Oklo CEO wants to make clean nuclear energy more accessible

Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited to be here. There's a couple ways to kind of differentiate it. Size is one big factor which comes with significant benefits. It allows for a lot more scalability, a lot more capital efficiency, which are big attributes. But also what you're seeing happen, and like what we're doing, is bringing forward some of these next-generation technologies that just have certain inherent upsides to them thanks to sort of the innate benefits they offer. And what that means is they look different than today's plants. They don't use high-pressure water as a coolant. Instead we use liquid metal that operates at atmospheric pressures. It's compatible with common alloys. It allows you to sort of have a clear path to scalability. It opens the door to do really cool things like nuclear waste recycling. So all those things are what we view as sort of the next generation of nuclear technology coming forward. Some of which, like ours, are very mature technologies, right? We've had success experiences as a society building and operating a lot of these plants. And so, it brings forward just a different combination of attributes from cost-effectiveness, from scalability, as well as what they're delivering in terms of both the combined heat and power product to open the door for a lot of different use cases. Obviously, on data centers, there's a lot of excitement on the electric side. But there's also actually interest on the heat side cuz you can drive some cooling with the heat product, which is kind of weird, but one of the things you can do.

Yeah. This is why I fell in love with nuclear as a kid. When you split an atom, you get almost 50 million times more energy than when you combust like a molecule of natural gas or so. It's incredible. What that means then is there's a lot of energy in nuclear fuel. And actually, in almost all reactors, you only use about 5% of the fuel in one pass through the reactor. And there's reasons why. Long story short is, you know, you could put more fuel in, it could run for longer, but that comes at increased cost for the added systems you need to manage all of that. So, it's kind of where the optimum lives. That means that more than 90% of the fuel remains unused coming out of the reactor. Now, that said, it's not equally usable by all types of reactors, but by fast neutron reactors like what we're developing and a few others are developing, that's a technology that can actually use that material and keep reusing it till you use pretty much all the energy content that's available in that fuel. So, you'll keep recycling it a bunch of times and get that remaining energy out. Just to put a number on it, what's cool about that is today in the US, there's something on the order of about 90,000 metric tons of used fuel around the country. That sounds like a big number, but it's pretty dense stuff. It would fit in something the volume about the size of a super Walmart. But there's enough energy content remaining—in other words, there's enough unused fuel there—to power the entire country using what we're doing for over 150 years. And every year the current plants are producing enough waste to power the country for 4 more years. So, pretty exciting opportunity to sort of de-constrain nuclear growth as we think on sort of the longer-term outlook, but also reduce fuel costs with the added benefit of sort of changing the waste profile.