Comment by philipkglass | Hacker News Reader

Comment by philipkglass | Hacker News Reader

Here's the denial letter to Oklo directly from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission:

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2135/ML21357A034.pdf

All Oklo application documents linked to from this top level page: https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/col/aurora-oklo.ht...

While searching World Nuclear News for background about Oklo I ran into this story:

"Oklo to power bitcoin mining machines"

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Oklo-to-power-Bi...

This is dubious on a couple of levels. Micro-reactors like Oklo (1.5 megawatt electrical output per unit, compared to 1000+ megawatts for Generation III reactors currently being built) would be hard pressed to produce electricity suitable for an industry that seeks globally-cheapest prices. Announcing a "20-year commercial partnership" to supply 100 units to a mining firm, before they've built a single unit, is optimistic to the point of recklessness.

The Oklo founders [1], Caroline Cochran and Jacob DeWitte, have no industrial experience, according to their LinkedIn profiles. They met at MIT while TA'ing and went straight from graduate school to founding Oklo.

I just don't think that Oklo knows what they are doing.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/28/oklo-planning-nuclear-micro-...

Ultimately I do not know whether Oklo and/or their founders know what they're doing, though I hope for the sake of the planet that they do and they succeed.

But calling them out for having no nuclear industry experience seems somewhere between aggressive and wrong. Both founders have graduate degrees in nuclear science from MIT and have been in the nuclear industry _at Oklo_ for the better part of a decade. A quick LinkedIn search also shows that Oklo employs other people with nuclear industry experience, including at the NRC itself.

If someone had a PhD from MIT in machine learning and then worked at Google doing machine learning for 8 years, would you say that person has no machine learning industry experience? At face value such a person would seem like a plausible expert!

I mean that they've never been at an organization that actually builds reactors or reactor components. Building working machines, at scale, at a price that customers can afford, is hard even if you're not in a heavily regulated industry. I'd also be skeptical of the chances for a pair of people to successfully move from graduate research in solar technology at MIT to commercializing a new solar cell design through their startup.

Hah, it's the opposite of "you need 5 years of experience in a 3 year old technology": they need X years of experience in an industry that has been dead for the last 40.

Looking at the number of failed kickstarters for physical objects that are multiple orders of magnitude less complicated than a nuclear power plant with new technology might be instructive.

China's been building new reactors, poach some of those project managers.

There aren't any organizations that build reactors though. You'd have to go to France or China.

Doesn't Westinghouse build nuclear reactors?

https://www.westinghousenuclear.com/new-plants/engineering-c...

They're hoping to get to build some. Not in the US of course.

They're building reactors in the state of Georgia:

https://info.westinghousenuclear.com/blog/shaping-the-future...

Other companies that manufacture nuclear components in the US include Areva, General Electric, and Framatome. But Westinghouse is the only company that has a new reactor design currently under construction in the US.

The US is still fielding new nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers. So, they ARE building new power plants, just...not commercial ones.

Even if you really had to go to France or China to get some experts (which is not the case) it would be quite reasonable to expect that they do so; using a combination of modern inventions such as airplanes and money it should be possible to get some of them across the ocean.

France does not appear to have the expertise either, Flamanville and Olkiluoto have been disasters.

Plus, it's really not clear how they could translate their organizational skills to entirely different culture. Maybe it would work, but it's certainly not a sure thing.

If they started an ML company that applied for grants and failed to supply the required information, it would be acceptable to inquire about their expertise.

Academic experience does not equal Industry experience.

> I hope for the sake of the planet that they do and they succeed.

The planet doesn't need nuclear. It just needs a concerted push to roll out renewables on a bigger scale and invest into promising long/medium term energy storage solutions (like various gravity storage solutions)

The opportunity costs for nuclear are just way too high.

https://www.oneearth.org/the-7-reasons-why-nuclear-energy-is...

> invest into promising long/medium term energy storage solutions (like various gravity storage solutions)

Since when is gravity storage a promising solution for powering the national grid?

Nuclear powered bitcoin mining. How is the human race so smart, yet simultaneously so so dumb?

Sometimes you have to attach yourself to dumb ideas to sell the smart idea. There's a good chance these folks don't care about cypto at all and are just using this to obtain further investment and survive another day.

"We want to build a nuclear reactor to supply energy exclusively to _____." is an easy blank to fill.

Our intelligence is dwarfed by our unlimited greed.

We’re more properly Homo callidus, not Homo sapiens.

If it displaces fossil fuel based Bitcoin mining that's still a net gain in my book.

Bitcoin mining is actually a really interesting use case as induced demand for a nuclear reactor which cannot easily lower its output beyond a certain threshold. Currently, fossil fuel plants are spun up and shut down to match demand for electricity, if our grid was entirely solar, wind, and nuclear, supply cannot be regulated, but by turning bitcoin miners on and off, you can regulate demand. There are other ways too, of course, such as grid connected EV chargers, but the nice thing about bitcoin mining is that the utility company can operate it themselves and use the revenue from mining to subsidize the construction and operation of the nuclear plant.

From what I understand the purpose of the mining operation is to keep the grid "balanced". "Bitcoin solves this" loses its luster a little when you compare it to running a data center next to that plant, without implicitly gambling the financial success of the nuclear investment on the continued value of bitcoin.

They want to put this in the middle of nowhere in Idaho. It wouldn't be worth running transmission lines to connect a reactor this size to the grid.

You could put the bitcoin mine right next to the facility and do something useful with the electricity. It really should be coupled to some real sink so they can see the dynamics of the reactor + powerset + consumer.

Before people jump down your throat with pseudo ethical pearl clutching, just replace "do something useful" with "generate income".

You don't have to personally believe that bitcoin mining is "useful" to acknowledge that it certainly can generate real money to offset the cost of a remote experiment like this one.

I have to admit I'm amazed how sentiment on HN against cryptocurrency has turned sharply negative.

I think a year ago we were comfortable with Bitcoin as a store of value but the NFT craze has made almost all of us adopt the "right-clicker mentality".

Years ago I was an INTP but something happened to me a year ago and I got into doing art projects and I lately scored as an INFP. I told my therapist the other day that, more than anything else, I want to plant my feelings like seeds, intensify and cultivate them, compress them into a ball, throw it at somebody and have it hit them like a lighting bolt.

NFT people drive me nuts because (1) I'm not that good at art, (2) I want to get much better, (3) I know I'm going to do that by really emotionally connecting with people and (4) I can't know I'm really doing it with people who are blinded with NFT greed. (Look at the sh1t they buy!)

I think it's more that people are getting increasingly terrified by the threat of climate change, so anything that uses and "unnecessary" energy is the most evil thing in the world. Naturally, these same people rarely turn their energy use critiques on their own hyper wasteful western lifestyles.

Ironically, bitcoin is one of the few things that gives me hope for a future potentially devastated by threats like climate change.

honestly part of staying sane as a working artist is quickly learning to detach notions of quality and value from one another. robert hughes outlined the depressing absurdity of art speculation over a decade before anyone ever uttered the phrase nft.

>https://vimeo.com/419591120

all that aside the most surefire way to get better at art is to enjoy it and keep doing things you enjoy, in perpetuity,

forever.

Thanks!

It is an old story. I was doing some reading to try to get into the head of somebody who'd been involved with the art world and came across

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Painted_Word

which was a cynical take from 1975.

"The Oklo founders [1], Caroline Cochran and Jacob DeWitte, have no industrial experience, according to their LinkedIn profiles."

So Theranous all over again?

Having read possibly too much Matt Levine my first thought wrt the Bitcoin things was "this is an investor relations move".

Hand picked by Sam Altman. Lol

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