Nuclear Power Can Save the Poor and the Planet | James Walker | EP 447

I I would say nuclear has suffered from the worst PR, and that might— it might be partly because governments have always been involved. And, you know, things like Fukushima or Three Mile Island get brought up. But I have to point out that nobody died in those situations. If you look at deaths per gigawatt hour, nuclear beats out wind, and it beats out solar. Surprising, right? It's the safest. Already. And that's not even considering that SMRs and micro reactors are still safer than big civil power plants.

PLS, hey everybody! So I had a great discussion today with someone I've wanted to talk to, the type of person I've wanted to talk to for a long time, and it turned out to be exactly the right person: James Walker. He's a nuclear physicist, CEO of a very interesting company called Nano Nuclear. Nano is making micro reactors that are nuclear reactors that are portable, that can be moved around on the back of trucks. This is something I'm very interested in, being interested in the Nexus, in the relationship between energy, environment, and the amelioration of poverty.

It seems to me that investigating the provision of low-cost, resilient, widely distributable nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuel is morally required, partly because we know—this isn't some wild hypothesis—that if you can make people who are absolutely poverty-stricken relatively rich, they start to care about their environmental future. What that means is the fastest way to environmental sustainability is by the amelioration of poverty, and the best way to do that is to provide low-cost energy. Potentially, the best way to do that is with nuclear energy. So I think these guys are on the cutting edge.

I talked to James Walker, who has an extremely interesting technical and managerial background, military background as well, about just exactly what they're up to. That's all part and parcel of this.

So, you know, welcome aboard! All right, Mr. Walker, James, um, you're CEO of Nano Nuclear and you've got a cool title, I think: Head of Reactor Development. That's a cool title. I was looking at your bio, and you know, it's quite a lot of fun. So what have we got here? Extensive experience in engineering and project maintenance including mining, construction, manufacturing, design, infrastructure, and safety management. That's a lot of practical work. And so, you know, I'm very interested in talking to you today, and so thank you very much for agreeing to participate in this.

I've been following Nano Nuclear on Twitter for quite a while, and I'll just give you some background so you know why I wanted to talk to you. I mean, I've thought for years that it's utterly insane that we're not pursuing nuclear energy at a rate that's as fast as we can possibly move. I have a lot of questions about simplicity of design, and I— they're probably stupid questions, to be frank, but now I have the opportunity to ask them, and hopefully I won't be quite so stupid after I'm done with this conversation.

So, do you want to start by telling everybody what it is that you're up to with Nano Nuclear and why you think what you're doing is plausible, helpful, and possibly revolutionary? I mean, you're up in Canada. Take mining sites or a lot of the First Nation communities— they're in remote areas. All of these things are run on diesel power, and you can't substitute this out for anything else until micro reactors come on the scene, and then suddenly you've got a market there: thousands of mining sites, hundreds of remote communities, island communities, charging stations for electric vehicles. You can essentially put these remote power systems in the middle of nowhere, and they would power your communities or businesses for 15–20 years. That's a wonderful business opportunity that has never really been present before, and that's why we pursued the micro reactor.

Okay, so let me get some terminology straight so I understand exactly what we're talking about here. So we have large-scale nuclear reactors in Ontario, which—and they're planning to refurbish the Pickering site, which is a new decision, I think that came up actually last week. And a good decision, thank God. We're not as dopey as California or Germany, let's say. Now, you talked about small modular reactors, and I've looked into the molten salt technology reactors and so forth, but you're differentiating that down further to micro reactors.

So do you want to distinguish for us, draw a distinction between a micro reactor and a small modular reactor? And can you tell us the scale of power production, you know, in-house equivalents? Let’s say a standard reactor— it will power something like a small city if I understand, if I've got my numbers aligned properly. A small modular reactor— I'm not sure about their power-generating capacity— and what exactly constitutes a micro reactor, so differentiate that for us.

Absolutely. So let's start with the conventional civil power plant because that's what everyone's familiar with. We've been using those for decades. Those things are powering cities and beyond, so usually a significant portion of your National grid, um, and that's in gigawatts. You know, but when you shrink down to a small modular reactor (SMR), you're talking about something really between, say, 20 megawatts and about 300 megawatts. When you're getting up to about 300 megawatts, you're getting up to quite a large reactor, and so that's really the definitional— the definition we can place on an SMR.

A micro reactor really is anything between— well, anything less than 20 megawatts. At that point, you're dealing with very small reactors. Um, okay, yeah? And so that's where we are, and we're at the low end of that because we want to transport micro reactors.

Okay, so let me zero in on the micro reactors now for a moment and then we'll talk about the technology. So when I've been thinking about this— because I've been thinking about the relationship between energy and the environment for a long time— a number of things struck me. The first is the absolute power density of nuclear fuel, which is unsurpassed by any standard except for fusion. And we're not at fusion levels yet, although I talked to someone about that recently and that'll be released quite soon.

Then I thought, well, we've obviously had something approximating micro reactors that are reliable for a very long time because we've been using nuclear submarines for, what— how long now? Seventy years? Yes, right? I mean, that’s a long time. And they fit in a submarine, so they're not very big, and submarines move around, so they're obviously portable. The people on them don’t die from radiation poisoning, and they can stay underwater forever.

So then I keep thinking, well, why the hell aren't they everywhere? And so, let’s talk about everywhere for a minute. I mean, there's some real advantages to distributed systems. I would say you pointed to the fact that they could be used in isolated communities, but I'm also wondering, it's like, well, why not a network grid of micro reactors as a substitute for these multi-billion dollar massive reactors that can, but don’t very often fail cataclysmically?

Is there, as well as a market for these isolated places that you describe, a broader capacity of making a resilient, networked power grid that gives countries sovereignty over their own power supply, but also has the advantages of multiplicity of provision? You know, I mean, we have a distributed system for fossil fuel, and there's some real utility in that because if part of it goes down, the rest of it doesn't.

So tell me your thoughts on those sorts of matters. Well, it's interesting you bring that up because, um, we were recently at a conference— in fact, just last week, a representative of the Polish government approached us about exactly this. They have a grid system where certain shutdowns mean that they— the whole grid gets lost. They really come up with no real solution to this apart from micro reactors, which they believe they could space accordingly so that in the event of a blackout in a certain area, the grid can be substituted with other power sources along the way.

This is a far more preferential solution than, say, a big grid system or even a diesel generator system, which is actually less consistent and requires the daily importation of diesel just to maintain. Right, right, right.

Well, how— what, these systems, are they resilient to solar flares just out of curiosity? Because this is also a concern, right? A solar flare is about a once-in-a-century occurrence, and the fact that a solar flare could take out our whole power grid seems to me a lot more pervasive and present a threat than this, like, climate alarmism that we're short-circuiting ourselves about.

So I know that the distribution infrastructure still might be susceptible to, say, solar flare-induced shocks, but what about the reactors themselves? Well, the good part about a reactor is that it's almost entirely mechanical. Obviously, the argument— mechanics can be very controlled by electricity, but the truth of it is that, like, the reason why micro reactors are very safe is that say, there was a big solar flare and knocked out the electrics, and the mechanical systems all simultaneously failed. With the micro reactor, you can't get the sort of disaster or the core melt, which is the big problem with a big civil plant, that you can.

The reason for that is that it can't generate enough heat, especially in our designs, to actually melt the reactor. So it passively cools. Right, right, right. So it just shuts down— shuts itself down? Even then, if the reactor, the uranium just keeps getting hotter, it's fine. It just radiates heat out, and it's not going to melt. It doesn't matter.

Like, the worst thing that can happen with a reactor is if, I don't know, it's a coolant leak which leads to a core overheat, which leads to core melt, which can happen in big reactors. It's not going to kill anyone, but it's messy to clean up. Right, right, right. In a micro reactor, it just passively cools. So, say you did get that solar flare— there’s not a huge amount of electronics that it— it would be a fairly quick fix to go around and put these things back in order, but they would essentially just sit there until you came around to do that fix. So it's a big advantage.

Okay, so that's another advantage on the resilient side. Okay, so now I want to delve, if you would, into other issues. So let’s say cost, availability, but I'd also like to ask some really stupid questions about the technology itself. So, I mean, and correct me any place I'm wrong— and that might, there might be many places like that. I mean, so you refine nuclear fuel and it heats up of its own accord as a consequence of radioactive fission. In a big reactor, you use rods to dampen down the rate at which the fission reaction occurs so that it stays within acceptable bounds.

So let me ask you really a basic, simple technical question. I was thinking, well, what would be the simplest possible source of electricity that you could hypothetically design if you were using nuclear power? I thought, well, why not embed pellets of enriched uranium or some other substance inside molten lead balls and calibrate the distribution of the uranium pellet so that the balls were basically red hot but no hotter? Drop them in a bucket of water, capture the steam, and run a generator.

Okay, so like, why is that stupid? Because it seems the lead seems to me to be something that's dense and would shield— I guess it would get radioactive over time, but so that’s a very simple design. So tell me why that's a stupid design. Oh no, I mean, effectively what you've done is design a basic reactor because uranium gets hot, heats up water. Like the only thing that's missing from your design is the circulation of water. So… Right, but that's a simple— we have pumps, we could do that.

So why aren't extraordinarily simple systems like— I mean, I know it's not simple to mine and refine the uranium, you know, but why aren't extraordinarily simple systems like that available even as heat sources, for that matter? Well, I'll give you a good example, actually. You know that, do you remember the Voyager spacecraft that NASA launched? I think they're on the edge of the solar system at the moment, and essentially all that’s powering those is plutonium that is basically radiating heat. That’s it.

It's like it's the Jordan Peterson reactor— but, um, it's radiating heat, and there’s like a thermoelectric turbine on the— just converts some of that heat into electricity. That’s it. That can be the totality of it. So that's probably the most simple nuclear device— nuclear power device you could get.

But say with a lead-lined uranium pet like you described, well say you have a place for your fuel and you're putting all of the lead pellets in there. That's going to obviously— the lead is now occupying space that the fuel could be, so you might need to have a bit of a larger reactor. And if you have a bit of a larger reactor, you need to put a bit more fuel in, and then you can get that runaway effect. Unfortunately, the laws of physics keep pushing us in certain design decisions.

I think that's been the challenge why micro reactors and SMRs have never been done before is that material science is now catching up. For instance, you've actually described something very close to a solution that a lot of the big reactor companies are coming up with called TOFU, which is like uranium encased in certain layers of lead. And eventually, you can't get the fuel to melt, and they’re essentially pellets that go into fuel space.

Okay, so that gives me some sense. I'd like to kind of understand the most basic possible model before things become elaborated. So can we walk a bit through your technology? One of the things that struck me about your technology was its portability on the back of a truck. I mean, I can imagine 50,000 reasons why that might be extremely useful. There's something that's kind of cool about it, too, that you can just trundle one of these things wherever it's needed for emergencies, for backup power, and for remote communities, which is all obvious. Land mining sites and so forth, as you pointed out, which is a big deal in places like Canada.

It would also, as far as I can tell, open up the possibility, especially in places like the Northwest Territories for mining, where that's practically not feasible because you can't build the bloody hydroelectric lines across 2,000 miles of tundra to fire up a mine. But with this provision of power, then I was also thinking it'd be pretty damn useful hypothetically on the desalination front, too, because everybody's jumping up and down about not having enough water, which strikes me as abysmally foolish, given that 70% of the planet or something like that is covered by, you know, water some miles deep. So I don't think we're going to run out.

So walk me through, if you would, the design of your reactors, and help me also understand why they’re not already everywhere. Okay, um, with our reactors, as you mentioned, we wanted them to be portable. That was actually a business decision that spurred that on because we thought, well, if they can fit within an ISO container, as an example, then you could transport them by truck or by train or just put it on the back of a maritime vessel, and you could ship these things anywhere. You could even effectively helicopter in.

Now, when you do that, you can streamline your design a little bit, so you've got to work within the confines of an ISO container. So you kind of end up with almost a bath-shaped design. But we have two technical teams, one drawn principally out of scientists and engineers out of University of Berkeley, California, and the other out of University of Cambridge, but we gave them the same MO. So it needs to be transportable, it needs to fit within an ISO container, it needs to be modular, and it needs to be able to passively cool, like we talked about earlier.

And they had different solutions. The US team realized that if they take the coolant out and you just have uranium in a conventional fuel rod and it radiates through a solid core, then you don’t need pumps for a coolant at all, and then the whole mechanical system shrinks right down. So it’s basically one of the most basic designs you could probably make, um, conducting a solid core, and then circulated air basically removes heat from the periphery of that core to a turbine, and that’s pretty much it.

Oh really? So you're not using— you're not using liquid at all? You're just using— unless you count air as the liquid, but that’s effectively their solution, and I think it's quite brilliant, I’m bound to say that, but I do genuinely think that. The University of Cambridge's solution was to take a basic fuel form, uranium dioxide fuel rod, and surround it with solar salt, but introduce some heat into that system to create a natural circulation.

As that circulates, the uranium keeps that momentum going, and so then you can take the pumps out, you can take the mechanical systems out, and the system shrinks right down. Okay. And you said that was salt-based? That was salt-based, yes. So it's— Right, right, right. But the salt isn't molten in that system, so how—is it molten, or how is the heat transferred?

So it is essentially liquid, so it'll start off liquid, but as you introduce heat, you create that natural circulation, and then the heat of the uranium maintains that natural circulation of salt, and that will remove heat from the fuel rods, then you can remove heat to the turbine and so forth.

Right, and so how is the turbine spun with that system? With that system, it’s a thermoelectric. So, we’re not going to design these turbines, but I mean, if you think like a helicopter turbine or something like that where you’re burning high-quality jet fuel to generate heat— and that heat is essentially moving that turbine. They’re very con— the good thing about turbines is that, right, quite similarly to each other.

Right, right, well, they've been around for a long time, so that's a well-established technology. Now, you also worked for Rolls-Royce for a while; if I've got my facts straight? I did, yes. I was in the Ministry of Defense. That's actually— you mentioned submarines earlier— that's how I got my start in nuclear. I was involved in the construction of manufacturing facilities to produce reactor cores, but they seconded me to Rolls-Royce where I worked as a physicist in the design of the next generation of nuclear reactors for the next generation of nuclear submarines.

I see, I see. Okay, so that's a logical segue into the commercial market that you're attempting to conquer now. How long have you guys been in operation? So actually, not very long. It was only really about 2020 when we wanted to really get the company going, and I was number two in the organization. We came at it, obviously, from that background when we were talking about why we— why nuclear, why micro reactors.

But what was quite interesting is actually once we got into the industry, we realized that the US infrastructure, the nuclear infrastructure, had kind of atrophied a little bit, and it had done that because the US could source enriched material from Russia, um, weapons-grade material, and then it could just down-blend that material for whatever domestic need it wanted, whether that was military or civil power plants. That allowed it essentially to not have to renew a lot of its systems.

So when we entered the nuclear industry, it was kind of alarming that we thought we would have major impediments to actually launching a commercial company because of these infrastructure problems. So we thought, actually, this could be an opportunity. So we're looking to try and build our own fuel fabrication facility, our own deconversion facility, or our own fuel transportation system, and hopefully, we could be part of, you know, this renaissance of nuclear.

Right, right. Where are you located? So the head— the headquarters are in New York. Um, so I'm here; I’m actually here at the moment, but I actually— I live in Canada most of the time. So I’m in— where do you live in Canada? Vancouver.

And have you had any contact, say, with the government people in Saskatchewan? Because, I mean, as you no doubt know, Saskatchewan has, like, uranium reserves that are, I think, unparalleled in the world and that don’t really seem to be being utilized all that efficiently. And so, I mean, it's such insanity as far as I can tell. We have this almost infinite power supply at our hands, and yet we've turned to solar and wind. We’re trying to cobble together battery storage, which, as far as I can tell, isn’t working that well at the moment.

So, well, so that was the other question I had: why aren't these already everywhere? You pointed to transformation in material technology and alluded to the fact that maybe we're just at the point where this has become economically viable and scalable. Are there regulatory problems? Are there problems of public perception as well that constitute impediments?

I would say nuclear has suffered from the worst PR, and that might— it might be partly because governments have always been involved in the funding of these big installations, and the government don’t care about— but like, if I was to say to somebody, you know, nuclear is the safest of all energy forms— like, if you look at deaths per gigawatt hour, nuclear beats out wind, and it beats out solar. Right, it's the safest already. And that's not even considering that SMRs and micro reactors are still safer than big civil power plants.

Right, right. And, you know, things like Fukushima or Three Mile Island get brought up, but I have to point out that nobody died in those situations, and really, it's just a cleanup operation. I don’t want to trivialize it, but it's— I think human psychology is interesting. I think radiation might be more intimidating because it's a danger you can't see. You can't understand the magnitude of that danger. Consequently, it's not like a tiger in the room you can see and you can assess, and that maybe has been an impediment.

Okay, well, okay, so that’s well— well, we can understand that. I mean, a huge part of the problem that any company has to solve is the marketing problem. That’s often 85% of the problem even if it’s a complex technical problem. And so then, what about government impediment or other sociological impediments specifically to your progress? Where are you— where are you getting resistance, and where are you seeing, like, a well-paved way forward?

Well, the good part is that when we— we did see a lot of resistance, but resistance in the form of infrastructure not being in place. And just to take an example of another company— and they probably won’t mind me saying this— new scale were the first company to license an SMR. In fact, they’re the only ones in the world to do that, but they became under fire because the costs of their megawatt generation were more than they thought it could be. But to be fair to them, everything they had to do was first of its kind, and so it's like the first pharmaceutical drug costs millions, and the second one costs nothing.

They got penalized for that, but if there was an infrastructure in place within the country to support everything they did and manufacture the fuel and parts they needed, it would have been an order of magnitude cheaper for a start. Logically, nuclear should be the cheapest form of energy, but you have all your capital costs upfront, which can really distort that picture.

In big projects, like, 70% of your overall costs might be financing costs related to that big front capital cost. Well, you know, one of the things it seems to me that you, from a PR perspective, a marketing perspective, that there's a wide open field of opportunity on one side of this equation that I don’t think has been well capitalized upon. I mean, first of all, I think you can make a— you already made a case for green. Um, what would you say for that?

That nuclear power can be a very green form of energy, at least in principle, especially when it's safely delivered in the form that you're delivering it. And you made a case for reliability and portability and all that, but there's another case that’s just begging to be made even additionally on the environmental front.

The data is quite clear that if you get people around the world up to the point where they're producing about $5,000 in US dollars a year in GDP, they start to take a long-term view of the future. They become environmentally aware, and that's because they're not scrabbling around in the dirt, burning dung, trying to figure out where the next meal is coming from, and willing to burn up and eat everything around them so they don’t starve.

So it’s clear that if you get people— we know that rich countries get cleaner; that's what happens. And we also think, at least that absolute privation and poverty is bad because do we really want starving people and stunted children and all the misery that goes along with that? There’s this opening, it seems to me, for people who are in a position to provide at scale inexpensive energy to say, look, we could feed the world's poor because there’s a direct relationship between energy and wealth— like more direct than anything else. Energy equals wealth.

Now we can make all the poor people in the world rich in a non-zero-sum manner. As soon as we did that, they'd start to care about the environment. So, like, where’s— what’s the problem with that? And what do you think of that as a marketing campaign, let’s say?

Well, you’ve outlined our marketing campaign because, um, when we were building up the company and we were making some very big connections— one of them, we were talking to some African diplomats, and they were mentioning to us, you know, one significant issue that Africa faces as a continent is that there are large sections of the population that are completely removed from grid systems. So that means diesel generators. But the problem there again is that you need a constant supply of diesel to be brought into those generators for fuel.

So their supplies are missed. If you have a micro reactor system— we touched on it earlier, like desalination plants, medical facilities— a micro reactor could be put there, and you've got 15 years of power for a community. And it's consistent, too. And then you have that $5,000 per capita wealth to create more long-term strategic thinking.

I've been to Africa enough and seen these poor areas to know that like when you're scrambling around in the dirt, your considerations are very short term because they have to, otherwise you’re going to die. And so it’s a situation that begets, you know, very damaging decisions for the larger community.

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Right, right. Well, that's the environmental cost of poverty. Like, we scream in the west all the time about the environmental cost of wealth, but the environmental cost of poverty is way higher, way higher. And so, and this is something I can't figure out. I cannot figure out why the greens don't get this because, in principle, they're on the left. The leftists in principle are on the side of the poor, but when it comes— but like, the thing is, I take Germany as an example— the green lobby got into essentially a position of power within that country, and they're effectively left with— yeah.

They were very— they heavily campaigned against nuclear to push for other renewable solutions, so they pushed heavily into wind and solar, but the result of that was that the country no longer could power itself. It had to buy power from Poland, which was manufactured by coal. Right!

And it had to buy, ironically, energy from France, which was generated by nuclear power. So… Right, right. The costs— the costs of the German energy—which went up for their power, and they became their carbon footprint. Right, right.

So we want to dwell on that for a minute. The consequence of the green movement in Germany was that power— let’s lay it out— power is five times more expensive than it should have been. The Germans became reliant on fossil fuels to a degree that they weren’t before, including reliant on Putin, which turned out to be a very bad idea, let’s point out.

Plus, and Germany is now in the throes of de-industrialization, so the poor are going to get a hell of a lot poorer. You might say, well, that’s all worthwhile because we’re so much greener, but the truth of the matter is that Germany now has among the world’s dirtiest energy per unit because of their idiotic policy. So they didn’t just fail on the economic front entirely and make the poor poorer; they failed by their own standards because the bloody goal was to decrease pollution, and what they did instead was increase it per unit of energy, and not just a little bit, a lot.

And so this just bedevils me because I cannot put my finger on why it is that the leftists are simultaneously pro-environment, pro-poor people, and anti-nuclear. It’s like, sorry guys, you don’t get to have all three of them. You can have two.

I imagine there’s a lot of posturing here, and it’s— yeah, yeah, it’s not just— I mean… that all right, well, yes, but like, as an example, like I was working in Utah once, and there was this— I was working in this small little town, and there was a massive coal power plant there, and I was like, oh, so this power is for Utah? And they’re like, oh no, we send all this power straight to California.

I was like, why? And they’re like, well, they shut down a lot of their power plants. Um, so they can claim that they’ve greened essentially, but really, they’re still powering their Teslas off coal that’s being generated in Utah. And so it’s the same kind of optics.

Well, you know, Californians and Utah— and the inhabitants— what are— what do you call people from Utah? What do you call— I have no idea what— anyways, you know that Californians and people from Utah, they don’t breathe the same atmosphere. It's like China and the United States; completely different supply as everyone knows.

So yeah, well one of the reasons I like to talk to engineers is because they don’t get to posture. Like, the thing that’s cool about engineers is their stupid stuff either works or it doesn’t, and it's very unforgiving. And so, you know, and— and, uh, yeah. It’s okay, the DEI people and the politically correct types, they’re going to take all you engineers out too, so you better get prepared.

Well, as a— my days might be numbered, so… Yeah, well, plus you're an engineer, man. You’ve got a lot of things— you know a lot of strikes against you. So, okay, okay, so we’ve made a case for these small— these micro reactors.

Now I’d like to know— and you alluded to something quite interesting, you know. You said that when you first started to contemplate doing this in the American environment, you realized that there was a lot of industrial and infrastructure pieces that needed to be in place that had been allowed to decay, because the Americans had had a reliable supply of file material from the Soviet Union as a consequence of its collapse, and so a lot of things were left to disintegrate, let’s say.

But now you've realized that that's also another economic opportunity. So it sounds to me like you guys are planning to build a, what would you say, from the ground up enterprise that will allow for these micro reactors to exist. So then I want to know where you are, how you came to that conclusion, where you are in that process, and then again, because I have a particular interest in western Canada, I’m curious about, you know, how these ideas have been received in places like Saskatchewan.

So I would say there’s like three questions there.
Yep, yep, yep. So, um, how these things have been received— like, let’s start with that one.
So, um, I think certain territories, like Alberta, become very friendly to the idea of powering a lot of their remote industries, even the oil sands operations, with nuclear power.
Right, right, right. And that’s an incredibly energy-intensive industry.
And so there has been support voiced for the— and there’s like an Invest Alberta program which is looking actually to bring in SMRs. But that's not ubiquitous across the whole country. You—you wouldn't see the same receptiveness from, say, British Columbia, where I am currently.

It's—it's again, certain more industry-friendly provinces would drift in that sort of area, and I think, obviously, Ontario—the greater Ontario area—came to the conclusion that nuclear had already provided a substantial portion of the energy for the province, and they didn’t want to substitute that for more fossil fuels. So they've gone back and invested in— and Canada actually has a pretty decent— I quite like the reactors they put together, the CANDU reactors, and they also almost generated their entire independent industry because they opted for designs that weren’t being widely used across the world.

So Canada is actually in a very strong position to build out their own SMR industry if they invest properly now in doing that. Otherwise, they’re going to suffer in the same way that the United States is suffering from getting going now. Another thing you mentioned is why we— why we saw these problems— we saw big companies like TerraPower.

It’s a big SMR company, and it’s backed by Bill Gates, so there's no shortage of money for this thing to get going. But they effectively could not find enough fuel to put into their reactors to complete the test work, and we thought that was very interesting. So what happened there? Well, they effectively had to shut down for two years, and that’s the worst thing that could possibly happen because you just burn cash, and so they probably— they’re probably going to burn through hundreds of millions of dollars.

And so the advantage— you know, a wise man can learn from the mistakes of others, so hopefully we just saw that and we thought, well, if we can’t—we’re not backed by Bill Gates, so we can’t afford to make a hundred million dollar mistake like that or a billion dollar mistake like that.

And so really, before we saw the US government realize that there was a significant problem, which very closely mirrored the Ukraine war when relationships began to become very strange, they began pushing a lot of funding opportunities out there to build back their infrastructure, and they’re doing that now, but it still comes a bit late.

And so the advantage we had is we started doing that before these funding opportunities from the US government came out to build conversion facilities, deconversion facilities, fuel fabrication, enrichment facilities. Because otherwise, if Russia cut off the states now—and they still are—they are still, through back channels, dealing in the supply of enriched uranium because the US can’t afford to go without it. But they don’t want to have those channels open anymore, and they want to cut ties, but they can’t do it.

And you mentioned earlier that Germany lost sovereignty over itself partially because it couldn’t [be] self-sufficient. It was reliant on Russian gas. Right, that’s a situation no country really wants. You want to have sovereign energy, um, you know, absolutely. Otherwise, your diplomatic strength is completely gone, and, um…

Yeah, well you'd think that no country would want that, but when you watch the policies that they're pursuing, a sensible person would conclude that that's exactly what they want. I do believe that posturing has a very large amount to do with that because almost all of the green idiocy is narcissistic posturing; it’s the pretense of doing good without doing any of the actual work.

Okay, so walk me through where you— okay, so explain to everybody who's watching and listening how you're involved right from the place where the uranium is still in the ore in the ground. Like, what has to happen at each step along the way so that the fuel actually gets to one of your reactors, and how is your company situated to make that happen, and where are you in that process?

So starting at the very basic— uranium mining, you mentioned the Saskatchewan deposit— so you mine the uranium, but the ore is effectively not very useful for anything, but you subject that ore to a leaching process and you create a yellow cake, which is essentially more concentrated uranium. That then would be shipped off for a conversion. Where we sit in that is that we've actually reached out to Central Asia, where almost the majority of the world's uranium is currently being mined— it doesn’t come from Canada, but say there are big deposits in like Wyoming and Saskatchewan that are not producing uranium readily now in enough quantities to meet the demand.

And so it is coming from abroad. I believe those domestic deposits will be built up now that the uranium price is rising because, like COP28 announces, we exit the necessity to triple nuclear energy by 2040 or whatever it is. So that is having an effect on the uranium price, which is encouraging mine development. But the problem with mining is that it can take five years from a greenfield deposit to get to a mine, and so you always have that lag.

If the lag— if during that lag, the uranium price drops, and that could even hit that might even come into commercial production; so it’s a lot of risk associated with, you know, not having your own domestic facilities in place. So we have reached out to them. We do have the ability at the president's office within certain countries in Central Asia to source uranium directly if we should need it, and we've even talked with the largest uranium materials broker in the world to make sure that we have a supply of that, because no business wants to make wants to like have the risk that you have all— you build all these facilities and reactors and manufacturing facilities, but the raw material that fuels all this isn’t there.

So there’s that component to it, too. Well, do you worry that you're dealing with these? Like, say, Central Asian countries again— it brings me back to the same thing: well, if you could have a resource in Wyoming or, let’s say, in Saskatchewan, that seems to me to be a lot more geopolitically stable in any real sense than trying to source something halfway around the world in countries that are definitely not politically stable. So why were you compelled to go seek out suppliers elsewhere?

Well, it’s the immediacy of supply. They are able to supply material now, and that is over— we have a mine, and it's at even feasibility level; you still need to put the mine works in place, the processing plant in place—processing plants for uranium operations could be a quarter of a billion dollars and take three years to build.

And so we want to make sure that it doesn’t have to take three years to build. I mean, you know, I also wonder, are there improvements in technology that are in the pipelines that would make it possible to do it in like a year instead of three years if people actually decided they— you know? I mean, Germany built new natural gas importing terminals in months when they needed to, so like we can actually move pretty quick if we decided it was a good idea.

So, okay, so you said immediacy of supply— that’s what drove you to Central Asia— but it would be better, perhaps, if there were domestic supplies that were at least in the pipelines, let’s say domestic supply from Saskatchewan or Wyoming would be a lot better. Of course, they’re— there’s no geopolitical, well, there’s less geopolitical uncertainty.

Like, for instance, even in Central Asia, like they do supply China and Russia still with the uranium that they need for their own programs, too. So you’re competing against other countries which are potentially hostile to the states or Canada or places like that, and if they’re looking to wage an economic war, we’ll look for more exclusive contracts. And so, you then are in a competing position for material you can't control, right? Seems like a bad idea from a geopolitical perspective; that seems unwise, let’s put it that way.

So I can understand why you guys are doing it commercially because, as you said, you can’t afford the delay and fair enough. Okay, so now do you have a stable supply fundamentally? Can you get moving with what you're doing? You can, so the good part about what we're doing now is we've ensured that we have broken enough good relations with certain countries that we can source material if we wanted.

We’re not in the business of enrichment, but we could do things like conversion and get it into a uranium hexafluoride gas which can go to a licensed enrichment company like Orano or Centrus, and they could enrich the material for us.

So what’s the relationship between the gas and the yellow cake? What you want to do with yellow cake is, once it’s been concentrated by that leaching process, that it’s easier to enrich a gas than it is, say, yellow cake, which could use a centrifugal system. But gas is certainly a lot easier to maneuver.

So if you would take the yellow cake and you would expose it to several chemical processes to turn it into uranium hexafluoride— And it's actually the enrichment companies will enrich uranium hexafluoride to produce, um, well, whatever you want, so, enriched— enriched whatever level the customer needs it.

But at that point, it actually needs to be deconverted back to a solid. Oh yeah? So our company actually wants to build out that infrastructure for the country, too, so take that uranium hexafluoride, convert it to dioxide, uranium hydride— sorry, uranium dioxide, uranium hydride, uranium metal, whatever the market will need.

So that’s one element, and then fabrication facility to tailor it for the specific reactor, so essentially fashion it into dimensions, composition, um, mold it with zirconium, whatever they want, and then sell that. The final part of what we want to do is build out a transportation company, um, so we can actually transport that around North America, too.

How would you transport it? So we’ve actually been spending about a year doing this, but we’ve got a patented technology now for a shipping system that can transport the most amount of enriched material around North America. And we’re just in the process of getting that license now with the regulator.

Okay, so that’s okay. So you’ve been working on solving the transportation problem. What are the problems associated with transport that you’ve had to solve, and how did you solve those? So the fundamental problem with transport is that you cannot have uranium critically configured. What I mean by that is if you— uranium is only actually really radioactive if you push it all together, which is the basis of a bomb, really.

If you push it together, then it triggers itself more, and it sets off a chain reaction, and it's the reactivity that creates the heat. Um, so effectively for road regulations, you have to store the material in a structured way to make sure it's not critical. But it doesn't end there. There’s a lot of other regulations surrounding that.

So is it going to be hit by a plane or a missile? Or is it going to fall underwater or what are the heat conditions going to be, cold? Can it be warm? You’ve got to run all these safety scenarios. So designing a transportation container that fits within a truck that can move a lot of material by road is a bit of an engineering challenge, but I don’t think it’s that— that difficult.

But it's certainly something that has not been in place previously because for SMRs and micro reactors, the uranium is enriched slightly more, and because it’s enriched slightly more, you need a completely new shipping system. And so that's where we thought, oh, we’ll jump on that and build that out, and that way, when the industry does take off, we’ll have the transportation able to move fuel for all the reactors.

Okay, so does that mean I see? So that means that your transportation system, in principle, is not only designed to service your micro reactors, but to be expanded to service these slightly larger reactors, the SMRs? Yeah, the good part—that's the plan. Yeah, that’s the plan.

So we don’t— I mean, we’re not in the business where we want the other competitors to fail. If they win, we’ll win. Yes, yes, right. Absolutely. The right number of competitors isn’t zero. No, exactly!

And also, we want them to succeed because, um, they’ll build out the infrastructure, they’ll generate more money within the country for this industry, and we’ll be beneficiaries of that, too. If they want to move fuel, we’ll help them move fuel. If they want to fabricate fuel, we’ll fabricate it for them, even if they outsell our reactors; it's fine.

So you can also be in on their success in that situation, too. Okay, so that’s cool. Okay, so you said you've got a supply, at least at the moment, in Central Asia that gets reduced to— by leaching to yellow cake. The yellow cake is transformed into— uh, uranium— what’s the name of the gas? Uranium hexafluoride. Hexafluoride, yes.

And then that can be, uh, concentrated, and then converted back into— about 20%, you said? Uh-huh. And so why 20%? And then, and what— and you can transport it at 20%, and you can do that safely? You can do that by rail, by ship, by car. Or… By truck.

And so now you have the 20% enriched material. What do you do with that when you get it to where it’s supposed to go? So, um, it depends where it’s going. So if it’s going to, um, if it’s the 20% enriched uranium hexafluoride, that'll need to be converted into uranium dioxide, hydride, whatever fuel form you want effectively.

Oh, so you’re transporting the gas? We go… Well, I don’t want to speak preemptively on that— okay, that’s fine— but actually, no, it’s fine. We do want to branch— take our shipping container and modify it so it can move gas. I see, okay, okay.

The anticipation is that currently we are building out a deconversion plan to be able to convert that gas into other forms, and then when they’re in other forms, um, it’s easier to fabricate into the final uranium form that the customers might want.

Okay, okay, and how far— how far along are you when you're thinking pessimistically in solving these— this— because you’ve got a bunch of problems, as you laid out. You’ve got the supply problem which you seem to have solved. Now you’ve got the transportation problem, which is also a huge opportunity, so that’s cool because that gives you multi-dimensional access to the market. You’ve got the transportation problem, and it sounds like that’s twofold— there’s a technical element, there’s a regulatory element, I suppose there’s going to be a public relations element to that too, but whatever.

Okay, so now you can move the stuff around. Now you’ve got these deconversion plants that are going to help you formulate the fuel you need to run your reactors, and then you have the problem of building the reactors and getting them to where they’re supposed to go. So four streams of problems that have to move together somewhat simultaneously. How far along are you on each of those streams?

So if I was— if it was a pessimistic timeline, I would say—I mean we’ve been working at this for a fair amount of time. I would say that the first line of business that we anticipate being commercially ready to deploy would probably be the transportation, actually, because we have the patented technology. We’ve already approached the licensing company to— to a regulator to do the licensing for us, and we’ve actually brought in the former executives of— I don't want to say the name, but the largest transportation company in the world, which might give it away, but we’ve brought in some of the former executives from their organization to build out the company around the technology.

So I believe that might be the first commercially deployable business. The timeline on that probably looks like we’ll finish the licensing, hopefully sometime next year, and then the build-out of the manufacturing facility to produce the shipping containers as well as the infrastructure around the containers to fit into trucks and things like that— we’ll do that simultaneously. Probably finish that sometime about 2026. Hopefully in 2026–2027 we would have a commercial vehicle ready to start moving material around North America. That would be—

Okay, so that’s pretty— it’s pretty fast. Okay, well, and if you were— if you were optimistic, what would you say?

Oh, I would say hopefully the licensing will run smoothly. While that’s going on, we build out the manufacturing facilities; we have them finished next year, um, and then we’re in a position to begin initially deploying vehicles that can move, um, enriched material up to 20% around the country. So maybe I shave two years off that if I’m super optimistic.

Okay, so that gives us a range. Okay, so now, if you had the opportunity to work with a state or provincial legislature that was, like, helpful in every way they possibly could be, what would that look like? What would you need from them? Is there anything you need from, like, a particular local jurisdiction that would speed what you’re doing along?

I would say the big thing on that topic is that the regulatory process, just for any reactor, micro reactor, SMR, or big civil power plant, is probably at minimum four years. Oh, yeah, that’s just no good. That’s a terrible problem.

The problem, I think, and they’re probably going to see this podcast and be angry with me, but I think they’re trying to apply a civil power plant regulatory framework to a micro reactor. A different product. And it’s almost— its own regulatory framework should be designed specifically. So you need a legislature that was willing to consider the fact that this isn’t the same old industry.

Yes, yes. It’s a new product; it’s a new industry, and it’s essentially all new technologies, and if they were to design some sort of regulatory framework that just looked at, say, safety criteria for where these things could deploy, like, uh, meet certain seismic conditions or temperature constraints or ranges, um, then the reactor would be approved for deploying anywhere as long as it met this criteria. I think if they—

Right, right, right. It could really allow for one the deployment of these things absolutely everywhere, and it would really be a much faster process because they’re also much more basic. I mean it’s come about because of advances in technology, but the technology itself, once it’s built, is— it’s more basic than the—

Right, right, right. Well, so do you have a jurisdiction with whom you’re having productive discussions that is simultaneously capable of understanding that this is a new technological front, that would be hypothetically— well, I mean because the economic opportunities here are extreme if it's done right, and so you’d think if you were optimistic, that there might be a legislature somewhere in the 50 states in the United States and the 12 places that this could happen in Canada that might be open to such an opportunity. I mean, are you having productive discussions with people who could conceivably clear away the regulatory hurdles?

We have, obviously, made contact with the Department of Energy in the states, and we've obviously broached this topic that this is something that should be considered. It's not that they're unaware that this might be a good idea too, it’s just they also need funding to implement new legislation or get approvals from Congress, um, or how it works in the states.

There’s good bipartisan support in the states for nuclear, but it still needs to go through the approval process where you get the Senate signing off on things. They do need funding to put this new regulatory framework in, so when they give it to a regulator like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the NRC, it can design that new framework, um, and it needs to obviously employ people to do that.

What kind of funding is necessary to do that? Like, I’m trying to get a real handle on the impediments, you know, because the advantages are so stark and obvious, and we’ve done some pretty extraordinary things on the idiot wind and solar front and in relatively short order. So you wouldn’t think that this is— that this is impossible.

So like what sort of funding is necessary if you're starting a new regulatory enterprise essentially from scratch, designed around this new technology? I don’t understand the necessity for this great expense and spending of time. No, I think really it could be done, if I’m honest, it could be done very, very quickly. I think the problem is that, say like a Department of Energy, they run into needing more funding to create a smaller department to design a framework, and then they could be waiting on that funding for a long time as government debates.

But actually if government were very in favor of it, I’m sure on both sides of the aisle, there would be general support for just a small amount of money.

Okay, so let me ask another practical question. If I said, um, do you have a 20-page document that would outline an intelligible regulatory framework that you could hand to a legislator who was positively predisposed to you? Like do you guys have that? Because you know one of the easiest ways to get people to say yes to anything is to make it extremely easy for them, right? And to provide them with—

Exactly! Exactly! Because if you're saying, well, you have to whip up a regulatory structure from scratch and you have to take all the political risk, they’re going to say, yeah, five years from now and we’ll let other people do it, and it’ll take forever. But if you can hand them a tailormade solution essentially…

I know that runs you into the problem of government-industry collusion, but that’s a secondary problem as far as I’m concerned because this isn’t collusion; it’s joint effort to move forward something that would be of great benefit to people. You know, then, and if it happens to be of benefit to your company, it’s also going to be of benefit to many of the other companies that you described too.

So do you have a set of proposals at hand that you could supply to an interested legislative party? Yes, I mean, to be honest, that would take us a few weeks just to put together a proper—

Okay, well that’s not long. A few weeks is long, you know, because I can imagine some people who might be interested in taking a look at something like that.

Oh, well look, if they were very interested, I’d be very interested in that conversation. Our scientists would be very happy to prepare a formal document that outlines a proposal for how these things could be— like it would have to be a very high-level thing, but I down— but essentially the criteria for approving the safety of these things for deployment en masse to different locations is very different because, like a big civil power plant, you have a site regulation process where they— it has to be site-specific and you tailor your safety case for that specific site.

Yeah, for a reactor, you wouldn’t do that. It would be a different process where there is a safety criteria that you need to meet. But as long as the site meets that safety criteria, the reactor can deploy that. So it’s fundamentally different.

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Right, right, right, well, this is exactly it seems to me that this is exactly the sort of thing that has to be dealt with in the kind of detail that legislators would appreciate so that that differentiation is not only made conceptually but made in a manner that would be credible to, like, investigative news reporters and so forth, and people who are skeptical about this.

But I do know that technical problems are one thing, and obviously you guys are capable of solving them, but it’s very, very easy for a whole industry to fall into a mess of red tape and never get out, and certainly that’s happened on the nuclear side of things, and so that’s just not good. It’s— it’s— once I see.

I realized— I worked— I’m ashamed to admit this to some degree, but I worked on a panel years ago, 10 years ago, something like that, which was one of the early UN documents on sustainability. And I worked on that for about two years, and I learned a lot about how such things were made— how such sausage was made, let's put it that way—but I also learned a lot about the nexus between energy and the environment.

One of the things that really— and the economics— one of the things that really struck me, and I never forgot it, was the fact that soon as you make people rich, they start to care about the environment. And I thought, oh my God, that’s such a wonderful thing to learn because it means that we could deal with the problem of absolute poverty and we could deal with environmental sustainability in the same way.

Okay, what’s key? It’s clear— what’s key is easy, it’s cheap energy, period! And so, okay, so then the next question is, well, where are the available energy sources? And obviously one answer to that is with continued use of fossil fuel, but we see the geopolitical trouble that’s laid in front of us because of that, and there are problems of pollution, especially with coal, although they’re not as grotesque as they’ve been made out to be.

But nuclear— you think nuclear. I mean, I read— tell me if this is true— I read that part of the reason that nuclear is safer than solar is because people fall off the roof all the time installing solar panels, and that, you know, falling is actually like the fifth leading cause of death, right? It’s no joke, right? So falling is really hard. But it’s true—like, and also, if you look at wind power too, there’s a significant number of falls that are generated by the installation of these, and they need constant maintenance, which means there is a constant stream of people going up and down these things dying, which is why, when I mentioned earlier, it's a stupid solution; low energy density—like, they’re not a good solution.

And solar— I mean, one of the things I’ve really watched in the last five years, say, as these big solar and wind projects come on, especially in Alberta, because I’ve been watching the Alberta power situation— it’s like the price of electricity goes to infinite on windless and sunless days.

Okay, infinite is a bad price. That’s a very bad price, and you can’t have unreliable— you can’t have an unreliable reliable grid; that doesn’t work. So I don’t see a solution to that. I mean, tell me if I’ve got this wrong, so my understanding is that fundamental— the fundamental problem with a renewable grid is the phasic nature of the power, and because it’s phasic, you have to have backup. It’s like, well, it can’t be nuclear because it takes too long for them to get online, at least in their current form.

So you have to have natural gas and fossil fuel backup, or coal. And if you have to have the backup, then why not just use the systems? Because you’re not going to build two parallel systems. Like, who in the right mind— Germans would do that? You know, and that’s insane.

You know, one of the things I thought was funny when I first moved to Canada is that I was actually living up in Yellowknife in Northwest Territories for a few months, and it's an interesting place to live for a little while. But I was— someone mentioned that the whole city was powered on diesel. I said, ‘That’s crazy! This is a city of like, can’t remember, 40,000 people or something like that. It was fairly significant. I was like, why?’ And they were like, ‘Oh, the dam is broken.’ I was like, ‘Can't they fix the dam?’ It’s like, ‘Well, they can’t really. It’s blocked up, and it’s winter; it’s difficult to get people up there.’

So we’re just running off diesel generators. As far as I know, it’s still running off those diesel generators, and I— I was there six or seven years ago. So think how much diesel there’s— yeah, well, there’s nothing more permanent than a temporary fix, especially if the government happens to be involved. Absolutely, absolutely.

And so, right, right. Well, and, and, Yellowknife is isolated, and so the fact that all that diesel has to be brought in, all that means is that it’s really, really expensive to live in Yellowknife. That’s the outcome. Yeah, there was another— there was another province— I think it was in Yellowknife too— they were talking to us about— there was this— there was a community of about 800 people, um, one of the First Nation settlements up there.

And they— they— the outlay of the diesel alone, if you ignore the logistics and manpower and the cost of generators, was $10 million all alone for just the diesel by itself for 800 people for a year. And I thought, well, that’s crazy! Like, that’s— that’s an enormous expense for just 800 people.

Right, right, right, no. That’s right. There’s many crazy things going on, and all that posturing that you described combined with a tremendous technological ignorance of the most stellar sort means that we are putting into place solutions that cause way more problems than they solve; this just isn’t acceptable.

It’s not acceptable and look, I never want to denigrate fossil fuels too much because I believe they definitely have a place, and they've been an enormous asset to humanity. And I— and people talk about zero, as in going to zero, yeah, that’s insane, that’s completely insane.

Also, just not practical. I even if you were to stop all power, what about the textile industry or the downstream products of the fossil fuel industry— plastics? You’re never going to eliminate them completely. And so it’s— it’s foolish— without eliminating a lot of people.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. And that seems to be the plan. Well, you could imagine a world where we used fossil fuels as a basis for chemical production— like, fertilizer, for example, because we’re not going to substitute nuclear for fertilizer, right?

So, well, and we shouldn't be burning— arguably we shouldn't be burning up our fossil fuels when we need it for chemical— for chemical stock. I mean, that seems to me— so why not?

Okay, so let’s— let’s go be optimistic here for a minute. So let’s imagine that you cleared the regulatory hurdles, and now you managed to transport your fuel material safely. And you can start building these reactors, okay?

Now, and people clue in, and we can start to build a resilient power grid as a consequence. Now you can start manufacturing at scale, right, in principle.

So how much how uniform a product are you making at the micro reactor level? Like, is this something that's assembly line manufactured, and can you drive down the cost with volume?

Yeah, so this is actually— it is that the economy of scale here is the real benefit. So if you’re producing two or three of these a year, it’s very expensive, but if you’re producing fifteen of these, it actually gets very cheap.

And the good thing about micro reactors, which has not been possible before, is that it allows for very easy manufacturing because they’re simple enough to do so. There's no reason why you can’t have a production facility that just 3D prints these things, and then the costs come down very quickly.

And then you are cheaper than a diesel generator. And once you are cheaper than a diesel generator, that will take a few years, to be fair, but once you do get to that point, there will be no real logical reason to use anything but micro reactors in these remote locations and mining sites.

Okay, well, let's go be— okay, let's go expand beyond that. So now, let's assume that you can use this printing technology that you described, and you said the scale—the economies of scale start to kick in.

At how many reactors a year— I would say actually really about fifteen, and then that sort of points to more economic. It’s actually very low— in fact, I think Idaho National Laboratory concluded that it was something like nine—not to mis—

Okay, okay, so it’s a very low— okay.

So let’s— okay, so let’s expand our vision. Let’s say, hypothetically, you could produce a thousand of these things a year, and that they were distributed widely enough to start putting some back resilient backbone into the power supply and start to substitute for natural gas and for—and for coal.

Well, we could start with coal, okay? So how much down do you think you could drive the price of energy— like compared to what it is now?

Well, I mean, that’s very interesting because if the infrastructure was in place and you had domestic production of uranium, um, and we upgraded our enrichment facilities domestically, which we currently don’t have, and you mass manufacture these things, I mean, I’d hate to put a price on it, but like, yeah, there’s no reason why you can’t keep optimizing that system to keep making it incrementally cheaper.

So even— right, okay, so you’re driving down the price— you’re driving down it, and to be SMRs, it’s not our business, but those guys: their costs will also fall commensurately with ours are falling too because there’s no reason why they can’t mass manufacture those things to be major components of a major grid system.

So it’s a more robust system that’s getting cheaper all the time. Um, there’s no reason why that couldn’t have the beneficial effect.

Well, that’s ridiculously exciting, all of that, and so— yeah. Well, seriously, seriously. I mean, it’s such an optimistic possibility.

Okay, well, let’s— okay, let’s be smart about this. Let’s talk about downsides now. We talked about the fact that people are afraid of nuclear technology now. In principle, that could be handled with a marketing strategy that wasn’t based on lies that provided accurate information about the fact that this was essentially a new technological approach.

And that could go in lockstep with the provision of the material the legislative material, right? You can imagine a parallel campaign. So that seems to me to be a solvable problem now.

Okay, some terrorist hijacks one of your trucks. How about that? So the assumption there is they’re going to turn it into some sort of weapon, um, or spill it, or spill it.

So let’s think— let’s think about how they would have to do that. So if they were to seize your micro reactor or your SMR, the problem they have is that the uranium is not enriched to a weapons grade level, so they can’t make it blow up.

And it’s also alloyed, so they’d have to build a multi-billion dollar facility, chemical plant, to recover the uranium and separate it from the alloy.

Okay, so that— okay, so that’s just not a danger.

What about— what about stealing one of your trucks and threatening people publicly with, like, radiation?

I know— look, I already understand! I want to put this in context because it seems to me that anybody who hijacked a propane truck would be in a pretty good position to cause a lot of mayhem.

So—and you know, or derail a train that is carrying fossil fuel. So we have plenty of risk like that already in the system. So do you— where do you see, if anywhere, do you see the kind of risk to the public that can be leveraged by someone crooked who wanted to cause trouble?

Well, just to touch on that quickly, if they seized it, the problem they have, people use examples of things like dirty bombs, which is where you attach a bomb. But the problem with the reactor, uranium is that it’s not going to explode.

If you— reactors can’t blow up for a start like they’re not enriched to a suitable level enough. If you were to take the uranium out of it, strap it to a bomb, the most dangerous thing is the bomb that you’ve made, not the uranium around the bomb, actually.

Right? If you blow up uranium, it becomes less dangerous because you’ve separated the material, so it’s going to react less with itself and become—

Right. So you could imagine that as a public relations disaster fundamentally, yeah— because you can imagine how that would be played up.

But again, I don’t think that puts you in a category that’s any different than, you know, people who are moving fossil fuel from place to place. 'Cause that’s—that’s more risky. That’s at least as risky.

No, it’s more risky because it’s much more explosive. It’s much more explosive and it's dirtier, actually. Like, obviously, if you had a dirty bomb, you’d have to pick up the pieces of uranium. No one’s going to get hurt, but like it’s still you need to maybe cordon off for a micro reactor maybe up 100 meters either way, but it’s still not very say— the BP oil spill— I think some of the effects that are still being felt.

So it’s—it’s a lot—it’s a lot cleaner— cleanup operation.

Um, right, right, right.

I think it’s tricky. I don’t want to sound like it’s all perfect, but you know, what’s a terrorist going to do with a micro reactor? Heat your house, you know. It’s— that is a good advertising campaign, right?

Yeah, micro reactor, heat your house!

Right, right, right. All right, well, okay, so now let’s see— we’ve covered timelines, we’ve covered your process essentially.

Okay, maybe we could talk a little bit more about the micro reactor technology per se. So, what is it about the technology that makes it amenable to mass manufacture, and why does that drive the price down? And where are you in the manufacturing process?

Okay, so the good part is that like if you think about those big civil power plants, they’re huge. They take up, I don’t know, 30 city blocks; they're absolutely enormous!

But there’s an enormous quantity of mechanical components— pumps, all sorts of systems that go into that as it should be. That’s fine, but as you shrink down to SMR and you shrink down to micro reactors, a lot of that goes away, and we actually—in, say, one of our reactors, have hardly any mechanical components at all.

And so then you can get to the point where you can 3D print these things, which you couldn’t do for more complicated mechanical systems where it’s a bit more finicky.

Um, and that does allow for mass production of these things whereas mass production for larger machinery that’s more intricate becomes harder. You can obviously still 3D print components and piece them together, but there’s still a lot more engineering work and human involvement that would be necessary to complete those, whereas a lot of that can be automated, I think, as you get simpler and simpler.

Well, so you've pointed to something very interesting there, which we've kind of glossed over, is that you know you basically said something approximating—almost no moving parts.

Okay, and that’s not— that’s not something that should be brushed over because that’s quite remarkable because fewer moving parts means fewer things that can go wrong. So that’s a big deal, but that's also simpler, more understandable; it’s more marketable, too, because people can understand it.

But also, as you pointed out, it’s much more manufacturable. So to what degree have you reduced the moving part complexity? Like, when you say there are virtually no moving parts, how many parts are there fundamentally?

So I would say, take our Zeus reactor just as an example, that’s a bit further along— like there are moving parts, say, control rods that are inserted into the core, and control rods are to moderate the reactivity, so they go in, they eat up neutrons, if it becomes too reactive, and that’s how you control power, essentially, as well.

So that is a moving part, and that does require mechanism, um, but the it does need fewer safety mechanisms involved than a much larger reactor because a much larger reactor or an SMR will have the ability to overheat and have a core melt or coolant loss and a core melt, which then leads to the reactor being essentially destroyed and needing to be cleaned up.

Like, you got in Fukushima when that reactor essentially melted, and then you just had to spray it with water— that really can’t happen with a micro reactor because it can’t overheat to a point where it will melt. And so you don’t need as many redundant systems in place, um, in case—

Wasn’t it a safety system that went wrong that caused the Three Mile Island trouble? I read that it was like a safety camera that broke off and got lodged in an exhaust pipe or something, which is, you know, horribly dismally comical.

Dismally comical. Exactly, and this is the— this is the problem, is like you still need sensors and things like that within a reactor so you know how to operate so you can see, you can tell what’s happening and then obviously modify the controls accordingly. So there are systems inside a reactor that could fall off in Three Mile Island. Obviously, you— something was dislodged and affected the flow, and then created effectively a runaway effect where core melt and then you did have a—

Right, right, right, right. But again, like Three Mile Island, no one died in that kind of operation, but it’s bad. It’s bad PR, certainly!

Yes, yes, yes! Well, and that’s a problem. I mean,