Improving Nuclear Cost and Schedule Performance

There's a way, a way such a better way today, today. The nation's voice tells the world there's a better way, today there's a better way. This is Rod Adams and it's time for another Atomic Show. These days, one of the major arguments that is used against nuclear energy is the issue of cost and schedule. Over the years and along history of safe operations, most of the safety questions have fallen to the wayside, but it's still valid for people to say, nuclear is maybe nice, it may be great for the climate, it may be this, it may be that, but man, they sure cost a lot, and they sure take a long time to build. And it's difficult to dispute those arguments. But with me today, I have three experts who have all gotten involved in very significant detailed analysis of cost and schedule history, and have identified some of the common attributes that cause nuclear plants to go long and take a long time, and also have identified several cases or series of cases where cost and schedule have taken the normal route, which is, as you learn how to do something, you get better and better at it, and in a production or construction business, better and better means it gets cheaper and takes less time. So, my guests today are Jessica Lovering, a nearly completed PhD student with the Carnegie Mellon University who is from the Breakthrough Institute. At one point, it was a senior energy policy analyst. Welcome, Jessica. Thank you, thanks for having me. And also, we have Kirstie Goggin, who is the director of Energy for Humanity, and also a principal at Lucid Catalyst, an analysis consulting firm that has done a lot of studies on various attributes of nuclear energy and climate, but one in particular, conducted near the end of 2018 on cost and schedule. And as well as Kirstie, Eric Ingersoll, who is a managing member of our managing partner in Lucid Catalyst. So, Kirstie and Eric, welcome to you. Thank you very much. Thanks, Rods. Great to be here. So, let's start with the very first question that comes to mind, and each of you can say what you have found in your studies. Is nuclear energy inevitably too expensive and too slow? No. I think we probably all say no, but there are a lot of reasons why it has been costly. So, I think just to jump in here. It's not inherently expensive, but the way we've structured the regulations and the incentives and the markets, has pushed it to be costly, and we could redesign things, reform the incentives for clean energy, for low carbon energy, to help drive down the cost of nuclear through innovation, through improvements and performance. But it needs to be a very coordinated and concerted effort. Yeah. I'll jump in here too. If that's okay. I agree with what Jessica was saying. I think there's something even more sort of basic actually in a way. The surprising thing to me is that the vast majority of nuclear plants that are being built around the world today are being built very cost-effectively to very reasonable schedules. Often when we talk about this discussion about cost, we do so with a real focus on a small sample of projects that are being built in the United States and in Europe, which are really expensive and slow. So, they create this perception when you just look at that small sample that nuclear is too expensive and slow to make a meaningful contribution towards solving climate change. And actually, those projects that we're basing that perception on are all first of a kind first in a generation projects. And yeah, you do need to make a really big investment in licensing that design in building up the capability and skills within the supply chain and labor force and the project leadership team, qualifying the supply chain, all of that requires a really big lift. And the first time you do it, you're likely to encounter many issues, especially if you don't start construction with a completed design, which is a hallmark of these expensive and slow projects. By contrast, in the study that Eric and I led for the Energy Technologies Institute, the Nuclear Cost Driver Study, where we analyzed more than 30 plants around the world that are either completed or recently completed in the last few decades since three mile island. What we found was that the projects that were being built as part of a program where the new build was sequenced, designed with standardized, the construction teams had become experienced, the supply chain were experienced. That's when you really started to see not only those first of a kind costs, no longer needing to be spent again when you move forward into a second and end of a kind project, but actually the learn and the start to improve performance and efficiency in construction as well, leading to cost reduction. So it's really about getting good at it. It's like major infrastructure projects can be delivered really cost effectively if you standardize your designs and you keep doing it over and over again. So one of the next answers that I get from people who generally fundamentally oppose nuclear anyway, so they're just making arguments, but it's not a bad argument. They say that if you need that kind of steady planned work, does that link nuclear success to being a command and control economy? People have pointed to France and said, well, that was a national program. Do you really want a national program in the United States or in the UK? Do you really want to try to just even Sweden, it was a national program? Do we have to have a national program to be successful? Well, hey, Eric, why didn't you speak to what you found looking at the US experience? Yeah, I think the interesting, I would sort of answer your question right now by also going back to the previous question, which is actually what we've done, and this is very, this is what Jessica was alluding to in her answer as well, is that we've actually figured out how to make nuclear expenses. So nuclear wasn't expensive, and it certainly doesn't have to be expensive, but what we've done with our approach to regulation and the way we contract for nuclear plants and the way we do in the West is we've figured out how to make it expensive. So in other words, there's a very specific set of activities or attributes or decisions that go into these projects that cause the risk to go up, cause the projects to become more difficult to manage, cause the constructors to spend a lot more time on the site, delivering the same amount of concrete or steel that is delivered for half a year. And those, those, those adjustments, those attributes of projects are what we need to focus on. And we all have a, you know, we all, you know, when you have these kinds of discussions about nuclear costs, it's usually not in a vacuum. It's usually people also talking about have renewable costs have come down, specifically solar costs and wind costs. And, you know, there is a good understanding in those industries spread among the various stakeholders of the factors that drive the costs in those, in those industries. People understand that you need to have continuous, you know, if you started and stopped solar manufacturing and installing all the time, there would be no cost reduction in that industry at all. We all understand that you need to have continuous production. You need to build bigger and bigger factories. You need to have bigger and bigger projects. You need to get all the stakeholders to focus on soft costs. You know, there's a very clear understanding, a shared understanding among the advocates, the policy makers and the people in the industry of how you reduce costs in that type of an industry. The same, the, the same as possible in the nuclear industry. It's not the same things. It's a little bit different. But it, so it doesn't require a national program any more than reducing solar costs requires a national program. But it does require that you can, that you, that the group of people that are involved, the customers, the suppliers, the contractors, the policy makers, the advocates, the etcetera that they come together and have a shared understanding about what factors do drive the costs and what we are going to all commit to doing about those factors. And I want to add one little anecdote that came out of the study that Kirsty and I did together, the cost driver study. We developed a list as we, so what we did in that study that was interesting was that we actually interviewed the project leaders for these 30 plants that we profiled. And we were able to develop a list of the things that you must do if you want low cost plants. And a, a kind of counter list, if you will, of all the things you must not do if you want a low cost successful project. And, you know, what we found was that the high cost projects in the US and Europe, they were, they were diligently doing everything on the high cost list and diligently avoiding everything that you must do to be on the low cost list. These things are, you know, we could go into it more detail later if you're interested, but these things, you know, doing the thing on list, the high cost list, instead of doing the thing on the low cost list, these types of things do not require, you know, some huge state intervention and national policy. What they require is coordinated activity, just like we've seen in the offshore wind industry in the UK. And just like we've seen in the solar industry that people get together and they agree that they're going to do the sensible things that reduce costs because their, their market depends on them achieving these cost targets. And I think that the other thing I would say about this government program kind of view, obviously the government needs to be involved, the government has been highly involved in the solar industry and the wind industry and, you know, successfully. But I think what we need, what we don't have in the world today is a great model of nuclear energy as a commercial, you know, as a strictly commercial activity. And we believe strongly that we need to evolve the industry towards many more. towards conforming to the sort of norms and activities that are involved in successful commercial power projects. And so, you know, while we need that kind of supporting framework to do this, obviously people have to be buying nuclear plants, there may need to be some kind of financing incentives and so forth in the beginning of a build-out. We're not, you know, what we see is really the opposite of that. You know, rather than a kind of like huge government procurement program, we need to use the government's procurement leverage in strategic ways as we evolve the industry towards a much more cost-effective, low-cost, commercially attractive model so that customers choose nuclear because it's commercially attractive. Hey, thanks, Eric. I appreciate that explanation and I do like to point out that we don't create or build nuclear energy in a vacuum. It's part of a massive industry where there are competitors and there are people who don't necessarily want to be on the team of making nuclear more cost-effective. And I've often stated that it's obvious to me that the opponents to nuclear learned a lot faster than the proponents of nuclear in terms of who's making the right moves to achieve their goal. And I think that there are people whose goal is to drive up the cost of nuclear and they work very well at achieving that goal. You know, that is something that the industry in the U.S. in particular, the industry didn't do very well at challenging that activity because the incentives were such that they actually benefited when costs increased. Our utility regulators in the U.S. were based on cost plus a fixed percentage capital cost as the way you set the prices for electricity. And of course, if you want to make more money selling electricity, under that model, the thing to do is to have expensive capital. It worked. Now, from a long-term perspective, it also ended up really contributing to enforcing the idea among everyone that nuclear means expensive because every time a new nuclear plant came online during our successful building program, the first thing the utility did was to go to the regulator and say, we've completed our new plant. Now we need a rate increase to pay off the cost of adding that new plant to our capital base. So for everyone who paid any attention, every time a new nuclear plant came online, there was a little bump in the rate of electricity. And that was the driver. Now, how do we make this industry more commercial? Does smaller help it? And any of you can answer that question. Yeah, I think there's a big potential for smaller nuclear to have much lower costs, but it really depends on how it's built and how it's deployed. And so I think we're at a critical moment now in figuring out the regulation, the financing, the market reforms needed to make small nuclear work. And that's actually a big part of what I'm working on in my thesis is focusing on some of these questions for microreactors, which are SMR's smaller than 10 megawatts is how I'm defining it. And I think that potential is why there's so much focus on SMRs, but they're not necessarily the silver bullet just on their own. They could do really well if they get good factory production regulations that think of safety and think of licensing the reactors as a mass produced product rather than individual projects for every single power plant. And getting finances and investors to understand the reduced risks and if I both fight anti-anterous and safety risks from smaller reactors and have confidence in investing in them. But it makes sense to me. And I think it makes sense to a lot of people that moving smaller is a good idea, but it is also bad out in a lot of kind of, you know, learning curve theory around mass producing products. You can see this obviously with wind and solar. It's, you know, they're built in factories and the cost have come down not just through new technologies and innovations, but just kind of boring improvements in processes at these factories and similar even larger gas turbines are modularly fabricated and shipped to the site. And I think for most people as well, if all these other energy technologies are produced this way, it kind of makes sense that nuclear will be more expensive if it's still produced kind of like a large hydroelectric project or a large coal plant instead of a mass produced product. Exactly it's moving from a project based approach to a product based approach is to sort of put a very simple wrap around that idea. And essentially what you have there are, you know, two opportunities. Firstly, to increase productivity and secondly to reduce risk. And, you know, just to unpack that a little bit. You know, we know that productivity and construction sites compared to factories, for example, is extremely poor. And our understanding is that productivity on nuclear construction sites is even worse and a big piece of that of course is linked back to, you know, the sort of licensing and regulatory supervision requirements and the sort of quality assurance processes that are needed. And also associated with the fact that you're still in the kind of project model where again, often in these traditional first of a kind projects in particular. You know, we have situations where the design engineering is coming late to site leading to all kinds of inefficiencies. Both in terms of, you know, specifications for suppliers, but also the the current, you know, choreographing the construction on site and planning the site infrastructure. All of these things add up to, you know, real inefficiencies and slowing things down which represents cost. And then the other side, the other piece is about risk. And again, that's really linked to standardization and quality control and performance. That if you know what you're making and you're making it over and over again, you're going to improve efficiency and productivity and and de risk questions related to licensing that can lead to changes that have not gone effect elsewhere in the design. So there's, you know, ultimately the sort of one of the key findings in our study was was that what drives the cost difference between, you know, the very large difference between projects being delivered elsewhere in the world compared to what we're seeing today in the US and in Europe was less about material and equipment and all about the process of delivering the plant. So we've now moved much more towards an emphasis in our work away from reactor technology design itself much more towards delivery and deployment models. Oh, thanks i'll jump in there. My favorite topic. So another. Rod, another way to think about this question is that. For a given approach to delivering a project say say you're going to do a large construction project to deliver a conventional large light water nuclear plant. Based on its current design. So you're not redesigning the plant in some way you're just saying we're going to build an AP 1000. There are a lot of things that you could do to reduce the risk and reduce the cost of delivering that project and we we've sort of already touched on a number of those Christie's mentioned a number of those as well. So you could sort of think of it at almost as if there's like a water level and that water level is a efficiently delivered conventional plant. And the question is right now we're at you know three times that water level for the AP 1000s that we've delivered in the US. So there's kind of a one project is sort of how do we get from that number to just down to the water level which is you know an efficient plant delivered for 3500 or 4000 dollars a kilowatt. And which is you know depending on how you do the math is kind of like the global average you know plant cost. So that's one project that just like I was talking about is how do you get below that. In other words you know there may be a whole lot of that 3500 or 4000 dollars a kilowatt that would be an efficiently delivered you know AP 1000 in the US. That you could also get rid of but but to do that you would have to redesign the plant you would have to do what we call design for manufacturing and assembly DFMA and that is what all product companies do to continuously reduce the cost of their product. And so for example one thing that you have to make sure you do is that you don't have to redesign your project each time you build one even in a small way. So that means it this is what that's part of what it you know when we say turning something into a product that's what we mean is like you're not redesigning it each time. And and then you are designing the you're designing the product in the first place you're designing that product for a manufacturing process for an environment that can you know effectively and cost competitively deliver that product. And usually in that DFMA process usually in that process of finalizing a design so. And then many of these plants that are expensive had a very low level of design completion when they started so the. was less than 30% design complete when they started pouring concrete. The good thing about making things in factories is that you cannot start making it in the factory until you finish your design, because you have to design the production process that goes with that product that's part of what product design means. And so we think this transition of transitioning nuclear technology it's not going to be manufacturing a standard plant in a factory it's going to be you know quite substantial redesign of the whole plant so that the whole thing can be. designed for high volume high high productivity production. processes and the things that you can't do that way, you either decide that they're really necessary and you're going to keep them in or you just more likely just exclude them and you figure out some other way to fulfill that function in the design or in the product. And over the years, we've been involved in a lot of work related to shipyard manufacturing of nuclear plants. So I was involved with a study team at MIT for about three years and we did a lot of detailed work looking at putting both large reactors like AP-1000 style reactors and smaller reactors, sort of 300 megawatt-class SMRs into plants that where the entire plant would be made in a shipyard and floated to its location, which could either be offshore or could be an onshore location where you would sort of pull it onto shore and make a little harbor or something. And the numbers that we have seen from this allow you to get to well below half of that global average nuclear plant cost. So if you take that nuclear average nuclear plant cost of about $3,500 a kilowatt for a Gen 3 plus reactor, we see that you can get well below 2000 and by building that plant in a shipyard. And this is supported by very detailed studies. The study team had people who managed construction in shipyards at Naval Architects. It had one member of our team was the chief designer for the AP-1000. So we have done very, very detailed work looking at this and just believe that the potential to make extremely cost competitive nuclear plants in a high volume environment that we're not going to bottom out at around $3,500 a kilowatt. But there's a real glide path to getting to below half that. So for me, one of the reasons that I advocate going smaller, not tiny necessarily, but smaller than the 1000 is simply the size of the potential market leads you to being able to saturate the market fairly quickly with a fairly small number of units in the tens to maybe 100 or so units in most markets where and that is a small enough number to make it hard to do some of the kind of refinements that you're talking about. We got pretty good at building nuclear plants in shipyards back in the 60s when we built 41 submarines in the space of about five years. But it didn't take too long to saturate the market if you were looking at 1000 to 1500 megawatt reactors. So that's one of the advantages of small. In your studies, if you focus on any particular companies or technologies that look like they're taking on some of these advice that you and your you have produced in some of your papers and any of you can answer that. Yeah, I would just jump into say that I've tried to stay pretty neutral on on which companies because it's I think it's still too early and I still think we need a lot of diversity in technologies in companies and business plans because we're not sure what works yet and what's going to be successful. So that's sort of been one of my driving forces but I think you can see differences with some companies are really focused sort of laser focused on commercialization and getting their design to market whereas others and I will say it's more some of the legacy firms, the older incumbents that are still doing a lot of R&D concept, kind of slow and steady development of advanced reactor concepts or small modules or reactor concepts and that may fit more with their company culture or how they see the nuclear industry working in the past. But I think because the funding might not be as big as needed to get a really new technology to market for a lot of these companies I think there is going to be competition between them and so the companies that are more focused on getting their costs down, figuring out their supply chain, moving towards regulation or getting their designs licensed are going to be more successful. And I think that's one way that having private investment, having venture capital investment does help as it keeps you focused on the end goal which is having a cost competitive product. I am excited by the number of companies working on advanced nuclear technologies, there's over 60 just in the US but not all of them are going to be successful and that's a good thing. Percy, do you have anything to add to that? Sure. Yeah, in terms of specific companies I think I think I really agree with what Jessica was saying about keeping our options open right now, diversity, there's an incredible number of entrepreneurs and startup companies for the first time really in the nuclear sector it's worth saying. And that's very promising. I think there are some principles that are not technology specific but are linking back to these core ideas that we've been discussing today which are related more to sort of this question about de-risking and productivity design standardization, having a product based approach. I think one way that we could really de-risk the development of the emerging advanced reactor and SMR technologies would be to standardize as much as possible. And to use as much as possible commercial off-the-shelf components, I think one of the tendencies that we've seen in the nuclear sector traditionally has been a very sort of vertical structure where each of the sort of reactive vendors and developers requires very bespoke system and components for the entire plant. And there's a risk I think that the advanced reactor developers will move away from what you could call their core business to sort of ending up having to design an entire plant with bespoke systems and components so that the entire plant has to be licensed as a piece. And there's a couple of big challenges associated with that. First of all, it creates risk in terms of licensing and regulatory uncertainty. That could lead to changes in the design or an unspecified period of time through which the plant is being reviewed and licensed. But it also from the customer's perspective creates risk because it means that they don't really know what it is that they're buying and that the first customer of course has to take the punch has to really take the risk of of buying that first plant. Whereas we've seen for example with the GWRX300 design, they've made a very conscious and deliberate and concerted effort to use off-the-shelf known commercialized components wherever possible. So moving much more towards a product based almost a catalog based approach which really should de-risk the offer to customers. But I want to hand over to Eric here because I think there's sort of further evolution of this idea that Eric you might like to describe. Yeah, so we are working with a sort of coalition of people in the industry to develop an open architecture standard for nuclear power plants. And so the idea here would be that customers when when customers buy computers they can make choices about which components go in the motherboard but they don't have to hire an engineering firm to design them a computer. And the reason they don't is that the standards for interconnecting those components on the motherboard are all decided already. And so you could say I want to have this huge hard drive and I want to have this kind of memory and I want to have this kind of processor and those things all you know you don't even have to put them together yourself. You can you can have some integrator do that for you. But the integrator isn't doing engineering to figure out the you know whether that kind of processor can work with this kind of memory or whatever, right. Those are all those products those memory products those processor products and so forth they're all made according to standards in order to be able to interface with the other components. And you know as we look at things like you know developments in combined cycle power plants. And certainly when we look at things like the the data center data centers and the the open compute project which is an open architecture data center standard very similar to what we are trying to create with for nuclear power. These this kind of evolution moving an industry towards this where you have these defined standards and interfaces it enables companies to focus on just the part that they're really delivering that's valuable. It greatly reduces the risk for customers because all these different parts work together. So you all of a sudden have a deep supply chain. You could just decide not to buy Intel's processor and you could buy somebody else's processor instead. So as as we move to a standard standard-based power plant architecture like this it will we believe that this could be very empowering for customers and we're working with customers at the major utilities to develop a customer group that would be looking to purchase power plants according to these to this type of standards and architecture. Now it's important to say that this is not like open source. So what we're not saying is oh you know each company would put their plans on the web and you could hire anybody you wanted to build anyone's power plant. The opposite of that each each supplier of each standardized or standardized architectural component can have their own IP and their own proprietary solution for delivering that functional piece. But those proprietary pieces all fit together according to this set of standards. And this is a like a this creates a really good balance between You know, getting the incentives for venture capitalists to invest and for companies to make profits and invest in making their products better and faster and higher performance over time. And creating an industry structure that makes it easy for customers to purchase plants and feel confident about the costs and the risks associated with the business risks associated with buying those things. Yeah, if I could jump in on that point, I think that's so critical and for a number of reasons, but when I want to focus on is in terms of expanding the market for nuclear and who can have nuclear energy, that's sort of one of the driving forces for smaller nuclear and for mass produced nuclear. And historically, only the largest utilities have been able to have nuclear power plants, whether it's state supported utilities in Europe or Asia or the largest investor in utilities in the US. And if you're a small municipal utility or a rural electric co-op, you could never navigate the bureaucracy, let alone, you know, finance a large nuclear power plant. And one of the hopes is that with small modular reactors that does open up more of the small utilities to being able to access nuclear if they want it, if it works for them. But we still need a lot of innovations in the business model. We talk about mass producer factory produced nuclear as it could be plug and play. It could be you order it and you know, in 18 months, the module comes and you plug it in. But there's going to be there's going to need to be a lot of not just regulations that need to be developed around that, but business models around that. And something where you can see a good analogy is in renewable technologies in emerging economies and microgrid technologies. So, you know, solar makes a lot of a sense for for small households and off-grid communities in a lot of parts of the developing world, but still hard for them to afford. And so there were a lot of deployment innovations and business model innovations that allow much lower income people to get access to solar and battery combinations. Some like leasing models and different ways to do tariffs and different ways to do ownership, different ways to finance microgrids. And I think nuclear is going to need to see something similar for much smaller designs because it's a very different model than large investor utilities buying and financing a huge project. And so I think yeah, you don't want to have if you're you know, a small community of maybe 50,000 people, you don't want to have to go through the NRC and get your project licensed and finance it and do all these things that it would normally take to build a nuclear power plant. You want to have a template where it's more like, you know, buying a wind farm or something like that, which is still complicated, but there's a there's a model. You can follow what other communities have done. There's companies and financers that are going to help you through it because they know how it's done they've been a before. And so getting that more of a standard process that's easier for smaller communities to get on board with, I think it's going to be a critical development. Eric and Jessica, one of the things I kept thinking about is you were talking was interchangeable parts. You know, the things that made rifles and cotton gins easier to build and manufacture. This is not a newest new idea, but it really is something kind of new to the nuclear industry. So it's it's pretty fascinating. One of the things I'd like to kind of touch on is there is a pretty interesting difference in the model that solar has taken to drive down its costs compared to the model that wind has taken to drive down its costs. And in solar, one of the fascinating aspects is that somebody who puts solar panels on their roof of a hut in Africa might very well have exactly the same technology that's on a massive solar farm and the desert of California because the panels might be exactly the same. In wind cost decreases have largely come from the economy of building really big wind turbines and finding really windy spots to put them in. There's a little bit of a contrast, but both models show that there's potential in different different aspects, different ways to do things. Is there a way to get close to the solar model in nuclear? I think, you know, one of the things that are work around deployment models and cost reduction is pointing to at this point is that it's, you know, an interesting project that we're just finishing for the Electric Power Research Institute is looking at kind of radical innovations in delivery models and how much cost reduction could be achieved through those. And one of the things that's very interesting is that we took a reference plant for a approximately $1,200 a kilowatt advanced reactor plant, 500 megawatt plant that was built in a shipyard designed to be built fully in a shipyard. And we were doing some work on how to reduce those costs even further. And we found that you could possibly reduce the cost by another 40%. So the first thing I would say is, you know, my experience doing in businesses doing cost reduction, like the kind of work that is going on in solar and like the kind of work that's going on in wind, is that, you know, you think, wow, we've achieved these low costs, we must be very close to, you know, the bottom here. But actually, you know, there are ways to keep going on a lot of these costs. And especially, I think for nuclear, we're at a very, you know, although nuclear power is well established, we've got an incredible operating history. We understand, you know, the level of scientific understanding and engineering understanding that we have about nuclear power is really astonishingly advanced and has been for decades. We are not very advanced, you know, we are, as Jessica is saying, we're almost all of that has been with the old model of delivering nuclear. And so we're at the very, very beginning of really thinking through how we would make these kinds of mass manufactured products. And so I think it's going to be really interesting to see that the role that micro-reactors can play in broadening the kind of application space for nuclear power is going to be very important. But I don't think, you know, the thing about the wind industry is that it's the improvements, you know, you still see learning curves. And I'm sure that Jessica could, you know, describe to us the kind of all the debates that go on about these different sort of industrial learning curves and cost reduction curves. But the innovations in wind are much less an effect of kind of these gradual improvements the way they are in the solar industry. In the solar industry, it's, you know, like, oh, we changed to this kind of back contact. And we figured out how to make the little solder lines thinner. And we figured out how to do this. And these are all these kind of modest improvements that increase the effective area, converting area of the solar panel and reduce the cost of the glass and allow more light to come through the glass encapsulation. And you know, all of these things which kind of multiply together to make an improved solar panel in wind, it's kind of more chunky than that. And so, you know, you figure out how to control blades that are 30% longer than people used to have. And all of a sudden your capacity factor for the same site goes from, you know, 35% to 50%. That's a massive change in the economics of wind. And, you know, so I think nuclear is going to be more like wind where we figure out kind of big design changes that dramatically change the cost structure of the plant. And those are going to get as big, big steps. And it's not going to be like solar where we, you know, we're sort of stamping out tens of thousands of these things. And, you know, and where it's a combination of all these tiny little tweaks, multiplying up to some kind of big change over time. But I'd like to mention one other key aspect here, which is that we've been primarily talking about electricity as the market. And we're cursing our just about to release a paper looking at the role that you know, if we can make nuclear low cost enough, nuclear becomes a source of primary energy. You know, our primary energy sources are things that typically we use to make heat with, right? They're oil, gas, and coal. And we use them to make heat. And then we convert the heat into electricity or we convert it into motion in a car or in a ship or an airplane. And we think that there's a, if we can make nuclear low enough cost, nuclear production of hydrogen and synthetic fuels becomes a very, very large market for nuclear power. And the whole question that you had how big should the plant be and how big is the market? That question, the answers to that question look extremely different when you start talking about the fuels market. So for just to give you you know, to give you a comparison, a project that is two gigawatts electric is considered a very large power plant project. I mean, big projects in the, you know, the the UAE's barocop project is, you know, five gigawatts. You know, there are a few other places in the world where we have these multi plant installations, but those are considered sort of like, whoa, those are really big. If you convert a refinery to thermal power, you're talking about things that are five or six times as big as that. And so the fuels market and the fuels market is, you know, on an energy basis is four times as big as the electricity market. So and it's extremely difficult to decarbonize. You know, we're not. There are a lot of mainstream projections that show that in 2050, we'll still be using 50% fossil energy. And it's mainly oil and gas that we're using at that point. And that's because those fuel sources, those fuels, those means of moving energy around and storing it and using it in equipment are so, so convenient and energy dense. So we believe that if we want to decarbonize 100% by 2050, we're going to need very, very large amounts of zero carbon fuels. And we believe that nuclear energy delivered through these radically innovative and radically low cost delivery models can, in fact, be cheap enough to be a mainstream supply of those fuels. The market's pretty huge. Yeah, tens of thousands. Yeah, it's very large. And the interesting thing about moving more into the commodities market, away from the traditional utilities model, is that you're no longer constrained by needing to be within a close proximity transmission and a long stable power purchase agreement. So you could be developing these production facilities anywhere in theory. They could be very large and they could be developed anywhere in order to then produce fuels or export into the global commodities markets. So that's a very different model. And I think moving away from the one by one, you know, a building approach where you have challenges citing close to communities that will be the consumers of the power, particularly when we're looking at the, you know, the sort of the need for clean, reliable affordable energy in the developing world. And we know that many countries, you know, are pursuing nuclear technology. And we, Eric and I, attended a conference, the African business development conference where 10 countries were represented that are pursuing nuclear, but stepping through the IAEA milestones in order to, you know, demonstrate that they have the necessary mature regulatory capability and skills and supply chain to build and maintain an opportunity. And maintain and operate nuclear plants. But that's a long road. And so the opportunity with the fuels piece that really appeals to me is that, you know, we could, you know, we could in theory be, you know, these countries could be commissioning nuclear facilities to produce clean synthetic drop in fuels that could be used today with, you know, fairly liner or very little upgrading or retrofitting to engines. And using those clean fuels in, in combined cycle gas turbines with diesel engines, enabling a much more rapid switch, whilst also creating, you know, new opportunities for growth and prosperity. Yeah, and it would be, it would be probably quicker to make the transition. If we could convince at least a portion of the existing fuels producers to produce, actually produce fuel rather than mine. And they can realize so much of their infrastructure if that's what they decide to do if they shift towards production, vice mining. And the funny thing is, they've always called mining, drilling production. It's not really production. They've just, you know, taking what exists already. But, you know, if they're the consumers, there's some of, well, maybe a changing my mind. They used to be some of the best capitalized companies in the world. Things for changing rather dramatically in today's market. Yeah. We will have to revisit the last strategies. Yeah, well, and of course the market for fuels these days is pretty small. Compared to the amount of capability to produce it. It's just why the producers are getting together to restrict production. But anyway, I'm thinking that you all probably have something else to do in the near near time. I think somebody exactly has another appointment coming up. So what I'd like to do is kind of move to a wrap up. I think that you all have shared some incredibly useful information. And this particular podcast may be aimed more at people who are inside the nuclear industry and advance fuels than those who are outside. But it does help us understand that nuclear technology has the capability for dramatic cost reductions and schedule improvements as long as we accept the fact that we have to learn from what we've done in the past and avoid mistakes and reinforce successes. So concluding remarks from each of you. Oh, go first. I love tearing what Kristi and Eric were saying about countries in Africa that are pursuing nuclear. And I did want to jump in to say there's great work being done from energy for growth hub, which is a think tank in DC. And they're taking nuclear seriously for developing countries and trying to figure out what it takes. And I think that's a really cool, potential application for SMRs and microreactors is helping countries get access to nuclear earlier if they want it. And an equitable and economic way. So I think that's something just to keep on the horizon that you used to do a lot of exporting of nuclear as a form of aid or development assistance. And I think that's something that could be in the future as well with nuclear. And especially if we figure out industrial applications and taking advantage of nuclear as more of a fuel source, not just electricity source, has even bigger implications for the developing world where a lot of the growth in industry is going to be happening not just electricity. So that's my closing bet. Yeah, okay. Well, so I would say that in general, the value proposition of nuclear technology is very underappreciated. And right now, our prospects of self-inclimate change, or say self-inclimate change, are prospects of achieving our carbon reduction targets within the century timescales do not look good. And I think that part of the reason for that is that there's been a huge emphasis really on a very narrow set of technologies within a sort of narrow category of the challenge, which is a lot of effort and resources spent on driving down costs and driving up the rates of deployment for wind and solar within the power sector. And we've seen that really great successes can be achieved with the right levels of effort and resources. So I think as we sort of move into the kind of, you know, preparations for COP26, our call to action would be a much more consistent approach to investing effort and resources into a broader range of technologies, looking across the whole of our deep decarbonisation challenge, including the other 80% of our energy consumption outside of the power sector, which is that part that we've just been discussing, which is, you know, fuels, liquid fuels, coal, oil and gas, and then looking at the potential contribution that nuclear technology could make, not only to the production of things and petic pills in hydrogen, but also potentially re-powering coal, which is something we haven't had time to talk about today, but maybe that's something that we can come back to in the future. Thanks. Well, this is a great opportunity. I'm very honored to be on this program with Kirsty and Jessica. And I guess what I would say is that we really need to think about how we somehow, although there are a lot of startups involved in innovating in nuclear technology, we don't see, we seem to kind of keep nuclear walled off and separated from kind of broader innovations that are, that are very powerful and working well in other sectors of the economy and with other technologies. And, you know, what I would encourage, so our work is involved in looking at a lot of how to apply these innovations, these business model changes, these manufacturing-based deployment models and so forth. But, you know, we really need to look at this, this needs to become a much broader area of interest among a much broader range of stakeholders. The ability of the, you know, to give you a kind of poignant example, when we look at the global energy models that are run to show us how we could decarbonize or how challenging it might be to decarbonize and so forth. We still see assumptions about nuclear in all of those models that are, you know, that you could have made in 1950. So, none of this idea about business model innovation, about product-based deployment, about manufacturing costs, about, you know, none of these things which we apply in every single other industry. And are the reasons for those industries success and scalability and cost improvement and performance improvement. Those are never applied to nuclear energy. And this is both, I think, a failing of the industry and it's a failing of imagination on the part of advocates and policymakers who are concerned about, you know, who might be concerned or interested in how to have nuclear energy. play a much larger role in de-risking decarbonization and our response to climate change. So, I would, I would sort of want to just summarize by supporting the comments that we've all three been making that we really need to kind of change the frame on how we think about this and stop looking backward, stop looking at the past and really say, you know, not, not how do we get the nuclear industry to grow, but how do we transform nuclear energy? and to something that can play this much broader role in creating clean energy future, clean and prosperous energy future for all of us. And that, of course, is the goal. Clean, reliable, abundant energy to enable prosperity for humanity. That's right. We should have called it prosperity for humanity. Well, prosperity for humanity is dependent on abundant energy, at least in my opinion. And especially if the energy needs to be clean because we can't have a prosperous humanity if we're all choking to death. And, you know, and or if we live in a planet was, you know, gradually rising temperatures and rising sea levels will spend far too much of our prosperity trying to defend ourselves from the results of what got us prosperous. better if we can do it cleanly. So thank you. Thank you all very much. You've been wonderful guests at Kirsty. I really do now need to schedule another discussion about how we repower coal because one of my one of the things I'd like to do is talk about that. Coal is carbon. And carbon is such a bad thing as carbon to oxide. It's a problem. Well it says Fatty Birl, the director of the IEA said energy is not the problem. And this is the problem. Yeah, agreed. All right. Thank you all very much. Have a great day. Thank you, Ron. Thanks a lot, Ron. Great speaking with you all. Thanks. So, make sure boys tell the world there's a better way to day there's a better way. Ooh, there's a wave. Such a better way today. Today. 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