2024 MIT Sustainability Conference: Startup Exchange Lightning Talks - Femto Energy

JACOPO BUONGIORNO: All right. Thanks, Randy. This five-minute presentation format is great. I'll test it tomorrow in my class. Let's see how the students react. So I'm Jacopo Buongiono. I'm a Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT, also co-founder of Femto Energy. We refer to it as a clean energy solutions company.

So who are we? Well, we might not shine for gender diversity, but we have a good diversity of backgrounds here, ranging from architecture, Norman Foster, you might have heard of him, Nuclear technology, myself, Roberto Casula, the energy world, Michael Ford for operations of energy systems, finances, Walid, design, Ian, et cetera.

OK, so what's the problem, or what's our goal? It's to deliver plentiful energy that is secure, environmentally sustainable, and equitably distributed. And I would argue, the challenge at the moment is that current low-energy alternatives, whether they are wind, solar, or even nuclear on the grid, are often not easily adapted to a remote off-grid locations, industrial processes. They don't scale well. They're not available everywhere. And often, they're not affordable.

So what is our solution? Well, it's centered around a technology that we call the nuclear battery. Nuclear battery really is a small nuclear reactor, nuclear fission reactor, just to be clear, not fusion, which is still a few years out there, generating of the order of 10, maybe 20 megawatts. A nuclear reactor is a heat source. If you want electricity, you've get a couple to a turbogenerator. And you get electricity. But naturally, you get both heat and electricity combined, which a lot of customers are interested in.

Nuclear is zero-carbon in operation, lifecycle CO2 emissions very low, comparable to wind, lower than anything else out there. The idea of these small reactors-- here you see an artistic rendering, not very realistic, but great because it was made by Norman himself, of what a nuclear battery might look like. But the idea of this small reactor, these nuclear batteries, to be mass fabricated in factories, completely standardized, sort of plug-and-play, which means, really, days between the time that these machines arrive to the site to the time you start generating your heat and electricity.

They could operate for 3 to 10 years without refueling. That's the beauty of nuclear. The energy density of the fuel is extraordinarily high, millions of times higher than fossil fuel. So there is not a need for frequent refueling. They can be air-cooled, reject the waste heat, essentially, to the atmosphere, instead of being linked through proximity to a body of water, be it the ocean, a river, et cetera. Semi-autonomous operations, that's required, because a lot of operators would basically break the business model for these things.

Now, what is unique about these nuclear batteries, other than what I already said? Well, they're a very small site footprint. These basically fit in shipping containers. And the whole site could be order of an acre for generation of say, 10 or plus megawatts of electricity, 24/7 and clean. Incremental capacity, you could basically provision the capacity incrementally with a small initial capital investment, unlike traditional nuclear plants, which, of course, would set you back billions and billions of dollars. I already mentioned transportable, redeployable, very, very robust safety profile.

And nuclear is not the cheapest. It's never the cheapest. But once it's built, then actually, its cost is pretty predictable. And for some applications, this predictability over a long period of time is highly desirable.

Now, Femto is not a nuclear technology development company. We don't have our own nuclear battery design, in spite of the pretty picture that I showed you earlier. But we work with various established nuclear reactor companies. I'm sure you've heard of Westinghouse. You might not be familiar with BWXT. That's actually the company that makes reactors for the US nuclear Navy, for submarines and aircraft carriers. And these companies have been developing these nuclear batteries.

And so what do we do? Well, we are really a project development and execution company. So we pooled together the expertise that we have in-house, with working with reactor vendors, with customers, et cetera, to set up projects where these nuclear batteries are coupled to some production activities that the clients are interested in, the customers are interested in, and realize an integrated clean energy system. And so here you see some of the key words of things that we are eager to work on. They range from techno-economic analysis. Of course, that would be the front end to show the promise of the project. Nuclear reactor design, safety and materials evaluation, operations, and training, assembly, et cetera cetera--

So we like to think about ourselves as being at the center of a little ecosystem of, again, vendors, prospective operators of these machines. And the model here that we have in mind is a fleet of nuclear batteries. It doesn't make sense to have one-off. You've got to be able to operate a fleet of potentially hundreds, maybe thousands, being optimistic, of these nuclear batteries, because that's how the costs, particularly the operating costs, are going to come down, because there is a range of services that operating, refueling, and maintaining these machines is going to require. And that again, makes sense if you have a multiple of units.

So we are ready to support across many sectors. Again, this is the value proposition here. This is not for the grid. And as we know, the grid is only-- what, a quarter of the CO2 emissions is associated with the grid. The rest is industry, buildings, transportation, et cetera. And so this solution, we think, based on our analysis, is almost like the Swiss knife equivalent of the energy world. You could use it almost everywhere. And so we are ready to support and deliver. And we just finished our first front end assessment for an offshore oil and gas that desires to decarbonize their offshore applications. And it looks pretty promising.

So with that, I'll stop. I think I ran out of time. So I can't tell you exactly what the meaning of Femto Energy is. But if you're curious, come see me at the table out there. And I'll tell you what's behind the name. Thank you.

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