The Best One Yet Sep 18, 2026 1h 18m 54m saved
With Jake DeWitte, co-founder and CEO of Oklo, who started the company with his wife Caroline after they met at MIT and took it public in 2024
Oklo took a reactor from a bare field in Lockhart, Texas to criticality on August 6, eleven months after construction began, on private land and with private money.
The rest of the advanced-nuclear industry sells designs. DeWitte said a typical competitor finishes a reactor design to about 80%, charges a nine-figure fee for the paperwork, and leaves the buyer to complete the design, permit it, build it and operate it. Oklo keeps the plant and sells the electricity instead.
"So our view was make it easy to sell reactors which is not selling reactors, it's selling power because that's what people wanted."
DeWitte grew up eight miles from a nuclear plant in New Mexico, wrote letters to the makers of SimCity 2000 as a child complaining that the game treated nuclear power as a liability, and went through Y Combinator on Sam Altman's encouragement. Altman became an investor and later chairman of Oklo's board. This interview was recorded inside the reactor building, a few feet from the vessel.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 78 minutes of audio, 16 minutes of reading.
Here are the 16 insights that matter.
Key Takeaways
Spent nuclear fuel is only about 5% used, which is why he calls it fuel rather than waste
A fast reactor extracts over 90% of the energy in mined uranium against under 1% today, a 90x change in utilization
All US nuclear waste — about 100,000 metric tons — holds more than four Saudi Arabias of oil-equivalent energy
Oklo sells 20-year power contracts, not reactor blueprints, which is what moved utility buyers
Recycling turns the fuel cycle into a critical-minerals business, with gold, palladium and platinum among the outputs
Some medical isotopes trade at around $400 trillion a kilogram on the figure he cited, and are supply-constrained
The reactor reached criticality on August 6, eleven months after the site was a field
Revenue was $1.2M last quarter against an $80M loss, with power sales not expected until 2028
Permitting in parallel with construction, rather than before it, is the regulatory change he credits most
Fast reactors are the only design that can fully recycle fuel, because of the physics of fast neutrons
The recycling process never produces separated plutonium, which is his answer on weapons proliferation
1. The Pellet and the Physics
The interview opened on a fuel pellet the size of a pencil eraser. One of the hosts said its energy content matches a ton of coal or 149 gallons of oil — a year of household electricity. DeWitte's answer was about the size of the gap.
Splitting an atom releases millions of times the energy of burning a molecule
Literally, when you think about splitting an atom, you're getting tens of millions, I mean millions of times more energy out than when you combust a molecule like a hydrocarbon.
Jake DeWitte
He put the ratio near 50 million times, and compared it to the difference between a sprinter and the speed of light. New Mexico, where he grew up, carries both the Manhattan Project history and the museums, and DeWitte said he learned as a child that the state drew about a quarter of its power from a plant in Arizona — so one of the four bulbs in his room was running on a reactor.
The career decision was made in childhood
So I knew I wanted to work on it from the time I was very little.
Jake DeWitte
He also wrote repeatedly to the makers of SimCity 2000, because the game coded a nuclear plant as a brown, dirty, 4-by-4 liability. Nobody wrote back. He wrote about nuclear power in English, literature and history classes through high school, including poems.
2. Going Critical, Defined
Asked for the vocabulary a listener would need, DeWitte started with the chain reaction. Splitting an atom releases two or three neutrons on average; the question is what those neutrons go on to do.
Balanced neutron production is the definition of a critical reactor
And if you balance that evenly, so the same number from one cycle to the next, that's called being a critical reactor.
Jake DeWitte
Above that balance the reactor is supercritical and rising in power; below it, subcritical and off. Criticality was also the milestone Oklo hit at this site.
Criticality is the moment the machine starts working
Criticality is when a reactor really becomes a reactor.
Jake DeWitte
From there the physics is conventional. The split atoms deposit kinetic energy as heat in the surrounding lattice, a coolant carries the heat out, the heat boils water, the steam turns a turbine and the turbine spins magnets to make electricity. DeWitte pointed into the pool at the fuel below: arrays of 17-by-17 pins, each about the width of a finger and roughly 12 feet tall, zirconium tubes packed with uranium dioxide pellets, with neutron-absorbing material inserted alongside.
3. Tiny, Sexy and Tidy
The hosts' framing for Oklo's three differences was that the reactors are small, deliberately good-looking, and produce no waste to store. DeWitte's answer on size was about the coolant: liquid metal rather than water.
Liquid metal moves heat out of a smaller volume
Liquid metals are really good at removing heat.
Jake DeWitte
His explanation for a general audience ran through the heat-transfer coefficient, the rate at which a medium pulls heat off a surface, and a hot tub at 102 degrees against air at 102 degrees. Liquid metal beats water, and it does not boil at the temperatures water does, so the system does not have to be pressurized and the components get smaller. A design that does not need pressure containment is not pushed toward a large size by physics.
The technology is not new. The first reactor to make electricity in the United States used liquid metal, and DeWitte named two American predecessors he returns to: Experimental Breeder Reactor II, built in the 1960s, and the Fast Flux Test Facility, built in the 1980s. Both showed the safety behavior, the operational reliability and the fuel recycling worked.
The research existed but was not searchable
Like, all this stuff was done, but all of it was archived in paper and it wasn't digitized.
Jake DeWitte
That, he said, is part of why the gap between the first nuclear build-out and this one lasted as long as it did: the material sat in libraries, in limited copies, some of it restricted.
4. Built in 11 Months
The site is at a development in Texas that a founder named Josh set up to make heavy infrastructure easier to build, and where Oklo originally planned a training facility. A regulatory lane that existed but had not been used changed the plan to a working reactor with a target of turning on inside a year.
The old sequence required the full safety and hazard analysis before any construction. DeWitte accepts that for fuel loading and rejects it for an empty building.
Permitting now runs alongside construction
That's what's recently changed and why we're in a new era and why we could build this in parallel to the permitting.
Jake DeWitte
The facility was finished well before the authorization to load fuel arrived, and if the permit had not come, Oklo would have used the building as a test facility. He called that a risk worth taking. The second change was cultural.
The industry's habit is to perfect the first unit
You're not going to design and build the perfect reactor the first time, which is how nuclear, you know, the industry's kind of taught itself.
Jake DeWitte
Build one, learn from it, make the next one better — which he said changes both the cost and the schedule. Speed came partly from deliberate overbuilding.
Going fast meant adding margin, not cutting it
And that's something I think people sometimes think about is like, well, if you go fast, you're cutting corners.
Jake DeWitte
His answer is that a conservative bounding assumption lets a decision be made quickly; the extra material costs money and the schedule pays it back. The pilings go about 60 feet down.
The structure was overdesigned on purpose
The concrete surrounding this vessel is well over a foot thick.
Jake DeWitte
He described the reactor as, so far as the company can tell, the fastest privately sited and privately built reactor ever — his own hero stat, and one that matters to him precisely because the industry's reputation is for schedules running long.
5. Why Demand Came Back
The hosts offered three reasons for the regulatory turn: carbon-free electricity, energy independence, and the data-center build-out. DeWitte added a fourth that he thinks gets less attention.
Manufacturing came home and brought its power demand with it
We outsourced so much manufacturing and therefore power demand out of this country for so long and now it's coming back in
Jake DeWitte
Re-industrialization needs the round-the-clock base-load supply that nuclear provides. Electrification raises demand on its own. Then AI sits on top.
The customers are the largest companies in the world
They existentially need electricity.
Jake DeWitte
He named Meta, Google, Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX, and said AI has pulled Oklo's timeline forward by twenty years or more. In 2013 and 2014 the response he got was that nuclear was too big for a data center. Most of the industry avoids the phrase "silver bullet"; he said he will use it for fast reactors and recycling, on climate and on energy abundance.
The plant the interview was recorded in makes isotopes, not electricity. The hosts compared it to SpaceX's Falcon 1 reaching orbit in 2008 — not a revenue product, but proof a private company could do the thing, and the basis for what came next. DeWitte accepted the analogy, and said the reason it matters is what he was told growing up.
He was told repeatedly this was among the hardest things anyone could do
I don't believe that it is the hardest thing to do
Jake DeWitte
The physics was understood, he said; the difficulty was self-imposed by the industry and by regulation.
6. Is Nuclear Actually Safe
The hosts said they read Oklo's public-offering paperwork and counted the word "disaster" four times, then asked the question directly while standing over the reactor.
His case is the deaths-per-unit-of-energy record
Nuclear technology is one of, if not the safest form of energy in the most brutal but distilled metrics for that.
Jake DeWitte
Deaths per megawatt-hour are among the lowest of any source, he said, around the level of solar and possibly better depending on the accounting. His explanation for that record is that the industry learned the technology was dangerous early and built rules around it. The design goal now is a reactor that controls and cools itself through physics rather than through operator action.
The demonstration he cites happened on April 3, 1986, at Experimental Breeder Reactor II in Idaho. Engineers locked the control rods out so they could not be inserted, shut off the pumps while the reactor ran at full power, and let it shut itself down in front of an audience. They shut it down properly afterward, went to lunch, restarted it and ran a second test that DeWitte described as worse than what happened at Fukushima. It regulated itself both times.
On his own exposure at the site
I would drink the water. I know it's fine. I know it's safe. I would do it.
Jake DeWitte
The water shields the radiation, he said, and the questions he gets at dinner are always safety and waste. His comparison point is fossil generation.
Coal is itself radioactive, and unmonitored
You get more radiation living next to a coal plant than a nuclear plant
Jake DeWitte
Coal carries small quantities of radioactive material that goes out of the stack, he said, and nobody measures where it lands.
7. Why Nuclear Got Canceled
Asked why an invention this useful was abandoned, DeWitte gave several causes and put the information environment first.
The public could not check the claims being made
And so what happened was misinformation, disinformation, confusion, fear, and uncertainty drove how people perceive certain things.
Jake DeWitte
During the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s there was no way for an ordinary person to look the facts up, and the confusion with nuclear weapons went unchallenged. His view is that search changed that: people who get curious now find the record, and the record favors his industry. He went on to two further causes, flagging himself that one sounds conspiratorial. Competing energy interests paid for anti-nuclear advertising, and foreign interests that did not want American energy abundance argued against it. The industry also failed to defend itself as the environmental movement grew in the 1960s and 1970s.
One of the hosts compared the fear to flying: people rate a plane crash as more dangerous than a car crash against the data. The show then put its own statistic on the table, drawn from a term paper one of them wrote at the University of Michigan: "More people die every day from fossil fuels than have ever died in the history of nuclear power." The framing is the show's rather than DeWitte's: deaths yesterday from gas, oil and coal, mostly respiratory illness, set against the full 70-year history of nuclear energy.
DeWitte's own addition was about air quality rather than carbon. Pollution and emissions are things people can see and measure, and rising energy density has been the direction of travel for humanity throughout.
8. The Isotope Business
The reactor at Lockhart makes isotopes, which DeWitte said is the least understood part of the company. An isotope is a version of an element with a different number of neutrons, such as deuterium and tritium against ordinary hydrogen, and the unstable ones decay in ways medicine can use.
He split the medical market in two. Diagnostics and imaging come first, and he said supply is short enough that conditions go undetected which would be treatable if caught. The second use is therapeutic.
The delivery mechanism is targeted rather than systemic
Then you have the capability to load these things almost like targeted cruise missiles to cancer cells.
Jake DeWitte
Molecular carriers that only cancer cells take up carry the isotope inside, where it decays and destroys that cell and its neighbors. Unlike chemotherapy, which he described as killing the whole body slower than it kills the tumor, there is very little decay elsewhere. These treatments are becoming front-line, he said, and there is not nearly enough supply.
The reason is industrial. The isotopes do not occur in nature and have to be synthesized by absorbing neutrons, which is what a reactor produces cheaply. The United States stepped back from this work; Russia never did and China has been expanding. He pointed to the highest-selling cancer treatment he knows of, which uses a lutetium isotope and is being consumed faster than it can be supplied, and said researchers cannot get hold of other candidates at all.
The prices at the top of the market
Including some that I think the last I saw the going market rate would be about $400 trillion a kilogram.
Jake DeWitte
Nobody makes kilograms of these materials, he added — the point is the order of magnitude. The strategic argument is about what gets invented next.
New supply changes what researchers can attempt
It could open up entirely new drug discoveries and platforms and then we're the ones producing.
Jake DeWitte
9. A Natural Reactor in Gabon
The company is named for a place. DeWitte said the name pays homage to nuclear fission being a natural process rather than an invented one.
There is a geological record of a reactor running without people
So there's a natural nuclear reactor that occurred in Africa.
Jake DeWitte
The mechanism: uranium-235 decays faster than uranium-238, so a long time ago the natural enrichment level was higher. In certain concentrated ore bodies, water flooding in from a nearby coast was enough to start a chain reaction. The reaction heated the water, made steam, the steam vented, the reactor lost its moderator and shut down, then the water came back.
It cycled for a very long time
So it would run on and off and on and off and on and off for a long time.
Jake DeWitte
He said the general view is that it ran for hundreds of thousands of years before the fuel depleted or the geology changed. It was found because French buyers of uranium from the region noticed the ore arrived already denatured, as if it had been through a reactor, which they initially read as evidence of a secret program.
10. What Altman Taught Him
DeWitte met Sam Altman in 2013, shortly before Altman took over Y Combinator. Asked for the biggest lesson and the biggest disagreement, he took two lessons first.
The instruction he kept
One is never stop swinging for the fences on everything you're doing.
Jake DeWitte
Do not let near-term work compromise what you are building toward. He restated Oklo's version of that: unlocking the full energy content of heavy metals through fast reactors and recycling, which on known reserves he put at enough to supply the planet's entire energy needs for more than two billion years, without carbon emissions. The second lesson was to mark the small wins along the way, because on a project this long nobody reaches the end state inside a career.
On the disagreement, he named two, and dated both.
They differed on how much to finish before the first build
I think there's some views that he's had about like incremental hard tech development versus going all the way to where you want to get to on the first iteration.
Jake DeWitte
That was 2013 and 2014, and he said they would probably agree now. The second was about communication: he thought Altman over-prepared the ground before saying anything in public, where DeWitte's view is to tell the story, accept that it will be messy and accept that some people will hate it.
Asked whether Altman was already predicting in 2014 that reactors would power AI, he separated the two claims.
The prediction was about energy, not about AI
He wasn't saying that explicitly, but what he was saying very clearly was that he thinks the world is going to need unbelievably more amounts of energy
Jake DeWitte
Altman and Elon Musk launched OpenAI the following year. Altman resigned as Oklo's board chairman a year after the company went public, which the hosts attributed to OpenAI wanting to buy nuclear capacity and needing to clear the conflict.
11. $1.2M Revenue, $8B Cap
The hosts laid out the financial position: an $8 billion market value, $1.2 million of revenue and an $80 million loss in the most recent quarter, a stock that fell 54% on its first day of trading in 2024 and now sits five times above that first close. Their question was when the money arrives.
DeWitte said the current revenue comes from customers paying Oklo to accelerate power-plant work, isotope reactors, fuel fabrication and recycling infrastructure. Isotope revenue is expected early next year, possibly sooner. Power sales are expected to start in 2028.
Some customers have already paid
We do have prepayments from customers, right?
Jake DeWitte
He said the order book is publicly around 18 gigawatts, from hyperscalers and from specialist cloud operators. On whether he wants a meme stock, he said he cares about employee ownership, since every full-time employee gets equity, and treats volatility as a cost of having retail owners.
His answer on the valuation was about the denominator
So, $8 billion looks like a small number relatively speaking to what those numbers would be.
Jake DeWitte
And the condition attached to it
If we execute, there's a clear trajectory to become one of the biggest companies in the world.
Jake DeWitte
12. Selling Power, Not PDFs
DeWitte traced the business model to a course he and his wife took at MIT, run with the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, where utility executives get a crash course in the technology. Pitching the engineering did not move the executives; changing what they were being asked to buy did.
The industry standard, as he described it: design a reactor to roughly 80% completion, charge a nine-figure fee for the design package if you can get it, and hand the customer the job of finishing the design, permitting, siting, procuring, building and operating the plant, with service revenue afterward. His hosts' version was that a competitor sells a PDF and a partly finished kit car.
The product people actually wanted was electricity
So our view was make it easy to sell reactors which is not selling reactors, it's selling power because that's what people wanted.
Jake DeWitte
Oklo designs, owns and operates, and sells the output on 20-year contracts. Build-and-transfer stays available for a buyer who asks for it. Two advantages follow.
Owning the build sets the schedule
And this allows us to move at our speed and not the speed of really slow customers who need to be the ones that build your plant or your product.
Jake DeWitte
The second is that the operating experience stays inside the company and compounds across the fleet. Meta does not want to build a power plant, he said, and neither does a utility — but a utility will want one built once somebody else has done it first.
13. Waste as the Gold Mine
Under the power business sits fuel, which DeWitte argued is the layer that changes the economics. Spent fuel from a conventional reactor is mostly unused fuel: the process he described is to chop the assemblies up, dissolve them in a bath of molten salt in an electrorefiner, and separate the elements electrochemically across an array of anodes and cathodes, in the manner of a battery run backwards.
The utilization figure is where the margin argument sits. Enrichment discards most of the uranium that came out of the ground, and a conventional reactor uses less than 1% of the energy in the mined material. A fast reactor uses well over 90%.
The improvement is two orders of magnitude
So that's a 90x improvement in utilization.
Jake DeWitte
The second revenue source is the rest of the periodic table. Neutron absorption transmutes uranium into a spread of other elements, so a recycling plant is also a mine.
The output includes precious metals
You make a lot of gold out of this stuff.
Jake DeWitte
He named ruthenium, palladium and platinum alongside it. And the input costs less than nothing: the feedstock is cheap, free, subsidized or comes with a fee attached, because the federal government carries a legal obligation to dispose of the material. The United States does almost no recycling today, though DeWitte said a small quantity of recycled fuel is being made in Idaho now and will go into Oklo's first power reactor there.
The fuel shortage is the reason this matters commercially
Recycling is a way to unlock that.
Jake DeWitte
Uranium mining, conversion, enrichment and fabrication are all undersupplied relative to the build rate now planned, he said, and recycling relieves the front end. Asked what Wall Street misses about the company, he named this — the revenue diversification and the position it creates in fuel markets.
14. Four Saudi Arabias of Fuel
Oklo's plan for the states is what the company calls nuclear life cycle innovation campuses, and DeWitte accepted the hosts' rebrand of them as lifestyle campuses. Three states will be chosen first, from a list the hosts gave as Utah, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Idaho and Louisiana. Each would host fabrication, enrichment, recycling, reactor construction and power generation. The question is why a state would accept other states' nuclear waste.
The premise of the whole campus plan
So nuclear waste is an asset, not a liability
Jake DeWitte
The quantity is small. All the spent fuel from the entire history of American nuclear generation comes to a little under 100,000 metric tons, which he said would fit inside a building the size of a large supermarket.
The reason that inventory is worth having
It's only 5% use. It's only 5% waste really. It's like 95% fuel.
Jake DeWitte
On his arithmetic "there's enough energy content in that material to power the entire country's energy needs for over 150 years," which he restated as more than four Saudi Arabias of oil. Split across three states, that is more than one Saudi Arabia each, with the annual addition to the national inventory worth roughly a Norway on the same comparison.
15. The Plutonium Question
The hosts raised the reason fuel recycling has been avoided for decades: concentrate the material in the wrong way and it becomes weapons-usable. DeWitte treated it the way he treats reactor safety — as a property to design in rather than a procedure to enforce.
The process never isolates the dangerous material
You never separate out pure plutonium. And that's one of the key things you want to focus on.
Jake DeWitte
Nor does it produce separated highly enriched uranium. Those two, he said, are the whole proliferation concern. He addressed the counter-argument directly: electrorefining does appear in weapons programs, but there it is used to purify plutonium that is already pure, stripping out the americium that builds up as it decays. Starting from pure plutonium and cleaning it is a different operation from starting with a mixture and never concentrating anything.
What comes out the other end
So the outputs of this are really nasty material that's thermally hot and radioactively hot. Not useful in a weapon at all directly.
Jake DeWitte
Asked whether a careless operator could leave separated plutonium behind, he said the technique never produces it in the first place. On site security, he noted the passports the hosts had to show were access protocol rather than a sign of what is in the building, which is all low-enriched.
16. Bulls and Bears
The hosts closed with the case for and against. The bull case: a fleet of reactors, the recycling plants that manage the country's waste, cancer isotopes, a reactor next to every data center and a replacement for every island running on diesel. The bear case: an AI slowdown or a build-out backlash cutting demand, a permit that never arrives in the most regulated industry in the world, politics turning, execution failure, and competition from NuScale, X-energy, Bill Gates's venture, the Russian state and a rival that filed to go public on the day of the recording.
DeWitte's answer was the stack. Fuel, reactors and isotopes are three connected businesses, and he borrowed Jensen Huang's layers-of-a-cake framing for it.
Fuel is the layer underneath everything else
Like fuel is the bottom layer of the cake.
Jake DeWitte
Oklo is the main company working on fuel recycling, he said, which ties to both of the other two. Space and defense are further markets: almost everything interesting done in space has run on isotope power, and missions have been scaled back for want of supply. On competition he was not defensive.
He expects the sector to have more than one winner
There's going to be several nuclear winners, if not many.
Jake DeWitte
Oklo invests in other nuclear companies and partners with them, sometimes without expecting a return, because of where it sits.
The position he thinks is underpriced
We're uniquely positioned, I think, to be able to bolt on to any nuclear deal basically in the Western world in some form.
Jake DeWitte
Recycling services, fuel supply or power from its own reactors — there is a way into most deals. His analogy, which he flagged as a stretch, is that Oklo is a layer below the chips in the AI stack rather than a competitor in it. On demand he made one point that has nothing to do with AI: people are tired of paying more for electricity, and new generation is what brings the price down. Medical demand, he added, is set by demographics rather than by a technology cycle.
Bonus Insights
The reactor pool will glow on its own
It'll light itself up blue.
Jake DeWitte
The hosts had seen photographs of the pool lit blue and asked to have it lit for the recording. They were refused, and DeWitte explained why: at higher power the water glows without help. Beta decay converts neutrons to protons and ejects electrons fast enough to exceed the speed of light in water, which is lower than it is in a vacuum. Cherenkov radiation is the resulting blue light, the optical equivalent of a sonic boom. Lighting the pool artificially would suggest the reactor is making more power than it currently is.
Half-life, defined for the same dictionary
The hosts asked for one more term. A half-life, DeWitte said, is "it's the time it takes for half of a material that's decaying to decay away" — one day leaves half, two days a quarter, and after ten half-lives there is almost nothing, which he offered as a rough rule for how long a material stays a problem.
Plant lifetimes run to 60 years and possibly far longer
Most of these designs are built for 60 years or more and can be relicensed after that, DeWitte said. The parts that set the limit are the foundation concrete and the vessel, and how long they really last is not yet known — he named 60, 80, 100, 120 and 140 years as possibilities. His expectation is that a site gets torn down and rebuilt on rather than abandoned. One of the hosts described the conventional alternative from experience: the plant he grew up eight miles from was decommissioned.
The penthouse reactor
An early prospective customer in 2013 asked DeWitte whether a reactor could go in New York. He said the basement; they said the top, as the mass that damps a skyscraper's sway. He has been amused by the idea since. On whether a small reactor could sit next to Madison Square Garden, his answer was that it is technically viable and that New York is interesting because of the existing district heating system, but that the near-term siting is downstream on the grid where land is cheaper. He added that he would like to see New York move faster, and that other states are moving faster.
The rapid-fire answers
On the best barbecue in Texas he gave what he called the diplomatic answer: anything in Lockhart. His business leaders were Musk for vision, Huang for playing the long game and Altman for the scale of his ambition. The thing to do in New Mexico is eat red and green chili on everything.
And the book
I'm a sucker for The Lord of the Rings.
Jake DeWitte
He named Jurassic Park and Project Hail Mary alongside it. For a personal ticker he offered JDW, his initials, then DOT — a play on his surname that predates the Nike slogan. He is expecting a first child in about six weeks.
DeWitte's bottom line is that fast reactors plus fuel recycling turn spent nuclear fuel from a storage liability into the cheapest large energy reserve in the country, and that the same reactors produce medical isotopes the United States currently imports — which is why he is willing to call the combination a silver bullet and why he thinks an $8 billion valuation understates what the company would be worth if it executes.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Oklo (Reached criticality at its Lockhart, Texas isotope reactor on August 6, eleven months after breaking ground; $1.2M of revenue and an $80M loss last quarter against an $8B market value)
Meta (Buying nuclear output for a data center, and the example he used of a customer that does not want to build a power plant itself)
OpenAI (Its interest in buying Oklo capacity is what the hosts said prompted Sam Altman to resign as Oklo's board chairman)
Y Combinator (Where Oklo went after DeWitte met Altman in 2013; Altman then invested)
SpaceX (The hosts' analogy for this reactor: Falcon 1 in 2008 proved a private company could reach orbit without being the revenue product)
NuScale Power and X-energy (Named by the hosts as the listed competition, alongside Bill Gates's venture and the Russian state)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Where DeWitte and his wife met, and where the reactor technology course for utility executives taught him the engineering pitch was not what moved buyers)
Experimental Breeder Reactor II and the Fast Flux Test Facility (The 1960s and 1980s American fast reactors Oklo's design descends from; the first ran the April 1986 self-shutdown test)
SimCity 2000 (Coded a nuclear plant as a dirty liability, which is what he wrote letters about as a child)
Books & Resources Mentioned
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien, Jurassic Park – Michael Crichton and Project Hail Mary – Andy Weir (The three he named when asked for the best book he has read; he said he liked the third for itself rather than for the film)
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