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Think Hiring a Ruby Developer is Hard? Try Staffing a Nuclear Reactor Startup
- Loic 15y agoJust cross the Atlantic, open a subsidiary in France. You will find there a lot of extremely qualified engineers for everything nuclear related.
- starfox 15y agoAre they still using Francs for their units of reactivity, or did that get changed to Euros as well?
- starfox 15y agoI'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_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.
- csomar 15y agoHow is your first comment relevant? Answer that, and you'll figure out why you were down voted.
- starfox 15y agoWell, I'm sure it's something that could be worked out, but there will likely be naming issues between French and Non-French nuclear engineers working together. It seems relevant to me, given that the topic was to bring French engineers into a U.S. startup.
- ma2rten 15y agoComments which are voted down are often misunderstood. More often then not, those comments consist just of a single sentence. A few days ago I made a comment, which had 3 downvotes, however the 3 posts where I explained myself had 15 upvotes in total. I think it's great that HN has this feedback mechanism that sometimes lacks in real life (especially in non face-to-face conversations).
- mrb 15y agoYou 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 15y agoBut then you have to operate in France, which by all accounts (from my European colleagues) may not be worth the cost :)
- jarek 15y agoLuckily you can just Change The World by doing a node.js startup in the Mission...
- mkuhn 15y agoI think what the GP tried to say is that France is not the easiest environment to launch a startup. Labor laws, taxes etc. make it one of the less desirable places in Europe to start a company.
- jarek 14y agoIf dealing with administrative stuff is too difficult for the entrepreneur, they could always try to find comparable talent elsewhere or to convince the established, proven talent to move where it's convenient for the entrepreneur.
- justincormack 14y agoIf dealing with government bureaucracy is not your thing, a nuclear startup probably isn't.
- jarek 14y agoThat node.js or iOS app startup is looking better all the time...
- Loic 14y agoI 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 15y agoI thought thorium was the frontier in nuclear reactors.
- starfox 15y ago80% 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 15y agoI 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.
- kemiller 15y agoThorium 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 15y agoIts 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 15y 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.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- kemiller 15y agoI 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.
- ScotterC 15y agoI'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 15y agoI 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.
- ScotterC 15y agoIt 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.
- mjwalshe 15y agoand $50Mill is probably not going to pay for building a test reactor and all the research that will need to be done before that plus you will need some decent HPC grunt to do you CFD modeling then real world physical models (1:1 and over scale is not cheap) to prove the math works.
- forgottenpaswrd 15y 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.
- mhd 15y agoI'm a bit scared that there might be "rockstar" nuclear engineers out there.
- zecho 15y agoThat won't happen until someone builds an incredibly popular framework for nuclear power.
- pavel_lishin 15y agoOr ones hoping to build the first nuclear broactor.
- jstin 15y agoI 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.
- res 15y agoI 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.
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- squozzer 15y agoNot 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 15y agoI 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/ http://www.navy.com/careers/nuclear-energy/
- philwelch 15y agoThe Navy trains operator-engineers, not design engineers. They are indeed one of the biggest sources of operator-engineers, though.
- nknight 15y agoMy 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 15y agoNinja 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 14y agoMust have 10 years experience with Waste-Annihilating Molten Salt Reactors.
- scheff 15y agoHow 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 15y agoSmart, good looking and ambitious. I should just give up.
- suyash 15y agoTry hiring a Hadoop or Machine Learning Architect, Ruby dev are easier trust me!
- achy 15y agoThe 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 15y agoI thought CANDU was acquired by a private company--do you foresee another Canadian research reactor after Chalk River?
- larsberg 15y agoThe 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.
- KevinMS 15y agoDon't perpetuate the myth that ruby developers are difficult to find.
- ericb 14y agoHave you tried to hire one in the Boston area lately? Our second Senior rails dev position has has been open for about 5 months.
- KevinMS 14y agoSo 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.
- ericb 14y agoWell, our last developer hire had no degree of any kind, is 20 while everyone else is 36-50 and he is working out great. We've had 1 resume in the last 2 months come in. I wouldn't want to spoil your pre-conceived notions, though. edit: By the way, I read your comment history. We do all our hiring through recruiters because we are a small team without the time to chase talent--our interest and time is spent coding. Maybe that is the issue--you won't work with recruiters, and most ruby shops are small, so they outsource hiring to recruiters. As a datapoint for you, I got this job through a recruiter, and I'm quite happy with it. Recruiters got me several other interviews with decent places as well. There are decent recruiters out there with real jobs--you just have to use your gut about who isn't sketchy. We gave this opening to 3 different recruiters that we work with--maybe they called you and you ignored them.
- kevinalexbrown 15y agoI'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 14y agoThis 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 14y agoSame 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaiont_Dam * 2009, 75 deaths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Sayano%E2%80%93Shushenskaya_hydroelectric_power_station_accident 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
- drucken 14y agoAnyone 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 14y agoI 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)
- drucken 14y agoThorium MSRs process nuclear waste from current production reactors too. Sorry, I assumed people reading about this article new that.
- uvdiv 14y agoThe 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://g.co/maps/b9haq http://www.usec.com/media/photo-gallery http://www.usec.com/media/photo-gallery http://web.ead.anl.gov/uranium/faq/storage/faq16.cfm http://web.ead.anl.gov/uranium/faq/storage/faq16.cfm
- vinayan3 14y agoI thought this was a joke... I guess not.
- billsix 14y agoHiring a Ruby Developer is not hard.
- CookWithMe 14y agoI never thought someone would use something associated with "Fail early, fail often" in the same sentence with nuclear reactors.
- ses 14y agoThese 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.