A chat (+transcript) with James Walker of microreactor startup NANO Nuclear Energy

Shipping container sized. "10 years" out.
Image Unavailable, Please Login Pretty cool if they pull it off. Seems well thought out...





...The MO we gave to both of them was the same: It has to be modular, it needs to be passively cooling, it needs to be able to be shipped anywhere in the world, so it needs to be fit within an ISO container. And we gave both teams that MO. They both came up with very innovative and novel solutions to that problem.

...Are you viewing this as primarily initially as an American market or as a European market, as an Asian market? What do you see as the potential market for this? Once we're up and running,

The first market will be the American market, and that's going to hit things like mining sites, military bases, data centers, AI centers, things removed off from the grid; but then you can expand very quickly in this state to something like charging stations for your EV vehicles in the middle of nowhere. If you bring diesel generators in to power those things, it defeats the point. And you can't just put wind and solar farms wherever you want because they're very locationally dependent on weather systems. But microreactors actually mean you can suddenly electrify the entire country. So you can periodically cite charging stations or EV vehicles throughout the whole country, and that'll be tens of thousands of potential essentially recharging stations that you can then drive your EV vehicle across the country because there could be periodic charging stations for all these vehicles. So it'll begin with that way.

...the cost of these things by 2035 will have fallen to such a point that they will be more economic than diesel generators in the middle of nowhere that rely on a constant importation of diesel and the associated costs with that, it could be very transformative.