Who Is the Elon Musk of Nuclear Power?
Are there anyone who can revolutionize nuclear power the way Elon Musk revolutionized electric cars and space rockets?
If WE CAN fix all the problems with nuclear power, then we can save the planet from global warming while also bringing prosperity to the third world.
Nuclear power today has several problems that needs fixing:
- Long construction time — Median time to build a reactor is 7 years. However in the West it is much longer. Olkiluoto 3 in Finland has been under construction for 17 years.
- Very High cost — Around £100 per megawatt hour which is typically twice that of wind power. Olkiluoto 3 has cost at least €11 billion.
- Safety — Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima has made the public scared of Nuclear power.
- Storage of Nuclear waste — How do we deal with nuclear waste? This is still a contentious issue.
Thus fixing nuclear power means being able to build cheap, safe plants quickly without a nuclear waste problem. If you can achieve that then you have a tremendous source of clean power. Nuclear power gives massive amounts of power output on a tiny area and can produce power whenever you need it unlike wind and solar. And unlike gas and coal plants it does not cause any CO₂ emissions.
Thus countless companies today are pursuing this holy grail of clean power production. In this story I want to explore who in the nuclear startup scene can fill the role of Elon Musk. By that I mean somebody using strategies similar to those Elon Musk used to revolutionize the rocket and car industry.
That means both understanding what exactly the Elon Musk formula for success is as well as understanding the nuclear startup scene. What kind of companies are there and what do they do?
Broadly speaking nuclear startup companies fall into two camps :
- Fusion power — Companies and governments trying to create a nuclear reactor which fuse hydrogen to produce energy. These produce very little nuclear waste and cannot have a meltdown.
- Fission power — Inventing next generation reactors splitting Uranium without the problems of current reactors using metal, salt or gas as coolant instead of water as in current reactors.
Fusion power is what generates the biggest headlines. You got companies such as Tokamak Energy, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Helion Energy and many more announcing one breakthrough after the other. It is easy to think this is something new and just around the corner. Yet there has been over 200 Fusion reactors built since the 1950s. None of them have worked.
Fission power generated fewer headlines as it has garnered the same reputation as steam engines in our modern world. They are seen as dangerous and producers of bad nuclear waste. For a long time we have simply built larger and ever more complex Light Water Reactors. The overpriced enormous reactors which always get delayed are of this type.
To understand why next generation fission reactors can solve this problem, you need to understand why current reactors are so dangerous and expensive.
The Problem With Todays Nuclear Reactors
The key problem with the reactors we have today is that they are water cooled. This basically turns a Nuclear reactor into a dangerous ticking bomb. Let me explain why. The wikipedia definition of an explosion is as follows:
An explosion is a rapid expansion in volume associated with an extremely vigorous outward release of energy, usually with the generation of high temperatures and release of high-pressure gases.
If you apply extreme heat to water it will rapidly convert into steam, which is water in gas form. When this happens the volume of water expands 1700 times. Thus one liter of water becomes 1700 liters of steam.
This process is exactly what happens inside a normal nuclear reactor today. Fuel rods made out of Uranium produce intense heat. Water is used as a coolant. The water has to constantly flow. If it doesn’t you are going to turn massive quantities of water into steam. Thus you end up with a strong container with massive amounts of gas pressure inside. That is how a bomb works: Pressure builds up inside a metal container until it violently blows open.
Thus using water is the key problem, and that is exactly what the next generation fission reactors are trying to solve.
Fission or Fusion, That is the Question
So todays mega reactors with water cooling is a dead end. They require massive and complex safety systems and enormous amounts of the highest quality concrete to build thick walls, foundations and just about anything to make everything safe. They are like modern day medieval fortresses, except they protect from dangers inside rather than outside.
Futurists and optimists will place their bets on Fusion, because it is by far the coolest sounding technology. But here I will make a car analogy to make the case for why this is not the best bet. Growing up in the 80s I remember three technologies really hyped up:
- Fusion power
- Hydrogen fuel cell cars
- Artificial Intelligence
What is perhaps equally interesting is what technology I didn’t hear much hype about:
- Solar cells and wind turbines
- Battery electric vehicles
It is not surprising. These are boring sounding technologies, which do not capture our imagination. Yet these are the technologies which have really transformed power production and transportation. All these technologies already existed in the 1980s, but they needed time to mature and get perfected. Fusion power for all its promise doesn’t actually have any working reactors. It is not even where wind, solar cells and batteries were in the 1980s.
In the car analogy, fusion is hydrogen fuel cell cars and fission is battery electric cars. Fusion like hydrogen fuel cells is the coolest sounding technology. But fission nuclear power just like batteries is already proven technology we have a change to rethink and perfect.
Elon Musk Formula: Bold and Boring
If you look at technology history, it has been the application of established technology in new and novel ways which has created revolutions. One of the most famous examples of this is Nintendo, which called their philosophy lateral thinking with withered technology:
While competitors were outdoing each other with the latest hardware features like color displays and computing power, Nintendo focused on providing great gameplay with cheap and readily available technology. Gunpei Yokoi called this philosophy “lateral thinking with withered technology”.
Using cheap and readily available technology and combining it in new ways was a stroke of genius.
This philosophy has much the same with the Elon Musk philosophy which I will just call “Bold and Boring.” To revolutionize transportation, Elon Musk did not create a hydrogen fuel cell technological wonder. Nor did his company invent any new batter chemistry. In fact Tesla didn’t even make any new types of batteries at all.
Instead Elon Musk made an important observation: The computer laptop market had exploded and mate laptop batteries produced in high volume at low price. All other car makers would use large batteries specifically designed for cars. Tesla instead glued together 7000 laptop batteries and threw them in their car.
It seems insane and counterintuitive. Using larger and fewer cells make more sense from an engineering and science perspective. But Elon Musk understood what many often fail to grasp: That industrial infrastructure, technology maturity and volume production often matters more.
The “boring” part here is using an already well established battery technology. Or in Nintendo terminology, using “withered technology.”
The “bold” part, is using the technology in a novel way. Instead of using the batteries in a laptop, he chose to use it in a car.
But there is more to this. Traditional EV makers would pursue compact and small cars to appeal to the eco-conscious crowd. It gave electric cars the reputation being something akin to a golf-cart. Before Tesla, if you saw an Electric car you would usually chuckle, because they looked a bit silly.
Elon Musk made a bold move: He designed a car, the Tesla roadster, for a millionaire playboys. I remember when the Roadster came out, I thought: “What an idiot, this Elon Musk guy is!” My rational was this: How are you going to save the environment by selling toys to the rich?
I utterly failed to see how brilliant and bold this strategy was. Elon Musk understood that EVs have an image problem and they are largely unknown. By making a sexy electric sports car he could create a splash and put electric cars in the headlines and change the idea of an EV from that of a silly little golf-cart to a high performance sports car that anyone who loves cars would want to own.
It worked like a dream. I live in Norway where 90% of all cars sold today are EVs. Porsche Taycan alone now sells more than all gasoline cars combined. Today Tesla is just one of many EV brands, but Tesla turbo charged this change by creating the momentum and change in perception that the rest of the industry could piggy back on.
This is what we have to look out for in the Nuclear industry as well. Can somebody cause a perception change and create a momentum which the rest of the nuclear industry can piggy back on? The big automakers ignored EVs for a long time. Today everyone are jousting to get yet another EV model out.
The nuclear industry is in much the same position today. The big players with the deep pockets are wedded to old outdated water reactors. The equivalent of gasoline cars. We need somebody to show success with alternative reactors to get these guys on board.
What is a Next Generation Nuclear Reactor?
I have said fusion is like hydrogen cars. The near future is some kind of fission reactor. However we know it cannot be based on water cooling.
Read more: Different Small Modular Reactor Designs.
The solution is to use metal, salt or gas. If you heat solids like metal and salt they will turn into liquid but you require an insane amount of energy to turn them into gases. Even nuclear reactors will not achieve this. Thus molten metal or salt can be used as coolant in a nuclear reactor. Due to their density they are extremely efficient at heat transfer. Compare e.g. the heat transfer of water cooling vs air cooling. This allows reactors using salt or metal for cooling to be very compact and small while still having high power output.
An alternative is to use gas cooled reactors. While gas expands when heated up, it doesn’t expand remotely as much as water expands when it turns in steam. Gas cooled reactors need to be larger than metal and salt based reactors because gas is less efficient at heat transfer.
Thus both approaches avoid the key problem with water based reactors. But they also add some very important capabilities which water cooled reactors lack: They coolant medium can be heated to very high temperatures such as from 500°C to 950°C degrees. Water cooled reactors operate at 290°C–340°C. While this difference may seem purely academic, it actually matters a lot.
With high output temperatures it becomes possible to store energy. Concentrated Solar Power plants which have already operated for many decades utilize this to store energy from the sun as molten salt in a large reservoir. When power is needed the heat from this salt is drained by using heath from the salt to generate steam driving turbines. In a sense you get a cheap large battery.
This matters when combining Nuclear power with renewables. When the sun is shining and wind is blowing, output from the Nuclear plant can be stored as molten salt in a large reservoir for later usage. This is much cheaper than Lithium iron batteries and scales up much better.
Another opportunity is for the production of Hydrogen. At high temperatures in combination with other chemicals one can produce Hydrogen from water in a processes called Thermochemical Water Splitting. One example is using water heated to 850°C with sulfuric acid. This is significantly more efficient than using Nuclear power to generate electricity and then use that electricity to perform electrolysis of water to produce Hydrogen.
I could talk at length about gas cooled and metal cooled reactors. They both have many interesting properties. However the most interesting reactor type is Molten Salt Reactors (MSRs).
Why Molten Salt Reactors Are The Future
Molten Salt reactors have a number of advantages. Usually during fission lots of nasty radioactive gasses and metals get produced. However in an MSR these radioactive materials get bound to the salt used as coolant. Thus if the reactor core should split open there isn’t a lot of radioactive material to release. It is bound in the salt.
Read more: Yes! Clean Nuclear Power Exists
Unlike a Light Water Reactor, a Molten Salt Reactor is not like a ticking bomb. There is no high pressure being contained. If the reactor core splits open, then molten salt seeps out but quickly solidifies as it is cooled by its surroundings. Nuclear contamination thus never get very far. Compare this with Chernobyl where nuclear fallout got violently thrown into the air and fell down as far away as Northern Norway and Germany.
However a gas cooled reactor using TRISO fuel would have some of the same safety advantages. A more important thing about Molten Salt Reactors is how it can easily be use with a variety of fuels. You can feed it Uranium, Thorium and Plutonium of different enrichment levels. This means you can feed MRSs with what is nuclear waste from other reactors.
MSRs are more environmentally friendly than fusion reactors. MRSs have negative nuclear waste production.
It cannot be overstated how important this is. This ability allows one to use Molten Salt Reactors to burn up Nuclear waste. Sure you will still get some waste out, but it is generally a lot less of it and less dangerous.
In this regard I will argue that MSRs are more environmentally friendly than Fusion reactors. MRSs have negative nuclear waste production. Fusion reactors produce small quantities of nuclear waste. Sure, the waste from Fusion reactors is not that hard to deal with, but Fusion reactors still cannot be used to get rid of nuclear waste. With MSRs you can.
With MSRs you can not only get rid of nuclear waste but you can also get rid of Nuclear material such as Plutonium used to make nuclear weapons. To create a world free of Nuclear weapons we can use MSRs to burn up the Plutonium from these weapons while generating electricity for millions of people.
The next advantage is Thorium. It can be mixed with nuclear waste to generate more power production while producing very little waste. Thorium will get relatively short lived radioactive material (300 years). Thorium has the advantage of existing in abundance, thus making the Earth supplied with energy for thousands of years.
Okay so this sounds great, so what is the problem? Molten Salt is highly corrosive. Thus a MSR can easily get ruined and require a lot of maintenance. For this reason MSR startup companies spend a lot of effort coming up with ways of dealing with corrosion problems. Another problem is cracking of graphite which is usually used as a moderator inside the reactor core. What is a moderator you ask?
A moderator is a chemical compound used to make neutrons move slow. Slow moving neutrons can more easily be slurped up by Uranium atoms. A little geeky factoid which may help understand this better: Higher energy particles have shorter wavelengths. Thus slower particles in a quantum mechanical sense are bigger, thus more likely to interact with an Uranium atom.
Heavy water and graphite are compounds commonly used as moderators. One MSR company, Seaborg, is taking the novel approach of using sodium hydroxide (NaOH). It does not get damaged by neutron bombardment like graphite and unlike heavy water it remains liquid all the way up to 1388°C. Thus no chance of creating a steam bomb.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed and operated a MSR reactor from 1960 to 1969, where a lot of these problems got uncovered and worked on.
There a numerous MSR companies trying to tackle these problems such as Seaborg Technologies, Copenhagen Atomics, Moltex, TerraPower, Flibe Energy, Terrestrial Energy.
But there is one company, ThorCon Power, which I think stands apart from all of the rest of them.
The “Bold and Boring” Vision of ThorCon Power
How do you get to market quickly with a working solution? You use well established and understood technology. Unlike all the other contenders ThorCon is forging ahead with basically the same technology developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It is a proven but flawed technology.
These reactors may not last long due to corrosion and issues with the graphite moderator. ThorCon has basically just said “Screw it, we will build a nuclear power plant around those limitations.”
ThorCon has designed a whole system based on well-established cheap mass-produced standard industrial components: ThorCon Nuclear Power-plant Design.
They have a whole barge with cooling systems, steam generators and everything you need to actually produce electricity. The reactors themselves are contained in sealed Cans, which can be slotted into four silos made to house four reactors. ThorCon refer to these are power modules or PMODs.
These Cans containing the reactors are cylinders which are 11.6 meters high and 7.3 meters in diameter and weigh 400 tons. A large crane is fixed to the barge allowing these Cans to be added or removed when needed.
What is so smart about this design? Each reactor really only lasts 4 years which is shit. You would normally not build a reactor lasting that short time. Reactors are typically built to last 60–80 years. But with a standard water cooled reactor there is no simple and cheap way of removing or adding reactor cores.
The way ThorCon solves this is by always working reactors in pairs. Only two of the four reactors are producing power at any given time. When four years have passed, the fuel is pumped over to the the inactive reactor and it is powered up. That is because there is 4 more years worth of fuel consumption left at that point.
The emptied reactor becomes inactive and put in cool-down mode. From operating for for 4 years it will contain a lot of highly radioactive material. However highly-radioactive material will quickly decay. After four years the cooled down Can is removed and replaced with a new Can. Fuel is transferred to this new Can while the other Can goes into cool-down. Fuel has to be replaced every eight years.
So why is the system I just explained brilliant? Because ThorCon has designed the whole thing for frequent and easy replacements. It doesn’t matter that each given reactor lasts a short time. There is a whole system in place cycling Cans containing reactors in and out. Cans taken out are taken to processing facilities where they can be refurbished and readied for another round.
Thus instead of coming up with some novel and brilliant solution to Molten Salt Reactors lasting only a short time, ThorCon has just solved it by designing a system allowing for cheap and easy replacement of worn out parts.
We can compare this with the challenge of limited range of electric cars. Companies sought a “clever” solution to this by investing heavily in complex hydrogen fuel cell cars of exotic battery chemistry. Tesla instead dealt with it as a dead simple manner: They just built lots of charging stations. That did not require any new novel technology.
Likewise ThorCon isn’t using any new and novel technology here. They are simply adding big cranes and a modular system which allows quick and easy removal Cans with reactors. By making the system modular, they don’t have the expense of replacing the bulk of the system which contains cooling tanks, steam generators and other components. The parts that don’t last long and which need frequent replacement is cleanly separated from everything else. Only the parts that last a short time has to be replaced.
The fact that these reactors are Molten Salt Reactors make this possible or several reasons:
- MSRs are quite small and can thus be made small enough to be moved with a crane in one piece onto a ship for processing.
- Unlike Light Water Reactors (LWRs) you don’t need a massive concrete dome over the reactor, because it cannot blow up.
There is another important element to this design. The ThorCon founders have long experience in building large ships. They are building the reactors as large ships, or barges more specifically. This is a very clever move. It allows mass production of reactors at a shipyard. Once a barge for reactor cores are made, it is pushed out to sea and they can start building the next barge. This way you get something akin to an assembly line production of nuclear power plants.
This is extremely important. Nuclear power plants today are slow to build because they are essentially bespoke structures assembled under different conditions by different people at different sites. By building at a shipyard one has the benefits of using the same company, people and equipment repeatedly. And shipyards are fast at building large structures.
If we are to solve global warming we are going to need lots of nuclear power plants in relatively short time. Traditional reactors are of no help. They require so many specialized parts, equipment and skills that production is very hard to scale up and do quicker.
By using a shipyard ThorCon can crank out lots of nuclear power plants in short time. It may seem limiting that reactors can only be delivered as barges which are placed out at sea. However most of human population lives close to the coast or a major river.
All of these reasons is why I think the ThorCon solution is so brilliant. At almost every step of the way they are using well established technology and solutions which we know how to build cheap, fast and at scale. The Molten Salt Reactors themselves are the exception but ThorCon is playing it safe here by using a design which has already been proven to work by Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
If Elon Musk had gone into Nuclear power, then this kind of approach is what I think he would have pursued. It is what he did with rockets and cars. New and improved technology has been added gradually once a product has been out.
ThorCon promises to do the same. Of course they will research having reactors which last longer and are more reliable. However with this approach ThorCon has the advantage of being able to keep cranking out power plants while improving the design in parallel. I believe this is better than spending lots of time to find optimal solutions. Gradual improvements and iteration is the way to go, once a working solution is out. Operational experience of having real working reactors will help speed up research on better reactors.
The Halo Effect
The importance of getting one successful MSR out in operation cannot be overstated. It will be much like getting the first Tesla’s out. It will prove the viability of the technology and lead to more funding and confidence in other MSR companies. This will help get more MSR companies online quicker.
What About Renewables?
Renewable energy from sun and wind still matters. ThorCon has not yet delivered a reactor and we cannot sit still waiting until they do. The ThorCon approach gives us hope that clean and cheap Nuclear power can get online quick enough to actually matter to the world.
We need solutions to handle intermittence of wind and solar power. Today that is primarily solved with gas power plants. That is not a viable long term solution. It has been suggested e.g. using green hydrogen or ammonia to run these gas power plants in the future, thus eliminating CO2 emissions.
However that is currently expensive and ThorCon is promising Nuclear plants which are cheaper than coal.
Related Stories
Other stories I have written about nuclear energy which you might find interesting.
