I first approached Dr. Leslie Dewan last October with the intention of featuring her work as a nuclear scientist. I wanted to discuss the power of nuclear energy and its place in fighting climate change reversal for a piece in our green tech series. But when we finally spoke, I learned that her eight-year-old nuclear fusion startup, Transatomic Power Corporation (TPC), was winding down.
Dewan and her team weren't simply letting their work die away, though. Instead, they embraced failure and decided to put all of TPC's research in the public domain—they wouldn't profit from this move, but scientists could use and improve on the methods they'd developed.
“It seemed like we just weren’t going to be able to scale up rapidly enough, so we wanted to be pragmatic about it,” Dewan told BostInno in 2018. “The goal is to have advanced reactors be built. So the best way to move the needle and make that happen is by sharing our work for other startups to use.”
Today, all of TPC's assets including its patents, designs, blueprint and research papers are available on GitHub. Dewan, who also testified in front of the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Energy Subcommittee on the future of nuclear energy, wanted to make TPC's journey count.
A year on, she is now the founding principal at Nucleation Capital, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based venture capital firm that invests in 21st-century nuclear technology. We caught up with her to glean insights and lessons that emerged from TPC's failure for a feature we're calling "Inno Autopsy," where we dissect a shuttered startup to learn more about how failure can push the innovation community forward.
Why’d you launch the business? What did it do?
We were incredibly drawn to the molten salts reactor (MSR), which is a nuclear fission reactor where the fuel is a molten salt mixture. We believe in nuclear energy and were extremely excited about the safety benefits of molten salts reactor. MSR was first prototyped in the 1960s and met with some success. And we wanted to create an MSR with modern designs and better computer simulations.
What was your biggest milestone or success?
When we started TPC, there wasn't a regulatory pathway for nuclear energy. Through our work, I was able to give congressional testimonies and work with legislators and regulators to make it possible to build advanced reactors. Public opinion of nuclear power is changing for the better.I'm very proud of the technology we were able to develop. It had some substantial benefits on the safety side, and I was happy about the way we were able to wrap up the company and put everything out in the public domain.
Describe what TPC was like a year before it shuttered
We wanted to create an MSR with modern designs and better computer simulations, compared to the ones first prototyped in 1960s. The idea worked in theory, but we encountered complications during the build-out stage.
What happened?
We realized that we had made a mistake while recreating the design, which steered us away from the original goal of designing a reactor that could use spent fuel rods, managing the disposal of waste efficiently. The updated design still had benefits but wasn’t as good as we initially thought it would be. When we did the redesign, we had a 2x or 3x better product vs 20x better. Since the redesign took a long time, we realized that it wouldn’t be able to scale as hard and fast as expected.
What were some early warning signs?
We had made some mistakes while recreating the design, which steered us away from the original goal of designing a reactor that could use spent fuel rods, managing disposal of waste efficiently.
Could the end have been avoided? How?
I am glad our team and investors were on board with putting all our work in the public domain. Some people commented on the calculations. I wish we put that whitepaper out earlier. One of the things I want to do is to encourage our portfolio companies to think about what part of their IP really matters. We would have picked up the signs much earlier on — much earlier heads up, we would have much more time to adjust our trajectory.
How did this experience personally affect you (if it did) outside of the office?
Personally, it was a tough experience realizing that the reactor couldn’t consume nuclear waste - that’s the problem I really wanted to solve. That was a tough piece for me. That we were not going to solve the problem we were going to solve. At the same time, I was so glad throughout the process that we had such a great team and investors who were ethical and moral people aligned with what we wanted to do. The situation was so tough and knowing that all of the people were ethical, moral people who would do the right thing.
What were your biggest lessons learned from the experience?
The biggest lesson we learned was to have put our whitepaper in the public domain earlier than we did.
Describe your current business through the lens of the shuttered one; what’s different?
What I do now is adjacent to my work with TPC. I am able to draw very heavily from my experiences at TPC. I encourage them to put their information out in the public domain, learn from the missteps I made and advise our portfolio companies on the best path forward. I’m lucky to draw from those experiences.
Watch Dr. Dewan's TEDx talk on the power of nuclear energy and TPC's journey below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoAcntoAVXE&t=44s
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
