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

[kevinalexbrown]

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.

[wisty]

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.

[ScotterC]

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]

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.

[forgottenpaswrd]

"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.

[neutronicus]

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.

[Loic]

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

[starfox]

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

[jff]

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

[larsberg]

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.

[jph]

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]

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

[mhd]

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

[jstin]

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.

[neutronicus]

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

[zecho]

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

[res]

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.

[pavel_lishin]

Or ones hoping to build the first nuclear broactor.

[kemiller]

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.

[squozzer]

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.

[philwelch]

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

[SkyMarshal]

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/

[nknight]

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.

[uvdiv]

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

[achy]

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.

[ylem]

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

[drucken]

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]

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)

[CookWithMe]

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

[amalag]

I thought thorium was the frontier in nuclear reactors.

[Symmetry]

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.

[InclinedPlane]

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.

[kemiller]

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.

[starfox]

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.

[ses]

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.

[KevinMS]

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

[ericb]

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.

[scheff]

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?

[vinayan3]

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

[billsix]

Hiring a Ruby Developer is not hard.