The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 447. Nuclear Power Is Safer Than Wind and Solar

00:00:00.940 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

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00:00:57.420 Hey everybody, so I had a great discussion today with someone I've wanted to talk to, the type of person I've wanted to talk to for a long time,

00:01:18.360 and turned out to be exactly the right person, James Walker.

00:01:21.320 He's a nuclear physicist and CEO of a very interesting company called NanoNuclear,

00:01:26.240 and Nano is making micro-reactors that are nuclear reactors that are portable, that can be moved around on the back of trucks.

00:01:32.640 And this is something I'm very interested in, being interested in the nexus, in the relationship between energy, environment, and the amelioration of poverty.

00:01:41.600 And it seems to me that investigating the provision of low-cost, resilient, widely distributable nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels is morally required.

00:01:56.900 Partly because we know, we know, this isn't some wild hypothesis, that if you can make people who are absolutely poverty-stricken relatively rich,

00:02:08.660 they start to care about the environmental future.

00:02:11.460 And so what that means is the fastest way to environmental sustainability is by the amelioration of poverty.

00:02:18.520 And the best way to do that is to provide low-cost energy, and potentially the best way to do that is with nuclear energy.

00:02:26.060 And so I think these guys are on the cutting edge.

00:02:28.300 So I talked to James Walker, who has an extremely interesting technical and managerial background, military background as well, about just exactly what they're up to.

00:02:39.040 That's all part and parcel of this.

00:02:40.660 So, you know, welcome aboard.

00:02:43.700 All right, Mr. Walker, James, you're CEO of NanoNuclear, and you've got a cool title, I think, Head of Reactor Development.

00:02:52.100 That's a cool title, and I was looking at your bio, and, you know, it's quite a lot of fun.

00:02:57.040 So what have we got here?

00:02:59.560 Extensive experience in engineering and project maintenance, including mining, construction, manufacturing, design, infrastructure, and safety management.

00:03:07.960 So that's a lot of practical work.

00:03:11.000 And so, you know, I'm very interested in talking to you today, and so thank you very much for agreeing to participate in this.

00:03:16.820 I've been following NanoNuclear on Twitter for quite a while, and I'll just give you some background so you know why I wanted to talk to you.

00:03:23.280 I mean, I've thought for years that it's utterly insane that we're not pursuing nuclear energy, like, at a rate that's as fast as we can possibly move.

00:03:31.820 And I have a lot of questions about simplicity of design.

00:03:35.900 And they're probably stupid questions, to be frank, but now I have the opportunity to ask them, and hopefully I won't be quite so stupid after I've done this conversation.

00:03:43.340 So do you want to start by telling everybody what it is that you're up to with NanoNuclear and why you think what you're doing is plausible and plausible, helpful, and possibly revolutionary?

00:03:56.120 I mean, you're up in Canada.

00:03:59.120 Take mining sites or a lot of the First Nation communities, they're in remote areas.

00:04:05.580 All of these things are run on diesel power, and you can't substitute this out for anything else until micro-reactors come on the scene.

00:04:11.920 And then suddenly you've got to market this, thousands of mining sites, hundreds of remote communities, island communities, charging stations, freebie vehicles.

00:04:21.720 You can essentially put these remote power systems in the middle of nowhere, and they would power your communities or businesses for 15, 20 years.

00:04:32.300 And that's a wonderful business opportunity that's never really been present before.

00:04:35.760 And that's why we pursued the micro-reactor route.

00:04:39.940 Okay, so let me get some terminology straight so I understand exactly what we're talking about here.

00:04:45.300 So we have large-scale nuclear reactors in Ontario, and they're planning to refurbish the Pickering site, which is a new decision, I think, that came out actually last week.

00:04:54.320 And a good decision, thank God.

00:04:56.360 We're not as dopey as California or Germany, let's say.

00:04:58.840 Now, you talked about small modular reactors, and I've looked into the molten salt technology reactors and so forth, but you're differentiating that down further to micro-reactors.

00:05:08.840 So do you want to distinguish for us, draw a distinction between a micro-reactor and a small modular reactor?

00:05:14.420 And can you tell us the scale of power production, you know, in house equivalents, let's say, a standard reactor will power something like a small city, if I understand, if I've got my numbers aligned properly.

00:05:28.920 A small modular reactor, I'm not sure about their power-generating capacity.

00:05:33.120 And what exactly constitutes a micro-reactor?

00:05:36.220 So differentiate that for us.

00:05:37.680 Absolutely.

00:05:38.760 So let's start with the conventional civil power plant, because that's what everyone's familiar with, because we've been using those for decades.

00:05:45.500 So those things are powering cities and beyond.

00:05:48.700 So usually a significant portion of your national grid.

00:05:53.300 And that's in gigawatts, you know.

00:05:57.020 But when you shrink down to an SMR, you're talking about something really between, say, 20 megawatts and about 300 megawatts.

00:06:06.180 And when you're getting up to about 300 megawatts, you're getting up to quite a large reactor.

00:06:10.740 And so that's really the definition we can place in an SMR.

00:06:16.660 A micro-reactor really is anything between, well, anything less than 20 megawatts.

00:06:22.340 At that point, you're dealing with very small reactors.

00:06:25.960 Okay.

00:06:26.940 Yeah.

00:06:27.740 And so that's where we are.

00:06:29.280 And we're at the low end of that, because we want to transport a micro-reactor.

00:06:32.960 Okay, so let's zero in on the micro-reactors now for a moment, and then we'll talk about the technology.

00:06:38.400 Okay, so when I've been thinking about this, because I've been thinking about the relationship between energy and the environment for a long time.

00:06:44.920 So when I've been thinking about this, a number of things struck me.

00:06:47.940 The first is the absolute power density of nuclear fuel, which is unsurpassed by any standard except for fusion.

00:06:55.360 And we're not at fusion levels yet, although I talked to someone about that recently, and that'll be released quite soon.

00:07:01.580 And so then I thought, well, we've obviously had something approximating micro-reactors that are reliable for a very long time.

00:07:09.340 Because we've been using nuclear subs for what?

00:07:12.040 How long now?

00:07:12.680 70 years?

00:07:13.460 Is it at least 70 years?

00:07:15.460 Yes.

00:07:15.700 Right?

00:07:16.820 I mean, so that's a long time.

00:07:18.220 And they fit in a submarine, so they're not very big.

00:07:21.460 And submarines move around, so they're obviously portable.

00:07:23.960 And the people on them don't die from radiation poison.

00:07:26.460 And they can stay underwater forever.

00:07:28.300 And they're obviously extraordinarily reliable.

00:07:31.060 So then I keep thinking, well, why the hell aren't they everywhere?

00:07:35.260 And so let's talk about everywhere for a minute.

00:07:37.760 I mean, there's some real advantages to distributed systems, I would say.

00:07:41.920 You pointed to the fact that they could be used in isolated communities.

00:07:45.040 But I'm also wondering, it's like, well, why not a network grid of micro-reactors as a substitute for these multi-billion dollar massive reactors that can, but don't very often, fail cataclysmically?

00:07:58.820 And so, I mean, is there, as well as a market for these isolated places that you describe, is there the broader capacity of making a resilient networked power grid that gives countries sovereignty over their own power supply, but also has the advantages of, like, multiplicity of provision?

00:08:17.200 Which, you know, I mean, we have a distributed system for fossil fuel, and there's some real utility in that, because if part of it goes down, the rest of it doesn't.

00:08:25.040 And so tell me your thoughts on those sorts of matters.

00:08:29.440 Well, it's interesting you bring that up, because we were recently at a conference, in fact, just last week, and a representative of the Polish government approached us about exactly this.

00:08:38.000 And they have a grid system where certain shutdowns mean that the whole grid gets lost.

00:08:45.620 And so they've really come up with no real solution to this, apart from micro-reactors, which they believe they could space these accordingly, so that in the event of a blackout in a certain area, the grid can be substituted with other power sources along the way.

00:08:59.580 And this is a far more preferential solution than, say, a big grid system, or even a diesel generator system, which is actually less consistent and requires the daily importation of diesel just to maintain it.

00:09:14.580 Right, right, right.

00:09:15.660 Well, what these systems, are they resilient to solar flares, just out of curiosity?

00:09:20.880 Like, because this is also a concern, right?

00:09:23.540 Because a solar flare is about a once-in-a-century occurrence.

00:09:27.080 And the fact that a solar flare could take out our whole power grid seems to me a lot more pervasive and present a threat than this, like, climate alarmism that we're short-circuiting ourselves about.

00:09:37.580 So I know that the distribution infrastructure still might be susceptible to, say, solar flare-induced shocks.

00:09:45.500 But what about the reactors themselves?

00:09:47.080 Well, the good part about a reactor is that it's almost entirely mechanical.

00:09:51.860 Obviously, you can make the argument that the mechanics can be very controlled by the electrics.

00:09:57.640 But the truth of it is that, like, the reason why micro-reactors are very safe is that, say there was a big solar flare and it knocked out the electrics and the mechanical systems all simultaneously failed.

00:10:09.140 Like, with a micro-reactor, you can't get the disaster or the core melt, which is the big problem with a big civil plant.

00:10:20.920 And the reason for that is that it can't generate enough heat, especially in our designs, to actually melt the reactors.

00:10:28.740 So it passively doesn't.

00:10:30.960 Right, right.

00:10:31.500 So it just shuts itself down.

00:10:33.460 And even then, say the uranium just keeps getting hotter, it's fine.

00:10:37.820 It'll just radiate heat out and it's not going to melt.

00:10:40.140 And it doesn't matter.

00:10:41.640 Like, the worst thing that can happen with a reactor is if, I don't know, it's a coolant leak, which leads to a core overheat, which leads to core melt, which can happen in big reactors.

00:10:50.560 It's not going to kill anyone, but it's messy to clean up.

00:10:53.160 Right, right.

00:10:53.680 But in a micro-reactor, it's just passively cool.

00:10:57.000 So say you did get that solar flare.

00:10:59.040 There's not a huge amount of electronics in it.

00:11:01.680 It would be a fairly quick fix to go around and put these things back in order, but they would essentially just sit there until you came around to do that fix.

00:11:09.720 So it's a big advantage.

00:11:10.660 Okay, so that's another advantage on the resilient side.

00:11:13.200 Okay, so now I want to delve, if you would, into other issues.

00:11:17.300 So let's say cost, availability, but I'd also like to ask some really stupid questions about the technology itself.

00:11:24.040 So I've been, and correct me any place I'm wrong, and there might be many places like that.

00:11:29.480 I mean, so you refine nuclear fuel and it heats up of its own accord as a consequence of radioactive fusion.

00:11:37.900 And then in a big reactor, you use rods to dampen down the rate at which the fission reaction occurs so that it stays within acceptable bounds.

00:11:50.460 So let me ask you really a basic, simple, technical question.

00:11:53.820 So I was thinking, well, what would be the simplest possible source of electricity that you could hypothetically design if you were using nuclear power?

00:12:02.420 So I thought, well, why not embed pellets of enriched uranium or some other substance inside molten lead balls and calibrate the distribution of the uranium pellets so that the balls were basically red hot, but no hotter.

00:12:18.760 Drop them in a bucket of water, capture the steam and run a generator.

00:12:24.060 Okay, so like, why is that stupid?

00:12:25.800 Because it seems, the lead seems to me to be something that's dense and would shield.

00:12:29.940 I guess it would get radioactive over time.

00:12:33.400 But, so that's a very simple design.

00:12:36.580 So tell me why that's a stupid design.

00:12:38.600 Oh, no, I mean, effectively what you've done is design a basic reactor because like uranium gets hot, heats up water.

00:12:44.900 Like the only thing that's missing from your design is the circulation of water.

00:12:49.080 So what you would want to do is obviously move the hot water.

00:12:51.960 Right, but that's a simple, we have pumps, we could do that.

00:12:57.400 We have pumps.

00:12:57.960 So, okay, so why aren't extraordinarily simple systems like, I mean, I know it's not simple to mine and refine the uranium, you know, but why aren't extraordinarily simple systems like that available?

00:13:12.100 Even as heat sources for that matter.

00:13:14.180 Well, I'll give you a good example, actually.

00:13:17.300 You know, do you remember the Voyager spacecraft that NASA launched?

00:13:20.860 They're, I think, on the periphery of the solar system at the moment.

00:13:24.560 And essentially all that's powering those is plutonium that's basically radiating heat.

00:13:30.720 And that's it.

00:13:31.400 It's like the Jordan-Peterson reactor.

00:13:33.980 But it's radiating heat and there's like a thermoelectric turbine on that just converts some of that heat into electricity.

00:13:40.480 That's it.

00:13:41.760 And that's the totality of it.

00:13:44.240 So that's probably the most simple nuclear device, nuclear power device you could get.

00:13:49.520 But say with a lead-lined uranium pellet like you've described, well, say you have a place for your fuel and you're putting all of the lead pellets in there.

00:14:02.100 That's going to, obviously, the lead is now occupying space that the fuel could be.

00:14:05.180 So you might need to have a bit of a larger reactor.

00:14:07.680 And if you have a bit of a larger reactor, you need to put a bit more fuel in there.

00:14:11.040 And then you can get that runaway effect.

00:14:13.140 And unfortunately, the laws of physics keep pushing us in certain design decisions.

00:14:19.880 So that's, I think, been the challenge.

00:14:23.540 And why micro-reactors and SMRs have never been done before is that material science is now catching up.

00:14:31.240 So, for instance, you've actually described something very close to a solution that a lot of the big reactor companies are coming up with called Trisofune,

00:14:42.200 which is uranium encased in certain layers of lead.

00:14:51.860 And so, essentially, you can't get the fuel melt.

00:14:55.580 And they're essentially pellets that go into a fuel space.

00:14:58.780 Okay.

00:14:59.100 So that gives me some sense.

00:15:00.580 I'd like to kind of understand the most basic possible model before things become elaborated.

00:15:07.240 So can we walk a bit through your technology?

00:15:10.580 One of the things that struck me about your technology was its portability on the back of a truck.

00:15:15.840 I mean, I can imagine 50,000 reasons why that might be extremely useful.

00:15:19.860 But there's something that's kind of cool about it, too, that you can just trundle one of these things wherever it's needed for emergencies,

00:15:25.820 for backup power, and for remote communities, which is obviously on mining sites and so forth, as you pointed out, which is a big deal in a place like Canada.

00:15:34.860 And would also, as far as I can tell, would open up the possibility, especially in places like the Northwest Territories, for mining where that's practically not feasible.

00:15:43.420 Because you can't build the bloody hydroelectric lines across 2,000 miles of tundra to fire up a mine.

00:15:50.020 But with this provision of power, then I was also thinking it'd be pretty damn useful, hypothetically, on the desalination front, too,

00:15:56.760 because everybody's jumping up and down about not having enough water, which strikes me as, like, abysmally foolish,

00:16:02.140 given that 70% of the planet or something like that is covered by, you know, water some miles deep.

00:16:08.720 So I don't think we're going to run out.

00:16:10.420 So walk me through, if you would, to the design of your reactors, and help me also understand why they're not already everywhere.

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00:17:59.100 Okay. So with our reactors, as you mentioned, we wanted them to be portable.

00:18:04.600 But it was actually a business decision that speared that on because we thought, well,

00:18:08.460 if they can fit within an ISO container, as an example, then you could transport them by truck or by train

00:18:15.300 or by just put it on the back of a maritime vessel, and you could ship these things anyway.

00:18:20.420 You could even effectively helicopter in.

00:18:22.480 Now, when you do that, you can straighten your design a little bit.

00:18:25.060 So you've got to work within the confines of an ISO container.

00:18:27.320 So you kind of end up with almost a bath-shaped design.

00:18:32.880 But so we have two technical teams, one drawn principally out of scientists and engineers

00:18:38.540 out of University of Berkeley, California, and the other out of University of Cambridge.

00:18:42.820 And we gave them the same MO.

00:18:43.980 So it needs to be transportable.

00:18:45.400 It needs to be an ISO container.

00:18:46.740 It needs to be modular.

00:18:47.840 It needs to be able to passively cool, like we talked about earlier.

00:18:50.860 And they had different solutions.

00:18:52.900 So the U.S. team, they realized that if they take the coolant out and you just have uranium

00:19:01.420 conventional fuel on it and it radiates through a solid core, then you don't need the bumps

00:19:06.760 for a coolant at all.

00:19:08.240 And then the whole mechanical system shrinks right down.

00:19:12.440 So it's basically one of the most basic designs you could probably make.

00:19:17.880 Okay.

00:19:18.020 Simply conducts through a solid core and then circulated air basically removes heat from

00:19:22.740 the periphery of that core to a turbine.

00:19:25.200 And that's pretty much it.

00:19:26.100 Oh, really?

00:19:26.720 Really?

00:19:27.080 So you're not using liquid at all?

00:19:29.800 You're just using heated air?

00:19:31.420 Unless you want to define air as the liquid.

00:19:34.120 But that's effectively their solution.

00:19:36.780 I think it's quite brilliant.

00:19:38.620 I'm bound to say that, but I do genuinely think that.

00:19:41.080 And the University of Cambridge's solution was to take a basic fuel form, uranium dioxide,

00:19:50.000 fuel rod, and surround it with a solar salt, but introduce some heat into that system to

00:19:58.320 create a natural circulation.

00:19:59.860 And then as that circulates, the uranium keeps that momentum going.

00:20:03.960 And so then you can take the pumps out, you can take the mechanical systems out, and the

00:20:07.360 system shrinks right down.

00:20:08.420 Okay, and you said that was salt-based?

00:20:11.520 That was salt-based, yes.

00:20:12.980 So it's like a molten system.

00:20:15.620 Right, right, right.

00:20:16.520 But the salt isn't molten in that system.

00:20:18.800 So how is it?

00:20:19.900 Or is it molten?

00:20:21.100 Or how is the heat transferred?

00:20:23.100 So it is essentially liquid.

00:20:25.260 So it'll start off as a solid.

00:20:27.280 But as you introduce heat, you create that natural circulation, and then the heat of the

00:20:31.620 uranium maintains that natural circulation of salt.

00:20:35.000 And that will remove heat from the fuel rods, but then you can remove heat to a turbine and

00:20:40.340 so forth.

00:20:41.240 Right.

00:20:41.900 And so how is the turbine spun with that system?

00:20:46.940 With that system, it's a thermoelectric one.

00:20:49.460 So we're not going to design these turbines, but if you think like a helicopter turbine or

00:20:57.920 something like that, where you're burning high-quality jet fuel to generate heat, and that heat

00:21:03.840 is essentially moving that turbine, the good thing about turbines is that they're quite

00:21:10.220 similarly to each other.

00:21:11.940 Right, right.

00:21:12.400 Well, and they've been around for a long time, so that's a well-established technology.

00:21:15.260 Now, you also worked for Rolls-Royce for a while, if I've got my facts straight.

00:21:19.660 I did.

00:21:20.120 So I was Ministry of Defense.

00:21:21.940 Actually, you mentioned submarines earlier.

00:21:23.680 That's how I got my start in nuclear.

00:21:25.300 I was involved in the construction of manufacturing facilities to produce reactor cores.

00:21:31.200 But they seconded me to Rolls-Royce, where I worked as a physicist in the design of the

00:21:36.320 next generation of nuclear reactors for the next generation of nuclear submarines.

00:21:40.240 I see.

00:21:40.820 I see.

00:21:41.200 Okay, so that's a logical segue into the commercial market that you're attempting to

00:21:46.180 conquer now.

00:21:46.880 How long have you guys been in operation?

00:21:49.080 So actually, not very long.

00:21:50.780 It was only really about 2020 when we wanted to really get the company going.

00:21:54.920 And I was number two in the organization.

00:21:58.380 And we came at it, obviously, from that background when we were talking about why nuclear, why

00:22:05.180 micro-reactors.

00:22:06.060 But what was quite interesting is, actually, once we got into the industry, we realized

00:22:10.780 that the U.S. infrastructure, the nuclear infrastructure, had kind of atrophied a little

00:22:15.500 bit.

00:22:15.780 And it had done that because the U.S. could source enriched material from Russia, weapons-grade

00:22:23.380 material.

00:22:23.780 And then it could just downblend that material for whatever domestic need it wanted, whether

00:22:28.840 that was military or civil power plants.

00:22:32.740 And that allowed it, essentially, to not have to renew a lot of its systems.

00:22:38.660 So when we entered the nuclear industry, it was kind of alarming that we thought we would

00:22:44.760 have major impediments to actually launching a commercial company because of these infrastructure

00:22:49.520 problems.

00:22:50.020 So we thought, actually, this could be an opportunity.

00:22:52.600 So we're looking to try and build our own fuel fabrication facility or our own deconversion

00:22:56.720 facility or our own fuel transportation system.

00:23:00.740 And hopefully, like, we could be part of, you know, this renaissance of nuclear.

00:23:05.800 Great, great.

00:23:06.460 Where are you located?

00:23:08.000 So the headquarters are in New York.

00:23:10.980 So I'm here.

00:23:11.760 I'm actually here at the moment.

00:23:14.100 But I'm actually, I live in Canada most of the time.

00:23:18.460 Where do you live in Canada?

00:23:20.460 Vancouver.

00:23:20.900 And have you had any contact, say, with the government people in Saskatchewan?

00:23:26.640 Because, I mean, as you no doubt know, Saskatchewan has, like, uranium reserves that are, I think,

00:23:31.520 unparalleled in the world and that don't really seem to be being utilized all that efficiently.

00:23:36.320 And so, I mean, it's such insanity as far as I can tell.

00:23:39.440 We have this almost infinite power supply at our hands.

00:23:42.620 And yet, we've turned to solar and wind.

00:23:46.460 We're trying to cobble together battery storage, which, as far as I can tell, isn't working that well at the moment.

00:23:51.580 And so, well, so that was the other question I had.

00:23:56.860 It's like another question I had.

00:23:59.180 Why aren't these already everywhere?

00:24:02.080 You pointed to transformation in material technology and alluded to the fact that maybe we're just at the point

00:24:07.560 where this has become economically viable and scalable, are there, like, regulatory problems?

00:24:15.060 Are there problems of public perception as well that constitute impediments?

00:24:19.540 I would say nuclear has suffered from the worst PR.

00:24:22.620 And it might be partly because governments have always been involved in the funding of these big installations.

00:24:31.500 And the government don't care about that.

00:24:33.000 But, like, if I was to say to somebody, you know, nuclear is the safest of all energy forms.

00:24:40.000 Like, even safer than, if you look at deaths per gigawatt hour, nuclear beats out wind and it beats out solar, surprisingly.

00:24:46.480 Right.

00:24:46.900 It is the safest already.

00:24:48.300 And that's not even considering that SMRs and microactors are still safer than big civil power plants.

00:24:55.860 Right, right.

00:24:56.940 And, you know, things like Fukushima or Three Mile Island get brought up.

00:25:01.620 But I have to point out that nobody died in those situations.

00:25:05.820 And really, it's just a cleanup operation.

00:25:08.380 I don't want to trivialize.

00:25:10.300 But I think human psychology is interesting.

00:25:15.460 I think radiation might be more intimidating because it's a danger you can't see.

00:25:21.840 And so you can't understand the magnitude of that danger, consequently.

00:25:25.440 It's not like a tiger in the room you can see and you can assess.

00:25:28.400 And that maybe has been an impediment.

00:25:31.620 Okay.

00:25:32.040 Well, okay.

00:25:32.580 So that's, well, we can understand that.

00:25:35.020 I mean, a huge part of the problem that any company has to solve is the marketing problem.

00:25:39.600 That's often 85% of the problem, even if it's a complex technical problem.

00:25:43.640 And so then what about government impediment or other, like, sociological impediment specifically to your progress?

00:25:51.840 Where are you getting resistance and where are you seeing, like, a well-paved way forward?

00:25:58.200 Well, the good part is that when we did see a lot of resistance, but resistance in the form of infrastructure not being in place.

00:26:05.440 And just to take an example of another company, and they probably won't mind me saying this, is that NewScale were the first company to license an SMR.

00:26:13.920 In fact, they're the only ones in the world to do that.

00:26:17.140 But they became under fire because the costs of their megawatt generation were more than they thought it would be.

00:26:24.200 But to be fair to them, everything they had to do was first of its kind.

00:26:28.280 And so the first pharmaceutical drug cost millions, and the second one costs nothing.

00:26:33.060 And so they got penalized for that.

00:26:35.980 But if there was an infrastructure in place within the country to support everything they did and manufacture the fuel and parts they needed, it would have been an order of magnitude cheaper for a start.

00:26:47.140 And logically, nuclear should be the cheapest form of energy.

00:26:53.000 But you have all your capital costs up front, which can really distort that picture.

00:26:57.020 Right, right, right.

00:26:57.560 In big projects, like 70% of your overall costs might be financing costs related to that big up front capital cost.

00:27:05.100 Well, you know, one of the things, it seems to me that from a PR perspective, a marketing perspective, that there's a wide open field of opportunity on one side of this equation that I don't think has been well capitalized upon.

00:27:18.540 So, you know, first of all, I think you can make us, you already made a case for green, what would you say, for, that nuclear power can be, is a very green form of energy, at least in principle.

00:27:31.220 Especially when it's safely delivered in the form that you're delivering it.

00:27:35.100 And you made a case for reliability and portability and all that.

00:27:39.580 But there's another case that's just begging to be made, even additionally on the environmental front.

00:27:45.320 And so, the data is quite clear that if you get people around the world up to the point where they're producing about $5,000 in U.S. dollars a year in GDP, they start to take a long-term view of the future.

00:28:00.020 They become environmentally aware.

00:28:03.040 And that's because they're not scrabbling around in the dirt, burning dung, trying to figure out where the next meal is coming from, and willing to burn up and eat everything around them so they don't starve.

00:28:12.860 So, it's clear that if you get people, we know that rich countries get cleaner.

00:28:18.880 That's what happens.

00:28:19.940 And so, and we also think, at least, that absolute privation and poverty is bad because do we really want starving people and stunted children and all the misery that goes along with that?

00:28:32.460 And so, there's this opening, it seems to me, for people who are in a position to provide, at scale, inexpensive energy to say, look, we can feed the world's poor because there's a direct relationship between energy and wealth.

00:28:46.860 Like, more direct than anything else.

00:28:48.840 Energy equals wealth.

00:28:49.780 And now we can make all the poor people in the world rich in a non-zero-sum manner.

00:28:54.440 And as soon as we did that, they'd start to care about the environment.

00:28:57.360 So, like, where's, what's the problem with that?

00:29:00.660 And, well, and what do you think of that as a marketing campaign, let's say?

00:29:05.380 Well, you've outlined our marketing campaign because when we were building up the company and we were making some very big connections,

00:29:13.180 one of them, we were talking to some African diplomats and they were mentioning to us that, you know, one significant issue that Africa faces in the continent is that there's large sections of population that are completely removed from grid systems.

00:29:25.540 And so, that means diesel generators.

00:29:27.860 But the problem there, again, is that you need a constant supply of diesel to be brought into those generators for them to run.

00:29:34.000 So, their supply is intermittent.

00:29:35.980 If you have a micro-reactor system, we touched on it earlier, like desalination plants, medical facilities, a micro-reactor could be put there and you've got 15 years of power for a community.

00:29:47.720 And then it's consistent, too.

00:29:50.000 And then you can have that $5,000 per capita wealth to create more long-term strategic thinking.

00:29:57.540 And, you know, I've been to Africa enough and seen these poor areas to know that, like, when you're scrambling around in the dirt, your considerations are very short-term because they have to be, otherwise you're going to die.

00:30:10.220 And so, it's a situation that begets, you know, very damaging decisions for the larger community.

00:30:19.660 Right, right.

00:30:20.200 Well, that's the environmental cost of poverty.

00:30:22.760 Like, we scream in the West all the time about the environmental cost of wealth.

00:30:27.540 But the environmental cost of poverty is way higher, way higher.

00:30:31.580 And so, and this is something I can't figure out.

00:30:33.480 I cannot figure out why the Greens don't get this because, in principle, they're on the left.

00:30:38.220 And the leftists, in principle, are on the side of the poor.

00:30:42.340 But when it comes…

00:30:44.400 But, like, the thing is, like, take Germany as an example.

00:30:47.540 Like, the Green lobby got into essentially a position of power within that country.

00:30:51.480 And they're effectively left-wing.

00:30:53.120 Yep.

00:30:54.660 And they were very…

00:30:56.720 They heavily campaigned against nuclear to push for other renewable solutions.

00:31:00.380 So, they pushed heavily into wind and solar.

00:31:02.840 But the result of that was that the country no longer could power itself.

00:31:06.500 They had to buy power from Poland, which was manufactured by coal.

00:31:11.000 And they had to power…

00:31:11.740 And lignite.

00:31:12.760 Lignite coal, right?

00:31:13.760 Not just coal, but the worst kind of coal.

00:31:16.640 Yeah, I know.

00:31:17.100 Brilliant.

00:31:17.840 Brilliant.

00:31:18.100 Which is incredibly polluting.

00:31:20.740 And they also had to buy, ironically, energy from France, which was generated by nuclear power.

00:31:29.060 Right, right.

00:31:29.720 So, the costs of the German went up for their power, and their carbon footprint went up.

00:31:36.440 Right, right.

00:31:36.960 So, we want to dwell on that for a minute.

00:31:39.100 So, the consequence of the Green movement in Germany was that power…

00:31:43.780 Let's lay it out.

00:31:44.640 Power was five times more expensive than it should have been.

00:31:47.700 The Germans became reliant on fossil fuels to a degree that they weren't before, including reliant on Putin, which turned out to be a very bad idea, let's point out.

00:31:56.480 Plus, and Germany is now in the throes of deindustrialization, so the poor are going to get a hell of a lot poorer.

00:32:03.380 And you might say, well, that's all worthwhile because we're so much greener.

00:32:06.840 But the truth of the matter is that Germany now has among the world's dirtiest energy per unit because of their idiotic policy.

00:32:15.620 So, they didn't just fail on the economic front entirely and make the poor poorer.

00:32:20.380 They failed by their own standards because the bloody goal was to decrease pollution.

00:32:25.080 And what they did instead was increase it per unit of energy, and not just a little bit, a lot.

00:32:30.220 And so, this just bedevils me because I cannot put my finger on why it is that the leftists are simultaneously pro-environment, pro-poor people, and anti-nuclear.

00:32:45.140 It's like, sorry guys, you don't get to have all three of them.

00:32:47.900 You can have two.

00:32:49.320 Yeah, I imagine there's a lot of posturing here.

00:32:51.900 Yeah, yeah.

00:32:52.740 It's not just Germany.

00:32:53.940 You might say that, all right.

00:32:55.480 Well, yes.

00:32:56.500 But as an example, I was working in Utah once, and I was working in this small little town, and there was a massive coal power plant there.

00:33:04.320 And I was like, oh, so this powers Utah?

00:33:06.480 And they're like, oh, no, we send all of this power straight to California.

00:33:10.280 I was like, why?

00:33:11.520 And they're like, well, they shut down a lot of their power plants.

00:33:14.220 So, they can claim that they've greened, essentially, but really, they're still powering their Teslas off coal that's being generated in Utah.

00:33:26.920 And so, it's the same kind of...

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00:34:37.080 Well, you know, Californians in Utah and the inhabitants.

00:34:42.500 What are you, Newtonians?

00:34:44.060 I have no idea what you call people from Utah.

00:34:45.980 I have no idea.

00:34:48.440 Anyways, you know that California and people from Utah, they don't breathe the same atmosphere.

00:34:54.020 It's like China and the United States.

00:34:55.480 Completely different air supply, as everyone knows.

00:34:57.940 So, yeah, well, one of the reasons I like to talk to engineers is because they don't get to posture.

00:35:02.040 Like, the thing that's cool about engineers is their stupid stuff either works or it doesn't.

00:35:07.320 And it's very unforgiving.

00:35:08.800 And so, you know, and yeah, it's okay.

00:35:11.920 The DEI people and the politically correct types, they're going to take all you engineers out too.

00:35:17.720 So, you better get prepared.

00:35:19.100 Well, as a black male, my days might be numbered.

00:35:21.340 Yeah, well, plus you're an engineer, man.

00:35:24.240 You've got a lot of things, you know, a lot of strikes against you.

00:35:27.080 So, okay, okay.

00:35:28.160 So, we've made a case for these small, these micro-reactors.

00:35:34.920 Now, I'd like to know, and you alluded to something quite interesting.

00:35:39.220 You know, you said that when you first started to contemplate doing this in the American environment,

00:35:44.300 you realized that there was a lot of industrial and infrastructure pieces that needed to be in place

00:35:51.220 that had been allowed to decay because the Americans had had a reliable supply of fissile material

00:35:56.360 from the Soviet Union as a consequence of its collapse.

00:35:59.680 And so, a lot of things were left to disintegrate, let's say.

00:36:02.940 But now you've realized that that's also another economic opportunity.

00:36:06.260 So, it sounds to me like you guys are planning to build a, what would you say,

00:36:10.200 from the ground up enterprise that will allow for these micro-reactors to exist.

00:36:16.320 So, then I want to know where you are, how you came to that conclusion, where you are in that process.

00:36:23.440 And then again, because I have a particular interest in Western Canada,

00:36:26.420 I'm curious about, you know, how these ideas have been received in places like Saskatchewan.

00:36:33.020 So, I would say, there's like three questions there.

00:36:39.940 Yep, yep, yep, yep.

00:36:41.760 So, how these things have been received, like, let's start with that one.

00:36:47.760 So, I think certain territories like Alberta have become very friendly to the idea of powering a lot of their remote industries,

00:36:56.640 even the oil sands operations with nuclear power.

00:37:00.000 Right, right, right, right.

00:37:01.340 And that's an incredibly energy-intensive industry.

00:37:04.360 And so, there has been support voiced for the, and there's like an Invest Alberta program,

00:37:13.080 which is looking actually to bring in SMRs.

00:37:15.820 But that's not ubiquitous across the whole country.

00:37:17.960 Like, you don't, you wouldn't see the same receptiveness from, say, British Columbia, where I am currently.

00:37:23.800 I mean, it's, again, certain more industry-friendly provinces would drift in that sort of area.

00:37:32.400 And I think, obviously, Toronto, well, the Ontario, the greater Toronto area came to the conclusion

00:37:37.340 that nuclear had already provided a substantial portion of the energy for the province,

00:37:44.060 and they didn't want to substitute that for more fossil fuels.

00:37:51.320 So, they've gone back and invested in it.

00:37:54.060 Canada actually has a pretty decent, I quite like the reactors they put together, the can-do reactors.

00:37:59.920 And they also, they almost generated their entire independent industry

00:38:05.060 because they opted for designs that weren't being widely used across the world.

00:38:09.100 So, Canada is actually in a very strong position to build out their own SMR industry

00:38:14.280 if they invest properly now in doing that.

00:38:18.380 Otherwise, they're going to suffer in the same way that the United States is suffering from getting going now.

00:38:24.900 And another thing you mentioned is why we saw these problems.

00:38:30.720 We saw big companies like, say, TerraPower, it's a big SMR company, and it's backed by Bill Gates.

00:38:37.040 So, there's no shortage of money for this thing to get going.

00:38:40.760 But they effectively could not find enough fuel to put into their reactors to complete the test.

00:38:47.120 And we thought, that's very interesting.

00:38:49.620 So, what happened there?

00:38:51.400 Well, they effectively had to shut down for two years.

00:38:54.440 And that's the worst thing that can possibly happen because you just burn cash.

00:38:59.000 And so, they're probably going to burn through hundreds of millions of dollars.

00:39:02.380 And so, the advantage, you know, a wise man can learn from the mistakes of others.

00:39:07.140 So, hopefully, we just saw that and we thought, well, if we can't, we're not backed by Bill Gates.

00:39:12.460 So, we can't afford to make a $100 million mistake like that or a billion dollar mistake like that.

00:39:18.100 And so, really, before we saw the U.S. government realize that there was a significant problem,

00:39:25.420 which very closely mirrored the Ukraine war when relationships began to become very strange.

00:39:31.880 And they began pushing a lot of funding opportunities out there to build back their infrastructure.

00:39:36.620 And they're doing that now.

00:39:38.440 But it's still come a bit late.

00:39:40.840 And so, the advantage we had is we started doing that before these funding opportunities from the U.S. government came out

00:39:47.760 to build conversion facilities, deconversion facilities, fuel fabrication, enrichment facilities.

00:39:55.280 Because otherwise, if Russia cut off the states now, and they are still through back channels

00:40:01.860 dealing in supply of enriched uranium because the U.S. can't afford to go without it.

00:40:06.480 But they don't want to have those channels open anymore.

00:40:10.520 And they want to cut ties, but they can't do it.

00:40:14.140 And you mentioned earlier that Germany lost sovereignty over itself partially because it couldn't power itself.

00:40:21.520 It was reliant on Russian gas.

00:40:22.800 Right.

00:40:23.620 That's a situation no country really wants to be in.

00:40:26.360 You want to have sovereign energy.

00:40:30.020 Absolutely.

00:40:30.840 Otherwise, your diplomatic strength is completely gone.

00:40:33.900 Yeah, well, you'd think that no country would want that.

00:40:37.580 But when you watch the policies that they're pursuing, a sensible person would conclude that that's exactly what they want.

00:40:43.880 And I do believe that posturing has a very large amount to do with that.

00:40:49.580 Because almost all of the green idiocy is narcissistic posturing.

00:40:53.740 It's the pretense of doing good without doing any of the actual work.

00:40:57.560 Okay, so walk me through where you are.

00:41:00.100 Okay, so explain to everybody who's watching and listening how you're involved right from the place where the uranium is still in the ore in the ground.

00:41:10.620 Like, what has to happen at each step along the way so that the fuel actually gets to one of your reactors?

00:41:17.920 And how is your company situated to make that happen?

00:41:22.320 And where are you in that process?

00:41:24.140 So starting at the very basic uranium mining, you mentioned the Saskatchewan deposit.

00:41:30.720 So you mine the uranium, but the ore is effectively not very useful for anything.

00:41:35.820 But you subject that ore to a leaching process and you create a yellow cape, which is essentially more concentrated uranium that then would be shipped off for a conversion.

00:41:46.620 Where we sit in that is that we've actually reached out to Central Asia, where almost the majority of the world's uranium is currently being mined.

00:41:55.540 It doesn't have to come from there.

00:41:57.560 But say there are big deposits in like Wyoming and Saskatchewan that are not producing uranium readily now in enough quantities to meet the demand.

00:42:07.600 And so it is coming from abroad.

00:42:08.820 I believe those domestic deposits will be built up now that the uranium price is rising because like COP28 announces the necessity to triple nuclear energy by 2040 or whatever it is.

00:42:21.840 So that is having an effect on the uranium price, which is encouraging mine development.

00:42:27.140 But the problem with mining is that it can take five years from a greenfield deposit to get to a mine.

00:42:34.500 And so you always have that lag. And if the lag, if during that lag, the uranium price drops and that can even hit, that might even come into commercial production.

00:42:44.920 So it's, it's, there's a lot of risk associated with, you know, not having your own domestic facilities in place.

00:42:52.140 So we have reached out to them.

00:42:54.620 We do have an ability at the president's office within certain countries in Central Asia to source uranium directly if we should need it.

00:43:00.220 And we've even talked with the largest uranium materials broker in the world to make sure that we have a supplier because no business wants to make, wants to like have the risk that you have all, you build all these facilities and reactors and manufacturing facilities, but the raw material that fuels all this isn't there.

00:43:19.180 So that there's that component to it too.

00:43:21.520 Well, do you worry, do you worry that you're dealing with these, like to say Central Asian, again, it, I bring, it brings me back to the same thing.

00:43:28.880 Well, if you could have a resource in Wyoming or let's say in Saskatchewan, that seems to me to be a lot more geopolitically stable in any real sense than trying to source something halfway around the world in countries that are definitely not politically stable.

00:43:43.400 And so, so why were you compelled to go seek out suppliers elsewhere?

00:43:49.860 Well, it's the immediacy of supply.

00:43:52.640 Like they are able to supply material now.

00:43:55.340 And that is a major advantage over, we have a mine and it's at even feasibility level.

00:44:01.180 You still need to put the mine works in place, the processing plants in place.

00:44:05.360 Processing plant from a uranium operation could be a quarter of a billion dollars and take three years to build.

00:44:11.660 And so we want to make sure that...

00:44:14.400 Does it have to take three years to build?

00:44:16.500 I mean, you know, because things do move a lot, they could move a lot faster now than they once did.

00:44:23.060 And I'm, you know, I also wonder, are there improvements in technology that are in the pipelines that would make it possible to do it in like a year instead of three years?

00:44:31.120 If people actually decided they, you know, I mean, Germany built new natural gas importing terminals in months when they needed to.

00:44:38.920 So like we can actually move pretty quick if we decided it was a good idea.

00:44:42.340 So, okay, so you said immediacy of supply, that's what drove you to Central Asia.

00:44:48.320 But it would be better, perhaps, if there were domestic supplies that were at least in the pipelines, let's say.

00:44:55.260 Domestic supply from Saskatchewan or Wyoming would be a lot better.

00:44:59.940 Of course they would.

00:45:01.420 There's no geopolitical, well, there's less geopolitical uncertainty.

00:45:04.860 And, like, for instance, even in Central Asia, like, they do supply China and Russia still with the uranium that they need for their own programs, too.

00:45:13.980 So you're competing against other countries which are potentially hostile to the States or Canada or places like that.

00:45:21.740 And if they're looking to wage an economic war, we'll look for more exclusive contracts.

00:45:26.360 And so you then are in a competing position for material you can't control.

00:45:30.280 Right. Seems like a bad, yeah, like, from a geopolitical perspective, that seems unwise, let's put it that way.

00:45:36.800 So I can understand why you guys are doing it commercially, because, as you said, you can't afford the delay.

00:45:42.320 And fair enough.

00:45:43.920 Okay, so now do you have a stable supply, fundamentally?

00:45:47.140 Can you get moving with what you're doing?

00:45:49.500 We can.

00:45:49.940 And so the good part about what we're doing now is we've ensured that we have brokered enough good relations with certain countries that we can source the material if we want it.

00:46:00.980 We're not in the business of enrichment, but we could do things like conversion and get it into a uranium hexafluoride gas,

00:46:08.740 which can go to a licensed enrichment company like Arano or Centrus, and they could enrich the material for us.

00:46:16.380 From gas.

00:46:17.040 So what's the relationship between the gas and the yellow cake?

00:46:20.560 So what you want to do with yellow cake is, once it's been concentrated by that leaching process, is that it's easier to enrich a gas than it is, say, yellow cake,

00:46:34.080 which you could use a centrifugal system, but gas is certainly a lot easier to maneuver.

00:46:40.740 And so you would take the yellow cake and you would expose it to several chemical processes to turn it into uranium hexafluoride.

00:46:51.520 And it's actually the enrichment companies will enrich uranium hexafluoride to produce, well, whatever you want.

00:47:00.120 So enriched to whatever level the customer needs it.

00:47:06.000 But at that point, it actually needs to be deconverted back to a solid.

00:47:10.660 Oh, yeah.

00:47:10.960 And so our company actually wants to build out that infrastructure for the country, too.

00:47:16.140 So take that uranium hexafluoride, convert it to dioxide, hydride, sorry, uranium dioxide, uranium hydride, uranium metal, whatever the market will need.

00:47:28.560 And so that's one element.

00:47:30.560 And then fabrication facility to tailor it to the specific reactor.

00:47:35.120 So essentially fashion it into dimensions, composition, mold it with zirconium, whatever they want, and then sell that.

00:47:42.980 And the final part of what we want to do is build out a transportation company so we can actually transport that around North America, too.

00:47:51.720 How would you transport it?

00:47:53.560 So we've actually been spending about a year doing this, but we've got a patented technology now for a cask system that can transport the most amount of enriched material, so halo material.

00:48:09.380 So it's enriched up to almost 20% around North America.

00:48:12.640 And we're just in the process of getting that license now with the regulator.

00:48:15.740 Okay, so you've been working on solving the transportation problem.

00:48:21.320 And so what are the problems associated with transport that you've had to solve?

00:48:26.680 And how did you solve those?

00:48:28.380 So the fundamental problem with transport is that you cannot have uranium critically configured.

00:48:33.760 And what I mean by that is that uranium is only actually really radioactive if you push it all together, which is the basis of a bomb.

00:48:42.520 If you push it together, then it triggers itself more, and it sets off a chain reaction, and the reactivity creates the heat.

00:48:51.620 So effectively, for road regulations, you have to store the material in a structured way to make sure it's not pretty.

00:48:59.780 But it doesn't end there.

00:49:01.580 There's a lot of other regulations surrounding that.

00:49:03.780 So is it going to be hit by a plane or a misfortune, or is it going to fall underwater, or is it going to fall?

00:49:09.240 Or what are the heat conditions?

00:49:11.400 Can it be cold?

00:49:12.060 Can it be warm?

00:49:13.420 And you've got to make all of these safety scenarios.

00:49:16.120 So designing a transportation cask that fits within a truck that can move a lot of material by road is a bit of an engineering challenge.

00:49:24.340 But I don't think it's that difficult.

00:49:27.240 But it's certainly something that has not been in place previously, because for SMRs and micro-reactors, the uranium is enriched slightly more.

00:49:38.240 And because it's enriched slightly more, you need a completely new cask system.

00:49:41.700 And so that's where we thought, oh, we'll jump on that and build that out.

00:49:45.420 And that way, when the industry does take off the SMR micro-reactors, we'll have the transportation able to move fuel for all the SMRs.

00:49:53.460 Okay, so does that mean, oh, I see.

00:49:54.880 So that means that your transportation system, in principle, is not only designed to service your micro-reactors, but to be expanded to service these slightly larger reactors, the SMRs.

00:50:05.080 Yeah, the good part is…

00:50:05.700 And that's the plan.

00:50:06.980 Yeah, that's the plan.

00:50:07.940 So we don't, I mean, we're not in the business where we want the other competitors to fail.

00:50:13.120 If they win, we'll win.

00:50:14.000 Right, yes, yes, right, absolutely.

00:50:16.240 The right number of competitors isn't zero.

00:50:19.340 No, exactly.

00:50:20.200 And also, we want them to succeed, because they'll build out the infrastructure, they'll generate more money within the country for this industry, and we'll be beneficiaries of that too.

00:50:30.320 They want to move fuel, we'll help them move fuel.

00:50:32.460 They want to fabricate fuel, we'll fabricate it for them.

00:50:34.840 Even if they outsell our reactors, it's fine.

00:50:37.400 Right, so you can also be in on their success in that situation too.

00:50:42.920 Okay, so that's cool.

00:50:44.440 Okay, so you said you've got to supply, at least at the moment in Central Asia, that gets reduced to, by leeching to yellow cake.

00:50:52.900 The yellow cake is transformed into uranium hydro, what's the name of the gas?

00:50:57.620 Hexafluoride.

00:50:58.780 Hexafluoride, hexafluoride.

00:50:59.980 Uranium hexafluoride.

00:51:00.980 That can be concentrated and then converted back into about 20%, you said, and so why 20%?

00:51:10.460 And you can transport it at 20%, and you can do that safely, and you can do that by rail, by ship, by car, or by train.

00:51:19.860 And so now you have the 20% enriched material.

00:51:25.120 What do you do with that when you get it to where it's supposed to go?

00:51:28.500 So it depends where it's going.

00:51:30.640 So if it's going to, if it's the 20% enriched uranium hexafluoride, that'll need to be converted into uranium dioxide, hydride, or whatever fuel form you want.

00:51:42.140 Okay.

00:51:43.200 Oh, so are you transporting the gas?

00:51:45.820 We go, well, we don't want to, I don't want to speak preemptively.

00:51:48.600 Okay, well, that's fine.

00:51:50.680 But actually, no, it's fine.

00:51:52.240 We do want to branch, take our cask and modify it so it can move gas.

00:51:57.780 I see.

00:51:58.320 Okay, okay.

00:51:58.920 The anticipation is that currently we are building out a deconversion plan to be able to convert that gas into other forms.

00:52:07.580 And then when they're in other forms, it's easier to fabricate into the final uranium form that the customers might want.

00:52:16.560 Okay, okay, okay.

00:52:17.600 And how far along are you when you're thinking pessimistically in solving these, because you've got a bunch of problems as you laid out.

00:52:28.300 You've got the supply problem, which you seem to have solved.

00:52:30.500 Now you've got the transportation problem, which is also a huge opportunity.

00:52:35.080 So that's cool, because that gives you multidimensional access to the market.

00:52:38.660 You've got the transportation problem.

00:52:40.340 And it sounds like that's twofold.

00:52:42.520 There's a technical element.

00:52:43.620 There's a regulatory element.

00:52:45.380 I suppose there's going to be a public relations element to that, too.

00:52:48.140 But whatever.

00:52:48.820 Okay, so now you can move the stuff around.

00:52:50.860 Now you've got these deconversion plants that are going to help you formulate the fuel you need to run your reactors.

00:52:57.380 And then you have the problem of building the reactors and getting them to where they're supposed to go.

00:53:01.980 So four streams of problems that have to move together somewhat simultaneously.

00:53:07.140 How far along are you on each of those streams?

00:53:10.540 So if it was a pessimistic timeline, I would say, I mean, we've been working at this for a fair amount of time.

00:53:17.480 I would say that the first line of business that we anticipate being commercially ready to deploy would probably be the transportation, actually.

00:53:26.100 Because we have the patented technology.

00:53:29.480 We've already approached the licensing company to regulate to do the licensing for us.

00:53:36.000 And we've actually brought in the former executives of, I don't want to say the name, but the largest transportation company in the world, which might give it away.

00:53:44.740 But we've brought in some of the former executives from their organization to build out the company around the technology.

00:53:51.840 And so I believe that might be the first commercially deployable business.

00:53:55.220 The timeline on that probably looks like, finish the licensing, hopefully sometime next year.

00:54:03.880 And then the build out of the manufacturing facility to produce the casks, as well as the infrastructure around the casks to fit into trucks and things like that.

00:54:16.280 We'll do that simultaneously.

00:54:17.760 Probably finish that sometime about 2026.

00:54:20.660 Hopefully, here in 2026, 2027, we would have a commercial vehicle ready to start moving material around North America.

00:54:30.440 That would be my pessimistic.

00:54:31.040 Okay, okay.

00:54:31.280 So that's pretty fast.

00:54:32.820 Okay, well, as a pessimistic view.

00:54:34.360 And if you were optimistic, what would you say?

00:54:38.540 Oh, I would say hopefully the licensing runs all smoothly.

00:54:41.960 While that's going on, we build out the manufacturing facilities.

00:54:44.800 We have them finished next year.

00:54:46.120 And then we're in a position to begin initially deploying vehicles that can move enriched material up to 20% around the country.

00:54:55.720 So maybe I shaved two years off that if I'm super optimistic.

00:55:00.540 Okay, so that gives us a range.

00:55:03.060 Okay, so now if you had the opportunity to work with a state or provincial legislature that was helpful in every way they possibly could be,

00:55:12.480 what would that look like?

00:55:14.160 What would you need from them?

00:55:15.320 Is there anything you need from like a particular local jurisdiction that would speed what you're doing along?

00:55:21.680 I would say the big thing on that topic is that the regulatory process just for any reactor, microreactor, SMR, or big civil power plant, is probably at minimum four years.

00:55:34.720 Oh, yeah.

00:55:35.100 That's just no good.

00:55:36.580 That's terrible.

00:55:37.400 The problem, I think, and they're probably going to see this podcast and be angry with me, but I think they're trying to apply a civil power plant's regulatory framework to a microreactor.

00:55:47.700 Yeah.

00:55:48.240 It's a different product.

00:55:49.540 And it almost needs its own regulatory framework to be designed.

00:55:54.020 Okay, so you'd need a legislature that was willing to consider the fact that this isn't the same old industry.

00:56:02.680 Yes.

00:56:03.260 Yeah, it's a new product.

00:56:04.580 It's a new industry.

00:56:05.320 And it's essentially all new technologies.

00:56:07.520 And if they were to design some sort of regulatory framework that just looked at, say, safety criteria for where these things could deploy, like met certain seismic conditions or temperature constraints or ranges, then the reactor would be approved for deploying anywhere as long as it met its criteria.

00:56:28.340 I think if they could really allow for, one, the deployment of these things absolutely everywhere, and it would really be a much faster process because they're also much more basic.

00:56:41.480 I mean, it's come about because of advances in technology, but the technology itself, once it's built, it's more basic.

00:56:49.080 Right, right, right, right, right.

00:56:50.540 Well, so do you have a jurisdiction with whom you're having productive discussions that is simultaneously capable of understanding that this is a new technological front that would be hypothetically willing—I mean, because the economic opportunities here are extreme if it's done right.

00:57:08.020 And so you'd think, if you were optimistic, that there might be a legislature somewhere in the 50 states in the United States and the 12 places that this could happen in Canada that might be open to such an opportunity.

00:57:19.560 I mean, are you having productive discussions with people who could conceivably clear away the regulatory hurdles?

00:57:26.100 So we have obviously made contact with the Department of Energy in the states, and we've obviously broached this topic that this is something that should be considered.

00:57:35.000 It's not that they're unaware that this might be a good idea, too.

00:57:38.100 It's just they also need funding to implement new legislation or get approvals from Congress or however it works in the states.

00:57:46.300 And there's good bipartisan support in the states for nuclear, but it still needs to go through the approval process where you get the Senate signing off.

00:57:57.460 And they do need funding to put this new regulatory framework in so when they give it to a regulator like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the NRC, it can design that new framework.

00:58:06.700 And it needs to obviously employ people to do that.

00:58:09.660 Well, what kind of funding is necessary to do that?

00:58:12.660 I'm trying to get a real handle on the impediments, you know, because the advantages are so stark and obvious.

00:58:20.040 And we've done some pretty extraordinary things on the idiot wind and solar front and in relatively short order.

00:58:26.920 So you wouldn't think that this is impossible.

00:58:29.700 So, like, what sort of funding is necessary if you're starting a new regulatory enterprise, essentially from scratch, designed around this new technology?

00:58:39.860 I don't understand the necessity for this great expense and spending of time.

00:58:45.480 No, I think really it could be done, if I'm honest, it could be done very, very quickly.

00:58:50.120 I think the problem is that, say, like a Department of Energy, they run into needing more funding to create a smaller department to design a framework, and then they could be waiting on that funding for a long time as government debates it.

00:59:03.600 But actually, if government were very in favor of it, I'm sure on both sides of the aisle there would be general support for just a small amount of money.

00:59:10.080 Okay, so let me ask you another practical question.

00:59:12.400 If I said, do you have a 20-page document that would outline an intelligible regulatory framework that you could hand to a legislator who was, you know, positively predisposed to you?

00:59:25.860 Like, do you guys have that?

00:59:27.000 Because, you know, one of the easiest ways to get people to say yes to anything is to make it extremely easy for them.

00:59:34.040 Right.

00:59:34.440 And to provide them with this.

00:59:35.980 Exactly, exactly.

00:59:36.940 Because if you're saying, well, you have to whip up a regulatory structure from scratch, and you have to take all the political risk, they're going to say, yeah, five years from now, and we'll let other people do it, and it'll take forever.

00:59:48.700 But if you could hand them a tailor-made solution, essentially, I know that runs you into the problem of, you know, government-industry collusion, but that's a secondary problem as far as I'm concerned.

00:59:58.240 Because this isn't collusion, it's joint effort to move forward something that would be of great benefit to people, you know, and if it happens to be of benefit to your company, it's also going to be of benefit to many of the other companies that you described, too.

01:00:12.080 So do you have a set of proposals at hand that you could supply to an interested legislative party?

01:00:20.280 Yes, I mean, to be honest, that would take us a few weeks just to put together, like a proper...

01:00:25.940 Okay, well, that's not long. A few weeks isn't long, you know, because I can imagine some people who might be interested in taking a look at something like that.

01:00:33.820 Oh, well, look, if they were very interested, I'd be very interested in that conversation.

01:00:37.380 And we, our scientists, would be very happy to prepare a formal document that outlines a proposal for how these things could be...

01:00:46.140 Like, it would have to be a very high-level thing, but I know you don't need to put it down.

01:00:50.320 But essentially, the criteria for approving the safety of these things for deployment en masse to different locations.

01:00:57.840 And it is very different because, like a big civil power plant, you have a site regulation process where it has to be site-specific, and you tailor your safety case for that specific site.

01:01:11.860 Yeah.

01:01:12.000 Now, for a reactor, you wouldn't do that. It would be a different process where there is a safety criteria that you need to meet.

01:01:19.120 But as long as the site meets that safety criteria, the reactor can deploy that.

01:01:23.340 So it's fundamentally different.

01:01:27.340 Right, right, right, right.

01:01:28.440 Well, this is exactly, it seems to me that this is exactly the sort of thing that has to be dealt with in the kind of detail that legislators would appreciate so that that differentiation is not only made conceptually, but made in a manner that would be credible to, like, investigative news reporters and so forth and people who are skeptical about this.

01:01:48.820 But, I mean, I do know that technical problems are one thing, and obviously you guys are capable of solving them, but it's very, very easy for a whole industry to fall into a mess of red tape and never get out.

01:02:02.900 And certainly that's happened on the nuclear side of things.

01:02:05.340 And so that's just not good.

01:02:06.840 And it's, once I, see, I realized, I worked, I'm ashamed to admit this to some degree, but I worked on a panel years ago, 10 years ago, something like that, which was one of the early UN documents on sustainability.

01:02:20.440 And I worked on that for about two years, and I learned a lot about how such things were made, how such sausage was made, let's put it that way.

01:02:28.360 But I also learned a lot about the nexus between energy and environment and one of the things that really, and economics, one of the things that really struck me, and I never forgot it,

01:02:36.620 was the fact that as soon as you make people rich, they start to care about the environment.

01:02:40.900 And I thought, oh my God, that's such a wonderful thing to learn, because it means that we could deal with the problem of absolute poverty, and we could deal with environmental sustainability in the same way.

01:02:51.100 Okay, what's key? It's clear what's key. It's easy. It's cheap energy, period.

01:02:56.880 And so, okay, so then the next question is, well, where are the available energy sources?

01:03:01.780 And obviously one answer to that is with continued use of fossil fuel.

01:03:05.500 But we see the geopolitical trouble that's laid in front of us because of that, and there are problems of pollution, especially with coal, although they're not as grotesque as they've been made out to be.

01:03:16.920 But nuclear, you think nuclear, I mean, I read, tell me if this is true, I read that part of the reason that nuclear is safer than solar is because people fall off the roof all the time installing solar panels.

01:03:31.740 And, you know, falling is actually like the fifth leading cause of death. It's no joke, right? So falling is really hard on people.

01:03:38.420 I don't mean to laugh at it, but it's true. And also, if you look at wind power, too, there's a significant number of falls that are generated by the installation of these things.

01:03:46.600 And they need constant maintenance, which means there is a constant stream of people going up and down these things, which is leading to death, which is why would I mention that?

01:03:54.740 They're a stupid solution. Low energy density, like they're not a good solution.

01:04:00.500 And solar, I mean, one of the things I've really watched in the last five years, say, as these big solar and wind projects come on, especially in Alberta, because I've been watching the Alberta power situation.

01:04:09.200 It's like the price of electricity goes to infinite on windless and sunless days.

01:04:16.520 Okay, infinite is a bad price. That's a very bad price.

01:04:19.880 And you can't have unreliable, you can't have an unreliable, reliable grid. That doesn't work.

01:04:26.740 So, and I don't see a solution to that. I mean, tell me if I've got this wrong.

01:04:30.480 So my understanding is that fundamental, the fundamental problem with a renewable grid is the phasic nature of the power.

01:04:36.100 And because it's phasic, you have to have backup. It's like, well, it can't be nuclear because it takes too long for them to get online, at least in their current form.

01:04:44.600 So you have to have natural gas and fossil fuel backup or coal.

01:04:48.800 And if you have to have the backup, then why not just use the systems?

01:04:52.700 Because you're not going to build two parallel systems. Like, who in the right Germans would do that?

01:04:58.140 You know, and that's insane.

01:04:59.780 You know, one of the things I thought was funny when I first moved to Canada is that I was actually living up in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, for a few months.

01:05:07.660 And it's an interesting place to live for a little while.

01:05:10.960 But someone mentioned that the whole city was powered on diesel.

01:05:14.760 I said, that's crazy. This is a city of like, I can't remember, 40,000 people or something like that.

01:05:19.860 It was fairly significant.

01:05:21.920 And I was like, why?

01:05:22.660 And they're like, oh, the dam is broken.

01:05:24.760 I was like, can't they fix the dam?

01:05:26.260 And I was like, well, they can't really, like, it's blocked up and it's winter and it's difficult to get people up there.

01:05:31.160 And so we're just running off diesel generators.

01:05:33.360 As far as I know, it's still running off those diesel generators.

01:05:35.900 And I was there six or seven years ago.

01:05:39.600 So think how much diesel that's doing.

01:05:41.560 Well, there's nothing more permanent than a temporary fix, especially if the government has to be.

01:05:46.280 Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

01:05:47.900 And so, right, right.

01:05:49.100 Well, and Yellowknife is isolated.

01:05:51.140 And so the fact that all that diesel has to be brought in, all that means is that it's really, really expensive to live in Yellowknife.

01:05:58.400 That's the outcome.

01:05:59.880 Yeah, there was another province.

01:06:02.500 I think it was in Yellowknife, too.

01:06:03.880 They were talking to us about, there was a community of about 800 people, one of the First Nations settlements up there.

01:06:10.300 And the outline of the diesel alone, if you ignore the logistics and manpower and the cost of the generators, was $10 million alone.

01:06:19.860 But just the diesel by itself were 800 people for a year.

01:06:23.620 And I thought, well, that's crazy.

01:06:25.760 Like, that's an enormous expense for just 800 people.

01:06:30.240 Right, right, right.

01:06:31.200 No, that's right.

01:06:31.840 Well, there's many crazy things going on, and all that posturing that you described, combined with a tremendous technological ignorance of the most stellar sort, means that we are putting in place solutions that cause way more problems than they solve.

01:06:52.140 This just isn't acceptable.

01:06:54.080 It's not acceptable.

01:06:54.960 And look, I never want to denigrate fossil fuels too much, because I believe they definitely have a place.

01:07:00.160 And they've been of enormous asset to humanity.

01:07:02.860 And people talk about zero, as in going to zero.

01:07:06.880 Yeah, that's insane.

01:07:08.560 That's completely insane.

01:07:09.960 It's also just not practical.

01:07:11.980 Even if you were to stop all power by, what about textile industry or the downstream products of the fossil fuel industry, plastics, you're never going to eliminate them completely.

01:07:23.120 And so it's foolish.

01:07:25.120 Not without eliminating a lot of people.

01:07:27.440 Yes, yes.

01:07:28.380 Yes, yes.

01:07:29.020 And that seems to be the plan.

01:07:31.180 Well, you can imagine a world where we used fossil fuels as a basis for chemical production, like fertilizer, for example, because we're not going to substitute nuclear for fertilizer.

01:07:42.240 Right.

01:07:42.760 So, but.

01:07:43.760 Yeah, there's no one solution for every aspect of humanity's very complex existence.

01:07:48.420 But everything could have a very, very well-fitted place.

01:07:51.920 And to be honest, micro-tractors are in a much better position to power remote communities like Yellowknife than diesel.

01:07:58.860 Whereas, obviously, nuclear is never going to replace, you know, fossil fuels for producing fertilizers.

01:08:05.380 Right, right, right, right.

01:08:06.740 Well, and we shouldn't be burning, arguably, we shouldn't be burning up our fossil fuels when we need it for chemical stock.

01:08:14.380 I mean, that seems to me, so why not?

01:08:16.400 Okay, so let's be optimistic here for a minute.

01:08:19.120 So, let's imagine that you cleared the regulatory hurdles.

01:08:22.640 And now you've managed to transport your fissile material safely.

01:08:27.760 And you can start building these reactors.

01:08:29.980 Okay, now, and people clue in.

01:08:32.480 And we can start to build a resilient power grid as a consequence.

01:08:36.420 Now, you can start manufacturing at scale, right, in principle.

01:08:41.540 So, how uniform a product are you making at the micro-reactor level?

01:08:48.280 Like, is this something, this assembly line manufacturer?

01:08:51.600 And can you drive down the cost with volume?

01:08:54.640 Yeah, so this is actually it.

01:08:55.980 Is that the economy of scale here is the real benefit.

01:08:59.320 So, if you're producing two or three of these a year, it's very expensive.

01:09:03.080 But if you're producing a hundred of these, it actually gets very cheap.

01:09:06.760 And the good thing about micro-reactors, which has not been possible before, is that it allows for very easy manufacturing because they're simple enough to do.

01:09:14.800 So, there's no reason why you can't have a production line that just 3D prints these things.

01:09:20.060 And then as you do that, the costs come down very quickly.

01:09:24.060 And then you are cheaper than a diesel generator.

01:09:26.720 And once you are cheaper than a diesel generator, and that will take a few years, to be fair.

01:09:32.120 But once you do get to that point, there will be no real logical reason to use anything but micro-reactors in these remote locations, mining sites.

01:09:42.100 Okay, well, let's go be, okay, let's go, let's expand beyond that.

01:09:45.500 So, now let's assume that you can use this printing technology that you described.

01:09:49.160 And you said the scale, the economies of scale start to kick in at how many reactors a year?

01:09:54.180 I would say, actually, really, about 15.

01:09:58.380 And then that sort of point is becoming more economic.

01:10:00.900 It's actually very low.

01:10:02.280 In fact, I think Idaho National Laboratory concluded that it was something like nine.

01:10:06.660 I don't want to misquote you.

01:10:07.540 Okay, okay.

01:10:08.380 So, it's a very low.

01:10:09.160 Okay, so let's expand our vision momentarily and say that you could produce a thousand of these things a year.

01:10:15.000 And that they were distributed widely enough to start putting some back, resilient backbone into the power supply and start to substitute for natural gas and for coal.

01:10:26.380 Well, we can start with coal.

01:10:28.120 Okay, so what, if everything went as well as could possibly be expected on this front, how far down do you think you could drive the price of energy?

01:10:40.080 Like, compared to what it is now?

01:10:43.060 Well, I mean, that's very interesting because if the oil infrastructure was in place and you had domestic production of uranium and we upgraded our enrichment facilities domestically, which we currently don't have, and you were mass manufacturing these things, I mean, I'd hate to put a price on it.

01:11:00.880 But, like, there's no reason why you can't keep optimizing that system to keep making it incrementally cheaper.

01:11:07.700 Right, okay, so you're driving down the price.

01:11:10.480 You're driving down it.

01:11:11.800 And to be SMRs, it's not our business, but those guys, their costs will also fall commensurately with how ours are falling, too, because there's no reason why they can't mass manufacture those things to be major components of a major grid system.

01:11:25.260 So, it's a more robust system that's getting cheaper all the time.

01:11:28.660 So, there's no reason why that couldn't have a beneficial effect.

01:11:32.540 Well, that's ridiculously exciting, all of that.

01:11:36.520 And so, yeah, well, seriously, seriously, I mean, that's such an optimistic possibility.

01:11:41.320 Okay, well, let's be smart about this.

01:11:43.660 Let's talk about downsides.

01:11:45.040 Now, we talked about the fact that people are afraid of nuclear technology.

01:11:49.320 Now, in principle, that could be handled with a marketing strategy that wasn't based on lies, that provided accurate information about the fact that this was essentially a new technological approach.

01:12:00.340 And that could go in lockstep with the provision of the legislative material, right?

01:12:04.840 You can imagine a parallel campaign.

01:12:06.400 So, that seems to me to be a solvable problem.

01:12:09.000 Now, okay, some terrorist hijacks one of your trucks.

01:12:12.680 How about that?

01:12:14.440 So, the assumption there is that they're going to turn this into some sort of weapon.

01:12:19.540 Or spill it.

01:12:20.880 Or spill it.

01:12:21.540 So, let's think about how they would have to do that.

01:12:24.720 So, if they were to seize your microreactor or your SMR, the problem they have is that the uranium is not enriched to a weapons-grade level, so they can't make it blow up.

01:12:35.400 And it's also alloyed.

01:12:36.540 So, they'd have to build a multi-billion-dollar facility, chemical plant, to recover the uranium and separate it from the alloy.

01:12:46.000 Okay, so that's just not a danger.

01:12:49.740 What about stealing one of your trucks and threatening people publicly with, like, radiation?

01:12:56.640 I know, look, I already understand.

01:12:58.260 I want to put this in context.

01:12:59.780 Because it seems to me that anybody who hijacked a propane truck would be in a pretty good position to cause a lot of mayhem.

01:13:06.200 So, and, you know, or derail a train that is carrying fossil fuels.

01:13:12.020 So, we have plenty of risk like that already in the system.

01:13:14.880 So, where do you see, where, if anywhere, do you see the kind of risk to the public that could be leveraged by someone crooked who wanted to cause trouble?

01:13:27.760 Well, just to touch on that quickly, if they seized it, the problem they have, people use the examples of the things like dirty bombs, which is where you attach a bomb.

01:13:37.860 But the problem with the reactor uranium is that it's not going to explode if you – reactors can't blow up for a start.

01:13:46.160 Like, they're not enriched to a suitable level enough.

01:13:48.120 If you were to take the uranium out of it and strap it to a bomb, the most dangerous thing is the bomb that you've made, not the uranium around the bomb.

01:13:55.780 Actually, ironically, if you blow up uranium, it becomes less dangerous because you've separated the material.

01:14:02.600 So, it's going to react less with itself and become –

01:14:05.640 Right.

01:14:06.480 So, you could imagine that as a public relations disaster, fundamentally.

01:14:11.880 Yeah.

01:14:12.160 Because you can imagine how that would be played up.

01:14:14.180 But, again, I don't think that puts you in a category that's any different than, you know, people who are moving fossil fuel from place to place.

01:14:20.720 Because that's more risky.

01:14:22.460 That's at least as – no, it's more risky because it's much more explosive.

01:14:26.700 It's much more explosive and it's dirtier, actually.

01:14:29.060 Like, obviously, if you had a dirty bomb, you'd have to pick up the pieces of uranium.

01:14:32.940 No one's going to get hurt, but, like, it's still – you'd need to maybe cordon off for a microagd, maybe 100 meters either way.

01:14:40.220 But it's still not very bad.

01:14:41.660 Right, right.

01:14:41.680 I'd say the BP oil spill.

01:14:42.980 I think some of the effects of that are still being felt.

01:14:45.180 So, it's a lot cleaner of clean-up operation.

01:14:50.340 Right, right, right.

01:14:51.120 I think it's tricky.

01:14:53.560 I don't want to sound like it's all perfect.

01:14:55.520 But, you know, what's a terrorist going to do with a microagd apart from since his house?

01:15:00.040 You know, it's –

01:15:00.680 That is a good advertising campaign, right?

01:15:05.180 Yeah, exactly.

01:15:05.760 If you kill a microagdor, heat your house.

01:15:08.700 Right, right, right.

01:15:10.180 All right.

01:15:11.140 Well, okay.

01:15:11.860 So, now, let's see.

01:15:12.940 We've covered timeline.

01:15:16.120 We've covered your process, essentially.

01:15:18.580 Okay, maybe we could talk a little bit more about the microagdor technology per se.

01:15:22.760 Okay, so, what is it about the technology that makes it amenable to mass manufacture?

01:15:29.940 And why does that drive the price down?

01:15:32.400 And where are you in the manufacturing process?

01:15:35.580 Okay, so, the good part is that, like, if you think about those big civil power plants,

01:15:40.200 they're huge.

01:15:40.760 They take up, I don't know, 30 city blocks.

01:15:43.780 They're absolutely enormous.

01:15:44.760 But there's an enormous quantity of mechanical components, pumps, all sorts of systems that

01:15:51.300 go into that, as it should be.

01:15:53.200 That's fine.

01:15:54.020 But as you shrink down to SMR and you shrink down to microagdor, a lot of that goes away.

01:15:59.000 And we actually, in, say, one of our reactors, have hardly any mechanical components at all.

01:16:05.120 And so, then you can get to the point where you can 3D print these, which you couldn't do

01:16:10.420 for more complicated mechanical systems, where it's a bit more finicky.

01:16:15.400 And that does allow for mass production of these things, whereas mass production for larger

01:16:20.060 machinery that's more intricate becomes harder.

01:16:24.280 You can obviously still 3D print components and piece them together, but there's still a

01:16:29.140 lot more engineering work and human involvement that would be necessary to compete those, whereas

01:16:37.420 a lot of that can be automated, I think, as you get simpler and simpler.

01:16:43.120 Well, so you've pointed to something very interesting there, which we've kind of brushed

01:16:46.960 over, is that, you know, you basically said something approximating almost no moving parts.

01:16:53.720 Okay, and that's not something that should be brushed over, because that's quite remarkable,

01:16:57.520 because the fewer moving parts, the fewer things that can go wrong, so that's a big deal.

01:17:01.900 But that's also simpler, more understandable.

01:17:04.400 It's more marketable, too, because people can understand it, but also, it's, as you pointed

01:17:10.560 out, it's much more manufacturable.

01:17:12.080 So, to what degree have you reduced the moving part complexity?

01:17:18.080 Like, when you say there's virtually no moving parts, how many parts are there, fundamentally?

01:17:23.600 So, I would say, take our Zeus reactors as an example, because that's a bit further along.

01:17:27.940 Like, there are moving parts, say, control rods that are inserted into the core, and control

01:17:32.300 rods are to moderate the reactivity.

01:17:34.140 So, they go in, they eat up neutrons, it becomes less reactive, and that's how you control power,

01:17:38.860 essentially, as well.

01:17:39.980 So, that is a moving part, and that does require a mechanical system, but it does need fewer

01:17:47.020 safety mechanisms involved than a much larger reactor, because a much larger reactor, or an

01:17:52.940 SMR, will have the ability to overheat and have a core melt, or coolant loss and a core melt,

01:17:59.820 which is, then leads to the reactor being essentially destroyed and needing to be cleaned up.

01:18:04.860 Like you got in Fukushima, when that reactor is essentially melting, and then you just have

01:18:09.500 to spray it with water.

01:18:10.940 That really can't happen with a micro reactor, because it can't overheat to a point where it

01:18:15.340 will melt, and so you don't need as many redundant systems in place.

01:18:19.660 Wasn't it a safety system that went wrong that caused the three-mile island?

01:18:28.380 I read that it was like a safety camera that broke off and got lodged in an exhaust pipe,

01:18:32.860 something which is, you know, horribly, dismally comical.

01:18:38.380 Dismally comical, exactly, and this is the problem, is like, you still need sensors and

01:18:43.740 things like that within a reactor, so you know how to operate.

01:18:47.020 So, you know, you can see, you can tell what's happening, and then obviously modify the controls

01:18:53.180 accordingly. So, there are systems inside a reactor that could fall off, and three-mile

01:18:57.980 islands, obviously, something was dislodged and affected the flow, and then created effectively

01:19:03.900 a runaway effect where it did core melt, and then you did have a...

01:19:06.540 Right, right, right, right. But again, like three-mile island, no one died in that kind of operation,

01:19:11.420 but it's bad, it's bad PR, certainly.

01:19:14.860 Yes, yes, yes. Well, and that's a problem. I mean, that's pollution in the space of public

01:19:19.980 opinion, and that's not trivial. Okay, so let's recap here, just for a summary for everybody

01:19:27.180 watching and listening, and then maybe, as a closing, to see if you have anything to add to it.

01:19:31.820 So, there's plenty of uranium. It's a very, very dense fuel source. It needs to be mined and

01:19:39.740 transformed into yellow cake, and that has to be further refined into uranium...

01:19:44.860 Oh, now I forgot the damn gas name again.

01:19:48.460 Hexafluoride. Hexafluoride. Hexafluoride. Hexafluoride. And then that can be, that can be

01:19:52.140 refined further into the raw material for the, for the raw, for the, for the power source for your

01:19:58.140 micro-reactors. Now, we talked about what a micro-reactor is. It's, it's very easily transportable,

01:20:03.860 doesn't require, which also, something we didn't talk about, which is extremely important,

01:20:08.180 that also means that you don't have to produce the kinds of transmission lines to move the power

01:20:13.140 from place to place, which are also hyper-expensive and require a lot of maintenance. That's a huge

01:20:17.600 advantage. Okay, so you have these micro-reactors. They're under 20, how many watts? 20 megawatts?

01:20:24.380 Under 20 megawatts. Right, and you've built them reliably enough so that they can be just

01:20:29.140 transported on site, as long as the site meets a variety of minimal preconditions. And so this is

01:20:34.320 going to be superb for isolated communities or mining enterprises, et cetera. But in principle,

01:20:39.120 these could be networked together to provide a very resilient, reliable, and increasingly low-cost

01:20:44.400 universal power grid, which would enable us to free up fossil fuels for use as chemicals,

01:20:50.080 chemical precursors, let's say. That's a wonderful summary. Like, absolutely. And there's no reason why,

01:20:55.860 you know, some countries are examining doing exactly that. Like I mentioned, Poland was already

01:21:01.100 examining doing that, just to make its grid more resilient, more robust, and eventually cheaper.

01:21:07.440 Right, so that would be the start. You could imagine these things littered around,

01:21:11.280 in some ways, as backup for the current grid, right, so that to increase its resiliency. But as

01:21:17.240 they become cheaper and more reliable and more tested, even in the public market, then they just start

01:21:22.860 replacing pieces of the grid. Yes, exactly. And like, there's no reason why a developed country

01:21:27.960 can't, like, slowly transition in that direction. It doesn't have to be immediate. It doesn't need

01:21:32.040 to be trillion dollars of infrastructure spending. It shouldn't be immediate. It shouldn't be

01:21:35.560 immediate, because there's going to be problems that might rise that you don't understand until

01:21:38.940 you try to do it. So it should start locally, and then, well, absolutely. I mean, that's the problem

01:21:44.660 with, like, net zero by 2030. It's like, no, how about we don't stampede off a cliff,

01:21:50.260 like, linked arm-in-arm, you know? Maybe that's a bad idea, like it certainly is. Okay,

01:21:55.120 well, that's extremely cool, all of that. And so, now, is there anything you want to tell

01:22:00.920 people that we didn't get to on this side of the interview? I mean, the good thing is,

01:22:06.280 I mean, you covered a lot, and, like, obviously, your understanding is very quick on the nuclear

01:22:13.240 industry as a whole. I would say, I mean, holistically speaking, I just think it's best

01:22:19.400 to communicate that this could be extremely beneficial for mankind, generally. And I could

01:22:27.020 obviously talk about the company and everything like that, but I think, ultimately, the probably

01:22:31.260 more important message is that this could enfranchise billions of people around the world,

01:22:38.020 provide that energy. And I think you put it best when you said that, you know, if you give people

01:22:43.120 access to energy, you lift them out of poverty, and then they become more concerned with the

01:22:47.260 environment. And if you really care about the environment, you should try and lift people out

01:22:52.020 of poverty. Right, exactly. That's a great closing note. That's right. If you really care about the

01:22:57.240 environment, as well as people, let's say, because maybe we could include them in the environment,

01:23:02.280 then you do everything you can to lift them out of poverty. And then, with no holds barred,

01:23:07.140 right, that's the number one moral imperative. Right? I mean, even the climate, look, even the

01:23:11.660 climate apocalypse mongers use the safety and well-being of future generations as the rationale

01:23:19.300 for the moralizing. So there's no way out of that conundrum. It's like, no, how about we help the

01:23:23.880 people who are alive right now? How about we do that? And look, I have children of my own, and I worry

01:23:29.160 about them all the time. And I wonder what kind of world they're going to inherit. And I would like that

01:23:34.020 world to be one where they had access to energy and poverty was far more scarce and not an impending

01:23:41.000 risk. So I have a duty to the future to try and make it a little bit better.

01:23:47.740 Resilient wealth. Resilient wealth. That would be great.

01:23:52.000 That's a wonderful phrase. Like, if we could build in some sort of resilient wealth. And look, wealth is very

01:23:56.860 energy dependent. And so... Yeah, yeah. They're the same thing, man, for all intents and purposes.

01:24:01.520 Because energy is work. And work is wealth. So, like, end of argument, fundamentally.

01:24:06.000 End of argument. Like, I think the fundamental things to progress mankind, as long as it can feed

01:24:10.460 itself and it can power itself, then we should have a relatively decent future that can incrementally

01:24:16.200 keep improving, hopefully.

01:24:18.040 Yes, that's the goal. That would exactly be the goal. That's right. Incrementally improving in an

01:24:22.840 intelligent manner that feeds on itself. Yes, exactly. It's a good definition of heaven,

01:24:27.640 as far as I'm concerned. All right, so that's it.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - May 09, 2024

447. Nuclear Power Is Safer Than Wind and Solar ｜ James Walker

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