Caroline DeWitte

So like just to be clear, if you're worried about nuclear waste, you literally *want* fast reactors asap. That is the one way to consume the waste and reduce the lifetime it needs to be stored. (And btw they make clean electricity, in case you're also worried about environment.)

Our first NRC license!

I think few know or understand this- Jigar Shah (@JigarShahDC), after being a part of the driving success in solar pv scaling, turned his eyes to see how he could do the same for advanced nuclear. He saw the chicken-and-egg scenario of the complete lack of nuclear fuel supply chain and had the vision for funding both sides of the equation-- fuel enrichment on one side and companies that have demand to buy and fab fuel on the other -- to unlock development. The structural issues of the Loan Programs Office made this challenging to accomplish during his time but i still believe this is the best way to get fuel (fresh fuel anyway) in America going again. At Oklo we are uniquely interested in buying a bulk of fuel because unlike design firms, where generally the utility would own/operate and buy fuel, we plan to own and operate a whole fleet and buy our own fuel. Another thing that was challenging is that the most compelling cost numbers for SFR reactors are not publicly available for verification, although good cost analyses can and have been performed. Metal cooled fast reactors have something like 500 reactor-years of operational history. At least now, the Meta announcement shows the dominance of this design type (Terrapower and us). On another note, related to our recent tweet exchange, it is strange the narrative around us and the DOE and NRC. We took our lumps for leaning in before anyone else on the non-LWR reactor side with the NRC. When the NRC denied our application (out of process and suddenly) we did not even formally respond for our side of the story-- we literally just got right back to meeting with them to submit again. We had a successful readiness review with NRC for our Aurora plant last year just about the time we were selected for the DOE Reactor Pilot Program. We were weeks away from that application submittal which NRC already said had no gaps to successful acceptance. The DOE too, has a long and successful history of building and regulating nuclear plants. And now, we hope to be part of forging an interesting future where both DOE and NRC play crucial roles.

@JigarShahDC @EnergyDominant Can we invite you to visit one of our sites? :) Idaho has so much going on with Aurora and the fuel facility but so do a couple others.

Certainly agree. We've always been the team to lean hard into nrc engagement since 10+ years ago when all advanced reactors wanted to be "first to be second"! We have the following active NRC regulatory processes: - isotope facility license: NRC application under review (visit to facility last Thursday!) - topical report for fleet based operations under review by NRC - recycling facility active NRC pre-application work In addition to: -Aurora/INL: successfully completed NRC readiness review just before selection into DOE RPP -Aurora/Eielson: expected to be NRC licensed -Auroras/Ohio: expected to be NRC licensed -Several fuel related facilities expected to be NRC licensed and currently in DOE regulatory. A rundown is available at: oklo.com/regulatory

Billie Eilish made a great point. For most of the last 12+ years of working to build our company, we lived in a mobile home in California, and for a number of those years we paid ourselves the least within our company. Within the last year, our stock became worth more than a billion dollars on paper which still feels wild to put in writing but enough others did already. Oddly enough, about a year ago this time, our stock was worth 9 figures but we still couldn't sell it, and we actually struggled to buy a Bay Area relatively entry level home to get out of the mobile home with our newborn. Earlier this year we were able to move into a house house. We are still restricted in how much we can sell when (that's just how it works) although we've sold more now (still single digit percentage i think). But we've given away more than 3.5 times what we've sold for ourselves so we are trying to live those values. Her message is real. I'm very imperfect but i believe what the Bible said about true religion being about taking care of the poor and the orphans, and that it is hard for a rich man to get to heaven. The more I've seen over this year the more i think people have a right to be mad about where we are as a country regarding inequality. I hope to teach my son these values.

I have to say it hurts my heart to see the people that serve our country not being paid for extended periods of time. The fact that lawmakers are still being paid adds insult to injury. I'm proud that at Oklo we've never missed a paycheck in our 10ish years of payroll... even when it meant refinancing our mobile home 😅

I'm still astounded from the incredible groundbreaking last week! So many thanks to our team and too many friends/investors/partners to name. I'm not sure that what is happening in nuclear or specifically with Oklo has fully sunk in for the whole ecosystem- markets, suppliers, policy makers, etc. In the last couple weeks we announced groundbreaking and start of construction of our first plant, Aurora-INL being part of the Reactor Pilot Program-- effectively de-risking the regulatory path, and our recycling facility-- effectively de-risking a domestic, cost effective, and nearly limitless fuel source. In the last few months we raised over a billion dollars to make this all happen. This is just the beginning...

Jake and i were married in 2011 and started Oklo in 2013. I always thought I would change my name once/if we had kids. And here we are! So fyi I'm Caroline DeWitte now.

@danielkoss_ Thanks! Did you look through the dashboard including all of the pull down menus and info boxes? Lmk what you'd like more on

@caorilne Please share more of these seemingly trivial infos about Oklo. You have many excited retail investors that appreciate every bit of info!

Did you know the Oklo family of companies has six distinct regulatory licensing processes involving nrc and doe or both? 1) Aurora inl powerhouse 2) Aurora fuel fab 3) large scale fuel fab 4) recycling 5) isotope reactor 6) isotope facility Check out the dashboard for details:

I shouldn't dignify this but i have to ask why does @UCSUSA pay for such unscientific and inaccurate work, and attacking clean energy which is scientifically sound? Ed knows, or should know, we've been working with the US Department of Energy since our MOU with them on fuel and site in 2016. That fuel material was awarded to Oklo from a competitive process in 2019. We are now in progress on the 3rd of 4 DOE authorization steps for the DOE authorized Aurora Fuel Facility located at Idaho National Laboratory. The application to the NRC referenced is for a large scale commercial fuel fabrication facility.

The #nuclear startup @oklo says that it expects to have its first reactor up and running by early 2028. But the reactor cannot run without fuel. And it is not going to submit an application for the fuel fabrication facility before 2026. You do the math. nrc.gov/docs/ML2517/ML…

It was surreal to be able to be in the West Wing yesterday, but far more so, it was surreal to see these historic changes for nuclear deployment come to pass. I think the last time i was in the White House was when Obama held a nuclear roundtable. From Obama to Trump 1 to Biden to Trump 2, we have seen national support for advanced nuclear continuously grow. Let's go!

Let's permit and build clean firm reliable affordable power plants

Nor the first "transportable" reactor

Folks. Please stop. You can't hold a kg+ of significantly irradiated fuel unless you want a sub-second timescale fasttrack to win a Darwin Award. ...This is why fuel can be self-protecting, an important concept in nuclear security. Nothing anyone is building will be the: - first smr - first commercial smr - first commercial smr in the US - first microreactor - first commercial microreactor - first commercial microreactor in the US ... in fact the first commercial reactor in the US ever was a "microreactor" (check out GE Vallecitos) - first advanced (ie non-LWR) reactor - first commercial advanced reactor (see US, Russia and China) - first commercial advanced microreactor (see Russia) - first advanced reactor to sell power on the grid in the US (see EBR-II, Peach Bottom, decades ago) This is a good thing. The primary reactor types are well proven. The important thing is not whiz-bang "brand new" tech. Nor is it welding together non-fueled test loops (as some have sold their "prototypes" but yes we already did major non-fueled test loop testing campaigns, see METL). It's the design fundamentals, it's working with physics to ensure safety, it's figuring out the important places for nuclear QA and where commercial supply chains can be used (See SpaceX), it's fuel, it's business model and regulatory thoughtfulness. All the boring stuff.

I think the second paragraph in Caroline's response here is key. When I was at a national laboratory, everything had an extreme bias towards overclassifying things. I had seen entire systems classified into a higher quality category when only a single component in that system should have been in that bucket. There would be uncertainty from an engineer not living or breathing that system that wouldn't be sure what the proper categorization was, and a manager would never tell anyone to be less conservative. I think the most obvious concretization of the general philosophy is that when DOE was restarting TREAT, they designated the safety rods, which were not originally "safety-related," as such. Because, how could a safety rod not be safety-related? But, per the analyses and many years of prior, actual operating experience, we know that those rods don't actually meet the definition. TLDR; a lot of issues stem from doing it wrong or, once experienced enough, being too conservative due to learned biases.

I agree, sorta: I was part of a working group trying to map the regulatory requirements (10cfr50 appendix b) to iso and it just isn't straightforward in terms of the areas of requirements and what iso 9000 covers. Ultimately there is now a mapping that can be used to help dedicate iso 9000 items for safety-related use. Nqa-1 is the standard built to match the requirements 1:1. With more and more time i believe more and more that it's not so much the standards (although i don't think nqa-1 is ideal), but how they are applied, and the lack of modern document control, that really weighs nuclear down.

@caorilne Nuclear QA is a big one. Simply adopting a widely recognized QA standard like iso:9001 opens up a massive number of vendors and suppliers.

@HopfJames @Jaro_rogue You're exactly right that finding bounding ways to do seismic analysis is key. It's something we've been working on with the nrc for a number of years. I actually just learned some promising things on this topic today! Hopefully we will have some concrete good news on this soon.

One article I read referred to extensive site characterizations for a small SMR. One of the main things was determining max local seismic loads for the site in question. Do you think that that could be avoided, using some generic approach, e.g, the reactor must be able to take bounding g-loads that are determined for entire regions of the country? If so, the site evaluation would just be a demonstration that the site's known, already published environmental paramteres (max g-loads and ambient temperature ranges, etc..) are bounded by the reactor design's licensing bases. The notion that even micro-reactors are "major actions" is absurd and must be done away with. Any way to do that? Sounds like a job for Trump!

Totally agree. I believe that capability already exists, since only new information need to be re-reviewed in S-COLAs. This should be minimal in page count and cost, anticipating the site and environmental info is all that changes. And now that the RHDRA framework is being worked on and potentially piloted by nrc with us, I'm even more optimistic. On top of that, there has been recent political effort to see how NEPA, ESA, and NHPA can be right-sized for various nuclear plants since even small or micro nuclear plants are "major federal actions" requiring these analyses.

Great take about how much of it is fear of lawsuits. For decades, the anti side sued relentlessly, while the industry, or other pro-nuclear entities never sued. This may indeed change things. My view has been that rigorous evaluation of a given reactor *design* is OK. The time and cost of deploying each (carbon copy) reactor, at different sites, etc.. is the problem, especially for smaller reactors. Having a long, expensive regulatory process for each invidual reactor deployment, similar to the burden faced by deploment of a large reactor, would be fatal for micro-reactors and perhaps even for SMRs. Do you agree? How much cost, per reactor deployment, could your reactor withstand? My guess was no more than ~$1 million, for each Oklo reactor, at a new site. we have to develop generic, cookie-cutter processes for deployment of approved reactor designs. Basically, little if any licensing analysis/activity for each reactor.

It's a blessing and a curse to have a strong federal regulator. It's in no one's best interest to have 50 different state regulations. That being said i have long thought that the lawsuit could have benefits inside and outside the NRC just by existing. The NRC's legal office has ensured that the nrc is conservative enough (read: slow/says no a lot) on all decisions to win on anti-nuclear lawsuits. But the NRC might take on a different culture if they also balanced being guarded against pro-nuclear lawsuits, i.e. lawsuits against them for being too slow or not processing licensing actions efficiently. The devil as always will be in the details and whatever actually happens with the lawsuit. Could be good, could be not good. I think we see continued positive movement, but we will be able to report real changes soon as we are imminently working with them on another application submittal!

@caorilne Ignoring the language of the lawsuit, what do you think could be improved with the NRC and have you seen any improvements post Wrights appointment and DOGE? Have you guys been told to expect any significant changes, clearly there is a problem otherwise 4 states wouldn't be suing