nuclear-news

Nano Nuclear wants to reinvent the nuclear power business—but it could take a while.

The company is trying to not only reinvent reactors but also reinvent fuel production and transportation. It’ll take several years yet before we know if it works.

Fast Company, BY TIERNAN RAY 10 May 24

“…….. This week, a two-year-old company, Nano Nuclear Energy, is expected to go public on Nasdaq with a plan to solve what ails the nuclear power business.

The company, officially based on the 30th floor of an office building in New York’s Times Square, is a “distributed” company, meaning, its 27 staff members live and work here and there. The company is run by CEO James Walker, a physicist who was previously a nuclear engineer at Rolls-Royce.

Walker has gathered a mish-mash of engineering talent and former bankers to build what’s called a “microreactor,” also known as a “small modular nuclear reactor,” which can be hitched to a tractor trailer and driven around the country to wherever it is needed—be it a remote mining site that needs power, or an AI data center.

Walker has also assembled a star-studded advisory board that includes former U.S. presidential candidate and NATO commander Wesley Clark, and former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who hold stock options in the company.

The premise of Nano Nuclear is the same that propels competitors such as privately held Terrapower and X-Energy: conventional nuclear energy is too costly…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Nano Nuclear and competitors have jumped on the DOE’s effort to make “advanced” reactors, things so compact they can ride around on a semitruck and be parked where needed. They produce far less energy, on the scale of tens of megawatts, but also can cost far less, claims the DOE, and they can be run with minimal safety oversight because of their advanced design.

Just about every company in nuclear power is working on such innovation, including Westinghouse, Terrapower, X-Energy, and publicly traded NuScale of Portland, Oregon. Walker and team contend, however, that those companies are going about it all wrong. They haven’t done enough to solve the main limiting factor of small reactors, adequate fuel supply, the enriched uranium that creates the nuclear chain reaction.

“Large SMR companies have raised billions of dollars for development but have been stalled by the lag in developing or acquiring the fuel necessary to advance their reactors,” states Nano Nuclear’s IPO prospectus. The fuel is critical because small reactors need uranium with more of the uranium isotope U235 in order to be so compact. It’s the density of power per unit of volume of fuel that lets microreactors be made very small.

The DOE has been fostering collaboration among many parties on what’s called “High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium,” or, HALEU, which is uranium enriched more than the 5% standard in the industry, as high as 20%. Without enough HALEU, many of the advanced reactors being developed “do not have the fuel supply infrastructure necessary to succeed,” claims Nano Nuclear.

To secure HALEU, Nano Nuclear has started two subsidiaries, one to produce HALEU uranium, HALEU Energy Fuel Inc., and another to transport it in large quantities, Advanced Fuel Transportation, Inc. The company even has a subsidiary to mine for uranium.

You could say Nano Nuclear has formed a vertically integrated nuclear firm, going from uranium mining through fuel production and trucking to supplying the finished reactor.

Will it work? We won’t know for some time. The company’s two proposals for microreactors, “Zeus” and “Odin,” are not even built. The company has no revenue at present. Nano Nuclear hopes to have one of the reactors in production by 2030. The company apparently hasn’t begun the licensing process with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Agency, which can take several years. The fuel manufacturing, moreover, is not expected to be operational until 2027……………………….

Nano Nuclear nabbed almost ten million dollars with the IPO, but it expects to need “a significant infusion of additional capital for successful deployment, even following this offering.” Just the Zeus and Odin reactors alone are expected to cost four million dollars to develop. That means potential dilution of investors by lots of follow-on stock offerings.

The tiny staff of 27 is not entirely full-time. All the senior executives, including Walker and CFO Jaisun Garcha, are working as independent contractors, and they all have jobs running other companies.

You can’t scrutinize Nano Nuclear’s technology plans to know if they make sense because Nano Nuclear has filed no patent applications, instead preferring to keep its intellectual property secret.

The rest of this year, Nano Nuclear expects to use its IPO money to buy another company in order to get into the nuclear consulting business. The idea is to get some paying work in order to subsidize Zeus and Odin.

For a long time, then, Nano Nuclear is destined to be a far-less-interesting kind of company that simply has a great idea for the revival of the nuclear industry.  https://www.fastcompany.com/91122128/nano-nuclear-reinventing-nuclear-power-business

May 12, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | technology, USA