SPECIAL REPORT | NANO DEEP DIVE
NANO: Microreactors with big ambitions
Spotting an opportunity to capitalise on a surging nuclear opportunity, NANO Nuclear Energy came up with not one but two microreactor designs. CEO James Walker tells NEI about their low-risk multi-faceted strategy for success
FOUNDED BY JAY JIANG YU, NANO Nuclear Energy Inc was born from the anticipation of a resurgent interest in nuclear energy. Based partially on recognition that investment in renewables like wind and solar was falling, it also followed an understanding that mandates for industry to decarbonize were coming in and that the only solution was nuclear.
One of the first recruits to the emerging business was
James Walker, with a background as a nuclear physicist and engineer, he was clear that the nuclear industry has a very high bar to entry and is also very capital intensive. Nonetheless, he explains: “With further analysis we realised very quickly that actually the area where we believe the most potential actually was, was not in the more developed areas like small modular reactors, it was actually in the micro-reactor space. That was because you could make 100,000 micro-reactors in a year, and you still wouldn’t meet the demand that they could potentially have.” Walker argues that micro-reactors allow deployment of
nuclear to areas where there had been no nuclear before and in fact nothing else other than diesel. Markets such as remote communities, military bases, disaster relief areas, remote industry, mining projects, oil and gas projects and maritime vessels were all in the frame. As Walker says: “The number of clientele just went on.” However, beyond the clear market opportunity,
technical factors also played a part. “Another reason why we were interested in this space was because the level of
development was not nearly as far along as it was with SMRs. There was no licensed micro-reactor company, not even a company that was going through a licensing process. We thought with the right team and the right company structure so that we can finance it properly, we can actually pull ahead into this area pretty quickly,” explains Walker. On taking the decision to step into the microreactor
space NANO quickly reached out to two prominent and world-leading research teams. One from University of Berkeley, California, and one from the University of Cambridge in the UK. “We did a bit of analysis of what the customer would actually want and found that nobody would want to buy a reactor, nobody would want to run a reactor, and nobody wanted to deal with a reactor once it was end of life. We realised that if we own the reactor, we operate it and we just sell the energy that’s actually a business model everyone might be interested in because in remote locations, for diesel, it’s actually very expensive,” he says, adding that the logistical costs of bringing fuel in on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, are very x much more expensive than the cost of the fuel itself. Conversely, a micro-reactor would simply run for 15 or 20 years without any need for fuel supplies or other intensive logistical support. Walker explains: “If we had a contract with, say, a mine for 15 years, we can work out how much that’s going to cost, and we can contract that capital cost over time, and actually start beating the cost of diesel in these locations.”
Above: Both NANO microreactors are designed to fit within a standard ISO container 38 | July 2024 |
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