Doug Bernauer
Founder & CEO, Radiant · 2 appearances on the record.
computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →
founderexecutiveengineer@DougBernauer ↗radiantnuclear.com ↗
After spending 12 years at SpaceX working on systems such as the Grasshopper rocket and Hyperloop, Doug Bernauer co-founded Radiant in 2020 to build factory-manufactured, transportable nuclear micro-reactors. Radiant is developing Kaleidos, a 1-megawatt portable micro-reactor designed to replace diesel generators for remote communities, military installations, and data centers.
2 supported 2 partly supported 0 contradicted 2 not yet assessed 3 not checkable as stated how the 9 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
4 predictions · 5 assertions · 2 opinions · 1 insight · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 9 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 4 are resolved, 2 are not yet assessed, and 3 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Doug argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Expressed certainty vs assessment result
weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet
Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →
answered every one of 10 assessed questions directly
This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →
How they sound: speaking style how? →
281 words/min while actually speaking · 42.1 um and uh per 1k words · 11.9 false starts per 1k · 31.2% of pauses land inside a clause
Measured by listening to the audio itself: 2,685 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →
Everything Doug Bernauer said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Appearances (2)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| The Nuclear Renaissance - Radiant | a16z American Dynamism | Aug 4, 2026 | 2m |
| A Nuclear Comeback: Are New Reactors the Answer? | Mar 18, 2024 | 12m |