Thomas Jam Pedersen, CEO Copenhagen Atomics

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 right, Adamson. It's time for another Atomic Show. And I guess today is Thomas Dan Peterson, the CEO and co-founder of Copenhagen, Atomic, an exciting young company that is developing and testing molten salt reactors. Their concept is that the molten salt reactor will be a hundred megawatt heat source. It can be delivered on a single container. Now, that's not the whole system of course. That's the heat source. Thomas, welcome. Thank you very much. And tell us a little bit about your waste burner reactor. Yes, the reason why we chose the name of waste burners, because there's so many of these reactors that have three or four liter acronyms. And my mom doesn't understand that. So we thought that most people in the world doesn't understand these acronyms. So we wanted to sort of get across to people that this type of reactors actually able to take. Spent fuel from other reactors, say, light water reactors, and use it again, and get more energy out of it when we use it in our reactor. So we don't use all the fuel from light water reactors. We only use the transuretics. That is, again, all the elements above uranium in the periodic table. So that's roughly 1% of the so-called spend nuclear fuel that we could extract and use in our reactor. And this way generate a lot more energy from that fuel instead of putting in deep underground. All right. That's great. And now that you've introduced your reactor, let's introduce yourself. Where did you come from? And what made you decide that developing molten salt reactors was going to be your jam for the next period of their lives? Yes. Yes. I got bitten by this Thorwembach many years ago back in, well, it actually started all the way back in 2009. But it took me a couple of years when I was skeptical. I looked at fusion in the beginning much more. And I realized that I didn't want to invest my money or my time in fusion. And then I came across this idea of Thorwem, molten salt reactors. And I thought this was different than typical uranium sulphur reactors. And then I started studying that. And at that time, I was actually a consultant running mathematical models for the national grid operator in Denmark where I'm born. But I've also lived part of my life in the US and I'm an engineer. I'm educated as an engineer and I spend many years doing mathematical modeling and simulations and things like that. And then I realized that this thing about making a new type of reactor using Thorwem, but also a completely different concept where the fuel is molten and molten salt reactor had some benefits. And it was a long story, but eventually I met three other guys that were interested in starting a company. So we ended up the four of us starting a company together back in 2014 called Copeland Electronics. And then we have been working ever since that on making our dream come through, which is to create lots of reactors. And we want to mass-manufacture these reactors and then assemble them and get them out and produce electricity for the world. So from a single factory, a large package course, which should go production? So our reactors, the size roughly the same size as a 40-foot shipping container. So it's much, much smaller than many of the other reactors out there in nuclear reactors. And this means that it's much easier to manufacture it on an assembly line just like we make cars or airplanes or, you know, buses or other things like that. And when we started starting looking at this, we, some of us has a little bit of experience from mass manufacturing other things and we realized that it's not that difficult to make one nuclear reactor every day. The difficult part is actually to be allowed to install it because there's lots of rules and regulations. But we actually, we have sort of a strong belief that the world is going to change over the next 10, 20 years. And part of that change is that we will allow companies to install many reactors a little bit similar to when you make airplanes. You make them in one country and then you get some type of type of approval and then they allow to fly to many other countries and you allow to sell them in many countries. I think eventually we will get to the same nuclear reactors and we're definitely not there yet and it will not be an easy ride. And I don't think we will see a lot of progress in this type approval in the next five years. But the four people who found COVID megatomics have a strong belief that it is going to happen maybe in 10 years from now and then that is, that would work really well with our concept of manufacturing these reactors under the assembly line. My belief is that we're going to have a much better chance of getting the kind of type approvals you're talking about once we have operating reactors that are, even the regulators can see can be approved and meet the standards throughout a number of different countries. They can't quite do it with just the reactor designs until they're actually up and running at least that's my view. And I agree with you, I think things are changing fairly quickly in the world of nuclear regulation. But from good or bad, the US has always had a pretty strong influence on the way that rest of the world views regulation. And for a long time, our influence was to slow things down. It appears that there might be a chance that our influence will be to speed things up and to establish a more common goal. But that's just my opinion and I'll alter it if the facts change. So, tell me a little bit more about the combination or the influence or the role of the transuranic you're going to get from that nuclear fuel or use nuclear fuel, whatever you want to call it, and thorium. What's the benefit of matching those two up? Yes, at first of all, we also think that the world is a little bit of slow to adapt recycling of spent nuclear fuel. I mean, France is doing it and it has done it for many years. There has been other countries in the past that did it, but right now it's only France, but I think it's coming back. And it will be difficult in the beginning to be allowed to use transuranic. So, our very first reactors actually plan to run on 5% in risk uranium. The thing, the reason why I will try to explain to the audience, Thorium by itself cannot create a chain reaction. You first need to convert Thorium into another element called Uranium-233. Uranium-233 does not exist in nature. It's something we can only create inside a nuclear reactor. Once we create that Uranium-233, that is actually what creates the heat when it fissions. It creates the heat and the fission products. But it's sort of a, you could say, a continuous cycle where you convert the Thorium, and then that takes many weeks. And then eventually it turns into Uranium, and then that is fission. And then those neutrons that you get from that fission event is reused to make new Thorium into Uranium. So, it's kind of a cycle that's running all the time. So, you need what is called a kickstart of fuel, and to get this cycle going. And that kickstart of fuel is either Uranium-235, which we find in nature. Uranium-235 is what generates, I would say, 80% of all the energy in the world that is from classical nuclear reactors. And most of those reactors, we need to enrich the fuels, so we cannot just dig the Uranium-235 out of the ground, and use it directly. We need to enrich it in some big enrichment plans, and it's quite expensive, but that's how most of the reactors work. In our case, we would also need some of this Uranium-235 as a kickstart of fuel, or we could use what I call transurantics. So, transurantics being all the elements above Uranium. So, a lot of those Uranium or a lot of those elements are plutonium. That's actually the vast majority. Like 90% of that transurantics are plutonium isotopes. They are plutonium-239, 240, and 241. That's the majority. And all of those are, I actually an excellent nuclear fuel. We have roughly 3,000 tons of that in the whole world, including all the materials in existing reactors and existing fuel pools, but also in nuclear weapons and so on. So, there's not very much of this anywhere in the world, so 3,000 tons. So, we could easily use that up. But right now, it's seen as somewhat evil, or at least a waste product that we need to store deep on the ground, but I think this is not what's going to happen. I think we're going to learn how to separate those transurantics and use them in other reactors. We have, of course, not the only reactor that can use those, but I think we are one of the reactors that can use them most efficiently and get the best electricity price out of it. And we are able to pay quite a lot of money for that. There's a number of companies out there who say they want to receive money for taking the transurantics and burning it so that you destroy the plutonium. We are willing to pay. We've already set this several times, $10,000 per kilogram for transurantics. So, at that price, you can actually afford to recycle the spent fuel. I mean, this can pay for this separation process. But maybe I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself, but I hope that explains that we can use either spent fuel or we can use 5% of the rich uranium to get our reactor running. And then once it's up and running, it basically generates the energy from the one so that at the end, when you have ran the run the reactor for many, many years, then at the end you end up with the same amount of fistile fuel or maybe sometimes a little bit more because it's actually a breather reactor. So you might end up with a little bit more, fistile kickstart fuel when you stop, then when you start it. Alright, I'm going to take a quick break and disclose that nucleation capital has been such a fan of Copenhagen atomic that we have invested. So we are Copenhagen atomic is a nucleation capital portfolio company. So I'm not disinterested, discussor here, disinterested interviewer, but I wanted to share with the audience. The reason is why we're so interested and we're so excited about the possibility of the real high probability that you and your company are going to succeed in your goal of kind of changing the world. So, next thing I want to say is, agreed that it's going to take a while to get recycling up and running. The facilities are not simple to do that. Would you have to wait until a recycling system came into play before you could take advantage of the vision or fizzile nature of materials like plutonium- C-39. Is there another path? I mean, there's already some countries who have separated trans-eranics. We mentioned before that friends, there's actually the only country right now actively recycling fuel and they create something called Moxfuel, which is made from a mix of uranium and plutonium. And they are able to sell us plutonium, not like something you buy on a street corner, but under a sort of controlled process. So that's one source of getting plutonium. Another source, for example, is the UK. The UK used to do recycling of their fuel many years ago. And because of that, they have a very large stockpile of plutonium or a strange-eranics that they have not been able to use in their existing reactor. Potentially you could buy that or make an agreement with the UK to make a lot of energy in the UK from that already separate plutonium. But of course those are maybe a couple of hundred tons. That's a small quantity of the total global reserve. The USA is the country in the world with the most nuclear reactors and therefore also the most spent nuclear fuel in stores. So the amount of this kickstart of fuel is definitely by far the biggest in the USA. Other countries that have a lot of it would be Russia, China. Other countries who've had a lot of nuclear energy over the years. Yeah, $10,000 a kilogram. I think that the UK's inventory would be worth about $1.4 billion. As I remember the numbers, 140 tons, but I could be wrong. Correct. That would be enough to kickstart a large number of waste. The fuel in the UK is actually excellent because it's a more pure form of kickstart of fuel or plutonium mix than what you might get in other countries. So we would only need roughly 200 kilograms per reactor to kickstart one reactor. And you're absolutely correct. There's 140 tons in the UK. So you could start thousands of reactors with that. Yeah, up until just maybe two or three months ago, the prospects were using plutonium from some of these stockpiles was fairly low. but at least in the US we've recently seen an executive order that highly encourages the beneficial use of the material that was going to be diluted and disposed of just a few months ago. So maybe the things will change for you guys a day. There's another avenue that's going to open up in the near future. It will keep in reminding the controllers of this material that they're spending a lot of money to control and oversee this inventory of material and they're planning to spend even more to dilute and dispose of an underground. It wouldn't be better for them to simply sell it to someone who could use it and make good use out of it. So tell us a little bit about the concept that you have of delivering your containerized reactors. How would they be set up to provide heat and what would be the use of that heat and what would it look like? Yes, so the reactor we talked about, the reactor itself is sort of one sealed box. So when it comes out of the factory or the assembly line, it's already completely sealed and it's not going to be opened again. We do not plan to have sort of any service or replacement of any parts. If something breaks inside that box, the whole box needs to go for recycling. But so you make it in the factory and then you just use the normal shipping routes, put it on trucks and ships and so on and get it to the nuclear reactor site. And on the nuclear reactor site you install this container that is roughly 12 meters long and 3 meters wide and 3 meters high. You put that inside what we call a cocoon. The cocoon is a very, an even larger box, but very thick walls, so two meter thick walls and it's there to protect the outside from the radiation that is coming from the reactor and the inside, but also to protect the reactor from where the conditions and the airplane crashes and other things that might harm the reactor from the outside. So the cocoon is something that keeps the reactor safe. And the cocoon is basically just a lot of metal box. It's 30 meters long and almost 7 by 7 meters. And like I said, it has two meter thick walls to shield for the radiation, but also if there's an airplane strike or something, then it can shield the reactor. If you use a bunker, bust a missile or something, it's not strong enough to defend against that, but I don't think any of the other reactors are either. But on the side you can say the whole everything radioactive is going on inside that cocoon and what comes out of the cocoon is hot salt. So in the early reactors, the temperature of the salt coming out will be 550 degrees, but later on, we hope to be able to increase that temperature to 600 or 700 degrees and maybe even higher in the more distant future. And that heat or that salt coming out, you will then convert the heat into steam and run a steam turbine, for example, to generate electricity, but that happens in another building. So you have one building with all the radioactivity inside these cocoons and then all the non radioactive parts in a separate building where you can where you can actually make service and look after the steam turbines. When the box gets put into the cocoon, is there some sort of, how do we connect up the salt that's going to go in and out of the box? Are there pipes already installed in the cocoon and flanges? Yeah, so yeah, we do that already today. We actually have test reactors here at our headquarters in Copenhagen. Of course, they here in the current facility, we are not allowed to start the chain reaction, but we can still heat up the salt with electric heaters and pump it around. So we already have these types of systems today and we outside of the reactor container, we have a number of transport tanks used for transporting the salt and water and other things around because the reactive self and the fuel salt cannot, they cannot go on the same truck when they are delivered and they have to go in separate trucks, but that's sort of a different story. But you actually write these, the containers have pipes coming out, you know, a pipe for a salt going out and a pipe for salt going in and then we actually also need some cooling water and other things. So there's a number of pipes coming in and out and those are, those flanges actually welded together to the sort of the pipes that go distribute the heat inside the building. And we have a special system for welding those pipes and also cutting them open again, which is sort of very automated system where you instead of building the flanges together, we actually weld them and then cut them open with a small cutting tool every time we need to assemble and disassemble or take the reacts out of the cocoon. One of the reactors last. Yeah, so that's a very good question. We expect to get our reactors approved to run the first commercial reactors approved to run for five years and the thing is you could potentially get them to run longer than five years, but in order to achieve that and get that approved with the authorities, you would have to first of all use more expensive materials to make it last longer, but you would also have to get a lot more testing data. You can imagine if you want to approve something for 10 years rather than five years, you need at least twice as much test data and in some cases even more than twice as much. So the regulator is puts very high requirements on us as a company if we wanted to approve this for many years and that's why we we want to start out with five years because then we can test it for a reasonable period before the before we start the first commercial reactor and and get the data that we need to show to the authorities that this works as we have calculated and and tested ahead. So we actually already doing a lot of testing here at Cobingatomics. We we run sort of non radioactive loops where we pump salt around. So we heat the salt up with electricity and pump it around and we have more than 100,000 hours of of this pumping different salt systems and we believe that we are the the only company in the world or the company in the world with the most testing hours or testing. Yeah, the biggest testing facility and we do that because we need a lot of this data to show to the regulator that all the different components work and we have we can keep the corrosion under control and and we are able to measure exactly where the salt is and if there's any spill we can detect it and so on and so forth. I've said many times in in interviews and and talks that I believe that we need to run a total of one million or more than one million test hours before we can put the first commercial reactor online. So and now we are roughly at 100,000 hours. So we still have a long way to go before we are ready for a commercial reactor. So we mentioned that your pumping salt around and loops are you designed and built pumps that would be suitable for your full scale units or you still need to scale up the pump. We have a pump now that we have been using for a number of years that pump is going to be used in the first test reactor we going to run a test reactor and Switzerland at their national app called PSI in 2027 so the promptly have now can be used for the first test reactor. But the current pump is not sufficient for a commercial reactor. We need a bigger one for that and at some point we will start scaling up the one we have now but we actually we have found out that it's cheaper to generate test hours and these smaller systems and then once we've solved all the problems we can find on these smaller systems then we are going to scale it up. And then we still expect to find some minor problems after the scale up and then of course we have to fix those and test some more. But yeah, so we have manufactured more than 100 of these mobile salt pumps and I don't think that there's anyone else in the world who has that many pumps and have tested that many different pumps of course some of the early versions were not as reliable as the ones we have now so that's why we have made those many many pumps we have. 30 of these molten salt systems that are running and pumping salt plus we also using these these pumps in our reactor prototypes we have currently two reactor prototypes that each of them have seven pumps and then now we're building the third reactor prototype is a. It's a full size reactor prototype it will be the same size as a commercial reactor. but with slide smaller pumps inside and we're running with testing all of those as well. So yeah, lots of testing and that's important to make sure that we can deliver a reliable commercial reactor someday. You talked about the mockups that you have for connecting the various piping systems are those full size or are you doing those on a smaller scale first and then working your way up. Yes, we most of our systems is smaller scale and actually it's only this year that we have caught up with the salt production in the past for the last five years we've always been sort of lacking behind in our ability to. produce last quantities of salt so we we were we could make more test systems than we were able to fill with salt and it's only this year we have been able to catch up right now we manufacture the salt in in batches of. So we're doing a cubic meter per best and we can make one of those sort of roughly one per month. So that means we can make 12 cubic meters in a year and we need to scale that further. I mean before we start making many reactors we need to get to a situation where we can make 100 cubic meters per year or something like that so so there's still some. of the salt production system that needs to happen and we also. Right now. How we don't, we are not allowed to make the uranium and thorem salt in these big systems with cubic meter quantities. So that's also something we need to get approvals for. But that's coming later this year. So that's also very exciting to start making uranium and thorem salts at last quantities. Many people challenge the idea of using molten salts because they have the notion or the idea. And I can testify that I had the same idea that salt is very corrosive and leads to a lot of rust in places like the ocean. Notice what you do to minimize or prevent the salt from being corrosive material, especially when it's operating it 550 degrees Celsius. Yes, you are absolutely correct. And I had the same understanding when we, before we started this company, it's actually like I said in the beginning we were four people who started a company. And one of the other engineers who helped start the company, Thomas Steinberg, he had done his PhD at the Technical University of Denmark where he had studied salt corrosion and salt chemistry for many years. And he knew from that, from that department in the university that they had figured out how to make the salts much less corrosive. And there are several keys inside to this and I don't want to spill on the beans because that's part of our secret sauce. But the most important thing in this, I think it's starting to become well known in the industry, you need to remove all moisture and oxygen from the system. And then there's something called hydroxides which is basically a variation of molecules with oxygen in them. So you need to remove all of those oxygen related molecules from the salt before it gets hot because when it gets hot they become very corrosive. That's what makes it corrosive. And he already knew before we started the company how to do that. But of course we have improved that technology even further because not only do we need to remove the oxygen, we also need to remove other impurities because like I said a little bit earlier, we want to remove the fish and products while the reactist running. And it's a little bit like taking some salt that you have bought that is very expensive. And then you put all kinds of other elements into it. And then you have to show that you can chemically separate those elements out again from the salt. And that's actually also quite difficult. And that it's the same process that is used for removing fish and products and using removing moisture and hydroxides. So we have become very good at doing this here coming at some extent. And we have to say that we didn't start from zero. We already had several decades of research from the university. And actually the professor who used to run that department, he's now retired. But he actually, he did his postdoc at Oak Ridge National Oak Ridge National Lab back in the 60s and 70s when they ran the military reactor experiment over there. So he already learned from, he learned about this from the guys who ran the the military reactor at Oak Ridge. So it goes way back. And we're very, very happy that that we have been able to build and all that. Notice that has been kept alive for all these years. And then this is the reason why we now are able to manufacture salts at very high quantities and very, very good quality. When I said good quantity, I actually mean the amount of corrosion that you generate. So the way we measure that is we take different salts. And then we put small samples, stainless steel samples or sometimes other materials into the salt. And then we run them for a thousand or ten thousand dollars. And then we see how much it corrode. And we can measure that under a microscope. And I mean, we can we can easily make the salt a hundred times less corrosive than if you just bought it from a chemical supply and mix it and melt it. So it's a significant reduction in the corrosion. But of course, there is still a small amount of corrosion. And and that's also why we cannot we cannot get the reactors to last for you know, 30 years or 50 years. I said before that in the beginning, we want to make the reactors last for five years. And maybe later when we get more data and and then we can convince the regulator to approve them for you know seven or eight or nine years or whatever. But and we could also use more expensive materials and maybe make them last a little bit longer. But you always have to you know, if you have to pay for materials that is 20 times more expensive to only get two or three years extra, it's actually not worth it because and there's another thing that happens every time you change to a new version of your reactor, you're able to to upgrade it a little bit. So their technology gets better and better over the years. So so that's another effect that you get by replacing them every five years that you keep on improving your technology. And that means when your nuclear problem is 50 years old, your technology is only yeah five years old or something like that. And and therefore it's much more likely to get lifetime extension after 50 years. At least at least that's what we believe now. But let's wait and see. All right. So when you finish this five year period, you've talked about how the fuel breeds new thizile material. So your core, your molten salt bath, your molten salt inventory will have more thizile material, at least a little bit more. And it did when it started that thizile material is valuable stuff. They're going to take the reactor at a service. What are you going to do with the fuel? Yes. So every let's say every five years we replace the reactor. So what happens is we while while the salt is still molten, we unloaded from the reactor container into some tanks that are inside the cocoon. So it's still inside the protective wall. And then we when that's all this inside those transport containers, we let it freeze. And then we can take the reactor container out of the cocoon and put a new one in. And then close up the cocoon makes you everything is is leaked tight and proliferation safe and everything. And then we will melt the salt and pump it back into the reactor, start the reactor again. And this process of swapping out a reactor that takes roughly one week. We've actually we've done this here at this location where we unload the salt into transport tanks and then we move the tanks over to another system and connect them and load the salt again. So we've already done that a number of times and yet takes roughly a week to do that loading in and out. And those salts like you said, they always have the same amount of fissile inventory. And over the years, if you if you get the technology improved and you get to a state where you have a breeder that has a much better breeding ratio than one. So there's this concept called a breeding ratio. And if right when you're at exactly one, then you have exactly the same amount of fissile inventory all the time. And we humans have never been able to build a reactor that can can do that. There's been well, it's a longer story with fast reactors, but there you have to take the fuel out and do reprocessing. And when you do that reprocessing, you lose a little bit of of the fuel. And therefore they have not been able to get to one in the past. But we believe that our reactor can get to one maybe not the very first one, but sort of within the first five years, we can get to a to a breeding ratio of one. So it's an isoprater. But then over the next five or 10 years, we can improve it even further and get up to a breeding ratio of maybe 1.1. I think 1.1 is probably the best we can get in our type of reactors. And 1.1 is it's a doubling time. That means that the amount of fuel you have will double in something like 15 years, which is actually pretty good for a thermal reactor. I should say that these reactors run in thermal spectrum. So with slow new transverse, slow down by heavy water, we use heavy water as a moderator. So I hope that answers your question. Otherwise, please ask a little bit more. You've started, you introduced a couple of other topics on the tip of my tongue. So next thing I say, okay, you guys have a thermal reactor, a typical problem with molten salt reactors. Is the damage caused to the graphite while operating? Because most of the molten salt concepts I've seen are thermal reactors with graphite as the moderator. How do you use heavy water instead of graphite? What's the configuration of your reactor that allows that to be the right moderator? Yes, you absolutely correct. I mean any reactor, a light water reactor you would have the uranium oxide inside the fuel rush will also be swelling over the years while you run the reactor. And the cladding, which is in most cases, circulars will also have a limited life because of the neutron damage. And it's the same if you have a molten salt reactor using graphite, or even if it's another reactor using graphite we've seen, the Magnox reactors in the UK using graphite. So that graphite will also start to swell because of all the neutron damage that it takes over the years. So any material inside a reactor core has a limited life because of this neutron damage. And it's the same case with our, our reactor, the walls. We have walls that separate the salt and the water and the insulation and so on inside the reactor core. And those walls, they also see a lot of neutron damage and they also start to swell and get brittle. And that's one of the factors that limit the lifetime of of that reactor core. So where in a light water reactor, you replace all the fuel rush every, you know, 36 months or whatever it is. Then in the most all reactor, yeah, okay, sorry. So yeah, so yeah, so it's actually quite regular that you have to replace those fuel rush. But in a molten salt reactor, we believe that we can get it approved to run for five years before you need to replace it. And you'll write the, the neutron damage and also the corrosion from the salt are two of those effects that limit the life of those, those components. So your core, I think you call it the onion core, it seems rather special. Tell us a little bit about how that works to help increase the productive life of your reactor fuel. Yes, so yeah, almost all the reactors we humans have ever built is sort of cylindrical configuration in one way or the other. But of course, if you can make it spherical, you can sort of make it more compact and you can have less leakage neutrons. And in order to reduce leakage, you really want to have a blanket that sort of goes all the way around. So if you think of a ball, if the, if the home ball is covered with a, with an outermost chill, that is a a lower blanket that can capture the neutrons, then you have very little neutron leakage. And in some case, that, that blanket will actually also have reflect the neutrons back into the core. So, you know, when they, when they fly around in the center of the uninkore, they will fly, some of them will fly out to the blanket and either get it absorbed or they will be reflected and fly back in and maybe create a fishing in the fuel channel. And then in order to slow down the neutrons, we use heavy water and heavy water is a, is a really good moderator because the, it does not capture very many neutrons. Whereas if you lose light water, light water captures lots of neutrons and therefore you have, you, yeah, you have a bad neutron economy. So heavy water gives you better neutron economy. It's of course a little bit more expensive to buy heavy water, but you can use it for more than a hundred years. It doesn't get damaged. And it does heat up. So you need to cool it, but we can easily pump it out and cool it down. And, and that water also helps to keep those walls cold. I talked about the walls getting damaged from the sun. So in some respect that helps that called some of the ones are called. And yeah, so this onion core is unique because when it has this spherical shape, that's when you need the minimum amount of fuel to make it go critical. And this means that the amount of fuel we need to load into our reactor to make it critical is small. And that also means that the, when it's small, it also means that we can make the reactor core quite small. I mean, if you look at light water reactors, you can easily find light water reactors that needs more than 100 tons of uranium to go critical. And then they have a very high neutrons leakage. Some of it to the light water and some of them just flying out simply because of the geometrical shape of that type of core. So they're not very economic in terms of neutron economy. And that's really what we try to optimize for. Try to really make a reactor core. That was super efficient in neutron economy. And when you use, when you have a reactor in thermal spectrum, you slow down the neutrons and therefore you don't have the problem that they fly really far away. But that's another problem with fast reactors is that knowledge to have a good neutron economy. You need to make it quite large. But with the thermal reactor, we were able to make it small. The diameter of our onion core is less than 2 1 1 1 1 1 12 meters in diameter. And inside of there, we have everything, both the blanket and the fuel salt and the heavy water for moderator. So it's not very big and that helps us also doing the mass manufacturing because it's easy to manufacture things that are small and if they become really big. Like you've seen some of the reactor vessels at Hinkley Point Sea or something where they need the world's biggest crane or what it was to install it. Yeah, very large things. Although everybody talks about the economy as scale, there's also some DC economy just once you get to certain sizes. If you have to have a unique infrastructure, unique cranes, unique transport vehicles, all those things, the costs add up quite quickly. Now, in your core, you've got this heavy water. What's the heavy water temperature? And is there any pressure needed? Because the water is inside a reactor core. Yes, correct. Yes, we definitely didn't want to put the water on the pressure because the water is not the heat transfer medium. The water is just there as a moderator. So in the beginning, we actually ran the water at 20 or 30 degrees Celsius. But now we have changed. Now we run the water at 80 degrees. And part of the reason for that is the speed at which the water will evaporate. If you had some problem, you have a pipe break or some other way of spilling water, that water would spill out on some hot surfaces. And then it'll start to evaporate. And it turns out that there's something called the latent front thrust effect. You know that when you put water on a hot frying pan, you can actually see that in your kitchen that the, it takes a long time for the water to boil off because the water sort of floats on a cushion of steam that is between the hot steel plate and the water. And that's also what happens. If you pour a lot of water onto a hot surface, it creates this latent thrust effect where there's a small layer of steam between the steel plate or the hot plate and the water. And this makes it boil actually quite slowly. So by increasing the temperature, I know this is a little bit counterintuitive, but you can make the experiments quite easily in your kitchen. By increasing the temperature of the water, it takes longer for the water to boil off because of this latent thrust effect becomes more outspoken. So yeah, so we run the water at 80 degrees and we only need a few degrees delta T from the water going in and coming back out. We need to cool the water all the time because the most important job of the water is to slow down the neutrons. And when you try to slow down all those neutrons, the water will heat up. And it's also heating up from gamma rays. And therefore, we have to cool the water. A lot of people think that the majority of the heat in the water comes from being so close to the hot salt. But that's actually not the case. The, it's only roughly 1% of the heat, 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 of the heat that's coming through the insulation from the hot salt into the water. The other 98% or whatever of the heat comes from gamma rays and neutrons. Yeah, and that, so that's the reason why we need to cool the water all the time. So the water is also circulating quite quickly. What happens if the water starts circulating or leaks out? Yeah, so if the water leaks out, it might hit a hot surface and start boiling. And then we have detectors for that. So as soon as there's a tiny pressure change, we stop all the pumps. And when you stop all the pumps, then all the different fluids both the water and the salt drain into their respective dump tanks. And then it's separated from each other. So you might be able to spill, I don't know, 10 liters or, you know, something like that. A few gallons and that will evaporate. But it doesn't, it doesn't really damage anything. And we've shown an experiment that we can easily shut down the reactor really quickly because the only thing we do is cut the power to the pumps. Basically just a, there's a relay that cuts the power to the pumps and then they all stop spinning and all the water starts draining into the dump tanks. The other thing you mentioned sort of a, what happens if you, if you stop pumping the water, you know, while the reactor's running. And then actually what happens is the water will expand. And then the, it has a negative feedback coefficient. So that means that the chain reaction will actually stop also quite quickly. So whether you stop the pumps or you just have the heater, the water heat up, it all leads to the same situation, namely that the chain reaction stops. And then you will dump the salt and the water. There is, we have modeled this quite carefully in simulation. So right when you have these, there's this different accidents scenarios we call them. So in some of those you have the salt temperature go up by some degrees and in some of the worst cases, it increases by 50 degrees in temperature because you have to remember that there's a, there's a last body of salt and the heat capacity of that salt is actually quite high. So it takes, you know, it takes many seconds to, to heat up that salt. And therefore in, in almost all the accidents scenarios, we're able to, to drain the salt before the temperature decreased, yeah, sorry, increase very much. So and, but there's a lot of simulations in this. And I agree that there's a lot of questions from people, all kinds of people also nuclear diners and regulators because this is a new type of reactor and they want to understand hard works. And there's many different types of molten soil react to the science and, and some of them react a little bit differently depending on how they can figure some uses a freeze clock and we don't use that. We use this, this system where we, as soon as you stop the pumps, they, the fluid will drain into the dump tanks. And yeah, there's, there's some other situations again, we mentioned before that we use heavy water, some other companies use graphite. And there's also, you know, what happens when the graphites heat up and so there's a similar, similar simulations, but with a little bit different results. Yeah, a lot of my friends in the nuclear advocacy world like to quote Admiral Rick over on various things. Here, I'll quote Admiral Rick over very briefly. He used to say water doesn't crack. So using heavy water as opposed to graphite is a, something Admiral Rick over would approve of, he was actually saying that in reference to this field, then, but it, they thought still stands. Water is, it is a very useful material. And then it doesn't crack and it can be reused for 100 years or more. That's a good thing. Yes. Now, what you want to mention because I want to mention one more thing that people, a lot of times people ask, oh, what happens if you generate a lot of steam? But we also have something called a condenser inside the cocoon. So it's really, really difficult to create a lot of steam. But of course there is, there is a risk that we create some steam. And we have something called a condenser, which is basically a, it's a section of the cocoon where we have a lot of steel plates sort of very close to each other. And it looks like a giant radiator. And then the steam is sort of passed through a burst disk in the react container and into this condenser. And then that steam hit all these cold steel walls. And then it condenses back into water. And we have tested this and we can, we can get condensed huge amount of water, you know, as quickly as we can generate it. And this was back to the thing I talked about before with the late and frost effect. We look at how quickly can you actually generate the steam and how quickly can you condense it again? And as soon as you can, or as long as you can condense it much faster than you generate the steam, then you have a safe system because the pressure doesn't go up. I mean, it goes up slightly like a few hundred millibars. But that's not a problem at all for the cocoon. All right, I got a couple of challenging questions to finish up this discussion here. What are you going to do with all of the containers, particularly if you're manufacturing new ones at the rate of one per day, at some point you're going to start bringing one per day offline. And it was can stack up pretty quickly. I mean, containers are not uncommon and stacks of containers are not uncommon, but some of them are pretty ugly. Yes. So first of all, the day that they are no longer in production, we cooled them down, but we actually keep them in the building. They're stacked up at the end of the building. And we have enough room for reactors for 50 years at the end of the building. So we just stacked them up there, because right when the reactor is taken offline, it's still radioactive because all the materials inside are activated. But the great thing is that the half-life of those different stainless steel and copper and so on that are activated is not that long. So by the time the reactor has, or the plant has been running for 50 years, the vast majority of this activation has already decayed away. And this means that the reactor's that has already been set aside 50 years ago, they are not very very active anymore. And then what we can do is we can sort of put them into a big giant crusher, like you do with the cars where you kind of crush them down into a small brick of steel. And then we can put that into a melting furnace. There's actually some also some other steps where we do some washing. We can, because there will always be a little bit of salt residue in there. And we need to wash that out first so that doesn't go into the furnace. But then basically we inside that same building where we have the nuclear reactors, we re-melt the steel. And then the majority of the remaining radioactivity will be left in the slack. And then the slack on top of that steel that you've mowed them, that slack needs to go to low level waste and needs to be packaged correctly for that. The steel can then be reused for new containers or in many cases you'll be able to freely set for things like pilings or bridges. You might not be able to free release it for you sort of in for the general public folks and knife and stuff like that But for for things like pilings you most likely will be able to free release it But that's actually something that that brings me to another thing. I think maybe we should touch on that they You know recently the demonstration in the US has looked at that the radiation limits are some of them are maybe not realistic or scientifically valid and We should look at some of these these requirements. We have for what is low level waste and very low level waste is sometimes unreasonable Yeah, one of the things is that the limits for when you can Release something as not being radioactive anymore are different in different countries and The funny thing is that if something comes from a nuclear power plant the limits of when you can release it is sometimes Much lower than if for example, it's ashes coming from a coal-fired power plant so and that's that's because you know before we had the nuclear industry Always hyping coal-fired or piping coming from drilling for oil and gas. That stuff can be pretty hot Compared to what comes out of a nuclear power plant Yeah, so I hope that in the future those limits for How much radio activity we can accept? Will change and be more reasonable and that's actually one of things that have changed recently in the US is that You want to start discussing this and looking into this There's another funny thing that if you look at tritium Like how much tritium can you be allowed to release in seawater or something? the limit is there's a thousand times different from the the country with the smallest Legal limit and the the largest legal limit so countries are not in agreement and all about What should what the limits should be? But I think over the next 10 or 20 years This is something that will be discussed quite a lot and also will be adjusted in many countries All right, I told you when we were discussing this interview I was going to challenge something that I keep reading about I keep seeing comments from those who Let's say really like thorium rather than a femme of the other phrases that I've seen people use for those who really like during they talk about a Thorium breeder reactor or thorium reactor as being far more energy dense than a uranium reactor, but it seems to me like they're ignoring the fact that your aim to 38 Can breed new fuel almost as well as thorium 232? Yes That's correct. So if you if you take if you take all the different elements Sorry isotopes then there's actually only a free ice Soaps that can create a sustain a chain reaction and those are uranium 233 which come from the one It's uranium 235 which we get out of nature and then it's protonum 239 Which come from uranium 238 in nature. So So you have to use one of those fuels and the the amount of energy you get out of each one per kilogram is almost the same But the thing is the Reaxis that you can construct with those different materials are not the same They actually Quite different and and thorium works really well if you have a breeder reactor in thermal spectrum But thorium is not great if you have a light water reactor for example It has been tried many times where people put thorium into solid fuel Rots in light water reactors and then they realize that it's not better than than in rich uranium And you can actually easily make those Calculations on a piece of paper if the warm only becomes really good When you start to approach a breeding ratio of one And of course if you get a bug one, it's really really good fuel And it's a little bit the same with the uranium 238. I mean uranium 238 in the light water reactor It does create a little bit of plutonium and it does contribute to maybe 25 or 30 percent of the total energy production. So it does contribute But it it again, it would be better in a fast reactor But the problem in the fast reactors they've recycling of a solid fuel rods in fast reactors are complicated and It has been difficult for the there's been a lot of experiments in the past and and there's actually fast Reaxis running right now in russia and I believe also Maybe one in China and one in India But the problem with those reactors is that this recycling of the fuel rods is Very difficult and very expensive and in in russia where they have both fast reactors and light water reactors They they say that the the light water reactors are much better A more economic than the fast reactor. So so that's why some people say that fast reactors are only for burning spent fuel and Ah, it shouldn't be like that, but But our reactors can do both so that's great Yes, and there are some fast reactors under development today which are The similarly designed and make it easier to recycle the fuel and they many of them build on the proven technologies that were used in the EBR2 the experimental breeder reactor number two which operated at the Idaho National Laboratory from 1964 to 1994 and This almost got to the point where they were going to show how this integral Fast reactor cycle could work where you take the fuel out You melt it down and you recycle it back in and the thing It was made it easier to recycle was the fuel was metallic alloy Rather than being an oxide fuel was with some kind of cladding on it Of course then IFR program the integral fast reactor program was abruptly defunded and closed down in 1994 But there are there are a few reactors that build on that of full few reactors being designed today They build on that some are getting close to demonstration So at some points they made you know offer some good competition And there's even some reactors coming from your side of the pond at Europe There's one in front a company called nucleo and France and Bleecala in Sweden which are looking at lead cooling and they also believe that their breeding systems will be readily recycled because of the way they're designed in their fuel So again, there's some competition coming in But thorium as we all know is about four times as abundant in nature as uranium And right now it's it is being mined But everybody who might be just throwing it away because it's it's accidentally mined as part of rare earth Minerals mining is my understanding And in fact one of some of the thorium advocates are actually looking for a market for their their byproducts because they're actually critical minerals or Rare earth miners who have a lot of material they need to get rid of Yes, it's in that kind of system though thorium is is actually a nuisance because it is Very slightly radioactive. What is the half-life with thorium? Or you know nine billion years or so like that Yeah, it's some billion years. I can't remember if it's four or 14 or something Thomas is correct thorium half-life is 14 billion years. Yeah, it's millions of years. It's longer than the the The eight of this planet. So yeah Well, year in 239 is very long lived as well something in the billions of years, but Thoriums maybe two or three times longer than year in 238 So both of those are stardust As well as the 235 And as she said that the other two thizile materials we have to make year in 233 three and plutonium 239 and All thizile materials in my view are just magical they have so much energy stuffs in them Just amazing what this supernovas did Just stuffing energy into the atomic nucleus All right, Thomas you guys are moving moving well. You've got a lot of testing going on I think you mentioned briefly that you're gonna build your first reactor your demonstration reactors Probably a very low power reactor in Switzerland And at the Paul Spierrer Institute PSI and that brings me to the final question Why in the world? You and your co-founders decide you want to found a reactor company in Denmark a country that Pohibich the use of nuclear energy Yeah, that's a that's a good question and and I have been thinking many times lately that it's Maybe it's a bad idea to start in Europe because it seems right now that both Asia and the US is moving forward faster than Europe in terms of Nuclear energy, but I hope I hope of course that Europe will will catch up someday So the reason we start in Denmark is simply that all of us are born in Denmark and when we met each other We were all in company and we we met each other at a Different venues but bars and cafes and in covening and all of us have a At background from the technical university of Denmark, so we have connections there as well And so that's the reason why we are in Denmark. Of course we have family and everything here But we've always thought of the company as a as a company that is going for the global market We we never thought of this company as somebody who's who's supposed to make energy for the Danish market Denmark is actually in a little bit of a unique position because it's a very flat country We have lots of wind power And then we are right next to Sweden in Norway that has huge amount of Hydro power both of them and and also Sweden have nuclear energy and because our grids are connected You you typically get something like 10 to 15 percent of the electricity in the Danish grid are from Swedish nuclear power plants And the Danish authorities or Government has been against nuclear for many years It's not entirely correct that you are not allowed to make any reactancy We actually used to have free research reactors in the past And I think soon we will have another resource reactor again, but But it's correct that that the government had a rule that the government could not invest in nuclear reactors For many years and this is still this is still the case, but now they are talking about removing that restriction so the government can invest again, but it's actually doesn't say anywhere in the law That if you were a private company who wanted to build a nuclear reactor Denmark that you couldn't do it But this is a little bit special thing because that there was no regulatory body So and you know who who you're going to go get it approved or get your licenses from so Yeah, so it was pretty difficult for many years and it's still difficult now, but it will get better. I believe So they say we're not going to prohibit you from operating reactor, but it actually licensed and we don't have anybody to collect it for you Yeah, exactly Yeah, there's another possibility we looked at is that we can you know In the Scandinavian countries. We were very good neighbors So we could ask Sweden on Norway or Finland to to come and and give us a license and then Ask the government. You know will you will you accept this license from the Swedish regulator? But we haven't done that, but that is actually also a possibility I have read recently I believe that Denmark is re re thinking it's current position and so maybe things will change there About the time you're ready to start spelling reactors. Maybe yourself some to your neighbors Yeah, hopefully All right, Thomas. Thank you very much for your time and a reminder to the listeners. Yes, nucleation capital Ramamana in partner is an investor in Copenhagen, and a Thomas. We think that their product is pretty amazing and as a potential to make a significant change in the world. So thank you for your attention. Thomas, thank you for being here. And until next time. I hope you enjoyed this episode of The Atomic Show. This is Rod Adams. I've been here host for The Atomic Show for more than 15 years. As the publisher of Atomic Insights, I've been speaking with experts in analyzing nuclear energy for more than three decades. About half a decade ago, it became clear that investing in advanced nuclear developments could provide exceptional returns. Successful investors, based on Silicon Valley, agreed. While I'll continue to produce new content, Atomic Insights is now a part of the Nucleation Capital, a venture capital fund that specializes in nuclear and nuclear adjacent emerging companies. As a managing partner at Nucleation Capital, I'm expanding my access and digging even deeper into nuclear energy companies. 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