All Reactors Large and Small

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 Wright Adams and it's time for an atomic show that we've been trying to get together for about two months. With me I have some of the world's leading experts on nuclear costs and how to bring down nuclear costs. With me today I have Jessica Loveran, Nick Taran, Eric Ingersall, Kirsty Gogon, and Chris Keifer. And I'm going to let each of those guests give a brief introduction in the cells that you all know what their voice sounds like. And it'll give a little background as to why I consider this to be the A plus team of people to discuss nuclear costs. Jessica wants to lead us off. Thanks, Fred. So I am the co-founder and co-executive director of an organization called Good Energy Collective. And what we're doing is developing a progressive nuclear policy agenda, particularly for advanced nuclear. And I have a long background in nuclear policy, particularly around economics and how to drive down the cost of nuclear and how to accelerate commercialization of new nuclear technologies. Hey, Rod. I'll jump in real quick. Jessica just got for PhD on nuclear economics. Yeah. Yeah. Hi. So this is Eric Ingersall. I'm a managing partner at Lucid Catalyst, which is a consulting firm that works on strategies for deploying advanced nuclear and reducing the cost of advanced nuclear, along with other scalable clean energy technologies. And also the co-founder with Kirsty Gogon of Terra Praxis, which is an NGO that work on sort of planetary scale climate solutions and how we can accelerate the deployment of those. And I think I was next. This is Nick Turan. I am a nuclear engineer, relatively long background in doing the engineering design of advanced nuclear reactors. Going back to the mid-2000s, really. So alongside doing the engineering design, I'm of course keenly interested in the major cost drivers. And so I spend a lot of time trying to peruse and analyze and understand the policy and economic analysis put out by Eric Kirsty Jessica and the gang. And then try to figure out how to apply that on the engineering side. I also incidentally run a sort of public education website called what is nuclear.com where I do some just kind of public education outreach stuff on the side. So that's me. Great. Thanks. So this is Kirsty Gogon and Eric's already helped me sort of describe our two organizations and what we do. So I'll just add a little bit there and say that you know, Eric and I've spent the last few years really understanding what drives the cost of nuclear. And one of the things I guess I'm fond of saying is that nuclear can be really expensive, but it really doesn't have to be. And looking forward to digging into this, into this discussion. And you know, really what we're motivated by is sort of applying the same kind of creativity and determination to drive down costs and increase rates of deployment for all carbon technologies as we've seen really successfully applied to some technologies like wind and solar especially. Right. I think that that leaves me for the end here. My name is Chris Kiefer. Rod not not exactly accurate that I'm a world expert in nuclear economics by any means, but I wear a lot of hats. I am a fellow podcaster. I run the decouple podcast and another podcast called We Can Do It, which is more Canadian focused. I'm a medical doctor who got very interested in nuclear energy out of my concern around air pollution and climate change and so I'm also the director of doctors for nuclear energy. And most recently I've just launched a nonprofit here in Canada called the Canadians for nuclear energy. So I'm the president of that organization. And I have a really strong interest in the conversation today, which I think Roger calling the show all reactors large and small. That's correct. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, Canada is engaged in a vision for the future, which is very focused on SMRs and on certain streams of nuclear and maybe we'll get into that later, but it's of sort of vital interest to me in my new role as as president of Canadian Canadian's for nuclear energy. So I'm really excited to kind of join you all a slight bit of imposter syndrome, but looking forward to a lively discussion. I'm hoping for a lot of the discussion and and what the heck we're all kind of imposters on some on one level another. But I'd like to start this conversation off with kind of an open ended. What is the best way to move forward and have the most impact on global carbon emissions building. Large reactors, the ones that we know how to build the designs that we've been have proven and have 50 years worth of operating history or to shift to smaller reactors and build something new and different because although we know how the light water reactor works, we also know that it can be pretty expensive. I'm going to leave that throw that open as an initial thought. Yeah, if I could get the ball rolling. I think it's a hard question because my my initial gut reaction is to say, well, we need all kinds. We need the big ones and we need the small ones for different markets. But of course, we have we meaning, you know, the big governments working on developing nuclear the big main countries that have nuclear reactors and development have limited resources to invest in commercializing new nuclear technologies or improving the existing large reactors. That we have so it is a little bit of a of a competition and what you devote resources to, but I do think there's definitely a market globally at least for different sizes. You know, there's countries that have really fast growth and electricity demand. And they can handle those big reactors and those are cheaper electricity if you can get them built budget, but I think in places like the US and parts of Europe that have deregulated power markets. There's going to be more of a demand for the smaller nuclear they can fit into more places. So really getting that diversity and finding the different market needs. I think it's the way to go. I can follow up on that. I think there's a there's also it's really important to kind of take Jessica's question and think kind of very deeply about, you know, what is it that we're trying to do with nuclear energy here. And, you know, we're not least I'm not here because I love nuclear and you know, I would be promoting nuclear no matter what. I'm here because I think nuclear energy technology and I'm carefully distinguishing nuclear energy technology from existing nuclear designs, for example, has a massive role to play in decarbonizing the global energy system. Normally when we talk about nuclear energy, we really mean the role that nuclear technology in current plant designs has in producing electricity in a few developed countries. That is a very different thing from decarbonizing the whole energy system. We don't even really have examples or models yet of how we would use nuclear energy to make fuels, for example, which are something like 70 to 80% of our energy consumption globally. We, you know, are just beginning to think about the role that nuclear energy could play in producing hydrogen that could substitute for natural gas and be distributed in pipelines and so forth. So, I think we have to be a little bit careful when we're asking this question not to sort of be looking in the rear view mirror too much and looking at kind of the way we've used nuclear in the past. Yeah, actually Eric, can I just add something to you at something to that because that's the technology push and the telescope in some ways. It's like thinking about, you know, do we need this technology or that technology rather than looking at it through the other end of the telescope, which is what are the problems that we're trying to solve. And, you know, actually, if you look at the mainstream forecasts for energy use, it's mid-century, 2040, 2050. This is really consistent, you know, with BP, IEA, EIA, DNV, they're all anticipating that more than half of our energy will come from fossil fuels by 2050. And that's because even with an incredibly ambitious and successful deployment of wind and solar, which have proved to be really successful and we hope will continue to be those technologies alone are not going to get us all the way to zero. So we've really started to try to look at what markets or what parts of our decarbonisation challenge are looking at are anticipated to remain to be unsolved by 2050 and then looking at how we could apply, you know, high temperature heat and low cost power that has a very high capacity factor and a very small environmental footprint to solve some of those challenges through the production, for example, of hydrogen, through the production of high temperature heat that could be used directly. In industry or even for domestic heating and also even ultimately to re-power existing fossil fuel plants like coal plants. And that starts to become a really interesting conversation because then we're not trying to sort of carve out a niche for this technology or that technology, but we're actually defining a value proposition for a problem that otherwise will remain unsolved. I mean, I think, you know, certainly the topic for today's conversation, all reactors big and small is it's broad and it points to the need perhaps to be a bit more specific in our language. And I think, you know what, Kirsty and Eric are talking about these hard to decarbonise sectors. This is an area where advanced nuclear high temperature nuclear is really essential. I think my and I absolutely agree with them. That's important and we have enormous sectors of the economy to decarbonise beyond electricity. In terms of this question of, you know, SMR versus larger reactors, I think it's interesting on a number of levels. You know, what we're essentially talking about is economies of scale versus economies of multiples. And, you know, Jessica's argument around liberalized electricity markets I think is really important. But the other side of that is that liberalized electricity markets seem to be really good at funding startup concepts, getting lots of people going, but they're not great at choosing a winner. And if we're talking about economies of multiples, we have to ask ourselves how many units are we going to need to start to match the known economies of scale benefits. And whether that's 10, 20, 50 units. I don't know that that's really been worked out just yet. And not optimistic that liberalized electricity markets are going to be able to choose that winner. You know, and I guess I'm very worried in my own country that we're sort of the only politically safe nuclear, not just in terms of markets, but also for political figures, is something that doesn't really yet exist yet in terms of SMR. reactors. And in my own country, we're going to be seeing a large complex, it's actually modular in the sense of it being a series of kinder reactors and the smaller versions, shutting down and the promises that they may be replaced by seven or eight smaller reactors. But I'm just worried that there's a lot of hubris in the west around this. I think if this were a model that was so obvious that I think established healthy nuclear industries like China and Russia would be pursuing SMR scale nuclear beyond fringe applications to icebreakers and remote communities and South China Sea islands. So I'd be interested to hear what other people think about that angle. Yeah, I mean, I don't want it to seem like I'm saying we should just leave it up to the markets to decide. I think it's more about developing reactors that meet market needs, but there's definitely going to be a need for federal policy and investment in the first demonstrations, of course. But also, there needs to be policy on the demand side. So whether it's air pollution regulations or a federal clean energy standard, which is being talked about a lot in the US now, because the Biden administration put out this coal to have 100% of electricity come from low carbon sources by 2035, which is very ambitious. There needs to be some demand there to get these things built. But because the utilities are so small in the US and so diverse, they just don't have the balance sheets to do these large builds. And they can't find out. No, I think in China and Russia, it probably doesn't make sense to have SMRs just because you have you know, single utilities or very large utilities and often state financing and helps like that. So if you can afford to build a large reactor, that probably makes more sense for you. So that's that's more what I'm saying is is targeting the product for the market need, but not that the market is going to get this product to commercialization. And it's not just the ability to afford a large plant. In some cases, and we can see it in the US, in mature markets, companies don't want to build their capacity in clumps. I mean, it's too lumpy to add a thousand megawatts. If you're even fairly large electric utility is only growing at 300 or 300 megawatts per year of growth, wide-build, gigawatt scale reactors. Because that means you bring on a reactor, it takes three years before the market demand has actually grown to the output of the new reactor. Oh, yeah. Well, so in the UK, we're now moving towards completion of our first big gigawatt scale construction in a generation, I think we point C and contemplating the next one. And it's really interesting seeing how the next 3.2 gigawatt lightwater reactor is being sort of positioned. And as a sort of value proposition in the UK market because also people are saying, well, even in the UK, yes, we need to replace perhaps the existing fleet of nuclear plants that are coming to the end of their lives. But the grid is changing and maybe we just won't need this kind of base load, incredibly large capacity on the grid in the future. And so EDF energy that are developing the plant are making size well-see, much more about energy services and much less about always on base load power to the grid and really presenting a much more flexible option that could potentially supply heat directly for desalination or direct capture or to local industries. They're looking at the option to produce hydrogen when, you know, rather than sort of turning down the plant, they could be actually producing hydrogen instead that can be very, very valuable for seasonal storage, particularly if we do end up with a grid with a high penetration variable in your goals. And so the sort of versatility of these plants, even these big, you know, conventional plants, I think is going to become increasingly important and increasingly seen as being quite valuable. Just to chime in on this, I mean, I don't disagree with hardly anything that's been said. I don't think I would say that I think the magnitude of decarbonizing power worldwide, especially in a world that has growing energy needs as places like, for instance, Nigeria go from, you know, 200 to 500 million people and population keeps going up. And the energy needs of the population are is increasing as well. So we need, I mean, when you're talking about hundreds of exajoules, it's sort of whatever, whatever you can get. Unfortunately, there isn't like one big group of people deciding which type of reactors we're going to build. There's all sorts of different actors and all sorts of different markets. And they're all trying to figure out what's going to work in those areas. And so I think we'll probably continue to see large relatively standardized plants be pounded out in places like China. Russia will build them and sell them to who wants to buy them, likely in Africa. The Koreans sold four big reactors to the UAE recently. And I think that kind of of thing is going to continue. And if I had to guess, I would say that's going to be where the bulk of the megawatt hours from nuclear will be coming in the near term. That's not to say that smaller reactors don't have important places, especially for new technology. When you're trying out a new technology, there's this incredibly long history of challenges in any advanced nuclear technologies. It's just, it's quite a, it's quite a challenge in general. And so to be able to do that at a relatively small scale with not so much capital at risk and be able to handle even if a successful project is an economic that's still, that can still be okay because you learn something that can inform the next one. I think that's a really important role for smaller reactors. I think I could jump in here and talk about a couple points that are that we've all been touching on. I think one thing to keep in mind is that there are really probably three sizes of reactors, not two. There's things that are in the tens of megawatts or less, which I would call micro reactors. There's things which are obviously meant to work on the grid, but are just smaller units than a large light water reactor. And that's a sort of 100 to 300 to 400 megawatt size. So GE's, E-DOLR 300, the Rolls-Royce unit, which is somewhere around 400 or 450. There's a whole group of sort of obviously for the grid, small modular reactors. They're not that small, really. And as Rod was saying, you can make large combined cycle plants, but a typical plant might be 400 megawatts. So we're talking about reactors that are sort of roughly in the same size as those types of plants. And then you have the large light water reactor, which are generally over 1000 megawatts. And I think that the really interesting story is going to be for deployment of nuclear on the grid is going to be what about these sort of mid-size SMRs? Are they going to be, they're right in the middle where they're not big enough to have a scale economy, but they're big enough so that you may not just be stamping them out in a factory? And is that a sweet spot or is that a really difficult spot to be in? And we've done some analysis of the BWRX 300. And we actually think that if that is built in series with multiple units on a site sort of the six to eight units per site, you'll actually be building capacity that could be used to re-power existing nuclear sites in the US. And you will be benefiting from, you know, when we did our study, the nuclear cost driver study, it was really clear that building six or eight units on a site was the best thing you could do, even with large reactors. That is how you get down to 2000, you know, that's how you get down below $3,000 a kilowatt. And so if the sort of 300 to 400 megawatt class SMRs can be built, in series on single sites with multiple units, our data and our analysis says those things can get down to an average cost below $3,000. And if that's true, that's good enough to have those reactors play a fundamentally transformative role in electricity sector decarbonization. And then we want, so that solves the cost problem. Then we have all the other problems related to how quickly can you deploy them and all of that. But it's good to have those problems and not to have the cost problem. Right. And let me just briefly say that I mean, appreciating the analysis that the that size may be able to get down there. I mean, anything, any type of reactor that can hit those costs and be delivered reliably will succeed. So I think there's a lot of, you know, when you have an advanced reactor company that kind of has some costs, it's like, yes, we can reach this, you know, $2,000 a kilowatt, then that's all you need to say. Like that's going to succeed almost anywhere in the world. And so the real challenge is like, okay, prove it. Like let's get get our hands dirty and start delivering these reactors with those kind of cost targets. There's a lot of, I guess it's sort of, it's not really a pet peeve, but when people just say like, get off this goal and like, get to work, because that were your. Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, what, that would help. But yeah, I like that. I like that. Yeah. Can I, can I jump in? I just want to say, following on this idea of, of learning and getting to economies of multiples, you know, it does, it does need to happen at every size. And so I had this example, I was touring a nuclear power plant in China that was under construction. It was two, well, you know, one gigowatt reactors, these big AP 1000s. And it was a pair of them that they were building. And someone asked, did you change anything between the first and the second build? And there's kind of a chuckle from the, the people that worked there. And they said, we had over 15,000 changes. So even with those, those big plans, there's learning just between two. So of course, if you build, you know, six or eight, you're going to get better at building them. But what I've seen, so the last chapter of my dissertation was focused on this trade off between economies of scale and economies of volume. And there's a big, well, not a big literature. There's a small literature looking at the relationship between learning rates. So how fast you cost come down with successive builds and size across all sorts of energy technologies, energy generation, energy demand, energy storage. And what they find is there's a pretty strong relationship between between size and learning rates. So the small you get in capacity, the faster the learning rate is. And so I, you know, would expect to see that with nuclear, but. Of course, it all comes down to how many builds can you actually do of the same design? And so there's a need for standardization, but then also you want to have a room for changes and have the ability to innovate as you go between builds so that you're improving and bringing the cost down and improving performance as well. Just guys, I'd like to all up on that, just really briefly and say that when you look at, I think it's really important for us to make a distinction between learning and cost reduction. Learning is one species of cost reduction, the learning rate. And there are multiple types of learning that contribute to cost reduction. But it's also really clear from looking at multi-unit builds that there's cost reduction that does not come from learning. There's mobilization costs, there's volume purchasing, there's, when they built the Barra-Cai units, they had a 40% reduction in labor costs between unit one and unit two. And part of that was because they just didn't know who was good. And so they hired lots of people and they fired all the ones that weren't good and kept the good ones. And that's who built the second unit. And you also have site costs and licensing costs and all this other stuff that you don't have on your second unit. So I think one of the things I've noticed engaging with people around this topic of cost reduction is that people think that learning rates are responsible for the cost reduction from unit one to unit two to unit three to unit four. Learning plays apart, but there are lots and lots of sort of first time costs which you just don't have on the second units. And that's not learning. That's just not spending that money again. And so I think what we see is that learning will contribute significantly, for example, in this BWX 300 data, learning probably contributes about $500 a kilowatt reduction from the first unit to the eighth unit. But the economies of working on a single site and these first time costs and schedule shortening and other things like that contribute the other $3,000 of cost reduction. So this is one of the reasons why people, some people are very excited about micro reactors that honestly be factory produced because you don't restart every time you go into a new customer in a new place. You mobilize your team and train your factory workforce and you keep employing those same people to do the task and keep producing products at the same place. And the mobilization and demobilization and set up and break down and all those other costs that are associated with going from site to site become less. What do you think of that? Yeah. I think what's interesting about that rod is certainly, I think Eric was talking about breaking down the various sizes and so what you're describing in terms of something that's actually plug and play has to be tiny, right? Because for any of these more medium size reactors they need to be cited and you have all of the construction considerations. I also worry about this issue of material intensity. I think power density is gonna drop a lot if you're just slotting in tons and tons of these small units into a larger power station. Just because you're losing that efficiency of the economy of scale there, I don't know that it's gonna cause anything like this or increases in material demands that you have say going to a really power dilute source like renewables. But it kind of brings me to this issue of pragmatics which I think is really driving this debate. And I think there's a consensus that again, if you had the ability to plan, if you wanted to get to zero as quickly as possible you would be doing serial builds of a standard gigawatt scale light water reactor. And we've talked about some of the reasons why that's not feasible in some areas, including liberalized markets. But I think you're seeing we're pointing to the fact that in the UK sort of base load is going out of fashion. And it is kind of a source of sadness for me to see nuclear which I think has a lot of really strong selling points constantly sort of on the back foot and having to try and reinvent itself. To either sort of back up renewables or be able to cope with their intermittency when it is in fact the more and the most effective scalable decarbonization tool that we have. So I don't know how to sort of get off our back foot but I do worry that for an industry that's already really struggling to be operating off of its back foot and having to engage where it's already weak, we're gonna see further decline rather than a resurgence. That's my worry. So I wanna come back kind of strong there. I don't think that nuclear is our most effective decarbonization technology. It has been effective in the past. But we can't sort of wish for a better world and say wouldn't it be nice if everybody just recognized that nuclear was better and we had all the policy things in place and we had to sensible engineering trained politicians who could understand the math and make the right decisions. That's not the world we're in. And I think we have to be creative and come up with approaches that work in this world. And so to me that what Kirsty said about aiming this at really the places where we have kind of a brutal need for better decarbonization approaches, that is the way that we will pull these solutions into the market. We've developed, we think, oh, we're sort of post-renewable thinkers. So we think, okay, great, everybody sort of recognized we need to decarbonize but we're kind of not using the right tools. And actually, solar is really cheap and it's really easy to build. And... So where are the success stories of decarbonization? Look at California, look at German. I mean, these are tired arguments within the nuclear community. We can all address those. But I don't think... I don't think those are critiques of renewables. Those are critiques of renewables only. And I think that's a really big distinction to make. I don't think renewables are ineffective as a decarbonization tool. I think they need to be complemented by, you know, flexible, clean generation in order to work. And we're gonna be able to, between now and Q1, we're gonna be able to deploy a lot more renewables than we are nuclear. But I think we need to start, you know, we need to take Jessica's sort of guidance around, you know, designing for maximum learning. And we need to use that to design programs for constructed nuclear and programs for manufactured nuclear. And I'll just say one more thing. I actually think Jessica, part of the reason that Kirsty and I are doing so much work on shipyard manufactured nuclear plants, is that that's a way to have a large manufactured item. Eric, I will take your point, but I would say, you know, in the UK, there is debate about whether to do size well-see, right? And that is in the realm of politics and making a decision there. And we are talking about obviously finite resources. And in terms of what's more effective using the learning that we've gotten from the Hankley sites, you know, we exist in a time now of interest rates, you know, where governments can borrow at what point 5%. Yeah, yeah. 50% of the cost of Hankley was interest. I just think that we're surrendering too much to the, there's still, we haven't lost all the ground yet, you know? And I think there's still a chance to engage in aspirational politics. And for me, this is maybe a strange metaphor, but this kind of liberalized electricity markets in my healthcare mind, it's to me, it's like privatized healthcare. And I'm thinking we need Medicare for all, baby. And, you know, obviously, like, political slogan is, you know, that sort of atomic Tennessee valley authority doesn't have the same ring as a as a Medicare for all pitch. I get it. I'm a dreamer. I'm aspirational here, but I don't think the battle's been entirely lost. And, you know, certainly I think size will see is still in the running and, you know, I would devote my energies to fighting for that. I think as, you know, having the biggest decarbonization bang for its buck, if I were UK based. I don't know. I think there's, go ahead. I think there's room for, I just think that there's room for a lot of people to work at their particular levels and interest. One of the things I really like people to think about is, exactly what is it about solar PV that is made it so successful. And part of it is that fundamentally, all of the solar panels being produced today have almost identical components from the size of a solar cell that powers a wristwatch to the size of solar panel or solar cells that are part of utility scale solar power plants. The fundamental technology is the same and it's reproduced billions of times a year, those solar cells. It's not just that it's the same, but it's also exceedingly simple. A solar photovoltaic cell is compared to a nuclear power plant is unbelievably simple. And so even... It's always a trisoparticle. If I could jump it on that, you know, what makes solar is a popular, I think something aside from the technology is that people just really like owning or feeling like they own their power generation, which, you know, from a system's perspective where you can say like, oh, it's an efficient, it's more expensive, but it, you can't really deny sort of what people feel about their energy sources and this is something we're seeing in the US. It's particularly strong where I live in California, there's this move towards smaller scale, decentralized energy. And that's gonna be hard to fight against. We just did some polling around, you know, how people feel about the future and how we should do decarbonization policy and there was really large support for moving towards community ownership, community decision making around energy choices. And so I think that's something, you know, it's gonna be different everywhere, but we've seen even in places that are very conservative in the US, this support for distributed renewable energy. And in California, there's a lot of policies around microgrid. So I think, you know, it would just be hard to build big nuclear in California for many reasons, but I have gotten a lot more traction when talking to people about microreactors because it could be owned by a hospital, by a college campus, by a community microgrid and there's a lot more excitement around that. So that's just, you know, there's more than just the technology and the cost. There's also how the public feels about the technology. So it's strongly support that. That's exactly right. This is social as much as it is economic. And, you know, there's two parts to that. Actually, if you start to look at, you know, the scale of infrastructure build that we need to achieve if we're going to really deliver the clean energy transition, we're going to encounter all kinds of public responses to that. And many of much about will be positive. And I think those trends that you're describing Jessica, are really familiar to us in Europe as well. I think a big piece of why renewables are so popular in Germany, for example, is a lot to do with the opportunity for community ownership, human scale developments, you know, the opportunities to sort of, you know, change the, you know, decentralized energy systems is a big piece of the values proposition that's very appealing and attractive to people. The flip side of course. is that the clean energy transition is going to require a build which is at a scale that I think few of us really realize yet, especially if we're moving to low-identity technologies that have a larger footprint than the fossil fuels that they're replacing. And then when you combine it that with the additional transmission that will be needed as well for this clean energy transition, I think we're going to encounter some real challenges and I think it's really important when we're discussing our future energy mix that we take into account those those land use issues, you know the sensitivities around the aesthetics but also you know the biodiversity and habitat and wildlife implications of what it is that we're proposing and and that we think about the risks that those challenges might present, you know ultimately the risk of failing to decarbonize is the greatest risk of all. We have a theory and it's a hypothesis at the moment that power density may end up being as important as price in future. Well just to quickly add one point on that, Kirsty, that the other reason people like solar is because there isn't that much of it around and we haven't had to build two or three times the US grid yet which means putting transmission everywhere and we haven't you know we haven't built you know multi-kilometer square kilometer size projects all over California and I think the you know that the kind of looking backward values of renewable energy is that it's smaller and it's not in your face and you know it's kind of closer to nature and all that stuff but once we start scaling it up to actually decarbonize it's going to be the opposite of those things and you know part of what we're doing in our in our professional practice is trying to get people ready for those risks and Chris this is very much you know addressing going along with your point which is that people are going to come around and say whoops you know we're not going to be able to do all of this because it's offending too many people we need to move back to some kind of more power dense you know maybe out of sight kind of power generation technology and so it's absolutely critical that we not forget that and lose that and we who are the believers here need to be preparing for that day because it's coming yeah that's a that's a super interesting point so there's this classic book called power plant cost escalation by Charles Coleman off written in like 1980 or 1981 and he goes through basically colon nuclear plant cost escalation through the 70s and comes to this sort of interesting conclusion that to first order the cost of a generating technology is proportional to the fleet size of that technology and that's it was totally empirical he just kind of looked at any part of entry different models and basically for the exact reason you said Eric which is as you build more of a thing its impact and its presence is effects more nature and effects more people who live near it and that just leads to various things that bring up costs like with coal it was getting rid of acid rain and with nuclear it was updating and adding regulations and new red guides and whatnot so to ask okay is that going to happen with with distributed renewable energies is an interesting question and I think a lot of the proponents at the moment of renewable energy are thinking or hoping that it like it won't really be a major impact on price going forward prices just going to keep going down is sort of a common thing we hear but if that empirical model has anything to say and we can sort of imagine why perhaps those issues might arise as you just mentioned so I just think that's a really key point I think there's a really strong importance that distinguishing between a decarbonization versus a deep decarbonization technology and that's where I really think renewables end up falling flat I don't know if you guys heard about the green piece of wind gas that has been promoted in Germany now 1% bio gas 99% methane as a backup tool but I think that's where I would sort of disagree with the air in terms of seeing wind and solar as you know when I'm seeing a decarbonization tool I'm really referring to deep decarbonization because we need to get to zero and I think that's why you guys are also so passionate about these difficult to decarbonize sectors and the potential for advanced technologies for that you know and with the scale of that deep decarbonization I think it's a lovely idea to have you know small reactors with community consent at hospitals and campuses I think that's a lot easier said than done you know the more we cite smaller reactors throughout the landscape the more potential there is for anti-estar organized and they've proven to be very very effective and while they might give signals that they're more accepting to smaller or more advanced nuclear I think that's probably fairly deceptive or certainly the hardcore amongst them who are well organized well resourced effective campaigners are going to shut that down and again what we really end up caring about is the scale of that decarbonization so you know if we can build a series of I don't know five, ten megawatt reactors at hospitals and community colleges how many of those do we need to build to match the output of citing something that's maybe further away with there's issues in terms of community consent but where we can actually get a gigawatt of electricity on the grid yeah I would just for me one of the I just I just very quickly that I think that creativity like Jessica's describing and that makes just relating to around ownership models financing models anchoring these developments with direct benefits for the communities that are hosting them whether it's wind or solar or nuclear SMR is going to be absolutely critical if we're going to successfully bring the public with us in the scale of the transition and the scale of infrastructure build that's going to be needed. I like to respond to Chris about is I believe that the polling that I've seen in the conversation I've had over the many years is that the closer you've been to nuclear the more you like it and the more smaller units that we get deployed the more people will have direct experience with nuclear technologies and will become the same kind of passionate advocates that maybe I am because I've been a new reactor and we need to have small-sized plants available so people can get familiar with this stuff is cool. I saw some stats that said that I'd heard that before and I posted the thing just the other day on Twitter about how hey look people who live close to plants like them better but then someone from the Breakthrough Institute came in and said well actually that's not a very strong that's not a strong result and gave me a more recent paper that tried to replicate it in basically failed so I know I'm now a little bit more that's in concern about how true that is. I've seen quite a lot of polling that does support that and it may now be out of date but I think that what's interesting is that one of the great attributes or assets that nuclear technology has is its power density it has a very small footprint and the flip side of that is you can have a lot of power generated but with very few people ever really having any kind of contact with that facility and so it becomes quite a very remote technology that very few people have had contact with whereas with every other kind of energy technology most people have had some direct experience whether it's a coal fire or seeing what's seeing solar panels and so on so it's the same thing with a very long life, a very long operating life and some ways that's a great asset and another it's a real downside because we end up with a culture within the industry which is just an operating culture rather than a future oriented culture. To push to push back slightly Ron I would say that I haven't reviewed this literature personally but I would guess that a lot of the sort of social license around existing large facilities is that they employ a lot of people right probably on the order of 800 to 1000 workers per plant and the economic benefits are felt in the community and that's probably why they're popular within those communities and so you know if we're talking about small reactors that pay very few people and that are still fairly unexesable because I mean there's still big security concerns even at smaller plants I highly doubt that we're going to be doing big community tours and that lots of people are going to be exposed. I really think it's the workers that feel the benefits and that's why there's the popularity they get good wages, you know, they spread that economic wealth around it. There is that but there's also the peer-to-peer trust building that happens so you know the plant operators kids go to the same school as my kids and so there's implicit relationships of trust that are established indirectly as well as the direct socio-economic benefits and of course then there's the larger you know contribution that the asset makes to be to the overall community beyond the direct jobs as well. I guess I'm just saying that I think a bigger facility enables that in a way that a much good workforce is we're talking about a micro-reactor on a campus or something like that. They tend to also be the neighbors, they're quiet clean. Yeah it'd be I'm sure some MIT students have done studies on it right there's a relatively large research reactor in Cambridge, Massachusetts, right downtown at MIT and I think most people in Boston don't really know this so you could try you could probably do like AB testings and check sentiments or something based on telling people about it and be sort of interesting. Well remember that I used to operate reactors in in downtowns. I've pulled in a downtown Fort Lauderdale honorary reactor-powered ships. Yeah well and you guys tend to say quiet too though about where you are. But again part of my love of small reactors is the idea that there will be a lot more people who can get a lot closer and if you look at you know the community aspects of say, Oak Lowe's powerhouse. I mean Jake and Carolina are talking about building a building where people come in and use the building of the reactor as part of their community center and remote village or the waste heat from the reactor, he's the swimming pool that people use for their community. Yeah I love that. That's really nice. I mean this technology shouldn't be locked away, shouldn't be highly protected. So we'll be more accessible. So what's your thought on like environmental impact statements? Like right now you can if you want to build a nuclear reactor of any size you got to go out and do drills figure out exactly what the ground is like. Understand the entire seismic history going back thousands of years. You have to understand the weather patterns. It's very expensive to do these site type studies when you're doing early permitting for any nuclear reactor. And so I mean to postulate proliferation of small reactors you basically have to as a prerequisite make those type of regulations or that type of effort much much smaller. Right. I mean is that sort of the idea here? Oh yeah. I mean you have to if you go small enough you need to have a reactor that is functional no matter what the ground is doing. I mean again remember I used to operate small reactors on ships that would go through state five seas and would go up to 35 degree angles up and down. You know you can do this. The reactor's. Yeah and I think there's a move on the regulatory side to move towards not just streamlining the environmental impact statement process or NEPA as we call it in the US. But also making generic generic environmental impact assessments or designs that are approved for. or a bigger range of locations and so you don't need to do that detailed investigation of the site specifics. But this is something that affects all sorts of power plants and it's gonna be a big bottleneck for building transmission, building large wind farms. And I just wanna point out that it's not always the best option that we should get rid of these environmental impact assessments because it does contribute to the public's perception of the technology as being bad if it sort of pushed through against objections, against a lot of lawsuits against nuclear power plants now are based on, oh, this investigation of water quality or ground faults wasn't thorough enough. So there needs to be a balanced truck between how can you do it in the most efficient way that people really have, the public especially has trust in and that it's transparent. Yeah, I think absolutely. And one of the things that can I just mention that Rod, sometimes good, which is that I think a key, one of the things that we are meaning when we, and this is, you know, Chris, this is relevant to your point about large reactors which also need innovation, by the way. The one of the things that Jessica is pointing to is a design of a product or a design of a unit which is designed to make it easier to license. Just because something's easier to license doesn't mean that, you know, you're cutting corners on all this stuff. It could be that you designed the product so that it does not have some of the risks or some of the, you know, imponderables or some of these other things. And just a kind of bit of specialist knowledge here that may not be commonly understood. One way to do this is through seismic isolation. So you can design, seismic isolators are used in buildings in Japan and the French use them in a few reactors and they're used to protect, you know, very expensive pieces of art and various other things. You can make a seismically isolated platform which your smaller reactor or even your bigger reactor sits on. And that basically can be designed to make that site go from being a site that you have to do all this analysis on to a site which, you know, uses this interface to turn it into a standard set of conditions which you've designed your reactor for. So if that's an example of using technology and a design approach to simplify the citing and licensing of an advanced reactor. Yeah. And that's certainly, I think that probably has merit. Some other specialist knowledge is that large seismic events bound the safety analysis of almost any type of nuclear reactor around 10 to the minus six in terms of frequency. And so even with seismic isolation once the soil fails, the soil fails and it doesn't matter if you're seismic isolated. Now these events are extremely rare, you know, one in a million or once every million years. But those are the kind of numbers that reactors are being designed for at the moment. And so you have to sort of, there's a constant balance based on what type of reactor and what safety characteristics you have. And then the extra cost and the value of seismic isolation compared to this, you know, unboundedly large earthquake which is always on the PRA analysts radar even if it's maybe borderline ridiculous. You know, I don't know if I'd be shifting topic too much here because I think we've spent a lot of time talking about scale and maybe not enough time talking about advanced technologies and the relative merits of pursuing those, you know, aggressively, particularly in the West right now or not. And I think I've been really struck by Nick Taran's work because I think within the sort of nuclear advocacy community there's a big idea that we can just find a magic bullet in terms of a new designer innovation that's all of a sudden going to solve all of nuclear's problems. And I think looking at Nick's work is really kind of convinced me of the opposite of that conclusion. But I just wanted to maybe hype Canada a little bit here and pointing to some of the merits of using existing technology that, you know, capacity factors used to be very, very low for a lot of the nuclear that we currently run, can do is included. But, you know, we've just had to run it. One of our units are an ongoing run that's three years and just set the record for a thermal station. So I don't know if I'm kind of seizing the controls here, Rod and pivoting to an answer more. I just feel like it's near. We haven't touched on yet very much. I totally appreciate Chris what you say. I just want to add that the thoughts and thought leadership that is inspired and changed my thinking most has really come from the group that we have here from Jessica Kirsty and Eric have really influenced me. And I'm glad people are thinking of these other, other, you know, more systemic type changes that we can apply. I, you know, I have a name for myself for like coming out a little bit saying some of the putting down some of the magical qualities of like thorium, for instance. And I think that's maybe that's what you're referring to. But I don't want to discount the sort of exciting and new thinking that we're hearing from the rest of the group here as well. It is valid. And I think an important topic to talk about some of the various technological pathways we have available to us now. And some of them do take lessons from our long experience with light water and say, can we make a system that somewhat better, or better enough to make it worth the effort to change? And in some cases, can we go back to some of the technologies like the CanDo, which was originally designed to overcome a big obstacle for Canada. They didn't have the ability to produce a very large thick walled pressure vessel. So they came up with a different way to, and they also didn't have the ability to enrich uranium. So the CanDo reactor had different constraints and solved problems in a different way allows for online refueling a very flexible fuel input. I mean, CanDo's can burn thorium just fine if it's available to burn. But the advantages of those technologies are worth discussing. I think it might be make this particular episode a little too long. If we got into all the different options that are available to us today, but we can talk about a few of them. Again, it's a big world. And there's lots of different people with lots of different starting points. And so I'd like to think that there's room to explore a variety of things, even though, yes, there's limited resources. But it's not a zero-sum game here, a tiny, tiny fraction of the world's GDP is spent on any energy research of any kind. And so if we can get more people who are off doing ads or insurance or whatever else to focus on energy stuff, and maybe some nuclear stuff, all right, if that's beneficial. And if we do that, then we can and should have room to explore things like pressure tube reactors. And I'll just continue this many year search for repeatable economic low-carbon power. I'd like to jump in and address Chris's point and your slight repositioning of it, Nick. But I think the other thing to keep in mind here is that what we're seeing in the US for nuclear funding, which has thankfully increased a lot, is not the kind of funding that would be spent on a build of large light water reactors. What we're seeing is funding that's coming out of research and demonstration funds. And large light water reactors don't need that. What they need is a well-designed, if we wanted to deploy them in the way that you were describing, Chris, which I wouldn't be, which I would support. And I've done huge amounts of work about how that should be done and what we should and shouldn't do to make that successful. There's no doubt in my mind that we could make it successful. But it does require some right now the kind of political commitment to make that happen for a commitment to build 30 or 40 of these reactors and to not make the mistakes that we made, to learn from the mistakes that we made on the first of the kinds and not repeat those mistakes. I also just want to correct something that Rod said in the beginning, which is that, well, Rod and Jessica, both were saying that the current light water reactors are too financially challenging for US utilities. Part of the reason for that is we're paying four times or five times what we should be for those. And if we were buying them for three or $4,000 a kilowatt, then a lot more utilities could afford them. And really, it's both a question of the sort of juggernaut size that they've ended up at, those projects, and the risk associated with those. And a well-designed deployment program dramatically reduces risks, financial risks, schedule risks, supply chain risks, all of those. And we did it reasonably well in the US. Some other countries have done it reasonably well at various points in their history. And the Chinese are doing it extremely well right now. The Chinese are building their Gen 3 plus, while long reactor, for about $2,300 a kilowatt. That we think that would translate into somewhere around between $3,500 and $4,000 a kilowatt in the US. Eric, do you think there's a future where we'll be getting China to build while on reactors in the West? No, but I think if we could get out of our kind of ridiculous superpower rivalry moment that we're having and go and learn how to do it over there, we could easily learn how to do it. But we also have done some work that Jessica was doing, actually going and talking to the Chinese nuclear industry. And one of the things that's really interesting is that the Americans didn't want to learn anything from the Chinese projects. They sort of felt like knowledge goes one way, goes from us to them. And actually, the Chinese have done an amazing job. In fact, one of our findings in the Nuclear Cost Driver Study was that the countries that have done really well recently started out in learning mode. They said, hey, this looks complicated and difficult. We better try to learn everything we can about how to do this the right way. And the countries that have had a lot of problems, France, and the UK, and the US, actually forgot almost everything about how to do these the right way and have a kind of arrogance, maybe, if the right word, or certainly didn't have a, hey, this is difficult. We better go learn this again, type of attitude. Yeah, I did want to jump in with, particularly with regards to new nuclear designs and advanced reactors, you know, we get some of us get very excited about them. And there are several designs that are moving forward in licensing or in pre-application activities in the US. But this challenge that Eric is bringing up, I think, is really important to keep in mind of. even if you have a really great technology that has, the potential to be much cheaper, figuring out these supply chain issues, how it's gonna be manufactured, building up the capacity to build the components. I think will be a real challenge, particularly for new designs. Figuring out where you're gonna manufacture the fuel, building up that capability, these will be big challenges for new technologies. And on the international trade side, trade in nuclear is much more controlled than other technologies. And the US in particular has really strict restrictions on foreign investment in power plants and imports of technologies for a large power plant. So I wouldn't see that we'd be building, or China would be building their design here, but there could be room for more globalized supply chain. Again, it would be, it's more strict than other technologies, but looking at what Boeing does with their aircraft, components come from all over the world. They get the wings from Japan and the engines from the UK, and they're all assembled in Washington state. And so we might see something like that with nuclear would have to be from specific countries that we have nuclear trade agreements with to make sure it's all secure, but I think that might be a way that we move if we get out of this sort of superpower competition mindset. I think there is much more room for collaboration of who does what best, who can make what parts cheapest, and then have a system where things plug into each other's designs, like Rolls Royce makes jet engines that go into a lot of different airplanes. They go into Airbus airplanes and Boeing airplanes, but it's the same engine. And so things like that coming up with those standards to plug and play the components, I think can also help a lot with, with not just existing reactors, but new technologies as well. Well, we're coming up on the time when I think we need to start closing it up. I'd like to offer each of you a chance to kind of summarize what we've talked about. I think my summary is I'm a fission fan. I like all the reactor sizes, and I think it's important to have a variety of sizes available to meet various market niches and to give more people more familiarity with the technology. Great. Yeah, what a great discussion. I would think I would close by coming back to where I opened, which is that nuclear can be expensive. We know that, but it doesn't really doesn't have to be. And it's really all about the way in which we deliver those technologies. That's actually what really makes the difference more. In fact, then the reactor technology itself, it's really all about the delivery. How good we are constructing and how much we've built up for our skills and capability and expertise and experience and how we finance those projects. And indeed, if you take that to the manufacturing, if you move from project-based approach to product-based approaches, then you can potentially achieve even more cost-competitive products. But ultimately, the key thing here, I think, is that we have to stop leading with the technology and start leading with the market and customer requirements and design for that in terms of both applications that meet our societal and environmental challenges and needs. But also that are ultimately products that are designed for what communities and what people want. And if I could just jump in on or conclude on a little bit of a different note, I think it's important shift in framing of this challenge with the recently elected President Biden that his focus on climate change is about building. His motto was build back better, but he's had a lot of focus. When he talks about climate on building infrastructure, a large deployment of new capital, a lot of investment, a lot of focus on jobs. And I think, are I'm hopeful that we'll see that reflected in nuclear policy, so much more of a focus on industrial policy, on getting things built, not shying away from sort of supports for increased domestic manufacturing and things like that. So I think we'll see a shift in how we talk about nuclear as a climate technology. And as something that needs a lot of shovels in the ground. Right. No, I'll just, and so I came in with the message that a new or advanced nuclear technology is not automatically cheap. It takes a huge amount of work and effort and development and new forms of collaboration between different actors in the industry and across national lines, as was just being mentioned. And so that's what I came in with. And I'm leaving with this sort of new thought that I picked up from the discussions here, which is that I think I heard this basically said, is that maybe there's a good opportunity for nuclear advocates to align with advocates of renewable energy in finding ways to explain. As NIMBYism maybe goes on the rise for all three, are any kind of low carbon energy source if we could show the value in new and interesting ways, whether it be impact on helping climate change or air pollution or whatever. That's like a great and interesting way to ally with our friends and the renewable energy world. I know Chris wants the last word, so I'm happy to go here. I think I'd like to kind of build on some things that Jessica and Kirsty were saying about really the importance of design here. And not just in the simple sense of how you design a plant, but what kind of system are we trying to design and what kind of future are we trying to design? And really looking at the way that a product designer would think about it. First of all, it's not one thing. We're not talking nuclear, you know, is a word, and it refers to a great many things. And I think what Kirsty outlined in her opening remarks about these different applications for nuclear, those are really fundamentally different things. They happen to share, you know, this thing called nuclear energy inside them, but you know, car is pretty different from a power plant, which is pretty different from a furnace that heats your house. They all have combustion in them. If we call them all combustion, it wouldn't be very useful in terms of thinking about what those are, because they have fundamentally different functions and designs. So, you know, when we look at the future of what's needed for decarbonization, you know, we think that we might need 14 or 15 terawatts of nuclear by, you know, before the end of this century. That's not going to be big, complicated cathedral style, light water reactors. That's going to be something made in a gigafactory. That's the things that are made in factories are what win in our society. We can make more of them, they get cheaper, faster. We can distribute them around the world easily. We can build more factories if we need more of them. In a way, that's, we really need to be designing to win that game here, both from a climate perspective and an energy access perspective. And so that doesn't mean that we have to, you know, I'm not necessarily saying advanced fuels or, you know, breeder reactors or any of those things. I'm saying, you know, we have a heat source. That heat source can be matched to different applications and can be designed to be turned into products and manufactured in different ways. And I completely agree that we should build size well. See in the near term, we've got to do everything we can to get as much zero carbon energy on the grid. And in the longer term, we need to have amazing products that are going to just delight and fascinate and sort of amaze people with the value that they create for their lives and for the future. And that's, you know, we need to bring that level of creativity to this design challenge. And so the little steps we're taking now with advanced reactors are really important step moving in that direction. But we're still kind of stuck in the build-of-power plant and, you know, boil some water type of mentality. And I think we really need to be thinking much more broadly about how we solve the much bigger climate and energy problems with products that are really well designed to meet that mission. And yeah, I guess to have the last word, I mean, really it's, you know, I think it's no secret. I'm a bit of an idealist. And I care deeply about trying to change the politics not just kind of follow along with the prevailing kind of wins right now, which are in the West certainly trending away from any degree of planning and towards liberalized markets and the kind of nuclear that that entails. But I mean, this is a super complex issue. And I think the industry itself in the West, in particular where things have been in decline, needs to, in my mind, exercise a lot of humility and recognize what their capacities are and not get too ambitious in terms of, I guess, pursuing too many things at once. And I think COVID has some interesting lessons for us in terms of the way we've ignored countries that have been doing very well. I think we need to pay a lot more attention. I think as some of us talked about earlier to countries that are doing nuclear well, even understanding that their context are so different. But in that theme of humility, I mean, I just as an idealist, I have so much to learn in terms of the pragmatics from all the other experts on this panel. And I look forward to engaging a lot more and hopefully trying to lure you over to my podcast as well so that we can discuss further. I can educate myself further, because the more you try to do the topic, the more the done and cruder, in fact, can sort of slip away and you can realize just how complex it all is. So it's been a real pleasure to join you guys today. Well, thank you all and this is for Chris. Take good care. Ha ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha. All right, thanks, Brad. There's a way, a way such a better way today. Today, the nation boys tell 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 region boys tell the world there's a better way. Today there's a better way