hunt for red october reactor meltdown in the book

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. None of them are quite ready to scale to market-level production, but given the investments being made into the technology right now, along with an increasing realization that we won’t be able to shift away from fossil fuels without nuclear power, it’s a good bet that at least one of them becomes a game changer. Oklo is one of a growing handful of companies working to solve those problems by putting reactors inside safer, easier-to-build and smaller packages. Or even if they can get it in time to reach urgent climate goals, given how long it takes to build. But no one is really sure they want it, given its history of accidents.

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.Īt global climate summits, in the corridors of Congress and at statehouses around the U.S., nuclear power has become the contentious keystone of carbon reduction plans. 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.

Hunt for red october reactor meltdown in the book