Matt Loszak
@MattLoszak
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CEO @AaloAtomics . Working on factory-made nuclear reactors, and showing the world that nuclear energy is incredible. Previously: Engineering, Physics, Software.
Austin, Texas
Joined October 2011
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For 40 years, nuclear power was expanding exponentially, ushering in a new era of clean & reliable power.
Then in 1989, it hit a wall.
What really happened? … 🧶 …
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For every ten likes, I’ll make this person increasingly realize how incredible nuclear power is
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Excited to see
@DOE
posting content like this
45 years' worth of spent nuclear fuel from an entire power plant is shown in this photo, and it’s barely visible.
More people need to see this
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My Green Card 🇺🇸 was officially approved!
The journey to build small nuclear reactors in gigafactories continues.
To celebrate, here’s me eating a donut in front of an American flag.
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If you think the energy transition is going well, look at this:
Not only is clean energy barely even visible on a graph of energy use globally,
But oil and gas is still growing.
What’s going on here? (🧵)
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Here they are, visualizing how 1 BARREL of uranium has the same energy content as 2 MILLION BARRELS OF OIL
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Hearing that France and Ontario essentially FULLY decarbonized their grids by building nuclear power plants in just about 10 years
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How much nuclear waste has the US ever created?
You may have heard it would fit on a football field...
But stacked how high? And stored how?
@whatisnuclear
wrote a great post on this... 🧵(1/8)
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Radioactive metal was accidentally used in the construction of 1700 apartments in Taiwan in 1983. Nobody realized for 10 yrs.
Yet the 8,000 residents have reportedly had a LOWER cancer rate than others in the area.
How? Here's the controversial story of radiation hormesis 📖 👇
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Realizing that not only is nuclear incredibly safe, but it also SAVES MILLIONS OF LIVES PER YEAR BY PRODUCING MEDICAL ISOTOPES FOR HOSPITALS ALL OVER THE WORLD
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Here they are deciding to drop everything and devote their lives to helping nuclear energy succeed in a world that has totally mischaracterized it as dangerous, slow, and expensive, when in reality it is incredibly clean & safe, quick to build, and economical, when done right.
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My O-1 🇺🇸 Visa just came through! Moving to America to build nuclear reactors.
The move could have gone more smoothly… but I made it to Austin today.
Come say hi if you’re in town!
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They've now realized this means that we have enough nuclear fuel on earth to power humanity’s growth for 4 billion years
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Your personal electricity use each year (4,500 kWh) could be powered by (pick one):
- $20 of nuclear fuel (size of a skittle)
- $150 of coal (size of an adult male rhinoceros)
- $330 of nat gas (volume of average house)
- $4,500 of diesel (size of a small dumpster)
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Millions of people mistakenly believe that Solar is now our cheapest option for powering the grid.
What's misleading them?
A sneaky metric known as LCOE. 🧶👇
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They've just learned that nuclear waste is safe and easy to manage, and that there's a tiny amount of it:
All the nuclear waste (ie spent fuel) ever produced could fit on a single football field stacked only 10 yards high
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Next they've discovered breeder reactors, which can create more fuel than they consume
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Nuclear uses the least land and raw material per unit energy
But we’re afraid of it, so we prioritize sources that require more resources
In time this fear will subside, and our relationship with nuclear will sweeten. This will be reflected in the economics
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Here they are, reading that nuclear is statistically just as safe as solar or wind
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Each “nuclear waste” cask can prevent 4 BILLION lbs of CO2 emissions.
This is hard to visualize, so here’s the amount of coal you’d have to burn to produce that much CO2!
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Nuclear is the best way to decarbonize shipping:
Zero emissions, infrequent refuelling (timescale of years), more cargo space (needs way less fuel).
The military has had nuclear powered aircraft carriers and submarines for decades,
But nuclear fear has held society back here.
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All the light and electricity in this photo is powered by a single CANDU nuclear reactor(*)
Each fuel bundle lasts a full 1-2 years before replacement, w zero emissions
These reactors can run on natural uranium, thorium, or even spent fuel from US-based reactors
Pretty epic!
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An under-appreciated fact:
60-80% of nuclear's LCOE comes from paying off interest. That is insane.
Factory-made small reactors could solve this:
Instead of 1 large reactor that takes 7 yrs to build,
install 10 small reactors (2 per yr), minimizing debt.
👇🧵
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The most important nuclear reactor that you've never heard of is….
The MARVEL reactor from
@INL
!
They received permission to start construction THIS WEEK.
Why should you care? ⬇️
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The new Oppenheimer film looks amazing!…
But it may rekindle public confusion between nuclear reactors and the bomb - confusion that set the energy sector back decades in the 70s.
Here’s how engineers turned Earth’s deadliest weapon into one of our SAFEST energy sources ⬇️
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The two main ways existing grids have been decarbonized:
1. Live on land near a magma pocket or heavy water flows (Iceland, Quebec, Sweden, etc.)
2. Embrace nuclear power (Ontario, Finland, France, etc)
Awesome visualization by
@GrantChalmers
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The difference between nuclear in 1975 and 2022 is that there is now much less controversy WITHIN the industry around safety.
After 70 years (18,000 reactor years!), nuclear's safety record is on par with solar & wind, despite 3 widely publicized accidents.
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Unpopular view 👇
Solar + storage should NOT be used on the grid.
And yet, solar could still play the largest role in the energy transition.
How so?… 🧵
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Apple: Afraid to even *hint* at nuclear energy in their net zero marketing.
Microsoft:
Word is out: Microsoft is plunging ahead on nuclear energy.
They want a fleet of reactors powering new data centers. And now they're hiring people from the traditional nuclear industry to get it done.
Why?
Lack of stable long-term power, whether clean or dirty, is constraining
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So, a football-field sized pile of "true" nuclear waste, stacked only 15 cm high,
is what powered 20% of the 300,000,000 people who live in the US, for decades.
Pretty incredible if you think about it!
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If city lights were coloured by where the energy comes from 💡
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In 1979, the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear plant had a meltdown.
This was the first major accident in nuclear's 30 year history.
No deaths were directly tied to the accident, but public trust was tarnished.
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What would happen if a nuclear reactor were lit on fire, dropped from 100 ft, crashed at 400mph, or intentionally blown up?
NASA wanted to find out, as they planned to launch a reactor into space in the 60s (which they did!)
Here’s how it went (🧶 1/n):
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The Bruce Nuclear Power Plant is incredible -
Some highlights from their CEO on a recent pod:
➡️ Nuclear enabled the coal phase out in Ontario. In 2005 there were 53 smog days. In 2013: 0 smog days. Way less people hospitalized with asthma after 2013.
➡️ They make life-saving
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Fuel bundle movement in a BWR. Tell me this doesn't look like the future!
Emissions free, on-demand energy using rocks formed in supernovae (uranium).
Each fuel bundle can power 20,000 homes for 1 year
With coal, that would require 50,000,000 lbs (filling 7 olympic pools)
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3️⃣ Anti-nuclear movements, coming from:
A) Environmentalists against population growth & higher energy usage
B) Oil & gas industry lobbyists
C) Citizens unsure of how safe nuclear power truly was (see: China Syndrome)
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Credit to Nick for the images and original post:
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2️⃣ Unless you're a scientist or a curious citizen, it's not clear how different nuclear power and nuclear weapons are. (Very different).
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Nuclear plants traditionally take 5–10 years to build.
This implies utilities stopped placing orders around 1980.
Why?
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With the right balance of regulation, earned public trust, continued engineering innovation, and its gold-standard safety culture, we may well see a world where nuclear plays a major role in decarbonization, and powering the future of humanity.
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Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for future posts :)
(And thanks to prior work by
@_brianpotter
and
@Atomicrod
for inspiring some of this.)
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The next company I start will be in Nuclear Power.
Here are a few words on why!
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The real reason a nuclear renaissance is happening right now:
Anyone born after 1990 has seen virtually no nuclear weapons testing in their lifetime.
This generation is now 30 years old, and are coming into an age of influence on government, policy, and industry.
These are
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Here's what it would look like if you stacked only the fuel pellets, with no shielding.
Now, the pile is only 3 m tall, about as high as your ceiling.
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Very excited to announce that Aalo has closed a $27M Series A!
We’re honored to be partnering with an incredible group of investors going into this next chapter. The future of nuclear is bright, and Aalo is just getting started.
We’re on a mission to make small nuclear reactors
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With this in mind, if we remove all of the remaining usable fuel, we're left with this:
a 15 cm (1/2 a foot) pile of fission products.
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In the 50's, workers swam in spent nuclear fuel pools as a joke (with zero health consequences).
More recently, some of this pool water dripped onto the ground, and MILLIONS were spent on cleaning it up.
How'd we get here? Here's the story of Toomer's Creek & LNT 🧶👇
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You’ve heard of the periodic table of elements…
But those atoms are boring!
Let’s check out the magical table of isotopes, which can save lives, power space rovers for years, and tell us the age of ancient artifacts 😲 ⬇️
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Utilities shied away from new nuclear builds.
Why invest billions into something, if a single accident could render the plant unusable for years? Coal plants didn't have that problem.
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In the years that followed NRC's formation (1976 -1988), new regulation led to a >30% cost increase in new nuclear plants.
BUT, regulatory burden was ALREADY increasing, even before the formation of the NRC in 1975.
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Nonetheless, the world is realizing the importance of decarbonization + energy independence.
3rd party, unbiased observers, like doctor
@Dr_Keefer
and influencer
@isabelleboemeke
are leading succesful pro-nuclear movements.
30 years post-plateau, nuclear is getting a 2nd look.
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Case closed? Not quite…
Utilities were also ALREADY seeing rising costs due to increased regulation, before Three Mile Island.
Some may blame the NRC - the new nuclear regulator that was formed in 1975 (4 years before TMI).
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To decarbonize a single steel/cement/ammonia plant, we'll need either:
A) Clean electricity from thousands of acres of renewables, or
B) Clean heat from a single small Gen-4 nuclear reactor.
This chart shows which reactor type can decarbonize which industrial heat app:
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When they say “nuclear is too expensive”, show them this:
Nuclear is the lowest cost, most profitable energy source in the long run.
But it requires a bit of patience to get there.
Let’s break it down 🧵⬇️
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Excitement about the “nuclear renaissance” is high,
But we’ve been here before in 2007 and that renaissance failed.
What went wrong, and why will this time be different?
🧵(1/n)
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1️⃣ Even people within the nuclear industry (*at the time*) were unsure of how bad an accident could be, since there was no way to derive an answer definitively from first principles.
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🗣 "Why bother with nuclear and its perceived risks, if we have solar and wind?"
✅ Because nuclear is THE BEST way to completely decarbonize the grid.
Here's why (🧶 1 / 7)
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30 US schools have had nuclear reactors on campus for decades, and most students don’t know about them.
They use a special fuel that is inherently safe: UZrH. The hotter the fuel gets, the less reactive it gets.
This is the fuel that Aalo reactors will use.
Whoa. The University of Illinois wants to build a nuclear microreactor on campus, to provide carbon-free electricity & heat.
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Australia should really be more pro-nuclear.
They do 9% of global uranium exports, but sit on 30% of the known reserves.
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While many individuals at NRC may recognize this, it's difficult for the organization as a whole to course correct, lest they lose the public's trust.
And while the nuclear industry may want to help win over the public, it's difficult given how hard it is to build anything new.
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Military submarines are like a microcosm of humanity’s future energy infrastructure.
Here are the top 5 systems used in military subs that will soon be deployed everywhere: (🧵)
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So, why was all this regulation being added? Why wasn't nuclear loved unconditionally by all?
You'd think a new, clean & reliable energy source which went 30 years without a major accident would have garnered widespread support…
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What LCOE ignores, is the cost of unreliability.
While it might selfishly be a good investment for a solar developer, it could be a terrible investment for the grid, and society at large.
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What is all that oil and gas being used for??
Mostly:
1️⃣ Moving things
2️⃣ Heating things
These two applications consume ~80% of all humanity’s energy.
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What would happen if nuclear waste were on a truck that crashed going 60 mph?
And what if it was put back on a new truck,
And crashed AGAIN at 84 mph?
Sandia Labs had to know, & ran the tests in 1978 🧶👇
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But we're not done yet!
Most of the material in those pellets is still usable nuclear fuel, not waste.
Only the atoms that have fissioned are truly considered "waste".
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Before the NRC, there was the AEC, who was responsible for both promotion AND regulation of nuclear power.
You might expect this to be a conflict of interest (that's why NRC was formed!).
But plant costs were also increasing under the AEC's watch, ⬆️ 176% between 1967–1974.
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Visiting Arco with
@energybants
Wild that the first reactor to ever make electricity was also a breeder reactor that could produce more fuel than it used (EBR-1)
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What would happen if nuclear waste were on a truck that crashed going 60 mph?
And what if it was put back on a new truck,
And crashed AGAIN at 84 mph?
Sandia Labs had to know, & ran the tests in 1978 🧶👇
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The grid (electricity) is only a small part of all energy used by humans:
Electricity: 25,000 TWh
All energy: 160,000 TWh
30% of the grid is clean, but that means only 6% of total energy is clean.
The rest (94%) is oil and gas.
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You live on a giant nuclear power plant 🌎
Radioactive decay of earth's mantle produces 8x the energy of our entire global electrical grid.
This helps keep earth’s core molten, which creates earth’s magnetic field, which in turn protects us from the radiation of deep space!
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On a 1000-yr timescale, Nuclear Energy deployment will far surpass oil and gas
The delay of the past few decades won't be noticeable
Even Oil and Gas companies knew nuclear was the long term obvious solution to humanity's energy needs.
This chart is from 1956 and produced by Shell.
Note how the bottom plot covers thousands of years.
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Oil and gas companies love renewables.
Today, renewables are always backed 1:1 by oil-and-gas based generators, to fill gaps.
In the future, solar purists propose mega storage, and overbuilding (extra panels) as the solution.
These extra costs aren't factored into LCOE.
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Key takeaways
- Nuclear fuel is 10-200x cheaper than combustion fuels (for the same energy)
- Nuclear fuel is > 100,000x more energy dense by mass
- Americans & Canadians use a lot more residential power than people in other countries
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Believing that nuclear waste needs to be buried deep beneath a mountain to keep us safe...
...is like a kid believing their parents should pay for a $30,000 bank vault door to keep them safe from the monsters in their closet.
@tomaspueyo
put it best: “I actually think that deep
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The problem was that nuclear power was ALWAYS controversial.
Here are a 3 reasons why:
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Here’s what would happen if you flew a fighter jet into a nuclear reactor containment building
(Expand to see the aftermath)
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If you have to build a clean backup nuclear plant, why not just use it around the clock!?
You wouldn’t need solar + storage to begin with.
When it comes to the grid, solar needs nuclear, but nuclear doesn’t need solar.
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Let’s break it down further:
1️⃣ Transport includes cars, trucks, planes, ships, trains, etc.
2️⃣ Heating includes both residential and industrial applications, at a wide range of temps.
(Note: cooling is normally grid-powered)
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All the nuclear waste in the history of US Nuclear Power would fit in 8516 dry casks, shown above.
See below for a size comparison with the field goal posts.
This pile would be 135 m tall, about as tall as a 40 story building.
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Investors have poured billions into fusion💥,
hoping to fund the ‘holy grail’ of energy.
I believe they’re funding an expensive science experiment that won’t play a role in our future grid (but will still be great for humanity).
Here’s why ⬇️
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We just hit a big milestone in our journey at
@AaloAtomics
: We've been granted a DOE-ID Siting MOU!
This is the first step towards the deployment of an Aalo-1 reactor at the INL site.
We’re aiming to start construction as soon as 2026.
The next steps will include:
✅
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But those casks contain a lot of concrete for shielding, and other structural metals.
How much nuclear waste is really stored within the casks?
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Why does
@Lazard
dislike nuclear?
From CTVC: "Nuclear fares poorly in Lazard’s analysis, but their methodology arguably puts nuclear at a disadvantage. Lazard caps IRR to only the first 20 years of operation, which may justly reflect the lifespan of a solar or wind farm, but
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This is the inconvenient truth of renewables on the grid: you HAVE to accept either blackouts, or emissions (& extra cost) from gas or coal backup.
With nuclear, the energy is safe & clean, blackouts are not a concern, and it CAN be cheaper than coal (see South Korea, China).
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Excited to announce Aalo Atomics!
This is a new startup created to help push nuclear energy forward, and it’s what I’ve been working on for the past year.
More announcements coming in the next few months…
@AaloAtomics
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Of course, too much radiation is a bad thing.
Interestingly, too LITTLE radiation may also be a bad thing.
Scientists tried growing bacteria in a radiation-free environment, and found that the cells grew LESS, supposedly because the DNA repair mechanisms were less active.
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Superconductors already exist TODAY,
But they require bulky and inefficient cooling equipment.
So the real question is: What new tech is unlocked by ditching the cooling equipment??
Let’s take a critical look at the hype 👇
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Imagine we were talking about two internet providers: Sun Internet Co, and Atom Internet Co.
Sun Co charges $1 / GB, while Atom Co charges $5 / GB. But Sun Co only works from 9am–5pm, and its speed drops by 80-90% on cloudy days.
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Fun nuclear physics puzzle:
If neutrons are like the “glue” in an atom, then why are there no atoms made entirely of neutrons (with no protons)!?
Answer is in the comments 👇
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Experts can't seem to agree on the best way to decarbonize the grid.
Is the answer in renewables? Nuclear? Or do we need a new breakthrough technology?
Here's what you need to know 🧶👇
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Another big milestone from MARVEL: Non-nuclear full-scale prototype testing has started
"MARVEL will be the first new reactor at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) in more than four decades and is targeting to be operational in 2025."
What does this mean?
Instead of using nuclear
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Levelized Cost of Energy, or LCOE, is the total cost of a project, divided by the total energy that it produces in its lifetime.
If you build a field of low-cost solar panels that produce a lot of energy over their lifetime, it's a low LCOE and a great investment, right?
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We made a video!
@AaloAtomics
is a young company with a lot to prove, but we want to get in the habit of communicating what we’re doing, and why we’re doing it.
In the next few months, we’ll start work on our full-scale physical prototype.
We’re going to have to overcome a lot
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What about trucks, planes, ships, and trains?
These are much harder to electrify.
Oil and gas is at least 10x more energy dense than lithium ion batteries, and this matters for larger vehicles.
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The theory of *radiation* hormesis is that, when the dose is "just right", your body's immune system and repair mechanisms are activated in a healthy way.
This response may result in your body finding and solving problems sooner than it otherwise would have.
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A familiar form of hormesis is: Exercise.
A lack of exercise can be bad. A little exercise is better. Extreme exercise can harm you.
Oxygen is another example; too little or too much call kill you. Hormesis describes any such response curve for a biological system.
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