Lessons From a Lagging Industry
There’s an industry where America broke ground, led the world in discovery, innovated for three decades — and then squandered that lead over the next three decades. Accidents took lives and hurt public perception while costs soared, progress stalled, and the number of deployments fell off a cliff. The 1980’s through the early 2000’s were a complete quiet period where the industry hung on by a thread.
Sound familiar? You’d be forgiven for thinking I was talking about the nuclear industry. But, in fact, I am talking about the space launch industry. The parallels between the two are shockingly similar — except for one key difference: the space launch industry has turned around and grown massively over the last 20 years, while nuclear has not.
Space launch is the only industry where we’ve squandered our lead and recovered.
Nuclear has the opportunity to be the next.
In order to maximize the chances that the nuclear industry experiences a similar renaissance, it’s useful to understand what changed space launch (spoiler: it’s the Falcon 9) and apply those lessons. It just so happens that much of the Applied Atomics team spent the last 15 years working on just that.
Going From Rockets to Reactors
Well over a decade ago, Chris, Paul, and Ben met while working on SpaceX’s Vandenberg Launch Site where they helped take it from conception through design, build, commission, and the inaugural launch. They did everything from system design, to running crane operations in the field, to writing the procedures that operated the pad, to controlling the pad and vehicle on launch day. We were expected to wear many hats (but always steel toed boots).
When we joined, we heard all the same things we now hear about the nuclear industry:
Engineers don’t know how to design “these things” anymore.
There’s no technical labor pool to do the construction.
There is no supply chain to build with.
The regulatory environment makes the job impossible.
On the surface, the people saying these things weren’t wrong. Space had stagnated. Yet, it didn’t matter. Either way, it was our job to deliver a brand-new launch pad – the first on the west coast in decades.
Let’s look closer at each complaint to see how it might inform the Applied Atomics approach now in the nuclear industry.
“Engineers don’t know how to design these things anymore”
When we joined SpaceX, there weren’t many engineers left in the aerospace industry who possessed both the required expertise and the right mindset to succeed at a rocket startup. The latter was particularly challenging because only NASA and Boeing-Lockheed’s ULA were employing these engineers in any real number and those were definitely not hotbeds of startup thinking. Therefore, new engineers had to be produced rather than simply hired. This meant to build its workforce, SpaceX had to lean hard on young new grads.
Of course, to prevent reinventing the wheel it was important to temper that youth with the bits of crucial experience available that did meet muster. The company hired a handful of “graybeards” to corral us new grads in the right direction and save us from our worst instincts. These graybeards were central to the success of the company because they put firm boundaries on our work which prevented us chasing our tails or traversing false passes for months (or years) at a time. Constraint is healthy, and we flourished in the massive free space within those hard set boundaries. It would have been impossible to succeed with only graybeards or new grads; it was the blending of the two that drove our success.
We’re in the exact same situation today in the nuclear industry. We believe the answer now is also the same: we are bringing in critical expertise early to define the constraints of systems, build foundational processes, and prevent reliving history in the wrong ways. We’re also planning on bringing in fresh talent of all backgrounds to fill out the team, tap new energy, and break problems down to first principles. The reason this works is because no matter the industry, the physics, many of the standards, and the methodologies are the same. People have the know-how, what they’re missing is the experience that saves time and money. We can provide both.
“There’s no technical labor pool”
While the amount of massive infrastructure projects has dwindled in America, it is untrue that we do not have the labor pool required to deploy nuclear power. We dealt with the same situation in the aerospace sector – after all, few of us had experience building launch sites – but for the teams of electricians, welders, pipe fitters, and concrete workers direct past experience is not actually required.
That’s because, at their most basic, both a launch site and a nuclear power plant are nothing more than concrete, rebar, pipe, and wire. Of course, it is up to the engineers to produce designs that arrange those elements properly. And it’s up to the same team to transmute that knowledge into a set of drawings and work orders for the tech teams to follow. The technicians then need only ply their trade following the approved work packets.
Therefore, sourcing construction talent is all about tapping into the industry-wide collective expertise of our technicians. In aerospace, we pulled predominantly from oil & gas for weld teams and we will employ that same strategy here. For civil steel and concrete, we have worked with construction firms that built shipping ports, football stadiums, and shopping malls. Electricians came from large facilities such as hospitals, chemical processing plants, and other power stations. Our operators will come from other nuclear plants, US Navy Nukes, and be trained in collaboration with INL.
These are complex projects, but they aren’t inscrutable mysteries. They are elements that must be arranged according to well established industry standards, codes, and practices. America’s tradespeople know how to build.1
Crucially, Applied Atomics is building an internal Deployment team to serve as our EPC. This means we can leverage the power of a strong, lean internal team that also has aligned incentives with the rest of the company. If there’s a change, we can work it out as a team, rather than on a conference call with 50 people across five companies. This is how the SpaceX launch and landing pads we were a part of were built and we experienced first hand the ways in which this streamlines communications, compresses schedules, and lowers costs.
“There is no supply chain to build with”
It’s true that the nuclear-specific supply chain is in tough shape due to the contraction of the industry over the last three decades. However, it’s important not to artificially constrain ourselves further and to apply alternatives where we can. First and foremost, is fuel. Many companies are choosing fuels such as TRISO and HALEU that are another 5 – 7 years away from availability at scale. We use standard LEU fuel which is in use in all 94 operating reactors in the United States today, and which enjoys a robust supply chain from allied countries. Yet, even then competitors are choosing to customize that fuel to fit their application, rather than work with configurations that have already been approved. There can be benefits, however there is a penalty on cost and schedule. Striking a healthy balance is necessary.
On the components side, many components can be sourced from neighboring industries. Outside of the nuclear steam supply system (NSSS) represents the “balance of plant.” This actually makes up around 80% of the infrastructure and can enjoy high commonality with every other large-scale power plant on earth, if designed properly. By taking that approach, we ensure our plant uses the same valves, same instrumentation, same piping, same everything as every other heat-engine power plant. This is a major benefit to our program in cost savings, schedule, and supply chain resiliency.
When it comes to the reactor (and all components located on the nuclear island) the standards call for the use of “N-Stamped” components. We have some methods for addressing these issues, but we aren’t sharing them publicly yet. If you want to know more, shoot us an email and we can talk. If you want a hint, go study what SpaceX did to get NASA’s approval with the cargo straps on Dragon.
While supply chain is a challenge, and one we must keep an eye on, it is not impossible – these strategies are the same ones we used on the launch pad and in the rocket factory as well.
“The regulatory environment makes it impossible”
The regulatory environment is challenging, but our stance is that it is also helping safeguard the citizens of the US and the environment from the impacts of poor planning and careless work. It should take some work to gain permission to wield this much power among the citizenry of the United States.
In our past lives on the launch pad, we not only had multiple regulators, one of them was also often our customer. That made conditions extremely challenging, since the regulating bodies didn’t always agree with one another and sometimes didn’t agree with themselves on the customer side! The way through is with strong planning, an understanding of the rules, and a program that can tailor while working to match equivalent safety. It’s not good enough to ask for relief from a rule — we must show how we are meeting the spirit in another manner, or how that rule doesn’t apply without compromising safety. The work is on us, but it is achievable. The answer definitely is not myopic lawsuits against the regulator.2
Aligning Incentives & Minimizing Miracles
The key lesson from our collective half-century leading New Space launch and landing efforts is that cost and availability matter most. The best new technology in the world is no good if we cannot afford to deploy and use it. Applied Atomics is vertically integrating the full-stack of nuclear development and deployment because it aligns incentives and drives down cost, the same way SpaceX did with the Falcon 9. Outside engineering firms and construction management teams have different goals than the primary company. Giving those company ownership of critical systems is how you get overbudget and behind schedules like the Space Launch System in the aerospace field and Vogtle in the nuclear industry.
Space launch is the only industry where we squandered our lead and got it back. That war wasn’t won with fancy new physics, exotic fuels, or novel designs. It was won by taking existing technologies (e.g. a liquid fueled rocket with a capsule on top) and doing the hard work of making them affordable and available by vertically integrating. We believe turning around the nuclear industry will require the same approach.
That’s why our mantra is “minimize miracles,” that’s what we work on every day, and man, do we have some cool things to share soon.
Stay tuned.
We see those efforts as taking the Flanders’ approach to parenting.