Nuclear Wasted

After fighting radiophobia for decades, the pro-nuclear community now has to contend with a new problem: nukebros too cavalier about radiation

Nuclear Start-up Valar Atomics is suing the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), claiming in essence that the NRC doesn’t have the right to regulate small reactors, and instead the states should have oversight. Let’s skip over for a moment what a nightmare it would be to have 50 different regulators to deal with just for one country. Their claim — that small reactors are not capable of accidents posing public health and safety concerns — is dangerous baloney.

It seems after decades of fighting rampant radiophobia from anti-nuclear activists and scared normies, the pro-nuclear community must now also contend with a new problem: nukebros who have become too cavalier about radiation.

Valar Atomics’ own Ward One is a reactor named in the suit. Ward One is a 100kWt High Temperature Gas Reactor using TRISO fuel.

“Our analysis indicates that holding the spent fuel from this system for five minutes gives the equivalent radiation exposure to receiving a CAT scan,” claimed the company. Oh, really?

This audacious claim received immediate pushback from atomic lore-holder Nick Touran on X: “Nuclear engineer here. This statement cannot possibly be true. Any nuclear reactor of the power you’re referring to makes spent fuel would give a person a fatal dose within a few seconds if they were to hold a handful of spent fuel. Can you share details of this analysis?”

Valar Atomics’ founder Isaiah Taylor shot back at Touran ungraciously, calling him a “mindless hater” and “the most arrogant person I’ve ever interacted with on the internet. But he did also share the details of his analysis. In short, Valar assumed a single person held a kilogram of spent fuel that has been out of the reactor against their chest for five minutes. They took the “top 15 gamma emitting isotopes,” calculated the dose rate for each and then added it up to arrive at a dose of 8.3 millisievert (mSv), less than a full-body CT scan at 10 mSv.

Even without any nuclear engineering background, Valar’s methodology seemed crude and arbitrary to me. Why only 15 isotopes? And why only gamma radiation? Turns out the Valar way is very much not the way radiation dosage is generally calculated in the industry.

Nuclear engineer Gavin Ridley used a software tool called OpenMC, used in the industry to model actual nuclear reactions. In contrast to the “typical CAT scan”, Gavin found that the LD50 radiation dose would be delivered in about 85 milliseconds when he plugged Valar’s assumptions into OpenMC (LD50 being the dose that is expected to kill half of the exposed population).

“Because the numbers Valar presented were the NRC’s numbers for a PWR, I simulated a single fuel pin in typical operating conditions at that type of plant up to a burnup level of 3 MWd/kgU using OpenMC. This entails tracking all the nuclides with nuclear data and some without that we know of that are documented in ENDF-B/VIII.0. The calculation tallies fission neutrons’ reactions as they traverse their life in a PWR, which allows a calculation of all the relevant transmutation rates in addition to the addition of fission products over time. Because Valar’s post hinted at a 30 day cooldown period, the code then solves the Bateman equations to get the whole picture of remaining nuclides’ decay and consequent formation of decay products. After the 30 day decay period is simulated, the nuclear data library gives us information about the gamma ray lines emitted by the isotopes that are still present. The calculation uses ANS-standard gamma ray flux to dose in biological tissues, converting from gammas per area per time to dose per unit time to get the final result, summing across the menagerie of all the nuclides the code predicted would be present.”

I’m not going to pretend I understood all of that, and Valar hasn’t yet responded. But for now, I’m going to take Nick and Gavin’s word for it that holding raw spent fuel next to your chest is not going to be worth the social media clout, unlike say hugging a dry storage cask with spent fuel in it.

“We URGENTLY need to recalibrate people to re-understand the radioactive dose rates given from holding spent nuclear fuel again, even from small reactors. The statement underlying this lawsuit appears to be dangerously wrong,” said Touran on X.

And: “While suing the NRC is one approach, another is to just roll up your sleeves, do the work, and send in a permit application. Kairos just did this for two *actually nuclear* prototype reactors. Hermes 1 got approval in 26 months. Hermes 2 got approval in 16 months. And this is a pretty exotic advanced reactor! The NRC is not the long pole in this tent.”

The Elemental Take

I can’t believe it, but I’m actually going to stand up for the NRC.

Yeah, we’ve gone through some dark days. Barack Obama is really the villain here for appointing not one but two anti-nuclear chairs in a row to the commission. Disaster. But things changed. I have to give credit to President Trump for correctly recognizing the strategic importance of nuclear energy during his first term and stopping the rot.

He was followed by President Biden, who not only took Trump’s lead but doubled down. Nuclear energy became a rare bipartisan issue in an increasingly divided congress. That rare unity led to real reform. The ADVANCE Act modernized the NRC’s mission, clarified that it should enable nuclear energy, not just regulate it. Licensing is streamlined. Multiple nuclear startups are finding a new NRC that’s proactive about working with reactor vendors.

This is the most inexplicable time to sue the NRC. Furthermore, Valar and co. are making the case that their reactors are too safe to be regulated by the NRC. NO. I don’t want power reactors of any size to go unregulated by the NRC.

The reason is I love nuclear energy too damned much. And we all know that all it takes is one dumb duck to duck up before the industry is set back again for a decade…globally. The fact of the matter is nuclear energy is safe because it has been strongly regulated — not because it’s not hazardous.

Founders with a “move fast and break things” mentality are not welcome. Especially when they are not doing the proper maths before making outlandish claims about the safety of nuclear materials.