The Nuclear Option

Old-fashioned fission may be the best way to wean the world off fossil fuels. So Bret Kugelmass wants to deploy 10,000 inexpensive, off-the-shelf microreactors-but not in America.

- Christopher Helman

An hour west of Houston, where suburban sprawl surrenders to cow pasture, sits a cavernous industrial workshop in which welders and pipefitters assemble equipment bound for oil refineries and drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. "These guys have been working for decades to modularize components for high pressures and temperatures," says Bret Kugelmass, 36, the founder and CEO of Washington, D.C.-based Last Energy. That's why he came here, to VGas LLC, when he wanted a prototype of the small, modular nuclear fission reactors he's betting could play a big role in cutting down on fossil fuels.

Based on Kugelmass' open-sourced design and using mostly off-the-shelf components, VGas cated almost all the parts for a basic small lightwater reactor and crammed them into nine shipping container-sized modules. It took only two days to bolt them together.

To be clear, this wasn't a working prototype-in fact, its 75-ton reactor pressure vessel is cut away to show how standardized fuel assemblies of zirconium rods filled with pellets of enriched uranium fuel could nestle inside. "We're not doing any new chemistry or reactor physics," Kugelmass emphasizes. "Our core innovation is the delivery model of a nuclear power plant. We're just packaging it in a different way."

We're talking old-fashioned fission technology here the kind that for decades has been used to generate energy by splitting uranium atoms apart. It's the opposite of nuclear fusion, which is how the sun generates energy: by fusing hydrogen atoms. For decades fusion research has stalled because scientists could not coax more energy out of fusion reactions than it took to trigger them. Recent breakthroughs show promise, but even in the most optimistic scenarios commercial fusion is many years away.