Former SpaceX engineer and Radiant CEO Doug Bernauer told us 'execution is everything.'
The idea for the microreactor, called Kaleidos, stems from CEO Doug Bernauer's time working at SpaceX, where he was tasked with devising methods for producing enough power on Mars to allow future colonies to survive and also travel between Earth and the red planet.Bernauer found that his work could also be applied on Earth to bring power to remote communities and military bases, and could also be used as an easily deployable fleet of reactors for populated areas.
"I treat it like my alma mater. If someone says where did you go to school, I'll jokingly say SpaceX." Then, at the end of the year, we aim to have a helium compressor, which is really the heart of the system. It's the pump that drives the helium into the reactor and then extracts it, brings it back out, and then transfers it to the other equipment. It's a very cool machine. The pump is driven by a shaft that's floating on two magnetic bearings. It outputs 75 kilowatts of power and goes over 10,000 rpm.We are also working towards building a helium loop test.
So the NRC already has an amazing safety record, but you could beat that by using live fleet monitoring that tells your team of nuclear engineers exactly where they need to look. And that information could also be passed on to regulators.A traditional reactor uses water for coolant and that water becomes radioactive. We're using helium, which is extremely safe compared to water because it does the same thing without becoming radioactive.
That's maybe why you mentioned before that five years sounds like a short time span when it comes to microreactors. But it's not really, it can be done much faster. How fast did we make Chicago Pile-1, for example, the world's first [artificial] nuclear reactor? It was less than a year. Blue Origin's been around for 22 years, and it was only about five years ago it started flying. So that's the usual slow type of timeline we think about.
"I think nuclear technology is required to... make a real vibrant frontier for civilization in space"
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