PAI-300 · Education

The Unattended Plant: Energy That Ships, Intelligence That Crews It

Portable nuclear is the first energy technology that moves to its load instead of tethering the load to a grid, and a plant too small to carry a round-the-clock crew needs physical AI as its crew. Three countries are already building that autonomy. This course builds the half this review did not locate work on: the layer that lets an unattended plant demonstrate what it did to someone who was not there and has no reason to trust it. Two benches carry the argument: the plant boundary where the joules cross, and the replay where a regulator checks rather than trusts.

Skilled → Frontier·5 modules · 10 labs·10 lessons
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THE HORIZON

Where this sits, and what moves it.

Binding constraint · Staffing cost per delivered joule. A plant small enough to ship is a plant too small to carry a round-the-clock crew, and that arithmetic -- not the reactor physics -- is the floor that decides which designs exist.

Was impossible

Energy tethered its load to a grid. A source that travels to the work rather than the work travelling to the source was a logistics idea without a machine that could run without people standing next to it.

Is probable

Three countries are building that autonomy, and this course says so plainly rather than claiming the space is empty. A flat source meeting a bursty load is an impedance problem with two named failure modes, and it is buildable today.

Becomes possible

The half this review did not locate work on is the evidence layer: what an authority can CHECK rather than trust about a plant with no one on site. The course ends at the venue where that argument has to be made, because the missing piece is a method and a standard rather than a technology.

Every hard thing was impossible until the constraint that made it impossible was named. How we read a frontier →

Module 1

Energy that ships to its load

Establish the portable-nuclear ladder as one coherent object, and price a joule where it is actually used rather than where it is generated.

  1. L3One rung per class of machineThe portable-nuclear ladder spans from milliwatt cells to barge-mounted plants. How many orders of magnitude is that?Read the portable-nuclear ladder as a continuous spectrum and match each rung to the machine it powers.→
  2. L4The fully burdened jouleComparing a container reactor against a diesel generator over five years, which input most decides the answer?Price energy where it is used rather than where it is made, and find the crossover against trucked fuel.→
Module 2

The crew that isn't there

Establish why staffing is the cost floor that kills small plants, and meet the programme that already died of it.

  1. L3The staffing floorA 1 MW plant using a conventional round-the-clock crew. What does labour alone cost per kilowatt-hour?Show that the staffing model which works at gigawatt scale is what makes megawatt scale uneconomic.→
  2. L3The graveyardThe 1960s portable reactors were abandoned. What was the cause?Meet the portable-reactor programme that already failed, and identify precisely what killed it.→
Module 3

The plant boundary

Establish that a flat source meeting a bursty load is an impedance problem, and that its two failure modes need different instruments.

  1. L4A flat core meets a bursty fleetA flat 1.2 MW core against a bursty fleet, with nothing in between. What fraction of the core's output is wasted?Quantify the two ways a plant boundary fails when a constant source meets a stochastic load.→
  2. L4Capacity or timingYou can buy storage or dispatchable compute, not both. Which closes the gap?Show that storage and dispatchable sinks fix different failures, and that dispatch order decides whether storage works at all.→
Module 4

Proving what the plant did

Build the check a regulator could run on an unattended plant, and find the condition under which it is worth nothing.

  1. L4Replay the shiftA plant files a shift with a six-hour undeclared derate. Against a twin at ±2% fidelity, how many hours are flagged?Use a deterministic twin to check a filed claim without visiting the site.→
  2. L4Who wrote the logThe replay is re-run with a log written by the plant's own software. What does the regulator see?Find the condition that makes the whole check worthless, and state it as a design requirement.→
Module 5

The regulator's question

Close the course on what an authority can check rather than trust, and locate the venue where that argument is actually made.

  1. L4Certificates, not claimsA regulator receives ten thousand hours of clean operating logs for an autonomous controller. What has been established?Distinguish an artifact a regulator can evaluate from a claim a regulator must believe.→
  2. L3The venueWhere does an argument about how autonomous plants should be evaluated actually get decided?Locate the institutional setting where an evidence argument for an autonomous plant would actually be made.→