The Future of Nuclear Energy: Politics, Culture, and Technology with Mark Nelson
Let’s talk nuclear. It’s not as scary as it sounds. And it holds great promise for the future of energy.
My guest is Mark Nelson. Mark has worked in nuclear for his whole career. He is now the managing director of Radiant Energy Fund. He previously worked in Europe, tracking electrical systems emissions. He has a masters in nuclear from Cambridge. When it comes to nuclear, Mark knows what he’s talking about.
This podcast is packed with all things nuclear. We talk about the different types of reactors. We explore the history of nuclear, where it’s at today, and possibilities for the future.
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Here’s what I learned from the episode:
Mark discovered an impending energy crisis that no one seemed ready for. He thinks nuclear energy is going to be the future.
Two things are driving a nuclear renaissance. One is concern about climate change and the need for clean energy. The second is the natural gas boom of the last decade has reached its conclusion, with the new land wars in Europe.
The main issue for nuclear is not so much about the safety rules but about the investment decisions. The upfront costs for building a nuclear plant are high. But the ongoing operation costs are low and the lifespan is long.
The most expensive part of nuclear electricity generation is the people.
The marvel of nuclear energy is that you can store a ton of energy in a tiny place. If carefully managed, you can power all of society on jest a few machines.
Energy price is an imperfect reflector of energy cost. We see this in France’s mismanagement of their nuclear fleet. France is one of the only countries in the world where electricity costs are not going up very much in the global coal gas crisis.
Historically, the moral panic about nuclear energy in the West was about it being too cheap, too cost effective, and too powerful. Yes, you read that right.
The Chernobyl reactor explosion did not stop Chernobyl nuclear plant from running. Nor did it stop Ukrainians from embracing nuclear.
Disasters can eliminate entire categories of accidents. We have learned from the Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima Daiichi disasters.
A lot of the younger generation got into nuclear via thorium hype on Reddit and other message boards. But they quickly learned thorium is not actually so exciting.
Learn more about Mark Nelson:
Additional episodes if you enjoyed:
Episode Transcript:
Eric Jorgenson: Hello again, my friends, and welcome. I'm Eric Jorgenson and this is a podcast. This show explores technology, investing, and entrepreneurship to help us all create a brighter, more abundant future together. This podcast is one of a few projects I work on. To read my book, blog, newsletter, or invest alongside us in early-stage tech companies, please visit ejorgenson.com. Today, I'm very excited to introduce you to my friend Mark Nelson. He is the managing director at the Radiant Energy Fund, an organization which advises governments, nonprofits, and industries about nuclear energy. He has worked in nuclear his whole career. He worked in Europe tracking electrical systems’ emissions, especially in France and Germany, which we talk about a fair bit. So that's a relevant credential. He has degrees in aeronautical and mechanical engineering and a master's in nuclear engineering from Cambridge. If it sounds like he knows what he's talking about, he does. He also, I want you to know, has a great moustache. So, you can picture that as you listen, and it just adds to the credibility. We talk a bunch about nuclear, nuclear energy and fundamentally what it's about, the history of it, the future of it, sort of the geopolitical implications of it. In the next 90 minutes, you'll just get a download of everything that Mark knows. It's a perfect primer introduction overview. We talk a little bit about the different types of reactors. We talk about where nuclear came from and where it's going and why it's important. And I hope all of this is useful information that just helps our generation find our way towards a future with less scarcity, more equality, and more abundance. Thank you for listening, please enjoy.
When we first met, you were halfway through your introduction, and you just started like telling me why, like there's an impassioned five paragraph essay in between your resume about why each step happened. And it was a beautiful thing to witness. And I'm excited to bring that passion to some other people and grow the tribe.
Mark Nelson: Great. We Midwestern boys have got to stick together.
Eric Jorgenson: Mark, will you just give us a little context and your background, just how you came to do what you do and know what you know?
Mark Nelson: I'm Mark Nelson. I'm from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. I grew up wanting to be an astronaut and started studying aerospace engineering and mechanical engineering at Oklahoma State University. Around the end of my undergrad, I discovered that Earth had problems, very serious ones, and I felt that I had to do something about it. I discovered nuclear energy, switched to that for graduate studies. And over in Europe, I discovered that there was an energy crisis coming that no one seemed ready for. I tried to get a job in the nuclear industry during a very bad downturn for that sort of thing. And then eventually got distracted in policy and especially environmental campaigning. I went over to California to work for a sequence of environmental nonprofits focused on keeping nuclear in the conversation, and then spent four years trying to keep nuclear plants from being shut down around the world. After the pandemic started, I branched off on my own as an independent consultant in energy. I work mainly with environmental nonprofits and with industry. And I'm here to talk about why we're having such a moment for nuclear energy and why I think it's going to be the future.
Eric Jorgenson: It seems, at least from my perspective, my very techie corner of the world, like nuclear is having a little bit of a popular renaissance. I don't know if that is felt in the world at large yet, but it does feel like the snowball is growing. And that is a great thing from my perspective. Do you see that in a broader sense, too?
Mark Nelson: Without a doubt. And you can either look at the hard evidence, or you can pick up the vibes. So harder evidence would be polling done in countries around the world, especially those countries where we have continuous polling over time. Some of that polling started with the Fukushima Daiichi accident, March 2011 in Japan. It created, as it should have, a great deal of panic and distress in the nuclear industry. And then, the opinion of nuclear energy sank to a modern low in the years after that event and then have recovered. The recovery has been about two things. One, concern about climate change and the understanding of the younger generation that if we're having any chance of bending the curves that we see from scientific work on climate change, we've got to have more energy, and it's got to be clean. And then the second thing that's been big is that the natural gas boom of the last decade, based in the United States, led to low prices that have now reached their conclusion, punctuated by the launching of new land wars in Europe. All of those things have disrupted very long held plans to move forward without nuclear. When those plans were disrupted, it led to a clean slate, an open field for nuclear to make a comeback.
Eric Jorgenson: I think it’s interesting you said you got distracted by the regulatory and policy piece. I have seen this pattern in a few friends’ careers where they have no interest in politics until they realize that the core problem or the core thing holding back technology or holding back advancement in their industry, and I've seen this in finance, definitely seen it in nuclear, is regulatory. And you're like, well, shit, if I actually want to have an impact, if I want to see this technology flourish, I almost have no choice but to get involved in that front of the battle. Was that your journey? Did it just become more interesting to you? Did it feel the highest impact? Like what was that actual decision like?
Mark Nelson: Eric, I’d put it this way, you may have heard this phrase, if you're so smart, why aren't you happy? Or maybe a more business oriented one – if you're so smart, why aren't you making money? Or if you're so smart, why aren't you rich already? And in nuclear, I think this phrase is quite adaptable. We could say if nuclear energy is so good physically, then why aren't we using almost entirely nuclear energy? That sends you down a rabbit hole. In fact, a lot of my initial concerns were those of many people who work on nuclear, which is the regulation itself about nuclear energy. But quite quickly, I discovered that the regulation of electricity, regulation of the environment in which nuclear would be working was, if anything, more important and less explored, then concerns that nuclear has too many rules and regulations leftover from the 70s and 80s.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. I guess I've never heard it separated that way. So, talk to me about the regulations around electricity. Are those more cumbersome than the regulations on like the actual nuclear technology itself?
Mark Nelson: Well, in this case, it's not so much the rules for safety but the rules for who gets to generate electricity and when and how they get paid. That is the deregulating, the restructuring of electricity markets in much of the Western world and much of the rich countries of planet Earth, that had a terrible effect on certain technologies, not because of characteristics about whether they keep society safe or not, but merely by how they have to make investment decisions, when, and how they're rewarded for doing so. So, here's what I mean: if you're planning out an electricity system, and you see that if you build this type of power plant, and it's very expensive, but over a long life, it should pay for itself and many times over, well, that sort of thinking has been removed in most of the West. You're only supposed to think on three or four year time horizons. Power plants are supposed to live and die, be born and then go away rapidly, according to the sudden influx of cheap fuels of one type or the cutting off of that fuel. That's supposed to drive the decisions on who gets to make electricity and how much they get paid. But it's no way to plan, especially if you have a technology where the upfront costs are very high, but the life span and the ongoing operation costs are long and low, respectively.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I do not know much about it other than that there is a technical over there that I'm aware of that it's like this very bizarre like government oversight and regulation of the prices that can get charged by electrical providers, and the supply chain of electricity is very governed or supervised or controlled or something along those lines. It messes with the fundamentals of the market. Are you saying that is all sort of upstream of why we're not seeing sort of more open investment into nuclear?
Mark Nelson: In some ways, you can see it as like the garden in which you have to plant seeds and grow plants. If you're bad at gardening, then you're not going to be able to make much of bad soil. But if you're really good at gardening, sufficiently bad or tainted soil will stop you from growing plants. Sorry about the slightly odd metaphor, but if you make an electricity system that does not guarantee that investors in high capital cost plants can recoup their investments, they won't do it. In many grids around the world now, old power plants are running down and declining, new power plants that can do the same thing, that is turn on whenever humans say so and just keep running, new plants that can do that are not being built. Nuclear obviously falls into that category. And because nuclear only really gets built when there's an extremely long time horizon to recoup costs, then in much of the world, nuclear hasn't been built. And if there are not customers asking for nuclear plants, if there's not an expectation of building multiple plants, then all sorts of things go wrong with the attempt to even try to build a single plant. Nuclear energy is best thought of as a program. Let me give you an example. Back before all the cheap gas from the fracking boom hit the United States, gas prices were expected to be fairly high for a long period of time, say in the 2000s. United Arab Emirates, a major exporter of fossil fuels, decided to embark on a nuclear program. It took several years of discussion and preparation. It took a year or two to launch and close the tender for the plants, South Korea won. And then after the start of construction in 2012, it took about six, seven years before the first plant was ready to turn on. And then that turning on was delayed a little bit because the Emiratis wanted their own trained citizens to be the ones at the controls, physically operating the controls to turn the plant on, even if there were Western instructors or observers or experts giving help. Then, after that long period, what is this, 14 years from the time it was first a twinkle in the eye of the state planner, you had two reactors turned on within two years, a third is turning on shortly, and then the fourth will be on next year. So, should we say that it takes 14 years to build a nuclear reactor? Or should we start it from the start of construction and say it takes 7 years to build a reactor? Or are we saying that it takes 11 years to build four giant reactors? If South Korea offered another four units and UAE accepted, you would expect that many of these timelines would be shortened considerably. But that required a massive investment. And in fact, in many of the cases we're seeing around the world where nuclear plants actually get built, in order to finance the plant, they are selling their power forward on a contract for 30, 40, 50, even 60 years is one of the power contracts we've heard being recommended in at least one emerging nuclear state.
Eric Jorgenson: That's well within the lifespan of the reactor to pay back, though, right? That is exactly- we should be thinking in these super long time horizons.
Mark Nelson: But Eric, think about this, you can't do a 30, 40, 50 year contract for natural gas. We don't know whether we're going to find a lot more or a lot less. And there's just not the need. You can just pass the natural gas costs on to customers. Everybody should be able to assume that they're roughly getting the same gas costs in each country. Because the gas supply for each country isn't- well, it's an article of national importance. Germany has just discovered that almost nobody is going to be good enough at wheeling and dealing natural gas in Germany to make up for the giant pipelines closing. There's no financial wizardry that can make up for the physical loss of that amount of fuel. You're just not able to do extremely long dated contracts for fossil fuels because the fossil fuels themselves are such a massive portion of the cost of generating electricity. That gets us to the heart of the nuclear value proposition, if we want to use boring words. That is, the cost of the fuel in nuclear, even more the cost of the uranium, which is just a portion of the cost of the fuel, is so small that uranium going up or down in cost makes almost no difference to the price of generating electricity from nuclear.
Eric Jorgenson: Where does the bulk of the cost come from in nuclear electricity generation?
Mark Nelson: People. And you're not burning through people, hopefully, in nuclear. Those tend to be extremely long-lived, well-paid jobs. Now, different countries spend more or less on that. So, for example, Germany, one of the ironies of the current moment is that Germany is one of the most outstanding and cost-effective operators of nuclear in the world. Partly it's because of the outstanding quality of the reactors themselves, decisions were made to take more care and more expense in the construction and design of those reactors in order to reduce staffing levels. Another thing is Germany doesn't do this sort of like security theater that we do in the US where after the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11, we just had this arbitrarily increasing security thing going on that kind of runs itself at the nuclear plants now. Bigger and bigger armies of dudes with machine guns even though the reactor doors are locked shot. And it's like if we responded to 9/11 by every year doubling the number of armed air marshals on flights. Like it doesn't even make sense. But we allow it in nuclear because nuclear is so low cost ongoing that you could just increase the security requirement without necessarily killing off the plants in the US. Now we did lose a number of plants because of cost being too high and natural gas costs being momentarily low. But Germany doesn't have that same issue. And most European countries don't. They just work on the nuclear plant safety, they have a bit of site security, and they have first responders ready to move in if there was a security issue. That means Germany staffs their plants with less than half the number of permanent employees that you would expect in a similar American plant. So, there are the costs. Depending on which plant we're talking about, anywhere from 10% to 25% of the cost is going to be fuel itself, of which only a portion is going to be the uranium, if that makes sense. The rest is the human costs, the paperwork, any legal battles. It would be marketing people. It'd be the influx of staff during high intensity refueling outages. It would be parts that need to be replaced periodically. That sort of thing.
Eric Jorgenson: Who is the customer of a nuclear power plant? Are all of these being purchased and commissioned by governments directly? Is that the majority of it?
Mark Nelson: Great question. So, in the restructured or deregulated electricity markets, the customers are whoever would sign an agreement with that plant, or if you can't sign an agreement with a customer to buy the power directly, you have to sell into the auctions, into the exchanges. And if people decide that they will only buy electricity contracts from solar farms, or they will only buy electricity contracts from wind farms, typically, it doesn't mean you can actually get wind or get solar, it just means that you are preventing the nuclear company from doing any long-term supply contracts by being just unwilling to buy their power. Then the nuclear company has to supply the remaining market at a whole. And that market may have a lower volume of electricity needed, or worse, the market price may swing violently up and down based on weather conditions, both in terms of what the public demands, or in terms of what renewable energies are supplying. Meaning the nuclear is then left, potentially, without customers. It doesn't mean that power isn't staying on 100% year-round, it just means the nuclear plant isn't getting paid very much. So, where we're seeing nuclear success, the customer ends up, say, being a guarantee by the government, a backstop that your power will be sold at a certain price, so don't worry about that. Or that's the model now being used or proposed in Great Britain. In the UK, the electricity markets are so flawed, are so messed up, are so decayed, that in order to get any power plant built, the government has to offer a guarantee that you'll get at least a minimum price for your power. And then in other countries, so the situation in Finland, any new reactor going in there is expected to be paid for, financed ahead of time, by entities that want a share of the electricity itself. So ultra-heavy power using industries with very long investment horizons themselves like lumber mills, pulp mills, aluminum manufacturing plants. And so, they would put in money and get a stake on the future power production.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. So, in the US, somebody could, like you and I could decide to start a nuclear power plant, assuming we could get some massive investment, have the NRC tell us no, blackmail somebody, get it built, generate electricity from nuclear, and then still like not necessarily make money because we're still selling into this kind of open, uncertain market.
Mark Nelson: Yeah, I don't know if I would use exactly some of the language in there. I appreciate the sentiment.
Eric Jorgenson: I gave you too many things to correct.
Mark Nelson: It's okay. NRC, contrary to what many people think based on the outcomes we're seeing, the NRC staff, actually almost to a person, really like nuclear energy and want to see it succeed. The NRC and the nuclear industry are locked in this strange, I don't want to call it a love-hate relationship, but they struggle together. If a nuclear plant gets shut down, because of economic conditions say, then the NRC has to start cutting staff because the nuclear industry is required to pay for almost the entirety of the cost of its own regulation. So that means the regulator wants to be- What are the natural directions here? The regulator wants to be as big as it can without killing the host. And meanwhile, the nuclear plants know that they have cooperation with the NRC as long as they're paying the big bucks and staying on good terms. But at the same time, it's one of the burdens that’s shutting them down when natural gas was cheap. But yeah, to answer your question, let's say you get a plant financed, actually get it built, get permission to turn it on, and then you're in an area like the Midwest or the plains states, or, I don't know, California or New England, where there's this wild, wild west electricity market, yeah, you might not be able to sell your power. In practical terms, what would happen is you would bid into these auctions zero. You would just say, we're going to be on no matter what, $0, $0, $0. Because you don't want to staff up, fuel your plant, and then run your plant with some crazy curve up and down. Now, does this happen in some places in the world? Yes. If you had a mostly nuclear grid, it would make sense to vary your operations at different plants to meet the changing demand of the public. In France, this is expected; this is common. EDF, the state owned operative nuclear plants, has a number of their plants specially designated for both small and large adjustments. And by that, I mean not just daily sometimes, but they have a bunch of reactors scheduled for long, slow refueling outages and repairing outages during the summertime when typically demand is lower. And then all reactors are expected to be in great shape and on through the whole of the winter peak because France did so much electrification, they have a lot of demand in the winter. But yeah, if you don't have the structures I'm talking about to have long term sales, you may find that you're not selling electricity at a price that's anywhere near covering your interests, your construction, or your continuing operation.
Eric Jorgenson: I've just pulled this up. I just saw this tweet the other day. And correct me if I'm wrong, for context on the France comment, 69% of France's electricity is from nuclear, a larger share than any other country.
Mark Nelson: Yeah, that 69% shouldn't be 69%, Eric. It should be 75% or even 80%. But for about 20 years, a very intense program of defunding and, quite honestly, sacking their nuclear fleet has now ended up with them not having it when they desperately need it.
Eric Jorgenson: So even though they are the most nuclear in the world, they still- you're just saying like there's a ton of headwinds that are holding them back. It's not like they are actually- that could be better.
Mark Nelson: Until recently, French society was majority anti-nuclear. Like many countries, they only discovered that it actually matters to make your own energy. I know that sounds silly to say that people maybe didn't realize it was important. But honestly, we were living in sort of a dream, a beautiful dream where as long as somebody was out there making energy somewhere in the world, and you could get it to your country, that was as good as gold, that was as good as having it for yourself. Turns out that's not the case. Pipelines can be shut off. Coal supplies can be sent to other people. And you can be left without a source of energy.
Eric Jorgenson: And if you are without a source of energy, you are quite helpless as a country.
Mark Nelson: Yeah, I've been interested to see headlines come out of Germany, that it's like there's a ghost army doing war on Germany. They're talking about putting the lights out on big buildings in Berlin, like on the Bundesrat, you are going to put lights out on government buildings as if they're avoiding a bombing raid. But it's because they don't have enough power. Now, lighting does not take up much electricity. Depending on what country we're talking about, lighting is often, what, half a percent to maybe 2 or 3% of electricity. So, at the point that you're turning off that little usage on incredibly symbolic structures, it's like you're losing a war to an invading army. It's like you're dodging, you're trying to dodge bombs. And that's the situation they're in. Russia is able to invade Germany without an army just by turning off its export of fossil fuels.
Eric Jorgenson: And there's still people in Germany for some strange fucking reason talking about turning off the nuclear power plants for safety reasons. And there's other people saying it is much more dangerous to lose the ability to generate our own electricity. Yeah, it's a very bizarre-
Mark Nelson: In the last few weeks, though, the people saying that the reactors should follow the law as written today and turn off, they're not making safety arguments anymore. Because everything's dangerous now, right? Everything's dangerous. They are no longer making safety arguments. What are they making? They're saying it's impractical, or it's too hard, or the paperwork is too much, or what if nobody sells us any fuel, those sorts of statements. What's absolutely fascinating to me, as somebody who's been working on this issue inside and outside of Germany for almost six years, is that German organizations that are normally incredibly obedient and respectful to high political authority, and we're talking about a culture that really just has obedience down to an art. They follow orders, Eric. You say what you want about the Germans, they will follow pretty much any order anyone gives them in a position of authority, any order. And they'll do it really well. They'll just execute that thing. Yeah. Well, you would not expect organizations like the safety regulator, the head of the safety regulatory association of Germany to come out as he did in a newspaper article a few days ago in a tabloid, near tabloid newspaper – I don't want to insult anybody over there – and say the reactors could come online that we had already shut off, and they could do it in a matter of weeks. Now, my experts think that's a little bit ambitious. But for that to be said is deeply embarrassing. It's humiliating for the sitting government who are claiming to be the calm and responsible ones who should be managing this crisis because they've directly been contradicted by people with the actual technical abilities and the technical staff to make safety judgments, which of course, the politicians don't have that. And then, some of the reactor operators themselves, some of the companies that own these plants have come out and said, yeah, we could order fuel. And they've said even more. They've said, because this is nuclear, we don't stop operating because our fuel tank runs empty. Instead, the fuel in a reactor core is designed to keep operating for years, and you only replace part of the core with each outage. And since they went into this final swansong, their last year of operation with this full core, it means that they can just keep operating through the winter without turning off the reactor. Sure, will their power start to decrease a little bit? Yeah. But that hints at the marvelous power of nuclear energy, that you're storing so much energy in such a tiny place. That if carefully managed, you can power all of society on just a few machines.
Eric Jorgenson: And continuing to improve the economics of the massive capital investment of building the reactor in the first place. Like we should be trying to get as much life out of all of these as possible all around the world. There's some in the US that are still- Diablo Canyon, there's like a big scuffle about shutting that down.
Mark Nelson: Still is. But yeah, and it goes beyond just operating longer. Most of these plants can be operated. You can build slightly larger parts around the core, do some careful safety studies, change some operating processes, and then you can operate these reactors at sometimes 5, 10, 15%, 20% more power than originally designed.
Eric Jorgenson: That reminds me of the Charlie Munger thing, like when the railroads realized they could just stack train cars on top of each other and basically double the capacity of the existing railroad for no additional capital investment, he's like, there's not a lot of those laying around, but when you find them, you should absolutely take them.
Mark Nelson: Exactly. One of the horrible things about the French mismanagement of their world leading reactor fleet is that they're one of the only countries on Earth has refused to uprate their existing reactor. It's just sitting there on the ground, Eric. It's practically free. What, 15, 20% uprates across the entire fleet are possible, and they just haven't. They just haven't.
Eric Jorgenson: No, is fine.
Mark Nelson: It was fine, and now they have a crisis. Their electricity prices for next year electricity, the full year contracts, are 10 times higher now, right now as we speak, than they were for the decade between 2010 and 2020. That is civilization shaking. That is society ending if they can't find a way to fix it.
Eric Jorgenson: So, I'm sure that there are people who are going to say, look at this correlation, France has more nuclear plants than anybody else in the world, and their energy cost is exploding.
Mark Nelson: Wait, their energy prices are exploding. This is very important. Energy price is an imperfect reflector of energy cost. And there's a difference between the average cost and the marginal cost. The French have so mismanaged their nuclear fleet, that they are short on electricity supplies, and that marginal unit is extremely expensive and extremely scarce. But the cost of running most of their power plant fleet, the average blended cost has barely moved because they're using nuclear plants and not fossil fuel plants. Now, we didn't mention here the sun and the wind because, obviously, you would think the sun isn't more expensive, like the star, it's still just the same distance away from Earth. And the weather patterns haven't changed that much. And then the winds, there should be about the same amount of wind, and the wind hasn't changed price just because Russia has invaded Ukraine. So why are we talking about that fossil fuel price and nuclear price as being key determinants? I mean, look, a country like Germany is almost 50%. They're aiming for 50% wind, water, solar, biomass electricity. Why wouldn't their cost mostly stay low like France? Well, certainly Germany's prices have not gone up as much as France. But the costs, the blended costs of delivering, burning, finding fuels, burning them and delivering all that power, which is the necessary component of balancing out the natural energy flows from solar and the wind, that ends up being vastly more expensive in Germany than in France, even if the marginal price in Germany is about half that of France for the next year electricity prices.
Eric Jorgenson: That’s super interesting and a very, very good distinction, especially that the marginal unit of price is determined by that last watt sold, that inelastic demand. That is a peak number. So that is very interesting. And I think the first time we talked, you really made a point of all of this boils down to making cheap electricity – the technology, the regulation, the policy, like the goal, like all of it boils down to making cheap electricity and cheaper electricity. What I'm appreciating for the first time in this conversation with you is that that's relative and the relativity of it is a little- makes it complicated and slightly dangerous, because cheap one day- because we think of it as all coming from fossil fuels. So cheap relative to that one day versus another could vary a lot, but less so with solar.
Mark Nelson: France is sending most of its electricity to customers on extremely long term contracts based mainly on the cost of generating from the nuclear fleet. France is one of the only countries in the world where electricity costs are not going up very much in this global coal gas crisis.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, so I'm struggling for the right metaphor. But they are among the safest, like the iceberg under the surface is actually really stable and strong, and their risk of catastrophic loss is really, really low. Even though the price variability may be high for the marginal unit, they are producing a huge volume of extremely predictable, extremely low-cost power that will fundamentally keep them safe and sound and sovereign in the midst of energy chaos everywhere else.
Mark Nelson: Within the limits of them severely and intentionally abusing and bleeding their grid. So, they have many mechanisms set up to take away money that should have been used for upgrades and for repairs and for staffing costs. They have many legal mechanisms to extract that money from the nuclear fleet and give it to, say, natural gas competitors. And France doesn't make natural gas, Eric. Why? I thought we're supposed to be caring about carbon or the climate crisis. What on earth are they doing having a reverse carbon tax to subsidize fossil imports compared to their own nuclear fleet? It is insane how many ways they found to try to achieve exactly the sort of fleet breakdown that we're seeing now. So, on one hand, I want to praise them. On another hand, we can't praise that sort of fierce, fierce idiocy, that foolish short sightedness.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, but they're still producing more nuclear energy than we are. And even, yeah, it's amazing how many ways we have all found around the world of making this not about or not optimized for making cheap electricity with this incredible new technology. And I hope we can- maybe this is a good segue into sort of a little bit of the history of it because this is one of those things that we have heard about and in fiction see moments where it's like, oh, we have abundant nuclear power, and it's treated like this magical technology in fiction, but we've seen very little of it in our daily lives, and it has sort of changed the lives of the average person yet. But we had this technology for a while. So maybe, to the extent you're comfortable, take us back to the beginning, where we thought we'd be, and where we are.
Mark Nelson: Sure. So, the first thing I'll do is be a complete contrarian asshole and say we have not had this energy for a while. Certainly, we haven't had this energy theoretically as long as fusion. And we haven't had it nearly as long as, say, solar panels, using the photoelectric effect; that goes back to the 1800s. So, what is this fission? Why do we have this cultural indigestion about fission? So, in 1938, fission is discovered theoretically. In 1939, it's intentionally caused in a lab and observed and reported on. By 1940 and ’41, labs around the world are working on making their own fission, especially trying to make fission devices. By the winter of 1942, I believe is when we have the first, the Chicago Pile. So then, within two years, giant reactors designed to make plutonium for nuclear bombs, in secret, are in operation. These are reactors with hundreds of megawatts of thermal energy. They were some of the largest heat producing devices on the planet at the time that they went online. In 1945, we have the opening of the nuclear era, at least for the public, with the nuclear bombings in Japan that came at the conclusion of World War II. Then, within two years, we had the first light bulbs on a string being powered by little b test nuclear reactor. Within a few years after that, early 1950s, we had the first commercial nuclear plants that were also sort of making plutonium for nuclear weapons programs. But then we had the first strictly commercial plant in 1954. And then you can see, we can just see this rapid ramp up where almost every year through the 60s brought a new world record for most powerful unit at a power plant ever. And they were always nuclear, the biggest turbans, the most powerful individual heat devise, in this case reactors. And we were rapidly scaling up. In fact, the moral panic around nuclear energy in the elite left spaces in the West were about it being too cheap, too cost effective, too powerful to help limit population growth and limit resource usage of other kinds. Yeah, that's right. The worry on the left on the environmental, the extreme environmental left was that nuclear was too powerful, too good, too cheap. And that the way to limit overpopulation of Earth and keep, say, California precious and completely free of people in the wilderness, this is the same movement that they gave us the national parks, so there's definitely a double-edged sword here. The idea was, if you stopped nuclear energy through whatever means, whatever means, then you would be able to restore our harmony with Planet Earth and reduce the scourge of humanity. So, this was before any of the famous reactor accidents. This was during the age of health panics around fallout from nuclear weapons testing. Now, for an adult global generation that had just fought and died in World War II, and they'd gone through this incredible trauma, it took a lot to sort of shock that generation into action. But the younger generation, so these would be the baby boomers we're talking about, the children of those who fought World War II, they hadn't gone through the same traumas, didn't have the same perspective, and it was quite attractive, this idea that all nuclear energy was nuclear weapons, all of that was the same thing as colonialism and war. And if you wanted peace in our time, if you wanted peace on earth, you had to stop all of nuclear. Well, citizens have not had a great record in stopping nuclear weapons. That tends to be an issue between the tops of states. So, what they did was, instead, they stopped nuclear reactors. They fought to block them, to shut them down. And nuclear reactors were considered by the environmental movement as much worse than coal, worse than oil, certainly worse than natural gas. Carbon was an issue that was lingering in the deep background. But there were some environmentalists who felt that concerns about carbon would just give the nuclear industry a reason to exist. There are other environmentalists and energy philosophers who came out and said, no, you should make your own energy in little batches. You should have a bucket of heating oil and pour it into your little generator to get through winter. Small is beautiful. You should right size energy to live a good life, certainly, but just at the right scale. So many of the organizations that are now very large and rich, that are the environmental groups still fighting nuclear energy, they were fighting grid expansion for a very long time. They were fighting to make sure utilities couldn't produce and sell too much power. They were looking for a sort of, if you're judgmental like me, you could call it eco austerity, in large part because it would reduce the need for new large nuclear reactors, which at the time, were quite cheap and cost effective. So, I have to admit that as concerns about nuclear safety and the complexity of larger nuclear plants caught up to us engineers, then we became worse at building plants exactly when that was a specific target of environmental movement, backdating regulations to make fixes on site, veering with licenses, getting a lot of uncertainty added into the system about which rules would apply when. All of these things caused extreme delays, longer and longer and longer and longer, as you went from the 70s to the 80s and 90s. Now, then we get to the big accidents. What are the canonical nuclear accidents? Well, it was Three Mile Island in 1979. So that was a meltdown in the core of one of the two reactors at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. And radiation wasn't least. It was a major scandal, of course, and obviously a massive economic loss having to write off a single reactor, but the other one just kept operating for 40 years. So, I'm not saying we shouldn't have learned something, but we did learn something. And that has never happened again at that type of reactor. That family of reactors had an extraordinary performance run since then. Then we had Chernobyl in 1986 where one of the four of a very particular type of reactor exploded, had a steam explosion in what is now northern Ukraine. Now that did not stop Ukrainians from embracing nuclear. That didn't even stop Chernobyl Nuclear Plant from operating. Yes, Chernobyl Nuclear Plant kept operating just the whole way through. And the only reason it got shut down is because Germany and its partners were essentially extorting Ukraine to say, I know you like your nuclear plant at Chernobyl, but we don't want it and we're going to give you- we're not going to give you money to help you complete your other nuclear plants unless you shut that one down. Now, I've heard debates on both sides about whether they should have or shouldn't have or should have waited until they had full replacement. Anyway, just saying, that type of reactor is still in operation in far Eastern Europe in Russia near major population centers. Is it good or is it bad? Different conversation perhaps, but Chernobyl did not even shut down Chernobyl Nuclear Plant. Then we get to Fukushima Daiichi where you had, let's just be quite frank here, a completely broken safety culture, an intense concern with the feelings of local populations. That led operators of the plant to delay increasing the height of the seawall because it would imply that the seawall wasn't already the right height. It sounds insane, but I think it makes cultural sense over there. Obviously, it was an error. They got caught with their pants down, not just with the seawall, but also with the backup generators to keep the core cool in the event that a giant disaster wipes out 16,000 lives and crushes the regional infrastructure, which is what happened, they were not able to keep the core cool. Three reactors suffered partial core meltdowns. Radioactive particles were released to the atmosphere. And in all of these events, the nation involved has returned to nuclear energy being popular and relied upon. With Ukraine, it is more than half of their electricity. The US has 20%. Japan has an ambition to get back to around 30% now. So, the interpretation of these disasters as world ending or industry ending was coming from populations that were not the ones most directly affected, which is a very weird phenomenon. And I'm sure you're going to get some backlash for that. But what we're seeing is that there's a sort of inoculating effect of actual nuclear disasters after some time has passed, and that those most panicked about, say, nuclear war, nuclear bombs are the ones who are the most sensitive to nuclear power plant problems. Hence Germany, shutting off its plants while also relying on other countries to protect them.
Eric Jorgenson: And I think people tend to hear oh, it's radioactive and think, oh, then therefore dangerous. Like no literacy around what levels of radioactivity are and aren't dangerous. And I think you have this popular incepted image from the media or the stories of Fukushima, the Fukushima nuclear disaster is like what you hear, and then you forget that the tsunami is what caused all of the damage. There were no deaths due to radioactivity. I think there's maybe a disputed case over one death that is related to like the actual plant, and everything else was from the tsunami itself. And I found this quote as I was searching through the past things that nuclear power plants are now basically the safest, among the safest occupations in the world. It is more dangerous to work as a real estate broker than at a nuclear power plant.
Mark Nelson: I hear all that, and it's true. But I have to be empathetic to the public for the following reason. Real estate brokeraging is not going to be substantially different next year. But maybe if there's a single giant nuclear accident, it changes all the averages. So that is the long tail risk comes up a lot when sophisticated people are talking about why they're still worried about investing in nuclear energy. And I absolutely respect that perspective. But here's the thing that fascinates me: Compared to other technologies or other systems with long tail risk, the damages, the leverage that those long tail disasters have, is so dependent on a cultural message to the public that calms fears about radiation. That is to say, since the accidents already don't kill people physically, you can address the damage, which is mostly from fear, without having to make alterations to the technology. Of course, you should increase the safety culture in Japan, just like after the events of 9/11, we really just haven't had major hijacking since then. It's had to be the pilot with a death wish to take down a plane or a missile from outside, things you cannot actually stop with designs of the plane. Or at least it's not considered practical. So just as you have to allow disasters to eliminate entire categories of accidents, that has been done. But it's not been made clear to the public just how much risk has been reduced to them just by becoming more informed about nuclear energy and public officials becoming more informed about nuclear energy. It's not as good as actually changing rules and regulations and getting it put in law that you don't evacuate these areas if there's not a radiation threat to health, a serious risk to health that makes up for the risk of evacuation. So, we haven't made those formal updates to laws. But the general lower panic, the inoculation we've gotten from the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi has made future nuclear accidents safer for the public without actually changing the internals of the technology. Perhaps that's an interesting place to come to the so called advanced nuclear world.
Eric Jorgenson: Let's connect sort of the history with the present then. So, we've kind of come up through the beginnings of it. But yeah, let's talk about sort of the next wave of nuclear, which as you say, it sounds like it goes by the term or the family advanced nuclear.
Mark Nelson: Sure. So, I think we can take a moment here and say, what are these reactors? Any reactor is a quantity of nuclear fuel, almost always uranium in some blend of the abundant naturally occurring uranium 238 and some amount of a much less abundant naturally occurring uranium 235, with those numbers standing in for how many mass baring particles are in the nucleus of the atom. So just a little review, protons are mass varying little particles with a positive charge. The number of protons in the atomic nucleus gives you the element name. The number of neutrons, those are neutral particles also sitting there next to the protons, the number of those gives you the isotope, you could say the flavor of very closely related flavors of elements. So, uranium 238 has 238 of these little particles, and uranium 235 has 235, but they both have the same number of protons. The one that's a little lighter, the 235, is just a little more unstable, meaning when it goes in a big enough lump in the middle of a reactor device, it's able to start chain reactions a little better and continue them. All good? So, what are the other decisions that go into a reactor type? Well, it's what physical material you use to put that uranium or plutonium or thorium in the core of a reactor. Another one is what material you use to cool off and carry away the heat generated from the nuclear reaction. That heat being carried away, that's what's used to spin turbines and drive society. Then another constraint is whether you choose to slow down all the neutrons that are firing in all directions as atoms split apart, whether you choose to slow them down. Why would you do that? Why would you slow neutrons down? Wouldn't neutrons going faster cause more chain reactions? Well, yes, but they're also less likely to be taken into an atomic nucleus and make it unstable and split it apart. So, most reactors, almost every reactor except for a tiny handful in operation today, slow down those neutrons coming out of splitting atoms, they slow them down so much that they're quite likely to go into another nucleus and split the atom. So, the moderators are what those materials are called. So, we have the choice of fuel, fuel material, moderator, coolant, and then there's a few other choices in there. But those are the big ones. Those are the really big ones. Most people talking about advanced nuclear mean choosing attributes that are substantially different than those we use today. Now, there are some advanced nuclear companies focused on different manufacturing methods and different internal arrangements of reactors that are otherwise quite similar. They also sometimes focus on shrinking the size of today's reactors in order to increase the ability to naturally cool them down in the case of an interruption of power. And also, perhaps to make it easier to build and finance, if that's our limitation here in the West for major infrastructure projects, especially nuclear.
Eric Jorgenson: And the goal of those adjustments are mostly cost savings?
Mark Nelson: You hear a range of different reasons. One is cost savings, either from higher efficiency of internal conversion of fuel. You hear about cost savings because we're going to mass manufacture bigger chunks of the plant in factories under controlled conditions, and then ship them to the site where they're going to be installed. You hear that sometimes it's because we are going to dispense with the need of rules and regulations based around an extremely large plant that cannot self-cool, shall we say, in the same fashion. So cost is normally in there. But we have to be careful with that because the countries that have the capability today of building several different types of reactors of different sizes typically find that customers around the world want the large traditional reactors. So, it presents a challenge to those of us examining the advanced systems here in the West.
Eric Jorgenson: The thing I'm struggling with is like we just hear this big history of power plants, nuclear power plants and reactors that are producing electricity successfully at economically feasible costs. What are the- and we're still innovating on these things. But are we expecting another breakthrough in advanced nuclear? Are we eking out optimizations? I'm trying to find an analogy to like some of the other technological sort of improvement curves that we see. Like, is there a Moore's law analogy in technology? Or are we just trying to find new ways through the maze? Like the difference, the choice between continued reengineering and scaling the existing technologies is something that isn't obvious to me from what we've talked about so far.
Mark Nelson: I'd put it this way, Eric, why didn't SpaceX just dust off the old blueprints from back when we made a lot more rockets? Why didn't they just dust those off and make those again? Maybe you could find the blueprints, you could find a few surviving engineers who remember the process, maybe even a few folks who worked in the factories themselves. And you could maybe reconstruct, and then wouldn't that give you lots of experience and you could move forward? Well, one of the reasonable arguments for advanced nuclear is that we're having to relearn anyway. So just like SpaceX seeing quite clearly that there were decisions made in the previous generation of rocket building that we might not be stuck with if we're restarting. So, there's some advantages, but also, the machine tools themselves, the people operating them, the supply chains that came together in the final assembly of the rocket, if you're reconstructing all of those, those are as big or even bigger than the process of redesigning a new rocket. So, if you're already having to make something that even if you are attempting a copy is substantially new in time and experience needed to be regained and cost, then you might as well change things that could offer big future gains. So, one of the major things that SpaceX went for, of course, in rebooting American rocketry was being able to land rockets, and they started smaller before aiming for larger. And they laboriously built a program that can now churn out serial rockets. This would need to be true for an American based traditional reactor just as much as it would be true for an American based advanced reactor business. Now, you can go two different directions from this conclusion. You can say, well, okay, we know for a fact that the existing reactors operate extremely well and may do so for a century, maybe more. Why on earth would you dare change something that's like a gift, almost like a gift from God, certainly a gift from the ancestors? We've been bequeathed with these devices we’re not skilled enough to remake yet that keep operating well and exactly answer the needs of our times. Right? Why wouldn't we just figure out who's still making those, hire the best of their people or even contract, even if it's humiliating, bring in other countries to teach us how to build. If we have to learn, if our brightest young engineers need to learn Korean in order to interface with people who actually know how to build reactors in Korea, maybe we should do that. But you can see the other conclusion, which is here's a chance to go back and go in new directions with reactors, integrate the best ideas that were never conducted because of supply chain lock in, because of technology tunnel vision, you might say, and then if we're having to rebuild our supply chains anyway, then we'll just go from a new beginning. And if we're in this time where it's so hard to sell your electricity, or at least it was before the recent fossil fuel crisis, then maybe it's better to make smaller reactors to sell smaller amounts at a time. Maybe it's better to have a smaller project so that any problems can be worked out at a lower cost.
Eric Jorgenson: I like that analogy of advanced nuclear is attempting a first principles sort of clean slate approach to something that has worked in the past.
Mark Nelson: Well, some is. Some is clean slate, and those I trust least, the clean slaters. Yeah, because look, what if you even make a successful reactor and it just doesn't work very well and it's off half the time? And you can say, oh, well, we perfectly understand why it's off half the time; we'll just- but if it's off half the time, that's just not acceptable after you paid for a reactor. We happen to know that the existing things can be operated brilliantly, ultra-high uptime, ultra-high reliability. So, the first principles is kind of sketchy. Many of the most legitimate advanced nuclear companies, I think the ones with the best shot of success, change few things from today's existing reactors. And there are even cases where at least one advanced nuclear company is making no modifications to a reactor. They're simply arguing that the internal fuel, the fuel for the core, should be altered to increase performance. So, we've had everything from the opposite of blank slate to truly blank slate and restarting everything, different fuel, different coolant, different fuel material, different moderator, everything, all the way to every single one of those the same except for one little substitute narrowly without requiring a redesign of even existing reactors.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. Does this, from your perspective, seem like a cultural shift in nuclear? Like, are these new people sort of coming in? Is this like a renaissance from within the existing nuclear industry? Like when you say advanced nuclear, is that a new generation? Is it different people? Is it a renewed mindset? Is it just kind of like, hey, we got the population with us now, let's charge again? How does it feel?
Mark Nelson: Complete mix, total rainbow. You have companies that have existed from the very dawn of the nuclear age, who are saying we're going to add a new product, this product will sell better. And then you have scrappy, talented entrepreneurs coming in from entirely outside energy to follow their passion, to make an energy device that's going to answer the world's needs. So, the complete range. And what does this look like in a blend? A blend might be this: There's a reactor being worked on by a company founded by Bill Gates. This reactor shares a lot of technological attributes with even some of the reactors that are existing in Russia today. And they've combined forces and partnered with one of the most venerable and experienced reactor designers at General Electric. So that is sort of an interesting combination, a sort of middle ground of a startup that has now matured over about 10 years, I think, maybe longer, plus General Electric that has been making reactors semi continuously since the late 40s.
Eric Jorgenson: I want to go back to something you said a little earlier almost in passing about how we lost the ability to build nuclear, new nuclear reactors. And I think by we, you mean the US. And this may have been a piece of the history, but how and when and why do you think that happened?
Mark Nelson: The biggest story, I think, is that we lost the ability to do large infrastructure projects well. Within that, yes, within a whole, partly is that we had so much infrastructure built and so many people already building their lives around exactly what's already there, that the level of interference in any new project is vast. Environmental controls and restraints have both good and bad properties. One of the things they do is stop almost any kind of development, certainly slow it down and raise the cost. Here's another one. For decades, we've had absolutely elite talent at both company building and management, company scaling, in engineering design, go into non, you might say, non-physically engineered structures and devices. So, people going into finance from engineering schools, people going into software engineering as opposed to construction. So, we are quite weak on construction. We are quite vulnerable to labor shortages, especially in large regional projects, from the lack of skilled tradesmen, people going to trade schools. I think that there were generations of people who went to go get very marginal college degrees with great deals of debt who would have spent years with sophisticated hand eye coordination being put to use building and maintaining physical infrastructure. I am frequently astonished by the brilliance and the self-education of some of the young German machine shop workers I've met when trying to save the German nuclear plants. People who would be talented, talented students fitting in at Ivy League universities, at MIT, but then maybe they didn't get quite good enough grades in the German system. And anyway, German machine shop employees can do extremely well and rise up quite successfully. So, if you're lacking a lot of those avenues, or people don't know about them, then at the time when it comes to make large infrastructure projects, you have severely limited options. And look, I think many people see the value of unions and how important they would be at the point that the skills within the unions have started atrophying and the relationships and the management programs with project directors, those have decayed too, you start to get really perverse incentives at job sites. And it becomes very difficult to imagine trying to repeat the disaster we've seen at Vogel in Georgia, where we've been building reactors there for 10 years now. They are vastly over budget. When they turn on, they’re going to work and they're going to work for a century, and we're not even going to remember it within 20 years. But now, we don't just remember it, we see it, and it scares people away from attempting large construction projects like that. I understand it. It's just it's not clear there's an alternative that delivers what nuclear does. And for me, the very fact that it's hard or difficult to imagine coming back to nuclear construction makes it all the more attractive to me because we can see every day that the output, if we can succeed, is unmatchable.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's an interesting painting of everything because that is just almost a byproduct. That doesn't even account for the people who are actively trying to interrupt the continued creation of nuclear power plants, of which there are some interested parties absolutely.
Mark Nelson: Certainly, yeah. Those are real, but their power is fading. As we discussed earlier, the cultural trends towards nuclear are very strong. And it really does break down on age. The baby boomers who were born into a world of effortlessly expanding abundance, from their perspective, all you had to do was stop things to keep the good life, not build them. We're coming to the end of the lifetime of the infrastructure. We're coming to an end of the knowledge and skills being continuously passed on since the Second Industrial Revolution back in the 1860s, and 70s. And those of us young people, millennials, are having to see that we ourselves are going to need to rebuild a bunch of the systems that keep us alive today.
Eric Jorgenson: Let's build baby. Let's do the next industrial revolution. I want to see it in our lifetimes. I think a good sort of yin to the yang of our ability or our loss of the ability to build new nuclear reactors is the Navy. And I would love if you would take us through that kind of little pocket of, it's almost a counterpoint. Like it's an isolated little zone that is having a ton of success and I think has the most operated reactor hours of any, I don't know, organization on Earth, if that's the proper quote. But I would love to talk about that maybe as a counterpoint to the some of the challenges and as a success story, almost.
Mark Nelson: Sure. So very rapidly after the discovery of nuclear energy, people started to realize that it fit the model of what science fiction writers had been imagining for decades at that point, that's nearly unlimited energy that did not require oxygen to provide this power. You need only figure out how to harness it and seal it in a vessel before you had unlimited range, nearly unlimited speed by the standards of ships at the time. So where did that happened first? In the United States Navy, there was a young admiral who was on really kind of backwater assignments and found his way towards the problem of exploring nuclear energy for the Navy in 1946 and ’47. He gets assigned this, and he very rapidly stakes out a position for himself. This is Admiral Hyman Rickover. And he gets the funding and the confidence to execute a very small project, the Nautilus, where he needed to choose a reactor type from the huge range, the dizzying range of reactors that were already then being proposed and invented at laboratories. He needed to choose one, get it built and constructed, get it onto a ship and operate that ship on a maiden voyage that proved the concept. He did all this successfully with the USS Nautilus. And then, of course, the reference to Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was not by chance. This was the delivery of a vision of nearly unlimited range in power under the ocean. So, the submarines have been made in a nearly continuous cycle since that time by a variety of lead contractors. So, it isn't the exact same team that gets the assignment every time and the reactors are upgraded. What's being sought in the Naval reactor? You want to be able to turn the power all the way up and all the way down as rapidly as possible. You want to be able to run it at as high power as long as possible. You want it to be as reliable as possible. You want it to require as few sailors on standing watch as possible. And perhaps some other things, like you want to be able to decommission it with grace at the end of its life. So, the culture of building nuclear, building and operating nuclear reactors in the US Navy is extraordinary. I'm not sure we can go so far as to say you pluck the reactor out and put it on land because it may be using fuels that are not considered appropriate for land base civilian operated reactors. Also, there may be a cost issue where some of the attributes of the submarine reactor are not required on land. But certainly, we have an example of what's possible if we choose to do it with relatively little interference. Now, relatively little interference may sound glorious for an engineer, but it sounds anti-democratic to somebody who's publicly minded. We will need to find some sort of balance, I think. It may also be that breakthrough successes in nuclear reactors, especially small ones, do come out of the legal authority and regulatory authority of armed forces in the world. In fact, that's one of the ironies of a lot of work to stop nuclear energy. It's put the strongest nuclear energy capability in the hands of the least democratic entities because the compulsion to access such an extraordinary energy source overcomes almost any permanent obstacles. That is, nuclear energy is so good, people are going to find a way to get it. And if the most democratic entities with a very vocal minority stops that progress, then it will only be the less democratic entities that have access to this awesome power source. It is one of the paradoxes of nuclear.
Eric Jorgenson: It is interesting that there's no nimbyism in the Navy. If somebody decides we're building a nuclear reactor, they're building a nuclear reactor, and there's not a vote.
Mark Nelson: Well, I mean, it will be a vote to the same extent that military funding always is, through Congress. So yes and no. Elected representatives, behind closed doors, see the technology and make sure that the US has already always had it available since its invention. It's just those same leaders have not had the confidence to overcome decades of anti-nuclear activism. However, that confidence is rising by the day. We see Senators and Representatives compete against each other, left and right, to be more pro-nuclear. There's almost a total consensus in DC that nuclear energy is good and should be at least a part of the future. The debate is around how much of the future and how quickly we should try to get there. That should fill us all with a lot of hope.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's reassuring and a great source of optimism. How recently have you felt confident saying that? Would you have said that 10 years ago or 5 years ago?
Mark Nelson: Absolutely not 10 years ago. 5 years ago, we're getting there. The advanced nuclear narrative, regardless of technological or financial merits, the advanced nuclear narrative made it easy for early adopters of the new rhetoric to say, well, it's not that old nuclear, we want that new nuclear and not because we insist on nuclear being good, but maybe climate change is so important now, we just have to accept a little bit of nuclear. So, there was a kind of entryism. In fact, there's another- I mentioned the company that's looking at a new fuel for old reactors. What's very interesting is that many of us young people got into nuclear energy because we saw posts on Reddit or on various other message boards about how there was this magical fuel thorium, which is a slightly lighter atom than uranium and is about three or four times more abundant in the Earth’s crust. So, there is thorium everywhere. We use it for only a few little things like lantern mantle's for old gas-powered lanterns, and a few small niche uses of thorium out there. But we heard on these message boards that there was this thorium that was going to change everything, that it would unlock unlimited energy, that they hadn't wanted us to pursue it. Who was they? Well, it depends. They might be the anti-nuclear environmentalists. They might be the military who insisted on only reactors based on uranium because they wanted war like capabilities. None of it really made sense. But it was so fascinating that it spread virally with very little need to slow down and say, okay, this thorium, why have we actually not used it if it's so good? So, there was a thorium community that came together from outside of the traditional nuclear industry. They made conferences, they made videos, there was a few TED Talks that went out very early 12, 13 years ago, and those captured young, idealistic engineering minds like mine. Within days or maybe weeks of starting our nuclear engineering programs, our formal study, we would learn oh, that's why we don't use thorium because it's not actually a fuel. You have to turn it into uranium first. Which means if you have a reactor that can do that, why would you even- there's no shortage of uranium. So very rapidly, a lot of us fell out of love with thorium. Then eventually, more than falling out of love, we became dismissive or even annoyed by thorium because there would be these thorium bros who just kept suggesting stuff that they didn't understand – over and over, why not thorium? Why not thorium? Have you heard of thorium? Meanwhile, we're out trying to work on the regulation and electricity markets, advanced nuclear designs maybe that used uranium, and people are just talking about this thorium on and on. The irony for me is that I started working with a company that's going to find a way, has invented a way to combine thorium with uranium for one of the most ancient and overlooked reactor types, something that hasn't come up in our conversation at all so far. It's heavy water reactors. These are the reactor types descended from the devices that were first made at the start of the nuclear era. Heavy water is a slightly chubbier isotope flavor of hydrogen combined with oxygen that absorbs a little bit fewer neutrons. And therefore, those neutrons are available to, say, upscale thorium into uranium, so you can burn it and make energy. So, if you take these reactors, which are made in Canada, and if you examine them, if you interrogate these reactors that Canada uses, they are called CANDU reactors, and you say, are these advanced, they end up checking off almost every box that comes up when we say why we want advanced reactors. They can be refueled online. You can keep refueling them without turning the reactor off. You can run them for more than 1000 days of continuous full power operation, without turning them off for either refueling or repairs. That's extraordinary. They have a design that is inherently safe to melt down to the type that took down Three Mile Island or Fukushima Daiichi, to say nothing of Chernobyl. So, the worst accident that we've ever seen with these reactors is that maybe one out of a number of fuel channels overheated, and the fuel got slightly slumpy and had to be stripped out and repaired, but the reactor to return to service. So you have the accident resistance that we claim we want from advanced reactors. Here's another one. The core being made up of all these different bundles rather than one giant piece is modular. That is, you can train people to do the same activity over and over and over. And because all the parts are made in factories, you can ensure that you are mass producing relatively small pieces to assemble into the whole. So, all of these features start rolling, and you start to think, why isn't that considered advanced? Well, historical quirks. They were changing attitudes. Sales teams that didn't get the job done. And then one more, these reactors can actually produce plutonium, a lot of it. That is a concern if you're trying to stop the spread of materials that can be used in nuclear weapons. The fun thing about a thorium fuel for these CANDU reactors is that your plutonium production goes to almost zero, meaning for those countries, either offering this technology or receiving that technology that have concerns about proliferation, either public fears or official pressure from neighboring states. If you have this reactor, a fuel substitution practically eliminates that particular issue. And then the final bit, because you are turning thorium in the reactor into uranium fuel as you use the fuel, you can get much higher fuel usage out of each bundle of fuel. Each bundle is a little bit more expensive. On the flip side, you use many fewer bundles. So, if we go back to what were the operating cost of reactors, I said that the fuel bundles wasn't so much, but the staffing is a lot. And this is a reactor type where you're constantly feeding fuel in and taking it out the other end. So, your ongoing costs are more than just the function of the fuel. It's the cost of doing that online refueling at a much higher rate than you would refuel almost any other reactor type. Putting the whole story together, we have thorium, which is not really a viable technology in many cases, one of the oldest reactor types, and you're making it, you're rediscovering it as advanced as you go forward. And the end result is to Mars technology today, if we manage it correctly.
Eric Jorgenson: It's wonderful and a beautiful mix of all of the different stuff. I think I had two questions that came up sort of during that that I want to emphasize. You mentioned plutonium in there, and it's most reactor fuel is not weaponizable and not the same as- it's not like you could take that out and put it in a nuclear bomb and have a nuclear weapon. I don't think- that seems to be a Hollywood storyline a lot. But it turns out to not be the practicality of most nuclear fuels. True, false, or something in the middle?
Mark Nelson: True, absolutely true. And the way I would put it is that the physical constraints on any of the disaster scenarios that haunt our dreams around nuclear are severe. They're almost always deal breakers to actually doing the storyline of terrorists break into a nuclear plant, capture the device or capture the spent fuel, and then they take it away, and they make some sort of weapon out of it. And they extort entire countries, or they're just nihilists and they want to watch the world burn. These stories are not practical, but it hasn't meant that they haven't done a lot of damage to nuclear. So, in the end, if a country absolutely insists on getting nuclear weapons and is willing to pay a terrible price in its relationship with the world, it can pull that off. And I think the duality of nuclear energy is it's the most powerful source in the world. That could mean for ill or for good. Now, we have an irony to deal with where the only time a nuclear weapon has ever been used in war has been when only one country had it. That opens an entire can of worms I don't think we should get to today, at least, Eric. But it's not clear what the relationship actually is between the spread, the slow and controlled spread of nuclear weapons around the world and peace versus war. Certainly, the Russia attacking Ukraine situation provides much food for thought in addition to unimaginable levels of tragedy. But I think that it's clear that people intuitively know that there's some kind of link. It's just, Eric, that that link is not in the specific reactors or typically in the exact pieces of technology. It's in the skills, it's in the fears, it’s in the capabilities of various states and their and their citizens.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay, the other question is, do you have a sense of what is the supply chain of the reactors in the Navy? Like, are those designed and built and fueled, does that all happen inside the Navy? Are there contractors? Like I'm sure they're not outside of America if they are such an integral sort of vendor for the Navy. But is that coming from the private sector?
Mark Nelson: It is, yes. It's completely an endogenous supply chain within the US. It's private contractors like Westinghouse or sometimes Backtoll makes naval reactors, and various firms have been involved in making Naval reactors. I definitely get the sense, I'm not in the nuclear Navy, but I get the sense that they want to spread out the reactors for different vessels among different manufacturers to keep a bigger capability of more bidders available for each purchase. Typically, it is the same facilities that are used to design, assemble, and test the reactors. That way, you're repeating as much as possible. It's just the contractors who propose this reactor design or that reactor design may change. The biggest issue, in fact, the one that really worries people, is the fuel. There's an understanding that the US is short on the supplies of enriched fuel for the entire nuclear enterprise, not just the nuclear Navy, and the United States does not have its own domestic companies with the capability of enriching large amounts of uranium for either naval or utility purposes. So that is that is a concern. And it's one that's being addressed in a careful bipartisan manner, as far as I can tell, in DC.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, good. I mean, it sounds like an opportunity. We're sort of doing the same thing with chip manufacturing and realizing that that's a massive- to not have the ability to produce our own. And I'm sure uranium is similar.
Mark Nelson: Exactly. Eric, it's a bit of a chicken and an egg. You can't, if you rely on only market forces for giant strategic investments, you're not going to have any company that meets market demands or the strategic needs of the country. If you put a great emphasis on, say, having chip manufacturing or enrichment, you may end up with products that become globally competitive. So, we'll see. I think we have the capability to do it and several different directions are being pursued, including some unique ones that are not happening elsewhere in the world, like laser enrichment.
Eric Jorgenson: So, as we kind of wrap up here, I'd love to do a little bit of homework, call to action, next steps for people in maybe a few ways. But the first one I want to ask is, what are the reliable or canonical resources, books, people to follow, publications? If people want to learn more and sort of get caught up or get ahead on what's coming in nuclear, what's possible, what's happening today, what the future might look like, and where the opportunities are, where would you send them?
Mark Nelson: I would say one of the most important things that people can do is start to understand more about the whole energy system we use in an advanced economy. The single best book on this is still Sustainable Energy – without the hot air by former Cambridge professor Dr. David J. C. Mackay. That will give you an idea of how much energy is used for the different parts of sustaining life. And you can make a decision for yourself to reduce or increase different energy sources based on how easy it is to get that energy from clean sources or how important that use of energy is to you personally. In terms of keeping up with nuclear energy news, the World Nuclear Association has an excellent and thorough library online, and I find their resources to be superb. I sometimes go there for review, even on subjects that I've been formally educated on. So, I would recommend having a bookmark for the World Nuclear Association library. You'll never regret having that. The company that I'm working with to get thorium and uranium into existing reactors is CLEANCOR. You can follow them on Twitter or from their website or on LinkedIn. In terms of the groups that I see doing the most important work for the public and communicating about nuclear energy, in Europe, we have the Re Planet Network, that is an association of environmental nonprofits that have come together under one name to fight for nuclear energy in Europe and beyond. In the United States and globally, the Stand Up for Nuclear organization is one extremely dear to my heart. Friends and colleagues help run that, and I think that their work has been essential to spreading positive nuclear energy news around the world. So, when young people who find out about nuclear and love it want to do something in their country, there's always an organization, somebody who they can reach out to, and show them how young people in neighboring countries or across the world have turned their passion, their self-discovered passion for nuclear energy, into action. And then the Mothers for Nuclear Organization is an outstanding one here in the US that was a pioneer in fighting to save our existing nuclear reactors. Because, especially for your listeners in California, the battle is not done to save the final reactor in California. It's absolutely essential to save that to keep track of almost any of the goals that California has from carbon to grid reliability. We've got to save the Elbert County nuclear plant and Mothers for Nuclear are an excellent organizing center for getting involved in that battle.
Eric Jorgenson: Awesome. And if there are people who are at a career crossroads or are looking for more meaningful work or getting involved in the industry with their own blood, sweat, and tears, are there like, do you see opportunities here? Are there people making money in nuclear? Can you go have a great career? And if so, what are the places to go work and invest, and how do you educate or tool for that?
Mark Nelson: Especially if young people are okay with small town lives, it is absolutely possible to live like Homer Simpson – a single income, raise a family of three, house, two cars, if that's your style – on a nuclear power plant worker salary. So nuclear power plants always need great people. And if you need help getting connected, certainly reach out to me in Twitter DMs or by email, and we'll do what we can to get you hooked up. Also, nuclear engineering programs are finally expanding. And fortunately, just talking about engineers, almost any engineering background is useful in the nuclear industry. Nuclear power startups, nuclear power company startups certainly need talent, and nuclear focused nonprofits, organizations attempting to work with regulators to streamline regulation and to work with communities to help them host nuclear plants if they want to. There are a lot of those that are popping up, a lot of enthusiasm from donors to continue that work. Just get in touch, and I'll make sure you find a list of organizations that are worth contacting.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay, I love that. I hope that this does channel some people either intellectually or resources or effort or just awareness into this. I think it is such an important thing to see in our lifetimes. And my episode with Josh Storrs Hall was a lot about nuclear and nanotech, and establishing, we didn't really harp on it in this episode, but really changing the mindset around like energy as a negative impact thing that we talked about in the 70s and realizing that cheaper and more abundant energy is the single greatest way to lift people out of poverty and create better safety and more abundance in their lives. And the cleaner that we can accomplish that, the better off the planet is going to be and the less conflicts there's going to be between humans over scarce resources. Abundance is our only way out. And this is a magical technology, as you said, a gift from God that can let us do this next industrial revolution and blow everybody's mind with how great the future can be. So, I hope everybody kind of puts a shoulder to the wheel and helps move it forward and makes tomorrow better than today.
Mark Nelson: Well said, Eric. Glad to join you.
Eric Jorgenson: Thank you so much.
If you liked this episode, you will absolutely love my episode with Josh Storrs Hall. That is the author of Where Is my Flying Car?. We also go deep on nuclear in that episode, as well as nanotechnology where Josh is an expert. I also did a solo cast recapping all my favorite highlights from his book, Where Is My Flying Car?. So, both of those have a lot of overlap with what we just talked about. If you're interested in learning more about nuclear and this sort of potential next industrial revolution that is within our grasp in the next lifetime, check those episodes out. Please support the show in a free way; you can leave a quick review or text this episode to a friend or coworker you think would enjoy it. Those are the two best ways to grow the show and help us get bigger guests, more resources, and continue to bring you this kind of information. Thank you for listening.