Radiant

A Big Picture Problem 🗺️

The Quandary of Progress

The Dilemma

• Current State: Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and more intense due to climate change. When disaster strikes, widespread and prolonged power outages may affect large regions for prolonged periods. For example, in 2021, Hurricane Ida left over 1 million customers without power in the United States, with some outages lasting for weeks. The same year, the Texas winter storm caused blackouts affecting more than 4.5 million homes and businesses. The full damage and disruption caused by Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton are not fully known yet, but conservative estimates are in the hundreds of thousands.

• Complications: The increasing severity of climate events creates a multi-faceted challenge for power infrastructure. Extreme temperatures can lead to unpredictable surges in electricity demand that overwhelm a grid’s capacity and cause outages, while severe weather can damage transmission lines and disrupt supply chains. While diesel generators are commonly used as backup power sources during catastrophes, they require constant refueling to operate, which may be impossible to manage during a period of turmoil. Solar-powered generators are another option, but they require several orders of magnitude more space to power the same number of homes and facilities as a diesel alternative. Furthermore, remote areas often face longer power outages because it harder for disaster relief units to reach these areas and there is often less infrastructure in place to make quick repairs. The result is critical facilities like hospitals, water treatment plants and data centers become vulnerable to the same instabilities as other parts of society.

• Consequences: The ramifications of unreliable power infrastructure in the face of intensifying climate events are significant and far-reaching. Society’s transition to a resilient and renewable economy on Earth and for future space missions will not be complete until it manages to produce abundant clean energy that is portable and does not need to be connected to a centralized power grid.

Searching For A Solution 📡

Radiant

The Basics

• Mission: To create clean alternatives to off-grid power solutions and replace all diesel power generators.

• Summary: Radiant is developing portable nuclear microreactors designed to fit in a standard shipping container so clean energy can be easily transported to and from remote locations and critical infrastructure by air, ship, rail or road.

• Year Founded: 2019.

The Framework

• Solution(s): Radiant's flagship product is their Kaleidos microreactor. The reactor will be is designed to generate 1.9 megawatts (MW) of heat energy or 1 MW of electric power. For reference, this is enough energy to power hundreds of homes in the United States. Radiant also plan to connect its reactors to a software platform they are developing so engineers can remotely operate the system and setup monitors to receive near real-time reporting data about how their Kaleidos reactor is functioning at any given time.

• Strategy: The team plans to use TRISO particle fuel to power its reactors. These particles are about the size of a poppy seed and have uranium, oxygen and carbon at its core. This radioactive material is encased by graphite and other materials, which is important, because it means the heat generated from the TRISO particle’s core is spread out over a larger surface area to make the reaction easier to control. As the temperature of the radioactive uranium rises, the surrounding graphite expands, which makes it harder for the neutrons inside the uranium to collide and sustain a chain reaction. Consequently, when the temperature cools, the graphite contracts, the reaction rate increases, and the nuclear reaction resumes itself. This self-cooling mechanism prevents the reactor from overheating and producing a nuclear meltdown in a worse-case scenario. It makes the Kaleidos system less reliant on other fail-safe mechanisms to control the reactor’s temperature.

• Signal: As of October 2023, Radiant was chosen as one of three microreactor developers by the United States’ Department of Energy to design the first experiments at Idaho National Laboratory's Demonstration of Microreactor Experiments (DOME) facility in 2026. If all goes well, the Radiant team hopes to have their first commercial reactor available within 2 years of this aforementioned demo.

The Team

• Founder(s):

  • Chief Executive Officer - Doug Bernauer.

    • Previously:

      • Lead Avionics Engineer @ SpaceX.

  • Chief Technology Officer - Bob Urberger.

    • Previously:

      • Engineer for Grasshopper Project @ SpaceX.

• Headquarters: El Segundo, California, United States

• # Of Employees: 11 - 50

Click the button below to request an introduction to the founder

The Channels

• Socials: LinkedIn.

• Website: https://www.radiantnuclear.com

• Resources: The Uncertain Future of Nuclear Power.

Risk Alerts ⚠️

The Threats

• Commercial Risk: Last year, there were reports that Last Energy, another organization developing advanced nuclear reactors, has estimated energy costs between $130 - $200 per megawatt-hour. This is significantly more than the cost of solar power, the most cost-efficient option, which can be as little as $50 per megawatt-hour. It is possible Last Energy is an aberration and Radiant will deliver much better unit economics than these reported numbers. Either way, it may be difficult for small scale reactors to compete in this space because solar energy and battery technologies are getting more efficient, more reliable and more cost-effective with each passing year. Meanwhile, nuclear energy's unmatched scalability benefits become less relevant and compelling at smaller scales for off-grid energy projects.

• Technical Risk: There is an enormous chasm to cross for an idea to go from concept to commercial success. Since Radiant has not yet tested its reactor designs using nuclear fuel, it is possible the team encounters a slew of issues they did not anticipate. These issues may range from trivial to catastrophic, and the team needs to wait a few more years to find out if its blueprints for success are actually leading them astray.

• Comparable To:

  • X-Energy.

  • Last Energy.

  • Seaborg Technologies.

Deal Tracker 🧮

The Cap Table

• Series: B.

• Raised: $54 million USD.

• Investors: Led by Andreessen Horowitz. Participation from Founders Fund, Decisive Point, Cantos, BoostVC and others.

Market Insights 💡

The Landscape

• Recent News: Earlier this year, researchers from China’s Shidaowan nuclear power plant shared results of their 2023 nuclear reactor cooling test with a Pebble Bed Reactor. This is a Gen 4 nuclear reactor designed to be ‘meltdown proof’, and the team's study confirmed the reactor’s ability to cool down naturally, without needing pumps, fans or any other supplemental cooling system to prevent a nuclear meltdown. This marked an industry-first milestone, where commercial-scale nuclear energy demonstrated inherent fail-safe safety designs. Radiant recently shared that its Kaleidos microreactor passed a similar sort of passive cooldown test, which is a welcome sign for both regulators and the public at large.

• Growth Rates: There is an estimated ~100 million diesel generators worldwide, and most if not all of these generators will eventually be replaced by a renewable option. The International Energy Agency’s latest World Energy Outlook now expects global electricity demand to be 6% higher in 2035 than its forecast from just a year ago, meaning the world’s energy demands are growing much faster than experts are anticipating, with no signs of slowing down.

• Ecosystem Dynamics: After decades of harsh scrutiny and negativity from the disasters of Chernobyl, Fukushima and other incidents, nuclear power is turning the page on its public perception in the United States. It is unclear what is driving this shift, but the new sentiments may affect legislatures to make the regulatory landscape less onerous for organizations to operate in. To illustrate the point: within the past decade, just 3 new reactors joined the nation’s power grid, whereas 3x as many reactors shut down over the same timespan.

Industry Trends 📊

The Indicators

• Catalysts: Europe generates ~26% of its electricity from nuclear power, and this percentage is set to grow as the continent continues its renewable energy transformation. Similarly, China plans to build 150 new nuclear reactors by 2035, much of which will be large scale plants rather than small scale generators like Kaleidos. Meanwhile, the nuclear industry in the United States is benefiting from new incentive structures created by the Inflation Reduction Act, as well as by Big Tech companies and their insatiable energy demands to scale their AI models to astronomical levels in the years ahead.

• Challenges: The nuclear industry in the United States and Europe have historically been riddled with delays and massive cost overruns, largely due to regulatory complexities for construction and safety measures. For example, the Vogtle Nuclear Plants in the state of Georgia were delayed by over 7 years and were 2x the cost of its original budget, and the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station in Somerset, England is mirroring a similar fate. If similar headwinds persist, it will be exceptionally difficult for nuclear power to be an economically viable energy source for either country.

• Recommended Reading: The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes is a sweeping account of the scientists who discovered nuclear fission and the development of the atomic bomb during the Manhattan Project.

A Toolkit To Go 🛠️

The Equipment

• 🖥️️ Autodesk - A 3D modeling platform to simulate product designs and analyze components for all sorts of mechanical engineering processes.

• 🤖 MATLAB - A programming and numeric computing platform used for algorithm development, data analysis, visualization, and computation.

• 🗞️ The Aurorean Newsletter - Our team’s weekly roundup of STEM’s most significant stories of progress. We scour 100+ sources so you don’t have to.

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Share Your Thoughts 💬

The Community Wisdom

The results are in from our poll last week. Etched is a company on a mission to build the hardware that powers artificial intelligence. The following is a snapshot of the sentiments our audience felt about them.

• Bulls 33%

  • Subscriber Perspective: 'The only way for a newcomer to survive hyper competitive industries like AI chip manufacturing is through counterpositioning. They must structure their business model in a way to discourage larger players from copying them because it will cannibalize and damage their existing business, and they must focus on servicing one customer segment better than anybody else. It’s too early to know if Etched’s counterpositioning strategy will work, but if they are successful, then they will have a carved out corner of the market to live in for years to come.’

• Bears 67%

  • Subscriber Perspective: ‘There’s not enough evidence to indicate their product and software offerings can convince customers to use them over Nvidia and other alternatives. They are trying to out-compete the most sophisticated and well-funded organizations in the world on performance rather than on cost, flexibility or some other metric. Their strategy is bold, but it’s not something I would bet on working.’