Muller, whose company puts reactors at the bottom of a mile-deep borehole, says the core of a reactor is small. What makes nuclear plants huge, slow and expensive is the safety systems built around that core. Her company's pitch is to combine existing reactor fuel with drilling and geothermal technology.
…companies fail. But we just got the tick box for the second company. Like everyone believed that this was going to work, that we were a great founding team. They saw the examples of not just deep isolation, but also the nonprofit Berkeley Earth. And so it was much, much easier a second time around.
In those early days, how are you and your dad, Richard, envisioning a nuclear reactor actually operating a mile underground? And maybe start with how do nuclear reactors work above ground?
…when you take a large molecule or any molecule and it breaks apart. And breaking apart releases a tremendous amount of energy as heat, and you can then capture that heat. Now, the reason the reaction keeps going is it also emits a neutron that then hits your next atom of uranium-235, and then it breaks apart. And this is how nuclear works. Now, above ground, the core is the same. So, you know, nuclear fuel is so incredibly dense that if you use nothing but nuclear power to power your entire life, all of the fuel that you would need would fit inside one soda can. So this is really, really dense stuff. But I would be willing to bet that if you imagine a nuclear power plant in your mind, you're not imagining something really small. You're imagining something that's really, really big because anyone who's seen one of these nuclear reactors knows that they're huge. And so the reason that they're so huge isn't because of the core. It's because of all these…
And what about for end of life? How are you all envisioning in these early days how the end of life works, especially? I know you mentioned earlier how it can get compacted because it's so dense. How does that work for reactors underground?
Yeah. So the way that nuclear reactors work today, I just mentioned earlier, the spent fuel pool. Right. So, when your fuel is used up, you remove it from the reactor and you put it in a spent fuel pool where it will sit and cool for a number of years before you eventually put it into dry cask…
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