Bonus: Building Nuclear for the Moon with Tyler Bernstein of Zeno Power

0:28All right, Tyler, welcome to the pod. you break that apart, it's going to be a combination of wind, solar, nuclear, and other clean energy sources. You see John Kerry the other day at a conference where he stated that even if we quintuple the amount of renewable energy over the coming decades, we're still on track for a 2.4 degree increase by 2050, which does not meet the goals that we need. And you have a similar IEA report that states that we made an increased nuclear by two to eight times over the coming decades if we want to meet our goals. So I think ultimately, it is going to be a mix of energy is going to depend on nations around the world in the US, I think you could see it grow from, you know, we're at 10 % today to 20 % and upwards in the future to meet the goals that we have by 2050.

1:11Of course, the x factor here is fusion. And you know, there's a lot of exciting work going on in fusion, a swarm of activity, you know, amazing companies that are raising a lot of capital and have exciting milestones coming up. And I do think that is one of the x factors that could change how that's going to look in the next 30 years. Well, Tyler, I'm really excited to get a different angle on this nuclear energy topic that we are doing for the show here. Maybe talk to us a little bit about how you got into nuclear energy, but specifically, how did you start thinking about nuclear in space? Yeah, it is a very kind of roundabout early story.

1:46And I was a sophomore at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Computer science major thought that I was going to go worked at Google, Facebook, Amazon, you name it. And the beginning of my sophomore year, I was talking to a friend of mine who interned at United Airlines the previous summer. And he was talking about this summer at United, he really started to notice the reliance of the aviation industry on oil. And this was back in 2017. You were starting to see some conversations about electric airplanes, but at the time, really a lot of decarbonization of transportation across the board.

2:15And electric airplanes are great. Batteries don't necessarily have the high power density for long endurance flight. So we got together a couple of weeks later and said, how else could you power an airplane? And for some reason, he was a human and organizational development major. I was a computer science major. We said, what if you put a nuclear reactor on a Boeing 777 and you could build this long endurance, clean energy aircraft that could totally radicalize the aviation industry? So very random. It's an awful idea for so many reasons, but we ended up getting in touch with a professor at Vanderbilt who guided us and mentored us for a couple months and shared with us that in the 1950s, the US government spent over a billion dollars trying to build a nuclear powered airplane.

2:55And at a couple of points, we actually had critical reactors on airplanes flying over the US. In the early 60s, Kennedy canceled the program. But this professor said, no, it's been 60 years. Why don't you all dig into this a little more? So that was our first foray into nuclear and looking at nuclear reactors on Boeing 777s. My friend that I mentioned, And Jonathan and I ended up then getting in touch with a graduate student at Vanderbilt who was working on a similar concept, except instead of using nuclear reactors, looking at radioisotope power systems, compact devices that convert the heat from decaying isotopes into electricity, box the size of microwave ovens that generate electricity for decades, and looking at this technology on an unmanned aerial vehicle.

3:33So looking at powering drones for long endurances. To kind of cut the story short, we ended up looking at radioisotope powered drones once and for all in the summer of 2018 recognized we should just not mix nuclear and aviation, but more broadly noted this issue of actless energy in these off-grid regions from the surface of the moon to on orbit to the Arctic to the seabed and seeing that radioisotopower systems could have a lot of usability in these domains commercially built in the coming decades. So a very roundabout story of how we got from a nuclear power Boeing 777 to building radioisotopower systems for use on the moon, on the seabed, and many other environments.

4:07We're doing the season on terrestrial nuclear energy, but what's going on with the nuclear in space? I saw that NASA is going to be doing something with nuclear in space. What's the state of nukes in space in the year 2023? It's an incredibly exciting time and really the most exciting time for the nuclear space industry since really the 1950s and 60s. And I think that there's a lot of similarities to the terrestrial nuclear market in that sense. Kind of the very brief history of nuclear power in space. The first use of nuclear power in space was in 1961, when the U.S. launched a radio-isotel power system into space.

4:41In 1965, the U.S. launched our first reactor. And through the 20th century, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union launched hundreds of nuclear power systems into space for powering satellites, for powering assets on the moon, for powering deep space nodes. And a lot of our greatest scientific accomplishments in space, from Voyager, Cassini, to Mars rovers, have all been powered by nuclear. And you're really seeing this renaissance in the space right now. And similar to what I think you see in the terrestrial nuclear industry, but also similar to the aerospace industry in the early 2000s, this is being commercially led now.

5:14And that is a distinct difference compared to previous decades in the use of nuclear power in space. And you have unbelievably exciting activity, everything from powering, developing nuclear reactors to power settlements on the moon, to nuclear reactors for thermal propulsion and electric propulsion for satellites to radioisotope power systems for powering landers and rovers on the moon, highly maneuverable satellites. And you have a wide range of activity from, again, very small power systems to large power systems, everything from maneuverable satellites to landers on the moon to deep space probes to bringing humans to Mars in the coming decades.

5:48Can you talk to us, Tyler, a little bit about the difference between radioisotope power and, let's say, nuclear power for propulsion? Yeah, absolutely. So there's really two core ways that nuclear is used in space right now, as mentioned, and that's radioisotope power systems and vision reactors. And radioisotope power systems are hot rocks in a box. You have these isotopes that are decaying over decades because they're unstable. And as they decay, they produce heat. So you have these rocks that are just generating heat over decades as they decay based on the half-life of the isotope. So for example, the isotope the word primarily using is called strontium-90.

6:21And strontium-90 is a half-life of roughly 30 years. So over the course of 30 years, you're getting relatively constant heat generated. You can then convert that heat into electricity and again, have a small box the size of a microwave oven that generates electricity for decades. Now, this is small power. We're talking tens, hundreds of watts of electricity. On the other hand, you have the use of nuclear reactors in space and same core physics as nuclear reactors on Earth. You have uranium, hit it with a neutron, it fissions, you get a chain reaction, you get heat, you convert that heat into electricity.

6:52A lot of the reactors being developer now for spaces that were smaller. We're talking tens to hundreds of kilowatts of electricity, some ambitions in the future to get to the megawatt scale. So kind of the two forms to generate electricity. And then there are multiple ways to use nuclear energy in space, primarily focused on propulsion or power. So we'll talk about power first, and let's focus on the lunar surface, an environment where there's a lot of interest of nuclear energy right now. And as a part of the Artemis program, NASA and a lot of our international partners are going back to the moon and not just to visit the moon, but to stay there this time.

7:26And this is also huge commercial activity in this area, again, kind of following the same trend of commercial industry, working in the space and nuclear industry and taking the charge on a lot of those fronts. But when you're on the moon, you're generally in lightness for 14 days and darkness for 14 days, based off of the way that the moon orbits the earth and the earth orbits the sun. So if you're only using solar power and batteries, it can be very challenging, if not impossible, to operate in those 14-day lunar nights. For example, the U.S. is going to land two landers on the moon later this year, built by commercial companies that are likely going to operate for 14 days and then freeze to death.

8:03With a radioisotop power system or other sources of nuclear, you can have heat and power that enables these assets to operate for years instead of 14 days. Really critical as we look to have this sustainable presence on the lunar surface. As we look at future settlements as well, nuclear reactors, of course, are a great source of power given a lot of the dark and shadowed regions on the lunar surface. So that's kind of that focus on power and specifically on the lunar surface. And I'll add that there's only one asset on the surface of the moon right now that is operating 24-7, 365, and that is a Chinese rover that is powered by a radio-isotopower system using plutonium from Russia.

8:38So a lot of what we're doing and contracts we just want from NASA and are engaged with other commercial companies is to build American-made assets that can have that same presence on the lunar surface. So that's kind of the power piece. The other side is propulsion. And there's really two ways to generate thrust using nuclear as a source. And that is nuclear thermal propulsion and nuclear electric propulsion. Nuclear thermal propulsion being using the heat from a nuclear reactor to heat up hydrogen. You get really hot gas, and the gas creates thrust as it's ejected from the nozzle. And you can build a really fast rocket.

9:11And there's a lot of interest in the military for very high thrust I-delta-V satellites using nuclear thermopropulsion. There's also a lot of focus on seeing how we can cut the transit time to Mars so that we can bring humans there faster and increase the likelihood of safe human visits to Mars. So that's NTP, nuclear thermopropulsion. The other flavor is nuclear electric propulsion, which is using the electricity from a nuclear reactor to generate thrust through an ion drive or an ion thrust. And this is generally lower thrust, but much longer endurances. So if you want a slow, long burn, that's a great use for nuclear electric propulsion.

9:47So a lot of really exciting work there going on. You have programs at DARPA and NASA called the Draco Program focused on nuclear thermal propulsion. You have a program out at Air Force Research Laboratory called Jetsons focused on nuclear electric propulsion. And at Xeno, we have contracts in both of these areas. We have a contract with the Space Force to combine our technology with electric propulsion to develop a highly maneuverable small satellite targeting a launch in 2025 or 2026. And as of July, we also have a contract with NASA working with Blue Origin intuitive machines to provide power on the lunar surface to enable their assets to operate and survive during the lunar night and operate for longer than 14 days.

10:25You anticipated our next question, but I'd love to just even hear a little bit more about how you started it. We've talked to a bunch of founders in nuclear, and there's this very clear pattern that it's you start a software company, you make a bunch of money, and then you go into nuclear, you seem to have skipped the first step. So like, have you decided to take the research in college and start this thing? And like, what's the, you know, what's the company look like today? You know, like a lot of things, I think it was just curiosity in college. And I give a lot of credit to Vanderbilt for developing and fostering this culture where we were encouraged to just wander and think and be curious.

10:57And again, started off with this nuclear powered airplane. And, you know, Xeno really came together in the summer of 2018. And this was when we got a $50 ,000 grant from the National Science Foundation through what's called the I-Core program. And this is funding not to do technology development, but customer discovery. Before you invest a lot of time and capital into building a company, ensure that you're actually solving a problem in the marketplace. So over the summer of 2018, we did like 120 interviews with folks ranging from four-star generals in the Air Force to executives at Lockheed Martin and Boeing to just energy executives.

11:31And heard really for once and for all that, again, we should just not mix nuclear and aviation. But as I mentioned earlier, more broadly noticed this issue of access to energy in these off-grid regions, from the moon to the seabed, these regions of growing importance in the coming decades because of budding commercial activity, because of a new great power competition. And we started looking at radio-isotel power systems, again, a technology with a rich history. You know, over 1 ,000 radio-isotel power systems have been built historically, used both in space and also terrestrially. And there's really two flavors of this technology that's been used before.

12:03And that is using the fuel strontium-90 or the fuel plutonium-238. And plutonium-238 is historically what's always been used in space. Again, Voyager, Cassini, Mars rovers. And it's a terrific isotope. A long half-life, great thermal properties. It's an alpha emitter, so it's easy to shield. It can also be a complex isotope to produce. So the US right now is producing enough fuel to power marquee NASA missions. But again, as we start to see the growth of operations, there is just not enough plutonium to power the missions that could use a technology like this. On the other hand, you have Strontium-90.

12:37Strontium-90 being much more of an abundant available material, one of the largest byproducts of nuclear reactors, really a nuclear waste material. And because of this, over a thousand Strontium-90 radioized power systems have been built before. But historically, Strontium-90 has required massive amounts of shielding. So the systems were really heavy and had no usability in space. So I give all that background to say that Zeno really kind of started on these dual set of hypotheses that A, there was this need for reliable long endurance power as we see growing activity in these off-grid environments from the surface of the moon to the seabed to the Arctic.

13:11And that B, if we could build a radioisotopower system that is affordable, but also lightweight, that's a key combination that would open up much broader usability. And our approach here is using strontium-90, this available abundant fuel form with a novel design that allows us to use far less heavy shielding material, resulting in a more lightweight heat source, enabling for the first time a commercially built radioisotopower system using an available abundant fuel and a lightweight form factor, opening up much broader usability in a variety of these environments. That's great. You know, you mentioned a few things here.

13:44You mentioned cost, right? Novel design. We've talked a lot about these topics with our terrestrial nuclear guests. We've talked about economics, we've talked about regulation, even some of the cultural elements around nuclear, like the environmentalist anti-nuke movement. What did these three topics look like for nuclear and space? Is there regulation and the economics? What does that all look like? Yeah, I'll start with cost and economics because it's a big distinction compared to terrestrial markets. And when you look at nuclear terrestrially, at the end of the day, what matters more than anything else is the dollar per kilowatt hour.

14:19These are primarily competitive energy markets. And you are starting to see this change a little bit. You look at X Energy, for example, who is now looking to use the heat in the chemical industry. And you're starting to see where there's use of industrial heat. But generally, you want to get your energy cost as low as possible or else you could get outcompeted by the energy sources. In space, it's a very different paradigm. And it's not about the cost of the energy produced from nuclear. It is about the capability that is enabled. And it's enabling brand new capabilities from taking a lander that right now can operate for 14 days and enabling it to survive for five years and operate on the lunar surface.

14:55This is taking satellites that are in static orbits right now and increasing the maneuverability of them so they can have more dynamic operations as space becomes a contested environment. This is about cutting the transit time to Mars so we can reduce the radiation that astronauts are receiving to, again, increase the likelihood that they can safely visit and return from Mars. So again, it's not about the cost. It's about the capability that is enabled. And I'll give another example to put some newer numbers on this. Right now, the rule of thumb price to land one kilogram on the surface of the moon is$1 million.

15:26So you have a lot of companies right now that are commercially landing payloads on the lunar surface for a price of around$1 million. And that$1 million will result in 14 days of operations. Now, if we can tell someone who wants a scientific payload or commercial payload on the lunar surface. This can operate for five years instead of 14 days. Again, that completely blows up the economics there. It's a brand new capability. And we're still working through what this business model is going to look like exactly with a lot of these providers. But again, a very different paradigm than terrestrially, where the cost of energy is extremely competitive and one of the primary drivers.

15:58Regulatory is in a very exciting area for space nuclear right now. And in 2019, there was a presidential memorandum that overhauled launch approval process for spacecraft with nuclear power systems. And prior to this presidential memorandum, any spacecraft with a nuclear power system, whether it had a gram or 1 ,000 kilograms of nuclear material, had to go through the same multi-year, multi-agency safety review that ended in the president's signature. And very notably, only the government could launch nuclear power systems into space. This presidential memorandum did two things. First, it is breaking down the launch approval process into three tiers based off of the risk level of the launch.

16:36Tier three being the highest risk launch, primarily a highly enriched uranium reactor. Tier one being the lowest rich launch, primarily a radioisotope source that meets certain standards to ensure that it will be safely launched. And these tiered approaches, again, have different tiers of regulation surrounding it. Tier one, for example, being able to be regulated and authorized for launch by a single agency, whether that is NASA or the Department of the Air Force. So it broke this down into potentially a more streamlined process. Second, for the first time, this presidential memorandum opened up a commercial pathway to launching a spacecraft for the nuclear power system under the jurisdiction of the Department of Transportation and the FAA.

17:17So in a lot of ways, this was the presidential memorandum that has now unleashed this wave of commercial space nuclear companies and commercial space nuclear opportunities. So right now with our contract that we have with the Space Force, we're working diligently meeting these guidelines at a presidential memorandum. We're engaged with the FAA and the Department of Defense. Very excitingly, we've developed an approach and we submitted this approach to the FAA in January of this year. And our payload review application was accepted, which means the FAA believes that there could be a chance to see this to actually approving a launch.

17:48And right now we're targeting an approval for the launch in early 2025 to enable our launch in the latter part of that year into early 26, which could be the first commercial nuclear power system ever launched into space, hopefully when we execute against that. Thanks for listening so far. Hang on. We'll be right back after a quick word from our sponsors. Amazing, Tyler. What do you make of the FAA being the regulatory body? Obviously, they've mostly focused on airplanes. Do you think this is the right body for regulating our paths in and out of space? Or should there be something else? No, I do think it is good.

18:21And the FAA has been taking a very good approach at this right now. They are still reviewing these payload review applications on a case-by-case basis while they're working out what their final guideline is going to be. But the FAA has a rich history of approving space launches. So I do think that it is a very good fit for the commercial space nuclear launches. And they also are working closely with what they're calling an INSERV, an interagency safety review board. So this brings in folks from NASA, from the Department of Defense, from the Department of energy from the NRC to provide guidance as needed in support of approving these launches.

18:56That's great to hear. Yeah, I would love to hear about how you think about the competitive dynamics in the market. The fact that you can make this happen at all is unbelievable. There are buyers out there right now. Things are good. But thinking about this as a company, like five years down the line, you make this work. How does the market evolve? How do you think about protecting your place in it? Walk me through being a startup in this industry. It's an interesting industry to be a startup. We frequently say that Facebook coined the phrase, move fast and break things. And you cannot do that in the nuclear industry.

19:27You certainly can't do the nuclear space industry. We like to say that we move fast and bend things. You can only bend things so many times, and you can only go so far in pushing the status quo. Because of that, I do think that that makes it a little more difficult to have this pure advantage of the speed of a startup company that you have in potentially pure software or other fields. If you're in a software company, your pitch to investors or others is we are simply going to move faster. While we do believe that we can move quicker than a lot of large players, again, I don't think there is that exact same advantage.

19:59So what we've been focusing on, recognizing that competition is already starting to come up and is only going to grow in the future, we believe that we are doing really well. Sure, we have our IP. We believe we have some protection because of that. But we're really building excellence in every category of not just building things on paper, but building hardware in real life. So this is great engineers that not just know how to build on paper, build hardware. This is focusing on our supply chain of access to fuel and facilities. This is working through a regulatory process. This is ensuring that we have a great quality program.

20:32So assuring that across the board, we have areas of strength, and that is going to allow us to execute. And you look in the nuclear industry, the aerospace industry, execution across the board is relatively quite poor. And I think that that is really the competitive advantage that we are looking to develop is a company that states goals, that meets these goals and executes against them. And with the contracts that we now have from Space Force, from NASA, and some other folks, we now have this unique position to execute, be the first company to launch its power system in space, ideally on the surface of the moon.

21:04I believe that will give us a good competitive advantage as competition certainly begins to grow in the coming decades. But I think this is also a market that is growing quickly. There's a lot of opportunity for a lot of companies to play in here. This is certainly a growing pie. So, you know, it is not a zero-sum game by any means. So we're excited about a lot of interest in a lot of the companies that are starting to work in this area. So Tyler, what's the hardest thing about building radioisotope power systems for space? Is it something about the actual hardware you're building? Is it related to launch?

21:34Is it regulatory? Is it something else? Like what's your number one, like biggest challenge? You know, right now, and it's kind of follows what I just said before, and I think it's what we're starting to do really well, but it is execution. It is across the board from ensuring that our design is in a place that it needs to be, that we have access to the fuel that we need. We have access to nuclear facilities. We're working through our regulatory approvals with the FAA and the Department of Defense that we're hiring at a pace that we need to, ensuring that all of these aspects of our company are moving forward in sync to ensure that we can execute on the work that we have.

22:07So it's a little of a cop-out answer that it's not one specific area. But I do think compared to, for example, a lot of these advanced nuclear reactors, our technology is all things considered relatively simple and hot rocks in a box. We're using fuel that exists today. We're using facilities that exist today. There is some novelty in the regulatory environment, but we believe that we have a good hand on it and that we're working towards that. So it is not necessarily that there is this one massive area that is this huge hurdle to overcome. At this point, in a lot of ways, it is on us to execute against the work that we have and to actually deliver this technology to customers on the timeline that we promised.

22:44You mentioned hiring here. What types of people do you need to bring on to your company, particularly on the engineering side, to actually build your first product? Yeah, I was actually just talking to our VP of engineering, Lindsay Bowles, who joined us last April from TerraPower, which is, of course, an amazing company. I was talking to her yesterday about this, that most of our engineering team actually is coming from the aerospace industry. I certainly have a good group of folks that are from the nuclear industry. But when you look at what is required in the thermal analysis, structural analysis, systems engineering, a lot of that, of course, carries over into people of background in the aerospace industry.