Dr. Kathryn Huff, former Assistant Secretary of Energy for Nuclear Energy

There's a way, a way such a better way today, today. A major voice, tell the world there's a better way, today there's a better way. This is Rod Adams and it's time for another Atomic Show. Today my guest is Dr. Catherine Kady Huff. He was the Assistant Secretary of Energy for Nuclear Energy. But before that, she was an academic professor at the University of Illinois. And she's back to that esteemed title now and I'm working with students. He's an Associate Professor and is going to be talking with us about her time at DOE. And also we're going to talk about the series of executive orders that have been recently issued that relate to energy and nuclear energy. Welcome, Kady, how are you? Oh, I'm great. Yeah, thanks for having me, Rod. I think you came on the podcast several years ago now talking about the Micro Reactor Project that you are using. Remember that? Yeah, that's right. What an exciting idea that is. And it's currently being led by Kayla Brooks, another Associate Professor here in the Nuclear Plasma and Radiological Engineering Department. And it still has pretty solid support right here in the region. That's good. And I know that the project probably went through a little bit of uncertainty. Was the demise of USNC, but I believe that the project has been taken up by the company that purchased the intellectual property and designs from the USNC. It's called NANO Nuclear is that correct? Yeah, that's my understanding. I think it's probably worth a whole episode of its own. You could talk to Kayla. I'll talk to you a little about that. I thought I should have put you on the spot, but I think it's one of the quick status that project is still going forward. For the listeners, the idea here is to build an advanced reactor. They can serve both research interests, but also some of the electricity and heat demands of a campus. Demonstrate that capability. Some of the most prevalent places that have district heating systems in the US are on the college campus. That's right. Yeah. And they preserve, you know, sort of human life through the winter months here in Illinois, making sure those steam tunnels are full of steam. So it's important stuff. Yeah, sure is now where I went to school, the steam tunnels were also a way to sneak out of the dorms and get into town, but that's you did here. Of course, we only did that during the spring and fall. It seems smart. All right. So, Kayla, what was it like to go from being a professor and dealing with students every day to go into Washington? Almost Mrs. Fes goes to Washington. That's right. Yeah. I mean, it was it was pretty jarring and different in a lot of ways, but in some ways it was very similar, right? Instead of engaging curious undergraduates and trying to fill in the gaps where their knowledge, you know, is lacking, I was engaging Congress and folks at the agencies and whatnot. All on the same sort of topic, right? The importance of nuclear energy, how it works with the promises, et cetera. You know, I think I had a lot of things to learn. I think, for example, the most challenging was to sort of fully get my arms around the federal budget process and the role of the Office of Management and Budget. And, you know, what's an appropriation versus an authorization, all of those things that sort of determine how Congress wields the power of the purse. It's a little more complicated than just that, you know, how a lot, how Bill becomes a law song. Well, one of the things that many people don't understand about the federal budget processes, the drum beat and the fact that you're often working on three budgets at one time. You're going to budget. You're executing. You're planning the next year's budget. Then you're really planning the year ahead of that. That is exactly right. Yeah. You're you're in the process of executing a budget that you started planning three years ago, pretty much at all times. Yeah. So things that change in reality take a while to change into the budget. There's a delay there that is often frustrating for those of us and probably frustrated for those inside the, by the way, as well. But at least they understand what's happening. Yeah. And I think, you know, there is some comfort in knowing that that kind of process moves deliberately rather than sort of a move fast and break things sort of approach. I think a sort of deliberative approach is definitely more appropriate for a federal government. Well, that was an absolute absolute statement. Yeah. Yeah. I think we are looking at a period maybe where yeah, some of that startup culture could be, you know, trying its hand at federal management and you know, without getting into all of my own personal politics. I will say it's it's definitely not the way the institutions in Congress and the sort of process of the congressional budget process have historically worked. No, I think it's supposed to move slow at least there are those who have said the founders and the drafters of the Constitution decided to move slowly by having the balance of powers and the separation powers, but that's needed. Tell me what was the most interesting part of your job as the Secretary of Energy. Did you like it when people came to this draw office? I did love to sort of talk to people who visited the office. My favorite people to talk to, of course, was when students would come to visit like the nuclear engineering student delegation or, you know, we had some scouts come to visit the 4H Club of, you know, they all came to visit. They were very cool experiences to sort of have students in the office in that context. It was really refreshing and of course I had missed that, but I think that maybe the most interesting part for me was when I got to leave the building and go see the amazing things that we're doing across the country, especially at the national labs. You know, that position really enabled me to go and visit some of the places where the US taxpayer dollar is being spent on real nuclear energy innovation. And it is really impressive stuff, whether it's at the national laboratories or at some of our awardees, you know, in the advanced reactor demonstration program across the universities where test reactors are being used to really good effect in the research and test reactor program. All of those visits I learned something and I really feel like it was such a gift to be able to go and on the ground see the technology and action, see where people were innovating. I saw some amazing stuff domestically, but also abroad I got to visit some really cool facilities internationally too. What kind of facilities do you visit internationally? It sounds like it could tell me to be a real interest. Yeah, I got to see Chernavoda, the Romanian nuclear power plant, for example, where they intend to build SMRs but have existing reactors operating is a real glimpse into what, you know, what the nuclear power structure looks like in Romania where they had really big ambitions and sort of paused the completion of those plants halfway through. So they completed a couple of them, but there was more ambition in the initial plan for those reactors. And so there were some empty reactor buildings, for example, there at Chernavoda that was kind of cool to see Romania kind of restarting some of that enthusiasm. I saw I went to LaHogg to the reprocessing facility as a guest for Rano and of course that was really life changing as a person who's interested in advanced fuel cycles. Similarly, I visited Rokasho in Japan and a handful of other places spring fields, the facility in the UK, the National Nuclear Laboratory hosted me. They are in the UK, really some amazing stuff and of course our French counterparts, you know, hosted me at various facilities and national laboratories while I was in that job. Your academic research interest is the fuel cycle, right? That's right. Yeah, I do modeling and simulation of both advanced reactors and their fuel cycles with a lot of emphasis on how they work together. Right. How certain advanced reactors might behave in the context of trying to improve fuel utilization, but I also have a sort of specific interest in the advanced reactor multi physics area with regard to the reactor kinetics and dynamics, I'm particularly interested in incorporating computationally, delay neutron precursors and time dependence into our standard models. And so I do oversee a group that largely writes software for nuclear energy, whether it's software for modeling the fuel cycle, recycling strategies, transitions to new energy types, or the sort of core multi physics, the neutronics and thermodynamics in the reactor. I'm certainly no expert in this field, but it would seem to me that there'd be some really interesting modeling and simulation necessary for molten salt reactors, particularly those molten salt reactors that are operating in a fast spectrum and trying to do breeding or those that are using alternative fuels like thorium. It just, it seems like that is going to be a completely different animal than the solid cores that we're used to dealing with. That's absolutely right. Mobile fuels introduce an interesting kinetics dynamics problem where the, you know, the first fish, the vision in a reactor produces prompt neutrons in the first sort of 10 to the negative 14 seconds, but then a little while later, some of those vision products, delayed neutron precursors, are a precursor to, you guessed it, a delayed neutron, which affect the neutron balance in the reactor. In a reactor where the fuel doesn't move around, those delayed neutrons are emitted inside the reactor core. If the, if the fuel is moving, then a fraction of those delayed neutrons, which again contribute to the neutron balance in the reactor core, might be emitted in the heat exchanger, or, you know, outside of the core. If you're repossessing the fuel like you might do in a molten salt breeder reactor, then it could happen in the, you know, smartger. And so we have a tool called mulchres that we have contributed to the moose ecosystem of multi physics tools that specifically designed to address that delayed neutron precursor movement inside mobile fuel reactors. So yeah, you're absolutely right. And it's a really open area of research. Just delayed neutrons, it seemed to me, I remember there was being extremely important to just the ability to control a vision reactor, because if, if all the neutrons came out at the very beginning of that, 10 to the minus 14 seconds, the response times for things would be way outside of human or even automatic control. That's right. I've always been a fan of delayed neutrons. And part of the thing that makes me always look at the magic of vision as being something that was kind of by design. Yeah. I think, I think that's true. You know, it's a great gift from the universe that we have, you know, a few of these delayed neutron precursors that have a half life, you know, like bromine 87. I think its half life is almost a minute. Right. Without bromine 87 sort of dragging that average, you know, neutron lifetime out into, you know, human time scales, we would be lost, as you say, controlling reactors. And so what a great gift that we have those delayed neutrons. Yeah. Also just a gift that we have just the right number of neutrons. coming out of each vision. We can sustain the vision reaction, lose a few, and maybe use a few to use part of it to build some more fuel. Just the right number of neutrals coming out from most of the thizile materials. That's right. Yeah, I'm not a very mystical person. I don't really have a God. I'm sort of an atheist, but I do feel that we're very lucky in all of that. The God I'm talking about is that universe happens to be there. That's right. That's right. So now as you do all this, the traveling around the country, did you ever get the sense of nuclear technology is really spread out. Unlike, say, the tech world of Silicon Valley, where everything seems to happen in just a very small area. You've never realized just how many places it dates and localities have a nuclear presence. And it occurred to me while I was, I said this often to the staff in any that I think one thing that the communications team, which the nuclear energy office communications team is like the most amazing team, they are just profoundly effective at communicating ideas in nuclear energy. I used to suggest to them that we should have a passport that has, you could get stamps from all of the reactors in the country, or all the research reactors, or maybe all this sort of cool nuclear facilities and sites. Yeah, it occurred to me many times that gosh, how fun it would be to collect stamps. Like I've been to X number of the 90 reactors, 94 reactors in the United States. And I have a stamp from each one. I think that would be really fun. Yeah. Did you get to visit many commercial reactors? I did. I got to visit a few. Yeah, like Perry Island, for example, was one of my favorites because they have a very close relationship with the Perry Island Indian community right next to them. So that was an extremely interesting visit. Yeah, I visited a handful and everyone was so, so nice to show me around and I had a great time. Did any of your work get involved with some of the community interactions for things like interim storage facilities, those kinds of things? Yeah, we were really committed to restarting that consent based siting process and in some of the information webinars and things like that. I had the opportunity to sort of share the big picture. We routinely talked about these topics in the nuclear energy advisory committee meetings and sometimes had some public comments in that context. But yeah, I also sort of communicated about it pretty much every time we went anywhere. I had a specific engagement. You know, we would occasionally go specific places to sort of go visit reactors that had like particular interest in this context. So I think we visited Connecticut for this reason, you know, with, you know, political folks from that vicinity and had like a kind of town hall discussion. They're at their interim storage facility. This wasn't uncommon, you know, that some folks like, you know, Congressman Levin, for example, was extremely interested in seeing progress on consent based siting. And so I visited him at San and O'Fray where we sort of took a look at their interim storage facility there and the sort of preceding decommissioning of songs. And it was the entire topic of that kind of trip and engagement was sort of communicating with the congressman and his constituents and the various boards that were had concerned about where this Benfield would eventually go. And I presume that some of those very concerned communities are those with the orphan sites where they only think left on this site is the issue, the interim spent fuel storage facility. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. I mean, up there, the Indians have been compliant or the Indian Native American tribe has been complaining about the proximity of their reservation to the storage facility. And I think at one point, they almost tried to shut down the plant because the plant was running out of based in its cooling ponds and needed to build a storage facility. And the tribe said, no, you can't. Unless you promised to not build any more nuclear plants in the state of Wisconsin. Yeah, they had a very, you know, I think robust understanding of like what was going on nationally. They have representation, the period island Indian community. They have representation on the tribal boards in DOE that helped to advise nuclear energy and radiological transportation movement. You know, I thought it was very impressive the engagement that they were committed to. And at the time that we were talking, they were more supportive of the relationship and the ongoing relationship with the plant. And perhaps they had had in the previous times, but of course they still maintained significant concerns because yeah, they share a fence line with the plant. When you're talking about the interspend fuel storage and DOE's effort to side of the facility. I've had a question. Hopefully you can answer it. Maybe you can't. But why is it that you never hear anything about the privately developed interspend fuel storage facilities. From DOE, they don't recognize that those have been developed. Yeah, in part, I mean, there are a lot of reasons for that, but in part, you know, it's not necessarily a solution to the problem of the standard contract and the liability between the US government and the utilities that paid the waste fee. By having a private entity, like collecting that spent fuel into a consolidated location, it doesn't reduce the liability to the US government who eventually still must take title to it. DOE didn't spur those private companies to engage in this process and they aren't responsible as a contract or anything to DOE. Now, Holtec was a member of one of these consent-based setting consortia that were awarded. And so there's no sort of, DOE isn't ignoring the fact that they exist, but ultimately the judgment fees that are levied against the Department of Energy and therefore the taxpayer because DOE has not yet taken title to the fuel would continue to be levied against the DOE, even if these private fuel storage facilities were created, they don't sort of solve the problem for DOE, which is that it is DOE's responsibility to take title to the fuel. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. It seems to me that contract surely that could be, you've got a contractual problem. There is a standard contract that the DOE or this whoever it was, 1983 was mostly essentially forced the utilities to time for them to be the monopoly supplier of spent fuel services. It seems like they could just say, okay, you guys had just a release, we'll write you a contract and then we'll take title and then it's on your facility and contract your own facilities or government-owned contract or offer is all kinds of different modes out there. That's true. My understanding of the way that the private companies would like to run those facilities is not that though. They would like to sort of collect the judgment fund and run those facilities. So I mean, I don't want to get into all these contracts too much. It's a little bit wonky in terms of, but I think it is ultimately the DOE's responsibility to create such a facility. And of course, it would make perfect sense for the entities capable of building such an interim storage facility to be involved. And so it's no surprise that, like, for example, Holtec is part of that consent-based setting consortium. Because I think there is some recognition that eventually maybe it would go forth. But as you know, there's some issue that's been raised because there's questions that Texas had. And it's gone up before the Supreme Court. I'm no lawyer, but I expect that NRC's assessment probably will win out. But with the DOE, we're the requester of that license. I think that concern might not be the... And I might not have gone quite that way. Because then you would be following this consent-based process and you wouldn't have... Ideally, the consent-based process gets out ahead of that state-level concern that drove that Supreme Court case. Yeah. I agree. I also just wish somehow people would start to realize that the reason that we haven't solved this problem is because there's no real urgency. Because everything's being done safely and there's no real physical deadline out there. And that thing's going to happen in the next 10, 20, 50-100 years. If we don't do anything, as long as you keep doing the same thing we're doing now. But yeah, we do have this every time I read something about new states considering nuclear or new communities, there's always something in the article about the opposition raising the fact that we don't know what to do with the way so. I still believe it's sort of like going to the restaurant roads of particular community with a big family and saying, where are we going to eat? It may take a while for this. I'll be to decide. I think that is the urgency, right, is that people need to feel this confidence that the energy system that they're entering into is sustainable in some way. And I think if we can sort of give folks confidence that a plan for final destination of the spent fuel is sort of on its way. And that adminomum we're making plans for an interim storage facility, then there is something to point to as advanced reactor companies begin deploying and that should make the road a little easier for them. I hope. We all hope, of course, I also like the technology of taking advantage of the oil and gas industries ability to put things very deep underground. I didn't back out if you want to believe my new rad if you want to and they'll stay there in the words I like that deep borehole, particularly when you put a horizontal component to it. That technology is fascinating. We are promising. Now, there have been several executive orders if you didn't last two months talking about energy. I think it'd be worthwhile now that I have an energy policy or expert, at least one who is a policy expert in the previous administration. They talk about some of these. I'd like to start off with what is this idea about energy dominance. Don't we have a great energy system here in the US already? I think so. And I think, you know, some of these words when you kind of come at them politically hold a whole bunch of other meaning. And I think when we talk about energy dominance, it's sort of a call to folks who are more concerned maybe about the broader international competition and potential energy security. And so I think that's how some of those words seem to be being used in these executive orders. You know, they're not using generally speaking most of these executive orders are not using sort of plain legal language. They tend to use words like, general energy emergency, emergency, domination. This is taking an adjective and pulling it all the way up to the max for who knows why. But I think in this case, it's kind of about an international conflict that isn't totally obvious to me because I think fundamentally the most important sort of fundamental issue is that we be energy secure. Yeah. Yeah. And part of being energy secure is being able to cooperate with friends, like neighbors. Anyway, that's just my, my ability. Completely agree. I think a council that will help the United States to somehow determine how to dominate our own energy could just as easily be called, you know, the national energy security council. But an energy dominance council does make, does imply that there's a sort of interest in somehow dominating something other than our own energy grid. Now, the term emergency though does carry with it some real important legal inspiration. That's right. I think the hope and I'm no lawyer. But I think the hope is that you can become, you can give presidential access to certain emergency funds that way and specifically calls out the new clear, sorry, the national emergencies act with the idea of being that, you know, there's a threat to energy because the prices are high, I think because the nation doesn't insulate itself from hostility abroad. These are all words from that, EO, not my personal opinion. But the issue being, you know, this is therefore an emergency and so using lawful emergency authorities available to the agencies would be the sort of defense production act and things like that to achieve whatever the goals of the EOR. Yeah, and there's another aspect to the emergency declaration in that I think that there's acceleration capabilities for permitting, for addressing NEPA, we're using the Army Corps of Engineers capabilities for addressing the endangered species act, all of these different areas, I think that there's certain amount of flexibility given in case of emergency. And yeah, there are still considerations given to those but less ability to stop things simply by calling out of a certain type of threatened species or something like that. So I think that maybe also part of what's happened with this. And I think because a lot of this has to do with unleashing specifically oil production and refining and, you know, whatnot, that this does start to touch on areas where we have seen major environmental issues in that field. And so the notion that you should be waving it without review or sort of applying emergency, you know, waivers and whatnot, it makes one worry that we might become quite vulnerable to real environmental disasters with regard, especially to sort of oil and refining and things like that. Now uranium is on that list, which is extremely interesting. You know, it's various critical minerals, you know, but also, I mean, it starts with crude oil, natural gas, et cetera, and refined petroleum products and coal. And but uranium is on that list, which is very interesting. Now I don't think it gets you past then RC with regard to uranium impacts. I think it would, you know, it doesn't really sort of talk about the nuclear regulatory commission. But that's maybe where they, you know, really, I don't think there's a, a lot of new uranium mines that people are trying to deploy anyway. Well, we'll put a pin in that come back to one other thing that is preparing for just knowing that we're going to talk about some of these borders. I carefully reread some. And one of the interesting parts about uranium in there is that the definition of refining includes enrichment. Yeah. So it does have an impact of the enrichment issues that have been talked about quite intensively regarding nuclear. Where Russia really didn't have that biggest impact on our raw uranium supply, they were a huge portion of our enriched uranium supply. That's right. 20% right up to the limit of the Russia suspension agreement. And, and yeah, I, if I thought that the, you know, permitting and wildlife protections were somehow in the way of building enrichment facilities, then, you know, maybe I could see a reason to consider a policy like this. But I just, I don't think that's the longest poll in the tent for enrichers. I think a lot of it is merely sort of the capital cost, development of centrifuges, deployment of those centrifuges and other nuclear safety regulations that will go alongside and take about the same time, probably as those environmental assessments. And I don't think we should be skipping those. And so while maybe there's an opportunity to reduce the environmental impact statement links in the sort of, in the manner that's proposed by the advanced act, I don't, I don't see a reason to get rid of them all together regardless of the emergency that uranium supply kind of presents. It's a very slow moving emergency. Yeah, I agree with you, especially with regard to enriching because all of those things you talked about are parts of the length of time, it takes to do something. But that's kind of a fixed period of time. The period of time that isn't fixed is when you hit zero. In other words, all of those things happen after the final investment decision gets made and then you go forward and it takes, I don't know, five, seven years or whatever. But it can take an incident period of time and we get to time zero when the investment decision gets made. And we're already kind of seeing what that happens. I started writing about the need for halo in 2015. That's right. And if we somehow got to do an investment decision by 2017, we'd have the, have gone through all that lengthy process and we'd be deploying new enriched uranium in the US today. And right now, you know, centrist is still is the only one. It's that pilot facility that's DOE supported. And I think it's capacity is 900 kilograms here, which is not enough. Yeah, it's less than the ton. Yeah. But again, part of the, when I was talking about that, the reason we don't get to that investment decision is that the enrichers haven't found anybody. This is we will order whatever number of pounds they need to be able to sell before they start building. I hate to market. They need somebody to say, we're gonna buy that stuff. And of course part of it was the effort to say, okay, we're gonna permanently or at least as permanently as you can in politics. Keep rushing uranium from coming back into the market. Because without that, the enrichers legitimately said, what's been all this money put us all this capital into building this new capacity? And as soon as the Russians are allowed back in the market, they'll be able to undercut us in price. Yeah. And then where's our investment? And that's why DOE sort of unleashed this uranium strategy and released this RFP with, you know, $3.4 billion to spend to sort of buy uranium. The idea being, you know, we wanted to make sure that there was a buyer. Do we can't fully bankroll the entire market? But there is an opportunity to sort of put forth kind of contracts that could set the bottom wrong for the price of uranium and enable some of those investments to move forward. That request for proposals was released in June. And I think, you know, the sort of first certifications were, I think, released in the January timeframe. I'm not sure exactly the timeline. I stopped being constant attention. But, you know, the idea was that release of all those dollars should spur the enrichers to start building, even if they don't have commercial entities willing to buy it. And if there's enough commercial entities willing to buy it by the time they've finished building, then DOE doesn't have to buy it at all. But DOE will have written contracts promising to buy it if no one else will. Because DOE has uses for uranium as well, right? DOE supplies fuel for the research reactors. DOE has to have a level of kind of, and rich uranium supply for low-end rich uranium. This is the American assured fuel supply to sort of support our allies in the event of a disruption in the uranium market abroad and domestically. And so, DOE has a reason to have uranium and so promise to buy it. And so my hope is to see that turn into like, fuel announcements of major expansions of existing rich-in-facilities. I think we're seeing the start of that, but I would have liked to see it a little quicker. Speaking of quicker, I don't want to put you on the spot because you and I are old friends and I respect, did it take, it seemed to have taken a very long time from the time that Congress said they were going to appropriate just money and the RFP to be released. Yeah. Help me understand why I was too impatient. No, I hear that. And I think, you know, from inside the building, you want to see things move really quickly too. In the, the way the government is supposed to work, there should be a great deal of oversight on a commercial sort of subsidy program that's going to release over $2 billion to industry from taxpayer dollars, right? It's such a big number. I mean, that's the annual budget of NE's in the $2 billion, right? It's like, it's a huge amount of money and needs to be done extremely carefully. And therefore, underwent a lot of reviews and while I think a lot of those reviews, you know, I really would have loved to see them move faster. I'm glad that they happened because I feel more confident. You know, I don't wake up at night so often sort of worried that something about the RFP was pathologically designed. But I think that it does sort of feel like this sort of thing should happen super quickly, right? We had so much time to start putting things together. But it actually just, there's a lot of laws that dictate how the US should spend its money and DOE takes spending that money very seriously. And the staff of DOE are essential for sort of making sure that we're dodding all the eyes and crossing all the teas and one of these really big offers, you can't be sort of releasing that kind of money to $2.72 billion. You could be releasing that kind of money, really, Nilly. I appreciate that. And as a taxpayer, I'm very happy that people take care of the money and do things cautiously, carefully. Sometimes, which is why I sometimes point out to people that it's good to have government help, but sometimes government help doesn't move as fast do you need to move? You need to understand that. That's right. And at some point you do worry that like the usefulness of that money is declining with every minute. And in the case of uranium, it really, it felt that way a little bit. And I think people did push as hard as they possibly could to get those reviews moving. There were midnight's and things like that. But it didn't get to be like, it's been pushing the marshmallow though. Yeah, because there was such a great need to sort of be extremely careful with this kind of release. Yeah. Yes. The numbers are pretty amazing what it really takes to get a market like that moving. That is a very large number. It's not that big a number when you compare it to some other energy expenditure. But in this case, it is going on to another, I just thought an article that may be a ventureist is an article about an environmental management change of philosophy. DOE EM, which has got a budget. It's roughly four times as big as any budget. I think they're around $8.8 billion a year. And the article talked about how when environmental management projects are being pursued now, they want people to be really thinking about using the money to clean things up, but also to put them in condition for reuse, particularly reuse in the nuclear context. What do you think about the possibilities and could happen if we start using environmental management projects, clean up projects, to better effect? I think it's a brilliant idea. I think we did a little bit of this with regard to the Secretary Branholm called it, clean up to clean energy. Thought that was very clever branding, but largely her intent was to see us use our leasing capability at a number of sites to think about what it could look like to re-industrialize some of those clean upsides. One of the ones that I think about really often is Paducah Kintucky. That Paducah site, of course, was the site of incredible amounts of diffusion based enrichment. These gaseous diffusion plants out there. And it's now a clean up site. But there are a lot of nuclear aware professionals in the vicinity. There are a lot of excellent resources convertime, the metropolis facility for conversion is right there across the water and metropolis to Illinois. I mean, it's literally just across the river, but technically in another state. That region, that Paducah area, has all the kinds of folks from the cleanup that you might want to restart a nuclear power plant folks who are nuclear aware construction professionals, whether you're destructing something or constructing it, you're going to need welders and people who cut stuff, you know, electricians and things like that. And I think there's a real opportunity to see places like that be revived and revivified through government investment, especially in part when you think about the kind of burdens that those communities have experienced over time being a clean up site. It, you know, whether it's caused damage to anyone, it's like a bit of a burden for community to deal with kind of reputationally. And I think turning it into something is sort of more of a clean energy site, a production site. It changes the face of that community in a way that has like a great deal of sort of future looking hope. And at the minimum, I think we can't sort of just abandon a bunch of very skilled folks as soon as the cleanup project is done. Like congratulations for finalizing this incredibly large multi-decade project. You're now out of a job. What a horrible way to be. Right, let's not do that to people. Yeah, unfortunately, that's what we did to the vocal crew. Yeah. A lot of those were travelers too who like learned to love Wayne's, but Georgia and didn't start out there became, you know, from all of these different states. And yeah, you would love to be able to see them sort of have another nuclear power plant to start working on. Yeah, they've been dispersed to the winds already. I think the final workforce got on for that October of 23. Mm-hmm. They got most of the construction crew was completely done. And all of us left there was a testing crew. That's a long time ago from a job point of view. I mean, it's come time to do it. I was just, well, wait a minute, nobody said 24 months of pay going from somewhere else. Yeah. And so they're probably working on building other stuff, building winter bins, building solar panels, building airports or what have you, you know, and we've got to be better if we had them on a nuclear project. You know, you talk about the workforce challenge. I was listening to one presentation sometime, and they were talking about trying to work out whether it was better to build a couple of nuclear plants or have all the workers going to the new football stadium in the same area. Oh my gosh. It's pretty sad. Going back to me, that's the same. Going back to the idea of whether these executive orders are going to have any impact on the NRC. It does appear that one, it doesn't have the word energy in it. Might be the one that has the most impact on the NRC of these. And that's one about essentially bringing all of the independent agencies into the direct reporting to the president, ensuring accountability for all agencies. And I think that's something that's worth talking about here. Yeah, I certainly agree. You know, Paul Wilson and Mike Corradini and I put together a little op-ed about this in Scientific American, in part, because we were quite concerned about the possible implications. This was on February 18th, this ensuring accountability for all agencies. It sounds very innocuous, but by sort of bringing independent regulatory agencies under the supervision and control of the president, it is explicitly doing a thing that we call regulatory capture. And, you know, anyone who's been around this field any period of time knows that that is a bad, bad thing when either an industry or the political forces running a nation have an undue influence on the decisions being made for, example, safety or other features of the public good. That is called regulatory capture because it captures the regulator and forces decisions to be less than optimal. If, you know, if you have to clear a decision through a political lens, then it is no longer purely about safety. And for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, this is precisely the first and foremost principle of good regulation is regulatory independence. The decisions should not be made for political reasons. And so clearing them through the president is inappropriate. There are laws, specifically in 1974, when Congress split the Atomic Energy Commission into the Department of Energy and the, you know, NRC, well, I guess, you know, Urda and the NRC, but later. The NRC became its own independent agency. And the specific reason for that was because, very important of separating the advocates from the regulators and, you know, the entity that would become DOE was the advocate. So, yeah, I'm very concerned about that. The order touches on all kinds of regulators, the FEC, the Federal Elections Commission, the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission. But also the FERC, you know, the Federal Electricity Regulation Commission. And the FERC's job is to make sure that there's sort of, that when you buy an electron for your house, for your coffee baker, you're paying the same amount as anyone else. And you're not being discriminated against in terms of access to that electricity, just because of how much you're able to pay. That's largely the risk mandate, right? It's to make sure the public get electricity. And that utilities aren't making decisions that might spur profits, but neglect the public. Having, you know, politics enter into that also isn't good, and certainly serve the price of electricity for the average American. Yeah, I'm going to push back just a little bit and just, I'm sure. I've heard so many times that the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974, split apart the promoters from the regulators. I went back and I reread that Actist this a few days ago. Interesting. And what it really did was separate the developers from the regulators. That's true. In other words, back then, in the Atomic Energy Commission, they were doing most of the development, and coming up with the new ideas and the new systems and that they weren't. And it wasn't so much about, you know, promotion like advertising. It was about, you didn't want the developers in charge of regulating themselves. Yeah. That's actually a really good point. And that's fun that you read it. I should probably look at it closely too. But yeah, I think that's the same principle applies that, you know, still DOE isn't like running any of these companies and does not profit at all when a new reactor is built, but rather sort of helps the development of these technologies. So yeah, developers are better, a better term, to sort of capture that relationship. And the issue being that conflict of interest around, you know, you've become blind to this sort of safety issues in your design unless you have a real independent, objective critic. True. But I'm also a big fan of the advanced act. Totally. The direction from the politics or the legislators, the lawmakers, to tell the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that yes, you do have the authority or the responsibility for adequate safety, but you also have the responsibility to enable this technology to be used to benefit mankind and to balance the safety of nuclear versus the safety or the benefits of nuclear versus the benefits of other alternatives. Because, you know, if you have the mission or the belief that your mission is to make nuclear perfectly safe, and that's really always striving for better the search for perfection is also in the enemy of good enough. Yeah, perfectly safe workplace gets no work done, right? It's a perfectly safe place. There's no work done. Yeah, but I am very leery of what what it could happen if the president a future president decides they don't like nuclear and they decide on their own that they're going to regulate nuclear out of the distance. And that's possible and showing to be possible in other countries like the the rain of Diane in South Korea for four years, he did a lot to damage the South Korea nuclear industry because he basically by himself said, I don't like nuclear. We're going to get rid of it. Yeah. I think there's, yeah, there's definitely two sides to this coin. And depending on the administration, you wouldn't want to see then or see making different decisions based on who's president. You just, regardless, you just want their decisions to be based on what their mission is. And I agree with you about the Advanced Act and its emphasis on getting to those decisions more quickly. But throughout the Advanced Act, it does preserve the independence of the regulator and even acknowledges that they need more staff, not fewer, to get that work done more quickly. And I think at minimum, this EO takes away that independence by saying you have to kind of clear major regulatory decisions through the executive office of the president. It's, you know, this is absolutely the kind of thing that caused the operators of Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plan to sort of fail to deploy countermeasures that were demanded by some of the known seismic risks that had come up. They failed to plan appropriately for evacuation based on those updated known seismic risks in part because regulatory capture was prevalent in Japan's government and cap cause relationship with the regulator. And this is very much one of the reasons why they failed to avoid the second word of nuclear power plant accident history. The same is true with Chernobyl, right? National pride drove Soviet leadership and their captured regulator to ignore an own flaw in the nuclear reactor control rods to ignore safety protocols at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant when, you know, they wanted to move through operations and they caused the worst nuclear power accident in history. This is why the IAEA mean, you know, really is very clear that independence is important. Whether it's because you don't want to ignore safety or because you don't want to ignore the possibility of deploying a nuclear both rely on the regulator to be independent. You know, at Fukushima, even with all of the issues that you mentioned, the other one that came to play in terms of regulatory and capture was that the operators at the power plant had been trained that they needed to get permission from the government to take actual necessary actions, regardless of what, you know, design issues there were, there was an operator action that could have gone a long way to preventing the major release of radioactivity. And that was simply venting the containment vessel and venting it early and often as US boiling water reactor operators are trying to do. Then early then often one of the issues that happened at Fukushima was they did vent because it weren't allowed to release any radioactivity. And by the time they finally vented, the fuel failures had occurred. So when they vented, they vented a lot more stuff rather than venting kind of somewhat mostly clean primary cooling. Yeah. I think the and the TEPCO regulators and the government, you know, yes, they all had deficiencies. But the point you're making very clearly it's it's this point about actually that the diet that Japanese government did an incredible report on sort of why this happened and they have this interesting sort of baseline conclusion, which is that the first duty of an individual bureaucrat is to defend the interests of their organization. So when you carry that to an extreme, this leads bureaucrats in all kinds of ways to put organizational interests ahead of their duty to protect public safety, this happened, you know, when they were thinking about protecting the government from sort of minor concern about public public in concern about the seismic risks might look bad. And so they won't move forward on the sort of the preemptive approach. But then even in the operations, right, this sort of bureaucratic interest to protect the organization leads to unnecessary hierarchical permissions, which gets in the way of actually acting in the interest of public safety to your point. Yeah. And in the US culture, at least in the culture that I was trained, you got to admit your mistakes early. Yeah. So as you can fix them, the longer you try kind of protecting the institution, the worse it gets. You need to say, hey, we screwed that up, let's go do it better next time and take stock and go. And so I think this has been a fascinating conversation. I believe that we definitely need an independent regulator, but we also need a regulator that is structured by law to do certain things, including enable the technology that's it's regulated. That doesn't necessarily mean enabling all uses of it because some of them are less useful than others. But right. And certainly not sort of count, enabling just the president's cronies to build reactors or allowing the president to stand in the way of new licenses or allowing the president to make the energy to go back to the drawing board when a decision of non safety has been decided. All of those things, they have to be fully in control of their own decision making and therefore independent. Yeah, I wouldn't want to have the president say, I don't want to be WRX 300 in my background. Yeah. He has plenty of business contacts. It's clear that some of the sort of oversight on presidential relationships with regard to business, maybe it's not being taken as seriously. And this administration is perhaps former administrations, and you would hate to see that impact nuclear safety by sort of a presidential crony or presidential friends investments leading who doesn't get a license. Yeah. The other issue about this, like you said, judicial the review process doesn't seem like it's going to make you any quicker to get things done. Either positive or negative, because you got to go all regulatory changes would have to go and get approved by a group of busy people. Yeah, it adds the hardest step, which is getting things through the OMB. I think that, yeah, it's it's missing. Focus like someone who's truly worked inside the beltway. Almost nobody else knows what OMB stands for, what's how important and how controlling they are to say everything the government does. I sure didn't. Yeah, it is an office that office of management budget for those of you don't know what OMB stands for. And one should always recommend that whoever controls the money controls the outcome. Yeah, that's right. Or controls the action, though, should say not necessarily that outcome. All right. Katie, I'm going to offer you the opportunity to summarize or provide anything issue. We'd like to talk about that we haven't. Oh, I really just, I've enjoyed having this conversation so many times. I forgot we weren't just chatting and actually there. It's a whole podcast. So thanks for that. I think, you know, in summary, I would say this, like, you know, we are going to have to watch very closely the impacts of all kinds of decisions that are being made in this government because they're moving so quickly. And this sort of deliberative, slow, thoughtful approach that the nuclear industry takes to a lot of things. It's not going to be robust to a move fast and break things kind of approach. So I hope everyone's kind of with me and sort of keeping an eye on things as this all kind of shakes out. But, you know, I myself have particular concern about that independent regulator, EO, but there are plenty of other things to keep an eye on, especially with regard to the deployment of clean energy more broadly. I don't think we should ignore that clean energy and the need to sort of fight the climate crisis has driven a lot of the interest and bipartisan support for nuclear in general. And so backing away from some of those promises is really disappointing for me. And I worry that it will result in us losing a great deal of the support we've recently gained. So I hope everyone's with me as we kind of keep an eye on what's going on. Thanks, Rod. Well, letting the zone is very difficult to defend against. Yes. All right Katie, thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it and enjoy your students. I shall. I shall. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Atomic Show. We're talking with Dr. Katie Huff, a associate professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Illinois or Banis Champagne and former secretary of energy for nuclear energy. This is Rod Adams. I've been your host for the Atomic Show for more than 15 years. 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