Why the US Needs Nuclear Energy | Jordan Bramble, CEO of Antares | Ep. 11

It was really around the 1970s that things slowed down. We, we built something like a hundred, uh, reactors, uh, between, you know, roughly 1950 and the early 1970s. I think we've built and turned on three since in the US on the grid.

Wow! [upbeat music] All right. Really excited to have this conversation with Jordan Bramble, CEO of Antares. Jordan, thanks a ton for doing this conversation with me today.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah. We're gonna talk all about nuclear today. Maybe before we get into it, could you give me, like, a little overview of, like, the nuclear market, the history in the US, you know, what's happened over previous decades, and kind of catch us up to speed on where we are today?

Let's start from the beginning. So, um, the first, you know, artificial human-made nuclear reactor ever was, um, the Chicago Pile. So 1942, I think it was. Um, they actually built it at the University of Chicago, underneath of the football field, so, you know, right in the city, in the middle of Chicago. And the idea was you stacked, um, something like forty-five thousand graphite blocks in order to moderate neutrons. Um, I wanna say it was, like, fifty tons of natural uranium in order to sustain a critical reaction, and they actually only produced, like, a half watt of power. But that was the first, um, you know, first kind of academic research reactor ever built. Um, and the motivation behind it was, was really, um, uh, the Manhattan Project was going on, right? So we were exploring nuclear fission for the development of weapons, but then later, actually for the production of plutonium, because plutonium production is a by-product of nuclear fission, uh, uranium fission. So built, built a couple of reactors after that, um, and, you know, by 1945, um, '45, '47, so we're still in the '40s, um, we had pu- plutonium-producing reactors, both, um, at Savannah River and at the Hanford site in Washington, all to support the weapons program. And then in parallel, uh, an, a naval officer by the name of Hyman Rickover, started the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program in, I, I also want to say 1945. So, you know, all, all these things are happening really fast at this point.

Mm-hmm.

He eventually became Admiral Rickover, and is kind of the father of the nuclear navy. You know, 1952, we had the first nuclear submarine, so the Nautilus, which was a water-cooled reactor, and then in parallel to that, they built the, um, the Seawolf, which was a sodium-cooled reactor.

That was the first non-weapon application of nuclear, was submarines?

Cer- certainly first, first naval application. We'll actually get into it. The first, uh, kind of, you know, power-producing, civilian power-producing reactor was actually a, a spin-off from a naval reactor core that they didn't end up using. It was the Shippingport reactor in Pennsylvania. Uh, they built it in, like, eighteen months. So it's kind of a spin-off from, uh, the, the nuclear navy programs. It's actually only a sixty-megawatt reactor. Not long after that, we got the, uh, Yankee Rowe in Massachusetts, which, which I wanna say was, like, hundred megawatts, hundred and twenty megawatts, something like that. So significantly smaller than what we, um, what we build today. I imagine at some point, talk about small modular reactors. You know, one thing I would highlight is actually the, the kind of small concept is actually how we originally built reactors-