Sam Altman talks about Oklo nuclear microreactor SPAC

YesAn advanced small nuclear fission startup announced on Tuesday that it will go public through a merger with AltC Acquisition Corp.a special purpose acquisition company co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who is also Chairman of Oklo.

SPAC will be closed by early 2024, co-founder Oklo Jake DeWitt According to CNBC in a video interview on Friday, the company will raise up to $500 million.

The capital Oklo raises through a public equity offering will go toward ramping up its supply chain and acquisitions and building a pilot-scale production facility for its reactor, which it calls Aurora.

Altman became famous for his work in artificial intelligence after Microsoft invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, and the company’s ChatGPT chatbot caught the public’s imagination late last year. But Altman’s philosophical vision of a better future is based on two technologies that are developing in parallel: artificial intelligence and energy.

“My whole view of the world is that the future can be radically better and the two things we really need for that are lower cost of energy and lower cost of intelligence. And if we get that, we’re going to be totally surprised about how different and how much better the future can be,” Altman told CNBC in a phone conversation on Friday.

Altman met the founders of Oklo in 2013 and recruited them to join Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley start-up shop where Altman was President from 2014 to 2019. Carolyn Cochran And Jacob DeWittOklo founders, Joined Y Combinator in 2014 And Altman went on to lead Oklo’s Series A in 2015, at which time he also became chairman of the board.

“I’m all in energy,” Altman told CNBC. “I think there is an urgent demand for tons and tons of cheap, safe, clean energy on a large scale.”

Altman has long promoted the idea of ​​this access to energy It is an important critical factor for improving the quality of life worldwide.

“The alternative to not having enough energy is these crazy things that people are talking about. We really don’t want that,” Altman told CNBC, referring to the philosophy that restricting production, consumption, and energy use is a way to conserve nature. resources. “I think it’s crazy and a little immoral when people start claiming that.”

In particular, Altmann believes that nuclear power is necessary to meet demand while moving away from burning fossil fuels, which cause global warming. “I don’t see a way for us to get there without nuclear,” Altman told CNBC. “I mean, maybe we can get there just with solar and storage.” “But from my point of view, I feel like this is the best and most likely way to get there.”

Altman’s bet on nuclear projects is a little different.

Oklo is marketing nuclear fission, the reaction that powers all current nuclear power plants, but using much smaller reactors. He’s also invested $375 million in Helion, one of a thriving startup industry that is proving and commercializing nuclear fusion, the way the Sun generates energy and produces no long-lived nuclear waste, but has never been replicated and scaled up on Earth.

If fusion can be commercialized as Hellion envisions, Altman says, and Oklo can co-exist with its smaller, cheaper nuclear reactors. The need for clean, cheap energy is “so great,” Altman says, that having multiple sources of clean, reliable nuclear energy is a good thing. Also, since the Oklo reactors will be much smaller than the Helion power plants, they will likely serve different types of customers.

Basically, Altman told CNBC that “the world is very limited in terms of energy, and it’s an energy deficit that we all need.”

Oklo was founded in 2013 with the mission to reimagine commercial nuclear power. Conventional nuclear reactors are expensive and time-consuming construction projects. Vogtel plant in Georgia It is the latest of this type of conventional nuclear reactor to be built in the United States, exceeding its budget and schedule. became notorious.

Oklo plans to make much smaller nuclear reactors that can run on new or recycled fuel for up to a decade before needing to be refueled. Oklo’s power reactors will produce steady levels of power, as opposed to intermittent sources of power generated by wind and solar, and Oklo positions itself as a power source for data centers, utilities, defense installations, remote communities, factories, and industrial sites.

“Oklo has very strong customer interest,” Altman told CNBC. “There’s no shortage of want or need for that.”

Oklo also plans to operate the reactors themselves and sell the power to customers, making it easier for customers to use nuclear power without having to take on the responsibility of operating a nuclear reactor.

Oklo is still in the relatively early stages. In May, Oklo signed an agreement With the Southern Ohio Diversification Initiative to deploy two commercial plants in Southern Ohio, it aims to bring them online by 2030.

Oklo also received Approvals from the US Department of Energy To build a plant at Idaho National Laboratory by 2027. For this reactor, Oklo already I got approval from the INL for the use of some spent nuclear fuel. The company has also begun the process of applying for the necessary approvals to build a fuel recycling facility so that Oklo can put what would be considered “used” fuel into its advanced reactor design.

But Oklo has also faced some setbacks: In January 2022, the Nuclear Regulatory Authority, the country’s largest nuclear regulatory agency, rejected its first application to build and operate its advanced nuclear reactor. The NRC cited information gaps in the application, but Oklo is confident it will be able to resolve the issue.

“We’ve made a lot of progress with NRC dating back to 2016,” DeWitt told CNBC. “In many ways, a lot of the licensing detail around this is focused more on what I call structural elements and kind of procedural elements.”

If Oklo does indeed make it through the regulatory process, it has the potential to make nuclear power much more affordable than it is now, which is part of what makes Altman interested.

“One of the things I’m really excited about designing for Oklo is that I think economics can be very, very different,” Altman said.

Part of this is the smaller reactor size, but some of it is how the Oklo reactors are designed.

“We made intentional design decisions to build on proven technology that also utilizes parts, key parts and components used in other industries,” DeWitt told CNBC. “This means that we will buy a supply chain for large-scale production that is already functioning.”