8/18/2023 0 Comments Oklo natural reactor![]() “If we can modernize the way we meet these regulations and take advantage of the benefits and characteristics of these next-gen designs, we can start to paint a whole new picture here,” DeWitte says.ĭeWitte came to MIT in 2008 and studied advanced reactors during work for his master’s degree. Now Oklo is hoping its progress will encourage others to pursue new approaches in the nuclear power industry. “Newness was favorable because it shed some of the legacy inertia around how things have been done in the past, and I thought that was an important way of modernizing the commercial approach,” says Oklo CEO Jacob DeWitte SM ’11, PhD ’14, who co-founded the company with Caroline Cochran SM ’10. In many ways, the Silicon Valley-based company has cultivated a startup mindset, eschewing government grants to raise smaller, venture capital-backed funding rounds and iterating on its designs as it moves through the application process much more quickly than its predecessors. Oklo says the plant will run for 20 years without having to refuel in its lifetime.īut perhaps the most unique aspect of Oklo is its approach to commercialization. The company’s first reactor, dubbed the Aurora, is housed in an unassuming A-frame building that is hundreds of times smaller than traditional reactors, and it will run on used fuel recovered from an experimental reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory that was shut down in 1994. The added proportion of uranium-235 allows Oklo’s reactor to run for longer time periods without having to refuel.Īs a result of these differences, Oklo’s powerhouses will bear little resemblance to conventional nuclear plants. Compared to traditional reactors, Oklo’s fuel source will be enriched with a much higher concentration of the uranium-235 isotope, which fissions more easily than the more common uranium-238. Oklo’s reactors won’t use moderators, enabling the construction of much smaller plants and allowing neutrons to move faster.įaster-moving neutrons can sustain nuclear fission with a different type of fuel. The acceptance was the culmination of a novel application process that set a number of milestones in the industry, and it has positioned Oklo to build an advanced reactor that differs in several important ways from the nuclear power plants currently operating in the country.Ĭonventional reactors use moderators like water to slow neutrons down before they split, or fission, uranium and plutonium atoms. Earlier this year, the company became the first to get its application for an advanced nuclear reactor accepted by the U.S. ![]() Now the startup Oklo is forging a new path to building innovative nuclear power plants that meet federal safety regulations. ![]() That landscape has had varying degrees of success over the years, but it’s never been particularly inviting for new companies interested in deploying unique technologies. They also relied heavily on funding from the federal government, which through large grants and lengthy application processes has dictated many aspects of nuclear plant design and development. For one thing, companies made their reactors big, with power capacities measured in the hundreds of megawatts. today were built using the same general formula. Uranium was also leached during monazite alteration and may have contributed significantly to the genesis of the high-grade uranium deposits of the Franceville basin that host the natural nuclear reaction zones.All of the nuclear power plants operating in the U.S. The increase in Th/La from detrital monazite to residual Th-silicate phase indicates that about 76% of the light REEs were leached out, corresponding to a global amount of 2.01 × 10 9 metric tons at the scale of the FA Formation in the Franceville basin. Light REEs are simultaneously leached out together with P and U. The alteration phase is a microcrystalline Th-silicate phase, indicating low Th solubility at these conditions. ![]() Monazite, which represents the main light REE-bearing phase in the sandstones, was altered by diagenetic brines at 140 ☌ and 1 kbar. The anomalously high Th/La ratio (∼1.14) of the Early Proterozoic silicified sandstones of the Franceville basin (Gabon), compared to Archean and Proterozoic metasedimentary rocks (Th/La ∼0.27), results from extreme light rare earth element (REE) migration during diagenesis.
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