I’ve done a lot of TechFirst episodes on alternative energy … green energy sources like wind, geothermal, solar … but should nuclear be in the mix?
Nuclear’s having a bit of a resurgence lately as a green option for reliable energy. Are small modular reactors the answer to our needs? To talk about why and where it might fit we chat with the founder and president of Nano Nuclear Energy, Jay Yu, and the CEO, James Walker.
We discuss Zeus and Odin, their two nuclear reactors, safety, disposal after their usable lifespan, and what the ideal mix of green energy sources might be.
And yes, their nuclear reactors do fit on a truck 🙂
(subscribe to my YouTube channel)
Is nuclear back? Could tiny reactors fill an gap in the green energy picture?
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Google Podcasts
Overcast
Other podcasting platforms
Transcript: chatting with the founder and CEO of Nano Nuclear Energy
Note: transcript is AI-generated and can contain errors
John Koetsier:
Is nuclear back? Hello and welcome to TechFirst. My name is John Koetsier here. I’ve done a lot of shows on alternative energy, green energy sources like wind, geothermal, solar, should nuclear be in the mix? Nuclear is certainly having a bit of a resurgence lately to talk about why and where it might fit.
We’re joined by the founder and president of nano nuclear energy. His name is Jay Yu. He’s a serial entrepreneur and investor and James Walker, he’s a CEO, he’s a nuclear physicist and nuclear engineer. Apparently they’re two different things. He works for Rolls Royce. He has worked for Rolls Royce in the past and the UK Ministry of Defense.
Welcome, Jay and James.
James Walker:
Thank you for having us.
John Koetsier:
I am super pumped to talk about this. I mean, nuclear has a very long, very interesting history. It certainly is resurgent right now. James, let’s start with you. Why nuclear?
James Walker:
Well, why nuclear? Because no one really has a choice. I mean, if you want to move towards a green economy, you want to have base load energy, it’s not going to come from wind and solar as much as we would like it to. If you want to move away from fossil fuels and you want zero carbon emitting energy, nuclear is the only solution.
So it’s not so much that there’s a resurgence because there’s a renewed appetite. There’s a resurgence because it’s a necessity. Take for instance a country like Germany that had a real, say noble ambition to make their economy more green and their energy system more green. When they moved away from nuclear, they ended up burning more coal and they ended up with the most expensive energy prices in the whole of Europe.
Came from good intentions, bad things happened to them. Conversely other countries in Europe like Finland just opened up the largest nuclear reactor in Europe. they went away from that system, but it’s a necessity. It’s going to have to be part of the makeup of the future.
John Koetsier:
And so you’re referring to this last winter, I think, where of course, because of geopolitical things, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, shutdown of Nord Stream and Russian oil coming in, Europe had an energy crisis. And I heard actually in the UK, there were shops that had to close. There were astronomical bills, you know, thousands of pounds where you didn’t expect them for your energy, crazy prices. That has somewhat tailed off from now. Interesting. Jay, let’s bring …
Jay Yu:
I just wanted to also add with the UK, because you just mentioned the UK. I had a friend who owned a number of pubs and he literally went bankrupt because of the energy costs and the energy costs were surging, I think he said four times, where he couldn’t pay bills anymore.
He had to reduce his staff and at that point he just said, I give up. The profit margins are so small. I’m just gonna walk away. So he had to close out three of his pubs in the UK
John Koetsier:
I’ve heard of similar stories as well. Super, super challenging business environment in general already, then you add the energy part on top of that. Jay, you founded the company, talk about why.
Jay Yu:
So two years ago, I was looking to invest into green energy. I was looking at solar and wind and it didn’t make any sense to me. You know, you need the sun to shine, the earth to move, and there was no base load energy and no innovation in that space.
So when I started looking into nuclear, I said, okay, there’s big nuclear, but then there’s this acronym called SMR. I kept seeing SMR, SMR everywhere. There’s all these YouTubers and people talking about it. And that stands for small modular reactors.
So I looked into it. There were leaders in the space like Rolls Royce, TerraPower and Neoscale. So I started researching. Again, these are still really big. And what really cemented me was Larry Fink, the chairman of BlackRock. He said, the next thousand unicorns aren’t social media companies or search engines. It’s green hydrogen, green cement and green energy. And that kind of reinforced my thought process.
Again, I didn’t know Nano was going to turn into what it is today, but I knew I needed a rock star CEO. So I went into my network and I said, Hey, does anybody know any nuclear physicists or nuclear engineers? And, and then, one of the very first guys said … I know one up in Canada.
So me being an entrepreneur and me being very hands-on with how I scale companies, I immediately packed my bags, flew to Canada. I sat down with James and I said, James, I know I just met you, but I have a feeling here that green energy is going to be the next big wave and momentum, and in particular nuclear. And he thought I was crazy immediately. I left countries, I changed industries, and you’re telling me to go back into nuclear now?
I said, yeah, exactly. I looked at his resume, worked for Rolls Royce, big check mark because that’s what I was researching. He worked at the ministry of defense.
John Koetsier:
And we should mention here, by the way, that Rolls Royce isn’t just automobiles.
It has a big business in a lot of other things, including energy production, aircraft engines, a lot of other stuff.
Jay Yu:
Exactly. So then, so he had a Rolls Royce checkmark, worked at nuclear sub checkmark, nuclear physicist.
I was like, he’s my rock star CEO, but he’s also a rare combination because I come from Wall Street, where he understands also the capital markets, because he’s worked in public companies. And that combination is very rare in my eyes, especially in the nuclear industry. So I had to recruit him and he was basically number two of Nano Nuclear.
John Koetsier:
James, let’s come back to you. And I don’t necessarily buy everything you guys are saying about solar and wind and geothermal and wave and all that stuff … there are certainly some downsides that the sun does have to shine, but you know what? It shines a lot in Texas. It shines a lot in Australia, shines a lot in various parts of the world … Bermuda other places and so there’s good things there.
But there also are interruptions, right, and battery technology isn’t gonna always do load balancing and load management.
And and you know Morocco is putting a big solar facility in place that they’re gonna ship energy to in Western Europe, but will that always work? Will somebody cut the cable? There will be some challenges. So I do see a need for backups, for emergency access, for maybe leveling load and other things like that. Talk about your technology.
James Walker:
So I mean, just to touch on that very quickly, I mean, Jay was obviously considering, say for instance, solar. I think one of our directors, he was in the Department of Energy, and he invested $2 billion into solar, essentially for a project where after about three years of operation, a lot of the materials would need a complete replenishment.
It’s difficult because obviously there is definitely a will to go more green, but when you are looking to try and say for instance in a very developed country with a very developed infrastructure and grid, base load energy that is the city going to be within, is the sun always shining there? If it’s not then you need to get solar from somewhere else, how are you going to transport that electricity? There’s going to be losses there.
Nuclear can be put anywhere.
I mean that’s the biggest advantage. You can put it in your backyard. You know, wind is the same. From the UK, there was a big investment into wind. It makes up a very, very small percentage of the power structure, even though there’s enormous amounts of wind available there. There’s huge amounts of losses on wind power stations. Again, best intentions. It didn’t pan out as much as they wanted to. Now the government is putting money back into the nuclear industry again to try and put that gap where they wanted green energies to fill, they weren’t able to fill them. They have to go back to what works.
John Koetsier:
But a country like Norway has covered 100% of its energy requirements for entire days and good chunks of it for entire weeks or months, just with wind. But you know what, we probably have that debate offline or something like that. I want to know about your tech as well.
James Walker:
Oh, of course.
John Koetsier:
I grant the need for something that can be always on, doesn’t require the sun to shine, doesn’t require the wind to blow, doesn’t require the waves to come, can be put anywhere that you need and scale pretty quickly.
James Walker:
Yeah.
John Koetsier:
Talk about your tech and how it works. You’ve got two different reactor types, both named after gods, Zeus and Odin.
Talk about those, what they are and what the difference is.
James Walker:
I mean, the way we came about actually this business was that we came here from a very commercial angle. We looked at where the largest market for this was. And what we realized is that these companies like New Scale, they were creating reactors that were essentially still 10 city blocks in size.
It would cost a billion dollars to still sell these things.
And what we realized actually is that if we actually produced say dozens of very small reactors that were very portable, that could be moved anywhere in the world, then the market was essentially infinite.
Like if you look at mining operations as an example, I mean Jay and I both have some history in that industry. Tens of thousands of mines operate just on diesel. In fact the majority have to operate on diesel because one, there’s no infrastructure nearby. So diesel needs to be shipped in at all times. The mining industry has made enormous efforts to try and use solar and wind to power those operations and it’s not worked. It’s been a constant failure and mining companies have had to revert back to diesel. These kind of reactors, you could insert them into these areas, it would be zero carbon emitting and you’d be able to power a mine for 20 years without needing refueling.
Once it was essentially done or the requirements were needed, the reactor could be moved back and disassembled in a safe area at our headquarters. And so this was actually the much larger market, because the capital costs of producing the reactor would be lower. The smaller you make a reactor, the fewer working parts there are. So machining and manufacturing would come cheaper, too.
And there are even cities that have to run on diesel, like here up in Canada. Or Yellowknife, for instance, it runs almost exclusively on diesel. I mean, these sorts of potential customers are enormous. Even Africa, which is enormously resource rich, can’t access huge amounts of it because there’s large parts of the continent which are not connected to grids.
These microreactors, you could then have desalination plants. You could have medical facilities. You could access all those resources with these very small designs.
Going with that in mind, that’s the direction we took it. Jay’s the more connected of the two of us and he was the one who connected us with first of all some very specialist scientists out of California who got working on the Zeus reactor and then secondly we got the University of Cambridge working on the Odin reactor. Two very different designs with the same modus operandi to create a very mobile portable reactor that was very safe, very few working parts. very conventional, very simple design to deploy anywhere. They met slightly different power output requirements. But this is the direction we took it in.
John Koetsier:
Talk about safety of nuclear for a moment. Many of these tiny new nuclear reactor designs are designed to, and I’ll use quote marks here, be impossible to fail, like impossible to have a runaway reaction and overheat. Is that the case here? Is that what you built in?
James Walker:
That’s exactly what we went for. In terms of safety anyway, it’s always worth …
Nuclear has had the worst PR ever in the entire history of any energy system and that’s principally because it was always attached to the government. And they didn’t care, they just wanted the energy. But if you look at deaths per gigawatt hour, it’s safer than wind. It’s orders of magnitude safer than any fossil fuel. It’s up there with solar in terms of deaths per gigawatt hour ever. It’s the second safest energy out there. Beats geothermal, beats everything.
And those are the larger reactors where you can get those runaway reactions. If you go small, you can have a passive cooling system.
So even if you were to throw a grenade at it that blew up part of it, you would not need the cooling mechanisms to dissipate that heat to prevent a core melt that would create that environmental hazard.
So in our reactor, we removed the pressurizer, we removed the coolant, we removed control rods, we removed working parts. Essentially, you’ve got a reactor that, if everything stopped working, the heat would just naturally dissipate.
John Koetsier:
Wow, how much power can you get from them?
James Walker:
So it depends on the reactor, the Zeus reactor, which is going to be the smaller of the two … that’s going to be able to produce about 1 megawatt of electricity. So about 2.5 megawatt thermal, 1 megawatt electric. The Odin reactor is going to be a larger reactor. That’s going to be producing around about 5 to 10, probably in that sort of range of power output.
John Koetsier:
Interesting. And so maybe the smaller is for a mine type scenario way up north or way in some remote area or something like that. Drop that in. There you go. And the larger is maybe for a city or a town.
Jay Yu:
The Zeus reactor would essentially replace diesel generators.
James Walker:
Yeah.
Jay Yu:
That’s the whole plan. Anything that you have to truck back to the mining scenario where you have to truck millions of dollars of fuel every single month to maintain these mines. That’s where most of these mining operations or companies fail because they can’t keep up with that type of cost.
John Koetsier:
So I think that makes a ton of sense. And I think that that works very, very well. I guess a question is, in the current environment we’re in, where somebody could want to toss a grenade at something, obviously there needs to be security around these things. Do you bury them? Where do you put them?
Can some terrorist organization get one? Can they create a dirty bomb with one? What has to be done around the infrastructure? ensure that it’s safe not just in operation, but in anything that could happen.
James Walker:
So, I mean, I’ve never really understood the dirty bomb thing because if you wanted to create a bomb, what you’d have to do is get a reactor, take it to a multi-billion dollar chemical plant, melt down the zirconium alloy, uranium fuel, extract out the uranium, then take it through a billion dollar facility to enrich it, then fashion it into a bomb and then deploy it. I mean, I just, I’ve never understood.
John Koetsier:
Is where you tell me you’re a nuclear engineer and I’m not? 🙂
Jay Yu:
And this is the thing, John. This is the first thing I actually asked James when I met him. I said, that’s what the general public’s gonna ask. That’s the, can this be a dirty bomb? Is this mobile reactor, can it just blow up if you do something to it? And spread radiation across the city and kill everyone?
So that’s one of the first questions. And James looked at me just like this. He just said, you’re crazy.
James Walker:
I guess the most dangerous thing you could do is you could take the uranium alloy out of the reactor and hit someone in the head with it, I guess. Maybe that would really cause a concussion or something. If you threw a grenade at the reactor, you’d have a cleanup operation. But like, you know, these things are very safe. Even big plants like Three Mile Island and Fukushima, which are famous disasters, I mean, no one died.
John Koetsier:
Mm-hmm.
James Walker:
It’s very difficult to kill anybody with these things. If you go really small, I mean it gets even more absurd. I mean, the dirty bomb, I always just thought it would be really inconvenient to have something with nuclear material and blow it up and then everyone’s got to go through the annoyance of having to sweep it all up.
But, yeah, it’s prevalent I think because I think radiation is one of those things that… it’s easier to fear what can’t be seen as opposed to a tiger in a room which you can obviously objectively assess the danger …
Jay Yu:
Absolutely.
John Koetsier:
I think that’s a really important point, James. I think that’s a really important point. I mean, I’m reminded of when I was talking to a communications engineer about 5G and lots of people are concerned about 5G and everything like that. He says, you know what? You get way more radiation exposure from your microwave than you would if you had a 5G station right next to your house. So that makes sense.
And also, you know, I think Jay, you made this point. Diesel kills, right? You burn all that diesel, stuff is in our environment. We’re getting particulate matter, right? And people have asthma or people have other things. Asthma is on the rise, other things like that, right? And so there are costs that we don’t see because they’re downstream and they’re hidden … from other sources.
Jay Yu:
Totally agree with you, John, on that.
John Koetsier:
Talk about where you are in the process. You’re developing, you’re building. I don’t believe you have an operational nuclear reactor at a client site yet.
James Walker:
So where we are with both reactors at the moment is that both have gone through feasibility assessments, initial physics modeling work, just to prove feasibility and that this will work.
And now they’re going through a detailed design phase where we’re defining in detail and finalizing dimensions and material compositions with an idea that by the end of this year, we’ll have final detailed designs that will then move from that concept phase into a demonstration phase. And we already have a very good working relationship with the Idaho National Laboratories, where we’ll be doing a lot of that demonstration work at existing facilities that are there.
So based on the contracts we have with them and that demonstration work is nuclear and non-nuclear test work to prove up the models. Once that is done, you have a prototype at that point. Then you can move into the licensing of that prototype. And during that licensing phase, that’s the longest lead item, because you need to go through all scenarios, accident scenarios, operational scenarios, staff, all of that kind of thing. While that licensing phase is going on, we’ll be building manufacturing facilities for these
John Koetsier:
Okay, so it’s not happening tomorrow, Jay.
Jay Yu:
It’s going to take, I think we modeled it to six to eight years. But the main thing here is, for example, you look at other SMR companies, they’ve taken over a decade and also a billion dollars of CapEx of investors money.
They recently did some SPACs at a $2 billion valuation. And you know, with the SPAC market and the capital markets and Wall Street right now, with all these bank meltdowns, you know, that’s been slashed by half. So most of those investors that have been trapped for a decade, you know, looking at returns or losing money now, they’re probably pissed.
But also, that’s where we’re going to change things. We’re allowing retail investors and institutional investors to come into a company like us, sub billion dollars, that has two reactor concepts, that we’re also getting into the fuel fabrication business that if you want James to elaborate on that, he could take us into as well. But we also have a number of M&A strategies and plans that will take us to the next level and be the first advanced reactor technology company in revenues as well. So we’re looking at this from what James said, a commercial and business standpoint, not just academic research.
John Koetsier:
Okay, well that’s some patient money that has to go into these things because there’s a long time frame to recouping.
James, that sounds interesting. Jay mentioned fuel extraction, perhaps in Richmond. I’m not entirely sure. Talk about what you’re doing there.
James Walker:
So this was actually quite important. As we worked our way up to the top brass in the United States and got in front of the head of the national laboratories and began talking with the DOE, it became quite obvious, actually, that there were some very major national capability gaps within the United States.
And one of the most significant ones we realized was the fuel side of things. So you can have the best SMR or nuclear reactor in the world and it beats out all the competition, but you can’t currently fuel it at the moment.
And we saw this as an enormous opportunity for Nano to make themselves a cornerstone of the national infrastructure within the country. And so we solicited an enormous amount of reports from some of these national laboratory leaders and we’ve been pursuing the construction … the design and the development of the fuel fabrication facility which we intend to make an integrated facility with other national capabilities.
But we anticipate sourcing an enriched uranium hexafluoride and fabricating all the different types of fuel forms and then having that as a subset of our business where we will not just supply ourselves but we will supply other SMR companies so whoever wins the race in the nuclear race we will still be a business supplying them. And there’s an intention there to supply the Department of Energy, the National Laboratory Systems, as well as other SMR companies as well. So it’s going to be …
Jay Yu:
Just to add … I was just gonna add to what James said about you could be the best SMR, but if you don’t have fuel, you have nothing. So essentially, TerraPower’s public information … I think they raised $1.3 billion in six months. Their lead investor was SK Group from South Korea. I think they invested 750 million of that. And, you know, right when they closed that, I think a few months later, they said, oh, sorry, we’ve been delayed because we have no fuel.
And this is where me and James saw this kind of bottleneck here, and we took action to it. And we’re actually moving forward with that.
John Koetsier:
It’s almost a razor and blade scenario. So that makes some sense.
James Walker:
It’s quite remarkable actually …
I was just going to say it was quite remarkable once we got more stuck into the business just how many capability gaps are in the country that are looking to be filled now and I think there’s an enormous potential opportunity out there for Nano to expand very rapidly into these gaps that have been left there essentially by these capabilities not being renewed, money not being invested. There’s no competition for these things.
John Koetsier:
It does not shock me in the least because of a couple things that you said and a couple things that I know, which is that it has been a massive government project. And so you kind of do what you need to do. It’s all kind of bespoke. You do what you need right now.
And all of that knowledge and learning over some of those reactors, but also if we’re talking nuclear, there’s also weapons. It has been lost as people age out of the system and there hasn’t been investment in how to do things better, safer, cheaper, other things like that. And the supplementary businesses that collaborate to form an ecosystem that functions.
Super interesting. Let’s fast forward. Let’s say five years. You’re faster somehow … regulators say yes, quicker. So let’s say we fast forward five years, you’re in the market, you’re shipping. What do you see the grid of the future looking like and the energy sources of the future looking like?
Maybe Jay, you first.
Jay Yu:
I see, actually there was an institutional bank, one of our investors talked to, and they quoted them saying, the next few decades, small nuclear is gonna take market share from big nuclear, because they see all the rise of these SMR and these advanced reactors.
So the tech side, just like material science, is gonna get better and better. Your iphone’s are getting smaller … screens are getting more high resolution the cameras are getting more high def … what’s gonna happen is the structural shift in technology is gonna advance nuclear to the next level and you’re gonna see all these small companies rise up.
And you’re looking at energy independence here … democratizing energy …
For example, Hurricane Ian in Puerto Rico wiping out the island’s grid and bringing in like a Zeus, for example, empowering a thousand homes carbon-free. That’s the disruption that’s coming down in the next few decades.
John Koetsier:
And James, how does that fit in with other alternative and green energy sources?
James Walker:
I think there’s going to continue to be this drive towards greener technology and I think a lot more of the national infrastructure will draw its energy usage from more green energies.
There’s going to be a greater push for solar and wind of course. It remains to be established how far you can take some very large countries in that direction. I mean Norway, I don’t think the population is 5 million, but it’s also a very coastal city that has a big advantage with wind. And there’s other countries, let’s say like Iceland, that could benefit hugely from geothermal.
But when you have a big country like America where you have 300 million people, you need a very diverse set of ways to source energy from. When you’re looking for baseload energy, if you’re going to move away from natural gas, fossil fuels, it could only be nuclear on that front because it is essentially an energy source you can put anywhere.
Nuclear will make a big resurgence. It will make up more of the energy grid than it does currently. That’s for certain.
How much we retain in terms of fossil fuels will yet to be seen. They are very persistent and something like natural gas. I think we’ll continue to form probably part of a very large energy supply to major industrialized countries. They will just continue to grow.
John Koetsier:
It’s really interesting if you look at things as a system.
And so fossil fuels, that system has been with us for decades and decades, right? And so you mentioned natural gas, right? Well, there’s pipelines, there’s places where they pump it out of the ground. There’s refineries, there’s pipelines and it gets to a place and that perfectly suits kind of the grid, the way we’ve built it, sort of a hub and spoke model, right? Where … power generation is centralized and it’s spread all over the place. Your solution kind of fits into that pretty well because somebody could potentially take your larger reactor, put it down on the same place where they have, let’s say a natural gas power plant, right? And just flip the switch in some sense, right?
It’s interesting because there was, I forget, I think it was in the States somewhere recently, but it could have been somewhere else, but it was in the last month. There was an energy crisis because of storms or inclement weather or something like that.
Jay Yu:
You’re talk about California …
John Koetsier:
Probably.
And some of the contractors were contracted to have supplementary capacity that they could bring online quickly, right? And they did not, they could not. And so they’ve fined for that. Is that not correct?
James Walker:
That was California, yes. For some of the engineers I worked with, some of the nuclear engineers, they were involved in trying to remediate the situation in California because they did not have that strength in depth to supply energy when there was a deficit. It was a major issue.
John Koetsier:
Interesting, interesting.
I’m actually in Vancouver, Canada myself, but I know from many of my friends in the Bay Area and California, other places, it seemed like a third world country in some cases over the past couple of years, because they’ve had brownouts and power failures and all these things that have been quite significant.
James Walker:
Yeah, that’s right. And you actually just made me think of something, too, is that as there’s this push for electric vehicles, if you imagine when you’re driving across the country, you have very remote gas stations to obviously fill up your car, obviously the difficulty is that you would need some sort of electrical charge station if you do want to continue to continue to drive in the electric car direction.
But this would actually mean having to ship in generators or generate electricity through fossil fuels to replace these systems. If we did actually have one when these nuclear reactors are ready, you could have a charge station absolutely anywhere you wanted. You could fuel these electric cars anywhere in the world and you could then have a feasible situation where you could replace the grid and you could replace every single car and not need a fossil fuel car.
Jay Yu:
just to add to what James said, we actually have a cult following on Twitter and Elon Musk is very pro-nuclear and he tweeted one day, I think, we need nuclear and then we kind of retweeted his tweet and we said, you know, imagine, Elon a Zeus powering 50 of your Tesla cars at once.
And then I think we just… we received, I think we got a thousand new followers from him because of that, cause they all started going crazy with it. So that’s how viral this could become. Just the idea, but just don’t stop there too. You know, you think of space, right? How we could go deeper into space …
John Koetsier:
We’re going to be on the moon very soon. We’re going to Mars, too.
Jay Yu:
And space exploration you could look at too, but also looking at even the shipping, disrupting shipping as well, right? The shipping across the world, you know, burns so much fossil fuels. Imagine we could replace every engine there. You talk about trains as well. So the total addressable market of this is enormous. Sometimes I don’t even think it’s billions, I think it’s trillions.
John Koetsier:
This is kind of Jetson stuff here with the nuclear powered cars 🙂
Hopefully this fits on Starship or something.
I want to ask you if you go to one of those cities that is currently powering their grid on diesel or natural gas and you say: Hey I’ve got the solution here … 20 years before you need any servicing or anything like that, any new fuel.
What’s the cost differentiation here between the existing system that they have and the system that you’re offering? Are we talking half the cost? Are we talking the same cost? Are we talking 10% of the cost? Are we talking twice the cost? What are we talking about?
James Walker:
So we have tried to do a very in-depth analysis, as you would have expected, on the anticipated cost and how it relates to other fuel forms and other energy supply.
What we realized actually is that I think New Scale put out an estimate and then immediately changed it the next year and it was almost 50% larger. And that’s because they didn’t actually have a very good idea because the things that feed into that cost estimate can vary so much …
But when they took into account energy costs over the time it was deployed, plus if you take away the subsidies that the fossil fuels are getting and you look at the cost on which the energy is being supplied, then in Europe … nuclear would be commensurate with gas. And in the United States, it was commensurate, I believe, with coal. And so that’s the sort of energy you’re going to get, the energy sort of cost that nuclear will approximate given the time for deployment and the maturity of the technology.
John Koetsier:
And just for context here, coal is the cheapest form pretty much because it’s pretty abundant. It’s also super dirty. Nobody likes it. It’s dirty to mine. It’s dirty to handle. Dirty to transport. It’s dirty to burn. It’s just dirty.
And so that’s the cheapest form. Interesting. Interesting. Okay. So you’re not talking way less cost, but you are talking about the cost of the cheapest fossil fuel. And I guess one other thing that’s kind of important here and it harkens back to our conversation about pubs in the UK, you also probably get some sort of cost certainty going forward for the next 20 years. You know what you’ll be paying versus if you’re using fossil fuel over the past five years, you’ve been on a roller coaster.
Jay Yu:
That’s right.
John Koetsier:
They’ve really been on a roller coaster, because gas went way the heck up.
James Walker:
Yes, you’re absolutely right. And it’s very interesting to see what, as the world becomes more polarized actually, how those costs are affected. Certainly we’re looking at a much more polarized world where there’s much more energy competition, especially with regard to fossil fuels where you can essentially leverage your possession of those things for political gain.
And we’ve seen that already.
Nuclear, I mean, you’re never going to run out of fuel, and once it’s in a reactor, you know exactly what the costs are going to be for 20 years. And nothing that happens globally will affect that cost. That’s a major benefit. Energy security will become an increasingly important consideration for most countries, and this is going to be a way to provide energy security for anybody.
John Koetsier:
Especially countries that have people who can be voted out by people who are pissed off because energy is causing them more
James Walker:
Yes, yes, 100 percent.
Jay Yu:
Exactly.
James Walker:
Yeah, 100 percent.
John Koetsier:
Well, Jay and James, I want to thank you for taking some time. I do think our future includes a lot of solar, includes a lot of wind and a lot of hydroelectricity, which is in British Columbia, Canada, where I’m from. We have a lot. I do think nuclear has a role to play and I do think that some of the new forms of nuclear power, these small nuclear reactors that cannot overheat, cannot blow up, cannot melt down, just by design, have a role to play there. Thank you so much for this time.
James Walker:
Thank you very much.
Jay Yu:
Thank you.
TechFirst is about smart matter … drones, AI, robots, and other cutting-edge tech
Made it all the way down here? Wow!
The TechFirst with John Koetsier podcast is about tech that is changing the world, including wearable tech, and innovators who are shaping the future. Guests include former Apple CEO John Scully. The head of Facebook gaming. Amazon’s head of robotics. GitHub’s CTO. Twitter’s chief information security officer, and much more. Scientists inventing smart contact lenses. Startup entrepreneurs. Google executives. Former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold. And much, much more.
Subscribe to my YouTube channel, and connect on your podcast platform of choice: