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Sarika soundar anna nagar5/1/2023 Unlike today’s plants, which run most efficiently at full blast, making it challenging for them to adapt to a grid increasingly powered by variable sources (not every day is sunny, or windy), the next generation of nuclear technology wants to be more flexible, able to respond quickly to ups and downs in supply and demand.Įngineering these innovations is hard. And climate hawks should fawn over a zero-carbon energy option that complements burgeoning supplies of wind and solar power. Venture capitalists can get behind the potential to scale to a global market. Nuclear plants need no longer be bet-the-company big, even for giant utilities. But producing units in a factory would give the company a chance to improve its processes and to lower costs. The per-megawatt construction costs might be higher, at least at first. If existing plants are the energy equivalent of a 2-liter soda bottle, with giant, 1,000-megawatt-plus reactors, Oklo’s strategy is to make reactors by the can. Then building more and incrementally larger reactors until their zero-carbon energy source might meaningfully contribute to the global effort to reduce fossil-fuel emissions. In Oklo’s case, that means starting with a “microreactor” designed for remote communities, like Alaskan villages, currently dependent on diesel fuel trucked, barged or even flown in, at an exorbitant expense. After that, they want to do for neighborhood nukes what Tesla has done for electric cars: use a niche and expensive first version as a stepping stone toward cheaper, bigger, higher-volume products. But DeWitte plans to flip the switch on his first reactor around 2023, a mere decade after co-founding his company, Oklo. Fuel is hard to come by-they don’t sell uranium at the Gas-N-Sip. Regulations are understandably exhaustive. Building a working reactor-even a very small one-requires precise and painstaking efforts of both engineering and paper pushing. But more often DeWitte calls it by another name: a nuclear reactor.įission isn’t for the faint of heart. ”It’s a metallic thermal battery,” he says, coyly. DeWitte’s little power plant will run for a decade without refueling and, amazingly, will emit no carbon. Under carefully controlled conditions, they will interact to produce heat, which in turn will make electricity-1.5 megawatts’ worth, enough to power a neighborhood or a factory. ![]() In real life, it will be about the size of a hot tub, and made from an array of exotic materials, like zirconium and uranium. In red marker, it looks like a beer can in a Koozie, stuck with a crazy straw. On a conference-room whiteboard in the heart of Silicon Valley, Jacob DeWitte sketches his startup’s first product. A rendering of an Oklo Aurora power plant Credit - Courtesy Oklo/Gensler
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