Executives and engineers at NANO Nuclear Energy Inc. care little about updating old nuclear-power plants, whose huge water vapor clouds billowing against pristine blue skies, though harmless, have historically illustrated public fascination and hesitation around nuclear energy. Public investment and private expansion of this decades-old “greener” coal and natural-gas alternative have all but gone up in their own puff of smoke.
SMRs are even less risky, these proponents say, than old reactors because of their size and simplicity. And, as their truck base suggests, able to pull on site to power a manufacturing hub, for instance, or parts of the developing world long neglected when it comes to reliable electricity. That future, at commercial scale, is just a handful of years away, they say.
Read: Russia-Ukraine war leaves Doomsday Clock closest to ‘crisis’ hour of midnight in report’s 76-year history Related: U.S. scores a nuclear fusion breakthrough — but experts caution commercial viability is a decade or more away So, we actually approach this not as an academic exercise, as in [developing the science and then telling the world], this particular reactor could work and here’s how. We started with asking, what does the market need? And then from that feedback we determined that it needs small, portable nuclear reactors that can be shipped anywhere in the world, that can power small locations underserved by traditionally powered electricity, or at on-site industrial projects, and with flexibility.
Yu: Yes, and we have a real-life example of how this already works. Take the shipping industry. There’s no technology that has been produced to date that can rival bunker fuel or diesel or fossil fuels to push [commercial] ships around. But we know the U.S. Navy [with nuclear-powered submarines] has been doing it for decades without incident.
And one of the big interests for this will be mining operations. Almost all mines are in remote locations. And they all run on diesel, pretty much, because that’s the only power available. There have been efforts to power mines on wind and solar ICLN , but the economics and reliability have been issues. Nuclear technology would make tens of thousands of mines economically viable. You can unlock enormous amounts of mineral wealth, and this was picked up by some of our African partners.
MW: Does that commercial priority mean each reactor is different? I mean scale is the point, right, to keep costs down?
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