Doug Bernauer
person on 4 shows · 13 statements across 4 episodes · said 10 times in 5 episodes since 2024
TBPN 9 
Invest Like the Best 1 
Sourcery 
the a16z Podcast
On the record as a speaker too: Doug Bernauer across every show, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year, every show
tap a year for its mentions
TBPN 9Invest Like the Best 1
2026 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
2024 7 mentions in 2 episodes 4 per episode
every mention on every show, scene by scene, with the transcript →
13 statements about Doug Bernauer, every show
Bernauer: Nuclear is the only viable way to power Mars fuel production
“And so I looked into solar power on Mars and found that was really challenging, and then I looked into nuclear power on Mars and found that was the only way.”
Doug Bernauer: Radiant Focuses on Building Reactors, Not Reactor Buildings
“What we want to be doing is building reactors, not reactor buildings.”
Bernauer: Deployable and retrievable nuclear reactors require sizing around 1 MW
“It's only possible if you make a size about one megawatt, right? Make a small enough reactor, you can do this, transport it there and back again sort of trick, and take the fuel back, and so you have, like, no nuclear strings attached.”
Bernauer: Mass-produced micro-reactors will enable interstellar human travel
“Nuclear micro-reactors that are mass-produced, that are reliable in the most wild scenario enables humans to leave the star that we were born at, the sun, and go to other ones.”
Coogan: Radiant Nuclear raised $100M Series C to mass-produce 1MW microreactors
“And he writes we at Radiant Nuclear are announcing our one hundred million dollar series C today. Our plan is to test new our new reactor design at INL. That's the Idaho National Laboratory. Begin mass manufacturing reactors and deliver one megawatt reactors t…”
Bernauer spent 12 years at SpaceX after consecutive launch failures
“Yeah, I spent 12 years at SpaceX had joined when they had failed two rockets in a row but I thought it was just a big and beautiful mission to lower the cost of launch, to make life multi-planetary and that's why I did that for 12 years, but I worked on all so…”
Bernauer began researching nuclear power while designing SpaceX Mars systems
“But I also worked on Hyperloop and on the boring company, kind of ideas that came from that while I was there and on Mars systems, which is how I started to look at nuclear.”
Radiant microreactor contains 120 million poppy seed-sized ceramic fuel kernels
“What we're doing is these tiny poppy seed size kernels of fuel. There are about a hundred and twenty million of them. For a hundred kilograms of uranium and this is all in a core that's, you know, only four feet in diameter.”
Ceramic-coated TRISO nuclear fuel cannot melt down up to 1600°C
“The temperature limit of the fuel becomes this extremely high value, and you can go to about 1600 Celsius before there's an appreciable failure rate of the ceramic coated fuel. So what it means is you can't melt down the fuel.”
Helium gas coolant cannot absorb neutrons or become radioactive
“We use helium gas because it can't become radioactive either. And it's a gas. It can't actually absorb a neutron, which is what makes something radioactive when it starts out not being radioactive.”
Radiant microreactors cost tens of millions versus billions for conventional reactors
“So the, I mean, the really big ones that we have now are on the order of a few billion dollars for reactor. A tiny little one that I'm working on is on the order of tens of millions of dollars, but you know, everyone's design is quite a bit different, but it's…”
Bernauer: Nuclear energy will leapfrog natural gas
“Natural gas, which I agree with Dr. Huff the low cost of it definitely caused us to adopt that, to fill that need, rather than nuclear, but I think nuclear can leapfrog it.”