Isaiah Taylor

We kept it simple, right?

We just said, let's use what's off the shelf.

Off the shelf is low-energy uranium.

It currently powers 20% of the American energy grid, and there's lots of it.

So we start there.

We can use HALU over time as it becomes available, but we like to keep it simple to begin with.

So a shoebox is about as small as you can get a critical sphere in theory.

which means any machinery you add is going to be larger than that.

So there's sort of a minimum size of a nuclear reactor just based on pure physics.

And the physics here is essentially the mean free path of a neutron, meaning as a neutron travels, what is it going to hit and can it be reflected back and cause more fission?

And that size is actually pretty large.

So our reactor that we have in LA, it's sort of one vessel in a shipping container.

That's about as small as you can make a reactor moderated by graphite.

And graphite's really nice.

It's a cheap material.

It's abundant.

It's easy to get.

If you want to go smaller than that, you have to start getting into different moderators and that can get really expensive.

So for instance, beryllium is a moderator that people have used for like outer space where you need a really, really small reactor that fits on a satellite.

The issue with beryllium is A, it's extremely toxic.