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NPRE 199 Undergraduate Seminar Series - Tim Grunloh

Event Type
Seminar/Symposium
Sponsor
NPRE 199 Undergraduate Seminar Series
Date
Feb 9, 2021   12:00 - 12:50 pm  
Speaker
Tim Grunloh, Reactor Engineer, Oklo Inc.
Cost
Free and Open to the Public
E-Mail
bmeline@illinois.edu
Phone
217-333-2295
Views
25
Originating Calendar
NPRE seminars

Oklo and the Aurora

Oklo is a nuclear technology developer based in Sunnyvale, CA. The Aurora is our first product, a MW-scale fast reactor designed to provide clean, cheap, reliable energy to offgrid communities who largely rely on diesel generators for electricity. Oklo developed a novel combined license application for the Aurora, was submitted to and accepted for review by the NRC in 2020. This was the first ever combined license application for an advanced non-light water reactor and for a microreactor. The COLA is currently under review by the NRC.

Dr. Grunloh is a reactor engineer with Oklo and will discuss some insights into developing market-driven reactors for today’s energy challenges. Dr. Grunloh will also draw and his current and past experience to provide a few remarks on how entrepreneurs might secure various types of funding to grow early stage companies.

Bio: Tim Grunloh earned his Bachelor's from Illinois in NPRE in 2011. He earned his Ph.D. from the Univesity of Michigan in 2016 with a dissertation on advanced overlapping domain coupling methodologies for mixed fidelity codes as applied to the system code TRACE and the high fidelity CFD code STAR-CCM+. From 2016-2020, he worked at Illinois Rocstar LLC, located in Champaign. There he worked on a large number of projects spanning topics including solid rocket motor aging, consumer product optimization, reduced order model formulation, and many others.  These projects employed varied computational methods such as lumped parameter, finite volume, lattice Boltzmann, to name a few. He recently took a job as a reactor engineer at an emerging startup in the nuclear space, Oklo. 

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