Think Hiring a Ruby Developer is Hard? Try Staffing a Nuclear Reactor Startup
No one has ever built a nuclear reactor at a weekend hackathon, or on a bus to SXSW. In an age of lean startups and hyper-focus on capital efficiency, you might think nuclear power is anathema to the startup and venture world. But you’d be wrong.
Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie, both nuclear engineering PhD students at MIT, started working on Transatomic Power, a nuclear reactor design startup, back in 2010, and incorporated it last year. The company’s product is called the Waste-Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor (WAMSR) which they claim is not only safer than traditional nuclear reactors, but generates power using the radioactive waste of existing nuclear plants.
That means the design addresses two of the big questions around nuclear power: waste disposal and safety (the third is cost).
The business model is to license the design of reactors, not to build plants, which is an absurdly capital intensive endeavor. So a company like Transatomic can stay relatively lean. I spoke with Dewan, Transatomic’s CEO, about what it’s like to run a nuclear reactor startup, and why it’s actually a good time for the industry.
“We were trying to figure out what we wanted to do after we graduated,” she tells me, noting that most nuclear engineering PhD’s go into academia or to work for a National Lab. “We wanted to do something exciting with nuclear, and we realized the only way we could do that is to have a startup of our own.”
And, according to Lewan, it’s a great time to be running a nuclear startup. Despite last year’s Fukushima disaster, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently approved two new reactors, the first to receive licenses since 1978. And the environment abroad is better in many cases, she tells me.
One of the things Dewan finds most exciting is how much more room for innovation still exists in the nuclear industry.
“There’s so much more to be invented in it,” she says. “We’re kind of going into this uncharted space.”
But they’re not alone. Nuclear startups including TerraPower, General Fusion and Hyperion have raised tens of millions, including from prominent investors like Khosla Ventures and Bill Gates.
Though there are a handful of funded nuclear startups out there, startup culture remains somewhat foreign to the nuclear engineering community.
“People in nuclear engineering PhD programs don’t think about nuclear startups as being a career path after graduation and that perception I believe is changing just because of the growing visibility of other nuclear startups that exist in the U.S.,” Dewan says.
Nonetheless, she credits her department at MIT for being supportive of their effort.
As with any startup, one of the biggest challenges Transatomic will face as it tries to grow will be hiring. But the crunch for nuclear engineers makes hiring a Ruby developer look easy. Most of the nuclear engineering talent is locked up in academia and labs, and the demographics of the industry skew older, a legacy Dewan attributes to Chernobyl and Three Mile Island that is only recently starting to change.
Dewan admits that a startup in the nuclear industry faces extra challenges, but believes that the market is ripe for disruption.
“Compared to other startups, especially computer science startups, this definitely requires more of an infrastructure,” Dewan admits. “Fukushima brought much greater focus on the safety problem with old conventional nuclear reactors,” she says. “I think that it might be the case that Fukushima will push the industry toward more innovative, safer designs.”
See Dewan, Massie, and advisor and MIT professor Dr. Richard Lester present at TEDx:
from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/03/22/think-hiring-a-ruby-developer-is-hard-try-staf...