Oklo nuclear reactor

Idaho National Laboratory sprawls across nearly 900 square miles in the southeastern corner of its namesake state. Home to America’s first nuclear power plant, INL has served as the proving grounds for the future of nuclear energy technology for decades. Along the way, the lab has generated hundreds of tons of uranium waste that is no longer efficient at producing electricity. The spent fuel resides in temporary storage facilities while Most of this spent fuel will probably end up underground, although where and when are open questions. As it turns out, a lot of people Last week, INL tapped the nuclear energy startup Oklo as the first company to gain access to its stock of recycled uranium fuel. Oklo’s reactor, known as Aurora, will be a lot different from the reactors on the grid today. Each of America’s 96 nuclear reactors are housed on sprawling campuses and are capable of providing anywhere from 600 to 4,000 megawatts of power. Aurora, meanwhile, will look like a small A-frame cabin and generate just 1.5 megawatts. Oklo’s reactor also departs from legacy nuclear systems in its fuel of choice. Known as “high-assay, low-enriched uranium” or Haleu, this fuel packs more energy into a smaller package. In nature, uranium ore mostly consists of the isotope uranium-238 and a sprinkling of uranium-235. Only uranium-235 can sustain the fission reaction that makes nuclear reactors tick, so turning the ore into usable fuel requires separating the uranium-238 out in a process calle...

• Oklo has submitted a licensing project plan to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, outlining Oklo's plans for pre-application engagement activities that support the submission of a license application for its commercial-scale fuel recycling facility. • The first-of-a-kind fuel recycling facility will produce fuel to support the deployment of Oklo's advanced fission power plants. • Used fuel (also called "spent nuclear fuel" or "nuclear waste") from existing plants has over 90% of its energy content remaining. Existing inventories of used fuel in the U.S. could power the country’s energy needs for over 150 years. • Oklo's commitment to supporting and building domestic infrastructure will enable secure and economical fuel supplies for advanced reactors. SANTA CLARA, Calif., January 25, 2023--( This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: Oklo Inc. (Image: Gensler) Oklo has a unique position within the nuclear fuel cycle by being able to recycle used fuel from other reactors as well as its own reactors. "The ability to economically recycle fuel is an important attribute for developing domestic fuel supplies, and offering recycling services also presents a sizeable opportunity," said Jacob DeWitte, co-founder and CEO of Oklo. Used nuclear fuel can be transformed into an energy resource since used fuel is nearly 95% recyclable. The energy content in today's used fuel can produce the country's power needs for over 150 years. "We are taking a major ...

• v • t • e Oklo Mine (sometimes Oklo Reactor or Oklo Mines), located in History [ ] In May 1972 at the 6 samples from 235 U isotope. Normally the concentration is 0.72% while these samples had only 0.60%, a significant difference (some 17% less U-235 was contained in the samples than expected). Thus the French 235 U concentration as low as 0.44% (almost 40% below the normal value). Subsequent examination of isotopes of fission products such as 234 U did not deviate significantly in its concentration from other natural samples. Both 234 U concentrations significantly different from the 234 U relative to 238 U. This is due to 234 U being enriched together with 235 U and due to it being both consumed by 235 U by 234 U concentration present at the time the reactor was active would have long since decayed away. 236 U must have also been present in higher than usual ratios during the time the reactor was operating, but due to its half life of 2.348 ×10 7 years being almost two orders of magnitude shorter than the time elapsed since the reactor operated, it has decayed to roughly 1.4 ×10 −22 its original value and thus basically nothing and below any abilities of current equipment to detect. This loss in 235 U is exactly what happens in a nuclear reactor. A possible explanation was that the uranium ore had operated as a natural fission reactor in the distant geological past. Other observations led to the same conclusion, and on 25 September 1972 the CEA announced their finding t...

A West Coast startup wants to build two nuclear power plants in southeast Ohio By: Posted on: Monday, May 22, 2023 ATHENS, Ohio (WOUB) — A California company plans to build two small-scale nuclear power plants near Piketon that will operate under a new model compared with traditional plants. If the plants are built, they would be among the first commercial nuclear reactors in the United States to use the new process. The company behind the proposal, An architectural rendering of the design of the nuclear power plant Oklo Inc. is planning to build in southeast Ohio. [Oklo Inc.] The plants in Ohio would be Oklo’s second and third. The company plans to build its first reactor in Idaho. Oklo submitted a license application for the Idaho reactor in March 2020. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission denied the license in January 2022, saying the company had not provided enough information to do a full safety assessment of the proposed reactor, which the company calls Aurora. “Oklo’s application continues to contain significant information gaps in its description of Aurora’s potential accidents as well as its classification of safety systems and components,” Andrea Veil, director of the commission’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, said in The commission and Oklo have since been engaged in a pre-application process to lay the groundwork for a new license application. This process involves a different reactor design than the one first proposed for the Idaho site, said Scott Burnel...

Nuclear News Published since 1959, Nuclear News is recognized worldwide as the flagship trade publication for the nuclear community. News reports cover plant operations, maintenance and security; policy and legislation; international developments; waste management and fuel; and business and contract award news. Zeno Power Systems was awarded a $30 million contract to build a radioisotope-powered satellite for the U.S. Air Force by 2025. According to a SpaceNews article announcing the development and quoting company cofounder and chief executive officer Tyler Bernstein, the four-year contract is a “strategic funding increase” (STRATFI) agreement that provides $15 million in government funds, matched by $15 million from private investors. This article is the second in a series about the domestic nuclear fuel crisis. The first in the series, “‘On the verge of a crisis’: The U.S. nuclear fuel Gordian knot,” was published on Nuclear Newswire on April 14, 2023. Once upon a time, enrichment was a government monopoly—at least outside the Soviet bloc. But the United States, eager to get out of the field, was convinced that the private sector could do it better. Now, the West is dependent on the Soviets’ successors and is facing an uncertain supply, a complication of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Slowly, a consensus is growing that dependence on imports is a bad idea. Some experts also say that upsets like the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, and the collapse of natural gas pr...

In an exclusive interview, executives from Silicon Valley–based Oklo, a company Idaho National Laboratory (INL) chose this week to demonstrate the first-of-its-kind use of recycled high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel in its full-size Aurora micro-reactor, told POWER that the project could have broad implications for the future of nuclear power. Marking a significant boost for advanced nuclear innovation, which industry experts are banking on to transform nuclear’s future role in a rapidly changing power sector, INL The fuel, which will be downblended to a uranium enrichment of less than 20%—into high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU)—will still be owned by the Department of Energy (DOE), and stay at INL’s site in Idaho Falls, Idaho, where Oklo last year received a first-of-its-kind site use permit to build its Aurora plant. According to INL, while finalization of the opportunity announced on Wednesday still depends on striking a cooperative agreement with Oklo on the use of the HALEU material for the micro-reactor demonstration, the selection is a big step that markedly furthers its goal to accelerate deployment of commercially viable micro-reactors. As Dr. John Wagner, associate laboratory director for INL’s Nuclear Science & Technology directorate, noted on Wednesday, the benefit of using nuclear fuels with higher levels of U-235 is that it allows reactors to operate for years without having to be refueled. “That is an important attribute since this technolog...