Could you tell us about potential prototype trials for Radiant's microreactors? Is there an estimated date?
And my influences are I was at SpaceX for 12 years. So I have a large number of different influences from the projects I worked on and the people I worked for within that organization. I treat it like my alma mater, right? If someone says where did you go to school, I'll jokingly say SpaceX. That's where I actually learned right? So why not say that?
Then, at the end of the year, we aim to have a helium compressor, which is really the heart of the system. It's the pump that drives the helium into the reactor and then extracts it, brings it back out, and then transfers it to the other equipment. It's a very cool machine. The pump is driven by a shaft that's floating on two magnetic bearings. It outputs 75 kilowatts of power and goes over 10,000 rpm.We are also working towards building a helium loop test.
So the NRC already has an amazing safety record, but you could beat that by using live fleet monitoring that tells your team of nuclear engineers exactly where they need to look. And that information could also be passed on to regulators.A traditional reactor uses water for coolant and that water becomes radioactive. We're using helium, which is extremely safe compared to water because it does the same thing without becoming radioactive.
That's maybe why you mentioned before that five years sounds like a short time span when it comes to microreactors. But it's not really, it can be done much faster. How fast did we make Chicago Pile-1, for example, the world's first [artificial] nuclear reactor? It was less than a year. Blue Origin's been around for 22 years, and it was only about five years ago it started flying. So that's the usual slow type of timeline we think about.
"I think nuclear technology is required to... make a real vibrant frontier for civilization in space"
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