Fastest Path to Zero

There's a way, a way such a better way today Today, the racial voice tells the world there's a better way Today, there's a better way Ooh, there's a way, such a better way today Today, now racial voice tells the world there's a better way Today, there's a better way This is right at Amazon's time for another atomic show The shows are coming a little faster these days Now that I don't have a whole lot of other activities and no trial plans in the near future Would be today, I have two guests, first is Susie Suzanne Hobbes Baker, A creative director at the fastest path to zero An initiative hosted at the University of Michigan which is a multidisciplinary approach to determining a way to get to zero carbon emissions in the fastest possible way The second guest is Steve Apland, a consultant to the Canadian nuclear industry Both Susie and Steve have been guests on the atomic show before So you'll recognize their voices, welcome to both of you Bye to be here! And one of the latest thoughts this conversation was Part of the Cuz Susie has a time constraint We want to introduce what fastest path or introduce atomic show listeners to what fastest path to zero is What they've been doing already and what they plan to do in the near future So Susie, why don't you start off with that? Yeah, well thanks Rad, I always appreciate the chance to reconnect with you and to update on some of the cool research that we're doing So yeah, basically this initiative, it's hosted at the University of Michigan and it's a joint effort between the nuclear engineering department and the energy institute there, which is sort of like an academic think tank And it started because my long time mentor Todd Allen accepted the role of department chair and I had been working with him for years and years previously at third way and at INL and during that time I had been doing a ton of research and trying to understand through sort of the lens of cultural theory Why some people love nuclear, why some people hate nuclear and why some people aren't really activated by it as an issue and are kind of neutral on it And through that process, I started to realize that this wasn't just a PR problem, right? Like this was deeper than that and I got into a lot of sort of sociology, literature and realized that, you know, this is more of a socio-technical problem This is something that touches on technology, geography, politics, social issues, economics and the decision-making with regard to energy and specifically nuclear is really complex And I realized we didn't have a very good working framework for grappling with the level of complexity that we're really dealing with That's just a PR problem or that's just an economic problem And it's like, well wait, all of those problems also matter, right? And so I sort of wanted to dig deeper and start to think about how we integrate all of those different factors in a way that helps us get to better outcomes, particularly with regard to the deployment of advanced reactors So I think we probably all share the view that we absolutely need advanced nuclear climate change And it's kind of like this inflection point So basically, we have the opportunity to shake things up a lot because the technology is so different that we can change things like our business models or how we finance things or how people engage in social context Certainly tons of people are working on changing the economics of these plants So I realized that the timing was really good to do this research So about a year ago, I transitioned over to Michigan and started digging into this or this series of questions And basically what we've done so far is we've built and please jump in with any questions Because I'm just going to like go on and on Okay, but I am going to jump in right now since you gave me action One of the things that I've heard about this fastest path to zero that I really like is the fact that it's an interdisciplinary approach and spreads across the campus And it's not something that's focused in just engineering or just sociology or whatever it has people from all over the campuses Is that a correct impression? That's right, so we have like an advisory committee of experts across disciplines and across the whole campus who help us think through different aspects of the work So we've got everyone from architects to social justice scholars to renewable energy scholars and experts So you know, we're learning from other fields, we're learning from other technology arenas And we're trying to integrate sort of the very best thinking from a lot of different corners of academia into the way that we're thinking about advanced reactor deployment Yeah, what are the I'm going to jump in again, yeah, started with architects and I was impressed to see that there was an article about an advanced reactor in architectural digest Just last week, the Oklo powerhouse was featured, so it's pretty it may be they have something to do with you, I don't know I definitely encouraged I have encouraged all of the advanced nuclear companies that I interact with to take design seriously And I would say Oklo has taken that to heart and I think they always from the get go set out to create something beautiful in iconic So I did play a little bit of a role helping to connect them with some designers and things like that, but really I've been very impressed with how they've been thinking about it on their own as well But yeah, I think it's just it's the type of thing that shows that you care, right? And it may seem like an extra step, but it actually can be transformative in some of these different arenas that we're talking about that aren't just technology based, so and in the context of social acceptance design can be an incredibly helpful tool for getting people excited and involved creating opportunities for people to think about how the technology might fit into their communities And that's really at the heart of the research that we're doing right now One of the things that we've done in the past is as the nuclear sector that we're really trying to interrogate is this idea of just like network based deployment strategies Like oh well, I know a guy in this area who's really excited or this utility has a long history with nuclear or this that and the other And having sort of a single network based factor determine where resources go or where projects go that hasn't bode well for us historically and so using a framework called the diffusion of innovation, which is basically like the study of how technology adoption happens We've been trying to understand what characteristics are really necessary for early adopters to be successful so that they can help sort of reframe the narrative and serve as models that can be replicated by other folks So as I understand that model you find early adopters by finding people who really can benefit by even early versions of a new technology where the new technology is so much better than what is available to them that they'll pay a little bit at a lot extra sometimes because it meets needs as they have right now So is that a reasonable summary of what that strategy entails sort of so it's it's looking at all of those conditions might be more open to nuclear or advanced nuclear because they're already paying a lot. So you know if you've got really low energy costs the idea of adopting a technology that's going to drive up your overall cost may not be as appealing. So the political and policy conditions so this is one that I think we've got to be really careful about is you might have a place that has really great economic conditions for technology adoption, but they have poor policy and political conditions. So it's a dynamic where you might be able to get a project going but then you're going to run into significant hurdles that can drive delays and cost overruns. And so it's like okay you really got to think through what are the political conditions. So getting some early successes and places that have good political conditions can also help sort of influence in a lateral way because really states and governors and state legislatures and mayors, they constantly learn from each other and benchmark from each other. So you see policy change happen with this sort of like lateral influence network a lot. So it's important to you know get the success and then use that as fuel to drive for their political change. The things I think many technologists don't understand is just how often mayors and governors of various places get together and talk about things. Yeah, so for example, Rod if you look at renewable portfolio standards, both the adoption of the policy and the adoption of the technologies. It follows this pattern across states where a few states that had really ideal social political and economic and geographic conditions, especially for renewables because you've got to have the right when solar you know sort of conditions for success there too. So they were able to stand up projects early and create models that then they could share with their peers who could then tweak those models for their slightly different conditions, but they weren't starting from scratch. So we've seen this with clean energy standards across the states as well. There's definitely a process by which this this technology adoption happens. And so the more that we can understand that we can sort of front load resources and efforts in places that have the highest likelihood of success and a way that enables the adoption cycle to succeed. You've got to have some successes and of course one of the challenges that we have is the the four projects that got started in the US for units I guess are all very closely interrelated. So there's not really a sample of what might be possibly able to be done. They're all experienced similar challenges because they were the same technology the same people the same players and they you know they're not for independent projects. So we need, as you say, some early successes and hopefully more than a couple of individual projects can get started so that we can see how some of them succeed. Exactly. Yeah, we want to have lots of winners. So, you know, I think another lesson. and from the past that I think about a lot is how we ended up in this situation where we have just one nuclear product and it's huge in the number of communities or regions that can even sustain this technology are few. And so it's like we really need to, and I think the developers are doing a great job of this, rethink the products for lots of different users, right? Because we want to have many successes because if a few companies fail, that's fine. But if we get back to where we just have one or two products, that actually puts the whole sector at risk of sort of collapse, which I think is part of what we're coping with right now. So yeah, I think it's absolutely essential that we don't just go all in on a single technology. I've got a question. The zero in the title of the organization, I'm assuming that it refers to CO2, right? That's right. Yeah. What is fee like in the end in all of the multiple and sometimes overlapping criteria that people will use in evaluating whether they're on board of something or not? Where does CO2 stand in all those criteria as a as its own sort of standalone criterion for benchmarking any of these projects against one another? That's a really good question. So for our team, our mission is rooted in the need to be a part of the climate response. We want advanced nuclear to be a part of that globally. We also recognize it's not going to be right for every community and they all communities will still need to decarbonize. So with all of that in mind, there are some communities that highly, highly prioritize low carbon and their policy approach and their decision-making approach and others that don't. And what we're trying to do is to create sort of a framework that can adapt to the values of the decision makers and the communities themselves. So we know like through cultural theory that a lot of folks who are concerned about climate change are also scared of nuclear, right? So the sort of set of like attributes that contribute to the world view make you worried about both of those things. So there are places that may really not feel comfortable with nuclear, but they're still going to need to decarbonize. And then there are places that don't think that climate change is a threat, but they're still going to need to decarbonize too. So it's just a really interesting dynamic when you start to bring all these different factors together that you can kind of find the jigsaw puzzle piece of like, okay, we have all of these factors. Nuclear good work really well here. And sometimes it's like an extreme thing, like, you know, really high energy prices or like rural communities that, you know, there's like a single condition that really pushes them over the edge of making them open. But there are also a lot of places that are kind of like more politically moderate places that have really great conditions for the technology. So it really runs the gamut sort of across the full spectrum of who ends up looking like a really good potential adopter. Okay. I would say that in today's climate, it seems like those areas where they really dismiss the threat of climate change are starting to shrink to almost insignificant. It seems like so many places realize that there is at least a risk. And if you have a way to avoid that risk, you should take it that there's so people that certainly reject the idea that we should spend an enormous sum of money for little gain, but they recognize that it's not maybe not little gain and maybe some of the money aren't all that enormous. Right. It's like a hedge. Like, well, if we're wrong, then we still then it's fine. Yeah. No, I think, I think that's right. And there's an enormous amount of diversity in our country, of course. And I know Steve's in Canada, but I think that's also true Canada. And so just thinking, having a framework that allows us to think really flexibly and to be adaptive, but without missing key things, I think is really helpful. And guys, I hate to have to jump off in a few minutes, but I'll try to wrap this up and just share some of our next steps. At this point, it was an audio hiccup, Susie started describing a database that fastest BAFTA Zero has created that describes market conditions in various locations. So spatial information. So it's like place based information about the different conditions in different places. And we're working on building a tool for like utilities and companies and decision makers to be able to use, which it won't encompass the whole sort of breadth and depth of the database, but it will more be like a teaching tool for understanding how to incorporate all of these different factors into decision making. And from there, we're working with Arpei to make that available to users as quickly as possible, probably within the next year. And from there, we're also hoping to start to expand this framework to be able to think about the export of US advanced nuclear technologies globally, as well as how to apply this framework to the broader energy transition. So we've got a pretty ambitious timeline and set of goals, but we've got a really great team and we're having a lot of fun doing it. So anyway, I'm really grateful for the a chance to talk about this with you both. And please, you know, anyone who was listening to the podcast, reach out with questions or ideas or feedback. We were always hungry for that. And yeah, that's it. So you had to the contact you. And just as we started to get to the point, we need to pass detailed information where accuracy is important. There was a Skype audio issue. Here's Susan's contact information at fastest path to zero. Email at Sierra uniform zulu Yankee hotel Bravo at uniform Mike India Charlie Hotel dot echo Delta uniform. That's using the Finesque alphabet, which is freely available on the web. If you don't know it already. Thanks a lot. That's it. And take care. Okay. Bye. Well, that's interesting. It's an interesting, interesting effort. Yeah. And it sort of follows pretty nicely with a conversation I had a few days ago with Jigger Shaw from generate capital and jig to wit from ochle because you know, Jigger is a clean energy guy. But a clean energy guy who has focused on solar in particular, he was a founder of solar city and has been very active in making sure or arranging for incentives to allow solar markets to be created and cost to be driven down by the age old method of practice practice. So This is Stella's name again. Jigger Shaw. Jigger Shaw solar setting. This is the this is the outset that Tesla purchased. That's correct. Right. Jigger was was a founder and sold sold off the company. And now he's runs a company called generate capital, which is a sea corporation whose mission is to finance own and operate clean energy projects in particular, those that are maybe not as conventional as some might, you know, they haven't really qualified yet for the conventional type capital. Right. Project finance and that kind of stuff. They're trying to help technologies like waste digesters and other things that have some really interesting technological aspects, but they haven't yet been able to build enough inventory to prove to the banks that they can do it and replicate it. So so generate capital is an interesting group and their Jigger in particular has always been interested in nuclear, but also dismissed it as something that they nobody would let a company like his buy a nuclear project and develop it. But once he learned about Oklo and some of the other smaller nuclear plants, I think that there's a realization that the conventional view of nuclear is is very limited compared to what the possibilities really are. I'm experiencing some of that myself. Just up here, I interact with a lot of solar people as you do. And the president of the new president of our, well, one year now president of our nuclear association is a former solar guy. Not a former solar guy, solar guy. And he's and has had the same sort of epiphany when it comes to nuclear as a and its place in an effort to combat climate change and combat carbon emissions and that kind of thing. It's interesting that a lot of that space is starting to revisit their, you know, long held beliefs. I'm just going from what this from what this gentleman has explained about his own sort of personal journey through the whole, through the area. It shows interesting to have the sort of amenability in that sort of segment of the clean energy space because it didn't exist before. What's your sense of the of their sense? What's your sense of their sense to the, you know, pro solar proponents who are sort of on, you know, leaning towards amenability to nuclear in some application. What's your sense of their sense of the blockages for raising capital. Like you said, he would be able to pitch a nuclear project and why not? Well, I think in some ways, in many ways, the nuclear industry brought on many of its challenges by focusing only on big central states and power plants. People who are in the solar business are often very attuned to distributed energy, small modular type construction projects. You know, they like having a standard panel size that you can just go by, there's a bunch of different competitors that sell all the same kinds of panels and you can simply purchase them based on your own particular specifications and gang them all up together. You can put them on racks and there's standard inverters and those are being interested in that kind of of technology is kind of a philosophical thing. People who want to do that want to, you know, build solar on rooftops are not interested in big central station power plants that require billions of dollars of finance, the involvement of multiple huge corporations and, you know, a regulatory structure allows them to find markets for the output of a huge power plant. Now the developers are focusing on of smaller versions of nuclear, many of the people with the philosophical opposition to very large central station power plants are recognizing. Now there's a place where they might use their skills and talents. Yeah, I get the same sense that I'm conflicted about it a little bit because I think that given the scale of, you know, as soon as he was talking about sort of a transition to zero carbon that's going to be societal and, you know, as well as I do that this is beyond the way beyond, not just beyond it, but significantly way beyond the scale of just current electricity generation. So you're going to be providing heat and transportation power, this is a two to three-fold expansion of electricity in order to provide all that. I don't see the demise of a central station model in that I see actually an expansion of it. So I'm a little bit conflicted. I do understand the appeal that it has to people who want to scale it down so that it means something to them personally. I understand that. The central station model though, I don't see as disappearing. Please don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that the people who are interested in small, distributed power systems are going to replace those who are still interested and skilled at very large projects. They're going to mean an addition to the applications of nuclear. It's not a replacement. It's not that small modular reactors are going to eliminate the need for large central station power plants, although they may have certain markets where the two technologies will overlap and compete. But there are people in this world who are philosophically and our part of organizations where the big is their skill set, where they want to build the biggest and baddest of something or the biggest and best of something, baddest in a certain positive sense. But and those or the organizations that can do that are still going to exist and still going to be involved. Some of them look at small things as not moving the needle enough for them, not being interesting enough to get their management attention. And that's okay. There's different managers and different entrepreneurs and different skill sets involved. I think one of the challenges new clears had is it painted itself into a very small niche of the overall energy market when fusion could be applicable to a much broader range of markets. Why obviously, and people know I'm a former sub-brainer, why haven't people looked at the existence of nuclear submarines, even if Admiral Rick over and his subsequent replacements have protected the specific technology of nuclear propulsion and submarines, why haven't people said, well, just the existence of those submarines means it's possible to go smaller. And of course, now we are. There's finally people that are recognizing, hey, we can build reactors that can provide heat to a community or that can provide co-generation where they can provide electricity to a commercial park and then distribute heat among the residents of that commercial park. And that's a completely different model than a central station power plant, but they don't necessarily replace each other. Now we still have big cities. We still have a lot of people that just want electricity reliably delivered to their outlets. And they don't really care how it gets there. And there are good solid models and examples of central station power plants doing that job very well and very efficiently. But there's also lots of other people out there. Yeah. So I think it's good. One of the things I advise you to talk about, have you been tracking some of the developments of small modular reactors at CNL and what's going on there? Yes. The association, which I've done some work for and continue to, has really plugged into the SMR scene in Canada. And it's had some great success. Like there's been the, you've probably heard about the endorsement of the concept anyway, the idea of small nuclear reactors on the parts of some of our subjurisdictional political leaders at the provincial level, Ontario Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and now Alberta, to have the premiers, like the governors of those jurisdictions, at Bias public as they have been recently, like just in this year, publicly in favor of the concept anyway of SMRs, small nuclear reactors, to address their energy needs. This is just an absolute game changer. It's a really positive development. We wouldn't have seen this even a year ago. So it's maybe that there's some lip service there. But just the fact that these premiers who never know Alberta premier would have been this publicly on board of it up until the current one. Similarly with Saskatchewan, I sit in a jurisdiction right now, right as Ontario, that runs on nuclear power, you know, 60% of our electricity. It's all from Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan has been anti-nuclear, like provincially forever. And for a premier to come out and Bias publicly in favor of decarbonizing on that basis as the current guy has been, that's really very significant. So, I know a little bit about Alberta and why it has formerly been very reluctant to be interested in nuclear because of the oil sands and the oil production in Alberta. You know, there's a lot of people that saw nuclear as a competitor to that. It would seem to me that in the current oil market, people who have resources in the high cost production areas might be close to saying, you know, those resources are never going to disappear, but there just isn't a market for them in any time soon. Maybe it's better to stop spending money trying to to get them out of the ground because all we're going to do is lose money. And maybe we need something else that can be a different source of energy. I mean, obviously Alberta has had a very strong energy business for a long time, but they've got to have a lot of people who are wondering what are they going to do in an environment where the global price of oil is in the per the 20s US dollars per barrel. And our, you know, number one market, the market that that industry that the entire provincial industry is built around, I've been built around serving, is not even against our product. So they're just don't, they don't need it. And you know, since fracking sort of took over, or not took over, but became as prominent as it has, our price of our product and the incentives for Americans to bend over backwards to get it are just gone out the window. So yes, there's a, it's a, that's somewhat tied to, that may be somewhat tied to the, the, you know, newfound of menabilities in the Alberta political class anyway to sort of look at nuclear. I wanted the same thing that it's you do about about whether the sort of dismissal of nuclear across the board dismissal, not just in as a heat source in the oil sands, but just as a power generation in the province had to do with the, you know, they're afraid of the competition. In some ways, I mean, there's, you've got some of the most forward-thinking energy companies in the world in my opinion in Alberta. And I'm of course referring to TC energy formerly trans Canada, their majority partner Bruce Power, which is, you know, is our biggest nuclear plant. So that's an Alberta oil company, you know, energy transportation company, pipeline company that, that guys behind the infamous Keystone, plunking down serious capital to get into the nuclear business in Ontario. And that's a direction that I could see a lot of those companies taking. If they can, if they can be persuaded that there's, that there's, that there's, you know, their energy companies already. And they could, if they could follow that model, there's other nuclear plants and similar situations to the, to the situation that, that the Bruce plant was in in the early 2000s, on the same continent that are in great need of some sort of, some sort of, well, a regulatory change, but also a source of capital. I'm thinking of a couple of units out on the coast of California that would be wonderful take over targets. They, oh my god, they serve a high, price market and serve it very well, but their current owner doesn't seem very interested in continuing to operate. And of course I'm speaking at the Avocanian, but yeah, then there's, there's got to be some others. Now, one of the questions I, I, can you explain why Saskatchewan, which is the home of one of the most amazing uranium resources in the world, has been anti-nuclear. Well, because they've been, because, provincially, the NDP, the NDP is the Canadian version of, of what I would guess, what I think you could safely say is the AOC wing of the American Democratic Party. So on the, as if you put them on the political spectrum very, very similar. And that's who is, the trade places, provincially, and the, and provincial politics with, with the current conservatives who are more like Republicans. And so there's, it's a fairly strong provincial political class that is, that is, and that's the, that party federally, provincially, all across Canada for historical reasons has been anti-nuclear. So it's been absolute deadlighter, they won't even discuss it. But the fact that, you know, those, and, and that has, it's been, that's current has been so strong that even provincial premiers have shied away from it. With, you know, starting with Brad Wald, who is the current guy, is a predecessor, that's changed, but that's very, very recent development. So why is the NDP anti-nuclear? Well, you know, this goes back to why our center left progressive political parties across the Western world anti-nuclear. And we, that's off, that's a whole separate discussion. But that would explain why Saskatchewan has had that position for as long as they have. You know, uranium exports are, are sort of important to the provincial economy. It's not their biggest single export, but it's, it's important. It's not like oil, but it's important. So they, they're not above selling it, you know, knowing that it's going to be burned. who didn't react to in other jurisdictions, but they're just absolutely up until recently, they're not gonna talk about doing it in Saskatchewan, which is a fossil province that you get most of their electricity as Alberta does from fossil fuels, mainly coal and gas. So I guess Saskatchewan's got some local coal mines or? Yeah, yeah, they've got coal plants next to those mines they burn a very sort of low grade form of late night. But and they've been forever, because this is why I'm so dismissive of CCS, they've been involved in a federally funded CCS project, which has been putting a total of a million times or something like this under the ground. But they recognize that in order for them to get, if there's going to be a nationwide phase out of coal for power generation, what's going to be either gas or nuclear. So that's what they're facing and so they're at least hedging their decision by at least looking at nuclear. Well, that's good. Yeah, I think that there's some interesting synergies, although it takes some time to understand them and look at them between people who own coal mines and that kind of stuff and nuclear, because coal is a chemical product that could be vastly improved in value with the addition of some very clean heat to it. The people who have always mined and sold their raw material to somebody else, maybe very interested in being able to use their raw material in a much more value added situation and keeps the employment and the effort and the revenue from that activity more local. Yeah, and the only way to do that is with clean heat. Yeah, I remember that I haven't looked at it. I don't even remember the acronym now. Next generation nuclear plant, NGNP. The INL thing, the high-temperature gas reactor. For a while, the consortium consisted of the industrial consortium that was interested in clean heat, it consisted of dew plant, but also potash, corporofus, the sketch one, or whoever in Australia they have purchased them. So that's another sort of major interest and should this become viable and come into general use, another industry segment that would be interested in clean heat. So yeah, I think right now there is one company that is into stage, I think the third phase of licensing a micro-miniture or micro-majular reactor to be built at C&L. I believe that company is global first energy, global first power. And the technology that they're using is being provided by USNC, ultra-safe nuclear corporation. Are you familiar with this product? Because I think they've got a partnership with Ontario Power Generation. I'm not mistaken. And they do, and I'm not all that familiar with it. I'm very just sort of passively staying in touch with that. This is when you're talking about a bent stage of what regulation with our regulator, I thought that the most, the most, I've bent in that direction, like for an SMR company was new scale. As a matter of fact, our models of decarbonizing Saskatchewan electricity were based on new scale because it seems to be able to size that would be perfect for the province. Yeah, well, new scale is moving along fairly well. And they were chosen, new scale and terrestrial energy, I think, were chosen for the demonstration joint effort between the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. But I'm pretty sure that the global first power, which actually that's the partnership between USNC and Ontario Power Generation, I'm pretty sure they've quietly moved into application for an actual plant with an actual site. That could be, I won't disagree. I haven't paid as much attention as I perhaps should have. There's just so many SMRs and I was thinking that the first, the most likely application of one would be in new Brunswick, which is another province that we've sort of left out of the conversation, but hugely important because other than Ontario, we'll go back to the only province that has gone nuclear in any significant way. But yes, this would be, as all of this is quite interesting and be really interesting to see where LPG decides to put or to test one of these. I thought it was going to be at the CNL site like the Ralston, Ontario. That could be near the original nuclear power demonstration reactor up in that area. Yeah, top river site. That's where USNC is going to be, is at the top river site. Now, New Brunswick is a very interesting situation because the New Brunswick is in a key part of the grid. It has, unlike the shock river site, it's got great access to transmission and to markets, New England markets as the US can be reached from New Brunswick pretty well. Also, there are other places, but New Brunswick power of course has a nuclear plant with a nuclear site and they have made some significant investments into two companies, Moltex and ARC advanced reactor concepts, two different styles of small reactors and they're both moving along pretty well. But those I think would be cited at the site of the New Brunswick power station. Of La Pro, yeah, just to take advantage of the connection. Right. What is the global, the OPG, USNC partnership? What's that technology? High temperature gas is the basic reactor, but they used a high temperature gas to heat, molten salt. So they have essentially a molten salt storage system which separates physically and externally. The output from the reactor from the use of the heat somewhere else. And so the reactor can run at its full power, although it can handle transient, it's more economical to just keep it running at full power. I think about 40 megawatts thermal, 15 megawatts electric. And then the heat would be used sometimes for use in a heat, a process heat application, but also for a steam plant. Interesting. Well, if it's 15 megawatts electric, how are they making the electricity? So they're working fluid is what? The electricity is made through a ranking cycle that the molten salt is the heat input and then a steam system. What I believe they're using now, they also have some ideas about using the heat from their very safe high temperature reactor differently. I keep trying to kind of coax them into looking heavily at the direct gas turbine cycle, which is the one that I see is the highest potential. What to heck? Why not copy from your competitors? The reason that gas power plants are so cheap is they have a very low capital cost power conversion cycle, the Brayton cycle gas turbine. If it's so good for them, why not make it so that nuclear can use it? That's been my pitch for the last 30 years and I'll keep it. This was the atomic engines thing. Yeah, yeah. It's yes. The atomic engine was a direct site or is in concept a direct cycle gas turbine with heat from reactor that can produce gas temperatures. Roughly in the 800 very early stages of technology to the 1200 degree range, 1200 Celsius, which is right where combustion gas turbines like to live. And if you can make it so that those that heat can be delivered to a combined cycle plant, you can just go to all these combined cycle plants that already exist and start evaluating whether or not it's worthwhile to replace the input from burning fossil fuels with fissioning uranium, thorium, plutonium, whatever it is you want to fission. So anyway, so the many of the very small reactor developers look to your north as a place where their early adopters might be, have you done much a setting of what the power needs of northern villages might be? Well, it's a tiny market, but it is 100% fossil today. So from which a pick whatever northern community you want to pick they run on diesel and in principle, I could see that them achieving a far better quality of life if they had a more steady power source that is in its polluting or as expensive as diesel. And that's I guess the rub because you would need to provide this and it would have to be you know what they call walk away safe because these communities are not stacked with people who are engineers who can run these things. It's got to be a fairly fairly low interaction between the users and the source. In principle, it's like it's the only way that the Canadian north and the northern part of and northern or remote part of any country is ever going to decarbonize. So in that like on that principle and I think that I think Rod that this is not this is not outside anybody's capability. I don't like it's outside the realm of possibility. I think that this will be the future. It's just boy. How do we get from where we are today to that future? Because the plan is to in our sector is to and I'm not 100% on board of the strategy is to roll these things out in that setting. And I think that setting is the easiest way to kill it if you want to if you want to be cynical. So one of the questions that I have my understanding is that some of these northern villages with indigenous or first nation residents don't actually pay the costs of their current power generation directly. They have a lot of inputs or subsidies from the federal government merely in equity and quality of life and that kind of stuff. So the the diesel fuel is provided with significant support from the federal government. And if that is the case, it would seem that the real there's going to be a lot of involvement in the federal government supporting a lower cost way of of producing power. Of course you're still going to have to get social license to operate buy in. from the residents of the community and they need to be, need to understand that the, that the effort is not putting them at risk or anything like that, but it's giving them a better power system that's cleaner and quieter and more amenable to their, you know, natural or traditional ways of life. So it's going to be a challenge. I think, I don't know if you've read much about the Oklo Aurora Power Station, but I think it is in some ways targeted at fitting into that market well and their model of operation is that the company Oklo, Oklo Power would be the owner operator of the facility and simply deliver heat and electricity to their customers. Yeah. Yeah. I have casually followed it. I'm not a close follower. I love the philosophy behind it. It does. It does. It does. It does. First nations in indigenous, you know, philosophy of land stewardship. It's, you know, if you want to get new age you about it, it's a very spiritual thing to do. It's taking an element out of ancient rock and using it and putting it back into the rock. It's really quite, it's remarkable in that sense. Yeah. The, you, you, you're, you've touched on a sort of the sort of general situation, which is the federal government, provides a lot of services and a lot of money to First Nations communities in return for those communities settling on one patch of land and not roaming the landscape. And as, as part of that sort of compromise and, and that's just a, it's both a, it's a, it's a way of financing this stuff and it's also a kind of worms. If, if something, if a initiative like this came out of the federal government, it would be, uh, immediately viewed with suspicion just by that by virtue of having come, having come from the federal government. I, I, I shy away from the stuff having consulted in that area for a while way back when it's a, it's a tough, it's a tough area to, uh, to get into and, and it's, and each one, like it's a bespoke proposition for each community basically and there's hundreds of communities. And they're, and they are poor and, and they don't, a lot of them don't have a potable drinking water if you can imagine that and, you know, this is where a G7 member and one of the founding G7 members and we're, we're affluent or we're quite affluent. We've got a standard of living that's second to none and it's, and we've got communities all over the country that don't have portable drinking water. So there's, there's, it's fraught with administrative and financial issues that, in my opinion. But yes, a nuclear reactor would be perfect for these places as small and in this model that you're talking about that OFO would provide owner operator. This, uh, and again, it's not something that can't be done. It's, uh, some changes would have to happen for, for, you know, for this to come to pass. And, and I'm, I, I've, for a lot of those reasons I haven't spent a huge amount of time working up the details of how all this would work. It's certainly interesting, certainly a lot of potential. Yeah. Well, if it was easy, you would have already been done. But, it's just, it was easy that they would be nuclear today and not diesel. That's correct. Yeah. But, you know, that, that's the good thing is that there are thinkers out there who, who see those, those obstacles as challenges to be overcome rather than as barriers to, uh, hurt. Yeah. So, yeah. That's it. So Steve, I think that, uh, I'm going to probably close it off here. Would you, uh, like to offer any concluding remarks before we do? Well, uh, I just hope that I'm very interested in, in how the, uh, the current crisis, how we come out of the current crisis economically, that you, you have the same one that we do. And we're, uh, kind of taking York, you, when I say we, I mean, Canada and you, I mean, the United States are picking York, you for how to financially handle this. The current crisis, I'm really interested in how the nuclear industry comes out the other end, especially the, the entrepreneurial end of it. And, uh, you know, like what we've been discussing, the, the, the small, uh, novel design side of it. That will be really interesting to see how, how that sector emerges from this crisis. Uh, I'm, I'm hopeful that it's that, that some, some, uh, of the barriers that you referred to are, are diminished as a result of our having pulled through this. But, uh, I guess we'll see. And what about you? Well, definitely. I'm, I'm watching was, would deep interest, uh, you know, I have, I have a huge stake in the future as a grandfather of six very, uh, interested in excited and intelligent young people. Um, I want them to have a good future. I want us to, um, respond appropriately. Uh, you know, infectious diseases or something that have, have always played humanity. Yeah. And we have to learn to deal with them. They are not thinking enemies of us. They are simply part of the environment that we call earth. And, uh, we need to be able to deal with them in, in effective ways. And, and I think quite personal, quite frankly, I think most of the world has vastly overreacted in an effort to use air quotes here, keep people safe without recognizing the hazards of closing down the economy. Uh, and, and it's not, I'm not talking about protecting big business. I'm not talking about protecting, you know, everyday people who live good lives often don't have a tremendous amount of buffer. And, uh, you know, can't, you know, there is an enormous amount of economic activity to simply not happen. So when people start talking about creating more money and spreading it out, I just wonder what it's, what that, what the value is supposed to be represented there. If you're, if people aren't flying, uh, airlines or got expenses that don't stop, you know, people aren't going to restaurants, you know, there's a whole bunch of small business people involved in that enterprise, uh, who aren't performing any services and get a sale of expenses going. So I, I, I think that there's been some models run where every pessimistic assumption you can think of was made. They thought of them as conservative assumptions. I think of them as wrong assumptions. And I think that the, that, uh, you know, I'm, a lot of people have soundly criticized my comments that I've been making on this line on Twitter, but I'm pretty confident in saying that that many of the scary scenarios will not come to pass. There are certainly going to be people who are harmed. There are certainly going to be hospitals that are overcrowded, but I know for a fact that there are some hospitals who are so unaffected right now that they're sending their workers home early, uh, without them getting their normal working hours because they don't have anything to do. Yes, you did mention that. I was, I was very surprised to see that. I think most people would be because it certainly hasn't been talked about in, in the media, but it's going to happen. I mean, there, there are some things in life that, that can't be, can't be ignored. And eventually this, the, the truth will be available. And I think it will be that we overreacted and I just hope that there are people who recognize and take responsibility for that to overreacting is dangerous. Yeah. Although I don't, I don't hold that much hope for that based on events in the past. And quite recent ones, one that just had its 10 year anniversary. I know what you're talking about. Yeah, yeah, exactly. All right. Actually, it wasn't tense. It was ninth. Uh, you're right. It was nine. Good. Grace was a 10 next year. Well, the 10. That's right. We're not out of do arithmetic. All right. Street. All right, Steve. Thank you very much for your time and we'll be talking again in the relatively near future. I'm hoping. All right. Always a pleasure, right. Thanks. Thanks for having me and stay safe. You bet. Bye. Thanks. I apologize for the audio flips during this show. I hope that I edited well enough so that you got all the information you needed to get. Uh, I will try to do better and probably we'll set up some backup recording systems to account for the fact that there are sometimes during the high periods of network traffic difficulties when you're on a Skype call. I hope you all are enjoying the renewed interest with the atomic show. I'm having fun talking to people and we'll continue to do so. Take care and stay safe. We'll make your voice tell the world there's a better way today and there's a better way. Ooh, there's a way, there's such a better way today. Today, now, make your voice tell the world there's a better way. The way is the atoms way.