The Atomic Show Rod Adams - Atomic Insights

Atomic Canyon is a six month old company that is developing AI tools to improve the efficiency of routine tasks associated with developing, licensing, building, owning and operating nuclear plants. Their first product, called Neutron, uses AI to modernize searching the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s 52 million page collection of publicly available documents that are currently accessible through the somewhat cumbersome Agencywide Documents Access and Management System (ADAMS).







Trey Lauderdale, Atomic Canyon’s founder, spent the first 15 years of his career in the digital medicine field. At an inflection point in his career, with the freedom to live anywhere, he created a decision matrix to help him and his wife choose a place to live and raise their two young sons. San Luis Obispo, CA earned the highest score, with an excellent public education system as one of the contributing factors.







After finding their home and moving towards closing the purchase, Trey and his wife learned via real estate disclosure documents that they would be living within 10 miles of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. As members of a generation who learned most of what they new about nuclear energy from The Simpsons, they were initially leery.







But they quickly realized that the plant’s skilled, dedicated and well compensated employees and its property tax payments were major reasons that the schools and other aspects of the community had earned such high scores on the “place to raise our children” decision matrix.







After becoming a member of the community and conversing with local nuclear professionals, Trey decided to learn as much as he could about nuclear energy and the nuclear industry. He recognized that he and his skilled colleagues could build tools that could address obstacles that slowed work and added costs.







Atomic Canyon has just announced a cooperative project with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) that will train ORNL’s Frontier – currently the world’s fastest supercomputer, capable of more than a quintillion calculations per second – how to understand nuclear terminology. The resulting model will not be trained on proprietary or safety related information on the design and operation of nuclear power, but it will help analyzing the deep library of regulatory guides, inspection reports, and other publicly available documents to assist in increasing safety and accountability.







The products (models) created by the partnership will be open source and available to become part of the toolbox for other developers.







Trey and I had a fascinating conversation. I think you will agree.







Left to right in photo: Trey Lauderdale, Atomic Canyon CEO Kristian Kielhofner, Atomic Canyon CTO Richard Klafter, Atomic Canyon Lead AI Architect Tom Evans, ORNL Research Scientist Photo Credit: Genevieve Martin, Oak Ridge National Laboratory







Knox News provides a local perspective on Atomic Canyon’s project using Frontier: AI for nuclear plants? ORNL supercomputer’s new task is no sci-fi – it’s a clean energy win

Emmet Penney is an unlikely, but effective pronuclear advocate. He earned his degrees in fine arts and great books and worked for several years as a professional poet – along with working in a bookstore as a way to keep paying the bills.







He gradually transitioned from poetry into writing thoughtful essays on a variety of topics. One of those pieces caught the attention of Michael Shellenberger and began the process of converting Emmet into a passionate, erudite pronuclear advocate who reads voraciously about all topics that interest him. That attribute has given him a remarkable depth of understanding about the nuclear industry, its history and its prospects that is not complicated by the detailed engineering education that often leads to confusing public communications.







Emmet and I engaged in a wide-ranging conversation that touched on such diverse topics as why the Environmental Movement chose to take action that was harmful to the environment by focusing its attentions against nuclear energy and how the republican notion of an economy of small holders conflicted with the liberal notion of rapid technological progress and corporate management. (Notice that words like “environment”, “republican” and “liberal” that are written with lower case letters do not mean the same thing as when written with capital letters.)







I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation and expect that you will find it engaging as well.

Doug Sandridge is a lifelong oil and gas guy whose father was a geological engineer. While he was growing up, Doug lived a significant portion of his life overseas as his father’s job took the family to several different locations. When it was time to go to college, Doug returned to the United State to attend the University of Oklahoma. He took a brief detour into architecture, but by his second year he shifted his focus to engineering and petroleum-related topics.







During the past 40 years, he has pursued a career as a land man, which requires a blend of technical skills, specific legal acumen, negotiating expertise and real estate development. His career was inspired by his father, but he has also been dedicated to the task of finding and producing the affordable fuels that power our modern way of life.







In recent years he has begun advocating for nuclear energy after realizing that the industry was in trouble and closing plants that he had passively assumed would operate through their natural end of life. Although he had briefly declared his major to be nuclear engineering when transitioning away from architecture, he had spent his career not really thinking much about nuclear one way or another.







He linked up with the Save Diablo Canyon movement as a way to continue his education and do something positive. When he learned that other nuclear advocates were a bit wary of an oil and gas executive and heard some stating that the oil and gas industry had been working against nuclear for many years, he started an effort to mobilize other oil and gas leaders to declare their support of nuclear power.







The first result of his effort was the publication of a letter titled Declaration of Oil and Gas Executives for Nuclear Power. That letter was initially published on March 28, 2023. That date is probably not accidental; it was the 44th anniversary of the Three Mile Island event.







As you might notice, Atomic Insights is a little late to the response party for this important step forward. Mr. Sandridge has already appeared on several podcasts to discuss his letter, including Robert Bryce’s Power Hungry and Emmet Penny’s Nuclear Barbarians. Perhaps the first podcast to notice Doug’s intriguing background for a pro-nuclear advocate was Irina Slav on Energy. That interview was published more than two years ago.







Unlike those terrific podcasts, Atomic Insights has a long established reputation as a reference for instances in which fossil fuel interests – a term that is far broader than the term “oil and gas companies” – have worked openly or behind the scenes to slow or stop nuclear energy development.







We acknowledge that the vast majority of the people that work in oil and gas are not antinuclear, the term “fossil fuel interests” largely refers to people at the very top of organizations, the ones that create strategies and take market-focused actions. It also refers to people like Vladimir Putin and other global leaders that are almost completely dependent on the wealth and power provided by controlling fossil fuels and who consistently seek to adjust the energy supply-demand balance to provide outsized financial returns and other geopolitical goals.







Doug and I had a terrific conversation. I think you will enjoy the opportunity to learn more about the petroleum industry and the ways that i...

James Krellenstein is a physicist, consultant and nuclear energy historian. He is currently employed as a senior advisor to Global Health Strategies. He started up their decarbonization practice with an emphasis on nuclear energy along with renewables. He was the lead author on GEH’s report on ways to reduce global dependence on Russia for necessary supplies of enriched uranium.







He had the unusual and fortunate experience of growing up with a father who was a nuclear engineer turned nuclear financial specialist and a grandfather who ran a custom manufacturing machinery production facility. Both were the kind of professionals that enjoyed their work enough to “bring it home” for discussions around the dinner table and while engaging in bonding activities like fishing and camping.







(I know what that is like from both sides of the parent/grandparent/child relationship.)







James has become a bit of an “overnight sensation” in the world of pronuclear podcasting most notably with repeat appearances on Dr. Chris Keefer’s Decouple Podcast and Age of Miracles, hosted by Packy McCormick and Julia DeWahl. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the US nuclear industry and a unique perspective on current and future actions needed to restore its prominence.







I was motivated to invite him for a chat after listening to his thoughts on the relationship between reactor size and the cost of produced electricity.







We talked about the need for a larger catalog of options that can meet the needs of a wider variety of customers, the advantages of larger sizes in producing bulk electricity in grids and markets that can accommodate the output, and the differences between seeing reactors as a product that might be manufactured or seeing them as a “stick-built” factory that produces a bulk commodity.







Though our emphasis and perspectives are different, we hold similar points of view. Our conclusions for prioritization vary considerably.







I think you will learn something from this show and hope that you will take the time to share your thoughts on the topics discussed. Though there are many who dismiss the importance of conversation and discussion compared to concrete action that gets things done, it’s hard to successfully complete the latter without responsible and involved people engaging in the former.

Stefano Buono is a physicist and the successful founder of Advanced Accelerator Applications, a multibillion dollar company that pioneered the use of several therapeutic medical isotopes. After making several people very rich, including himself, he sold the medical isotope business and returned to his early 1990s field of study – nuclear fission reactors using molten lead as a coolant.







About two years ago, Stefano Buono and some of his colleagues and associates founded newcleo, a company with Italian roots based in the UK. Last year, newcleo ran two successful rounds of start-up funding that netted the company a total of €400 M. After passing through several important milestones, it is raising a subsequent round with a target of €1 B for continued development and for a state-of-the-art fuel manufacturing plant.







Dr. Buono visited the Atomic Show to share his insights on the paths to success as an entrepreneur in a deeply technical and undervalued field and on the role that timing – both planned and fortunate – plays in business success. He is convinced that it is a good time to be building a nuclear fission energy company.













Lead cooling for reactors has a long history with some demonstrated success. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet Union operated a class of submarines called the Alfa class, which were famously the fastest and deepest diving submarines in the world at the time. Seven subs were completed and operated with both impressive performance and technical issues that limited their reliability and service life.







The reactors in those submarines were metal cooled thermal reactors using lead-bismuth eutectic for cooling and beryllium for moderation.







The collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent economic conditions halted most lead cooled reactor development in Russia, but it resulted in a diaspora of Soviet scientists and engineers that stimulated research and development of the technology in Europe, especially in Italy and Sweden.







For several reasons, the lead cooled reactor community moved from lead-bismuth towards pure lead and away from beryllium moderation.







Compared to water, lead is virtually invisible to neutrons, letting fission neutrons remain in the fast spectrum. Fast neutrons will fission all actinide materials, allowing reactors to advantageously consume the long-lived components of used nuclear fuel and to breed new fuel from fertile materials like Uranium 238.







Lead remains in liquid form at temperatures far above reactor operating temperatures, eliminating the need to pressurize the coolant system. Compared to sodium, the molten metal that has been used more frequently by reactor designers, lead is not subject to explosive or flammable reactions if it comes in contact with water or air. Though sodium-cooled reactor designers have devised ways to ensure safe use of their chosen fuel, the techniques require additional systems and components that add cost.







Newcleo – France, Lyon Portraits d’entreprise





One disadvantage of lead has limited its attractiveness as a coolant. At the temperatures of interest for a reactor, corrosion rates in contact with stainless steel can cause operational problems. For the Alfa class submarines, corrosion products created some clogging issues – mainly in small diameter piping like that found in steam generators.







newcleo, Stefano’s company, is taking advantage of research and development conducted during the 40+ years since the Alfa’s were designed and operated.

Zeno Power makes cost-effective radioisotope power systems (RPS) for some of the most challenging environments in the solar system. Its systems use a proprietary package that allows a wider variety of isotopes to perform functions previously reserved for Pu-238, a rare isotope that is slowly produced at great expense.







What is the value of RPS?







RPS’s produce power and/or heat by usefully capturing the energy released when radioactive materials decay. Diminishing quantities of heat are produced as the materials release their alpha, beta and/or gamma emissions, with the production rate being governed by the half life of the isotope. It is a power source that is predictable as time; it can neither be accelerated nor decelerated.







By continuously producing useful power for decades at a time without a break, radioisotopes have enabled exploration of the most distant reaches of our solar system while remaining capable of relaying their findings back to Earth. It is a well established technology that has been used since the very beginning of the Atomic Age.







The majority of the radioisotope power supplies that have powered past space missions have used Pu-238, a marvelously capable isotope. It has an 87-year half life and decays with a pure, easily shielded, high-energy alpha particle. Unfortunately, it is slowly produced in specialized reactors and needs expensive processing and refinement. As a result, Pu-238 costs tens of millions of dollars per kilogram. It is only available for the most carefully screened mission applications.







The Strontium-90 option







Strontium-90 has good characteristics as a heat source for RPS. It has a 28.1-year half life and it decays with an energetic beta emission that is reasonably easy to shield.







With its relatively high specific heat generation, Sr-90 has been used in the past for terrestrial applications, but its decay produces occasional gamma radiation in addition to the dominant, heat-producing beta emission. Additionally, as the high energy beta interacts with conventional shielding materials, it produces bremsstrahlung radiations that must also be shielded. As a result Sr-90-based power systems require enough shielding to make them too heavy to launch into space.







Sr-90 RPS have been used to power remote light houses, underwater sensors, navigational buoys and remote weather monitors. Alternative, lower-cost power sources have gradually replaced Sr-90 RPS for each of those applications.







By the 1990s, the US had stopped producing Sr-90 RPS and was decommissioning the systems that had been deployed. A 2009 paper titled End of an Era and Closing the Circle – Disposal of Strontium-90 Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators contains a statement that almost sounds like a eulogy. “This unique and creative use of nuclear technology is fading into obscurity and soon will be forever a thing of the past.”







Times have changed. With a dramatically growing business of satellites plus lunar and planetary exploration, there is a crying need for reliable power supplies that are more affordable and more available than the ones that need Pu-238. Sr-90 is still available and it still has the physical properties that attracted early developers, but the technology for capturing the energy needed improvement before it could be c...