Mass Manufacturing Micro-sized Nuclear Reactors with Jordan Bramble and Julia DeWahl of Antares

Julia DeWahl (0:09)

Jordan, welcome to the pod. I'm going to pass it over to Packy to kick it off with our favorite opening question.

Packy McCormick (0:19)

All right, Jordan, get ready. So we kick it off with a tough one, which is in the year 2050, what do you think the pie chart of the energy sources in the US is going to look like?

Jordan Bramble (0:31)

Oh man, it's really difficult to know. But one thing I'm certain about is it's not predetermined. It's a policy question, it's an engineering question, and I think we should really think hard about what kind of world we want to live in 2050 and what needs to be true for us to get there. So here's how I would think about it. I think we should want to live in a world where global standard of living is at least equivalent to an American standard of living today, and we also need to decarbonize in the process of that. There's a really good book on this topic, actually, Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop. So a top recommendation for anyone getting into nuclear for the first time. But the book goes through this exercise, and the conclusion is we need something like 10x the energy that we have today. What needs to be true for us to do that? We're going to need to deploy a lot more energy at speed and at scale. There's obviously the grid to think about, but I think in order to do that, there's going to be a lot more behind the meter as well. So there's this obvious trend today of deploying solar behind the meter, but like any energy source, solar has advantages and disadvantages. It's really awesome when you put it on your roof and there's no incremental land requirements and you just get to take advantage of really cheap energy. But when you look at scaled industrial activity where energy density really matters and land use starts to matter, solar really breaks down behind the meter. So this is, I think, in nuclear the promise of micro-reactors. You could put them anywhere, you have high energy density, and you can deploy megawatts quickly. That's what we should be striving towards. Going back to the grid, I think there's going to be a lot more solar on the grid as well, but if we want to keep our critical infrastructure running and we want to be able to use the grid for industrial activity, we're also still going to need a lot more nuclear. It is the absolute best form of baseload power out there. Then I think there's this important question of what happens to fossil fuels as well. I think it's exceptionally hard to entirely phase out fossil fuels by 2050 if we're trying to grow global standard of living and also grow the world's population. We should be thinking a lot about how we can make fossil fuels as close to net zero as possible.

I think both hydrogen and nuclear have a potential role to play in that and solar as well.

I think the other market to consider is power in space.

You are almost entirely dependent on solar today.

But by 2050, we should really be doing some kind of scaled economic activity on the moon, and hopefully on Mars as well, but certainly on the moon. It's exceedingly hard to do that with nuclear not being part of that mix also. When you think about anything, hundreds of kilowatts in space, megawatts in space, it really has to be nuclear. So we figure out some kind of large scale power beaming solutions. Nuclear is the best way to do that. Essentially, we need a lot more of everything.

But nuclear is the one that stands out here in that it's the one that's stagnating. So that's a problem that I care deeply about, figuring out how to fix stagnation in nuclear.

Julia DeWahl (3:38)

So I'll take to the next question, hopefully a little more of a softball than the last one. But how did you get into nuclear?

And how did that take you into starting Antares?

Jordan Bramble (3:48)

Yeah. So it really goes back to childhood for me. I've always been passionate about astronomy and astrophysics. As a teenager, I read a bunch of Robert Zubern's books.

Nuclear just has such an important role to play. It's something I've always thought about. Just I remember my mom and my grandmother buying me science books as a kid.

And then I grew up in Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Virginia, that area, Hampton Roads, as people call it. Our power consumption was largely nuclear from the Surrey power plant. And it's also where the Newport New Shipyard is, which is where we build our nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. And it's one of two shipyards in the US where we build our nuclear-powered submarines. So I had the opportunity to work there multiple years when I was 19, 20 on the construction of nuclear-powered submarines and the overhaul of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. And then in college, I studied physics and systems engineering.