[Music]
the climate threat is not new we've known for a few decades that this was
going to be the big issue in the 21st century
this is clearly the biggest threat to the planet we have an emergency
[Music]
we have this whole new injection of people in the last ten years young
hungry ambitious eager engineers who want to do great things it started out as
an academic pursuit but once we started working on this it seemed like we might
actually be on to something you have a set of these small startups run by you
know these really young idealistic people who have kind of come up with
these really innovative designs call it nuclear 2.0 we wanted to develop a new
type of nuclear reactor that can consume existing stockpiles of nuclear waste we
need to be building reactors all over the world as soon as we can if we care
about climate if we care about dealing with emissions we need to build nuclear
so they don't build coal or burn other fossil fuels I want to build an advanced
reactor in the next decade so that we can build them all across the planet to
put this simply a nuclear reactor is not an app this is not the kind of idea that
can be fueled on pizza and lines of code the risk is proportional to the reward
and this is about as big as it gets
[Music]
I'm Ross Koningstein.
I worked on Google's effort to make renewable energy
cheaper than coal.
we published a bunch of material from this, I realized that
slowing or reversing climate change could not be addressed without new
energy technologies coming to bear, particularly cost-effective ones.
And In 2014 I founded the nuclear energy R&D
group here at Google.
And we wanted to see how we might accelerate R&D in
advanced technology.
something that could bring about more scalable zero-carbon
always available cheaper energy for humanity.
For those of you who are not students of nuclear science, nuclear
processes are fundamental to matter and energy in our universe.
We are made of matter that was formed through slow
fusion in stars and our heavier elements were formed through supernova experiment
experiments huh not so much
supernovae and nuclear decay.
Nature is naturally radioactive so the nearest radioactive sources
right near me in fact comes from the potassium-40 that is decaying in my
panelists and myself.
So on that note I'm looking forward to some scintillating
discussions with this group of innovators and experts.
So first off let's introduce David David Schumacher an
award winning actually Emmy award-winning director and producer of the new fire
welcome you're a graduate of the Berklee School of Music and then took a
left-hand turn to go into the world of film under esteemed filmmakers
such as Barbara Kopple and Ken Burns.
I think most of us are aware of one or two works that Ken Burns has worked on
that's great.
You became really inspired and driven to work on the new fire as we
have talked about several times this is great and you tie it to the
environmental need the technological abilities and the opportunities that are
out there that's great.
Our next panelist Caroline Cochran.
She is the co-founder and COO at Oklo Inc
a company named after a naturally-occurring reactor in Gabon, if I remember correctly
so Caroline earned her BA in economics and her BS in
mechanical engineering from the University of Oklahoma and her MS and
nuclear engineering from MIT.
She has a background working on solar vehicles
natural gas oil refining and of course nuclear engineering and her company Oklo
is working on clean energy plants for microgrids where advanced fission
reactors can pair and work along with renewables so it's pretty exciting.
Tyler Ellis is founder and principal of Ellis, black Ellis partners pardon me he
received a PhD, SM and SB degrees from MIT in nuclear science and engineering and
also an MBA from Harvard that's probably our most decorated panelist.
Previously Tyler was on the founding team at Terra Power
which is a Bill Gates' backed nuclear energy company and now at Black Hills
Partners.
He is an entrepreneur investor scientific adviser who works with both
the private and public sector to bring high impact energy technologies to
market and Mengyao, Mengyao Yuan is a postdoctoral research scientist at the
Carnegie Institution for science at Stanford.
She recently got her PhD at Stanford for studying carbon capture and
other low carbon technologies and her current research focuses on modeling
analysis of near zero emission energy systems.
So thank you all so much for being with us here today and so let's
talk about advanced nuclear energy technology and the solutions and
opportunities that it may present for the future.
So perhaps let's start with some maybe you could provide a little
motivation for each of you to let the audience know what you're about.
yes David yeah well I'm not I went to music
school in Boston and then on 150 Mass Ave. and I
found myself on the other side of the Charles River at Mass Ave.
at MIT why would I go and do this I was just worried about climate like
everybody else and when I sort of realized that the
science about how do you decarbonize was not really being followed by the
policymakers and the just general public opinion people had no concept of how do
we actually decarbonize and what role nuclear would have to play I felt like
well this is really worrisome because I'm we have to solve this problem and
the rate we're going we're just it's not going to happen and so I felt like
that's kind of a bold statement and kind of a very contrarian statement perhaps
and maybe not the most popular type of thing to do but I felt like once I sort of met
some people that were working in this field and I found you know saw these
amazing sort of heroic folks who were really just the dedicated to providing
clean energy for the world even if it's misunderstood at this time I thought the
people have to see this because I was so amazed by what I learned that to be able
to present that journey of discovery that I went through to other people and
they could see the whole get the whole thing at the 85 minutes as opposed to
you know spending three years doing all of this that's that's what I felt was
really exciting about it great Thank You Caroline I think in some ways my journey
parallels David's not entirely I was engineering in undergraduate but I
didn't know anything about nuclear at all and met some nuclear engineers
actually Tyler and an undergraduate engineering internship in DC I was
mostly interested in policy I thought I was gonna go to grad school and robotics
with mechanical engineering and really just became convinced every I was very
skeptical about nuclear we learn more and more about it and I my kind of
underlying passion is the environment and health and just realized that this is
one silver bullet that you don't really you really don't see something quite
this impactful so I became passionate about it decided to go work for a year
reapply to grad school and that's how I ended up at MIT
My co-founder Jacob DeWitte who's here actually today was passionate about
commercializing something in advance nuclear and so I became part of that
group but what we really realize this people needed this kind of power what
we're looking at now they needed it yesterday basically these microgrids are just
starving for clean reliable power so that's how we really got
focused in on this really really small concept great Thank You Tyler yeah mine
actually starts back to freshman year we had to pick your major and then I said
okay I got into a good school I think I should work on something that's high
impact to society and I said okay we have genetically modified crops for food
we have desalination technologies for water we have cheap building materials
for shelter but energy is really the underpinning factor that we don't know
how we're gonna get all that it is we need to get I said okay I'll work on
that and then I looked at all the energy funds that you could scale up without
emitting massive amounts of co2 in the interim and it's okay nuclear technology
is the best option there I said I'm gonna work on that I spent about seven and
a half years at MIT and then subsequently
worked with several other startups Afterwards Great.
And Mengyao.
Yeah, so what got me started in the energy and environment space is Captain Planet and
the Planeteers, which I really enjoyed watching as a kid.
But what keeps me going is just a sense of accomplishment I get from doing something
I find meaningful.
so I have a question for David
so of course congratulations with the the release of the film which was like
this weekend right yeah Friday yeah Thursday and I think you've told
us a bit about your motivation behind the story.
Can you tell us about the reactions at the film festivals and what
you think the path for the film will be well I think that the you know the
path with the film is just gonna be number one box office smash worldwide
no I mean it the point of the Film this isn't a commercial film I mean
when you go about making a film like a documentary you have to ask yourself why
am I doing this and there's generally three buckets that
could fall and it could be to make that money you know I want to make as much
money as I possibly can or it could be I want to be famous I
want as many people to see this film and awards and reviews and everything and
it's a really big deal or I want to change the world and I'd love to do the
first two don't get me wrong but my main priority with this film was changing the
world and I think that the thing that it could it was able to do and the biggest
concern that I had was that people who are concerned about the environment and
concerned about climate and sincere about that just don't understand nuclear
and don't understand the role that nuclear can play to really solve this
plant and solve this problem this energy problem this climate problem this social
justice around energy problem sustainable development problem nuclear
is something really interesting that can really help with all of those issues and
I felt that if I could somehow bring a story that can appeal to those
sensibilities of those type of people and get you know them to accept
especially advanced nuclear and the role of innovation we're already doing a lot
of renewables we're already doing storage we're already working on
efficiency systems thinking all of that stuff what else can we do because this
is a big problem the biggest problem we've ever had as a species
what about technology what's next in a pipeline and if you think about it in
that respect the development pipeline the low-hanging fruit in energy is
nuclear so I think it's really interesting and I hope that
environmentalists will see that this is that we're environmentalist too and
that's I mean Caroline could even talk about she was at the screening at the
world's largest environmental film festival environmental film festival in
the nation's capital and we're accepted as environmentalists I mean it's amazing
and we've been at four environmental film festivals and that's really amazing so
one of the things that many people might not know is that some of these film
screenings have Q and A's what were the reactions like from the people who saw
the film I would say that we've had some really great reactions I had one couple that
came after up to me after our screening at
the Philadelphia Film Festival environmental film festival and they
said you know we were we live downwind from the Three Mile Island these were
older folks than me they were young adults living around Three Mile Island
when that happened and they were very scared and it became very anti-nuclear
in the wake of that and started a branch of the Sierra Club and they were very
anti and they said you know we they came up to me they said you know we have a
friend who's been pro-nuclear and she's been trying to convince us and it hasn't
worked but you know seeing this film and seeing these the next generation
reactors and the people behind it made us you know really interested and inspired
and I think now we actually changed our minds and that was a really big deal I
mean I think it's a big deal for people that changed their minds but I think
also at these environmental film festivals there's a lot of disaster porn
you know there's so much bad news in the environmental space that to bring a
positive solutions based story was kind of a really nice palate cleanse and
beyond that it was just the way in contrast everything else so I mean I
could have asked for a better quality of response than what we've
gotten from the environmental film festivals in particular but film
festivals in general I would say that's great.
Well let's let's switch gears a little into a technology in the systems
view so I think as we all know you know in the early 1900's a telephone was this
40-pound box that was attached to the wall of your house and you had to hand crank
it and here we are today and we carry you know something that you can
call anybody in the world from and it fits in your pocket and it happens to
have a computer and all sorts of other good stuff in it.
Nuclear technology sadly has not seen the same
rate of advance however there are a number of advances that have occurred
and Mengyao I wonder if you might talk a little bit about what you think of from
traditional nuclear energy which is basically 1950s technology and how that
fits into the energy system and compare that perhaps with the possibilities of
advanced technology nuclear.
So yeah so traditionally nuclear power is a
large-scale zero emission technology and has played an important role in the
u.s. energy system nuclear currently represents 20 percent
of the electricity generation in the US and more than half of the country's
carbon-free electricity the energy system is changing rapidly however and
nuclear faces competition from cheap natural gas especially in the US as well
as increasing penetration of wind and solar PV and because of the variable
generation from wind and solar we need technologies that can fill the
gap between variable demand and variable generation and currently natural gas is
filling this role but to minimize the impact on the climate we would need
substitutes that are carbon free and these technologies would also need to be
cost competitive with natural gas because eventually everything would need
to compete on dollar per kilowatt hour basis future energy technologies will
also need to be reliable and flexible to accommodate the variability in the grid
and they would also need to be climate resilient to adapt to the more
challenging operating conditions caused by climate change and advanced nuclear
technologies could be an important player in a future energy system if they
can tick these boxes and I look forward to learning from the other panelists
about this topic thank you thank you well let's let's hop to that panelists
so Caroline you are in an advanced nuclear energy startup could you tell us
what that's like yeah well you know in the movie it says it's not like an app
that's true um in some ways but in some ways it actually is believe it or not
and that's part of why we're based here in Silicon Valley is because we feel
like the focus that's on developing and turning out something quickly is
really important we're part I think it's we also friends who are doing other kind
of really cutting-edge things like quantum computing and things like that
but I almost think this is it's harder than that in a way because we're not
just trying to break new ground but we're trying to break new ground and
such an old industry and kind of like what was mentioned by the other
panelists we've got an industry where it's no joke they still use analog
devices frequently okay so we're talking dials and levers and stuff um and so
we're trying to do this and a totally new kind of reactor using tested
technologies from the labs from decades ago but basically totally new in a
commercial sense for the micro grids but trying to do within an industry that is
incredibly backwards and not necessarily always friendly to that kind of kind of
new innovation so it is I think we're in a really interesting spot in that way
we're trying to use computers you know now with computing power you can
actually model an entire reactor used to be you really couldn't do that and so
you know using Python and using modern scripting and computing capabilities to
really turn this around much quicker and much cheaper so um yeah it's a really
unique space okay so you have the perspective of innovator Tyler I'd like
to turn to you and get the perspective of somebody who helps make things happen
in funding advice etc so in the nuclear space there's about 30 startups
operating today in advanced nuclear what do you see as some of the things that
that need to happen there to really make that successful yeah so I mean each
individual company and Technology approach kind of has their own specific
things that would be most beneficial so you know for one company maybe their
central technical risk is a new materials development program for
another company maybe it's a you know complex simulation and finding kind of
the optimum topology of reactor layout so kind of each individual concept and
company kind of has their own you know set of technical milestones that's that
would be most helpful in the like in the investment space I think there's a
variety of interesting things that are happening there with the rise of a lot
of new funds that have longer timelines and providing access to physical
facilities in order to perform a lot of earlier stage prototype development and
proof-of-concept without having to spend all the money to build up one of those
types of facilities and then just generally connecting
those types of organizations with large strategic companies that can help them
scale up or help them learn how to better really ramp that up into a
commercially viable type of design and then on the regulatory front I think
there's a number of kind of interesting developments there as well as far as the
NRC is entirely rate based they're about a 90 percent of their fees are recovered
from you know the rate payers but they're starting to change some of those
requirements such that you know smaller companies can go and talk to them and
have interactions you know for for establishing kind of a large-scale
design that's between like forty to a hundred million dollars which is pretty
expensive for a lot of early-stage startups but you're starting to see
movement in that space in order to try and alleviate that burden so kind of new
or more exciting technologies have a shot at actually getting to market
without having to raise hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to get
over that hump because that high amount of capital you know is a pretty
significant barrier to entry for a lot of the older space startups so you have
to be really keenly focused on what is that central technical risk let's do
what we can to take maximum risk out early and then use that to justify
the subsequent round of financing yes that definitely is one of the challenges in
nuclear space because energy is about 10% of the world economy
so the potential revenue stream is huge but you know scaling your company and
technologies to deliver that you need money to make that happen.
Great well I'd like to turn now to the panel part
of our discussion and I'd like to talk I'd like us to talk for a little bit about
the circular economy so the circular economy is somewhere where you reduce
your environmental footprint by designing out waste remanufacturing your
products or regenerating your systems so that your waste stream becomes
incredibly small and hopefully your supply stream also becomes quite strong
small of course to do this you tend to need to add energy and you know
processing to make these things work so for example Google has realized quite a
few savings as well as reductions in waste in our own implementation of
circular economy in the management of our data center hardware so nobody likes
to throw out a lot of you know used electronic equipment so
if you can close that cycle and minimize your waste stream then you have a much
smaller environmental impact energy technology can play a real role in
this and so I'm wondering if we could talk a little bit about the circular
principles of reduce reuse recycle etc and how we could embed that much at a
larger scale into a society's infrastructure how do you see the next
generation of nuclear reactors fitting into that picture so I mean just to kind
of reiterate what you said you know the amount of waste itself is actually
incredibly small you know when you look at you know it's a football field 9 foot
high which is the waste stream for the entire United States 20% of our
electricity generation for about 60 years
you know if an individual got 100 percent of their electricity from
nuclear energy and lived to be a hundred their waste would fit inside of a Coke can
it's very well contained very small so it's a fairly small amount to deal
with a lot of the existing nuclear reactors burn about 0.7% of kind of all
uranium that exists there's two isotopes u-235 u-238
many of the advanced reactor designs can go upwards of you know close to 50%
utilization which is a significant expansion as far as the uranium
utilization and then also once you actually split that uranium in there
there are a variety you get basically the entire periodic table in your spent fuel
elements so there are a variety of uses from any of those isotopes for
medical applications you know molybdenum-99 at Kazon to technetium-99
which we use for 20 million imaging procedures in the medical field today so
I think there's a lot of opportunities with many of those advanced technologies
to increase the utilization and or reuse their fuel for you know making new fuels (mumble).
Mengyao, I think you had a comment, no So, I'd like to add to that if there's extra
time I like once I learned about nuclear I found it's really the it's
almost like the ultimate circular economy situation because you can try to
recycle a lot of things but very few things can you recycle and produce clean
electricity at the same time so that's really what's so amazing about
it and part of why we're passionate about our technology - it's one of the
ones that Tyler was mentioning where you can really make use of the entire well a
large portion of the remainder of the nuclear fuel that's been used that's why
sometimes people call it used nuclear fuel instead of waste because one
analogy is like if you buy the liter pop and took a sip and threw it away we can
use a good portion of the remainder of that so that's really important to us is
making closing than what we call closing the nuclear fuel cycle but also like you
thinking about all so many different products for use today maybe we can try
to recycle them but they use an incredible amount of energy to recycle
so the carbon footprint of recycling and sometimes greater than just making it
new although you're still talking about resource impacts on the globe right and
in the environment and so we have to focus on what has the lowest carbon
lifecycle footprint and that's really nuclear by a long shot um when you when
you account for whether or not you have to have backup power or storage for an
energy source and then if you take that which is already incredibly low carbon
footprint and then recycle it then you really have an incredible situation for
the environment so that's why we're real excited about it and now you mentioned
the electric part but there's also the primary energy part where you know the
large-scale use of natural gas or other fuels that go into manufacturing
I just wanted throw something out here is that we're talking about the waste so
when people hear about nuclear waste does anybody worry about that well
that's reasonable because when you pulled spent fuel out of a reactor
that's pretty nasty stuff right then and there and you know you definitely only
be anywhere near it or you won't live very long but the thing I think is
really interesting it's the reason that I'm making this film at all is because
of fossil fuel waste that here in the United States we're putting 100 million tons
of it into the atmosphere this week and every week that's how much we do just in
the United States we use about 10% of the world's energy I think it is and yet
we're worried about a football field of spent fuel how many people know the
difference between high level waste and other waste so when you hear about the 5
million gallons of high level waste does anybody know what that is so that's the
scary stuff the high level waste is from military when they were doing the
Manhattan Project and they're just in such a rush to let's get the bomb as
fast as we can we weren't really worried that much about the waste and so forth
so there are some millions of gallons of waste that has not been fully remediated
yet and you know so that's kind of the cost of getting the the bomb finished in
time and finishing the Second World War however on the nuclear energy side every
bit of nuclear spent fuel nuclear waste that is produced by the nuclear energy
industry is collected by the nuclear energy industry is controlled by the
nuclear industry there's never been a fatality from that for many you know
civilians certainly and it's a it's a big lie out there about nuclear waste is
something dangerous I mean imagine if the fossil industry collected and
controlled its waste imagine if that happened we wouldn't need to have this
climate problem, would we but yet here we are
worrying about nuclear waste no one's ever died from it so who benefits from
that that's the question I want to know your fear of nuclear waste of radiation
who benefits from that because you're not supporting nuclear so then if people
don't support it it's not gonna get built and what fills the void think
about that on that thought-provoking note let's shift a discussion to what's
next so just sort of anybody please comment what do you think is needed to
scale the advanced nuclear reactor industry well please happy to go I
think there's a variety of things for a lot of the new startups kind of as I
mentioned before having sort of a new mechanisms in the
regulatory side is gonna be very beneficial so as I mentioned it's very
capital-intensive to have any sort of a regulatory review so that would have a
very massive impact I think another thing that you could do would be right
now each individual state has a renewable portfolio standard and they
actually define winners as only wind or solar, so they kind of artificially
selecting winners I think the original intent of the legislation is really to
encourage non co2 emitting generation so if individual state by state basis we
were to go around and say okay let's change the definition from only wind and
solar to all non emitting generation sources I think that would go a long way
towards helping uh helping that out and then I had one other but oh I'm sorry
the public-private partnership site I think there's a variety of interesting
mechanisms that could be used to a lot of Department of Energy experts and
other experts in the government can have public/private interactions with the
private industry so whether that's leveraging a lot of their large testing
facilities at National Labs so you startups don't have to rebuild all of
that or tap into some of that expertise I think they can go a long way and then
one of the other things that was really beneficial in the NASA COTS program
which basically provided about four hundred million dollars to SpaceX and
allowed SpaceX to be the success that it is today from from other companies that
didn't win that award like SpaceX they were actually able to interact with NASA
experts and then have NASA sign off on the technology approach and then have
independent experts say yeah that's reasonable if you build that that will
work then they're able to take that to the private investors and say oh well
you have NASA experts signed off on that you know we're gonna fund you to get to
your next milestone that actually encouraged a lot more innovation to
happen which was phenomenal beyond just the individual winner of the
public-private partnership.
I think that what's interesting about what Tyler is talking
about though is it's different between nuclear and and you know space travel
and when SpaceX is all about is that who doesn't want to see that type of you
know they're talking about going to Mars you
know like that's exciting who isn't excited about that but in a nuclear
business we're gonna build a new reactor like hey people just don't get as
excited you don't capture the imagination of the public but it really
should because this is how you get off fossil fuels and after all it's all
about keeping it in the ground that's what we have to do is keep fossil fuels
in the ground so if you ever wondering about a problem with nuclear like the
safety safety no one's ever died from a nuclear plant including Three Mile
Island in the United States ever yeah what happened in San Bruno a few years
ago with natural gas so we didn't have a moratorium on natural gas after a bunch
of people died when there's a big natural gas explosion in their
neighborhood but yet you know at Fukushima happens which nobody who died
from radiation at Fukushima either and Germany shuts down everybody shuts down
and it's just amazing because who benefits from this and who fills the
void fossil fossil is still the fastest growing form of energy in the world
right now out of all of the new energy that the capacity that's put out in the
world renewables is only about a third less than that the vast majority of a
new energy is filled with fossil and so you're not even replacing existing the
only thing that is ever you know worked at the scale and speed necessary in
the world is nuclear, but some people aren't gonna be happy about that
because if you think about the energy industry it's 10% of the world
technology and the fossil industry is a multi trillion dollar industry it's
crazy it's huge amounts of money nuclear is a few billion dollars a year in the
fuel space because it's basically free fuel doesn't cost thing right like one
gram of uranium has about saying that ash is two tons of coal and in those two
tons of coal there's four parts per million of uranium so when they're
Burning two tons of coal they're actually spewing more uranium out there
into the earth for all of us to breathe and whatever then you would need to burn
in a reactor to create the same amount energy in the first place and then you'd
have waste from one gram of uranium which is like a size of a pea
so this is how insane it all is and why because public opinion people afraid of
radiation people afraid of nuclear safety people afraid of all that but if
you look at the facts what's the most dangerous form of energy they ain't
nuclear, it's coal.
Nuclear's at the bottom it's the safest form of energy
along with renewables and you know hydro is actually much more dangerous because
people have you know had there's been bad accidents but there's it's not
dangerous and radiation it turns out that we're way over afraid of radiation
there's no exactly the amount of radiation required in a year so you
evacuate from a place according to you know health physics society and the EPA and
other guidelines it's 100 millisieverts annual dose well there's no biological
evidence of anybody ever getting cancer having a bad health outcome from
receiving less than 100 millisieverts not over a year but over the course of a
few seconds to a few minutes nobody's ever died from a cat-scan nobody's ever
died from an MRI nobody's ever died from a PET scan nobody's ever died for a
chest x-ray that's never happened there's no evidence of it yet here we
are being told these risks that are not real risks it's all like it's something
everything is upside down and nuclear everything I thought I knew was wrong
and it's just it's bonkers but it's so liberating it I just hope some of
you folks look into this it's really interesting so it's really interesting
to see that if you're particularly data-driven and you can set aside your
feelings on the matter then you can arrive at this kind of conclusion right
but you know most people who actually don't have a lot of information they
rely on things they see and hear what do you think about the importance of having
demonstrations of new technology in the nuclear space that the public could
somehow see and use as a basis for re-evaluating perhaps what they think
yeah yeah like that's actually a perfect segue cuz I was just going to echo what
Dave is saying and Tyler is saying but also you know how we scale this up or
how do we really change things I think we have to build
it I don't think we necessarily need huge government programs do that I think
huge government programs usually lead to the kinds of outcomes so you don't want
to see in this industry which is more backwards thinking and more kind of anti
innovation thinking which is what we're battling basically every day right and then
what's really behind all this there's not a big motive there because there
isn't the education the stuff that Dave's talking about people aren't
passionate like you see people have learned some things and then they get
really passionate it's really amazing but by and large like you're saying
people aren't and so there isn't the motivation for the politicians to push
things or to give credits or I think it all comes down to what people really
want and I think when you build something especially our reactors kind
of what we call community size so it's small enough that there's really nothing
that can happen to it and you can have a small piece of land where people could
come and actually come pretty close to the reactor because it is that safe and
we can demonstrate that and then they can see it and they can feel in a touch
it and I think it's not as foreboding as huge plants that have you know large
amounts of water intake like we don't require any water and you can't come
anywhere close and there's huge guards and you know guns and fences and all
those other things so yeah I think that's a huge part of it it's just
building it and letting people see it firsthand and letting them make their
own decisions and giving them education to know what's real what's not real yeah
we have the interaction is a huge part I mean if you get greater social licence
when you actually bring people in and show them as opposed to oh this is super
secret you can't you can't see what we're doing we're gonna do a put a black
box around everything and then users have to trust us so having that
interaction I think is very key for kind of the next generation to be successful
and deploying new technologies what we're seeing to as communities are
already opting in instead of sort of saying okay we have this huge plan we
have to site in this one you know kind of low cost area and so poor people end
up having to move or whatever it has a socioeconomic effect but when you
have this small thing that communities can decide to opt in on because it's
small enough and cost-effective enough for them to do that we are seeing
communities that are saying hey I want that for mine, and
that might be Native American communities or our small communities up
in Alaska and so we're basically already having what's almost like a early
purchase list because there's communities are like hey I want that in
my community I want my community to be entirely carbon free and so we can pair
that with renewables and have you know electricity at night or when the wind
doesn't blow or when it's really dark and extremely cold in Alaska and so I
think there's incredible power if you can have an opt-in situation great so
another advantage I would think of to build more reactors is to drive down
the cost of nuclear because currently the high capital costs especially of
nuclear is a barrier that prevents I think further development of nuclear so by
building more reactors we could learn from the
experience and potentially lower the cost of this technology great so we have
a number of people here in the audience today and a number of people who are
likely watching us through the internet do you have any words of wisdom or
advice to people who are interested in in learning more about this wanting to
make a positive impact on the world or simply get involved somehow in the
nuclear conversation Well, the first place to start is check out
the movie's website, newfiremovie.com Commercial plug.
The thing that we've done on the film on this website that we just relaunched or expanded
out is that it explains a bit about the technology and it has links to all sorts
of different sources of information so if you want a jumping-off point to get
into you know learning about this if you go to the website that's a pretty easy
place to start that's what I was going to say yeah we participated in this film
because I feel like there isn't a great there's not like a single great source
to point people to people are like hey I want to learn about advanced fission
like what is it how does it differ from older plants what is nuclear at all um
I'm not I don't have like a lot of resources I'm like oh this is a really
great way and user friend not really technologically dense to
learn about this and that's part of why we participate in this film it's
hopefully like it gets the word out about what's going on and a little bit
about the tech and then the website has more resources so yeah additional plug
so I completely agree with all of that I mean I think the the big thing that I
would say would be to start today don't start tomorrow or next week we've been
enough delay so we've people if you want to get involved involved now I think
reaching out to a variety of startup companies in the nuclear space are a great
way to get involved you know you can either help them out and you know some
way shape or form and that can kind of put you on the cutting edge of a lot of
that technology I think that's a really exciting way to learn about the
technology as it's being you know developed and kind of reengineered I
mean there are a few other industrial websites where you can do a little bit
of additional background reading so nuclear energy institute is a pretty
good source of information the world nuclear Association is another good
source of information if you want to do background reading that can kind of give
you a rough lay of the land and understanding of the technology
Just keep calm and carry on ok great
well I think we are coming up on our Q&A period.
Camila, do we have some questions can everyone hear me so one of the questions
we had come in was it seems apparent that we
can no longer reduce carbon we have to remove it from the atmosphere should we
use the need for energy to sequester carbon to justify nuclear energy
Yes!
- Other thoughts?
cool things I think about having such an energy dense and non
carbon emitting source of electricity is you can do really wild things so we've
looked into pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and basically making a carbon
neutral form of fuel for vehicles or planes you can do that when you have
such an energy dense form of electricity you can you can do desalination and it
really effective ways but yeah pulling carbon
out of the atmosphere is one of the things that nuclear can be really well-suited
to okay I would just say that I think it's
probably better to use the nuclear energy to sort of produce energy and
offset fossil and get rid of fossil and then once we're at, you know, zero fossil
or as close to that as we can get then start using it to suck the energy there
the co2 out but that's a small point yeah a big part of the challenge though
is there has to be some there has to be some mechanism that values removing co2
from the atmosphere because right now there's no economic way with which that
is valued so I think one of the big things for that is actually just being
able to have some sort of a market mechanism that addresses and values that
sort of you know that sort of technology approach and then as soon as something
like that happens and you're gonna see a lot more a lot more movement but
nuclear's I think probably the best way of being
able to actually power facility like that before you had mentioned using last
gen waste as next gen fuel does that limit at all where these next
gen reactors can be built do they have to be built next to waste sites from former
sites or can they be dispatched in other locations yeah it's pretty small
the fuel part is only five percent of the cost of nuclear electricity so even
if you were to spend a little bit more money or have it be a slightly more
complex process it really doesn't impact the net price of electricity much at all
and then you know the the kind of the choice between using fresh uranium fuel
versus using a used fuel it's more of a kind of an economic question because you
know remanufacturing old fuel or reusing old fuel will cost a bit more
money but then performance aside, it is kind of a society-level question of you know
where do we make our investment in and how much do we value you know utilizing
that used nuclear stockpile fuel and then manufacturing new you know new fuel
elements from that versus paying for a repository or something like that so it
really kind of comes down to you know what that particular society is
optimizing for you know we're trying to have you know the smallest repository
possible or you know for okay using dry cask storage on reactor sites, or just what
the desired mix is that'll be different for each country and I
think a great question is can you define advanced nuclear
I'll start, I guess, there are a lot of different definitions so that makes it kind of tough.
You know Congress defined it, they have politically motivated definitions that
are like any reactor after a certain year I think usually when people say
advanced they mean non light water reactors so in other words all the
existing commercial reactors the United States today use you know huge amounts
of water and they use water for cooling in moderation so ours doesn't a lot of
these advanced technologies don't there are some other people who would define
advanced is more or less having what we call passive safety characteristics so
in other words inherent safety so even if react an operator wasn't there the
reactor literally couldn't meltdown so there are some light water reactors that
have some of those safety characteristics what we call passive safety
characteristics so sometimes they get lumped into the advanced reactor bundle
so it kind of just depends on what you want to call it I think usually people
use it as a way to define newer technology so in the last couple decades
these passive safety to ensure that there is no meltdown capability so I
think that the important thing to think about when you're thinking about what is
an advanced reactor is it's and why would you want an advanced reactor is
precisely building on what Caroline said right now we have to use water as a
coolant and you have to get up to about 300 degrees Celsius or something like
that and water boils naturally at a hundred degrees Celsius so I think that
means you have to be at 150 atmospheres pressure so you got to keep that water
at that level and imagine the amount of you know the the size of what you're
dealing with in the magnitude and the strength of everything and it has to be
failsafe and has to run 100% at a time for 40 years that's a big ask on
materials and on you know this big plant where if you say well why don't we just
use material like a coolant that can't evaporate you know and we can get it up
to like a thousand degrees there's no way it's ever going to
evaporate and it could just run it at atmospheric pressure well as soon as you
do that it just gets way smaller and way less complicated and way fewer parts and
way simpler so why didn't we ever do that before because we didn't have the
materials at the time when they you know in in the 1950s when they needed to get
a reactor going it was like what can we get going it's gonna work right now and
that we can put in a submarine and it's gonna work right now and it was, like, a light
water reactor that made perfect sense but in the past sixty years with all the
developments and materials and everything else that's happened the fact
that we're still using water as the coolant in nuclear reactors is just I
mean it's great but it's like it's like going to Cuba and going oh look at all
these great old cars it's so nice you know, '57 Edsel, that's so great and it's
like but don't you think the people of Cuba want to be driving Tesla's like
everybody else I mean it's charming but we need we need
new technology and we need the pop social license and we need people
demanding it if you want to get off fossil fuel if you want to get at the
fossil industry and make them real mad and hit him where it hurts advocate for nuclear,
this kind of nuclear and so to that point the current state
of the nuclear industry what what is happening with these old reactors from
the 1950s are they being shut down with any replacements are they being upgraded
how is that changing well I think there's a couple of things that dynamic
wise that are changing so I mentioned one the renewable portfolio standards
and individual states which is actually mandating a certain percentage of
electricity which has to be purchased from either wind or solar and the way
that a lot of those markets work is that they quote out the total number of
megawatts they need for the day and each individual state will say okay well this
certain percentage has to be for wind and solar and that moves all the other
resources out of the stack and because of the advent of cheap natural gas it's
actually pushing what used to be one of the cheapest sources of electricity
generation which is nuclear fission power plants out of the stack and making
it challenging for them to be able to actually sell all their electricity so
that's why you're actually seeing a lot of
challenges with regards to should we keep this plant open or not I mean these
are very long-lived assets you know they're originally licensed for 40 years
but we're doing license extensions for 60 and likely 80 years they're replacing
a lion's share of the components in there so you know these already
constructed facilities can operate for a very long period of time but you know
really it's a it's kind of a market type of a dynamic and you know the advent of
the renewable portfolio standards have really changed that dynamic of being
able to sell that electricity so I think that's the challenge it's not a it's not
a waste issue it's not a it was partially kind of related to a cost
issue but it's because the market was actually changed the rules of the games
were changed and that's what actually is really hurting a lot of existing
generation now that's it one interesting thing though that's happened the last
couple decades is massive upgrades to these plants so we've added maybe 8 gigawatts of
clean electricity to the grid just because
these plants use advanced technologies to grow larger and produce more clean
electricity it's really valuable obviously for the grid because it's
that's 9 gigawatts we don't have to produce using something else that's a
really good story for the environment even if we don't think that those are
necessarily the kinds of plants we should be building now I've been really
happy to see some of that so these plants are operating at 95 plus percent
capacity factor so almost 24/7 and if you can get squeezed out you know you
know double-digit percentages greater power out of the same plant and that's
what they've been doing just because the need for power has been great and they
had I mean as you mentioned before the the better computational tools so the way
these reactors were designed in kind of the 1950's and 40s they had very large
margins in there and then after they've kind of sharpen the pencil with a lot of
their advanced computational tools they realize oh wow we can actually get a lot
more electricity out of this and we can shave those margins down to a more
reasonable level rather than excessively large margins so that's also part of the
so some states have had decent emissions cuts just because of upgrades in
nuclear which is great and then you mentioned before the high barrier to
entry sometimes with the cost of capital needed to start a nuclear reactor and so
nuclear we have a question says nuclear power is distinguished from most other
technologies in that its cost increases with time and so do you do you agree
with that and if so why does that happen I totally disagree with that it's
arbitrary the price of energy is arbitrary if you think about energy what
is it all predicated on right it's all predicated on this asset this commodity
fossil fuel commodity that started out as coal and it was a small thing to do
you know whatever they did with steam engines at first and then gradually you
got oil and then gasoline kerosene gasoline and natural gas and became this
multi trillion dollar industry the fossil industry so we predicate our
whole grid all of the energy that we get is predicated upon feeding money to this
commodity industry it's not infrastructure like you should be
infrastructure should be like building a hospital building roads building you
know sewage for cities and stuff it should be thought it was that nuclear
power just like renewables is power for the people it's about ideas using
smarter not using resources to get energy they're using some resources but
it's about using just really smart science to be able to get a ton of
energy out of the tiniest little it's mind-boggling and it's a huge threat to
the fossil industry but the fossil industry side a good ride
I think they've it's time for them to sort of pass on the torch and it's time
for the world to start thinking energy more as a public good then as a business
commodity driven type of thing that's all for the benefit of enriching a bunch
of folks that don't necessarily have the best interests of the planet in life but
I think we can point to economic statistics so the question referred to
that what we call a negative learning curve in economics and there are
examples of positive learning curves and in nuclear and I believe Korea is an
example of that right so maybe we could just turn that question around to the
panelists and say what do you think would have to change
for nuclear to go on a positive learning curve again yeah so I mean I think one
of the things that's important to keep in mind is that the cost escalation of a
lot of the plants in the United States is not representative of the global
experience around the world you know in a lot of the costs the united states
have gone up due to a lengthening of the regulatory and permitting process and a
wide variety of other challenges is very easy to challenge a lot of these
projects and then subsequently through the court delays drive up the lion's
share of these costs also American labor is a lot more expensive than labor in
other countries so if you compare the plant construction costs in South Korea
which has some of the least expensive power plants the other thing that
they've done is they've standardized designs you know so in the United States
we have about roughly a hundred-ish types of reactors they're all a little
bit different as opposed to you know South Korea kind of made a choice if
we're gonna have one plant design we're gonna standardize this and then we're
gonna come down that learning curve so that's all coming down the learning
curve necessitates some sort of a standardization so then you build it
over and over again and then those people that were you know helping to
construct this reactor can apply those learnings the subsequent reactor and so
on and so forth and and that's where you're really getting a lot of the
savings so I think you know the cheapest electricity reactor construction
projects in the world are gonna be driven by the South Koreans driven by
the Chinese where they're really standardizing a lot of these designs and
building a lot of the same types of plants because that's really where
you're gonna get the savings so Tyler has summarized a very elegantly although I
just wanted to add that if you're interested about this topic I would
recommend reading Jessica Lovering's pieces on this she also appeared in the
movie I believe so she has some excellent work on
this topic okay well on that note we are out of time and we greatly appreciate
appreciate each of you panelists taking time out of your day to be here today
and sharing your knowledge with our audience and also out in Internet-Land so
everybody please thank join me in thanking the panelists
and also a big thank you Camila Montes de Oca for making this panel
discussion happen thank you
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