TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #445: Dispelling Nuclear Energy Misconceptions with Ryan MacLeod

Episode Date: September 12, 2023

Marty sits down with Ryan MacLeod to discuss the benefits of nuclear power in contrast to its reputation and how it can synergize with Bitcoin. Ryan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/NuclearBitcoinr 6:12 - Riffing 7:46 - Texas demand scare 13:57 - Best source for stable energy 20:11 - Reputation of nuclear power 31:39 - If the end were nigh, we’d need nuclear 33:40 - Cost of capital and SMRs 36:53 - SMR and mining impact on grids 41:05- Bitcoin can ease problems with nuclear 44:37 - Nuclear looking good 53:15 - Germany’s idiotic policies 55:09 - Uranium supply 58:01 - Nuclear future 1:02:01 - Does the nuclear industry recognize Bitcoin? 1:07:09 - Wrapping up Shoutout to our sponsors: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Unchained⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠River⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bitcoin Talent Co⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TFTC Merch is Available: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Shop Now⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join the TFTC Movement: Main ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Clips ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Marty Bent: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠

sup freaks this is your boy marty here to introduce this rip of tftc before we jump into the ads got to read the top four boosts from rip 444 palindrome rip fiat ruins everything with jimmy song at blockchain bug 5000 sats what exactly is a fiat job bitcoin kook gave a good response in the comments on fountain one a job where you get paid in fiat and two a job that provides no value to society usually caused by the misaligned incentives that lack the lack of free markets brings along it's a good definition there at dsmk mplxx 1000 sets the bitcoin cowboy himself that's jimmy war's hat at bitcoin underscore kook 420 sets if you're not paying attention you probably should be heart emoji prayer emoji and at mcot em cot 378 sets a book

for bitcoiners cheers and thank you jimmy thank you freaks for boosting the show if you're participating in the value for value model i'm podcasting 2.0 we greatly appreciate it here at tftc uh keeps us coming back week in and week out this rip was brought to you by our good friends at river river is a company that's doing it the right way they build their own infrastructure they build their own wallets they're getting their own uh mtls and they've got customer support you can call river if you have a question okay and they've got a new onboarding plan so if you go to river.com slash tftc you sign up by a hundred dollars worth of bitcoin you're going to get five dollars worth of bitcoin river.com slash tftc

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mix to come join the industry building out the bitcoin standard enjoy this rip high signal you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free when you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be probably should be oh you don't want to keep you too long from the fiat mines yeah i got a peg for life i'm trying to trying to save up so that i don't have to use credit

or cold storage for my trip to africa in december that's why you're in africa i'm going to the uh bitcoin conference oh hell yes same way i ended up in el salvador i was just like you guys want someone to speak about nuclear power and they're like yes yes we like nuclear power and it's a benefit that i'm also familiar with bitcoin because a lot of the nuclear people they kind of get it on the surface but they got a ways to go so how did you get into nuclear power to begin with i am a chemical technologist so i went to college just learning how to do basic chemistry and using instruments like mass spectrometers uh icps aas just all the fancy instruments that do various chemical analysis and then i got laid off a few times and then ended up here at canadian

nuclear labs nine years ago and then i've just been yeah i work in a lab that specifically monitors the corrosion in the pressure tubes in the canadian uh can do reactors and why is it important to monitor that because it will embrittle the pressure tubes after a while and then the pressure that they're under it risks cracking and then you can leak the moderator water into the cooling water and it's a expensive time consuming mess to clean up it's nothing catastrophic but not something that it's easy to avoid if it's monitored okay all right that's good to know all right let's jump into it because i mean we're already recording but we had a big event here in texas last week it's part of the reason why i reached out to you i

saw that you followed the tftc account and then retweeted one of our tweets or i retweeted Yeah, I was talking with Peter St. Onge. He was railing against windmills because their economics don't make sense unless they have stupid amounts of tax credits and subsidies. Well, you're providing the perfect segue because that's part of the reason why I wanted to talk today is last week in Texas, we've got a bunch of new demand that's come on to our grid over the last few years as people have moved here,

as industry has moved here. Excuse me. and we had an incident last week where we almost had rolling blackouts because demand brushed up with the supply capacity. Luckily, there were some Bitcoin miners engaged in demand response to turn off and serve that electricity back to the grid, but this happened around 7 p.m. at night, and it basically came to be known that wind was not producing anywhere near its total capacity,

and obviously seven o'clock at night here in central texas the sun goes down and so solar stops producing energy creating this supply demand imbalance within ercot here in texas and this is a problem that's been bubbling up during peak demand periods whether it's the middle of the winter with the winter storms or the middle of summer with the extreme heat and over the last three years specifically i think this has become a massive problem here in texas and it's really frustrating to me uh not a native-born texan i'm new to the state only two years in but the solution to the problem of the supply demand imbalance that pops up during these periods of peak to mine seems very obvious in my mind but for some reason those involved in the grid down

here in Texas seen pot committed to expanding, expanding, um, wind and solar generation capacity in favor of more reliable sources like nuclear, nat gas and coal. What's going on down here from your perspective? Like how, how idiotic is this whole situation? Yeah, definitely prioritizing one technology over another and interfering with, with just normal market forces is going to have effects like this because we see it's basically a narrative that everyone is following that that we the climate is in such a chaotic state that we must engage in developing this specific technology or nothing's going to work because right now the big complaint about nuclear that we get from people that are pitching the wind and solar is that it

costs too much and it takes too long and there's a whole history to why that is it's mostly regulatory related and exaggerating certain safety cases with nuclear power and how that it can be sensationalized when shit does go wrong and over exaggerate so the narrative right now is telling a better story so that these technologies can get a better seat at financing and historically nuclear has never had a really good seat at financing while wind and solar has been riding quite high at very low cost of capital tax credits galore they often get paid to not operate just because that's part of the deal otherwise they wouldn't have been built in the first place because there would have been no incentive but then as that happens as you start adding more intermittency

to your grid you have to balance that with a stable base load that will be available for those demand events because you're you essentially have to build two grids because you're going to have your intermittent grid that yeah you may have installed capacity that when it's operating it can cover the base load requirements that are happening at that time but then it vanishes so you need to have a completely secondary grid to call upon when that electricity is required and that's why like there's peaker plants popping up all over the place and then and the bitcoin miners are getting a huge opportunity to play the demand response role and it's just it just seems like it's over complexifying the management of the grid when it would be so much easier to just

lots of base load that's have enough base load that can cover the most extreme demand events and then just have something on the load side that can be curtailed to support whatever the grid needs and you can strategically place it whether it's at your generators at your substations and there's millions of different ways that it can be configured because it's just we're just plugging computers and turning them off and when there's a higher order customer that needs that electricity and then we just that we just see how that can play these same roles that we're trying to perform now but a lot more effectively a lot more cost effective and just a lot more efficiency with the technologies that we actually need to engage with on these grids because there's

There's a whole host of other technologies that they want to incorporate with nuclear power and base load so that we can get more nuclear power off and built into these grids. But one of the biggest problems is you have to have that certainty of demand if you're going to engage in such high capital expenditures. So it does become a chicken and egg thing that you have to have certainty of demand before you build the base load but then with all these other complex complexing factors with the intermittency and all these other like batteries and hydrogen production that we want to incorporate into it that it's it's putting together a very complicated puzzle that i think can be simplified

a lot by having a flexible load like bitcoin mining in the mix yeah it seems like a a rube goldberg machine when you factor in the batteries again the hydrogen that you just mentioned there's so much extra infrastructure that needs to go into the wind and solar projects but if you have strong base load like nuclear nat gas or coal it's not as complex it's pretty straightforward and so i i think with that in mind like going through the spectrum from nuclear nat gas coal wind solar like what is the most viable energy source for a stable base load in your mind yeah like it really depends jurisdictionally because you're going to have a lot of different factors to consider especially like some places actually like do

have really good wind and solar resources that they can draw upon but like make making your entire grid dependent upon that seems to be a confusing strategy but some are trying it so we're going to get to see the example where in some cases it may work and in some cases we may see examples of it not working so much but yeah i like the idea of having a grid where you have the fuel available and you can confidently generate that electricity when the grid calls for it and trying to predict human demand for electricity is just is is not it it has its own challenges and then adding having to predict the weather on top of that adds a whole another layer of challenges and then if the weather doesn't cooperate with what you were anticipating and you

were expecting to have 10 gigawatts of wind online and you only have five gigawatts of wind online then you have to call upon your peaker plants and then that's when you've got your different degrees of peaker plants the ones your your spinning reserves that are operating at a partial capacity factor that can ramp up quickly and then your other peaker plants that will often be just left off and they get paid and compensated to just be available and then turn on within a day of expecting that load so like that's those services are being called upon more and more often as the complexity of the grid increases with more intermittent sources and then because of the nature of the peaker plants they're often the highest cost and highest emission generators

on your your grid stack so that that that will add a whole other like layers of consideration that you have to think about when you're adding new load and adding new generation sources so like that's why i'm i'm all in on nuclear very much but there are definitely areas where nuclear can struggle and not fully displace like hydrocarbons like we can get we can get natural gas and coal out of a lot of like electrical generation and mid to high grade like heat applications like various like industries like uh and creating biofuels and chemicals and polymers and a bunch of industries and fertilizer and steel refining and wood products and doing desalination and clean water stuff like those are all like good peripheral technologies that

can support these but um yeah we're going to need to build as much nuclear as possible to displace as much of our hydrocarbon use in in those areas that we can because then we can displace them to higher order uses like instead of using natural gas like as great as it is for heating and electricity the less that we need for heating electricity the more we can apply to creating like fertilizer and and other higher order chemicals that we can use for various other industries and like like hydrogen is used in a lot of industries as well so that's why there's a lot of emphasis on doing uh hydrogen electrolysis using nuclear power plants because they also have a similar degree of flexibility not nearly as good as the bitcoin miners but they do offer

some of those capabilities but then where bitcoin miners really beat them out is on storage because you have zero storage and transportation um for a digital product compared to something that you need to physically store and physically transport to the markets where it would be used so like Unless your hydrogen is being generated and used pretty much on site, it's going to have different opportunity costs that need to be considered when engaging with that. So if you've got a port where you can export a lot of this stuff, that's great. In New Brunswick, we're planning to build some pretty impressive ports system. The Belle Dune port that runs off coal right now, they want to replace that with entirely nuclear. build a big clean energy industrial park that will also have the the manufacturing plant for

the reactor that's going to be built on that site so they'll be able to export that technology plus a bunch of other like refineries and chemical processors that they'll be able to export so it's it really comes down to the priorities of of every individual jurisdiction on what industries they want to engage with and what they want their energy profile to look like And even with potentially what their future profile wants to look like, because now we have a placeholder technology that we can build the future capacity that we expect to use without any uncertainty that it's going to be underutilized. We will have that placeholder that can make maximum utilization of any electricity that would otherwise go to waste if there wasn't sufficient local demand for it. So, yeah, power systems are a very complicated thing that are unique to everywhere where they exist. Like, we've got really good, robust systems here in North America, and then you look over in Africa, and as soon as you leave the cities, it's nothing.

They're pretty much on their own unless they give themselves, like, a little microgrid, which is really cool seeing companies like Gridless engage with that. And I would like to see, as things progress further into the future, those similar models that they're engaged with being applied to the next generation of small modular reactors that we intend to build that are going to be in the 1 megawatt, 5 megawatt, 50 megawatt, 100 megawatt blocks. Much smaller capacity that will be more applicable to smaller markets where a gigantic gigawatt-sized reactor would not be applicable. So it's just weighing the trade-offs of what your markets look like and what your priorities are. Yeah. And I definitely want to dive into the SMR market because there have been some positive developments, particularly here in the United States, a partnership between Oklo and I believe one of the branches of the military up in Alaska. They're going to be doing a pilot project with their SMR. But before we get to that and how that may look, let's take a step back and just look at nuclear, nuclear specifically, why it's been demonized in the last five decades or three decades, probably more specifically.

What are the misconceptions around the economics and the safety and where are we today? because there seems to be, again, we're at somewhat of a crossroads. You're getting some conflicting narratives across the world where you have Germany decommissioning a bunch of nuclear power plants and then you have France trying to double down even though they're running into some problems with their raw material source countries at the moment. But why has nuclear had such a hard time

getting to where we believe it should be? like i believe it's the densest form of energy that we have at our fingertips and for some reason or another we're not utilizing it to its full potential which is a detriment to human flourishing right now yeah we could definitely be in a much better place had we have not derailed nuclear several times in the last few decades like a lot of the issues with energy systems that we're dealing with right now likely would not be issues that are as contentious and concerning like where everyone is sourcing their electricity from and whether it was coming from an adversarial nation

or a nation where you were getting uranium from and now they've overthrown their government and refused to sell you uranium at the low prices that you were getting it. Like it'll derail France for a short time, but they'll probably pivot to getting their uranium from Canada because we have a large abundant uranium resources here. But like as far as derailing the industry, like the weapons is definitely one that comes to mind because for the longest time the nuclear

weapons industry and the nuclear power industry was was conflated by people that were kind of ignorant of the finer intricacies of the two technologies like really the only thing that they share in common is the fuel source that they come from they both use uranium but then as soon as yeah they they take off on their own individual pathways after that so like and even things like The history of mining in the Navajo Nation, that's predominantly for weapons grade uranium extraction that had very little to do with the power industry. But because of how it's all tangled together, that's a legacy that needs to be contended with by the whole industry and kind of move on and atone for some of the historical legacy. And then there's waste has always been an issue because people don't seem to understand the concept of radioactive decay and that the waste actually becomes safer over time because of the nature of radiation is that the material decays over time. So similar to the Bitcoin issuance supply curve, almost every radiological material has a decay curve where you know the exact period of time where half of that material will be reduced.

So in Bitcoin, we know it's every four years, and that's our halving cycle. So it's similar with radiological waste. So the most harmful stuff is the stuff that decays at the fastest rate. So within 50 years, the material that comes out irradiated from a nuclear reactor has said significantly reduced amount of radiation that it will be emitting just because of the nature of how it decays. And then after like 100, 150 years, it's no more harmful than the unirradiated material that was put into the reactor in the first place. and that's that's the the fuel itself and the fuel is a solid product that actually has a very very small volume and so the long term we want to store it in deep geological repositories where it will be safely stored but also accessible because there is still valuable material and

potential power that can left be to be generated in those fuel rods then like uh yeah and then And then there's other types of waste, too, because tritium is another thing that's been in the news lately because of Fukushima. But it's just water that has two extra neutrons on the hydrogen. It is slightly radioactive, but it doesn't bioaccumulate. Ryan, we're losing you. There you are. There, I'm back. I was going on about tritium and just how the concentrations at Fukushima are incredibly low relative to the industrial standards.

And really the only way that tritium can attain high enough levels to be harmful more than just like overconsumption of water that like, yeah, you would have to concentrate it. But by then, if you're concentrating it, then it becomes a valuable commodity that can be sold to companies doing research in fusion. So it's another one of those tradeoffs where we're depending at one point in time, what was waste? Now there's new industries that can use it as a feedstock for whatever they're doing. So it's the same thing that the oil industry has been doing for decades, finding clever ways to repurpose what would have been waste into like the various other like polymers and plastics and the bajillion things that we have around us every day that have some element of a petrochemical involved in it. and then um there's accidents like that's a tough one to contend with because they were very sensationalized and if you like really deeply examine them the amount of casualties and fatalities related to them is quite insignificant it's between the three i think

like you could confidently say maybe 30 fatalities could be directly related to radiation exposure And there was far more hazard related to the haphazard evacuation of the Fukushima prefecture rather than the actual event that had happened itself. And it was an easy learning experience. Just don't leave your backup generators somewhere where they could potentially get flooded in the case of a giant tsunami. So I had the opportunity to visit one of these reactors in Japan that they're reconfiguring so that they will be able to withstand whatever tsunami happens again in the future. They've built 20-meter tall, 3-meter thick concrete walls around these reactors. They've turned these sites into fortresses, and they also have their backup generators on floating platforms so that there's no way that they can be flooded again. So based on what I've seen, I'm pretty confident that should it ever happen again, the reactor sites on the Japanese island will probably be the safest locations to evacuate to for the population rather than fleeing away from them.

and then the other big factor is is cost and and cost is is another complicated one because cost goes up because you need to take more more safety measures and often more safety measures are the result of of like exaggerating the harm that can actually come from being exposed to radiation like right now there's a lot of petitioning to revisit what's known as the linear non-threshold hypothesis where back in the 20s there was this researcher that came up with this this idea that that because there was um at higher doses of radiation you would start to see like cellular failures and cellular mutations and cancers becoming prevalent but there wasn't any way to detect small levels of radiation so there was just this there was a chart with lots

of dots like up into the right but then there was empty space to the left and instead of and and so it was just inferred that it was a straight line so that then that radiation was cumulatively cumulatively hazardous as as you increased your your dosage over time but now they're starting to re-examine that and see that it actually forms more of a j-curve where similar to like exposing yourself to to exercise is a good analogy like you can jump off a box of two foot box a hundred times and it'll it'll strain your muscle tissue and then you'll repair and you'll recover and you'll actually be stronger for it and compare that to jumping off a 200 foot building and having like a large exposure then that's it's a completely different ball game with how your body recovers

from that because it can like a large radiation exposure can expose your body to to a large enough radiation dose that that it can cause like organ and tissue damage that is difficult to recover so a lot of this is being re-examined now and because that was instantiated in a lot of policy related to nuclear power and and working with radiological materials that that has ballooned a lot of the costs associated with building nuclear power because if if every doses of radiation is assumed to be harmful then we need to take an outsized amount of precautions to protect ourselves from it but like you don't really like at the very small amounts like it's it's no different you'd be getting roughly the same as like eating a banana or getting a chest

x-ray or flying you you have to be repetitively and consistently exposed to radiation for it to have like severe detrimental effects so then and then that starts affecting cost and then another factor on cost is that there's been a very robust anti-nuclear movement going on since the 70s and they have their finance to the tune of billions of dollars so they they are very active at trying to telling a story that nuclear power is more dangerous than it actually is and then when policymakers hear that, then they require more safety measures to be taken and then more costs. And then before you know it, it costs a lot of money to build a nuclear reactor. And then one of the modern problems that we're having now is because nuclear reactors in the

West haven't been built in 30 plus years, you don't have a fully engaged workforce and supply chain that is ready and aligned to build nuclear reactors. So like building the Vogel reactor and the Hinkley Point 2 reactor are like they essentially had to restart their labor force and their supply chains from scratch so that has cost a lot of ballooning of costs of these projects and then on top of all of that is the cost of capital being relegated to controversial high risk investment categories like you're going to be paying high interest rates on these on loans for a project like this and when you're taking out billions of dollars in loans to build the project that you don't expect to be paid back for 40 years like the cost of

capital can accrue quite quickly and as we you can see on there's a chart for the Hinkley reactor that shows two-thirds of the cost of that reactor is just paying off the interest alone so like if we can if we can get it into just the more like the green taxonomy in investment categories then that will open up a lot more opportunity for investors to to invest in nuclear power without having to deal with like the same like high costs of doing so and the higher risks of doing so there'll be a lot more a lot more stakeholders and shareholders kind of sharing that risk so like right now something that's happening is because europe had put nuclear power in their green taxonomy so that it can get

better access to to investment and different investment groups and categories their green peace who we all know and love is petitioning the european parliament to remove nuclear from that green taxonomy and then there's like this this sub group of environmentalists because the environmentalists now are like the ones that that believe that the the apocalypse is nigh but that we don't need nuclear power and then there's the ones that believe that we we have to prepare for the apocalypse but we need nuclear power so they're starting to infight a lot against each other so there's this group called replanet that's now petitioning the eu counter-petitioning them against greenpeace so there's this whole like group of yeah environmentalists really starting

to get after each other about the fact that like whether or not we should have nuclear power as playing a larger role in dealing with the climate change concerns that many of our society has these days yeah the whole greenpeace thing just doesn't make any sense if you believe the end is nigh i'm sure many people listening to the show and you yourself ryan may be aware i don't believe the end is nigh but if we run with the assumption that it is it seems that and the end is nigh is being driven by carbon emissions co2 emissions particularly methane emissions then you would rapidly want to transition to nuclear considering that

the emissions profile is much lower than comparative fuel sources. It doesn't make any sense. You'd think so, but they've been hating on uranium far longer than they've been hating on carbon. So it's basically the same

people, they just transitioned to a newer, more hip movement that they can frame a narrative around. It's also tiresome. But going back to the cost of capital problem, do you think the small modular reactor movement is a sly roundabout way to get over that start on a smaller scale, have shorter payback periods and sort of prove out that, hey, nuclear safe, it's reliable, and it can be cheap. And then from there, once people see that data, they'll be more confident to bucket nuclear power into a green bucket so that you can get cheaper cost of capital and then go build larger reactors. Yeah, that's part of the game plan. It's like serial construction of these things is the name of the game.

Like that's how we drive down the marginal cost of production per unit is just by building as many as we can. Like now that all the capital expenses have been put together or getting that supply chain and that labor force aligned to build Vogel, like now is when you parlay that into build more and build a lot more because that's the Westinghouse AP1000. So that's one of the first ones that's been built since it's been available of the Gen 3 technologies. A lot of these reactors were already being proposed back around 2010 time, but all of that got derailed when Fukushima happened. So it is a very huge milestone for just the entire global industry that Vogel is operational now. Because had that have failed, it could have collapsed the entire industry. So that's reassuring. And then, like, one of the other things, like, yeah, with the SMRs, the serial production in a mass manufacturing type of style, like, that is the idea that we want to kind of put forward for the next generation of reactors.

They want to build them like airplanes and shipping freighters. They'll just be on an assembly line, and then they'll just pump out. Every few months, there'll be a new one that pumps up. And then they'll be able to ship it, depending on the size, ship it to site and stand it up and commission it within six months to a year. And the bigger ones, to get it up to the 300 megawatt range, roughly the two-year range that they're looking at for shipping it to site and then having it fully commissioned. so and the bigger they get the more components that they will be shipping like the really really small ones like one megawatt and the five megawatt they'll be able to ship those just on a truck bed and stand them up within a few weeks to a few months and then yeah as as you get you get larger

you you get more complexity and then they'll they'll have different uh cooling types so some will use some will use um like high temperature gas some will use molten salts some will use like a liquid metal and i think there's one that's like a there's uses like a graphite moderator so there's at the moment there's like 70 of these companies that are proposing different designs they're trying to get them to market so the big race right now is getting that first of a kind built proven demonstrated show off all of the different safety features that are being proposed and how it can collaborate with different industries to to uh work well with with hybrid energy systems and microgrids and larger grids that are serviced by a smaller generator that

doesn't need to be in the gigawatt range. With the SMR movement beginning to gain steam, what do you think the impact could be on grid systems, whether they be small, sort of geographically remote areas, and then bigger metropolitan areas like Austin, texas where i am today like how could this impact grid systems positively or negatively well i think it'll give local areas a lot more autonomy on their their grid systems so like you'll be able to have like a micro grid around specific jurisdictions that then can be then you then you can have interconnections with your surrounding grids much much to how the system is now but just more just distributed and at a smaller size so instead of the large big grids

that we have it'll be a connection of lots of smaller grids and then for stuff that doesn't even have access to the grid like that's one of the things that we want to do with um this five megawatt reactor that's going to be built by ultra safe nuclear company they're they're collaborating with uh our public utility ontario power generation and they want to build the first of a kind demonstration unit where i work here at canadian nuclear laboratories and uh and test The long-term game plan for that is they want to use it to upgrade remote northern communities and actual physical mining operations off of diesel generation and up to nuclear power. So then that will displace a lot of their diesel from power and heat generation, and then they can prioritize it for transportation and heavy machinery usage and get a lot more value out of it than just for power and electricity. and and then it will also benefit a lot of these uh remote northern communities because it's it's

more you can because they come in like the five megawatt modules you can right size and is the community so if say some for example uh Iqaluit and Nunavut is in the far north and they they at their at their peak they use about 25 megawatts but then in their summer low they they use about 15 megawatts so you're going to have like a lot of these these variance gap gaps in there but But what they'd ideally do is build a 30-watt capacity using six units, and then you can have that enough for your maximum, your peak load available, and then you can curtail something else to match your generation profile. So that's where I kind of see mining playing a big role, where we want to deploy these reactors where there isn't sufficient demand. because i've gone through like these lists of different power projects that were proposed in all of these like off-grid areas in northern canada in alaska and they're like well we want

to build this hydroelectric dam it's going to be 200 megawatts but we only need 30 megawatts so there's no value in building it so they'll they'll put years of preliminary work and and financing and costs into it and just scrap it because of uncertain demand and like uncertain demand has killed hundreds and hundreds of power projects and now we can we can bring our own demand by just plugging computers so that solves a big problem because it allows us to get very creative with how we want to distribute this nuclear power instead of having it try to balance with other generation sources like like if you want to fill like so that you don't use that um leave capacity stranded instead of building 30 megawatts of reactors part of the proposals now are like well

we can build a few windmills and then build some batteries and then have this thermal storage component and and in in some places like those those ideas will work out all right but i think it will be greatly simplified if we just build excess with nuclear fill in a placeholder and then we can curtail a load as needed to match whatever the community needs and then as the communities grow and evolve they can they can either add more generation capacity or they can peel away ASICs and sell them off the robust marketplaces that we're starting to see for secondhand ASICs. So there's any number of strategies that can be employed for deploying these reactors now, and we can get a lot more creative because of their smaller size and

applicability to a lot more different markets. Well, let's dive further into this because and really highlight why Bitcoin mining is uniquely positioned to solve this problem, because the way i understand it nuclear power plants they need they're going to produce a certain amount of electricity and they can't really deramp or ramp up above or below that level and when you compare that to something like a natural gas beaker plant they can do that pretty flexibly due to the fuel source and the um the flexibility that comes with natural gas but nuclear does not have that flexibility correct it has a degree of flexibility certain certain types like they can ramp down to about like 70 of their capacity at a ramp rate of about like a few

megawatts per 15 minutes so there's they can't just go on and off like we can just flip on and off like the miners but there there is that capability and with the newer ones they're trying to to enhance that capability as much as possible but even with the ability to do that like you're still putting by by cycling your your thermal output up and down all the time you're going to be putting unnecessary strain on your on your turbines and and in your uh your core and other vital components of your your generation source so like it works the same with the natural gas plants natural gas plant runs more efficient and puts out less emissions per kilowatt generated if it's running at a consistent output if you're if you're up and down all the time like you're

you're going to be putting unnecessary stress on your your equipment and you're going to be emitting more per kilowatt so if if we want to be eliminating emissions then we should be finding a way to run our generators at a more consistent rate yeah and bitcoin mining is uniquely suited to do this right because it's perfect co-locate just ramp up and ramp down the miners instead of the reactor depending on the demand at any given point in time yeah and you can right size them to be perfectly matched and like you can even like there are trade-offs but you could in theory use multiple tiers of different a6 that have different break-even points so that you can you can react to two different levels of responsiveness

on the grid like you would you would need more maintenance requirements if you're having to take care of both like s9s and s19s and and m30s rather than just having one system that's all just m30s it'd be easier maintenance wise but that would be the trade-off you'd have to make depending on what your load profile looks like because if you do have a load or if your demand profile has has it so that your your mining load would be curtailing and your mining load capacity factor was like less than 90%, then maybe you don't want it to be 100% of the newest generation miners because the capex that goes into that and whatnot. But it might make sense to have 90% of that load with your latest generation miners and then 10% of that load with some older miners that are just

there and available to buffer that margin at the edge of your supply and demand curve. So it'll be interesting to see how these different strategies play out because it's going to be a very changing environment when we start seeing more of these power generators figure out how to do this in ways that they can employ it and yeah i think it's only a matter of time before one of these big mining companies gets bought out by a giant power company or vice versa well the narrative i heard and i'd really like to hear whether or not this is true but another way in which bitcoin mining can help particularly on the capital side of things is when you plop down these these reactors you may be able to set them up within a certain period of time but then in certain areas

you need to build out transmission and you can try to do that in parallel but the timing's not always perfect and that sort of messes up the capital structure because you can set up the reactor but then you can't actually sell electricity because there's no transmission but with mining you can set up the reactor mine with that electricity as the transmission's being built out and then once the transition's built out you can peel off some miners and rinse and repeat down the road yeah you essentially have a digital digital conduit that can serve as in place of your physical conduit until you have it available to deliver it to wherever you need it locally and And then you also have your physical limitations of how far you can actually

transmit electricity before it's not feasible anymore. Like Quebec is a fascinating example because they deliver hydroelectric generation like all the way from James Bay into like the northern states that they border in like New Hampshire and Maine. And what's happened is for the longest time, Quebec has generated a lot of electricity, like an overabundance of electricity. So they've had very robust export markets. But then as more of their neighbors have started to lean on those export markets, we've started to see things like New York get away with shutting down in Indian Point.

And then a few other generation assets have been shut down in that vicinity of the northern U.S. So now they're starting to put a strain on Quebec's capacity and they don't have enough to serve all of their neighbors and themselves at the same time, especially in the winter when they start heating their peak demand because Quebec is predominantly electrical heating which could be replaced by ASICs if we can get creative on that front but so now Quebec is actually considering restarting a nuclear power plant that they had shut down 12-13 years or so ago and there was no expectation whatsoever that that nuclear power plant was ever going to be revived and now it's become something a serious talking point here in Canada amongst all the other advancements we have going on for nuclear.

We have our big fleet in Ontario that's 20 reactors. They're all CANDU reactors here in Canada. And so that just uses heavy water instead of light water. And yeah, there's talk they want to expand 5 gigawatts at the Bruce reactor site. We're not sure what reactor that's going to be. it's going to be bid out probably between a can do reactor Westinghouse and possibly the, uh, the, the South Koreans with their, that APR 1400 that they just finished in the UAE that they'll go through that

whole bidding process. I, I would like it to be the can do reactors cause that's homegrown Canadian technology, but I will settle for more nuclear just in general. And then at our Darlington site, we have a shovel ready site that was built and prepared and transmission was already put there for, um, what was expected to be an advanced CANDU reactor that was supposed to be built in the early 2000s, late 90s, but then changing in politics and changing in demand profiles for the province

that ended up falling through and never happened. So they've got a shovel-ready site that they're going to use for demonstrating a four-pack of GE Hitachi's 300 megawatt boiled water reactor. So that's where that's going to get its first-of-a-kind demonstration site. And then out in New Brunswick is where we have a single CANDU reactor, but they're going to use that site because it's already licensed to build a demonstration for the the moltex stable salt waste burner reactor which will predominantly be fueled by reprocessed fuel from the traditional fleet so that it can be similar to how the um the the fast reactors that the russia and france and japan all have that are able to consume their spent fuel and get more power out of them and

actually generate more usable isotopes inside of the fuel in the reactor that can self-propel the reaction and actually generate more electricity as the different isotopes are converted into more fissile isotopes so it's actually a pretty cool technology the way that they can use the the molten salts and the mixed oxide fuels to get more extract more energy out of the the fuel than was initially even there to begin with and then um yeah then what else Yeah, and I mentioned the Belduin port is another one that they want to build in New Brunswick. It's going to use the ARC 100-megawatt reactor, and it's also going to be molten salt. So there's big advances going on in Canada and then, I think, all throughout Europe.

Basically, everybody but Germany and I think maybe Austria, they're all about nuclear. Poland wants to get big on nuclear. They wanted 12 of those 300-megawatt BWRX units that Hitachi's building at Darlington. They're talking with the Koreans right now about getting one or two of the similar units that they just built in Abu Dhabi. They're talking with Westinghouse about AP-1000s. Like Poland's not screwing around. They want to get their energy game and not be dependent upon any neighbors ever again. Like Estonia, Lithuania, like all these Eastern Bloc countries,

they're very much looking forward to ramping up their nuclear power capacity in a way that that will make them independent from being reliant upon any of their neighbors because as we saw it's things can get tricky being dependent upon your neighbors and your friendly nations but yeah if you become dependent upon adversarial nations you can get cut off pretty quickly when things go sideways so a lot of these nations don't want to be caught with their pants down in a situation like that ever again so they they're looking towards the future and their future involves a of nuclear power like even the nordic countries that have really good wind resources they're starting to to lean more towards increasing their nuclear capacity like a recent government

elected in sweden has reversed sweden's position on nuclear and they want to build more capacity norway definitely likes nuclear finland likes nuclear uh denmark i think denmark's like the only one up there that doesn't really have much nuclear but all over europe uh like i'm hearing and tons of stuff throughout like many nations in africa are looking into getting into nuclear power so like smrs would be a lot more appropriate for many of their markets because they don't have sufficient grid infrastructure to support like a large gigawatt sized reactor but we will see when as things go in in time and yeah it's very exciting for the nuclear industry right now because india is building shitload of nuclear reactors china's building shitload of nuclear reactors

Japan wants to restart their entire fleet and start building more. South Korea wants to build a ton of reactors. They've already proven that they can export their technology to other nations. UAE, they just built four. They already want two more. All of their neighbors are paying attention to what's going on there. Saudi Arabia is talking with China because for the longest time they've denied the ability to get nuclear power by their relationship with the United States and being overly controlling over the fuel supply lines. so that seems to be an interesting situation because we the the west could have offered

saudi arabia nuclear technology but now they're going to china to get it just because of the the way that we were paranoid about proliferation and whatnot but what you're gonna do yeah well based off of that monologue i have three things i want to touch on uh how idiotic are the moves that germany has made over the last couple decades number one number two do we have enough uranium on the planet to build out the nuclear future that you envision and then number three if there's plenty uranium to go around and we can actually build all this out like what does that mean for the violence in the world like like how does each individual nation being able to produce reliable base load pretty consistently change the the nature of the geopolitical

landscape yeah that's going to evolve in ways that we are yeah we're not going to foresee how that plays out like we can predict all we want but i i predict more energy for more people is going to be better but yeah we'll start with germany because that is definitely presenting an example to the world of what not to do with your power systems if you want a reliable system as we're now seeing that they are tearing down windmill farms in to so that they can obtain the coal that is underneath them which is a strange reversal um but and the other crazy thing about germany is Yeah, because they've now done that, it's like they can still, Germany's still a wealthy nation, so they can afford to buy coal and they can afford to buy gas off just global markets. But then that has the secondary effect of driving up the cost of those commodities on that market for developing nations that were kind of dependent upon them staying at a reasonable cost.

And now Germany can just throw their weight around and buy it for whatever they want. And then it forces up, yeah, makes it more difficult for other nations that aren't as lucky to get there. And then seeing the amount of like historical, like high quality industry that Germany has had for centuries that withstood both world wars that are now considering leaving Germany for other jurisdictions. Like what the hell happened that it's gotten that bad that like you'd think that they would reverse course when things like that would start to happen. But I don't pretend to understand the mind of politicians and bureaucrats. Just when you think you've got a handle on them, they never cease to surprise you. But Germany is going to do what Germany does. And yeah, they may provide a great example, counter example to the world as to how to not handle your power systems.

or for all we know they come out the other side of this with a huge array of windmills and solar panels and batteries and they make it work i i don't think the odds are in their favor but crazier shit's happened but then on uranium we've got tons of uranium like canada alone like if we had the will to do so like we only have two major deposits that are active in northern saskatchewan but from what i understand there is an obscene amount available like all throughout northern canada that just it's it's not as high quality or grades so they that's why it's they're not as ambitious to go after it but if the demand for uranium increases that is something that is available that canada can tap into there's many other nations like there's there's lots of the

african nations they do have um they do have uranium deposits but they have complicated political situations at the moment that that makes that those markets kind of tricky to manage but then yeah like the russia kazakhstan australia actually has a really robust uranium mining industry even though they reject nuclear power quite vehemently which is strange because they could benefit from it greatly especially many of the nations in their vicinity that are like island nations could really work well with like small reactors and and then the other place that we can get uranium from there is actually in seawater there is i forget the exact like six parts per billion or something it's a very low concentration but there are technologies that can extract that

out of the seawater and then it does replenish itself because of just the equilibrium between the concentration in the seawater and the the the land and the the soil and then rock formations that are around it it'll it will erode that as if that equilibrium is disturbed so if we were determined we could extract an obscene amount of uranium out of ocean water so it's just a matter of the market economics of doing so more than anything and if there's lots of easily available uranium like in deposits in canada and russia and australia obviously those are the ones that we're going to be prioritized first but and then on top of that because like we can generate different isotopes in once exposed to nuclear radiation that create new isotopes that weren't

fissile before that are now fissile and then on top of that there's there's thorium so thorium has a slightly different supply chain than uranium because it's not naturally fissile it's fertile so like i was mentioning like it has to be exposed to a neutron environment for it to become an isotope that is naturally fissile and then it can be used as fuel in the nuclear reactors so and they just kind of self feeds on on the fuel that's inside of itself it'll create new fuel and then feed on that fuel and then create new fuel and so that's kind of the uh the ambitious plan for these new uh molten salt reactors that they'll basically be able to reprocess use use recycled fuel and then like reprocess it and get a lot more energy out of them um

um and then yeah like what does all this what does it all mean is we're going to have a lot more power available to humanity than we know what to do with like that's pretty much been the game plan but then there's been many of the i forget what the heck that guy's name is he was one of the very pro-environmentalist guys back in the 70s he was the one that made that bet about commodities diminishing over time and uh essentially he he he made the claim that giving humanity infinite power would be like handing like a shotgun to a small child and that we would just we would we would just wreck up the place with with having technology abundantly available to us like that but i think that is more of a side effect of fiat culture more than

anything because like we we can be better but just the technology we use and how we use it as a reflection of the health of our society and and i'm yeah having gone down the bitcoin rabbit hole and the fiat rabbit holes and it's just that this level of corruption on our society it's it's not the technology that we have available to us it's just it's how we use it and how we prioritize it how we think about the future but like if we can get power to places where it's never been before like we can change the lives of of everybody on the planet and because nuclear is the one that's going to save our ass because like i've been watching like events in south africa and and lebanon these places where they'll just power will just turn off they'll give you a heads up that

you're not going to have power for a few hours so then you start having to prioritize when and how you use your power and like we're starting to see that creep more and more into the western markets and like that's a sign of a failing system and it's a much harder to go backwards than it is to go forwards like once we've adapted to having a lot of power if we reverse course we are going to have a tough time especially at with the state of divisiveness in the western nations like canada in the united states right now if we start having to really really fight over scarce resources these people are going to start tearing each other apart and it's not going to be pretty so i think one of the best ways to avoid that is to just make sure that everybody everybody has the resources we

need available and nuclear power is going to be able to do that like we'll be able to feed people and make sure they have good adequate water resources and health infrastructure and educational infrastructure just it all that all is second order from just getting power if you don't have power you can't have any of that stuff or like even if you do it sucks yeah and you really sent my mind down um an interesting rabbit hole like when you factor in the ability for nuclear power to replace certain forms of hydrocarbon generation and then you can use those hydrocarbons for other petroleum products which can drive down prices lower for things like fertilizer the plastic that's used in this mic in this camera like the the positive externalities that can

emanate from simply not having to use those as a fuel source and being able to use them for end products that aren't energy could be massive from a from an economics perspective yeah we'll be able to make like we'll have the power available to make like synthetic hydrocarbons and like whatever we want like if we want to be making like jet fuel like we'll be able to just take take lower order like hydrogen and base chemicals and then it just requires a lot of heat and steam and power to combine them to make those higher order chemicals that that can actually be used as fuel and fertilizer and feedstock for countless other operations and industries that we have these days so it's just a matter of climbing up that stack more power we have available the

more creative we can get with how we use what we have available to us yeah with that mind i know we've got a shot clock here of about 10 minutes and just to wrap up the last part of this conversation is really to tie the bitcoin mining industry and the nuclear industry together what are you seeing on the front lines are people in your industry beginning to recognize the value prop that bitcoin mining can provide um as as they look to build out these small module reactors and larger rack reactors down the line are people understanding the economic benefit that the mining industry can provide nuclear they're they're they're starting to like there's there's a few bits and pieces where you can see that they are paying attention but like i watched a seminar

the other day and it was going through all of the different technologies that we want to collaborate with for for nuclear power and noticeably data centers was not on that list and like like just even even data centers in general should be on these these lists for for how to deploy like big power infrastructure with having a certain demand like load available with it so even if it is the always on type of data centers and in web services and like sensitive information like that sort of stuff like that's going to be a huge draw on power as well but Um, where I did find interesting was, uh, a few months ago, I went to, I was in Minneapolis. And while I was there, I actually got an opportunity to hit up Brandon Quittam's meetup.

We did a, we did a talk with, uh, was it Nazar Khan was there as well. And we were talking about talent energy and what they're up to at Susquehanna. But what I did not expect was at the nuclear conference itself that I was there for the North American young generation and nuclear. Cause yeah. And the only reason I'm going to these conferences, cause I want a contest. They had a contest that was, how can we apply nuclear power to the UN Sustainable Development Goals? And I was like, by applying Bitcoin mining to it.

Nuclear power already applies to all those goals, and we can amplify it with Bitcoin mining. It was really that simple. And then I won it, and then I went to a few conferences. But then at this one specific conference in Minneapolis, they had the chief nuclear officer of the Susquehanna power plant, where the Talon Energy, TerraWolf, CumulusCoin data center has been built. he actually gave a presentation to the conference about the data center and how it was built out in the process and and the people involved in their plans for expansion and and like how how they're using it for demand response and different other strategies that they have for for their growth and

and coming into the having and and their power price which is obscenely low compared to everyone else so they're going to be just fine and uh yeah so anybody that was not paying attention before then definitely is because there was representatives from across the entire industry there there was like that the president of xl energy the president of southern power like celestial energy energy like constellation yeah there was the who's who of the nuclear industry from across canada was there in that room listening to that presentation so that was was very cool and then just on the other things just like when i get the opportunity to present it to like random people throughout my company like like sometimes there's hesitancy and resistance

because the things they've heard about bitcoin definitely having the the blackrock etf in play makes it a little easier because of the institutional credibility so it's it's a lot a lot easier of a pill to swallow for like nuclear executives rather than having not that institutional cover to make it easier to discuss in these circles um but once you explain just like the basic idea of it's just a load that we can match to any generation profile and we can we can pair it up it perfectly with any nuclear power asset that we want to build they do start to see the value in it especially because that the flexibility is like nothing else and especially like i the way i kind of lead them to it is we'll go through the different technologies that are

used as demand response and like we'll talk about the different industrial loads or or like a residential like time of use kind of programs that they do and ultimately just lead them to be like all right so now we've got just a flexible load that we can operate like a dimmer switch like that that is at the tip pinnacle of of demand response and being able to respond to any changes we see in these these loads like right at the fine level of frequency even because it's like right now they just they have regulators that will just dump that load and it doesn't do anything of value with it but if you were to just dump load into an ASIC like then you could generate a little bit of hash rate and like so what if you're only making like a few cents here and there it's

it's actually a benefit to the grid to just have it there and available even if you couldn't earn anything profitable off of it because they already use something that's just gets them zero dollars when they curtail that electricity anyways so they they are catching on it's just it's it's a slow slow grind and like i'm fully aware that like the seeds that i'm planting right now like may not start bearing fruit for like five ten years but this is a long game we've got to play here well right i want to thank you for planting the seeds i think the work that you're doing is extremely important i think as bitcoiners we can um sort of get inoculated in our own narrative bubble and it's very important to have individuals like yourself out there on the front

lines really trying to get this message out to people in positions of power that can actually drive change particularly at the end within the energy sector um and with that in mind i know we have to wrap up here is there anything we didn't cover that you want to mention before we end the show uh i don't know i'm sure there was definitely something i missed like i didn't really go through much of the different companies that are being worked on with this but like i can list them off right now like just like westinghouse hitachi terrestrial energy arc energy moltex rolls royce kairos terra power whole tech new scale x energy oklo like all these companies are in like the early stages of like financing themselves so if there are people that want to

invest in nuclear power like reach out to these companies and see what what you can do with them like they're all they're more than happy to speak with people that have money and want to see them succeed so that's uh yeah i want to see it succeed so if i'm just happen to be the guy that can start putting these puzzle pieces together and connecting the right people like i'd i'd take every every little connection i make as a victory we're gonna win are we gonna win right i certainly hope so from this perspective the future looks a lot brighter than it would have otherwise like yeah was very pessimistic before bitcoin but uh i see i see a light opening up and it creeps up even wider when we start attaching nuclear to it we're going to supercharge it supercharge everything

but all the lights we got to fix canada though first like uh i don't know what the hell's going on so yeah you see this right here wd-40 trudeau wants to make it this illegal in canada why I don't know. I don't know. We don't know. That was just announced last week that something to do with aerosols. And he's already taken away our plastic bags and our plastic utensils. One of the first things I was really excited about when I landed in Minneapolis was I got to use a plastic straw. It was very exciting. It's the small things. It's the little things that people take for granted until the Cuban nipple crisis hits you and you're forced to. oh yeah our politics is going to heat up too like yeah you guys got your circus 24 just starting to heat up like we're ours ours can get called randomly at any time if it doesn't get called randomly it's going to be after yours but yeah with pierre and trudeau in play like things are going to get very interesting because like as much as i like trudeau and he's saying the things that

i like to hear that makes me want to scrutinize him even more because yeah i don't i don't know it sounds like i don't know if you watch much professional wrestling but that's kind of how i view politics is just okay yeah the heels and and the baby face and they just yeah they're all they're all just characters playing a role and they'll switch roles as needed to tell the story yeah we need to get the politicians out of the way and hopefully the free market bitcoin nuclear proliferation will help that ryan thank you for taking some time out of your work day to to sit down with us and educate us about the state of the nuclear energy and the potential it has moving forward um again i think the work that you're doing is extremely important and just want to

thank you for doing it and thank you for joining us yeah thanks for having me if anybody wants to find me nuclear bitcoiner on twitter noster orange pill app those are my primaries that i message people through and yeah it was great talking to you i love love your work love all this work and about the intersection of power and bitcoin mining it's a it's a fascinating new space that's growing very quickly i think it's um i think it's probably the most important intersection of bitcoin in any other industry at this particular point in time so the work you're doing is really exciting and keep crushing it thank you sir all right that's all we got today peace and love

Thank you.