Think Hiring a Ruby Developer is Hard? Try Staffing a Nuclear Reactor Startup
bostinno.com
bostinno.com
As I understand it, part of the problem in hiring is that for a nuclear startup you really need experienced engineers as you go into producing working prototypes. Depending on the position, they don't necessarily need explicit nuclear experience - my relative didn't have it - but they do need a proven track record of not majorly screwing up ever, and that requires experience you can usually only get working for years in real engineering environments. There can be no 'oops, we messed up the privacy requirements' apology or people die, meltdowns happen, and the company gets the biggest of red flags.
That's not to say you need to be old to start a nuclear company, but that you will probably need to work with older engineers, who are harder to hire, settled in their jobs, and scattered across the US, with mortgages, families, and the like.
Of course, it's great for the countries who already have it up and running, and those countries should also look at the latest generations, and the next generation which are being designed (which should be better and safer in every way that the old ones which meltdown when a tsunami hits them).
I love asking pro-nuclear Australians which level of government (federal or state) should regulate nuclear power, and who should be the minister in charge.
Some of the more famous hydroelectric accidents:
* 1959, about 2000 deaths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaiont_Dam
* 2009, 75 deaths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Sayano%E2%80%93Shushenska...
* 1975, about 171,000 deaths (of those 26,000 immediate): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
Argentina, a developing country with a history of social turmoil and a relatively high level of goverment corruption, has been using nuclear power efficently since the '70s.
Probably "the future" will need mixed energy generation. It won't be only nuclear nor only renewable.
But I see renewable power getting a lot cheaper than nuclear. It's easier to cut costs. It's easier to experiment with new stuff. More automation will bring the costs down, while nuclear tends to be one-off projects (note, modular nuclear might level the playing field a bit, but you can bet that they won't be laser-focused on bringing the price right down).
Energy is all about costs. Nuclear power is unlikely to drop in cost as much as solar and wind.
The reason it's a problem, of course, is because the both methods are politically difficult and require significant engineering (if not research) and capital investment to make them practical.
Talent is extraordinarily hard to find for this. All the great engineers with domain experience are starting to retire. The ones that are left are extremely risk averse. You have to attempt to poach from GE or Westinghouse.
I worked for Westinghouse for two years doing Pipe Analysis and Fracture Mechanics. There are funny things that happen to steel piping at 2250 psi and 600 degrees Fahrenheit. Only nukes are familiar with the stresses and environmental fatigues that can happen in that environment over an 80 year period.
And why we have to use steel piping at 153atm and 300C?
The fact is that we are using a design that is totally obsolete and designed for creating nuclear bombs, not for giving us energy.
The good thing about startups is that they could think different, use creativity to innovate and invent new methods. Einstein was not very intelligent a la Von Newman, contrary to popular belief, but he was super creative.
Creativity is destroyed in academia.
Two other types of plants you might be thinking of when taking bomb materials into account. The russian design for Chernobyl was meant to produce electricity and bomb fuel which is why it had a graphite moderator which creates a very high neutron flux.
The other one is the sodium cooled breeder reactor which we chose instead of the molten salt design discussed in the article. The sodium breeder was good at making plutonium but still was never designed to have that plutonium removed in any usable fashion. Sodium is a tricky substance it reacts with water violently. The french still have a plant or two going as do the Chinese but it's really not a stellar design.
Now, I agree about the temps and pressures being unnecessary. The reason for these is about efficiency of scale. In a power grid like America's where we need 1 gigawatt and greater plants, plus with licensing a plant being so difficult, you build the biggest baddest plant you can which can output the most power. This means you go with the highest temps and pressures while still being ultra safe to create a more power efficient reactor.
Smaller reactors which would be better for the power grids of the world. Like 250 mega watts would not need these extreme environments. There are some great designs for a back of trailer truck reactor which can just hook up to a coal plant's secondary systems (steam turbines and such).
The best part of nuclear startups is nuclear is not a 'if' question. It's a when. I just hope we can disrupt quickly enough to bring that sort of power production here sooner rather then later.
This isn't actually accurate. Reactor core water is pressurized to raise the boiling point -- at 0.1 MPa (atmospheric) it's 100 ºC, at 15 MPa (reactor coolant) it's 342 ºC, so they can push water to around 300 ºC and still keep it liquid in the core. The higher the temperature, the higher (in general) the efficiency of converting heat to work (in the case of nuclear plants, efficiency of the steam turbine). This is pretty much independent of the size of the reactor.
(Why liquid water? One huge reason is neutronics (the nuclear part): a very high density of hydrogen nuclei (H in H2O) is useful for scattering neutrons, which slows them down to speeds where they get absorbed by heavy nuclei (reactor fuel) and start fission reactions. [This isn't necessary: in fact "fast reactors" work with neutrons flying at relativistic speeds. But it's much easier.])
300 ºC is actually pretty cool; the steam from coal power plants gets up to around 600 ºC [1], and internal-combustion gas turbines can reach temperatures of even 1,600 ºC [2]. Water-cooled reactors are held back in efficiency by the need to keep water liquid at core temperatures. Conceptually they can get a bit further by pressurizing water to supercritical conditions [3], at about 510-550 ºC/25 MPa; these aren't being built. (These are fast reactors; the density of this supercritical water is very low, about 0.1 kg/L, so it's a weaker moderator).
[1] http://www.ge-energy.com/products_and_services/products/stea...
Btw are you the same uvdiv that writes on capacity factor? Used to read that blog all the time when I was in industry. Always liked the number focus.
I wonder what this means for nuclear engineering's future, because I'm looking at Transatomic Power's team and I'm seeing a lot of influence from academia. Both members of the actual management team are PhD candidates, and all three members of the advisory board are professors. Granted this is one sample, but it seems like the barriers to entry for energy startups in general, but especially those dealing with nuclear power, are too steep at the moment for anything to move forward without help from academia.
Despite the risks there is a lot to be said for a Very high temperature reactor (1000C) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_high_temperature_reactor
PS: There are actually a lot of reactor designs out there, but overall most designed are based on a small number vary old basic designs and a large number of tradeoffs. For example many people love Pebble bed reactor's, but they are gas cooled and use a lot of graphite at high temperatures which will burn with just a little oxygen at which point you lose your moderator and things can go vary badly.
Nah. Grant committees just don't fund its full expression.
I personally decided to get out of nuclear engineering and into physics, but best of luck to these guys and gals.
I'm really pulling for this new generation. Heck, I want to get back into nuclear engineering once I have a startup or two under my belt. But a lot of what it takes to be successful is gonna be politics and bureaucracy. Knowing the older engineers who have moved up to NRC is a huge boon. Also being able to work utility company execs that want to take a chance. Then there's the actual politicians to convince. It's a lot of work. Most of it isn't going to be actual engineering.
France, on the other hand, used "Francs". Conveniently, the exchange rate was 1:1. I'd be surprised if they went and changed everything to Euro's now, but I haven't heard anything firsthand from French nuclear engineers.
In the nuclear field, like in any highly skilled engineering field, the costs will come first from the salary of your employees. In fact, it will be cheaper in Europe, because in Europe, highly skilled engineers tend to work for less money because they have 6 weeks holidays (which you can take), 3 month sick days, very good health insurance and a 40h week. When you start to build stuff, the BOM is the same in the US or in Europe.
This is from my experience in the oil & gas and pharmaceutical industries (my field as process & chemical engineer).
I've been thinking a lot about this kind of problem because the foundry industry is in much the same state. My father has been working in it (metallurgy, process/lean, product design and test, etc.) for ~45 years and is retiring in a few years. The foundry industry is also a field with basically nobody between the ages of 25-55 in the US, and he's thinking about what he will do to keep busy once the pension and social security kick in, apart from the obvious occasional contracting gig.
I'm not bashing all programmers, just ones who are part of the "rockstar" startup scene.
(Maybe I misunderstood, but the talk seemed to imply that spent fuel storage was being shown. It wasn't.)
If so, why is the now quite well-known MSR advocate Kirk Sorensen not involved in this project, but instead started his own company (Flibe Energy) to design and produce a thorium MSR?
Still, I have a feeling that two US private startups is no match vs Chinese government MSR let alone other nuclear energy technology spending.
It always annoys me that laws on safety requirements go into implementation details rather than stating the desired result. If the requirements simply said that "an independent audit must show that the safety exceeds the following thresholds: ...", safer technologies wouldn't incur the additional overhead you describe.
edit: By the way, I read your comment history. We do all our hiring through recruiters because we are a small team without the time to chase talent--our interest and time is spent coding.
Maybe that is the issue--you won't work with recruiters, and most ruby shops are small, so they outsource hiring to recruiters. As a datapoint for you, I got this job through a recruiter, and I'm quite happy with it. Recruiters got me several other interviews with decent places as well. There are decent recruiters out there with real jobs--you just have to use your gut about who isn't sketchy. We gave this opening to 3 different recruiters that we work with--maybe they called you and you ignored them.
I should just give up.