In the U.S., the Nuclear Regulatory Commission sets design standards for reactors and issues guidance for meeting those standards. The industry is plagued with stories of plant construction taking a decade or more, with cost overruns in the billions. What DeWitte learned about the nuclear power landscape was not particularly encouraging for startups. “At MIT, through the projects and extracurriculars, I learned more about how the energy ecosystem works, how the startup model works, how the venture finance model works, and with all these different pieces I started to formulate the idea that became the seed for Oklo,” DeWitte says. For his PhD, he considered ways to extend the lifetime and power output of the large reactors already in use around the world.īut while DeWitte studied the big reactors of today, he was increasingly drawn to the idea of commercializing the small reactors of tomorrow. “If we can modernize the way we meet these regulations and take advantage of the benefits and characteristics of these next-gen designs, we can start to paint a whole new picture here,” DeWitte says.ĭeWitte came to MIT in 2008 and studied advanced reactors during work for his master’s degree. Now Oklo is hoping its progress will encourage others to pursue new approaches in the nuclear power industry. “Newness was favorable because it shed some of the legacy inertia around how things have been done in the past, and I thought that was an important way of modernizing the commercial approach,” says Oklo CEO Jacob DeWitte SM ’11, PhD ’14, who co-founded the company with Caroline Cochran SM ’10. In many ways, the Silicon Valley-based company has cultivated a startup mindset, eschewing government grants to raise smaller, venture capital-backed funding rounds and iterating on its designs as it moves through the application process much more quickly than its predecessors. Oklo says the plant will run for 20 years without having to refuel in its lifetime.īut perhaps the most unique aspect of Oklo is its approach to commercialization. The company’s first reactor, dubbed the Aurora, is housed in an unassuming A-frame building that is hundreds of times smaller than traditional reactors, and it will run on used fuel recovered from an experimental reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory that was shut down in 1994. The added proportion of uranium-235 allows Oklo’s reactor to run for longer time periods without having to refuel.Īs a result of these differences, Oklo’s powerhouses will bear little resemblance to conventional nuclear plants. Compared to traditional reactors, Oklo’s fuel source will be enriched with a much higher concentration of the uranium-235 isotope, which fissions more easily than the more common uranium-238. Oklo’s reactors won’t use moderators, enabling the construction of much smaller plants and allowing neutrons to move faster.įaster-moving neutrons can sustain nuclear fission with a different type of fuel. The acceptance was the culmination of a novel application process that set a number of milestones in the industry, and it has positioned Oklo to build an advanced reactor that differs in several important ways from the nuclear power plants currently operating in the country.Ĭonventional reactors use moderators like water to slow neutrons down before they split, or fission, uranium and plutonium atoms. Earlier this year, the company became the first to get its application for an advanced nuclear reactor accepted by the U.S. Now the startup Oklo is forging a new path to building innovative nuclear power plants that meet federal safety regulations. That landscape has had varying degrees of success over the years, but it’s never been particularly inviting for new companies interested in deploying unique technologies. They also relied heavily on funding from the federal government, which through large grants and lengthy application processes has dictated many aspects of nuclear plant design and development. For one thing, companies made their reactors big, with power capacities measured in the hundreds of megawatts. today were built using the same general formula. All of the nuclear power plants operating in the U.S.
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