Two feet behind us, atoms are getting split. This is the first podcast ever recorded inside a nuclear reactor. And we're going to interview the guy who did it in record time because 11 months ago, this was all prairie dust. But now it's the smallest, tidiest, sexiest nuclear reactor you've ever seen. And it's built by a publicly traded company that you can trade. We'll tell you how Oklo pulled it off. And how this place doesn't create nuclear waste, it eliminates it. By the end of this episode, nuclear will be officially uncanceled.
Yetis, put down the Stanley mugs and pick up the Geiger count because today's guest is bringing back the most canceled technology in America, nuclear power. We're hanging with Jacob Dewitte, the MIT educated co-founder and CEO of Oklo and former Florida Gator football player, walk-on football player. And right now, we are live at Oklo's brand new nuclear reactor in Lockhart, Texas. Oklo is an $8 billion publicly traded stock. That's one lift, but we'd call it the first ever nuclear brand. Not just because the power plants look like luxury ski shops. Uh, Architectural Digest. Did Frank Lloyd Wright do the blueprints of this thing? And Nick, Oklo is not just powering the US military. Their profit puppy is artificial intelligence because they've got a deal with Zuck fueling a meta data center with nuclear juice and a relationship with Sam Altman, an early Oklo investor and former chairman of the board. But today, Jake's going to reveal why nuclear is having a moment and why his reactors are different and how nuclear is not going to cause a catastrophe, but could actually cure cancer. So, if we're having a nuclear renaissance, then Jake is Leonardo da Vinci, and this facility is his Mona Lisa. So, please welcome the Sultan of Splitting Atoms, the chairman of Chain Reactions, the missionary of Visionary.
He didn't choose the nuke life, the nuke life chose him. Our guest today is Jake Dewitte, the co-founder and CEO of Oklo. And today's interview with Jake, next to his nuclear reactor is the best one yet.
It's a tea boy.
They work.
There we go.
That's pretty legit. That is really good.
Awesome with you.
The door actually said US Department of Energy as we walked in.
It did. So, it's our nuclear reactor.
We actually had to show our passports to get in store. That's right.
Did you, too?
Did I did when I had to get facility access, but
It's It's protocols. So Jake, you have the hottest meat cute ever.
Literally radioactive.
It's radioactive
because your co-founder of this nuclear startup is also your wife. You met her at MIT and then you bonded like hydrogen and oxygen.
Yeah. The electrons were firing. But the reason we're here today is because of a tiny pellet the size of a pencil eraser that when you saw as a kid basically set the path for the rest of your life. Because that little pellet of fuel energy was equivalent to a ton of coal or 149 gallons of oil. A year's worth of household electricity in a tiny pellet. And it's all thanks to the possibility of nuclear energy. You saw that when you were a kid. You got excited then and it got us excited now.
Well, the story of that pellet is the incredible energy density in the nucleus. That's the thing, right? Literally, when you think about splitting an atom, you're getting tens of millions, I mean millions of times more energy out than when you combust a molecule like a hydrocarbon. That's insane, right? But that's what people got so excited about when they discovered what was actually going on in the nucleus back in the early days of nuclear physics.
So, when you can harness that, you completely change how we think about energy. Like the delta in terms of like the energy density on a per reaction basis of tens of millions, it's like, you know, almost 50 million times. That's like the difference between Usain Bolt sprinting and the speed of light, right? It's an insane paradigm shift.
Well, you grew up in New Mexico and happens to be the location, the setting of Christopher Nolan's Robert Oppenheimer movie. Tell us about your childhood fascination.
So, I grew up around nuclear because of that, right? Like you grew up in New Mexico. You're around nuclear because of the legacy from the Manhattan Project.
And there's a lot of nuclear museums. And so as a kid, I would go to them, especially the what was the National Atomic History Museum is now the National Nuclear Science Museum. And uh fell in love with it. Like it seemed like science fiction, but was real life.
And when I realized that New Mexico got about 1/4 of its power from the power plant in Arizona, I was like, that's so cool. Like that means one in every 4 seconds, that's not exactly how it works, right? But like if you just discretize it, it's like wow. Like a quarter of the electricity. So if I had four light bulbs on in my room, one is being driven by a reactor. So I was obsessed with it. Um because it seemed like science fiction but real. So I knew I wanted to work on it from the time I was very little.
Uh yeah, it's just it's like it felt like okay really cool but also felt like it was the future partly just because I think as a little boy I was like I just was like oh that's what's next. Like tech is cool. It's what's next.
So like actually if you guys remember the game Sim City 2000.
Totally.
Yeah. So I used to play that and I got really frustrated because they treated nuclear power poorly. They treat it like it was a negative. So I wrote like nuclear was a liability.
The nuclear plant was a big one. It was like 4x4 in Sim City.
Yeah.
But it was like brown. It was kind of like dirty.
Wasn't pretty.
It wasn't great. And it like opposite.
It was a negative thing. And so I was like, I don't like So I used to write them letters being like, you treat it inaccurately. Blah blah. Never responded. But
this New Mexico kid writing in again
and like and I would write even in my like English class or my literature class or history classes. Any chance there was a reasonable freedom to write something,
I would often write about nuclear power in elementary, middle school through high school. poems.
I need to go look.
Nuclear is a new language for most of us.
Yes. But what is a nuclear reactor? Cuz we are next to this right now. We are sitting and recording this interview live next to one. So what are the key terms that you got to know if you're a yeti or a bestie or a listener out there from the nuclear dictionary to impress an atomic scientist on a first date.
Okay. So you want to understand what a chain reaction is.
You want want to understand what going critical is.
All right. So you get fuel um with the right concentration of elements in it. Put it in the right configuration so that when the atoms split, they release neutrons two or three times. That just happen two or three neutrons on average every time you split an atom.
All right?
Then what you want is those neutrons to go on and split other atoms and propagate. Right? So one one atom splits, two or three neutrons get out, one of those neutrons goes causes a fission and then one of those neutrons from that go on cause. And if you balance that evenly, so the same number from one cycle to the next the next, that's called being a critical reactor.
And if the number is going up, it's super critical. So it's increasing in power. And if it's going down, it's subcritical. It's just not on.
So that's what a nuclear reactor fundamentally is. And when you're splitting the atom, what you're doing is not just producing neutrons, you're producing a bunch of literally kinetic energy that's in the that's manifest as heat. Because those atoms as they split, the resultant the daughter atoms are going really they have a lot of energy, but they deposit all that. They basically slow down in the in the lattice the crystal like molecular atomic they're in lattice they're in and just deposit their energies
and that heat is then transformed into steam
is then turned Yeah. So so most reactors you're going to transfer that heat by some kind of coolant and then that coolant goes and does something useful for you. That liquid metal flows out of the reactor goes and ultimately transfers its heat to basically a boiler and boils steam and that steam spins a turbine
and that turbine eventually creates the electricity energy that powers our homes. turbine basically spins as the steam expands in it and then rotates a bunch of magnets inside other magnets in a generator and that's how you get electricity.
So if we were going to use the analogy we had from our interview before. This is the pot of boiling pasta water. This is what would be bubbling. So down in the bottom there you have fuel. You can kind of get a glimpse. You see on the top you see those like pattern of where those positions are that like plus shape.
So these those are each positions where there's fuel elements and those fuel elements is an array. um basically have 17 fuel pins by 17 fuel pins. So square and those fuel pins about the size of my pinky about 12 feet tall and they're arranged in that pattern and that's the fuel that and so what it is is zirconium tubes with uranium fuel uranium dioxide pellets that stack that length and then what you can do is you can put materials alongside of that in different positions and absorb the neutrons.
But the three differentiators we really see with Oklo is tiny, sexy and tidy. tiny, sexy, and tidy.
Because your reactors are relatively small. They're built to look beautiful from the outside, and they produce no nuclear waste. This is like the only nuke facility that we are going to see in Vogue magazine pretty soon, right?
And it looks nothing like the nuclear power plants from Homer Simpson. And your fast reactor technology eliminates nuclear waste by recycling old fuel. There's the tidy part.
So, I'm sure you've got a lot to say about all that. How are you taking a 70-year-old incredibly regulated and complex model and turning it all upside down? It
started that way. So, that's the cool thing, right? Like the very first reactor that made electricity in the United States is very similar to what we're building in Idaho for the power side uses liquid metal as the coolant. That's great at making it tiny. Why? Liquid metals are really good at removing heat. You know, basically there's this thing called a heat transfer coefficient and the higher that is, the better you can remove heat from a small volume. Liquid metals are so good at it. You we all know this kind of because right air is something humans are really used to air and water as our heat transfer media, right? If you get into air, that sounds really silly. If you get into air, if you're walking around in the air at a certain temperature and it's kind of warm, but then you go to water uh and it's the same temperature, it feels very different, right? Because of the heat transfer of water. Water is way better at removing heat.
Well, liquid.
That's why hot tub feels so much hotter than
than 100 degree hot tub. 102 degree hot tub feels way hotter than 102° air.
Way better. It's just right. It's way different. And that's because that heat transfer is so you're depositing way more energy from the water or it's removing way more energy from you. Um well, liquid metals are even better than water at transferring heat. What that means is you can make things a bit smaller as a result. On top of that, liquid metal doesn't boil at like the low temperatures relatively speaking that water does. That that means you don't have to pressurize it, which means the componentry is smaller. So all that translates to doing something that aligns itself to be a bit smaller. And it means that when you think about what it looks like to design and build a reactor, you don't have the same physics driving you to a much bigger design. And you can do more with less. You can be smaller with it. So that's part of the dynamic of why that can be done that way.
So I'm hearing a lot of like this is better the way we did it in the first place, but it still is new somehow.
Yeah. What happened was we as a society saw the potential in splitting atoms and harnessing the energy from them. But what we saw with these reactors is different types of fuels and coolants enable you to do different things. But what do we as a society and a species? Our industrial base in the 1950s when we were really going on the first steps of this technological adventure were rooted in boiling water and managing water because that's how steam power plants work. We know it super well. We didn't know liquid metals as well. The world's changed a lot because we've advanced this technology and other technologies that help this. So that what happened with some of those first reactors showed, hey, it can work, but they weren't working as well as the potential was because we had to work through things. But this culminated through multiple iterations of this technology sponsored by federal research in the US as other as well as other countries into really sort of the last generation of these builds. Um, notably in the US, there are two reactors I always like to talk about. It's called the EBR2 reactor or experimental breeder reactor 2 and then the fast flux test facility or FFT. Both of those reactors were built like in between 60s and 80s and well one was built in the 60s one was built in the 80s and what was really cool about it is some really neat things came out of that. We learned that they could run really well that they could do these incredible things on safety. They could do these incredible things operationally in terms of reliability and availability. They could do these great things as well on recycling fuel. And so at the end of the day it was like hey this stuff makes a ton of sense. What was new about us was realizing that that had been done and modernizing it in a couple different ways. There's one interesting part about this whole history, too. Like, all this stuff was done, but all of it was archived in paper and it wasn't digitized.
So, basically, we're in the nuclear 2.0 era. And we'll get to why there was such a long gap between nuclear 1.0 and 2.0.
By the way, if you're loving this interview, subscribe to the best one yet for daily pop business news and interviews, the coolest place in capitalism.
But this facility that we're sitting in, it is a nuclear reactor. It is.
And one year ago, it was a field of grass and shrubs. Now, it's the first ever nuclear reactor built on private land with private resources in just 11 months. How did you pull it off so fast and did Christopher Nolan write the screenplay for it?
So, I think what we saw was, you know, we originally found this awesome place where we're at in Prototown. um when Caroline and I had known this guy Josh who who started it this effort to kind of build a new American city and back years ago and he was looking at a place that this is just cool. We're we're into that. Um and then he found this spot specifically with a lot of support from the community to try to be a place where you'd come build hard infrastructure tech. Not just hard tech but also hard tech like it's just a place where you can build easier and faster. So we said, "Hey, let's go build some training facilities here." Because there's a company at that time, so circa 2024,
were pre-public and it opened a different regulatory lane that existed but just hadn't been used, directed the government to use it. And that allowed us to say, "Hey, what if instead of building a training facility, we actually build a reactor here with the goal of turning it on like in less than a year."
And to sprinkle on some quick context, Jack, one of the big reasons nuclear 1.0 know ended and we'll get to this more in detail in a second but it's because it took so long to build nuclear
power red tape something that was supposed to be 5 years became 20 years
magenta tape
do you have any idea how angry the investors are if it's supposed to be 5 years and it's 20
this reactor was built in 11 months so this reactor behind us achieved criticality yeah and I do want to remember remember Jake mentioned that in our speed dating nuclear dictionary earlier criticality yeah What is criticality? Because that's the the milestone you reached on August 6th, just a month ago.
Criticality is when a reactor really becomes a reactor. It's when it turns on and is self-sustaining. In other words, the neutrons released from fission go on to produce other fission events that produce other neutrons in a self-sustaining way. That's when it's actually on.
And so for an electric generating facility, that's when it could stay hot indefinitely.
Yeah. Basically until it depletes the fuel. But yeah, so that's when you turn the reactor on. uh before that before you're critical it's just it's not on yet and what was cool and why we were able to do this so fast was partly the partnership here with prototown and also the team we brought in to help build this with the mindset of design build and iterate because the permitting process in the past why it one of the reasons it took so long to build nuclear was we did a really silly thing in the policy space where we said okay you have to do a ton of permitting paperwork and licensing work before you can build anything which
was basically saying you have to do all this nuclear eval like you have to do all this nuclear safety work and hazard analysis and all this other stuff before you can build anything. I get why you need to do that before you load the actual nuclear material. That makes perfect sense. You should have to do that.
But if you're just building a building that has no real hazard, why do you have to do all that work? That loads so much frontend time and investment.
Yeah.
Could be doing both in parallel. Total mojo killer.
That's what's changed. That's what's recently changed and why we're in a new era and why we could build this in parallel to the permitting. We were ready. The facility was built for a while before we got the go-ahead to load the fuel.
Yeah. And if it didn't work out or you didn't get the permit, it could have been converted to something else. Yeah,
we could use it as a test facility. It was worth being risk on for that. And the other thing was we said, okay, we got to build, learn, and iterate from this. And by and the other big thing in nuclear that's hard because it's been so hard to build and we haven't built. The culture in the industry is pervasively stuck in analysis paralysis. It's slow
and we're breaking out of that. But what does that mean? You're not going to design and build the perfect reactor the first time,
which is how nuclear, you know, the industry's kind of taught itself. Now it's like, no, no, you're going to build and turn one on and that's awesome because you're going to learn from it and make the next one better and the next one better and the next one better. And it's changed its cost paradigm and the time paradigm. So
Jake sounds like someone who got a lot of reps in in the weight room after
getting the reps in.
And the reason for this paradigm shift in in regulatory it's kind of a combination of first of all climate change like we need carbon-free electricity.
Second energy independence and third the data center AI buildout.
I think so there's just all these things that compound themselves that electrification drives people to use more power. On top of that we have re-industrialization happening in this country. We outsourced so much manufacturing and therefore power demand out of this country for so long and now it's coming back in and we need the base load that 24/7 power that nuclear is really good at doing back and then on top of that
AI couple that whole layer with something we want to actually do sustainably so that we can kind of you know endure living on this planet uh very very very important um nuclear is the answer for all that and something people have been shy in this industry is to call it a silver bullet I'll stand up and say fast reactors and recycling like what we're doing are effectively they're a silver bullet for climate and energy abundance
But this plant generates isotopes, not electricity, the one we're in right now.
So the best analogy we could think of to explain what this nuclear reactor 6 ft behind Jack is doing. Jack, why don't you use the analogy? Yeah, don't fall in.
So this proved to yourself that you could do it. You learned how to do it, and you showed the world you could do it. The analogy we thought of was 2008, the Falcon 1 rocket launching into orbit by SpaceX. That wasn't a money generating product, but they showed that they could send a rocket into space as a private company, and it paved the way for the Falcon 9, which has done so much work sending stuff into orbit.
It's a very good analogy, and it's accurate, I think, for a couple reasons, too. When I was growing up in this space,
because I fell in love with nuclear as a kid. I worked on it like in high school. And I remember all these mentors and folks I worked with, you know, as a young kid growing up
always more or less said, I mean, people literally told me several times, multiple people people that building a nuclear reactor is one of the is like one of the hardest things you can do on Earth. It's one of the hardest things for people to do. And that never made sense to me because the physics we know we know how to manage this stuff. Yeah.
Like it was all because we just kept self-imposing both, you know, as an industry as well as regulatory stuff and all those things really hard things. So it was really really hard. So proving you could do it is unbelievably important because it starts to shatter the paradigm.
Okay. But one of the main reasons for all of those red tape and concerns is something that we should also reference which you know Jack and I are former Wall Street guys. So we jumped into your spa paperwork from when you guys went public. We did notice you said the word disaster four times in the paperwork.
And being two guys sitting next to your reactor right now. I wish it was zero times. But is this technology safe?
Absolutely. I look at objective facts. Nuclear technology is one of, if not the safest form of energy in the most brutal but distilled metrics for that. I don't love it, but it's clear. Is it has among the lowest deaths per megawatt hour of all energy sources. Like it's right up there around with solar. It might even be better depending on how you account for some of this stuff. It is incredibly safe. Why? Because we learned that it was dangerous early on. And we as an industry and as a society built rules, regulations, and operating practices and procedures that manage that. Well, if you cool and control it, it makes the containing part a lot easier. So, if you build a reactor that's self-controlling and self-cooling
based on physics, not systems, not operator intervention, you change the paradigm how you think about safety. This is something that human society figured out how to do. And this reactor is an example of it. The reactor in Idaho Falls that we're building that builds off of its predecessor proved it out on April 3rd, 1986. This reactor in Idaho called EBR2 was literally running at full power. They locked these control rods are uh control rods that are the things that would go in the reactor and shut it down. They locked them out of the reactor so they could not go in and then they turned off the pumps.
Was it like a stress test?
Huge stress test. An unbelievably challenging stress test.
Did people know was this public like a dangerous stress test?
They actually knew how well this was going to work and they had a whole audience for it. It was like a performance.
This was unprecedented. And what happened was the reactor had the following things happen. When I say self-controlling self-cooling what does that mean? It means that as it heats up, various phenomena come to play to cause the reactor to shut down. And that means it's not going anymore, but you still have to manage the heat cuz in a nuclear reactor, when you turn it off, it's still making heat because the decay products still are around. So, yes, it has incredible safety to the point that it's it's it's amazing what the system did. And that was just the morning. Then they shut the reactor. They like fully shut it down after it shut itself down naturally and was just fine. Went to lunch, came back, turned it on, and did what happened basically at Fukushima, but way worse cuz at Fukushima the reactor. Yeah. in the afternoon really stressful already. They just put it through something e just as hard and it was self-regulated fine. Yeah.
And it's because it's a quote unquote fast reactor.
Well, you can design a lot of reactors that have these features. It's just really about having a modern reactor that's passively and inherently safe.
The analogies you gave at the beginning about the the eraser.
Yeah.
That's with today's reactors that use 5% of the fuel in a single pass. With recycling, you can use almost throw it away.
Yeah. And with recycling, you can extract all that unused fuel almost. So you get almost 90 95 or more percent back. So now instead of
that being worth 147 barrels, it's worth thousands.
We're all crunching the math and not getting there. I expected the PhD would get there.
So Jake, all three of us are standing over a nuclear reactor.
Should we be worried for our health?
Not at all. So, first of all, uh the water is really good at shielding radiation.
So, there's no radiation really getting up here. Um you're fine.
So, yeah. Yeah. It's pretty cool.
They kept telling us that we're safe.
I mean, I would literally like I would swim in it, live and sleep in it, and do everything else. Like, damn.
I would drink the water. I know it's fine. I know it's safe. I would do it. Like, it's it's just,
you know, there's reasons I guess I can't yet can't yet live in a or above a reactor, but one day. What's the biggest, you know, on on that front, like the question Jack's asking, what's like the biggest misconception question you get when you're at dinner with people and you say, "Hey, I'm Jake.
I run an eight billion dollar nuclear company."
I definitely try to be more low-key. No, I just like people ask what I do. It's like, "Oh, I work in nuclear." And then people are always like curious about, well, what do you like
like, you know, what about the safety? What about the waste? Those are the usually the things. Um, and you know, oftentimes it's like, well, you're that close to stuff. It's like, guys, I've been really close to a lot of things that are very radioactive, but in managed controlled ways, and I know how to like I know the physics and know the science, but also importantly, we know the protocols and mechanisms to make it so that you're not actually at risk. You get more radiation living next to a coal plant than a nuclear plant
really because coal is actually radioactive. It has all sorts of small amounts of materials that are radioactive, and we just pump that out the stacks and it goes everywhere. And so, people get more radiation that way than they do, and they don't monitor it. Actually I the other analogy I like is what when it comes to the broader trend when we like stand back a bit to see where nuclear's gone up and down. Jack thinks fashion, Jack thinks bell bottoms, right Jack?
So bell bottoms hot in the 60s.
Yeah.
Lame for a long time after that. Hot again today.
Yeah.
So that's nuclear 1.0 versus 2.0. So from 1950 to 1990, that's the nuclear 1.0. 40 years we built 100 nuclear reactors all producing carbon-free electricity.
That was the 1970s swinging bell bottoms era.
We had one incident where nobody died.
Right
now the 40 years since then we have built three reactors
bell bottoms
up until this year when there's been a renaissance nuclear 2.0. So our big question here you know nuclear it's one of the incredible inventions of humankind. Why did it get canceled?
Yeah, I think you had a confluence of different factors that happened with it. One, it's hard to overstate this, right? Like generationally, we have a different mindset about how we think about interacting with information. Sounds really silly. The internet changes everything. People can go online and research things on their own with a lot of information at their disposal. Think about what we can do. Think what you can do right now. During the 70s and 80s and 90s, that wasn't available. And so what happened was misinformation, disinformation, confusion, fear, and uncertainty drove how people perceive certain things. And when you combine various factors that were sort of in an a little bit of an anti-development era, right, going on uh confluence inappropriately so with nuclear weapons, like all this stuff going on, it created this environment where fear and uncertainty, misinformation and disinformation could spread unmmitigated. And that caused a lot of people to be afraid. And it was hard to get information to dispute that. Look at our generation for a couple reasons that are different. I say our generation, I mean generations today.
They they're curious by something. They go look it up, right? And they find the facts. And I've seen this so many times anecdotally where people go in and say, "Hey, nuclear is really cool." Uh
or sorry, they don't know much about it. They hear about it. They're like, "This sounds interesting." They go into it and they're like, "Wow, this is really cool. Wow, this is really safe. Wow, this is great. Why haven't we done this so much before? What happened?" Right? And and like that is part of what's changed the world because the objective facts are on nuclear side. that's enabled a lot of this change to happen and it wasn't there for why these elements festered but also a couple other factors and it gets this gets borderline to the conspiratorial side but the the the facts are out there like look there were advocating interests in it and various other sources of energy that went against nuclear they paid for anti-nuclear advertisements
gas fossil fuels
right yeah
on top of that you had foreign interests that were not interested in the US having energy super abundance so they were not able to keep up. So they advocated for things against it. They've swed
doubt and fear and uncertainty and all those things. And again, then you add to that some poor dynamics that the industry didn't necessarily do a great job of getting in front of some of these elements when you were kind of going through this rise of the environmental movement in the 60s and 70s where people didn't stand up and tout the benefits strongly.
Yeah, that was a factor. And I feel like when you look at the data, it's a dark analogy, but it's kind of like how people are more concerned about when it comes to the danger concerns, people are more concerned about a plane crash than a car crash, even though the data clearly shows the car crashes are more dangerous.
Yeah. Which leads to this wild fact that should end any argument about nuclear safety.
And Jack is having he wrote a term paper in business and policy school about about nuclear.
I didn't know that.
Yeah.
At the University of Michigan. Yeah.
Got published.
It did.
Yeah. It's got like 100 views.
Nice. Maybe get a lot more. One of the few things that I have not co-authored with Jack.
Yes, it needs your razledazzle. We'll actually put a link to that to that paper in the show.
Yes, you should.
More people die every day from fossil fuels than have ever died in the history of nuclear power.
It's a great stat.
We need to repeat the stat.
It's a hero stat.
More people died yesterday from natural gas, oil, and coal, mostly through respiratory illness, than in the 70 plus year history of nuclear energy. More people have died from bell bottoms.
So, personally, I got super into nuclear because I'm I get the abstract fear of a nuclear disaster. That's incredibly scary.
But we have a very real thing happening right now called climate change. And in my opinion, nuclear is a must-have to stop the world from warming.
And it's all about timing, too. Like one of the cool things about Jack and I having the show is that you came of age, this nuclear renaissance moment when we were launching the podcast 10 years ago.
And so we've been able to follow this moment and cover it on the show the last few years. Like we've covered Oklo two years ago, last year when you went public and like now to actually tour the reactor with you.
That is very cool. And yeah, I think the other thing too is like sometimes people get caught up in the climate discussion. It's people know air quality, people know pollution and emissions. Those are real things like and the reality is like this is an important thing to mitigate and avoid that and at the end of the day it's climbing the energy density curve. Humankind has almost always done that. So it's the natural logical next step.
I think that's what he said at his frat sorority social.
It's the logical next step.
So, we're going to get eventually Oklo nuclear cores that are self-sustaining and the nuclear reaction continues and it goes as long as the fuel lasts, which could be years, right?
And it's going to be hot for all of those years. And the heat connects to a metal, connects to another metal, warming water ultimately, creating steam, and then that steam turns a turbine which generates electricity.
And that just goes on for years.
Yeah. So you load the fuel, turn it on, start making the power. Power causes, you know, flows through the system, ultimately manifests steam, spinning a turbine, making electricity.
And you can do that for several years before you then refuel a little bit of it and then run it again.
No smoke coming out of smoke stacks. So, no CO2 being emitted and creating greenhouse gases.
All of the waste, there isn't any.
Everything is contained in the fuel.
Everything's contained in the fuel.
And how much monitoring does it require? Is it like 24/7 there's always someone having to look at what's happening?
In a power plant, you do. Now, funny thing that your team may not have told you, but when we were scouting out and preparing and researching for this interview, we saw some imagery where this was lit up blue.
And we said, 'Can we light it up blue? Cuz that looks really cool.' And we were told we can't.
All right. We actually don't know the answer. The reason is come back. Here's why. So, right now, we wanted to get this set up commission like turned on.
Yeah. And then we're going to go through the process of going and upgrading to make more power.
Now, when you start making more power, you don't need to light it up blue. It'll light itself up blue.
No.
So, the reason we don't do it is we don't want to send the image like we're producing a bunch of power making it blue because this is going to be on because it will actually go blue on its own.
Now, it has to run at a certain power to do that.
And the reason is this. This is a crazy factoid.
Even this is like second date night kind of.
Yeah. This is good. So you asked my favorite term I said it's really Cherenkov radiation. So this is that this is the blue light that a reactor will do. So if you have a in a reactor that's producing power there's a lot of free electrons being produced by beta decay. What that means is you're converting neutrons to protons in the in the in doing so you release you spit out an electron and that electron is going so fast that it's actually going faster than photons go in water.
It's actually going faster than the speed of light in water. No. No. Speed of light in water is less than it is in a vacuum. It's called the universal constant, but it goes faster than the light in water.
And the sonic boom equivalent for a particle going faster than light in a medium is blue light called Cherenkov.
So come back, see it when it's actually doing that.
But that's why we don't we don't want to do it. It's like it looks cool, but it sends off the signal like, oh, we're doing that. We're not. We want it to glow blue on its own.
So wild. Oh, you got it.
Oh, we will on different things. Nice. So I guess a big surprise I had is that whether it's coal, oil and gas or nuclear, each one of them just creates steam which turns a turbine and creates electricity.
It's just two of them have really dirty byproducts to get to that steam and nuclear has nothing.
It's like half of a coal plant and half of a nuclear plant are actually the same thing.
So I think the first two business lines are the silver bullets, the power generation and the fuel recycling.
Right. But there is a supporting role character who we think is kind of a hero here.
It's funny that this third leg of the stool is not described by you as a silver bullet because it could potentially cure.
I just haven't gotten there yet.
We're talking about isotopes. We would say isotopes are the robin to nuclear energy's bat.
Yeah, we might have to update that cuz there's three.
But this facility is producing isotopes. What are what the heck is an isotope? What are the isotopes that are going to be popping out of from 6 ft behind factory? plan to sell them to and how will they be used?
This is another part of the business that's radically misunderstood and underappreciated and also another isotope great date night kind of thingy, right? So, okay, isotopes basically the elements on the periodic table. Uh, let's choose hydrogen is a great one. We all know hydrogen. Hydrogen primarily is just one proton orbited by an electron. But there's a flavor of hydrogen called deuterium which is chemically the same as hydrogen but it has a neutron bound to that proton and that's an isotope of hydrogen. So, and then there's another isotope of hydrogen called tritium which has two neutrons bound to that proton, one electron. Chemically the same as hydrogen pretty much, but that neutron that's now radioactive because it's imbalanced. Some are radioactive, so they decay and that radiation can be incredibly useful because it allows you to treat medical conditions or image the body differently or diagnose things like with cancer.
So, to me, I think of it like this. There's two major things about medical uses of that are really important. There's diagnostics and imaging. That's critically important for diagnosing a lot of different conditions and we don't have enough of these isotopes at all and it's completely transformative if you catch some of these things early. They're treatable and they can it saves lives.
Then you have the capability to load these things almost like targeted cruise missiles to cancer cells. Load them onto lians some of these isotopes and these molecular carriers are are found to be almost only uptaken or specifically uptaken by cancer cells. So if you load it with a ticking time bomb, which is what a radioisotope is, it gets taken up by the cell and then that radioisotope decays in that cell, it obliterates that cell in nearby cells.
It kills the cancer cell.
And importantly, unlike chemotherapy, which is killing your whole body, just hopefully slower than the cancer cells, this is really only killing the cancer cells because there's very little incidental radioactive like decay in the rest of your body.
It's unbelievable. The targeted therapies are insane what you can do with this.
Wow. And we don't have nearly enough of these things and they're becoming frontline treatments because of how effective they are. So what this reactor behind us is all about is making neutrons that can be absorbed by materials to turn those into these useful isotopes. So these materials, these isotopes, they don't exist in nature. They need to be formulated. They need to be synthesized. And to do that, they have to absorb neutrons. And reactors make a bunch of cheap neutrons that you can put these materials into next to the fuel. They'll absorb neutrons, turn into these materials. You pull them out, you separate them out, and then you can load them into therapeutics.
Why hasn't this been done?
It is being done, but what we did is we don't do enough of it, right? And so in the US, here's a couple things that happened, right? The US really stepped back on nuclear things. Russia never really did. China's been growing into it. So they produce a bunch. We as a country lapsed in nuclear in a lot of different areas and we just seated the ability to do this. So now we can actually bring back supply.
But what's interesting is there's two factors here. One, these materials have incredible value now and they're under supplied and there's going to be, you know, price and margin cannibalization, but given the audience, I think it's a fun thing to say. If you ever see like what are the most valuable materials on the planet, there's some social media posts out there like a good number of those are all isotopes.
Including some that I think the last I saw the going market rate would be about $400 trillion a kilogram.
Yeah. More than caviar and more than gas.
Like stupid numbers, right? You don't make kilograms. But these are the things you can make. Now, the other thing though is like you can also start making materials and isotopes that we don't make at all that researchers see incredibly promising but they can't get their hands on. It could open up entirely new drug discoveries and platforms and then we're the ones producing. That's a great place to be. So,
So China and Russia are producing these now.
Yes. And then there's limited production capacity in the US and in the Western world, but we haven't been growing capacity really like a little bit here and there.
And and does Dana Farber Cancer Institute become the customer? I think a lot of people become partners customers like they become research partners they become customers I mean right now if you look at one of the best uh I don't know if I say best one of the highest selling cancer treatments is out of Novartis it's called uh I think it's called Pluvicto uses lutetium 177 it's an isotope that is being gobbled up because it's becoming it's very supply limited in its use and there's so many others that just aren't even being supplied enough so that they can't make the decisions to treat or they can't even do the research to see because they look have so much promise but there aren't You can't even buy it because it's just not available.
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We want to talk about your origin story. Why is it called Oklo?
Yeah. So, um there's a natural nuclear reactor that occurred in Africa. It's a country Gabon Africa. Uh that we know of geologically. Most likely this occurred many many places. This is the only one we've discovered a record of.
This is insane, but go on.
Yeah, that is what and it's called the Oklo region and that's what we named the reactor off like off of and after because it was paying homage to the fact that like nuclear is natural. It's been around um and we literally had natural nuclear reactors on the earth. So, the history is really fascinating. A long time ago, uranium uranium, remember we talked about at the beginning, uranium 238 uranium 235 is the the naturally like best useful fuel directly. uh it's at a very low enrichment because it decays faster than uranium 238. A long time ago, it had a higher concentration. So it's the natural level of of the natural uranium was just enriched to a higher natural level. It was enough so that in in enough concentration in certain rocks and ore if water flowed in, it would start a nuclear reactor to start and happen, a chain reaction to happen and occur. And what happened at the Oklo reactor, as far as we can tell, is this was the case. Water would flood in from the ocean because it was near coastal. It would flood it. The reactor would start. It would heat up and it would produce steam and it would basically produce a nuclear-powered steam geyser.
Uh and then the steam would eject out. The reactor would shut down because the water went away and then the water would flow back in and it would start up again. So it would run on and off and on and off and on and off for for a long time. I mean I think people generally think speaking think it took it lasted for hundreds of thousands of years um before it finally like depleted itself and wouldn't run anymore and or the geology changed. So,
Yeah, that's the name. That's insane.
And you know the funny story about how they discovered this?
Yeah. is like the French were buying uranium from the region back when they were building on nuclear really successfully but they found that it came in somewhat denatured like it had been in a reactor.
And that immediately set off alarm bells like well what's coming where is this coming from.
A secret project.
Yeah so they would investigate and like well it did come from reactor just a long long long long.
Wild but the big break is 2013.
Yeah cuz give or take a decade after you met Tim Tibo while you were getting your PhD at MIT you met Sam Altman he was about to become the head of Y Combinator.
So, what's the biggest thing you've learned from Sam Altman? And what's something you totally disagree with him on?
Wow.
And he is listening and watching. We should point out.
Well, they just hit AGI, right? So, he already knew his his his uh his clone is watching.
Um, okay. So, that's an interesting question. Okay. A lot of things that I learned a ton. Um, I think one of the I'm going to kind of cheat and give you two answers. One is never stop swinging for the fences on everything you're doing. Like don't let near-term stuff sacrifice the long term of what you're going to like build through. Like don't just like build and learn and build and learn, but don't stop. Don't optimize for what the thing in front of you is, but grow through it.
In other words, what's Oklo's vision, right? It's effectively unlocking the full power of the atom with fast reactors and recycling and all the cool things you can do with that and isotopes at full scale. That is a terminal energy solution for the planet. There's enough energy content and known reserves of heavy metals with fast reactors and recycling that we can power the entire planet's energy needs for billion for two plus billion years for basically the durable lifetime of the planet.
Wow.
