Living With Climate Change: Modern-day Oppenheimers see the future of nuclear energy — and it’s mobile

Nuclear energy is powerful, relatively cheap, and in two rare and unforgettable instances, in Pennsylvania and the former Soviet Union, catastrophic. That energy, of course, can also be weaponized. Not just in the court of public opinion, but literally, weaponized, as this summer’s WWII-era biopic “Oppenheimer” reminds.

For Jay Jiang Yu, NANO’s founder, executive chairman and president, and James Walker, its head of nuclear reactor development, who recently talked with MarketWatch, all of our nuclear past should be left to historical films. The future of nuclear power for NANO and a handful of competitors lies with Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) — technology that fits on the back of a flatbed semi.

SMRs are even less risky, these proponents say, than old reactors because of their size and simplicity. And, as their truck base suggests, able to pull on site to power a manufacturing hub, for instance, or parts of the developing world long neglected when it comes to reliable electricity. That future, at commercial scale, is just a handful of years away, they say.

Renewed attention on nuclear power, pro and against, has been revived with “Oppenheimer,” a film about the personal and professional consequences of the race to turn nuclear power into nuclear weaponry. And that sits just fine with the NANO execs.

Any spotlight on nuclear, they say, only allows them to teach the broader public, and those with deep pockets who might invest, of its role in a modern energy portfolio. NANO, just like J. Robert Oppenheimer decades ago, has ties to the University of California, Berkeley (NANO has research affiliations in the institution), and to the University of Cambridge, where NANO can claim commercial-development ties.

There are more connections. The Pulitzer Prize-winning biography that informed the summer blockbuster likened Oppenheimer and the burden of the atomic bomb to the forever-tortured Prometheus, known for defying Olympian gods by stealing fire from them and giving it to humanity in the form of technology, knowledge and more generally, civilization.

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The responsibility of nuclear energy isn’t any less weighty nowadays, but its god-like powers are fully embraced at NANO. In its development lineup are “ZEUS,” the product name for the proprietary-in-design solid-core battery reactor, and “ODIN,” changing up the technology as a low-pressure coolant reactor. Both are portable and both capable of on-demand energy for the existing electricity grid — that means pushed into use as homes and businesses need power, day or night.

MarketWatch interviewed Yu and Walker, who, yes, have seen the movie. Answers have been edited for length and clarity.

MarketWatch: There’s a difference between nuclear energy as a weapon and nuclear energy as a source for electricity, degrees of benefit and risk not withstanding. But when there is a cultural phenomenon, and maybe it doesn’t have to be a blockbuster movie. Maybe it’s, for instance, the well-publicized nuclear fusion breakthroughs of recent years. Does that make your job, your conversations with stakeholders, easier or more difficult?

Related: U.S. scores a nuclear fusion breakthrough — but experts caution commercial viability is a decade or more away

Yu: So that [fusion] breakthrough, it does open up eyes, right? It does stimulate people and it’s an attraction, but it’s also about what’s realistic. We [on this call] will probably be gone before we see nuclear fusion in use. What we’re creating at NANO, it’s real, something that could, within 10 years, be licensed and broadly commercialized. But, yes, the phenomenon right now is Hollywood and that is helping us to open eyes. First, it was the Oliver Stone “Nuclear Now” documentary… again, increasingly for the average Joe, like saying you know, nuclear energy is like Prometheus… misused in the very beginning, but it’s really a miracle that it was given to us, and humans choose to use it for ‘bad’ or for ‘good.’

Walker: I think a new look at nuclear was inevitably going to happen because we’re seeing now a concerted government effort to channel funding and development work back into nuclear. But it certainly makes our life a lot easier when there are these big organizations that are appealing to a mass market. What’s happening also is the record heat wave across the world [in boosting attention on fossil-fuel alternatives].

Paul Brandus: ‘Oppenheimer’ gives stock investors another reason to be bullish about nuclear energy

MW: Similar to the scholarly Oppenheimer and all the major players in the film, climate-change solutions, including nuclear power, seem to start as a germ of an idea in academia and then it’s a private-sector technology and spending push — government in Oppenheimer’s case — that must bring it all up to scale, yes?

Walker: No doubt, a lot of nuclear operations start as a bit of an academic exercise. And that’s what, I believe, has actually held a lot of them back. When they start off in that position, even with good scientific grounding, they are almost entirely reliant on government subsidies or grants or loans or financing to progress. They have not been very successful at raising money in the capital markets. That’s enormously held back the next generation of nuclear. We’ve come at this differently. Jay is a former banker. I work in public markets as well, despite my background being a nuclear physicist and nuclear engineer.

So, we actually approach this not as an academic exercise, as in [developing the science and then telling the world], this particular reactor could work and here’s how. We started with asking, what does the market need? And then from that feedback we determined that it needs small, portable nuclear reactors that can be shipped anywhere in the world, that can power small locations underserved by traditionally powered electricity, or at on-site industrial projects, and with flexibility. We brought that concept to the universities and told them, this is what the market needs and this is where the biggest market is.

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Yu: We’re not just trying to win a start-up competition. We asked, how we can mass scale these, essentially, nuclear batteries on a truck, right? A portable nuclear battery that could last for 20 years and can provide carbon-free energy solutions for that 20 years — replacing diesel generators.

MW: And when you say replacing diesel generators, we are essentially talking about a one-to-one swap, correct? Nano is similarly sized; it’s literally on a flatbed truck?

Yu: Yes, and we have a real-life example of how this already works. Take the shipping industry. There’s no technology that has been produced to date that can rival bunker fuel or diesel or fossil fuels to push [commercial] ships around. But we know the U.S. Navy [with nuclear-powered submarines] has been doing it for decades without incident.

MW: We’re talking about on-demand, as-needed power, right? There is no need for a battery or storage component with nuclear reactors? The U.S., of course, is pushing for a varied portfolio of alternative, and for now, traditional fossil-fuel
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energy. But solar and wind are best suited for certain parts of the country and require the ability to store that energy for peak electricity use, sometimes when the sun doesn’t shine, for instance. Nuclear is different?

Yu: With a reactor essentially you can put this anywhere you want, and you can ramp up and ramp down as you need power. And so it’s got a massive advantage over other renewables in that sense because you don’t you’re not constrained by location. That’s why diesel generators have been so successful. You can put them anywhere. With the mobile reactor, this is the first time you’ll be able to replace that with something that does not need a daily top-up of fuel.

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MW: Let’s talk about reactor use-cases…

Walker: Number one is natural disaster relief. After the hurricane in Puerto Rico, we were rolling in with a [test pilot] of ZEUS. We immediately power up to 1,000 homes with carbon-free energy and replace that diesel generator.

And one of the big interests for this will be mining operations. Almost all mines are in remote locations. And they all run on diesel, pretty much, because that’s the only power available. There have been efforts to power mines on wind and solar
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but the economics and reliability have been issues. Nuclear technology would make tens of thousands of mines economically viable. You can unlock enormous amounts of mineral wealth, and this was picked up by some of our African partners.

MW: Is the U.S. electricity grid ready for this much nuclear. Is it a “retrofit” hookup?

Yu: Electricity is electricity whether it comes from diesel or nuclear or wind. We can tailor the reactor for a particular customer but even then, not that much tailoring is necessary.

MW: So how does new technology like yours make its way into such a highly regulated industry like utilities? And then, nuclear itself, highly regulated.

Yu: So you’re right, it is a very regulated industry. Even as this moment, the concept phase, we have partnerships with the Department of Energy, with DOE’s Idaho National Laboratories. We talk to the National Security Agency, letting them know what we’re doing. We’re in touch with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Broadly speaking, none of them are there to make you fail; they are there to assist. And of course, nuclear is held to a higher standard of safety, by an order of magnitude actually, than any other energy system. And so you do have that regulatory framework to contend with, but we operate with those timelines built in.

Walker: There are no micro reactors, industry-wide, currently licensed because, yes, the regulatory period can be so onerous that a lot of companies don’t make it through because of the financial demands. I believe we have mitigated against that. As we mentioned earlier, we are coming at this from a much more commercial angle with different backers. That helps with the expenses of the regulatory period.

MW: Does that commercial priority mean each reactor is different? I mean scale is the point, right, to keep costs down?

Walker: These reactors are going to be mass-manufactured, so there’s not going to be a huge amount of tailoring, but some specificity will be possible. Our aim is to manufacture hundreds of these a year because in essence, they are the same small, two meter-by-one meter core.

Yu: There is even 3D-printing potential.

MW: New government energy subsidies, in the Inflation Reduction Act, for instance, have been tied to sourcing U.S.-generated raw inputs, U.S. manufacturing components and using U.S. labor. Does that impact you?

Yu: Yes. And we have worked with this in mind. Our manufacturing is U.S.-based. But the biggest issue is sourcing nuclear fuel: uranium. Other interests face the same challenge — Bill Gates-backed and [South Korea’s] SK Group-backed TerraPower, for instance. No fuel can mean big delays.

Right now, we’re in Washington in support of the National Defense Authorization Act.

[Editor’s note: Introduced by Sen. Joe Manchin, the Democrat of West Virginia and Sen. John Barrasso, the Republican of Wyoming, and just passed in the full Senate, the NDAA, among other aims, establishes a domestic nuclear fuel program to improve access to enriched uranium, key to existing nuclear plants and advanced nuclear projects, and ending U.S. reliance on Russia, its proponents say. Another bill under consideration is the Civil Nuclear Export Act, which would expand authority and capacity at the Export-Import Bank to support nuclear export projects.]

But, perhaps our biggest move is to establish our own fuel fabrication facility, which we call HALEU Energy Fuel, Inc. It will be a future domestic source for a High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU). We are vertically integrated.

MW: So major disasters not withstanding, nuclear energy has a long track record, with no incidents, or built-in safety moves, and I’m talking about traditional fission plants, shutting down part of a reactor, for instance. For mobile reactors, how does safety work?

Walker: It’s actually even safer and the reason for that is that because you’re generating so much less power with these gigawatt generators. So imagine, hypothetically, in a large civil reactor, if you were to get overheating, you’ll get core melt. It’s pretty much the worst thing I think that can happen in a nuclear disaster. Nobody’s gonna die, but it’s going to be a very messy cleanup. Let’s say in some sort of worse-case hypothetical with our reactor, every single working part breaks simultaneously in a freak accident, there’s no such thing as core melt. It goes into just passively cooling, in which the heat, and it’s only heat, radiates out.

There just are far fewer moving parts and mechanical pieces. And the technology is just far simpler. And so it is a lot safer than the nuclear industry already is. And, listen, I challenge anyone to put the worker safety record of nuclear up against wind and solar.

MW: Do you get any pushback on the climate footprint of the trucks themselves?

Yu: We are looking into electric vehicles as part of our fleet. If people are very serious about electrifying the grid and completely moving away from fossil fuel vehicles, then they must think about charging in remote areas, too. So, add the chargers, and charge the reactor trucks using the nuclear power that the reactor itself creates. Very circular.

MW: What about labor? Who runs the little reactor? Is it all software? Are you training people at the reactor site?

Yu: The labor to maintain the reactor is almost nothing. I mean, we’re not going to do this, but technically you could have nobody there. We will have people there and they will be NANO personnel who will install and operate this. We’ve identified that the best business model will involve a central hub where all the behaviors and transient behaviors of the reactor can be monitored at all times by a centralized group that operates everything.

MW: Are we able to talk about cost to the customer at this point in development? Say compared to a traditional plant even?

Walker: We do know those sort of numbers on a manufacturing basis, but what the price of the final reactor will be has not been properly modeled yet. We’ve got an idea of the costs, the raw material costs, labor, but there’s going to be additional capital costs that need to be incorporated into that, as well as operational.

Yu: Let’s just say you can’t buy one for $10 million right now. Hopefully in the future.

MW: But surely, means for financing — bond issuance or whatever — or promoting the subsidies to your customers. You’ve thought of customers having the means to buy…

Yu: I’m not at all worried about that. Maybe a certain customer leases our reactors, a 10-year contract and the price you pay is per megawatt. There could be several ways in.

I don’t think we can emphasize enough the motivation to make costs and availability work. Think of the opportunities in Africa, portable reactors for a whole continent operating this long without even nationwide electrical grids. Think of spotty U.S. coverage and vulnerabilities that need an answer.

Capitol Hill is on our side. I’d argue Hollywood is on our side. And, as our reactor names tell you, Norse gods are on our side.