Nuclear Startup Roundup

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TL;DR

Nuclear power could be a powerful source of clean energy for the world, but is beset with a number of challenges. Rising costs to maintain nuclear power plants and the ever present danger of nuclear leakage have made nuclear power into a smaller part of the energy portfolio. But as have seen in our issues on solar cell manufacturing and lithium ion manufacturing, these technologies bring their own tradeoffs. Nuclear startups hold out the promise of cleaner, cheaper, safer nuclear power, but face formidable research and development challenges. In today’s issue, we review some of the most exciting nuclear startups currently operating in the industry.

Fusion Reactor Startups

Commonwealth Fusion Systems is working on a next generation fusion reactor that uses high temperature rare earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) superconductors to make more powerful magnetic fields for tokamak reactors (see picture below). Commonwealth has raised a total of $199 million (source), in an unusually large tranched series A (the round was raised in two parts, the first $115 million, and the second $84 million) (source).

A cut-through of Commonwealth Fusion’s proposed SPARC tokamak reactor. A tokamak reactor has a characteristic donut shape which provides a stable configuration to maintain high temperature plasmas for fusion (source).

General Fusion, founded in 2002, is pursuing an alternative route to fusion based on magnetized target fusion, which uses a combination of magnetic confinement (using magnetic fields to contain plasma) along with inertial confinement (heating and compressing small pellets of fuel to induce fusion) to generate power. The diagram below illustrates some details of General Fusion’s approach. General Fusion has raised $192 in funding over the last two decades.

A diagram of the General Fusion magnetized target fusion strategy. A small pulse of plasma is injected as fuel for fusion and contained with a spinning wall of liquid metal (source).

TAE Technologies, formerly Tri-Alpha Energy, has raised $980 million (source)(https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/tae-technologies) to build a unique “field reversed configuration” machine for hydrogen-boron fusion (source)(https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/30/photos-inside-tae-technologies-lab-and-nuclear-fusion-machine.html). TAE’s approach is less proven than other fusion approaches, but holds out the possibility of greater simplicity compared with more classical approaches like tokamaks.

Revisiting Fission Reactors

A number of startups are working to redesign the classical fission reaction. One prominent approach is molten salt fission reactors, which use molten salt as a cooling fluid for making cheaper fission reactors. Unlike light water reactors (which use normal water as opposed to heavy water as a coolant), molten salt reactors can operate at pressures close to atmospheric pressures, allowing for reduced amounts of necessary shielding. The diagram below shows a conceptual diagram of a molten salt reactor.

A diagram of a molten salt reactor. The molten salt is used as the primary coolant for the reactor. A secondary heat exchanger is used to further separate the generator from the nuclear fuel rods (source).

Seaborg Technologies is a Danish startup, founded in 2015, designing a new compact molten salt reactor that has raised a total of $25.7 million in funding (source). A related but technically different approach is the liquid fluoride thorium reactor. Flibe Technology, founded in 2011, is pursuing a thorium-based approach and has raised $4.2 million in funding (source). Kairos Power is another startup pursuing an alternative fluoride salt approach and notably has been awarded a $629 million dollar contract, spread over 7 years, from DOE (source). Elysium Industries is pursuing a molten chloride fast salt reactor, and has been awarded a $3.2 million dollar contract by DOE to pursue computational modeling research (source).

TerraPower, backed by Bill Gates, is taking an alternative approach by building a traveling wave reactor, which uses a seed of enriched fuel to transmute surrounding depleted uranium into additional usable fuel. Such reactors could achieve considerably higher fuel utilization than classical nuclear reactors. TerraPower has been awarded large DOE grants to continue its development efforts (source).

Microreactors

Microreactor companies seek to produce compact fission reactors. Oklo is designing reactors that will use a fuel source with a higher concentration of Uranium 235, which undergoes fission more readily than the more common Uranium 238. Oklo’s choice of fuel will allow its reactors to be much smaller than traditional nuclear reactors (conceptually reactors could be housed in small buildings as the illustration below shows). Oklo’s first test reactor will aim to generate 1.5 MW of energy and will be housed at the Idaho National Laboratory.

A rendering of Oklo’s first nuclear power plant to be built at the Idaho national laboratory (source).

Deep Waste Storage

One of the biggest challenges facing nuclear reactors is disposing of radioactive fuel. Deep Isolation is designing technology to inject spent nuclear rods deep into bedrock to prevent leakage and has raised a total of $14.1 million in funding (source). Deep Isolation selects geological formations which have been stable for a million years or more, deep below known aquifers to prevent leakage into the water table. The challenge of course with nuclear waste disposal is that unexpected disasters can expose previously hidden waste. It does not take much to imagine that future generations could well have forgotten about deeply stored waste only to come upon a nasty surprise in a mine decades or centuries from now.

A diagram of Deep Isolation’s technology for nuclear fuel waste disposal. Deep Isolation selects stable geological formations to inject waste into deep beneath the surface (source).

Orano Group is a French company that works on nuclear fuel waste management and which has been used by the French government to handle spent fuel from decommissioned nuclear power plants.

Discussion

Nuclear startups are exploring a number of different ideas to create useful next generation reactors. These ideas are collectively still high risk and likely many years away from generating energy at scale. Nuclear fusion has never been used commercially, but holds the promise of nearly unlimited power, while nuclear fission is still widely used today but is unwieldy and expensive. There is considerable debate over the role of nuclear energy in a clean economy, but nuclear plants can act as a powerful source of reliable clean energy when compared to other intermittent clean energy sources. Startups could play a powerful innovative role in the nuclear ecosystem but are still a long way from building mature power plants.

Highlights for the Week

• https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-immune-system-protects-the-brain-20210428/: The immune system turns out to provide some protection to the brain, partially disproving earlier theories about the brain’s “immune privileged status.”

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About

Deep Into the Forest is a newsletter by Deep Forest Sciences, Inc. We’re a deep tech R&D company specializing in the use of AI for deep tech development. We do technical consulting and joint development partnerships with deep tech firms. Get in touch with us at partnerships@deepforestsci.com! We’re always welcome to new ideas!

Credits

Author: Bharath Ramsundar, Ph.D.
Editor: Sandya Subramanian