Acclaimed Physicist And His Daughter Are Burying Tiny Nuclear Reactors A Mile Underground

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By Christopher Helman, Forbes. 

Excerpt: Liz Muller convinced her dad Richard to forego retirement and become an entrepreneur...a revolutionary approach to making atomic energy cheaper and safer. For more than a decade, Elizabeth Muller and her father have taken a three-mile hike...through the hills of Berkeley, California.... ...Richard A. Muller, who devised the modern carbon dating method used to determine the age of ancient plant and animal remains before he was 33 and won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award at 38..., after 40 years of teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, the 82-year-old physicist is on the verge of having his greatest commercial impact,.... ...says Liz, 47... “As a kid growing up in Berkeley, all my teachers and friends were anti-nuclear....” She too leaned anti-nuke, .... ...she moved to Paris in 1999 to earn a master’s at ESCP Business School.... In France, she explains, everyone supported nuclear power as a “clean, reliable global warming solution.” ...In 2022, ...the Mullers hatched the idea behind their nuclear power startup, Deep Fission...surprisingly simple: Drill a 30-inch-diameter borehole a mile into the earth, fill it with water, then insert a teeny-tiny nuclear reactor that will boil the water at the bottom and send it up a separate pipe to run a steam turbine. Each hole will generate 15 megawatts, enough to power 12,000 homes. Put 70 of them in a field and you can power a one-gigawatt artificial intelligence data center.... 

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