Think Hiring a Ruby Developer is Hard? Try Staffing a Nuclear Reactor Startup

http://bostinno.com/2012/03/22/think-hiring-a-ruby-developer-is-hard-try-staffing-a-nuclear-reactor-startup/

by wfrick • 14 years ago

223 81 14 years ago

Loic2• 14 years ago

Just cross the Atlantic, open a subsidiary in France. You will find there a lot of extremely qualified engineers for everything nuclear related.

starfox4• 14 years ago

Are they still using Francs for their units of reactivity, or did that get changed to Euros as well?

starfox4• 14 years ago

I'm not sure if this got modded down because people think I'm being facetious, but I'm seriously wondering what happened with that. For people who don't know, every country in the world, besides France, used "Dollars" for their units of reactivity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin#The_Dollar_unit_of...

France, on the other hand, used "Francs". Conveniently, the exchange rate was 1:1. I'd be surprised if they went and changed everything to Euro's now, but I haven't heard anything firsthand from French nuclear engineers.

mrb• 14 years ago

You probably got downvoted because, most people don't know Slotin literally proposed a unit of reactivity called the "dollar", and most thought you meant to type "currency" instead of "reactivity" which would make it a bad sarcastic joke... I know my jokes often get downvoted too :)

jff• 14 years ago

But then you have to operate in France, which by all accounts (from my European colleagues) may not be worth the cost :)

jarek4• 14 years ago

Luckily you can just Change The World by doing a node.js startup in the Mission...

Loic2• 14 years ago

I am French, working in Germany having founded a Limited in UK and I spent some years working in Denmark. If you factor everything in, the cost difference between the US and EU is negligible.

In the nuclear field, like in any highly skilled engineering field, the costs will come first from the salary of your employees. In fact, it will be cheaper in Europe, because in Europe, highly skilled engineers tend to work for less money because they have 6 weeks holidays (which you can take), 3 month sick days, very good health insurance and a 40h week. When you start to build stuff, the BOM is the same in the US or in Europe.

This is from my experience in the oil & gas and pharmaceutical industries (my field as process & chemical engineer).

amalag• 14 years ago

I thought thorium was the frontier in nuclear reactors.

starfox4• 14 years ago

80% of the cost of nuclear energy is building the reactor. With around $500B worth of existing reactor infrastructure worldwide, which runs on Uranium, don't expect that to go away too soon.

EREFUNDO• 14 years ago

I do not think they are simply attempting to replace existing reactors. I know in many countries governments have slowed down building reactors because of environmental concerns and costs. With the dwindling oil deposits and increasing energy need, safe and reliable nuclear reactors will be in high demand.

kemiller2• 14 years ago

Thorium reactors are often MSR designs too. But if this offers the possibility of reducing our existing waste supplies, it might make it more publicly palatable.

Symmetry• 14 years ago

Its the frontier of reactors-that-don't-explode. In the short term, our laws were written with light water reactors in mind, so anybody who wants to build a thorium reactor is going to have to build all the same expensive safety features that light water reactors need, plus the special metallurgy that molten salt reactors need. So basically it doesn't make sense until something changes.

JoshTriplett• 14 years ago

> In the short term, our laws were written with light water reactors in mind, so anybody who wants to build a thorium reactor is going to have to build all the same expensive safety features that light water reactors need, plus the special metallurgy that molten salt reactors need.

It always annoys me that laws on safety requirements go into implementation details rather than stating the desired result. If the requirements simply said that "an independent audit must show that the safety exceeds the following thresholds: ...", safer technologies wouldn't incur the additional overhead you describe.

cmelbye• 14 years ago

Not to mention the fact that the Nuclear (uranium) fuel cycle is much more established than the more immature and unproven thorium fuel cycle is.

InclinedPlane• 14 years ago

Thorium has some potential advantages and some disadvantages. Overall it's a mistake to imagine that it's some sort of nuclear energy free lunch.

kemiller2• 14 years ago

I wonder how politically difficult it would be to get one of these built near Yucca Mountain. Given that a) it's already a nuclear hotzone in the minds of the public, and b) this offers some possibility of improving the situation while generating exportable power. You'd think this would be an interesting prospect to at least one philanthropically-minded billionaire.

ScotterC5• 14 years ago

I'm so glad there are nuclear startups. There's so much to be done in this field. It's enormously tough to disrupt but licensing a design might be a start.

Talent is extraordinarily hard to find for this. All the great engineers with domain experience are starting to retire. The ones that are left are extremely risk averse. You have to attempt to poach from GE or Westinghouse.

I worked for Westinghouse for two years doing Pipe Analysis and Fracture Mechanics. There are funny things that happen to steel piping at 2250 psi and 600 degrees Fahrenheit. Only nukes are familiar with the stresses and environmental fatigues that can happen in that environment over an 80 year period.

rbanffy• 14 years ago

I fear certifying a design can be hideously expensive. I am not familiar with the rules, but I'd assume one would need to build a complete reactor and operate it for some time.

ScotterC5• 14 years ago

It is hideously expensive. Don't know how these guys are gonna do it. I remember talking with a prominent VC who had a division in the energy space. They got a few nuclear startup pitches. Always, it was 'we need 100 mil... and 50 of that is going to the gov't for licensing'. If these guys have figured out a way around this. All the power to them.

forgottenpaswrd• 14 years ago

"There are funny things that happen to steel piping at 2250 psi and 600 degrees Fahrenheit."

And why we have to use steel piping at 153atm and 300C?

The fact is that we are using a design that is totally obsolete and designed for creating nuclear bombs, not for giving us energy.

The good thing about startups is that they could think different, use creativity to innovate and invent new methods. Einstein was not very intelligent a la Von Newman, contrary to popular belief, but he was super creative.

Creativity is destroyed in academia.

ScotterC5• 14 years ago

Hold on there buddy. All Western designed PWRs or BWRs (which is nearly all of them) are not designed to be yielding bombs. Their neutron flux is simply not high enough to give enough enrichment.

Two other types of plants you might be thinking of when taking bomb materials into account. The russian design for Chernobyl was meant to produce electricity and bomb fuel which is why it had a graphite moderator which creates a very high neutron flux.

The other one is the sodium cooled breeder reactor which we chose instead of the molten salt design discussed in the article. The sodium breeder was good at making plutonium but still was never designed to have that plutonium removed in any usable fashion. Sodium is a tricky substance it reacts with water violently. The french still have a plant or two going as do the Chinese but it's really not a stellar design.

Now, I agree about the temps and pressures being unnecessary. The reason for these is about efficiency of scale. In a power grid like America's where we need 1 gigawatt and greater plants, plus with licensing a plant being so difficult, you build the biggest baddest plant you can which can output the most power. This means you go with the highest temps and pressures while still being ultra safe to create a more power efficient reactor.

Smaller reactors which would be better for the power grids of the world. Like 250 mega watts would not need these extreme environments. There are some great designs for a back of trailer truck reactor which can just hook up to a coal plant's secondary systems (steam turbines and such).

The best part of nuclear startups is nuclear is not a 'if' question. It's a when. I just hope we can disrupt quickly enough to bring that sort of power production here sooner rather then later.

res2• 14 years ago

>Creativity is destroyed in academia.

I wonder what this means for nuclear engineering's future, because I'm looking at Transatomic Power's team and I'm seeing a lot of influence from academia. Both members of the actual management team are PhD candidates, and all three members of the advisory board are professors. Granted this is one sample, but it seems like the barriers to entry for energy startups in general, but especially those dealing with nuclear power, are too steep at the moment for anything to move forward without help from academia.

neutronicus4• 14 years ago

There's enormous value in having 60 years of data on the neutron irradiation properties and mechanical failure modes of a material. An "obsolete" design is also a well-understood one, and you can't afford to fail fast and often in the nuclear industry.

Retric• 14 years ago

Heat engines are significantly more energy efficient at 600 degrees Fahrenheit than 300C (572F). Especially when you want to use a 2 stage system and limit how much your irradiating your turbines.

Despite the risks there is a lot to be said for a Very high temperature reactor (1000C) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_high_temperature_reactor

PS: There are actually a lot of reactor designs out there, but overall most designed are based on a small number vary old basic designs and a large number of tradeoffs. For example many people love Pebble bed reactor's, but they are gas cooled and use a lot of graphite at high temperatures which will burn with just a little oxygen at which point you lose your moderator and things can go vary badly.

Daniel_Newby• 14 years ago

> Creativity is destroyed in academia.

Nah. Grant committees just don't fund its full expression.

neutronicus4• 14 years ago

There's a lot of young talent out there - enrollment basically hockey-sticked while I was studying nuclear engineering from '06-'10. Their best bet is probably finding the right kind of phD student, because the real hot-shots from Westinghouse and GE can make more money striking out as consultants.

I personally decided to get out of nuclear engineering and into physics, but best of luck to these guys and gals.

ScotterC5• 14 years ago

I got out of nuclear engineering and into fine art oddly enough :). But mostly cause I like that the web doesn't regulate what I can and cannot do.

I'm really pulling for this new generation. Heck, I want to get back into nuclear engineering once I have a startup or two under my belt. But a lot of what it takes to be successful is gonna be politics and bureaucracy. Knowing the older engineers who have moved up to NRC is a huge boon. Also being able to work utility company execs that want to take a chance. Then there's the actual politicians to convince. It's a lot of work. Most of it isn't going to be actual engineering.

mhd• 14 years ago

I'm a bit scared that there might be "rockstar" nuclear engineers out there.

zecho• 14 years ago

That won't happen until someone builds an incredibly popular framework for nuclear power.

debacle• 14 years ago

Radium on Rails?

pavel_lishin• 14 years ago

Or ones hoping to build the first nuclear broactor.

jstin• 14 years ago

I think engineers in hard sciences are a bit different than "startup" software "engineers". Anyone can make mistakes of course, but the process and professionalism is different.

I'm not bashing all programmers, just ones who are part of the "rockstar" startup scene.

res2• 14 years ago

I might be wrong, but I was under the impression that engineering, with the exception of software engineering, was still very much a "suit and tie" field.

mjwalshe2• 14 years ago

depends on sector when I used to work in hydrodynamics (in teh nuclear engineering section) it was mostly lab coats jeans and wellies.

arethuza• 14 years ago

Wearing a tie is often expressly forbidden in a lot of environments.

neutronicus4• 14 years ago

The Nuclear Regulatory Commision will beat the rockstar out of them pretty quick.

squozzer• 14 years ago

Not sure if the talent pool would fit the startup culture but the US Navy might be worth investigating. Or the Russian, British, or French navies.

SkyMarshal• 14 years ago

I was thinking that too. There should be plenty of grads from the US Navy Nuclear Power School, and the officer grads are likely to have at minimum undergrad engineering degrees either from the Naval Academy or civilian universities.

http://www.navy.com/careers/nuclear-energy/

philwelch• 14 years ago

The Navy trains operator-engineers, not design engineers. They are indeed one of the biggest sources of operator-engineers, though.

nknight• 14 years ago

My mother was office staff at a nuclear plant for a number of years in the late 80s/early 90s (and for reasons passing understanding, received training as some sort of emergency/backup operator, despite making very clear that in an emergency, she'd be driving away as quickly as possible). From what she tells me, former US Navy officers and enlisted were absolutely everywhere, as both employees and NRC personnel.

jph• 14 years ago

Ninja rockstar wanted for lean startup in nuclear sector. Must know MVC framework (Matter/Valence/Controller), ATOM feeds, and the Ruby "split" method. Perks include free energy drinks.

maaku• 14 years ago

Must have 10 years experience with Waste-Annihilating Molten Salt Reactors.

scheff• 14 years ago

How hard can it be when that screw-up in sector 7G down at the old Springfield plant can keep his job after all these years?

cheez• 14 years ago

Smart, good looking and ambitious.

I should just give up.

achy2• 14 years ago

The majority of AECL (the CANDU reactor team) is un- or under employed after the buyout from the Canadian government - that's an entire workforce to tap into.

ylem2• 14 years ago

I thought CANDU was acquired by a private company--do you foresee another Canadian research reactor after Chalk River?

achy2• 14 years ago

It was, but the workforce was severely slashed, and (due to low market necessity) would have been moreso if not for a unionized work force.

larsberg• 14 years ago

The older age demographic may work in their favor --- the "about to retire" crowd might be willing to work with them on pretty favorable terms, especially if they are flexibile on location and hours. It would be a heck of a lot more interesting and rewarding than consulting part-time for Westinghouse or GE, which is what they would probably otherwise do.

I've been thinking a lot about this kind of problem because the foundry industry is in much the same state. My father has been working in it (metallurgy, process/lean, product design and test, etc.) for ~45 years and is retiring in a few years. The foundry industry is also a field with basically nobody between the ages of 25-55 in the US, and he's thinking about what he will do to keep busy once the pension and social security kick in, apart from the obvious occasional contracting gig.

KevinMS2• 14 years ago

Don't perpetuate the myth that ruby developers are difficult to find.

ericb2• 14 years ago

Have you tried to hire one in the Boston area lately? Our second Senior rails dev position has has been open for about 5 months.

KevinMS2• 14 years ago

So are you saying that absolutely nobody that can do the job has applied? Or have you turned away qualified applicants because they aren't a "cultural fit" or properly credentialed? I'm betting on the later.

kevinalexbrown• 14 years ago

I'm close with someone who was offered a position at a nuclear startup NuScale, that aims to manufacture cookie-cutter, modular nuclear reactors, where you scale the power plant by adding more reactors over time as your needs change, and ship the old spent ones off.

As I understand it, part of the problem in hiring is that for a nuclear startup you really need experienced engineers as you go into producing working prototypes. Depending on the position, they don't necessarily need explicit nuclear experience - my relative didn't have it - but they do need a proven track record of not majorly screwing up ever, and that requires experience you can usually only get working for years in real engineering environments. There can be no 'oops, we messed up the privacy requirements' apology or people die, meltdowns happen, and the company gets the biggest of red flags.

That's not to say you need to be old to start a nuclear company, but that you will probably need to work with older engineers, who are harder to hire, settled in their jobs, and scattered across the US, with mortgages, families, and the like.

wisty2• 14 years ago

This is why I don't think nuclear power is the future. Renewable power can afford to be innovative. Nuclear power will never innovate as fast. Even if it's better than wind right now, you can't have people hack on it, or manufacture in the cheapest country (I hope), or have small countries regulate its use in a cost efficient way.

Of course, it's great for the countries who already have it up and running, and those countries should also look at the latest generations, and the next generation which are being designed (which should be better and safer in every way that the old ones which meltdown when a tsunami hits them).

I love asking pro-nuclear Australians which level of government (federal or state) should regulate nuclear power, and who should be the minister in charge.

jeltz• 14 years ago

Same goes for some renewable power sources like hydroelectric plants. Bursting dams are more dangerous than meltdowns and have killed way more than nuclear disasters.

Some of the more famous hydroelectric accidents:

* 1959, about 2000 deaths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaiont_Dam

* 2009, 75 deaths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Sayano%E2%80%93Shushenska...

* 1975, about 171,000 deaths (of those 26,000 immediate): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

demian• 14 years ago

Besides the point brought up by jeltz about what "renewable" includes, I fail to see how the speed of innovation, or the fact that people can "hack it", will determine which energy source is "the future".

Argentina, a developing country with a history of social turmoil and a relatively high level of goverment corruption, has been using nuclear power efficently since the '70s.

Probably "the future" will need mixed energy generation. It won't be only nuclear nor only renewable.

dstorrs• 14 years ago

The problem with this view is that if you look at the energy demand curve for the human race, there are only two long-term sources that can even potentially satisfy the demand: nuclear and space-based solar. Wind, geothermal, ground-based solar, tidal...there just isn't enough energy there to satisfy the demands, especially once you factor in the inefficiencies of power transmission.

The reason it's a problem, of course, is because the both methods are politically difficult and require significant engineering (if not research) and capital investment to make them practical.

drucken2• 14 years ago

Anyone know if this is a thorium-based Molten Salt Reactor?

If so, why is the now quite well-known MSR advocate Kirk Sorensen not involved in this project, but instead started his own company (Flibe Energy) to design and produce a thorium MSR?

Still, I have a feeling that two US private startups is no match vs Chinese government MSR let alone other nuclear energy technology spending.

RandallBrown• 14 years ago

I think this has to do with using nuclear waste from currently running reactors to generate electricity. (If thorium is part of that waste and you already knew that sorry)

drucken2• 14 years ago

Thorium MSRs process nuclear waste from current production reactors too. Sorry, I assumed people reading about this article new that.

uvdiv3• 14 years ago

The photo @11:30 wasn't identified correctly. She's talking about spent fuel, high-level waste ("very big problem"), but the photo slide is absolutely not that at all; it is stored depleted uranium hexafluoride, a byproduct of isotope enrichment. (The site is the USEC gaseous diffusion plant in Paducah, Kentucky, USA). Comparatively benign chemical waste.

(Maybe I misunderstood, but the talk seemed to imply that spent fuel storage was being shown. It wasn't.)

http://g.co/maps/b9haq

http://www.usec.com/media/photo-gallery

http://web.ead.anl.gov/uranium/faq/storage/faq16.cfm

vinayan3• 14 years ago

I thought this was a joke... I guess not.

billsix• 14 years ago

Hiring a Ruby Developer is not hard.

CookWithMe• 14 years ago

I never thought someone would use something associated with "Fail early, fail often" in the same sentence with nuclear reactors.

ses• 14 years ago

These two have admirable goals but I don't think I'm alone in finding it hard to justify the terms 'nuclear reactor' and 'startup' in the same sentence together. It's incredibly judgemental I know, but I have a hard time taking those two young PhD students on a stage talking about nuclear power seriously... and I'm a young person myself. It just makes me think, will anyone take such a business seriously if they brand themselves as a tech startup? IMHO they would do better to actively steer themselves away from being seen in this light.

Think Hiring a Ruby Developer is Hard? Try Staffing a Nuclear Reactor Startup

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