Mark Nelson, Managing Director Radiant Energy Group

There's a way and a way such a better way today Today, the major boys tell the world there's a better way Today there's a better way This is right, Adam's and it's time for another atomic show Today I have with me a delayed, much belated gas that should have invited him years ago But Mark Nelson, the Managing Director and Founder of Radiance Energy Group Welcome Mark Thanks, good to finally be on here, Rod, I thought you'd never ask Well, you know, sometimes we procrastinate, that's my modus operandi Mark, get calls a little bit about yourself I know many of the listeners of the atomic show have heard you numerous different venues, the decouple podcast, Titans is nuclear, a few other places But what is it? What makes Mark Nelson tick and why are you so adamant about what you do? Yeah, Rod, well, I'm from flyover country, so I'm from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma from a place without any nuclear energy My father worked his whole life in energy, but oil and gas My mom's worked her whole life in nuclear, but nuclear medicine And somehow neither of those fields meant anything or appealed to me at all I went to university for engineering and Russian language and literature Still completely confused about what I wanted to do in the world But I thought that at least I should have an engineering education to keep my options open And then only at the end of my time as an undergrad discovered because of a Gordon McDowell video Another old timer has been around in this movement as long as you I think, or nearly Gordon McDowell video on YouTube of a conference talk that he got the invite for Kirk Sornson to join up in Calgary This talk on nuclear energy and how we barely begun to scratch the surface of our potential Well, within a few minutes of starting that video, I knew I was going to do nuclear for the rest of my life Couldn't say how I knew it. I just knew I was going to be doing it And I was sitting on a scholarship to go to Cambridge University over in England And I just needed to choose and apply for one of the master's programs in engineering And Cambridge had just started under the legendary Tony Ralston Formerly head of Rolls Royce submarine reactors and before that the Duneray fast breeder reactor program up in Northern Scotland Tony Ralston had just started a master's in nuclear engineering program at Cambridge I got in went there the rest is as they say history We're very happy in a pro nuclear world that you saw that video I'm decided what you need to do with the rest of your life So why didn't you go into being a nuclear engineer instead became a nuclear advocate? Oh, it was a series of failures both mine and out there in the world So first of all, I thought I'd stay in academia and get a PhD And was working on what I thought was going to be helpful in modeling the flow of isotopes And a fuel cycle through mix of advanced reactors and thermal reactors And just I felt that nobody really needed this type of tracking least of all from a student who had never worked in industry and didn't know anything about it I went to the World Nuclear Association annual meeting which I think is a fantastic event And I'd recommend it to almost anyone I went in autumn of 2014 was one of only one or two students there out of 600 people And was shocked that the issues that mattered to the industry had almost no relationship to what I felt I was being using my time working on back in academia and that was both exciting and depressing I knew I needed to leave and go out into the world and I did I went out into the world in 2015 back from England to America in a time when The UK had not yet committed to building Hinckley Point C So the local nuclear company was not yet hiring much for that job At least of all, did they want foreigners who they would have to somehow get visas for? So I didn't stay in Britain, went back to America. In America, I arrived to see a nuclear landscape An absolute disarray even though I didn't really understand why this was the fracking boom that was driving down Average electricity prices and sending nuclear plants into going bust all over the US And then when in solar we're dropping rapidly in price it was a period of real euphoria We're first straight talents. We're going into wind and solar in a way that probably is not happening quite as much anymore Because it was the exciting hot new thing and the slump after Fukushima Daiichi in general sentiment towards nuclear Despite a long-term trend that's become more pro-nuclear that made a very rough couple of years 2011 and 12 and of course then in nuclear construction Problems very serious problems at Vogel in summer. We're becoming obvious and starting to dominate the previously positive stories of building up The first new reactors in America and a generation So all of these things crashed around to make a pretty rough environment to be a PhD dropout Suddenly arriving on the scene. So I attempted to go find jobs at the two local reactors in Ohio When I was living in Cleveland when I came back from the UK and I could barely get an email response from first energy It was it was pretty rough blow to my ego, I'll be honest and then I Just accidentally found myself spending more and more time trying to answer nagging questions about electricity Trying to figure out if you could account for the carbon An electricity in different countries when traded across grids I was wondering if we could actually see day-to-day or even hour-to-hour variations in the performance of grids And compare the nuclear heavy ones to the ones without nuclear with little bits of nuclear And that rod is where our lives crossed you and me Yeah, I think there was some sort of infamous graph or famous graph that you put together to compare The carbon intensity of the German grid with the carbon intensity of the French grid on a minute by minute or hour by hour basis Is that a number of Reverend properly? You're remembering correctly. So my master's project at nuclear engineering out of Cambridge was to check on the prospects of the IFR The prism sodium fast breeder pool type reactor metal fueled reactor that the US had been working on before it was cancelled in the 90s So I was investigating how that reactor would fare under the British regulatory system and that's when somebody very helpfully put me in a Google messages group An email group along with you and Jim Hansen and a bunch of other mortals you might say Steve Kirsch and Per Peterson and Stophank Vist and a bunch of bunch of figures that have gone on to do incredible things or already had at the time And I was in that group to get information and documents for my thesis but just stayed in it afterwards And so when I was unemployed and in Cleveland and starting to figure out these really fantastic ways exciting ways to measure to show people electricity And I started putting my early versions of my charts up on that Google group and that's where I think you started taking notice of me Yeah, I thought they were pretty cool and as I recall I maybe violated somebody's trust by sharing them with the world I didn't I maybe can put it too harshly but I remember I was preparing to go on a train journey across the US to because I had the time and the tickets were cheap I was just going to join my then girlfriend now wife she was auditioning at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music to for grad school she ended up getting in and that she was there when I was out there in San Francisco working in breakthrough and afterwards with Michael Schallenberg her but yeah, I remember standing in a store getting some snacks for my train journey and seeing a message come into that group saying sorry mark this has become my biggest tweet ever I put your graph on and people are really loving it. It's only been up for a few minutes. It's got 30 or 40 likes which remember Rod back in the day that was big numbers that was real numbers for us. Yeah, it was that was when we maybe were talking a little bit more to ourselves than we are today yeah, I think so well to your audience and what happened was broad atoms leaked my precious chart out onto the internet he put it on Twitter and it ended up going quite viral by the standard of the time. Eventually being tweeted out by Michael Schallenberg himself who was one of the largest energy Twitter accounts I think he may have had even a few thousand followers at the time. Yeah, he's probably got a few more than that now. Yeah, about almost 700,000 so at the time though that was one of his biggest tweets ever Michael Schallenberg's and he sent me an email and as along with a lot of other people I saw Meredith England I'd never heard of her and she sent me an email because you leaked that chart out. Rod and I had my email on it. I got a lot of really supportive messages from people around the world and I only realized that later when I met him all and was digging up old emails and clearing out inboxes and I found I found a bunch of these really lovely emails from people I'd never heard of before. And Schallenberg asked me like what I was doing for work and I admitted that although I was out of a job I just been accepted to go out to the Breakthrough Institute for for a summer fellowship, but then I'd love to meet him when I was out there. So, Rod you I'll tell you you you introduced me to the person that I that I built my career with it's important when you find somebody who can mess. And engineering knowledge with the ability to visualize data. And so many of us have a good handle on numbers but we're not so good at helping to communicate what those numbers mean to others. So, I appreciate what you've continued to do your emphasis and your efforts in the nuclear advocacy world have been remarkable, particularly since you figured out that having a trademark is a trademark features one way to communicate. So, Mark what's your trademark feature within the nuclear world? That's an interesting question. You know, I didn't I didn't jump on podcasts until August 2020 never been on one. If you I could understand why you wouldn't have asked me I'd literally never spoken on a podcast before. And it was Chris Kiefer forced me out of my silo. But even then I'd never really tweeted maybe one or two tweets while between the years of 2016 and and 2020 when I was working at environmental progress for progress with Michael Shellenberger but I didn't really speak my mind on Twitter either. I think that my trademark has become my Twitter account and my podcast. I direct people to the rating energy group consulting website from time to time and we've written some reports that I'm really proud of but I think that for better or worse it's the Twitter account with its harsh letter limit. I don't pay for Twitter blue yet so I can't write long tweets. I've had to boil down the pro nuclear argument and the issues with electricity markets and grids into tiny, pithy sound bites and that may never have had to happen before quite like it has to happen on Twitter. So I think I think my signature is going to be snappy tweets that are mean spirit against bad things but not mean spirit against people. It's just lots of bad things to be mean spirit against these days and sometimes I guess I lose some patience at times with people who don't seem to understand the importance of truth. Sometimes there's a little bit of a post-truth thing going on and they get offended if you take them to task or issue. in improper or incorrect statements. But that's in your notes. So what is going on in your world these days, you've been active in the whole world of nuclear? What's the biggest issues I know that you were very active in the effort, unfortunately, the failed effort to try to convince Germany to retain at least a few of its nuclear plants? It's not failed, Rod. It's not failed until they drill holes in those reactor vessels to sample the core steel for science. Until that happens, those plants can come back online. And the greens in Germany are showing very serious signs of weakness. And the obvious coalition partners who are currently out of government with either of the parties currently in government that are not the greens in Germany, they have stated that they would want nuclear, public opinion is for nuclear, until the reactors are permanently damaged, they can return to action. And I hope to visit one of these closed reactors in a few weeks. Do you know how many of the closed reactors have not yet passed that point of no return? So I try to catch up on the information as frequently as I can. As far as I know, no reactor vessels have been damaged beyond return of these six reactors that have been closed since December 31st, 2021. Of those six plants, one reactor at each, one massive productive reactor at each of these six plants scattered around the country, one plant has full permission to decommission anything they want and have decommissioned parts of the plant that would be more expensive with longer lead times to restore to action. That is Gundremigansi, a twin of Gundremigan B, which was already shut down in 2019, and therefore the permissions to start tearing apart the plant had already been given. Of the five remaining reactors, two shut in December 31st, 2021, and three shut down a few weeks ago on April 15, 2023. Well, of those reactors, as far as we know, none have been damaged beyond repair. Some haven't even received permission to start doing permanent decommissioning work. And at least one of them are odd. Still has fuel sufficient in radioactivity and activity, neutron activity, to restart the reactor without necessarily getting fresh fuel. It's because of a quirk and how the reloading cycles work when the reactor is shut off. So five can return to service within, what I've been told is that the limiting factor is not equipment or fuel. The limiting factor is retraining any new staff from those who would not return because they permanently retired. I've also been told that there's great enthusiasm for any attempt at restarting and that it would be possible to return workers to retrain new workers. Good. So tell me a little bit more about a similar situation or at least somewhat similar situation, closer to your current home. What's going on with power-stage? It's actually a similar structurally and physically. Nothing's been done to power-sades. It's worse in terms of staffing as far as I know. In other words, a lot more staff would have to be returned to the plant compared to in Germany. It's better in terms of finding staffing because there's a lot more active nuclear industry in the US. It's probably the same in terms of regulator willingness to return to action. The German regulators would no doubt love to have a return of this line of work to their portfolios, active nuclear plants. It's a great deal for regulators and I don't even say that in a bad way. And then in terms of likelihood of happening, I see it as a little bit more of a sure thing but not that much more of a sure thing than returning German plant's activities. But I appreciate the comparison. In terms of the amount of energy, there's no comparison. This is what a 700 megawatt plant over at power-sades compared to the German plants, which are nearly double that. Each reactor is about 1400 to 1500 megawatts. From my point of view, the big important thing about power-sades is precedent setting. Setting the precedent that it is in fact possible to return a nuclear plant to service in the US after having given up its upper in life. I could not agree more, Ron. I think you're absolutely on the money. The precedent setting matters. The idea that we do not scrap valuable equipment when that world still has energy needs that can be answered by it. You know, last autumn with Maddie, Hilie, and Alyssa Hayes and Paris wines, I traveled up north of Chicago where I live right along the coastline to the town of Zion, Illinois where 2.2 gigawatts, 2 large PWRs. Very young, only a few years into their working life, where decommissioned and stripped down to the soil, is a field of flowers right there on Lake Michigan that should be producing a massive amount of dirt-keep clean energy to this day. And instead, we paid to rip it out. Absolutely unacceptable. It can never happen again, in my opinion. It was shut down because the claim was made that Chicago had too much electricity already, so it didn't need any extra. And sure enough, electricity market prices and the recently created PJM and myso electricity markets were really low because there were so many nuclear plants built up under the old utility model. Nuclear plants successfully built successfully operating, employing people pumping out a huge amount of clean power because of the logic of the electricity market rules, it was suddenly deemed a waste of power and they were shut off. That's unfortunately the way things work in competitive markets. I'm aligned with Mayor DeVang with on this one. I don't think that electricity is a naturally competitive market. It's not a good product to let the market decide how to plan your system and to make sure that we have the lubrication that makes our society work without electricity, everything stops. Yeah, the people who came up with the electricity market idea had a fundamental misunderstanding about how electricity works physically. The engineering, they didn't know at all. They thought the long tail risk of there being mass power outages from just not having enough power plants, they thought that that just wouldn't happen. Or it could be something you priced into the moment to moment prices of auction electricity over a long period of time leading up to the crisis. It was completely preposterous. The hubris is just suffocating. As late as right before the Texas blackout, Texas was held up as an example of electricity markets working right. The professors with no engineering education who came up with the ideas for implementing electricity markets and electricity price auctions. They had theory, but they simply didn't understand electricity. Physically, they just didn't know. I think it'd be funny to ask some of the orgies of electricity markets what they know about reactive power and just watch them spin in the wind to try to answer that. Or I would love to ask them, maybe a few beers in if I could meet them. Why they thought major blackouts or major under investment would not happen. Especially under conditions of changing weather or climate change or just in general, weather has extreme properties. You have once in a century storms. You have once in a millennia heat waves. And if the claim is that we are wanting to reform electricity to allow a lot more green energy to be built to stop or stabilize a changing climate, then that should induce more caution, not less on our ability to predict exact peak amounts of electricity usage or strange weather patterns. In general, these electricity markets induced ultra short term thinking, shorter and shorter and shorter thinking, while not actually returning value to rate payers to electricity customers. Since it's in a lot of people point to the price history of electricity over say the past 12 or 14 years and say, look, prices have gone down. That must mean competitive electricity is working. Ignoring the fact that the biggest driver of that cost decrease or price decrease has been ultra low natural gas price. Right. And when the natural gas prices went back up, the theorist says, OK, now the market will choose to build a different set of power plants. But it doesn't work like that. That's not how it works. That's not how decision making works. It's not how the life cycle of this large capital equipment works. Once you build out natural gas and drive away other types of reliable electricity generation, it's what you're stuck with even in a period of ultra high natural gas prices. I tend to think that there were some people involved in the decision to restructure markets who knew exactly how electricity works and knew exactly how large equipment and infrastructure works and how you can build yourself into a corner to the point where the only choice you have is to burn more natural gas. Well, I doubt the theorists actually understood that because they're pretty thick. But the in-run folks that egged them on and helped support these market restructuring processes they sure knew. At this point, our conversation interrupted by an unstable connection. You might notice a disconnect between what we just said and what we're going to say. As a reminder, I'm speaking with Mark Nelson, managing director, radiant energy group. Well, one of the stories that really just sticks in my head and I think about it probably once a week broad is that when I went to a FERC meeting, so that's a federal energy regulatory commission, I went to a FERC meeting, almost an emergency meeting you could say in 2017, that was about states, states that were part of bigger electricity markets in acting at the state legislator level, policies that advantage one or more types of generation in ways that the market, the people who believed in the markets felt were unfair and that the actual interstate markets were under threat. So this is a, multiple states are joining together to make these markets. And if an individual state gives goodies to one type of generator, but not to another, that can distort the market. Now, I heard some interesting things from some New England ISO, so any ISO executives and I tracked them down on the hallway and I said, sir, you've got multiple nuclear plants closing, representing a fairly significant portion of the stable generation on your grid to say nothing of the stable low carbon generation. How are you okay with these nuclear plants closing? And this executive of New England ISO turns to me and says basically, well, we only use a three year look ahead period. So three years out, it's totally fine. And I said, but what about after three years? And he says three years is as far as we model and it's fine for three years. So what, Rod, that puts us through 2020, right? Well, suddenly they don't have enough power, but that was four years later, right? Four years and five years later, not three years. And then you ask yourself, why do you only use a three year look ahead period? Why? And then you think, well, that's suspiciously close to the amount of time required to stand up a gas turbine if you can get through the interconnection queue. But it's not enough time for a nuclear plant. And I think that if there's a look ahead period to figure out whether there's gonna be enough power in the future, it should take into account a longer view than three years because three years sneaks up on you real quick. It doesn't take longer three years to pass and particularly when you're looking at electric utility planning, it takes an awful long time to bring some of them. generators on even natural gas generation when you need to not only connect to the grid, but you need to connect to the pipeline system to be able to supply that generator. But let's go on from this U.S. focused look. You've been traveling a lot. We've talked a little bit about Germany. What's going on in, say, Belgium? Oh, raw Belgium is interesting. It's one of the unusual cases where I probably know more than I can say. But let me say this, negotiations between the government and the nuclear utility, which is owned by giant gas company, formerly called Gas de France, now it's called Inge Angie, which is a pun on nuclear or natural gas in G. Angie. So it means natural gas. So this big natural gas company owns the nuclear fleet in Belgium, which until at this time last year, Rod was 50% of Belgium's electricity. And they were under under the law, under current law, Angie was supposed to shut off 50% of Belgium's power supply in three years by the end of 2025. Is that not just suicidal? Anyway, the government, even though the energy minister is still a green party member, still was a, you know, worked at a firm that was referencing a gas prom in Belgium. She was still qualified to be an energy minister without energy background. Well, she saw the writing on the wall that her political career and the greens in general would be destroyed if they did not start negotiating with the nuclear company to try to save reactors. So even though they've shut down several perfectly fine, perfectly working reactors, they're going to try to negotiate to stop the bleeding and try to keep other nuclear plants open. So there's a bunch of parts of this negotiating like how long the plants are guaranteed to get permission to operate issues around cost sharing. Maybe even the government taking ownership shares in the nuclear plant have a little bit of skin in the game. But it's clear that Belgium is very serious about a nuclear turnaround. And we're just waiting. I don't know. Will it be in the next week? Will it be next month that we hear an announcement about a deal to save the remaining Belgium nuclear plants? One thing I didn't ask you when we were talking a little bit about Germany's plants. There are a couple of reactors that are right on the border between France and Germany happened to be on the front side of the border at Festernot, and I sat down what two or three years ago. Yeah, so President Macron could deliver on his campaign promise to just arbitrarily close some reactors. Yeah, are those reactors still recoverable? I hear I've asked French folks in the know and the answer I've gotten is fairly negative. I think a year ago they probably still could have been saved. It's still probably cheaper to find a way to restore those reactors somehow. Even if you use a pressure vessel from somewhere else, then it is to do almost any other way of getting low carbon firm energy. But yeah, Rod, I'm afraid these they've cut into the primary loops. When is France going to finish the recovering their excellent operational record? Let me correct their operational record is not amazing. They take months on outages that take between 18 and 20 days in other European countries in 12 to 13 days in America. So I think I think the French could do with a few info missions if you catch my drift, but I doubt they're going to, but it's probably going to take through four years to get through all their backlog of work. They've been hiring for years, batches of engineers who thought that to rise up in management, they had to be anti-nuclear. So that's going to take a few years to correct. Tough when your government tells you that you need to move from 75% nuclear down to 50% nuclear. And think about this, that because nuclear was the dominant power source, moving down percentages of nuclear has a devastating effect overall amount of power available. It's particularly as a devastating effect on the people that operate nuclear though. You've got to do a lot of cutting to reduce the head count down. So that makes for a very nasty environment. Well, they can even quite figure out a way to reduce the head count. Because after shutting the Fessenheim reactors, they didn't, I'm not sure they they had a plan in place for which reactors to close after that. Maybe they were going to go by age arbitrarily by age, even not even by performance just by age, but either way, they would have to keep many of these reactors in operation to meet peak demands, even though the average output was supposed to drop, meaning that the cost to run the nuclear fleet would be about the same, while they lost a third of the output. Is that not the most insane and dumb plan you've ever heard? You know, the French recently had a parliamentary inquiry where they sat down a few of these so-called energy ministers who were like, I don't know, TV nature presenters and just career politicians who slept with the right person at the right time. That kind of folk was who was in charge of energy in France. They sat them down and they said, how did you pick this 50% target? And these so-called energy ministers basically said, we don't know, it was just a nice number. In many ways what France was doing was very similar to what Germany said they were doing, which was to make room for new renewables. They knew the grid had plenty of supply and the only way to bring on new supply was to get rid of some of the old supply. Rod, one of the coolest things you hear in France and Germany is people saying that nuclear clogged the lines by making constant power and those lines need to be available sitting empty ready to receive sudden bursts of renewable power. Which shows a complete misunderstanding of grid economics, electricity system economics. It's just astonishing to hear some of these, I hate to say it, but real lightweight involved in energy policy and energy leadership in Europe. I think they're going to have a really bad time coming and it's because they had absolute disrespect towards an understanding of energy and they put ideologues without technical educations in charge and they're going to pay the price. And maybe they just put renewable energy salespeople in charge. But you repeat my point, you repeat my point. I know that you've been you've been the cop right? I have twice now and I'm looking forward to going back to a third time. I absolutely love these climate conferences, even though I know a number of people, both climate scientists and energy experts who think that's the waste of time. Well, I'm excited about COP 28, partly because of the venue and what I understand about what the host country wants to do. Well, you're right on that. So it'll be in what's starting to be winter time, which means that heating demands will be dropping, especially at nighttime with hopefully four units of Barack on, that venue may be powered by the evenings by almost totally nuclear electricity. And unlike France, where we're hosted the Paris Cup, it appears to me that the UAE is going to be very proudly touting its clean electricity supply and its ability to harness this wonderful power source. No joke. I met the minister in charge of France's Paris Accord conference, the Paris Climate Talks and France's national presentations at other COPs. And I met him in Paris in 2017 and I tried to convince him to stand up for a Fessanheim and not close it. And I said it could power a few million electric vehicles. And the minister and France responsible for the climate conference said, oh, that's transportation policy. You'll have to talk to them. Yeah, you know, sometimes people talk about things that aren't in their swim lane or that's not in my job. If you're decarbonizing France and electric cars rely on grid electricity, it's in your lane to not shut off nuclear plants that can power future electric cars. Oh, I agree with you, but that's not the way government ministers think they have a certain portfolio and things that are outside of their portfolio. And I said, it's like this certain agency in the US that has the responsibility to protect the health and safety of the American environment and the American public. And they don't seem to think that coal is a worse and less healthy source of power than clean nuclear. In other words, they don't care about closing or forcing nuclear to be too expensive to compete with coal. Well, I'd like to think it's starting to turn around. I don't think we're going to lose future reactors in the US. I really don't think so. I think that the development of an international gas market, whatever that means, good or bad for other countries or for our country or for the price of gas in America, I think it will help protect nuclear plants in the US. In other words, if gas gets too cheap, we're going to be able to have outlet valves to send it overseas. That's true. Of course, this year, many people don't realize how US gas prices have were suppressed by the fire that took place in the free port natural gas export terminal would be exported about three BCF per day and instead exported nothing. Right. And the fact that we haven't heard any announcements of nuclear plants needing to close because of low prices, hopefully tells me that people understand that that was a temporary blip. Yep, it was. And the natural gas business or natural gas investors are trying to be a little more disciplined in their investments. And perhaps not taking so much gas out of the ground all at once it is suppressed as a market. They weren't happy with prices down in the $2 per million BTU range. So they're going to want to have better prices. And once they get into the $4 and $5 nuclear is in the money and actually nuclear can compete with lower prices. It's just that we can't make enough money to pay the overhead over the course of the year. We can sell it whatever price needs to be sold. But it's not good for overall revenues to do that. Right. Tell me, what else, where else have you spent a lot of time in Europe? If you've done a traveling to Asia? A little bit. So last year I went to Philippines for the first time, which was fascinating. Saw a brilliant Westinghouse nuclear plant built the highest standards that's just been sitting waiting to open since 1984. So that was a powerful experience because this was a Westinghouse 600 megawatt 2-loop plant where the reactor vessel was forged in Pennsylvania with facilities. We don't even have anymore. Yeah, that was built under the Ferdinand Marcos era. And then it did get to the point of completing the plant. Did they ever get an operating license? I don't remember. So they had operators trained. They had the IAEA certification that they were ready to roll. They had the first load of fuel on site. So it was one step before where nuclear plant and long island got where they actually loaded the fuel. So they were ready. They were ready to roll. And I think what happened is Westinghouse got caught up in the politics of the U.S. wanting to force out Marcos. And therefore he might be harder to dislodge if the nuclear plant were on. And since then, the plant has just been sitting there. Yeah, I've heard a lot about that from Twitter, a guy named Mark Kanjanko. Mark Kanjanko, who's been an absolute legend in fighting for that plant to come back a long line for decades now. Yeah, he's a legislator, part of the body there and representative. And he keeps trying to convince people that they have a wonderful nuclear plant and he's starting. Of course, they shouldn't stop there. It's got a lot of our needs that could be supplied by clean nuclear power. Absolutely. So in addition to the Philippines, I've made a number of trips to Japan. And I'm excited to hear about progress there and looking forward to my next visit, hopefully sometime this year, where the public keeps voting in the most pro-nuclear parties and pro-nuclear politicians in the pro-nuclear parties possible. That doesn't mean that they're making as fast a progress as they want with local politicians who only have their leverage, have their power over the central government by denying the ability of plants to start. But I think that there's a general understanding in Japan that there's bigger dangers out there in the world than whatever happened at Fukushima Daiichi, and it's time to get splitting again. Yes. Well, they have nine or 10 plants operating now and they want to start up another 10 or 12. Is it not just that they want to complete construction on the ABRs under construction and they would like to start new plants. And recently, the Japanese economics minister, or the economics ministry sent trade and boys to Europe to meet with multiple governments and to advocate for using Japanese nuclear companies and Japanese nuclear companies. And Japanese nuclear parts in their economy. Yeah, one of the projects in Japan that I've been fascinated with for many years is their HTTR program. Their high temperature gas reactor. High temperature test reactor, I guess what it's called. They've got a reactor that's been operating for almost 30 years and is producing temperatures in the range of 950 degrees Celsius from a trisobased core. That's pretty incredible temperatures and makes it really interesting for industrial uses and my old favorite, the inlet temperature of a gas turbine at 950C is a very nice. efficient place to be right and it's just an engineering test reactor. It's not it's not a power reactor like a few companies or countries that attempted to run and that China currently runs. But yeah, Japan really does need industrial heat. They import just about every single gram of fuel that they need in their country. And any industrial heat that can be displaced by nuclear will have a dramatic effect on reducing import dependence. Yeah, and it has been a test reactor for a long time and not a terrible amount of commercial interest. But up until the last couple of years, last year, so they've really started to talk about this capability they have and the fuel capabilities they have and they're partnering with some other folks that interested in high temperature reactors, including in the UK and in the US. So that's something else I'm kind of keeping an eye on. Well, I think what we're hearing from Japan though is they're returned to nuclear and several countries in Europe becoming interested in nuclear despite either never having built reactors or having phased out reactors like did market Italy, we heard about efforts and parliament both parliaments today. There's opening the nuclear question for the first time and very long time. I think in general what we're saying is Germany turning off its reactors doesn't even assure that those reactors won't come back on in Germany, but it has a galvanizing effect outside of Germany when before they close, maybe it's a good thing. Maybe it'll work out of Germany close its reactors. Who knows, right? As soon as the reactors close, coal fills the gap, gas fills the gap, the wind doesn't increase, the solar doesn't increase. There's just as much congestion as before. People don't feel any better. The Green Party is split by internal dissension and by by a lack of purpose. It's clear that Germany closing its three reactors in April is going to have a positive nuclear effect as weird and as ironic as that is to think about. And I'm convinced and I'm going to spend all of July in Germany talking to people and understanding what the situation is on the ground. I'm convinced that at least one of those reactors that was closed in Germany were going to find ways to save. Well, that's good. Of course, an orphan is never a key thing to keep around for a long time. But they have to keep them around anyway, Rod. There's very severe, very strict laws on staffing at nuclear plants until very deep into decommissioning process. What is your vision for the nuclear enterprise, say in by 2030? What do you expect to be happening in the U.S. and then around the world? So, 2030 is an interesting date because people keep tossing around that chart from the IPCC climate report that shows that by 2030 renewables will happen to the heavy lifting. Of course, it's 2023 now or halfway through 2023 and that's not enough time to stand up an entire nuclear program from scratch. But my vision for 2030 is that the countries that got out of nuclear are having a severe brain drain and a deindustrialization, the countries that got into nuclear, especially those that are hydrocarbon producers that get into nuclear. So, like the United Arab Emirates, which has hydrocarbons and yet still is built a nuclear program, those countries year after year will keep performing at a higher level, collecting more wealth, having more financial capabilities, having more technical capabilities, and they're going to spread a pro-nuclear outlook. They're going to spread nuclear financing and nuclear support and consulting abilities to parts of the world that want nuclear and don't have it yet. That's what I see, Rod. How many of these demonstration reactors that are being planned for starting sometime before 2030 will be starting operating in North America? Well, I think that the Darlington build, I have to hope that the Darlington build is going to attract the absolute best and brightest. That's Canada's attempt to build BWR 300 megawatt boiling water reactors. So that I have a lot of hope for a little bit less hope for new scale, a little bit less hope for terra power. I think they've already announced it's a lay. I don't believe it's because of the fuel actually. I think it's actually because of it's just don't have enough time to get it ready. I think one or more micro-reactor companies are going to have demonstrations. I think that clean-court thorium energy is going to be able to get their first commercial bundles into reactors long before 2030. So that'll make can do a very compelling option for countries in the future. That's the Canadian heavy water reactors that can run off of all sorts of fuel cycles. And Thorium Halo is going to be a great blend for those, I think. I think that various defense, Department of Defense in America projects and Department of Energy projects are going to get off the ground fast. That I'm not saying the NRC is world's worst enemy of nuclear, but just things might be faster moving around them. I think we're going to have our first indications of success for nuclear reactors on commercial cargo ships. I'm really excited about that. I think that Russia, regardless of what happens in its disastrous war with Ukraine is going to keep building reactors around the world. On the schedules and contracts they say they are the most experienced exporter of reactors in the world and they're going to keep building. What else? I think that pretty much covers it. South Korea is going to get back in the game and export to some more countries. Yes, but they need to work out their differences with Westinghouse. That is a big nasty entanglement and I'm hoping both sides come to a quality conclusion as soon as possible. Coming back to Westinghouse, a recently made a very interesting announcement, at least interesting from my point of view, that they're going to market what's essentially half of the equipment of a AP-1000. But producing about one quarter of the amount of power than an AP-1000 does. They say they want to use identical equipment. That means to me that means the same steam generator, the same reactor coolant pumps, but only have one loop. If you take any looks at that. I did and I'm still a general. I'm still figuring out what I think about that, but I think that it's important for Westinghouse to have an offering at that size range. My feeling has always been to need a full range of products, need a full catalog to be able to meet the needs of your customers. And knowing what I know about the difficulty of developing a brand new pump, even though it was an evolution, but a pump that was ten times as big as the previous generation or previous iteration is not easy. And once you get it all figured out and you get the manufacturing capability, the price of those were the cost of those pumps, at least, is going to decrease with everyone that gets ordered. I think that's right. And that's why I'm excited by even if the smaller reactors have a permanently higher cost per megawatt hour in the long run, it's the variance in getting them constructed that really deserves to be. All right, Rod, I probably have to head out after this. All right, we can do that. We can give you, I'll give you like five minutes or three minutes or two minutes for a conclusion. All right, all right. Bring us on, Mark. Rod, it has been amazing to watch the global turnaround in public opinion. People have been releasing polls showing a remarkable reconsideration of nuclear energy by publics around the world. And I just need to make this moment about you. I've been right for an extremely long time. You have been on this topic for an extremely long time. Your integrity, your curiosity, and your outstanding background as an officer for the US nuclear Navy all came together so much earlier than so many of us who came after you. We've relied on your riding. We've relied on your reporting and your podcasts and your Twitter presence to build a global nuclear movement. That I think is causing a much faster reappraisal by the public and by political leaders than would have happened to otherwise. I just have to say thank you. You made this possible. About the only hand I'd say that is all shocks. Thank you very much, Mark. I appreciate it. And it has been a long time, but I'm feeling really good about what's going on in the future. So thank you for the effort you have. I'm so glad that there are young people that are taking over. Thank you very much and thanks for having me on. See you soon. That was Mark Nelson and this was Atomic Show number 307. This episode of the Atomic Show was brought to you by Nucleation Capital. 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