Atomic Show #318 – Brian Gitt, Business Development, Oklo
Brian Gitt, the Business Development lead at Oklo, visited the Atomic Show to describe his employer’s business model and current prospects.
Oklo is an advanced fission and fuel recycling company with an expansive vision for becoming a competitive clean energy supplier. It plans to provide heat and/or electricity as a service from a fleet of small fission power plants that it owns, operates and maintains.
Oklo recently became a public company through a SPAC merger with AltC, a special purpose acquisition company led by Sam Altman, a venture capital investor and the founder and CEO at OpenAI.
Oklo was founded in 2013 by Jake DeWitt and Caroline Cochran, two MIT nuclear engineering graduates with a vision for building a company that could manufacture and operate smaller, simpler reactors.
Recognizing that nuclear engineering skills are not the only ingredient needed to build a company, Oklo founders made an early decision to participate in an entrepreneurial immersion training program at Y Combinator, a start-up accelerator and seed stage venture capital funder.
Their unique business proposition for clean energy development was compelling enough to attract serious interest from Sam Altman, who was then serving as the president at Y Combinator. He became one of the company’s earliest investors and began serving as the company Chairman.
As Gitt describes, Oklo has spent the past decade preparing for the growth in clean energy demand that is coming from both the energy transition and the growing use of energy for applications like high performance data centers for applications like artificial intelligence (AI). The company also sees huge opportunities in clean energy for materials production, mining and increased manufacturing in places outside of China.
For more details, you’re going to have to listen to the show. Please participate in the comment section discussion. I expect that many listeners will find this to be a valuable use of their time.
Disclosure: I have a long position in Oklo’s publicly traded stock in my personal portfolio.
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Great Show, I’m glad that Oklo is public now. I am glad he has identified the best market for small nuclear. I totally agree with his assessment. I have invested in Oklo. Rod have you heard of https://www.valaratomics.com/ You can find Isaiah Taylor on X. His goal is to use a LOT of Nuclear heat to take CO2 and water to make hydrocarbons in great abundance.
Good podcast – I was getting upbeat about the new construction of reactors until a little before the hour mark. Both Rod and The guest, Brian Gitt, stated that hydrocarbons aren’t “going away.” A bit before that Rod had commented on how the “real” price of natural gas is still lower than the price in the nineties. So, then I thought back to the discussion about the data centers. The guest talked of the PJM interconnection and how the reactors need not be located near the data centers. I guess the same would apply to a gas generation site. Gas turbines are lot cheaper to build and operate than nuclear reactors.
I also wondered how many people would be required to operate these small reactors. Labor is becoming increasingly scarce with today’s demographics and the lower supply commands a higher price.
All of the current massive fracking will lead to peak gas being a true reality and then companies like Oklo will flourish. Perhaps, there are niche markets that will enable companies to survive until that day comes. This does, of course, preclude the possibility of Greenhouse Gas legislation which will change the rules of the game.
Are we all supposed to gaslight ourselves for the time being and nod yes that Oklo could ever have sales revenue approaching the SPAC’s $300M ‘market cap’? I don’t doubt that some people will make money on this SPAC, namely Sam Altman when he reaches the trigger points that permit him to offload his shares. I read an article the other day that out of 400 SPACs since umptysquat date, only one is not a pennystock today.
The confidence game here is quite complex but the end state of OKLO is abundantly clear: tractor-size nuclear reactors are not going to save the world from temperature rise 5 MW at a time. Tractor-size nuclear reactors are not going to be exempted from security or operator staffing requirements, just like OKLO was never going to be exempted from needing to prepare an actual design certification, like the one NuScale spent $1B preparing.
I’m pretty sure you’re not terribly ‘long on OKLO’ with your personal retirement money. I watch the stock with interest but will not be gaslighted into taking part in it. Perhaps it’ll take 20 years to loose 99% of its value like lightbridge. Their hubris is at such an epically high level with their nouveau riche tech money that they’ll never admit defeat and crash/burn as fantastically as their classmates did with transatomic… but slowly fade their light will.
@Michael:
Oklo isn’t designing “tractor-sized” reactors. Their initial model will produce 15,000 kWe while their roadmap envisions models at 50,000 and 100,000 kW. (I purposely used kW, which is unconventional for nuclear power plants, but quite common in diesel generators, the dominant competitors in the markets where Oklo is likely to compete.)
Oklo shelved the 1.5 MWe model that they – quite rightly in my opinion – should have been able to build and operate with bounding analysis showing that no conceivable event would release a harmful amount of radiation to the public. They were unsuccessful in their attempt to explain their design’s safety via the Zoom meetings available during COVID.
I personally find it difficult to believe that Altman is looking for a few hundred million from his stake in Oklo instead of seeing it as a way to unlock billions in his much larger investments in AI. But you might be right.
You are correct in guessing that my Oklo holdings do not represent a significant portion of my retirement or savings portfolio. I have a widely diversified portfolio and intend to keep that diversification. But I am willing to invest modest portions in stocks that might be the kind of winners sought be people like Peter Lynch.
A significant portion of the modest portion of my portfolio that is in risky, high-potential stocks rests the Nucleation Capital (nucleationcapital.com) fund, which invests in companies that are not even public.
It’s important that the micro reactors be able to be licensed the way Oklo was seeking. Without that path we will never see them. We need the NRC to use the word “safe” about a licensed reactor. It is a deep lie to pretend a reactor the size and design of the original Oklo design is “dangerous.” The value of these small reactors lies in their ubiquity, and their ability to replace large generators. The public will get used to their presence, reliability and safety. This will accelerate nuclear approval.
My late friend”s advice back in ’03 was, “focus on and work with what *is*, instead of what you think *should* be. There is so much chatter about, “NRC needs to this or that…”
Show us (in the industry) where to lower the bar, specifically, instead of implying the NRC should just approve whatever comes across their desks. Congress continues to issue Acts and Bills (hollow edicts really), pretending they are going to ease the licensing due process with more words on paper, ” “Thou shalt make this process quicker, easier, less.”
What is. Not what I think should be.
“Should” means that I’m missing something….that I don’t understand or see the big picture. This perspective has served me well enough… helps me keep a job, and gradually earn the respect of others… I’ll never be enough of a ham to be CNO of a SPAC..
Michael:
With due respect, your friend’s advice sounds to me like “sit down and shut up.” I was not trained to simply accept things as they are.
The Advance Act makes an important change by empowering the talented, mission-driven staffers at the NRC to take action that makes their processes more efficient. They have also been directed by law to regulate without unnecessarily limiting the beneficial use of nuclear power and radioactive material. That means that they have been told to not only stop adding unnecessary requirements and that they should eliminate currently existing requirements that are not necessary for adequate protection.
In the case of the Aircraft Impact Assessment rule, the NRC itself described the rule as being “not necessary for adequate protection” in the Federal Register notice that issued the rule.
You and I have both had personal experience with the costs and engineering contortions that the AIA has imposed on all new reactor designs by encouraging the decision to put them underground.
That sounds so simple to people who are not fully versed in the challenges. Even the nuclear engineers at mPower were ignorant of the problems and costs until the Bechtel constructors told them how much it would cost to pour concrete of sufficient strength and durability in a hole that needed to be at least 15 stories deep. They were also shocked to find out how challenging it was going to be to place equipment in that hole and then to maintain that equipment over the expected life of the plant.
It can be done, but it isn’t anywhere near as efficient as building much closer to the surface, perhaps with only carefully chosen parts of the system placed below grade and the rest being placed with an eye towards better accessibility and monitoring – with safety and containment in mind, of course.
AIA should be struck from the books. I know that will raise the hackles of vendors that have invested hundreds of millions to billions of dollars in completing designs that comply with the unnecessary rule. I will cry a tear or two for them.
Another example: ALARA is not so much a requirement as it is a philosophy that is not necessary to provide adequate protection. When doses and dose rates are below a certain level, there is no measurable harm. Continually playing limbo (how low can you go) after that point is an imposition of costly requirements that are not necessary for adequate protection.
I’m not expert enough to identify all of the places where such changes can and should be made, but the people on the staff of the NRC collectively have that expertise. They now have a legal mandate to improve their processes with the aim of making them more efficient and reducing unnecessary requirements that limit the use of nuclear power and radioactive material to benefit the public.
Michael,
Oklo sought a reasonable path to license a reactor. “We cannot find a means by which a dangerous amount of radioactive material would be released to the public”. The NRC wanted something else. Oklo’s application exists. It IS. Would 100’s or 1,000’s of pages of notes change the conclusion? When something is radically simple, it’s hard to say much. What was wrong with Oklo’s application that caused the NRC to reject it? Do you have any insight into that?
Watch and see thousands of micro reactors not built, no matter what the hype… with people clapping inside a Tuscan Order box as the stonk goes IPO. This idea of micro reactors is not new. This idea of “if we build it, they will come” is for Kevin Costner films. Nobody outside of the labs will be able to go the distance detailing and licensing such a thing. The design and documentation process will churn through $300M before OKLO can make their FOAK heat-pipe fuel rod credible. When the labs build a triso-fueled micro rector this decade, watch it NOT catch-on like a wild fire. The liabilities are too great and the payoff is too small. Silicone Valley hype aside, if I were to pick a winner (as the DOE does by charter) I would take Westinghouse by a mile, knowing they had 70 nuclear engineers working on Evinci before the press releases stopped. Now Westinghouse hasn’t officially dropped the micro effort because the FED is still paying, but their silence says a lot about the merits. That is what IS: silence until the next round of handouts.
Hi Rod, I last commented on this site about 10 years ago is I was undergoing round 1 of my deep-dive re-education of nuclear energy and had largely swung around from a knee-jerk opponent to a cautiously optimistic proponent. This was all during “Nuclear Renaissance 1.0 (TM) in 2010-2012ish.
Anyway, good to see you are still hard at work and the opinion pendulum is definitely swung, it least on a very shallow level. All questions are some form of “Do you favor the use of bountiful nuclear energy to save the palent from climagte change?” I would be interested in seeing some questions asking about putting a plant in their county or anywhere near where they live, though.
I am disappointed you are platforming vapor-ware companies whose main goals seem to play the stock market for easy dollars. Oklo, NANO, The Nuclear Company (whose CEO’s last company AppHarvest was a disaster for the working people of Kentucky and Appalachia in general. This new generation coming online now are all of the same cloth with Crypto, Web3, AI, and gurus like Elon Musk. They don’t make ANYTHING and most have no nuclear experience at all; it’s simply a well-funded pump-and-dump.
In my mind, the industry is making the same exact mistakes in the first build-out: making unfounded and impossible promises while reaching in to your pocket to add to the money from taxpayers.
Best of luck but please don’t embrace every salesman who comes down the pike simply because they support nuclear power.