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 nobody is building: 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.
▶ Start the course ← All coursesWhere 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.
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.
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.
The half nobody is building 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.