Kairos Power CEO Mike Laufer explains the passive safety margins achieved by combining molten Flibe salt coolant with TRISO particle fuel.
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kairos aims to cut reactor capital costs by 50% across seven builds
“We see the ability in, in just those first essentially seven reactors, like dramatically bringing down the capital costs you know, 40, 50% is possible, and then we're staged for the second half of the twenty-thirties to scale from there”
Insight
Nuclear engineers struggle to adapt to iterative development, says Mike Laufer
“If you buy into the iterative process, you don't know what you're going to learn, and so you have to be able to take that information, which sounds simple, but engineers and people, nuclear engineers in particular, like to have everything, like, mapped out, li…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Nuclear competitors are copying Kairos Power's non-nuclear prototyping model
“Now people are finally catching on and say if you build the non-nuclear version of it, you can go much faster, you can learn, you get the information, so others are kind of following along and kind of copying that model, but at the time it was really novel to …”
Assertion Supported
Kairos secured an NRC nuclear construction permit in just over two years
“So fast forward, we got a construction permit from the Aggregatory Commission. First advanced reactor, you know, to submit and get, we did it in just over two years.”
Disclosure
Kairos plans to deliver 500 MW to Google across seven nuclear reactors
“When we look at the 500 megawatt total capacity for Google we're looking at kind of the 50 megawatts, ah, on the Hermes II side, and then we're looking at basically six more reactors to deliver at 75 megawatts each as kind of an evolution of that that initial …”
Insight
Nuclear energy will fail as a baseload solution without cost certainty
“The main challenge with new nuclear is really the cost. It's a two-fold problem. It's not just high cost, it's high cost uncertainty, and we're in a particularly kind of perilous moment where people are recognizing the value of the fixed, reliable, base low po…”