"Oklo" is the name of a region in Gabon with rich uranium deposits. In the 1970s, it was noticed that uranium mined from the region had a different isotopic makeup than expected, and it was characteristic of spent fuel.
Further investigation revealed that, billions of years (many half-lives) ago, when the naturally-occurring uranium was much "hotter", it was sufficiently concentrated to form a natural fission reactor. Groundwater acted as a moderator, and as the vein of ore would heat up from the reaction, the water would turn to steam, which would form voids in the moderator and slow the reaction down. It would cool, water would seep back in, and the reactor regulated itself this way for a few hundred thousand years before its fuel burned to a concentration too low to continue.
Now there's a startup with this name which is gonna make it harder to search for, but if that helps solve more problems than it creates, more power to them.
Imagine the alternate reality, very slightly different from ours, where nuclear reactors spontaneously erupted from the Earth's surface (in the modern anthropic era). Imagine a Pliny trying to make sense of a nuclear Vesuvius.
For anyone who missed HN's interesting feature yesterday: in the ancient Roman city of Hierapolis (modern Turkey), there is a lethal geological feature that emits invisible CO2. "But get an answer he did, almost immediately. "We saw dozens of dead creatures around the entrance: mice, sparrows, blackbirds, many beetles, wasps and other insects. So, we knew right away that the stories were true." And the Romans built a temple on top of this mysterious death -- and they called this temple the "Plutonium"!
Imagine the religious imagery if, instead of burning to death or suffocating in the ash, volcano eruption victims developed acute radiation sickness and stumbled into nearby villages puking their guts out and melting from the inside out.
It probably harmed some organisms, just not any organism that could complain about the adverse effects to us humans.
This thing happened 1.7 billion years ago, in Precambrian eon. So when this natural nuclear reactor was active there weren't many animals around anywhere in the world, let alone in that particular spot.
What makes you think the setting is unrealistic? And why is it an issue that the housing looks pleasant? I’m sure it won’t look exactly like, but for the types of customers that are in the market for consistent 1.5 MWe at $0.06/KWh (their target), a decent-looking exterior and an ability to be placed in remote settings seem like desirable product features.
> What makes you think the setting is unrealistic?
No one in their right mind builds a structure containing a nuclear facility right next to a fully grown tree, for example. If the tree is a spruce, for example, it'd likely be a shallow root tree, meaning not only would the roots penetrate the foundation, it'd also be prone to windthrow - a serious security risk considering the building is housing a nuclear facility.
There's also no security measures to be seen in any of the renderings (apart maybe from the tiny fence right next to the fully-developed road). Doesn't spark much confidence in security against proliferation concerns.
> And why is it an issue that the housing looks pleasant?
The issue isn't what the housing looks like. The issue is that it's mentioned at all given the current stage of development.
Just to clarify: the company has been around for 8 years and isn't licensed to even produce prototype reactors yet. Compare this to some of the competition mentioned in the article:
• Elysium Industries (just as small, ~6 years old) [0] features a CAD rendering of their reactor design front and centre
• HolosGen [1] features a detailed CAD rendering of their reactor design on the landing page and includes tons of reference material
• NuGen, founded in 2006 [2] - which is basically a two-person operation with an office in what looks like an apartment building in a residential area [3] - features a CAD rendering of their reactor on their homepage, plus related patents
• XEnergy [4], founded in 2009 and a little bigger, features CAD renderings of both the reactor design and the fuel cells on their landing page
General Atomics - another competitor mentioned in the article - is too big and thus not a fair comparison, which is why I left them out.
I hope you start to notice a pattern here. No matter how small and unimpressive these companies might seem at first glance, all of them focus on the actual technology behind their product and that's what they put at the centre of their presentation.
Oklo, OTOH, doesn't do any of that. I understand that they're in "stealth mode" or whatever, but if you do a CNBC interview and the press material you bring consists of a neat house in a boreal forest with a tree right next to the roof of a nuclear facility and no security measures to be seen anywhere, I call BS on that.
Security concerns are handwaved away without even addressing the point (are the reactors that “operate without security forces and have impeccable security records over many decades.” also found in remote locations?), regulatory obstacles and poor economics aren't addressed either, but instead the reactors will be housed in “aesthetically pleasing” structures - as if anyone cares if they are intended to be located in remote locations, fenced away and obviously surrounded by forest or desert...
[3] https://bit.ly/2SI9yVK (Google Street View of the principal office according to the latest business report filed with the North Carolina Secretary of State)
Weird! I just saw this mentioned in Joe Scott's recent video on Nuclear Waste[1]
I hope it's successful as I feel nuclear fission power has been unfairly maligned.
I strongly recommend the book Atomic Accidents by James Mahaffey[2] to learn more about how fission power plants work and what went wrong at Chernobyl etc. - it's one of my favourite books of all-time.
A lot of big countries have significant interests in preventing smaller states from acquiring nuclear arms. It is difficult to say how much of the FUD around civilian nuclear power was planted on purpose by governments.
Great book. One of the chapters is named "The US government almost never lost nuclear weapons" if I remember correctly. A glimpse into the author's sense of humor.
Yeah, his other book "Atomic Adventures" was recommended to me by my friends and also mentioned in the book "The Future of Fusion Energy" by Parisi and Ball.
We need to experiment every day with nuclear power. We need to try new things. We need to learn. We need to make mistakes and learn from them. We need to conquer this paralyzing fear. We need to not be afraid of the possible bad consequences because the upside is infinitely better and more important.
We need to continue to improve and evolve our technology. It's our only hope.
Instead of starting research on safe nuclear options, with results who knows when, we should go all in TODAY on established and safe regenerative energy options available right now: Solar and Wind.
Every cent we invest in nuclear research is lost to the immediate solutions.
> Every cent we invest in nuclear research is lost to the immediate solutions.
This would only be true if 100% of GDP was spent on climate solutions. In reality, it's not a zero sum game like this. If some people get excited about nuclear and want to invest while others are excited about wind and solar, then that's great. The more the merrier!
Solar and wind can only generate depending on weather, which is now constantly changing in unexpected ways. Good luck building battery arrays that can power cities for weeks at a time during cloudy periods.
No, nuclear is the only way forward. We know it can work. We need to invest now. Solar and wind cannot power our collective needs, and even if they could, to build it out would require such a massive doubling-down in fossil fuels that the planet would be one big desert by the time we finished.
It's a bit late to start the experiment if we need 20,000 working models in the next 6m to avoid climate change. That's the issue with nuclear: to late.
Too late is much better than "cannot work at all" which is what solar and wind give us. What makes you think solar and wind are up to the task right now? They cannot possibly power our collective needs, and even if they could, we have nowhere to store the energy at night or on cloudy/calm days.
Energy storage is not a solved problem, and it will not be a solved problem for the next decade. In the meantime, we need to build nuclear reactors now.
You realise you're planning for peak load grid management for 50 years after the collapse of society right? No one will need to power their ipad when food shortages have killed 50% of the population and the rest are fighting a war over access to water...
We could make some tiny portions of Earth uninhabitable for the next few thousand years. Still much, much better than making the whole Earth uninhabitable forever, which is what we are doing right now.
It's not just uninhabitable, someone has to maintain that property forever. You don't just put an "abandoned" sign on a melted down nuclear reactor and expect the problem to be solved. You don't just put the waste in barrels and tanks that go into the ground and have them leak into local rivers and ground water, which is what we're doing now.
We still need to clean up the nuclear messes from earlier decades of nuclear research, a time when we were not afraid of the bad consequences of nuclear, and it shows, much to our detriment.
That is like pointing at a model-T and claiming how dangerous cars are and how they are too dangerous for people to drive. All of our real nuclear problems are due to plants designed in the 50s and 60s, which is only around 15 years after nuclear power was first discovered. Of course that shit was/is unsafe, they barely understood the materials and science they were dealing with, they still had xray machines in shoe stores at the time. There is no disputing that our nuclear science has come leaps and bounds since then and there is no reason to think we can't make safe nuclear power plants.
The least we could do is atleast replacing the current 50 year old plants that are still running today with modern safer designs.
Where are the Model Ts that are leaking nuclear waste into rivers and ground water? The point was that bad consequences occurred from "not being afraid of the bad consequences of nuclear", and much of the hesitancy and cost associated with nuclear today is due to a better understanding of its risks and liabilities.
The problem is nuclear is very expensive to build, takes forever for ROI, is a huge liability risk that likely no private company can tolerate, and a logistical nightmare with waste management and proliferation concerns.
I would personally be for it being adopted as a major DoE energy independence project where trillions are pumped in over 25 years to do it properly, and provide a cheap baseload to the population. That's unlikely. Just as unlikely as a private company actually being able to come through without cutting safety corners to improve ROI, or not becoming insolvent and externalizing the cost onto society the moment there is a problem.
Almost all the radioactive waste that exists is from bomb making, not from power generation.
If you also create a good plan to recycle reactor fuel into new core assemblies, the total amount of waste drops by a significant amount below the relatively small volume power generation creates now.
Spent fuel rods are presently stored in casks on the grounds of power plants. There aren't mountains of them.
Reprocessing waste is extremely expensive, something like $50 - $60 billion to copy what France does, who funded theirs through weapons research.
It's not all dry cask storage, most energy sites store spent fuel in cooling pools. NRC has had to authorize plants to exceed the original design limits of their pools due to the amount of waste with nowhere to go. This is hardly a trivial problem.
All sites in the US that I know of store spent fuel in cooling pools prior to it going to dry cask storage. That's how the system works - the radioactivity goes down/the rods cool in the pool, then when they're sufficiently low activity they get moved to dry cask.
>NRC has had to authorize plants to exceed the original design limits of their pools due to the amount of waste with nowhere to go. This is hardly a trivial problem.
State your source(s) for this. I do know that the NRC has to authorize all on site storage whether there's "room" or not, simply because there's that much oversight involved.
How about we just throw it all into the sea? After all, that is pretty much what we are doing with our fossil emission (which contain plenty of radioactive elements, btw): belch them into the atmosphere without a care in the world since the air will dilute them enough so the effects are spread over huge areas.
But the trouble is not with the radioactive elements from the earth making it to the surface. Our current problem is with CO2 and its atmospheric accumulation. So instead of being scared of bogeyman like "waste leaking into the ground water" your only nightmare should be this:
Because that is on the whole planet and your future climate will affect every corner of the globe making whole continents uninhabitable, not just a few exclusion zones.
We already have nuclear sites such as Hanford leaking radioactivity into local water systems. We have Rocky Flats poisoning whole communities. While these are the aftermath of poorly managed nuclear weapons projects, it's testament to our extremely poor handling and the extreme costs of nuclear waste.
Regarding power generation, Fukushima has dumped gobs of radioactivity into the ocean. Even reprocessing facilities like La Hague release radioactivity into the channel which then flows into the North Sea.
The problem with just letting radioactivity leak into the environment(and those who claim "fewer people have died from nuclear than any other energy source"), is that the effects of radiation contamination may not be felt for decades, in things like early cancers, reproductive problems, and birth defects, and be hard to trace back to their original source.
Radioactivity is extremely dangerous, this is a well-known fact, and to not acknowledge the great challenges around managing nuclear projects and the waste they generate, just reduces the credibility of nuclear apologists. Nuclear could be done safely and effectively, it's just very very very expensive to do so and thus corners get cut, and we end up socializing the costs into haphazard sites, which will cost billions of dollars to maintain over the next few decades alone, and we all know nuclear waste will stick around much longer than that.
>Fukushima has dumped gobs of radioactivity into the ocean.
You mean the Japanese government has.
That aside, total radioactivity emitted by Fukushima's leaks stands at about 35 PBq if you count the amount released into the sea.
Total radioactivity released by coal burning power plants world wide is ~200 PBq.
Annually.
Fukushima grabs headlines, but it's releasing far less radioactivity than the ongoing operation of coal burning power plants.
>the effects of radiation contamination may not be felt for decades, in things like early cancers, reproductive problems, and birth defects, and be hard to trace back to their original source.
Especially since Fukushima is statistically unlikely to be the source, since so much more radioactivity comes from elsewhere.
>Radioactivity is extremely dangerous, this is a well-known fact,
Radioactivity is completely natural. It can be dangerous, but so can fire if you don't know how to handle it.
>and to not acknowledge the great challenges around managing nuclear projects and the waste they generate
Nuclear power plants generate only a small fraction of the waste that things like bomb making generate. The largest challenges for managing it are political because of the prejudice of the public against it.
Literally the only way to "save" Fukushima was to dump sea water on its melting down reactors in its initial days/weeks/months. I also don't get your deflection, as if you're insinuating the Japanese government is somehow a source of radioactivity. Actually it's coming from the melted down reactors. If you want to blame poor management as the cause of the nuclear diaster, unfortunately that seems to be a trend in the nuclear industry, so it doesn't help your argument.
>Radioactivity is completely natural.
Not in the concentration needed to run a nuclear reactor. Many mines are operating U-235 concentrations that are a fraction of a fraction of a percent. Some of those operations use methods similar to fracking to extract uranium, and are not clean. There are some select high-grade mines, but unsurprisingly, the high radiation levels require special precautions and heavy reliance on automation due to the deadly hazards radiation poses to personnel.
>The largest challenges for managing it are political because of the prejudice of the public against it.
Nope, it's a hard technical challenge that requires vast resources to solve. It is not as simple as nuclear apologist think it is. I would like to see it come to fruition, but as a major government project, where we stop the charade of it being a viable business model for private industry.
I think this is an interesting effort, but I question their fuel source - despite common perceptions, there's not a lot of suitable material around that could be recycled in this way, and what is available is of non uniform composition - like the waste from the experimental reactor design they mention. That factor could make reprocessing the stuff into fuel suitable for a given micro design expensive.
It's great that they're trying to use waste material to reduce the waste stream, but that's far from the biggest problem new reactor designs face... by volume, nuclear waste produced by power plants just isn't that much material. If these folks were somehow saying they could recycle the waste generated over decades of bomb making, that would be worthwhile... but that's not really usable waste.
I have some very recent, very specific domain knowledge in this area; there is more low-burnup ex-research reactor material, off-spec material, etc. out there looking for a good home than you might imagine—-especially at micro-reactor quantities.
I read the name "Oklo" and thought "that place already had nuclear reactors." I assume the company named themselves after the natural fission reactors discovered in Oklo, Gabon.
1.7 billion years ago the concentrations of fissile material and groundwater were just right that nuclear fission reactions happened naturally.
I understand stealth mode for startups, but the secretive, shadowy web presence in combination with nuclear baggage makes them feel a little sinister.
It seems like being involved with such a historically fraught energy source they would want to come out of the shadows and into the sunlight, so to speak.
For the past idk 10 years I’ve felt like nuclear power was really on the way out but over the past like 24 months I’ve noticed a huge resurgence in support for these types of projects. Maybe that’s just my bubble but it seemed like a serious inflection.
Or people are starting to notice climate change, and aren’t aware that large scale batteries exist.
Also people divesting from oil (which will still remain hugely useful and beneficial for a long time) want to diversify into other energy areas.
Then there is lobbying. Nuclear often has big ticket projects that don’t have to foot the bill for their own costs (the nuclear industry has been made immune from liability under US law at least) so there’s a lot of money to be made and once you build the thing, consumers who don’t have other options are at your mercy as it’s a single source you control.
I thought fast reactors were de facto banned in the US for civilian uses because of the proliferation concerns of the plutonium generated? Maybe this is exposing the extent of my knowledge and not all fast reactors are breeder reactors?
It is commonly stated that 'recycling nuclear fuel was banned by Jimmy Carter and remains banned to this day'. While Jimmy Carter did put a moratorium on it in 1977, Regan actually lifted it in '81 [1].
The article mentions they want to have these reactors unguarded and running without a human present. It seems dangerous to me, but at least for the security portion, I could imagine some kind of physical barriers and camera setup that would allow it. As for having no maintenance person there, I think it's a bit more risky.
When I read that the plants are "still several years off", and the most promoted feature (shown in three out of four images) is the "A-frame structures that are aesthetically pleasing", my skepticism went off the charts.
"Oklo" is the name of a region in Gabon with rich uranium deposits. In the 1970s, it was noticed that uranium mined from the region had a different isotopic makeup than expected, and it was characteristic of spent fuel.
Further investigation revealed that, billions of years (many half-lives) ago, when the naturally-occurring uranium was much "hotter", it was sufficiently concentrated to form a natural fission reactor. Groundwater acted as a moderator, and as the vein of ore would heat up from the reaction, the water would turn to steam, which would form voids in the moderator and slow the reaction down. It would cool, water would seep back in, and the reactor regulated itself this way for a few hundred thousand years before its fuel burned to a concentration too low to continue.
Now there's a startup with this name which is gonna make it harder to search for, but if that helps solve more problems than it creates, more power to them.