America Has Bet Everything On These Tiny Nuclear Reactors

For the first time, the newsreel camera is allowed inside the atom bomb city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where a vast army of workers kept the secret of a new age.

Los Alamos gets most of the Manhattan Project attention, but it was here in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, that the industrial end of the U.S.'s nuclear program got going. This is where we enriched the uranium that would go into the first atomic bombs. In the decades that have followed, Oak Ridge National Laboratory has remained as a major nuclear technology research hub. The U.S., though, has failed to maximize many of the lab's discoveries. This is due, in large part, to the country's souring on nuclear energy and nuclear power plants. That is, until now.

Now you see the administration shifting more towards nuclear energy.

Love him or loathe him, President Trump has very much helped make America pro-nuclear again. He's ordered the U.S. to boost its nuclear energy production and make new plants, which is why I've come to Oak Ridge and the headquarters of Standard Nuclear.

This area in Tennessee, I think of it as the Silicon Valley for nuclear. There's government institutions here. There are nuclear reactors all around. There's also a great university close by, so there's a large talent pool. And historically, this is one of the key sites for the Manhattan Project, so there's a large history, a large heritage of the nuclear industry here.

Standard Nuclear is building off decades of research done at Oak Ridge National Lab into something called TRISO fuel.

The name TRISO stands for Tri-Structural Isotropic, which is a central fuel kernel. You take that kernel and then you apply coating layers to it.

These are tiny fuel particles that surround uranium with layers of carbon and ceramic materials. The casing acts like a containment system for each particle.

It's completely hermetically sealed, so none of the fission gases are getting out, and it's extremely effective, extremely robust.

The pitch is that TRISO is very safe and ideal for a new class of small nuclear reactors being built by a handful of startups. These so-called small modular reactors are all the rage, and they can, in theory, be placed anywhere extra energy is needed. Standard is trying to become the main TRISO fuel supplier for these reactors and to benefit from a US nuclear revival.

We're seeing the wave of new reactors that use this type of fuel coming at us. Most startup companies that are developing small reactors in the US now are using this type of fuel, right? Because it's inherently safe.

A lot of this process revolves around refining the particles to be the perfect composition and size. Standard puts them through one stage after another, tests their chemistry, and sorts them.

So the first step of the process is where you take a uranium feedstock, dissolve it in acids, mix it with some other components, and we make what we call a broth. If you keep it cold, it remains liquid, if you heat it up, it becomes a solid.

That's weird.

So yeah, different than normal properties. So basically this is where industrial-scale kernel manufacturing. Okay. And so we can run about 3 kilograms of uranium through this system in a day.

Where do you guys get the uranium?

A lot of it comes from Canada, actually, in the US. We also have uranium mines in the US. Okay. Okay. So The next step is triso coating. Okay.

So we start out with a liquid.

We make a gel sphere. We put it in a furnace to densify and convert them to the chemical composition that we want. We upgrade them and then we bring them to this process where we coat them. Okay. Okay. And then you can get up there and when you look, you'll start to see the particles rotating around.

That's crazy. So what's happening? They're all just moving around.

They're all flowing around. And it's important that they flow around so they're evenly coated.

And the glow I'm seeing is just heat.

The glow you're seeing is it's glowing red hot.

It's like looking at the sun. To give your finances superpowers, switch to Brex.

Yeah, it is.

Yeah, it is. The important thing about triso particles is it's considered what's called a functional containment. When you look at a large commercial reactor, Normally you drive by on the road and you see a fence that's a long way from the reactor. Now in these reactors, the site boundary can be closer because the amount of activity that you would release during a severe accident is much lower.

A typical light water reactor, there's 90 or so operating around the U.S. Severe accidents for those can be bad. We know about Fukushima. The reactors that use TRISO fuel are really incapable, as a function of their design, of having an accident like that. Once finally you have triso particles and they're ready to go into their final fuel form, you can make simple shapes like that. You can also make shapes like this. So you could put triso particles in here and make a very complex fuel element.

So if you've seen the triso particles, it's just a big jar of very, very tiny loose particles. So you have to make a fuel form out of that, right? And there's a couple of different methods to use. Traditionally is to embed those in a graphite matrix. Basically, you have this little graphite pellet, and they're all inside.

The other is the silicon carbide.

So during the printing process, all the powder that doesn't get binder just remains loose powder, and that's what we're removing now. Everything that gets binder turns into the shape of the part that you want.

Okay, I see a gem hiding in there.

Mm-hmm. What I'll do now is air freshener.

Aha!

Behold! Recognize that?

It's glorious.

Nice logo.

Looks extra nice when it's made of silicon carbide. The physics on TRISO does check out. It really has been proven to be very safe. And China has been building TRISO reactors for years. The US military, AI startups, and others want to place these reactors, which can fit in a shipping container, anywhere they need extra energy. You might be able to put them in cities, you might be able to put them next to AI data centers.

That's what this fuel enables. There's a bunch of also military uses. The most common place to have our troops lost overseas is fuel convoys to supply remote bases. So if you can drop a reactor that's inherently safe at one of those remote bases, then you completely eliminate the diesel supply line that you need.

Standard hopes that its factory here is the first of many. As the U.S. tries to catch up with technology it invented in the first place.

I need to figure out what's going to allow us to produce TRISO at scale for the cheapest cost. We want to democratize TRISO because the more reactors that use this fuel, the more we can sell.

Yeah. Cleared for public consumption, I had one last stop to make in Tennessee. It was time to reunite with Kid Rock.