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it could be demonstrated at some military installation or some other place. And so it's like a fun thing that Drew and I have chatted about a little bit. We don't know when we'll be able to do that. Exactly”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think one of the things that it could do for people is you have a DC battery. We go DC to AC, right? So attach some like large battery system. And then maybe you have a solar grid, but that's on some different DC voltage. And that also needs to get converted AC to then put on a grid to use it. But you could have little cells like these things that we grow at the edge. It could be like megawatt hour battery packs, a few megawatts of solar for during the day and a reactor for at night and all those things actually merge and work perfectly on a DC grid. Yeah. Like a DC microgrid. That's. Sort of what I think what it could do, right? It's interesting for people to think about this.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If there is software, it's very slow to respond. And so you don't, it is harder in a world like that to imagine a bidirectional grid, right? Like the central planning from inside out. When you're thinking about protection and can I stay within the load ratings of these lines, when you don't have the infrastructure to dynamically control it the way you want, you're stuck. So I think it's an enabling alternative.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the idea that the grid can grow and move from the edge is just not something that we've really been able to process for the last 50 years in the US. Like the grid has been a very top-down project. And if you want to attach back into the grid as all these data center people are realizing now. So many studies. It's a huge nightmare. It's a nightmare. And so how do you make it easier to do that kind of organic?”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's civilization anew, right? And it can grow from the edges where our system makes sense. People with a critical need for power, for resilient energy at a military base or hospital, or for disaster relief. Yeah. The reason we have to use AC actually as the way to move that power.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For control. Yeah. Yeah. And I like to think of it as though, like, if the grid is civilization itself and everything is routed and AC and there's some much, much better way. You can metamorphosize the entire grid, like have civilization can regrow off of a new architecture of moving power. And I, of course, would like to think about the first power that you put on another world. Like if you put a megawatt on the moon or on Mars, distributing that will like set the precedent for how you do what the technology type will be. Will you plug into a DC thing or will you plug in the two prongs that we're used to in the US at least? Well, either way, because I'm not going to take a big stance one way or the other, it's like you should be using software and semiconductors, you know, which are higher efficiency, you know, much less mass in size, especially that matters when you're going to space. Like, you don't want to scale if this thinking weighs. I think there's less oil. I think the big...”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Smaller than a pencil eraser. And if you remember back to maybe you had a laptop in the 90s or something like that, or you did, I don't know, and the giant power brick that you were carrying around that was really hot when you stuck it in your backpack after charging your computer, like just in a couple decades, you know, you've seen more than an order of magnitude power density improvement there and efficiency improvement. Now you can do like multiple outputs and seven different voltages. And we're trying to do the same thing, but not for commercial electronics, but for industrial scale electronics. And our building block, as you said, it's a modular architecture. So that five megawatt Heron Link, it's got 3065 kilowatt modules inside. The product itself was fail operational. If one of those fails, we just keep operating. Oriented at rugged. The whole building could power off of one of those blocks, right? You can just switch your distribution to some modern.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Power semiconductors and software, and instead of converting voltage at line frequency using large coils of wire around like magnetic steel in a bucket of oil, which is how transformers generally are done, you're doing it at really high frequency with much, much smaller, simpler magnetic materials to produce called like ferrites using switching devices. You've charged a smartphone before like a little object, that little power brick that you have in your hand, you know, it's doing conversion from 120 or 240 volts AC to 5 volts DC to charge your phone and it's switching at a million times a second. There's like tiny little GAN gallium nitride devices switching a million times a second voltage across a transformer.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Data centers, solars and solar and batteries, but future products will be AC to AC, and that allows you to do all the utility use cases and use cases inside of commercial buildings like this building we're in right now. They can all benefit from AC to AC. And what's the solution? What is it actually doing, right?”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for sure. We're building. Our first product is Heron Link, and it's a five megawatt bi-directional solid state transformer that goes from DC anywhere from 800 to 1500 volts DC to 34,000 volts AC, which is effectively that AC voltages is the sub-transmission voltage of data centers of large battery power plants of solar facilities really It is the highest distribution voltage on the grid around us. So if you look at the wires on top of a pole, specifically the ones that are way up top, the highest voltage those will ever be is 34,000 volts. So we're going after all of the distribution voltages in the world. Europe is the same, so is Asia. And our first product is DC because that's about a 500 gigawatt market growing quickly of”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Muscle. And then I'm excited about Drew's product and company, what it can do for the grid, but also for microgrids. It'd be fun to hear your thoughts on how these things mesh together, actually. Because we had talked about where do were products actually go? Together? Yeah. Yeah. And talk about your product. I know you have like a power building block of a certain size”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to tie it back into the grid because I was just, I had some interesting thoughts, and we really, our product is for off the grid, right? So megawatt reactor on a trailer, and we build in our factory, we drive it or fly it to where the customer wants it to go, and then turn it on within like 48 hours. We go, you know, wheels stop moving, and then we go to power on your site in that amount of time. And then it lasts five years, which is like a full oil tanker worth of diesel equivalent. It's two million gallon diesel equivalent. So it's sort of an unbelievable thing where you can grow the grid or put a microgrid anywhere. But it's a totally different problem, I think, from the grid itself is civilization, right? Electric power is civilization. If you go and those sockets and you pop something into them and you just get power, that's very well developed. That's civilization and that's using electricity to do what you could otherwise only do with human muscle or animals.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Careful consideration of the thermal gradients and the alloys, right? You need high strength materials to do that. So that's really exciting, but we're not quite there yet. And I think if we're doing this same discussion next year, it's going to be dramatically different because we're going to be able to point at all these different designs, what you could do with them. And I think the products like nuclear reactors as products has never been seen before. There are always usually these giant mega projects where you dig a huge hole in the ground and you take five to ten years or up to 15 for the slower, the bad projects out there. But reactors that can just come, ours, you know, we're targeting one per week coming off of a production line from our Tennessee facility, which is 80 acre site we just signed for in October, not even a year ago.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not too much. I've been doing nuclear, thinking about it since 2016, but I founded Radiant in 2019. And then for a year, just learned how to do reactor design and then raise money in 2020. And just I never found a company before, never intended to really do that. And I kind of slow rolled into it. I could have tried to go much faster, but I've stayed totally committed to just building. And actually, the funny thing is like in 2020, I said in 2026, I will put a full scale reactor and get it critical and get it up to full power. And we're on schedule to do that, which is kind of wild. It's not like that was really the actual plan, but it was just, I was resilient to all the challenges that were put in the way. We are now the only reactor permitted of these new reactors to go to full power. So a lot of others are getting to critical, which doesn't mean you get to high temperatures or high power. And those things are very challenging on all the parts in the system.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so by July 4th, several companies will have reactors built that go critical that are fundamentally new designs, completely new and from scratch, but it hasn't happened yet. So it just feels like a little bit of cart before the horse.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good question. I think there's a bunch of fun ways to answer it The one thing I like to say, it sounds a little sensationalist, is that there is no nuclear industry Really true. It's almost like we're getting excited about flight before Kitty Hawk. To a certain degree, there's a really coming very soon deadline. A lot of companies, a lot of little nuclear startups have actually been given access to fuel and facilities. Just expedite support from the subject matter experts required to regulate to make sure that these are going to be safe tests.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It seems like the tide turned on nuclear a few years ago in that more and more people start to realize the Borne's criticality of it. What is sort of the progress that we made as an industry? What have we achieved? And what are the biggest bottlenecks remaining in terms of really making progress as a country?”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much more decentralized thing. And so I think both of what you're building sort of feeds into that sort of micrograde behind the meter, on-grid, off-grid, hybrid. We just need to be a lot more flexible and a lot more adaptable to a variety of changing conditions.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lots and lots of different types of power generation and a lot more resiliency in the overall system and network. So I think we all take for granted that when we turn our lights on in the office, you know, when you boot up your computer, there's sort of like a unidirectional line of electrons that go from some sort of massive central power generation station to your power outlet. And what we're seeing and what seems to be necessary with much more spiky, much more complicated loads on the grid and off the grid is that resiliency, decentralization, and software driven workflows really matter. And it's going to be impossible to build out the grid for sort of the max power capacity that we could need even at the most remote edge use case, like on an army base or something like that. So when we think about our energy thesis, it's how do we turn this network into a much more software-defined, much more resilient, much more decentralized.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, whether it's data center compute or the broad based reindustrialization of sort of the industrial base of the US, whether it's defense use cases on the edge or more centrally, all of these technologies that we're investing in at A16Z are kind of demanding access to power. And it's not strictly access to power on the grid. I think what we're seeing is the importance of having”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, you know, this sort of AI moment in time is a really good forcing function. I'm very grateful for AI for lots of reasons, but it's just, it's bringing to a head a lot of things that have sort of been brewing under the surface for a long time. And it's kind of forcing us to remember how to build large scale infrastructure in the US again and reminding us that actually energy is really important, electricity is really important, getting it to the place where it needs to be is really important.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you flesh out our energy investing thesis a little bit more in terms of what are the types of opportunities we've been involved with or interested in the why now is it technical breakthrough is it is it regulatory is it some combination why don't you flesh out a little bit more”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, decades of not a lot of change means like the brightest and most talented people are like, I got to go do something else more impactful with my life. And a lot of those folks actually, like, for example, a lot of the talent and GE went to Korea, right? Or Japan, because those were the growth markets. And so you got this almost like hollowing out our China, right? Hollowing out of the knowledge base. And so, yeah, we need to reinvest because we're growing again. It's exciting. I mean, it's opportunities for both of us and others to come to make it happen.”
2026-03-31 · a16z Podcast · How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source