What happened with Nuclear is the best lesson on the importance of not making the same mistake with AI. Overregulation and vilification will cause us to lose out on huge potential upside.

The real goal of US nuclear startups should be to surpass Japan Steel Works in total GW deployed. They hold the record for most GW of nuclear hardware shipped from a single factory. >130 GW lifetime, 50 years, often 4 vessels / yr ~= 4 GW / yr.

Zirconium is nearly transparent to neutrons, which makes it the perfect metal to clad nuclear fuel. But it has an evil twin, and the two are the closest pair of elements in the periodic table. In every ore on Earth, zirconium comes locked together with hafnium. Hafnium absorbs neutrons six hundred times more than zirconium does, which is enough to ruin the economics of a nuclear reactor. Hafnium is so identical to zirconium that for decades no process could separate them. Hafnium sits directly below zirconium on the periodic table, so it should be a bigger atom, but on the way there you pass through the 14 lanthanides, each adding a proton to the nucleus and an electron to a buried 4f orbital that barely shields the outer shell. The extra nuclear pull shrinks the atom by almost exactly the amount the new shell added. This identical size and charge makes these two elements very similar chemically, which is why separating them is so hard. But in the late 1940s, government chemists worked out liquid-liquid extraction schemes that could finally pry the two apart at industrial scale. Zirconium alloys as a result have become a nuclear standard, and today every commercial water-cooled reactor on Earth wraps its fuel in zirconium that has been purified in this way. And the leftover hafnium still has a use in some reactors... in control rods, to intentionally stop the chain reaction!

Cool that @boomsupersonic will go faster than Earth's rotation, so you could do lunch in NYC and then another lunch in SF :D Also, future collab idea: Aalo reactors should power clean synfuel production for your planes @bscholl

Someone should make a game where you have to restart a 50 year old industry in a civilization that has forgotten how to build big things by mass-manufacturing stainless steel vessels that can magically generate billions in revenue when you put cosmically-born spicy rocks in them, all with the goal of maintaining AI supremacy in the west, while lowering the cost of electricity far enough to bring nations out of energy poverty and supply abundance to the world

Robotic arms and tele-robotics were originally invented for nuclear energy. In 1949, radioactive materials at Argonne were stored behind three feet of leaded glass, and tongs were used for handling. Raymond Goertz built two mechanical arms connected through the concrete wall by steel tape. When he moved the handle on his side, the arm inside would copy him exactly. When he gripped a beaker, he could feel it push back. This was an early demonstration of force feedback, working only with steel and cable, before robotics was a thing. By 1954, he swapped the tapes for motors and made the first electric telerobot, running on vacuum tubes, with no computer in the loop. The first industrial robot did not get installed until 1961 at a General Motors plant. Space arms, deep-sea ROVs, and surgical robots where a surgeon feels tissue all descend from Raymond's hot cell. Will be interesting to see what role robotics will play in the Second Atomic Age. Aalo intends to do a lot here!

Just spent some time with @paulg, turns out his father worked on sodium reactors too, and basically wrote the book on safety for fast breeders. And, last year Aalo coincidentally funded the restoration of several videos of the very reactor he worked on! Link below.

The machine that makes nuclear fuel cheap was designed by a prisoner: Gernot Zippe was an Austrian engineer captured by the Soviets in 1945. He spent a decade in a detained research group where his team worked out the design of the modern gas centrifuge: a thin rotor spinning on a needle bearing, held by a magnet, consuming almost no power. Released in 1956, he was allowed to leave but not to take a single document, so he reconstructed the design from memory in the West, and his architecture became the basis of Europe's enrichment industry. The efficiency gap was amazing - Centrifuges enrich uranium using roughly fifty times less electricity than the gaseous diffusion plants America ran at the time. Diffusion plants were so power hungry that they consumed entire power stations worth of energy. Diffusion is now extinct; the last US plant closed in 2013. Thanks largely to Zippe's rotor, enriched uranium is cheap enough that fuel is a minor line item in the cost of nuclear electricity.

We are proud to welcome J.R. Biggs to Aalo Atomics as Senior Vice President of Nuclear Operations. J.R. brings more than 45 years of experience taking complex nuclear facilities from concept to operation. He previously served as Deputy Director for Advanced Reactor Demonstrations at Battelle Energy Alliance. He also chaired the Joint Test Group for advanced reactor startup at Idaho National Laboratory. In those roles, he supported DOE startup authorization and oversaw construction, fueling, startup testing, and initial criticality. His career includes many of the nation's most significant advanced reactor programs including the restart of the TREAT reactor, Project Pele, Antares Mk-0, and the establishment of DOME as a Hazard Category 2 nuclear facility. At Aalo, he will work on the operational organization and governance needed to take advanced reactors from development to commercial deployment. Deploying reactors at scale requires more than great technology. It requires disciplined execution and operational excellence. Few people have shown this more often than J.R. and we're honored to have him.

Sometimes it’s cool to remember that the sun is a giant fusion reactor floating in space 100 million miles away and earth is orbiting around it just fast enough to not fall in and burn up, and this gave life a chance to get started and become smart and go about our lives and take all this for granted