Marcus Seidl – Researching small modular reactors near Hamburg, Germany

There's a way, a way such a better way today, today. The measure boys tell the world there's a better way, today there's a better way. This is Rod Adams and his time for another atomic show. And with me today I have Marcus Siedel, who is a traditional utility guy and a researcher on energy issues in operating out of Hamburg, Germany. Welcome Marcus. Hi Rod, thank you very much for having me. Yeah, I'd like you to tell us a little bit more about you and the interest you have in small reactors and why we got in touch with each other. Sure, so it's now exactly 20 years since I started my nuclear career. So in 2002 I received a PhD in nuclear physics. And then I first joined a German TSO, a technical support organization, advising the regulator on issues on radiation protection, criticality safety and shielding. And then I later switched organizations went to a turnkey supplier of nuclear power plants and in that role mainly work as a commissioning engineer for the new Munich high flux research reactor. And after this project was finished, I thought maybe it's a good time to really understand the big reactors and ice which again jobs and ever since then I have been working for German nuclear utility. So here my main responsibility is all about nuclear core and future fun. And this means everything about reactor physics, thermal heat r and let me shortly mention here that I'm giving in this podcast all my personal opinion and experience and of course this should not be regarded as a statement of the organizations which I work for. So I'm also working not only for utility I'm also a percent I'm teaching reactor physics and energy market fundamentals at German universities. And yeah, I like teaching very much this is consuming almost all my spare time and I like it so much because it's really always a test a test if you really understand what you're talking about. And it's also a good opportunity to keep up to date with latest research. And part of the research which I'm currently doing is I'm part of the so called make safer collaboration. And a European Union sponsored research project and it has a very complicated name. It's called high performance advanced methods and experimental investigations for the safety evaluation of generic small model reactors. So here the main objective in the first stage of the program is to adapt all those comparatively sophisticated tools which has been developed for big commercial reactors and adapt them for small model reactors. So here obviously the focus is on I would say more classic small model reactors like the new scale concept. And yeah, there is of course a great diversity of small reactors now coming to light and mainly if the project is extended we will also consider for example molten salt or high temperature gas cool directors. And maybe a small anecdote why it is also natural for a person located in Germany to look at small reactors. Some of you might remember the nuclear ship auto horn which was a nuclear powered vessel in the 1960s and 70s it was operated for 10 years quite successfully. And until it couldn't any more compete with much more cheaper deal engines. But it was already there these technologies were already there here in the country more than now 60 years ago. And that is part of my motivation to continue here the search in this area. So you chose an interesting field to enter considering you obtained your PhD about a year or year to have after your country had decided to exit from nuclear energy. That's absolutely right and maybe I give you some high level point of view by I think the search in nuclear fission is still worthwhile. This is a technology where I always thought it has great potential and we should be much more grateful that we have it compared to other technologies and let's talk a little bit about the details what I'm meaning here. So in the laboratory you can generate energy from a lot of processes. Now we have nuclear fission we have nuclear fusion we have a lot of biochemical possibilities to create and produce energy. But the one important thing is how can you scale up something from the laboratory to the real world so that we can generate macroscopic amounts of energy. And there when you look to fission there are actually three natural constants which are of the right size by luck and by sheer accident that they enable this scaling up. And the scaling up may not be possible for fusion or other processes which are able to be demonstrated in the laboratory. So which are these three basic constants that's the size of the fission cross section for neutrons on the radial turns 35. This is the size of the number of secondary neutrons and this is the number of delayed neutrons imagine a word for example where you have a neutron fission cross section which is as small as for example the photofission cross section. So photofission also works and you can demonstrate it in the laboratory but it's very unlikely that with this process we could scale it up and build something commercially useful. So this is the first kind of wonder which we should appreciate that the fission cross section for uranium 235 with neutrons is sufficiently high that we can build these reactors. Then when you look at secondary neutrons imagine a world where secondary neutrons are zero. Then we would produce all the neutrons for fission externally but this is probably very energy intensive and on balance you get out less energy than you produce by the fission event. So a nuclear reactor is not only a source of energy it's also a source of neutron amplification and therefore it makes it possible that we create microscopic amounts of energy. And finally we have the delayed neutron fraction if this would be zero we would basically see a sequence of explosions. Maybe a reactor control could also be possible under these circumstances but I doubt it so it's very good that this fraction is a little bit smaller than zero and that we are able to control the reactors in the way we can control them. So these are these three basic constants which are by luck in a sizable amplitude which allows us to build real reactors from that. And that is always testament, native meat and that means also that I was not intimidated to join the subject because I think we really have here something which is proven to work and we should continue working on and make it useful for society. Yeah, I agree with you on those three I would add one more fortunate occurrence and that is the fact that there is enough material available at reasonably low cost to extract or find it to make this a commercially viable energy source. We have as many estimate we have hundreds to thousands of years worth of fuel that can be found and extracted and used. So that is for rather unusual coincidences happening all in line with each other and I'm a probabilistic kind of guy so I in some cases don't really believe that for such wonderful fortunate events happen. So by luck or by mirror chance because I have to I'm sure well aware every coincidence that has to happen in series reduces the probability of that coincidence happening. So I'm not particularly often called Susan a gift I'm not particularly religious guy but I am I guess a little spiritual so moving on, you have spent some time in the realm of neutron amplification by working on a high flux test reactor sounded like tell us a little bit about why Germany has constructed that facility and is it still in use. Yes, it is still in use and it goes actually back to the Munich research reactor number one so the Munich research reactor number one was also constructed already very early at the beginning of the nuclear age. And there, of course, we had much more enthusiasm for nuclear so it was a new technology also a lot of the political establishment wanted to have it in Germany and study its processes so it was actually yeah. Munich research reactor number one which is as old as a commercial age basically and in around 2018 90. It reached its its use for life and there was consideration how it can be extended so in Munich at technical university of Munich as a strong team of scientists who have always worked in matters of newton scattering and material sciences and they were very ambitious that they replace this old Newton sauce and have a state of the art facility. And luckily one can say they had the right political backing still at that time to construct and get funding for this project and it's still running. It's running on highly enriched on random and of course, they try at the moment to find yeah at least a down grading solution for the nuclear fuel but that's of course difficult because you have a compact source of energy. highly compact source highly enriched and it's quite a challenge to use lower enriched, rain, and get the same newton density out of the device but that is ongoing research and I hope that they will be successful in some time in the future. If they're not successful do they have a sufficient inventory of highly high high-end research your any to operate for a few decades. No, I don't think so. I think they have for a couple of years inventory, but they would run out maybe after five years. If no new deliveries was coming. I didn't expect you to be able to get any new deliveries with that material and the transition of research reactors from Highland rich uranium to. High assay low enriched uranium has been ongoing for a number of years, but there have been a few casualties reactors that were not able to transition. Sounds like yours might be one of those. If you can't come up with a technical solution soon. I mean, a transition is always possible, but maybe you lose new from the intensity and you possibly lose new from the intensity. And then the question of course is can this still be a state of the art research facility. If you move on to something else you told us that one of the topics that you specialize in at the university level is electricity markets. Can you tell us a little about what what you teach your students about markets and how they either subtract from or add to the value of nuclear electricity. Now the most important thing which I'm talking about is what I call the management of risk uncertainty and volatility. And I would like to make the students aware that there is no linear planning how the energy market and the energy technologies in general develop. So I think when you go to universities and you are educating engineers, especially they have kind of more model based worldview. So learn how Tom Hedrotic works and you have two deterministic equations that when you design something on paper it will really work like it's designed on paper. So no surprises that's the aim of engineering. But when you then join the real world and you see for example also the German history of energy politics you will soon see there are lots of switches back and forth. And the question is how can you understand this as an engineer because as an engineer you have basically a trained deterministic mindset. And yeah we all know from the stock market that it's fluctuating all the times and we have witnessed especially in Germany the switching between different policies and how can you explain this. And as a traditional engineer you learn a lot about risk kind of catheumatoid strategies. And you know the path different scenarios you know the probabilities you know the payoffs you can easily calculate expectation values. But this is not really happening in the energy markets there is something which you can better explain as uncertainty. And looking at situations where you only very vaguely know which scenario may come up you only very vaguely know what the probability are. So what do you do in these circumstances where the future is very opaque. And that's really what's happening in the energy market too. And there's a lot of development at the moment going on a lot of potential substitutes of what is challenging the traditional technologies. How do you behave under these circumstances of high uncertainty. And the question is of course high volatility. It's always getting more uncertain in which kind of business area is shouldn't rest. And there's the only answer is okay you need to do what financial people are doing you need to invest in a portfolio. And you have to deal with optionality. And you do not want to put all your ex into one basket. But you basically want to buy options which are now allow you to participate if some breakthrough occurs in some part of the portfolio that you can have a positive benefit from that. So this is very generally what I'm teaching at the energy market for the mental causes. I'm a systems technology guy and know that all systems have a certain amount of capacity. And you operate somewhere in a band of either fairly low utilization of the capacity or increasingly high utilization. And what happens a lot of times in a system. In fact all the time as far as I can tell is as you get closer and closer to the capacity of the system. You get closer to a break point where the system starts failing much more often than it would normally fail. And that appears to be what we've been driving the electricity system to in many markets a place where there's not that much difference between the use and capacity. And then we increase the probability of failure by adding capacity that may or may not be there depending on the whims of the weather. And how does that circumstance sound to you. Yes, it's probably a kind of built in fragility. So nobody really understands why the energy networks are still as stable as I are. So somehow we are able to metal through and to keep everything stable. But the degree of fragility is probably increasing. And a fragile system will sometime just break now in an unforeseen manner. And I think the way how the traditional distribution grid was built and all the new additions which are coming online from very small suppliers and non base load capacities which are added. This adds much to the complexity of these systems and yeah time will show if this complexity can be controlled. Or if we somehow have a devasting failure and I mean from a physical perspective you can say. Fragility with time will always lead to a breakdown. It's only when and it's difficult to say when it will particularly happen. But it might happen. And as we know as we are all experiencing politics only when very few things happen, we get a commitment to upgrade something. That's cursed to me that there's some real cognitive dissonance associated with people worrying terribly about the breakdown in a nuclear reactor. And its consequences compared to the breakdown of our electricity distribution grids electricity transmission distribution grids. What the consequences of a breakdown there might be it just seems kind of we as engineering types i'm not actually an engineer i'm more of a generalist who kind of has an engineering event have not carefully commune or not effectively communicated the the real concerns that we have about the system breaking. Yes, I absolutely agree I mean from a psychology perspective, humans try to few risks in isolation. You have the risk of a breakdown of a nuclear power station and people are very afraid of it, but they do not compare this risk to other risks which are occurring. And the risk of a breakdown of the electricity grid probably is a little bit higher at the moment than the risk of a nuclear accident. And also the consequences of a breakdown of the electricity grid. The expectation value is probably higher the consequences the impact is stronger. This is willfully, I would absolutely agree in this point of view. The consequences of a nuclear reactor accident have often been described as high. People will talk about reactor accidents as low probability high consequence events yet the experience that we have other than the reactions to the accidents the experience has been that. Accidents that nuclear plants are no worse than accidents that other industrial facilities and in fact in some cases seem to be far less consequential. Absolutely do something to communicate that is is there some advantage to smaller systems to make that distinction clearer. I think the smaller systems have one of the objectives of reducing still reducing the core damage frequency. So this is one of the basic ideas of these smaller reactors to have still another way forward to reduce the potential of a severe accident. And maybe let's look for more abstract perspective how this core damage frequency can be reduced. So obviously by making a reactor simpler this is one way forward. Why by making it simpler when you look at a nuclear reactor and try to understand what the systems there all mean you can describe a nuclear reactor like a catastrophic insurance machine. Now all the energy generation is easy it's almost work for itself so not much oversize their necessary but all the investment and all the difficulty in getting a nuclear facility license is about accidents. So the components which we have all around the reactor are really catastrophic insurance components. And just as a side remark if we would have this amount of catastrophic insurance in for example the banking sector we wouldn't have seen all these great breakdowns for example in 2008 but that's another matter. So we have a reactor which has a lot of equipment just there for catastrophic insurance. And how can we make this even more safer so the best way to make it safer is that it becomes inherently more safer and that we can reduce the amount of catastrophic insurance which we need. And this is usually done by stripping potential event trees. So in a classical light water reactor you have the possibility that costs a large by a loss of coolant accident. And if you do not want to have it in your event tree you integrate all the components into a single vessel. Now you have this steam generator in the vessel you have the pressure rather in the vessel you have primary pumps in the vessel or you have no primary pumps at all and just rely on natural convection. So this is basically a process of stripping the event tree making it simpler. Therefore you need less catastrophic insurance equipment you decrease the core damage frequency and thereby hopefully the smaller reactor is much more safer than the existing plants which we see. also get some advantage from an accident consequence perspective if you have a smaller core less powerful core that has less decay heat available to it and less capability to exit the pressure vessel if it gets damaged in nuclear safety calculations that have been associated with some of those people. to feel like if you get to a core damage you've failed and in course that is true and on some perspective but if the core gets damaged and the radioactive material never leaves a vessel it has no external consequences. The owner might not be very happy about it but the public shouldn't care. Yes I agree and one can also add a different perspective here. What is the real problem of any fish in the wise? From a safety perspective the real problem or challenge is always to remove the decay heat. I mean shutting down the reactor has never been really an issue. The issue is always you shut down the reactor and there remains the decay heat. The decay heat is around 7% of the nominal reactor power at shut down so it's quite a significant amount of energy which you still need to remove after shut down and which you need to remove for a couple of days and even weeks and the logical consequences you need a lot of water, a lot of coolant to still remove the decay heat. So for more classical small reactor how can you do this? You can just put this reactor in a large pool and thereby you ensure almost naturally that there is enough cooling capacity available. Compared to a large reactor you of course could also passively provide a huge amount of moderator or a huge amount of coolant as an emergency preparation of course larger reactors have a small pool of emergency inventory but for say week-long cooling this is of course not sufficient you would have to need a lot more of emergency coolant just to use it as a natural repository. So that means in the large reactors you rely on active components, now to recycle the coolant this is something which smaller reactors don't need. Now you can build economically relatively large amount of pools where you place those smaller reactors and then you can rely on passive equipment to ensure decay heat removal this makes it all safer and easier to control this devices in case of an accident. You said that your research initially focused on smaller light water reactors, small modular reactors but you are going to expand it to some of the other concepts of high temperature gas reactors and liquid sodium fast reactors and the most salt reactors which are all under development for a reason other than simply shrinking some of the effects and some of the needs to provide decay heat removal or putting the need to provide decay heat removal into a small enough package to be conceivable for almost an indefinite period. But some of these other concepts use a different thought process for how to get rid of decay heat. For example a high temperature gas reactor in some concepts that I've been reviewing have fairly low actually relatively much lower power densities than traditional light water reactors. They use a material which has much greater heat capacity as part of the solid and they show that the decay heat that is produced after shutdown can be absorbed within the core and core materials these by just heating up those materials to a point where it's still below where the materials will fail and so it doesn't need any sources of cooling to keep you from causing damage to the core. I know that Germany has had some significant experience with high temperature gas reactors and I'll focus on those initially. What are your thoughts about that path towards eliminating the probability of core damage from decay heat? Yes this is another alternative way to deal with the decay heat issue as so to speak. If you have a molten salt reactor the core is already molten and you do not need to really care about a melt down event of a reactor because you can naturally already control it. You have everything already in place and if you have enough heat capacity to absorb the decay heat and stay below some critical temperatures it's even more easy to deal with these events. So as you said these are just two other passes forward to deal with this very important issue. Another reason why some people are interested or many researchers are interested in different coolants other than water is that water at reactor operating temperatures really really wants to be steamed and so you have to be very conscious of your reactor pressure boundary in order to keep the conditions of the reactor coolant being water or at least mostly water and that in some of the other coolants liquid sodium or molten salt the operating pressures need to be much much lower near atmospheric pressure in order to keep the coolant in a condition that you expected for reactor physics calculations. What are your thoughts about alternative coolants? Yes I'm saying this is a very attractive approach to deal with the difficulties of having water to want to turn into steam. So I think that's nothing new of course I mean this was tried already many many years ago and this machine so always say a trade-off. There can be of course corrosion issues when you have these alternative coolants and on the other side we have today already a lot of experience dealing with this water wanting to turn into steam. So you have to trade off the great amount of knowledge which we have about water cool reactors compared to more speculative designs with alternative coolants which look very attractive operating at atmospheric pressure no pressure boundary really needed and we have to see and wait if the confidence in the knowledge of the material properties and the reliable operation under these conditions is already sufficient to make these devices happen. So from a very abstract ground perspective you probably have heard and read the book from Thomas Kuhn about the structure of scientific revolutions and he always said there is a period of puzzle solving and a period of paradigm change and I think these alternative approaches with new coolant types they are in the puzzle solving phase trying to figure out do we have enough knowledge to make it work reliably on the expectation our utility has and of course investors in these technologies they hope that this paradigm change will be right around the corner and that they can profit from a breakthrough in this field. One of the other innovations or breakthroughs is happening in a smaller reactor realm. Is it some of the reactor vendors have decided that what they really see is the path towards high profitability is to be a developer and operator of their own reactors because in the case of selling a reactor to the utility the utility is the one that actually has the stream of revenue for the next 40 to 60 years and the reactor vendor if they design a system that is as reliable as they possibly can make it the reactor vendor gets cut out of revenue so they think that maybe the possibility is to design a really reliable low cost reactor low total cost reactor not not a cheap reactor and then own it and operate it themselves have you run into that I know you're a traditional utility guy. I'm not afraid of it I'm not afraid of it because you will soon see that operating in the electricity market is quite a complicated business and first of all the revenue is not guaranteed you often see a lot of fluctuation of course at the moment at the time being with a very high electricity prices everybody wants to be in the business of generating electricity but this can also turn around and there are also periods where electricity prices were not so high then the market is very regulated and I doubt that traditional turnkey suppliers would really want to enter this kind of market you can also look for example at the manufacturers of wind turbines you can say manufacturing wind turbines is very simple very easy so why do those companies not enter the electricity market because they want to stay to their core business and I think if traditional turnkey suppliers of nuclear power plants would study the electricity market and all the regulations which come with it they really stay to the core business. Yeah of course it is remains to be proven that traditional utility companies are any better at operating in today's markets than anybody else today's markets are difficult at best to predict so it it not necessarily sure that being a big traditional utility gives you any real advantage in making decisions I don't see it like I said I'm not sure that anybody can figure out how to operate in a market that's designed the way today's market is I think the real beneficiaries are the fuel suppliers. Yes and I may also add another perspective here what is really the ultimate goal the ultimate goal is really that we have a reactor which is as boring as a battery now if we would come to this stage that a reactor can be deployed in a plug-in-play way and that we can use it like a battery then I would also say maybe the whole structure of the electricity market is going to change. Yeah then you don't need sophisticated regulations you don't need all the knowledge about the electricity markets you can just sell these batteries for example commercial customers who operate them on-site for their purposes and then I think this middleman role of traditional utilities maybe you really dying out. Today's traditional vendors have evolved to a market where they make most of their money from servicing the reactors they sold decades ago and in that case it's not necessarily to their benefit to have a very boring reliable never maintained reactor. Yes it's simply the way of business that you have to figure how you're going to make your money and where your income stringent and a come from. So tell us a little bit about the research effort that you've initiated. You sent me to a web page and indicated that it's calling for researchers to come and maybe publish their research all in one place. I think that's what it seems to be. Yes, it's one of my initiatives to bring this knowledge and current research activities regarding small reactors into one place. So obviously there's a lot of activity ongoing and when you look at traditional papers with which are written in the field. They are often very focused and what I personally would like to see is that it is put more into perspective. So I mean small reactors are not falling from the clear blue sky. We had already quite some attempts in the early 50s and 60s to enable and to try and test small reactors and they somehow failed. They failed due to economic reasons they failed due to bad design choices and also due to material issues. And then along period of panel solving a continued and nobody was really able to figure out how to. Yeah, they build a fleet of small reactors. Now we are suddenly seeing a lot of interest in the field. And if you're doing research on this subject, it's really for me important to show yes, we know what has happened in the past. We can be confident that we are this time much more successful than we were in the past. And this is something which I not see so often. So I thought it would be a good idea if there's research say on high temperature, gas cool directors. What are they really now making better than before, what is the reason that we can have more confidence compared to the early designs which they're already existing. And I think there are a couple of reasons why we can be optimistic. Now we have a lot better engineering tools. We have evaluated nuclear data and we have many validated sophisticated tools which allow us to increase the search space and to find the best possible configuration for that particular reactor design. And I would like to have that participants really contribute to this perspective. Okay, this was happening in the past. Now we have new research new tools new knowledge about material properties also new material itself are available on the market. Therefore, there's reason for optimism and that's the basic motivation to bring this research together in one place. I've done a lot of reading and research about many of the earlier small systems. And it appears to me that if you judge them on the basis of being first or second of a kind system their success was much higher than in what you and others have implied that there. Yes, there were some issues of few things that ultimately cause the specific reactor to more the specific system to not be as effective as it could have been. But one of the real challenges that then lack of follow through lack of additional installations sales, if you will, of these reactors so that there would be sufficient motivation to solve those engineering problems or some cases they were just minor niggling problems that may have led to a reactor not performing as well as it could have but all it needed was an adjustment here and adjustment there. And it would have been better those kinds of things happen in almost any manufactured or constructed product. But in order to make the changes you have to have a stream of revenue that would encourage you to go back and fix what you had before and make make evolutionary changes. So it appears to me that one of the things we really need is some research on better marketing and better ability to sell product so that you can go through the engineering process of improving it and refining the product. Will that be part of your research effort marketing. Yes, I mean, I would like to demonstrate to my own colleagues that we are now much more confident that this can be a business success. So this is part of the marketing effort. I would say and I would also like to mention or add here. You have to have the right person at the right time at the right location. So for example, going backwards 195060 there was the US Army nuclear program and there was a US Navy nuclear program and we as army program somehow faded. And it was a very important, complete with much more cheaper diesel engines. But the environment for the nuclear submarines for the aircraft carrier fleet was just right for those small reactors to continue their life and they exist and fulfill their job until today. So it's always also a question is the conditions environment right for those reactors. I think we have a great market leverage. We have the issue of energy security and we have the issue of greenhouse gas emissions and I think that will add a lot to our marketing ability. On the other hand, there is capitalism can we do it reliably. And the research project really here is to add to the optimism that I can go into marketing and say yes, look, the research has progressed so much that we really can expect the next couple of years of part it can change that small reactors can reliably be a source of electricity. I've also studied a lot about the Army nuclear power program and I don't know if I mentioned it to you, but I spent 33 years in the Navy so part of that in operating in our nuclear submarine fleet and part of it in being at the Navy headquarters and making investment decisions on parts of the nuclear reactor program like maintenance training and even supported neighbor reactors for a while. So I have a pretty good understanding of how the fleet concept worked and also how important the single man theory was at least for the first part of the nuclear reactor program in the Navy. Again, part of the thing that happened in the Navy was that there was sufficient motivation to make the system work and to refine it to become a reliable and actually amazing reliable system it is today. Yes, back in the early days, I believe the burn up availability of the fuel was somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 megawatt days per ton and it is now enough so that we can operate a reactor for a full 30 year lifetime of the the hull and never refuel the reactor. There's also been many many improvements within the system. Unfortunately, the Navy is something to maintain those improvements as confidential or secret or even tougher classification levels and never shared them with anybody. Except for the very first we wish the Navy reactor program did share what they knew about pressurized water reactors in 1954 with the rest of the world helped to build the first pressurized water reactor and then never shared any more information. Kind of what the commercial fleet diverge and figure out its own material issues going back to your talk about corrosion materials, of course in a light water reactor with boiling water and and pressure. So, we had enough motivation to solve them and refine the materials as time went on. So, small reactors had been operating in a fleet mode for the last 60 years and we've gone through several series of small reactors, one of the most successful was the the S5W reactor plant that I believe there was something in the order of 85 of those built and operated successfully for many years. So, I don't think there's any question whether or not small light water reactors can be a success, it's just a matter of figuring the right design and building enough of them selling enough of them to enough customers to make them economic. Yes, at the moment it might be the right point in time and history, so this may succeed. Partly because the idea of cheap diesel and the engines may be cheap, but when you make the calculations of how much it costs to produce power from a diesel engine. Yes. I think you spend as much as the engine costs after just operating for about a year and a half for the rest of its operating life, almost all of its cost is fuel. And as I like to point out to people almost all the revenue from a diesel engine goes to the fuel supplier not the people who operate it not the people who build the machine not the people who maintain the parts and everything else. It almost all goes to the people that sell the fuel. If you know that's a pump. Yes, it's a pump. Yes, I'll agree with that. Unfortunately, it pumps its exhaust material into the atmosphere and causes real problems for the rest of us for the rest of its operating life. So there's a real disadvantage to burning hydrocarbons. Not only are they costly, not only do they pollute not only do they contribute to greenhouse gases, but in many cases they come from regimes that are not necessarily friendly to the rest of the world. Exactly. And that's a shame. It's maybe not quite accidental that the Russians are making more money from selling fuels today than they were six months ago, even though there's been some effort to restrain our purchases of them. They may sell lower volumes, but prices of their fuels are higher enough higher than that over comes the disadvantage. It may be more difficult for Russia if you have a low oil price now. Oh, there's no doubt that it would be more difficult for the Russians to get a low oil price. Some forget that the reasons that the Soviet Union ended up collapsing in the end of the 1980s was the period from about 1985 through 1990 was a period of exceedingly low oil prices down to below $10 barrel after having been in excess of $45 a barrel in the earlier parts of that period. And I believe there's a really good case to be made, although people haven't made it very well that the period of the 1980s was an awful lot of new nuclear power plants were being brought online around the world. Many of them in places that were previously dependent on burning oil, France, Sweden, Taiwan, Japan were all major oil consumers for electricity production. For sure, I mean, the fleet and Germany of nuclear reactors was also driven in this time to be built. So that was the original motivation and it seems like history is repeating itself. at the moment. I came of age in the 1970s so I definitely feel like there's echoes of my early years first being aware of how the world works happening again today. It's it's pretty frightening for my near-term thoughts, particularly as one who's got growing grandchildren who are not too far away from starting to think about college and what they're going to do for their career. The 1970s energy crisis was partly what motivated me to enter the career I did. I joined the Navy to learn about nuclear energy quite frankly. I decided I found out that was the best place in the world to learn about nuclear energy and that's where I went because that's what I wanted to do. It wasn't that much about the other thing. I like serving my country but I really wanted to learn about nuclear energy. Do you think there's any possibility that Germany will enter into the small modular reactor realm? So I have my own theory about it as a physicist. I have my own theory. So basically you have to understand from a high-level perspective what is going on here? We have a country. A country is a complex system. What do complex systems do? They behave call it a call. This means when you follow the history of a country certain properties of this country will just change stochastically randomly. Now we have a couple of people who insist that this country never ever will have energy generation by means of nuclear fusion again. And you should realize this is actually a prediction those people are making on the future of a chaotic system. So you basically cannot really predict what will happen really. You cannot predict how the world looks in five years, how it looks in ten years. So if we have this paradigm change what Thomas talking about and if he would really see that small reactors are employed on a large scale and not only on a large scale what we see is an ecosystem of small reactors which also may offer waste burning potentials. So if this is really established on a large scale and if it's successful in a lot of other countries then I think it's no doubt that a government will reconsider its approach which is having no. So I'm personally optimistic that sometime there will be a paradigm change and what the history remains is the right. Do you think there's any relationship or how big is the relationship between some of the opposition that Germany has some logical opposition to having tactical or short range or intermediate range nuclear weapon stations there and the attitudes of the German public towards nuclear energy in general? I think it's again this kind of looking at risks individually. People focus on civil nuclear energy innovation and I think not many focus on these weapons being placed in Germany. So they can't compare the different risks and they're also not sinking holistically what it all means and if they approach to civil nuclear it's logical with regard to other nuclear devices which are in the country and I think at the moment a lot of the German public probably would be in favor of this nuclear deterrent seeing the threat of Russia and they would look at this differently compared to what they think about commercial nuclear reactors. So it's probably not a driver so there's a protection from nuclear weapons is probably not a driver to increase the confidence in civil nuclear because risks are considered separately. Germany has a very strong green party that has always been opposed to the use of nuclear energy and I think that some of the people that you're mentioned that have said that Germany will never use nuclear fission again come from that party. What region of the country did the green party originate from or was it a rather distributed party? I think for sure the green party comes from the western part of Germany it was not possible in the eastern part of the former eastern part to establish itself. So it's strongly backed by the western part of Germany and I think there it's fairly well distributed of course there were core centers of what you may call resistance where the nuclear reactors were originally built. There was hands-on threat so to speak right on the face. But these reactors were built and scattered all around Germany so when you look at the identity distribution of the green party I think it's more or less equally distributed among the the western German energy regions. Did the opposition to nuclear really arise local to the plants in the US many poles have been taken and found that the closer you are to an operating nuclear power station the higher the support for nuclear energy is logically because the people who are close to the plant have more association with those who work there and more understanding of what the benefits of having a nuclear power station nearby can be. I think when you just ask these people who are living near the plant this is correct. This is probably also correct. A has been correct for a long time in Germany because these plants have been a great source of revenue for the local community. On the other hand I think the opposition was of course attracted to these sites to demonstrate their resistance and this of course naturally led to the wider environment around those plants to also host the opposition parties. But I would also maybe add another perspective to this question. It's again a question of being the wrong person on the wrong location at the wrong time so I personally don't really think that there is opposition due to nuclear fishing at all. So it was just a say maybe a little bit of bad luck that this issue was hostage taken by some politically interested people who saw that they can raise emotions and that they can build a political movement out of it. And if there would have been any other topic which would have been able to create similar emotions available at that time then probably we would have not a nuclear fishing movement but some other movement which we really don't understand from a rational point of view. I mean you know from your own countries there are other topics which you can't really discuss originally and I don't think that these topics which are so irrationally discussed have something to do with the topic itself. It's just bad coincidence that this topic was available for a group who wanted to establish itself politically political support and unfortunately in Germany it hits the nuclear fishing industry. Yeah we definitely have our issues that cause great divide and part of what happens when you have a great divide is that some people end up getting a lot stronger and it's very concerning to me particularly since I have four granddaughters and I'm very concerned about what some of our recent decisions have been it's distressing. It's just outside the topic of this conversation. So we're coming on well we actually just passed an hour of talking. I'd like to offer you the opportunity to maybe sum up or provide any other thoughts about where you see the future of research on small modular reactors is going and what you think the possibilities at least some of the small modular reactors being developed today are going to meet the needs of potential energy customers. So my first thought is here what we need is a paradigm change. We need those reactors to be deployed not on the orders of tens but also orders of hundreds and more. So if new scale just produces 10 of those reactors this doesn't change the world history. We need to make an impact on climate change and energy security that means small reactors need to be deployed and mass. And the only way that this can be done is that they prove to be almost as reliable as a battery and I think there is from an educated guest point of view the potential that this will happen but of course there's still no guarantee. So it's happening when it's happening and if it's really as reliable as those companies envision then you would probably see big industrial consumers to install these what I had called in quotation marks batteries on their sides and they hopefully have a reliable source of electricity especially in these very volatile times. So that is my first thought. The second thought here is what I'm still missing a bit not in the small reactor development but generally is an automation of the licensing process and of the whole project management of building a reactor. So when you look at the delay which have plucked flammable or cuter-free it all boils down that it's more or less everything hunt made and also licensing of small model reactors and other reactor types are almost still hunt made and the usual experience is you go to the regulator and you have to work out a compromise and you have to adapt your design and then it takes over many weeks until you come up with a new design and until it's reviewed again. So I think in this field there is really a potential for some companies to add innovation in order to make this process much more automatic and much more systematic so that you go today to the regulator come to a compromise next day you are half already on your plate the revised design and okay this benefits both small and large reactors but there are also personally hope that we see more innovation but we have available with all these great machine learning tools with increased data bank tools so that may be one overlooked point where innovation really can help to turn the industry around. Thank you I do believe that one of the advantages that you have with smaller reactors is the numbers of reactors that will be needed and sold offering in the opportunity. these to take advantage of some of those design refinement potential that we have with modern tools. Yes. When you have a very large system, it just takes a long time to get everything in place and to complete the project. And by the time you've learned things and completed the project, it may be too late to enter the refinements into the system. For example, in the US, we have this really nice design called the AP-1000. And unfortunately, the first opportunities to employ that design were such dramatic failures taking too long and costing too much that none of the customers even though it's already have approved licenses to build AP-1000s are showing up to ask for more. So we need to be able to refine designs and turn that around quickly enough to make a difference. And I think going smaller gives you that opportunity. Yes, smaller reactors have a head start. But if you're an ambitious technologist, you would say maybe we can bring in a later stage with advantages also to bigger projects. So it's impossible to tell how the future will look like. Maybe we are successful with smaller reactors and people get more courageous and then also attempt to build pickup plans again. Nothing is for sure here. Yes, we didn't build the first wave of big plants starting off very big. We started off smaller and practiced. We learned how to build and then decided to go bigger. And that may be a path that we follow again by restoring our ability to build and design and license and operate smaller systems. We may develop the confidence and the skills necessary to succeed with bigger systems. It's plan and bill and Oklahoma, Ludo. We're not only trying to build big systems to begin with, they were bigger than any before. So anyway, that's part of my own persuasion of people is we've got to practice. We've got to get better. We've got to build things in series. That doesn't mean a series of completely identical machines, but machines that are very close to each other with some refinements in between. Marcus, I really appreciate you coming with us and sharing your thoughts and wish you the best of luck in your research efforts. Thank you very much, Rod. It was a pleasure to have an interview with you. Thank you very much. You enjoyed this episode of the Atomic Show. This is Rod Adams and I've been your host for the Atomic Show for more than 15 years. Along with the Atomic Insights, I've been speaking with experts in analyzing nuclear energy for more than three decades. While I'll continue to produce new content, I am also actively investing in advanced nuclear and related ventures. As a managing partner of Nuclearian Capital, I'm expanding my access and getting to dig even deeper into nuclear energy companies. We're working hard to select ventures with extraordinary promises success. They're building the advanced nuclear sector and helping expand our clean energy options. The best part is the fact that we're building a portfolio of ventures on behalf of investors like many of you. We don't just take funds from the large institutions with typically allocate to venture capital. 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