The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - Ryan aka Nuclear Bitcoiner - The Future Of Energy Generation

Episode Date: March 13, 2025

FRIENDS AND ENEMIESThis week we welcome Ryan (aka Nuclear Bitcoiner) to the show to discuss the future of energy generation in Canada & the rest of the world.With energy being used as a bargaining chip in a trade war, people are beginning to view energy in a different light. How will Canada and the US meet their electricity demands of they continue to grow apart from each other?If you want to follow Ryan on X, he can be found at: https://x.com/NuclearBitcoinr From a couple of Canucks who like to talk about how Bitcoin will impact Canada. As always, none of the info is financial advice. Website: ⁠www.CanadianBitcoiners.com⁠Discord:   / discord   A part of the CBP Media Network: ⁠www.twitter.com/CBPMediaNetworkThis show is sponsored by: easyDNS - ⁠⁠www.easydns.com⁠⁠ EasyDNS is the best spot for Anycast DNS, domain name registrations, web and email services. They are fast, reliable and privacy focused. You can even pay for your services with Bitcoin! Apply coupon code 'CBPMEDIA' for 50% off initial purchase Bull Bitcoin - ⁠⁠https://mission.bullbitcoin.com/cbp⁠⁠ The CBP recommends Bull Bitcoin for all your BTC needs. There's never been a quicker, simpler, way to acquire Bitcoin. Use the link above for $20 bones, and take advantage of all Bull Bitcoin has to offer.

Friends and enemies, welcome to yet another edition of the Canadian Bitcoiners podcast. I'm Len. Today I am going to be talking to Ryan McLeod. He is the nuclear Bitcoiner. And we're going to be chatting a lot about what's going on in the world of energy generation and what's going to happen with the future of energy because this is going to be something. Well, it's actually a topic of the day these days, given what's going on with tariffs and energy and how that's being vetted about.

It seems to be a currency that's being used as a way to try to leverage and influence power over somebody else. But either way, it's a topic we'll be talking to Ryan about. Before we go any further though, I do have a couple of sponsors. I got the chart, got my list of things to do here. So number one, we have

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on the man of the hour. The man providing us the power. Ryan LaClavre, nuclear Bitcoiner. How are you? Evening, Len. I'm doing great. Yeah, lots of excitement going on in Canada for nuclear power. Yeah. And I see you're wearing a hockey jersey. It's a Team Canada jersey. This is my Bitcoin jersey. Yes. I got one joke. Very cool. I got this playing in the Canada inaugural Canada USA Bitcoiners hockey game that took place at the Montreal conference last year. Yes. I was the losing goaltender but I'm not going to feel bad about it because I haven't played in a while and they needed a goalie and I'm at the very minimum requirements of I have equipment that still fits.

So if they do find somebody else that meets higher than those requirements, I haven't been able to get any ice time. So I would not be upset if I get cut from the team, team They find a better but I will play if they need a goalie I am still down if they absolutely need somebody that has equipment that fits so right Final score. I know that it was not a game I know like nine or something like that and they had a ringer, right? They had some yeah Well, they had Brandon Gentile. He was like, almost went pro were it not for an injury. So yeah, I think he was kind of might even have been holding back on us. So it was it was a fun game. Nonetheless, we had a great time. I made a few

good saves, probably let in more than I didn't. But it was fun. It may be time, you know, we call in our own ringers is Crosby going to be doing anything around that time? Probably yeah, because it's going to be the beginning of the season. We got to call in an ex player. Well, we did joke that sooner or later, there will be Bitcoiners that come from professional hockey leagues.

And we will need to set some standards in the dressing room as soon as there is shit coining. Like, I don't care how many Stanley cups or Canadian gold medals you have, you cannot be on this team so like we've we've it's been discussed and it is an eventuality that we are expecting and there has to be some some standards set early to set the tone that this is the Bitcoin hockey tournament. I will say this and you don't have to respond to this our cricket team is gonna be fantastic in about a decade's time So I was gonna leave it at that

Right, you've been in our show this is the third time you've been in our show something like that three maybe four I'm not sure yeah You're a good friend of the show. We've met at a few conferences and random So for people who aren't aware who you are Just give like a quick background because you're not just some Joe Bloy pulled off the street that's going to be talking about nuclear energy. You have some pedigree here, so maybe you can just give a quick background of who you are. Well, I'm Ryan McLeod, as you've said. I'm not an engineer or like a professional scientist or in any matter, but I'm a chemical technologist that works in the Canadian nuclear industry at Canadian nuclear laboratories. And I got this idea in my head that we should be

using Bitcoin mining to advance Canada's agenda and intention to use small modular reactors to upgrade remote northern communities off of diesel and improve our energy sovereignty and energy security across many different domains. And yeah, basically I'm pitching that Bitcoin can be a great amplifier to the goals that are already set in motion that Canada is pursuing in regards to various sizes and scales of markets that we want to apply small modular reactors to. And then like even in the last few years, we've pivoted back into building large reactors as well. And there's intentions to market a new version

of the Kandu reactor as well, then see if we can build that domestically and possibly internationally. But that is, yeah, that is some exciting things going on in Canada. And I've just been kind of pushing my little angle of Bitcoin mining inside of it. And it's gaining a little bit of traction. I've gone to a few conferences promoting this idea in general.

And it's simply just like when you want to build power assets in the middle of nowhere, you have a customer that you can sell that power to that is very dynamic and flexible and location agnostic, it opens you up to a lot more creativity in terms of scale and planning and projecting into the future of what you want the growth of that community to look like. And the Bitcoin mining can act as an insurance and a hedge against that uncertainty of does the growth happen or not. It can still just act as a placeholder.

But the initial intention of what I'm promoting essentially takes from Brandon Quidom's idea, the Bitcoin is a pioneer species idea, treating Bitcoin mining as a pioneer load that can be used to facilitate the deployment of small reactors within Canada in small markets that don't typically have the demand that would support that level of power generation. So the small modular reactors, what is the definition that makes up this? Yeah, the the SMR category is a nuclear reactor that's less than 300 megawatts of generating capacity. The typical reactors that we're familiar with, especially in Canada, the Kandu reactors,

started with the first ones about 600 megawatts and then the later ones were 900 megawatts and they're expecting the newest one to be over a gigawatt. The reactors that were just finished in the Abu Dhabi and the United Arab Emirates, they were 1.4 gigawatts each. So a set of four is putting out 5.2 gigawatts in total. Yeah, most of the reactors that are being built in Chinese or by the Russians right now are on the gigawatt scale, but they are also experimenting with smaller reactors that have applicability to a broader range of markets that the typical gigawatt-sized reactor would not make sense for. Like, we're not going to put a CANDU reactor in a CalWit,

but a 300 megawatt reactor might make sense. So it also breaks down into multiple subcategories, because then you can get down to less than 10 megawatts, they call the microreactors, and those are more applicable to very remote communities, remote industrial applications, like mineral mining and refineries that are isolated from grids. And there's also the consideration that Canada has military presence all through northern regions that would be much better security

with nuclear reactors and being able to support our defense capabilities in the North, because yeah, from the looks of it, like yeah, if the Russians mobilized it from the North, Canada is not gonna be putting up much of a fight. So that is one of the angles of how we bolster our security in the north is to amplify our power generation capabilities up there as well. I just put players with hockey pucks up there and just start shooting them because we have an ability to at least shoot. Maybe that's one way we can keep them. Those micro reactors.

I'd rather keep the conflict to the ice in general. Yeah, why not? The whole point of like, yeah, we have these hockey tournaments and we invite each other and like we we take out our grievances in the sports arena so we don't have to with kinetic warfare. 100% yeah at the end of the day, you know, maybe a few egos have been hurt a few teeth are lost but still everybody still has their limbs and only lost alive this is a good thing to do. So you can find another day. So these microreactors, I find to be fascinating though. And in terms of like the quickness and how quick one of these can be put up, what's the timeframe from basically,

yes, we're gonna go ahead with it to finally one of these microreactors are actually producing energy. But what the timeframe from from those two times it's going to be definitely a few years because there's phases to this like the first step is they have to build a demonstration reactor to to prove its capabilities to prove the technology to work out troubleshooting so for many of these first demonstration reactors they're using licensed nuclear facilities like Canadian Nuclear Laboratories,

like the Darlington site, the Bruce site. They're taking advantage of these existing sites to facilitate first of a kind new generation reactor. So what's going on at the Darlington site is they are currently building the 300 megawatt BWRX reactor that's designed by GE Hitachi. There is some tension about that right now because it is an American company, American design, and there's the tension with the Americans right now, but that has been the go ahead plan. And many have argued that because the site is licensed for a much larger

reactor, we should actually be building a much larger reactor instead of 300 megawatts. But at the time when the decision was made, the generation and the demand for that generation wasn't really where we expected it to be. So we weren't in the market for gigawatts of power, but now we are in the market for gigawatts of power. So the calculus has changed. So even now in Canada, like we're looking at a site in Wesleyville, it's further down the highway. So Pickering is the closest one to Toronto and then Darlington is out towards Bowmanville.

And then further on Port Hope is Wesleyville, which is a site that OPG has owned for decades now that was initially considered for the original build out of Candy reactors, but it has basically just been mothballed and now they are looking at it as a potential site for new nuclear reactors. And then they're also planning on expanding the Bruce site to build a third set of four reactors that will bring its operating capacity up to something like

almost 14 gigawatts of in total with between 12 full units. But that is currently out for... They haven't decided on which technology they're going to use for it. Obviously, there's a lot of the Canadians are arguing for the Kandoo technology, but there's also Westinghouse, the Koreans have modeled EDF in France as a reactor design. So there's a few different contenders potentially to build on that site, but obviously I'm biased and would like to see a candy reactor and that would be fantastic. And yeah, so we're just taking advantage of what we have

and then we're going to, so those first phases will probably take like five years or so. Then once the technology is kind of proven out and there's been the troubleshooting, then we have to build the mass production facilities, which is the intent is kind of like to build them in a off like a production line similar to like aircraft and like large ships. And then the idea is that you can build several of these a year in quick succession, and then they will be designed in a way that they can be quickly transported to site and then assembled and generating. So once the site's

already selected and prepared, once the reactor arrives, it will only take six months to two years, depending on the size and scale and complexity of the project. But we're looking before these things are in commercial operation, like mid 30s, like that we might start seeing the first ones prove their designs in the early 30s, like, and then it'll be a gradually then suddenly, oh yeah, like we're tons of time away. Like this, this is the nuclear industry is a very, very slow moving behemoth. And it's, it, it's very risk averse and having not built things in a while makes it challenging to get back into the flow of building new things. Canada is good at taking care of our reactor fleet and operating them, but we haven't built anything new in a long time. The Americans

also haven't built anything new in a long time. So maintaining your labor force and your supply chains that are kind of those capabilities is it creates complexity when you don't have them and you have to rebuild them. And so so there was a time when people were looking at nuclear, like it didn't have a good future over the last few decades. So then you you don't get people getting going into nuclear engineering. They'll go into finance or some sort of tech career, where there's also a lot more money and lucrative opportunities. Whereas if you want to go into nuclear, you have to want to go into nuclear. And so it hasn't been drawing as much talent as we've needed to sustain the capabilities of what we want to do in building these things.

So like it's a very chicken and egg problem. Yes, and we have to transfer the knowledge of the generation that we still have here because many of them are aging. And then there are some gaps just because of not hiring, just not attracting the talent. But now that that's reinvigorated, we have seen in the last two to three years a significant increase in interest in nuclear power at all levels. But it takes a good generation to reinvigorate and completely

reestablish a labor force that is capable of these projects and interested in doing it. And it's not an easy project to undertake. And then there's so many different designs that are in the market to try and find the product market fit. So in the different subcategories and the different markets, we're not going to need 10 different reactor designs.

They'll probably settle upon one or two that get built in mass succession, which is, has much better economics of scale and multiples of whatnot. So there's going to be bankruptcies, which in fact, there already has been one, the company that Canadian Nuclear Laboratories was working with called the Ultra Safe Nuclear Company. When bankrupt, it looks like it was just poor finances and they, um, they had to file for bankruptcy, and they had to auction off all of their assets.

So I haven't heard any news since December or so about that, but it's uncertain as to whether or not we will see or hear from that company again. It's private, so we won't really hear much about it until they are comfortable releasing more information. But there's still many other companies that are pursuing these small reactors and like big reactors. Like yeah, nuclear is getting so much attention right now, but it's not going to be happening very fast. Yeah, it's like a big ship and you're moving it

and the direction which you're trying to head into takes forever for the ship to be pointing at it. So I'm wondering though, Western nations, I mean, I'm looking like in Europe mostly right now, like Germany, for example, they have mothballed a few of their reactors, they shuttered them and it's obviously causing some issues over there for their energy generation. But here in Canada, especially Ontario, it seems to be like the

mecca of nuclear energy. And I don't know what's the reason for that? Why do we embrace nuclear over here where other jurisdictions seem to be pushing it aside? here where other jurisdictions seem to be pushing it aside. Ontario Power Generation, well, like back in the day, Hydro, yeah, Ontario Hydro was what they were called before they split. I remember that. So Ontario Power Generation and Hydro One, they used to be just one entity. They were a lot more, like, like, I don't know, they were interested in building big things.

They had the capabilities to build this infrastructure. It wasn't contracted out to other parties to do this work. Ontario Hydro had built dams. They had been building the coal plants that we have. The one in Nanticoke was for the longest time the largest coal plant in the world until it was retired in 2014. And yeah, so they just, and they had collaborated with other, yeah, with the Tennessee Valley Authority. So there's a long standing relationship between that institution and Ontario Power Generation. They've built a lot of projects in collaboration with each other and shared a lot of knowledge with

each other. And they're still like this small BWRX project is part of that long-standing collaboration that they've had with each other. And it also just came about in the early 50s when Canada wanted to build nuclear reactors. We did not have the same capabilities of building the steel required for the boiled water reactors and the pressurized reactors that the Americans were using. We came up with our own can-do design and it actually worked out very well. It was unique in that it uses heavy water as its moderator, allowing us to get away with using non-enriched uranium as our fuel.

And so that had its benefits of not having to deal with enrichment and the weapons proliferation problems. And it was a great design that kept reiterating and building and improving with each successive generation. So like the Pickering A-side was the first set of reactors, then Darlington, then Bruce, and then we exported a few around the world. There's a candy reactor in Argentina, South Korea, one in India, one in China, and two in Romania. And the two in Romania have actually received financing from some large development company, I think an American company that is going to help fund finishing that project.

So two Kandoo reactors at Chernivoda, three and four will be completed and that will be two more Kandoo reactors to add to the fleet. So yeah, Canada is eager to get back into that position that we once were. We are a powerhouse in nuclear power. We have the full supply cycle. We mine the uranium, we process it, and then we refine it into fuel.

And we use it to fuel our own nuclear reactors. We're working on a deep geological repository and a near surface disposal facility so that we can safely manage the waste for long-term storage and, uh, and reaccessibility for if it ever has any uses in the future. And it's, we, we need to be reviving that and bringing it back to the state that it was in the 70s and 80s when everyone, that when, yeah, when Ontario was an example

to the whole world of like, when you really set your project management onto a goal, like you can build these great things. And I think we built like 16 or 20 reactors within like 25 years or so, starting in the early 70s. And most of them are still operating today. The only ones that are being retired officially are the ones, the A-side and Pickering one through four and the ones that were built in Quebec, which most

people don't even aren't even aware that there was nuclear reactors in Quebec. But I thought it was all Yeah, what the heck, they have them there, I had no clue. Yeah, the Gentilly reactor. So one of them was just like a demonstration on a new Kandu design, so it never fully manifested the potential, so that was more of a test. But the second one was exactly like the Kandu reactors at Darlington, so there was no reason why it couldn't have been had

its life extended and continue operating. Like there was that actually we have our environment minister to thank for that one. He was one of the head cheerleaders for retiring that reactor because it only it was only shut down in 2009, 2010 sometime. So it was not really that long ago that that Quebec removed itself from the nuclear power. And then we also have one in New Brunswick. And New Brunswick also has plans with some of these small modular reactors. They have a port in their northern parts, I think it's called the Belle Dune part, where they have a lot. It's right now powered by a large coal plant, but the idea is they want to turn it into a large clean energy industrial facility where it's going to be primarily powered by a 100

megawatt reactor in multiple modules. And then it will also power the manufacturing plant to build that module of nuclear reactor, but then also support all kinds of other industrial processes, whether it be desalination, hydrogen generation, the synthetic fuels, like you name it. Like once you've built enough power and it's available, like we can do all of these fancier applications that are scientists and are very eager to deploy into the commercial markets, but it just doesn't quite seem that we're there yet,

seeing how many of these hydrogen projects and battery projects are struggling to find their footing and manifest anything in the real world without struggling financially. Because it seems like a lot of these projects without massive support are not as financially viable as we had hoped for. In terms of where it operates best and where it can't operate,

I'd like to know. Because I know, for example, in Italy, we're talking about having nuclear plants established there. But because it's prone to earthquakes there You know, it's hard for them to go ahead with it. So that's one of the things that they're looking for is Very stable. You're not gonna have earthquakes like then that seems to be one of them. Is there whatever like The ambient temperature does it work best if it's hot or cold or doesn't really matter. It just it just works period I want to know like where Nuclear works best and where it shouldn't be

placed though as far as I know like it depends on the reactor type so if your coolant is water you're going to want to be near a body of water or like a river or something that's so most reactors are like in Canada and the US are ringed around like the Great Lakes. Throughout Europe, they're drawn rivers and like the German ones, the French and they're, they're all near bodies of water. But then like Russia has reactors, they're in the far north, so they can tolerate the cold. Like, it's just a giant boiler. And the just the complex part about it is that the source of the heat for that boiling is radioactive material.

So handling that safely in civilian use cases can often be challenging. That's one of the reasons why we haven't seen huge uptick in nuclear freighters. There's a lot of talk about them, and there's a lot of potential and interest in them. But it's that having nuclear-powered ships on the high seas, there's jurisdictional problems

and who's responsible problems. It's one thing when it's maintained under military applications, but yeah, there's some regulatory complexity to be worked out before we start seeing nuclear powered freighters all over the ships. But there are some that are out there. The Russians are known for having icebreakers

that are nuclear powered and they have small barges that they use to plug into like remote coastal Siberian communities that they can use to power them up. So like the use cases have kind of already been proven. Like there's no reason Canada could not do that if we were able to facilitate one of these designs to like commercial maturity and find a way to make it modular so that we can put it on a ship or on a barge. And then we have lots of coastal regions that can benefit from that. We have lots of potential customers all throughout the world.

Canada typically has a pretty good relationship. So if we have a good product, we will get it out there. We just need to start building and the industrial alignment. Sorry, we're losing. Domestically, I think we need it more than anything else, given what's going on politically. He's like, I hope everybody's aware of it, but we're talking here in Ontario to levy

25 percent tariffs on exported energy to New York, Michigan and other states. And that was since been rescinded. So there's going to be no longer putting this on. But it just goes to show you how sensitive people are to having any increase, like large increases to the cost of generation of electricity. So here in Canada, are we doing a good enough job, though, for preparing ourselves for scaling out? Is there going to be more requirements for electricity in the future, right?

More people go towards electric cars, more people electrify just about everything in their lives. There's going to just be more demand. So are we prepared for this demand? Are we putting ourselves in a good position to meet it in the future? We will be able to, but like we're going to have to kind of give on some of this net zero,

like at all costs position that some leaders seem to be all in on because if we want to meet the needs, like yeah, we're going to need gas plants. We're probably going to need to continue having like our operating coal plants continue operating. We need to take full advantage of all the hydro that we have. And then we also, yeah, we have to consider that, like, we have neighbors that kind of became dependents on us. They retired their nuclear capacity, like, all throughout that northeastern corridor that you described. They have retired, I believe, five, maybe six nuclear power plants in the last decade

or so, like Palisades, Pilgrim, like Duane Arnold, the Indian Point, Vermont Yankee. I know I'm missing at least one or two, but that's a lot of power that's been taken offline. And then the assumption, like the argument was that it wasn't economical to extend their life because the market was not favorable to them because of the way that the market is structured. It kind of gives better incentives to the intermittent generators or anybody that's collecting like tax credits or, or other out of market incentives because they are basically paid to generate electricity when the grid doesn't want electricity. That doesn't work for a nuclear power plant.

They just want to operate all the time and just get a base rate for power and they will be happy. But when their other generators on the grid are pushing too much or too little, and you're trying to compensate with your base load generators. Economics just don't work. And so that's one of a number of reasons why they just decided not to invest in extending their lives. And then they said that, oh, it's okay. We will just replace them with windmills and solar panels and batteries. And in reality, they got replaced by more natural gas and more exports from Canada.

So then you have to consider that there's only so much to go around. Like, yeah, Quebec has been blessed with massive amounts of hydropower that previous generations had built and commissioned for them. And it's now challenging to build more because you can only flood so much land and there's only so much like river space available. And you go further and further north, you get the harder and harder it is to transmit it to the south. And then the perpetual perennial problem that they have building power generation in Northern Canada is there's no demand up there for it.

And yeah, it's not a viable investment. But obviously, now we'll get around to Bitcoin mining, but that's the whole idea. That kind of customer frees that up. But they had this kind of long-standing thing where when Canada is generating excess, because we often do in Ontario and Quebec during various seasonal variations, and do in Ontario and Quebec during like kind of various seasonal variations. Like when Ontario was at our max capacity, when all of our nuclear power plants are all out, we've got our hydro up to the max and all of our other facilities are pushing power onto the grid, we are way over the demand that we are required, like terawatts over. Wow. So I think it was, yeah, sometime in like 2018, 2019,

before we started refurbishing the reactors. Yeah, it wasn't unusual to have a year where like 20 terawatt hours was either curtailed or negatively priced somewhere in that ballpark. And it's a lot less now because we have a partial reactor fleet shutdown for refurbishments and life extensions that will be happening for the next few years. So at any given time, we've got two, maybe three reactors offline. So we're not pushing all that power onto the grid that we can. But if you consider that, like 20 terawatt hours, if you put a five cent per kilowatt hour price tag on that, that's a billion dollars worth of potential revenue that's just out there. And so we've kind of, I assume this is accurate because of the source that I got it from, I forget what his name is, but he's one of the guys that works with

the Canadians for nuclear energy. But he was saying that, that yeah, we, we basically, the Americans pay 0.2 cents kilowatt hour for our nuclear exports. And this import tariff was gonna bump it up to one cent. Which was roughly what he was saying. I know it's still ridiculous. And it was throwing this whole fit over like 25%. Like we need a tariff tracker because there's like so much of this sanity going on.

And like it's hard to track. I think it's just to keep everyone confused and on their toes and reactive. But like, it's very entertaining when you can kind of like step away from it and kind of take the view from above. Although it's going to greatly impact our cost of living and standards of living here in Canada if our leaders react poorly to it. But we will see how that goes with our new God King in place. And we'll see what is true. Those finally go and everyone's happy.

But yeah, now we have a central banker as our Prime Minister. This is new territory and he's a smart guy and he's very well connected, but he doesn't sit at the kids table like Crudeau does when it comes to who's making decisions about what's best for Canada and its place in the globe. So, he also feels like we're stepping it up to a higher caliber of opponents. Yeah. It really does. To politicians that probably hate Bitcoin and we just need to prove that you're not

going to be able to do anything to stop what's coming. But there's a reality here. In the States, you mentioned those five to six nuclear plants that were shuttered in the past decade or so in the United States and that's caused them to have energy demands that they can't meet. That's why they're importing some of the energy from Ontario. Now those locations that were shuttered, are they at a point where they could be started up again or are they just that's there's no way they could because I'm wondering if there's going to be an opportunity for them to look at what they have and say you know what we have these sites here that

they're closed but we could you know do a little bit of work to bring it back up to speed oh and if we have any excess electricity hey look at this we have a president that's now talking about bitcoin why can't we use this as an opportunity to then send a little excess electricity to earn some money in this case, mine Bitcoin. So I'm wondering, is this even a potential over there? Could they bring up these nuclear reactors that have been a mothballed in the past little while? I know they are actively working on the one in Michigan, the Palisades reactor,

that one got shut down. And then like within a year, there was talk of restarting it. So the last one that was going to be shut down was then like within a year there was talk of restarting it. So the last one that was going to be shut down was Diablo Canyon, but a group of very determined activists made sure that that didn't happen and they kind of backed down and kept it operating and it's proven to be very vital to keeping power in California. Yeah, so Palisades up in Michigan. I think that there was talk about Dwayne Arnold. I haven't seen anything conclusive, but for the most part,

it seems like most of them are no, but a few are yes. Three Mile Island was actually another one that was mentioned a few months ago, that Microsoft is interesting in taking all of it. There's that because it's also has the notoriety for being the site of the 1979 coolant accident. And it's a bit of a mess, but like, nobody got hurt. Remember the nuclear accidents that happened where like nobody got hurt. and it was relatively benign relative to other industrial accidents that happen all the time.

It's like, yeah, radiation is another industrial hazard. Like it has its risks associated with working with it, but so does working with electricity or hot things, spinning things, moving things. There's a lot of hazards at the workplace. And that's also just one of the challenges of working in the nuclear industry is that there's the striving for excellence in safety

manifests in a lot of bureaucracy. And sometimes that can be challenging to overcome. Things can take longer to get done than they otherwise should for just simple things like. Yeah. But it's the nature of the beast, and we have to work within the constraints that we're given. But I do feel that it is unfair that nuclear power is

disproportionately maligned compared to similar industries and technologies when it just mostly comes down to people's poor understanding of radiation and the hazards that it poses or doesn't pose. Because we are exposed to radiation all the time. If you have granite countertops, they are emitting radiation. There's radioactive material in bananas. I was going to say bananas.

Yeah. There are places in the world, like there's beaches in, there's a beach in Brazil where the sand is radioactive. There's a hot spring in Iran where there's like much higher than normal background levels of radiation. And it's showing that there's pretty solid evidence that small exposures to radiation is not only like basically harmless, but it's, it's kind of your body reacts

to it similar to exercise and like muscle tissue damage, where it causes small amount of damage that is within the scope of your body's ability to repair and recover from, and then also become more resilient from being able to recognize it and being familiar with that repair.

But like anything, like you jump off a hundred foot building, you're not recovering from that. So it's like there are limitations and thresholds where that does not apply. But then that's one of the complexities is that it was a long-standing in nuclear safety that any exposure to radiation at any dose was potentially harmful and cumulative. But since then, decades of evidence has disproven that at least up to a certain threshold where then a certain amount of exposure is definitely hazardous. And it manifests in various degrees and symptoms depending on the severity and the dosage. There are examples of being exposed to massive amounts of radiation in a very short period of time,

and that is essentially a death sentence. But yeah, I work with small amounts of radiation constantly. I have no issues whatsoever. I work in an industry that has people that have worked here for worked with radiation for decades and have shown, yeah, there's, there's no noticeable change in like health effects in relation to the people that work around the radiation and the people that work in the neighboring communities. So it's, it's just mostly comes down to just education and understanding because radiation is a tricky thing is like when it When when it when it's happening at a dangerous rate

That means that the material is decaying fast and then that it will reduce itself into a safer state at a fast rate so most of like the harmful radioactive material that we do encounter from the accidents or from any incidents is encounter from the accidents or from any incidents is reduced to a level of harmfulness equivalent to like the ore that we got it from within about a century. And then people will also say that, but then some of it is radioactive potentially for millions of years. But the material that is radioactive for millions of years, that's because it's very slowly releasing the subatomic radioactive particles. It's not giving the same dose at the same rate as the ones that decay faster.

They're essentially benign as long as you're not consuming them. Some material like that, it just gets stored in a canister and gets safely stored away in an underground repository, as long as you're not consuming them. So some material like that, it just gets stored in a canister and gets safely stored away in an underground repository is the long-term plan for that material. And even some of it, we will be able to get more fission energy

potentially out of it because there's still lots of uranium and other fission products that are a part of the fuel. So like, and it's a solid thing. Like that's another like poor understanding that people have is like they think that this radioactive material is gonna contaminate the waterways if we put it into a repository deep underground

because we've chosen a site in Ignace, Ontario, which is up close to Thunder Bay. It's been chosen as a site for the repository for Canada's nuclear waste. And the people that are trying to derail that and don't want that to happen, they will, first of all, exaggerate the hazard of it traveling, and then exaggerate the potential of it getting into the water table, when in fact it's going to be buried beneath the water table, and the water would have to penetrate multiple layers to get to the material and then and then extract itself out and then find its way up hundreds of feet into the waterway and then for

people to get exposed to it. So like, yeah, I've heard the complaint that yeah, like, well, we'll have these these these death traps and death zones that like Generations of people won't be able to go near but it's like it's really not that complicated It's just gonna be an underground like web of tunnels and a large open kind of dome area where we just have large lead casks that just sit there for Decades centuries and it'll be monitored. It's not like yeah that just sit there for decades, centuries, and it'll be monitored. It's not like...

Yeah. And it's also like a lack of faith that humanity's like not going to be around to like take care of it. Like if we are continuing to like build and grow, like unless we completely destroy all of humanity, like pretty sure we're going to monitor what we're doing with our nuclear byproducts and potential fuel for

more energy. Well, the stakes are so high considering what you're dealing with. And if you consider how many nuclear reactors and how many years we've been using nuclear reactors for and how few incidences there were, you mentioned Three Mile Island, Fukushima would be another one, and Chernobyl. But the latter two that I mentioned, one is due to a tsunami and the diesel generators were just overwhelmed when the water table came up. But the other one was just human error. From what I gather with Chernobyl, they just did a poor job when they were trying to test something. I don't know the specifics of it, but it was just more human error for what they did over there.

But what I'm trying to get at is with all we've been doing with nuclear, do we have so few accidents, not just with the reactors themselves, but also storing of it? It kind of reminds me like the airplane, the airline industry, where the stakes are rather high. If you have an incident with the airline, the likelihood of death is rather high. But we don't hear a lot of it because just because they have so many redundancies built in, there's so much regulation put into it, they test things over and over again. And I look at the nuclear industry in the same light that they just, they do the right thing with it in terms of the storage, with the maintenance of it, with

everything with it, you just, it seems to just work in my eyes. So that's just my own two cents. But I want to bring back this discussion quickly to Bitcoin and how this is going to somehow potentially be used in energy generation moving forward. Because you obviously you're a Bitcoiner and you're your nuclear guy too. But so the melding of these two, I'm not sure how many people share the same views you do, but I hope more people do. So I'm wondering in your eyes, what's the marriage between these two in the future?

Well, it certainly sounds like many Bitcoiners are fans of nuclear power, especially once they've understood how Bitcoin mining works and how it is a basically an insatiable energy sink that will take whatever we throw at it. And as long as the economics work for whoever is operating the machines, we will clearly continue feeding this thing. And nuclear power seems to be very attractive to the people that operate these machines. As far as I know, there's one operating facility, Terawolf, at the Susquehanna nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. They built a small site. They've had an interesting situation recently because they had sold off the rest of the site to Amazon, and the intention was that Amazon was going to build a data center behind the meter at that power plant. But now they're getting into

arguments with the Energy Commission because taking a gigawatt of power off the grid is no longer contributing to the costs of maintaining the distribution network. So that will end up costing the ratepayers more if that amount of power is not contributing. So there's that and then there's the UAE. It's pretty well known at this point that they have a partnership with Marathon Digital Holdings that they've built a fairly large immersion cooled facility with like state-of-the-art cooling tapes to keep them clean and cool in the desert environment and they're pretty basically using that to absorb the glut of energy that they get sometimes

from their solar and the fact that they've now got 5.2 gigawatts of nuclear power constantly running. And some seasons they need more or less than the power that they have available to them. So the Bitcoin miners provide a very convenient buffer for them. them. So the Bitcoin miners provide a very convenient buffer for them. But my general idea is that I see nuclear power is very excited about the prospects of AI. And there was, and it was like, very feverish, like there was so much interest. And then that deep seek thing came out and kind of

torpedoed, it torpedoed a lot of people's expectations in the amount of power that is going to be needed to support these inference machines and these large language models that we've found ourselves consuming a lot of our times with and communicating with probably more than other humans at these days. But it did show that they can get these days. But it did show that they can get similar outcomes with less energy intensive resources, whether they were genuine or whether they are hiding or obfuscating that or not remains to be seen,

because you never know. But the general idea was that maybe we're not going to need tens of gigawatts in these large 5 gigawatts star bases that they were talking about to power these massive data centers. But maybe we still will because that then gets into everyone started talking about Jevin's paradox where it's like if you just make it cheaper to do it, people are just going to do more of it.

And then ultimately you're still going to consume obscene amounts of power to support this fun new tool that humanity has gotten its hands on. And like I barely think we're getting started. Like I still talk to most of the people in my day-to-day life, they've barely even touched it. Like I've I play with it a lot. Like I'm building a pretty fancy spreadsheet model and like I'm coming into encountering like spots where I'm like I need a formula. I know that Excel can do that formula but I have no idea how to make it do that formula so I just give the robot little instructions and

then it just spits out a formula for me. What you're going to is a grok? I've just been using chat gbt is just like I started using it and I just haven't I haven't really up moved on yet but I want to like I've been playing around with perplexity, but it's convenient. And like just sometimes when you're just lazy, you just don't want to type all that stuff. It's just like you do this for me. And I've, there's been some tension between me and my wife because she's prefers the human touch to things. So she's, she's not a big fan of using it as a crutch. Because I'll also like the, my kids are in high school. So they're getting, having encounters with it and school is very complicated about how they treat AI. So they're getting, having encounters with it.

And school is very complicated about how they treat AI, but they don't want you like using it and then plagiarizing with it. But you also want to be able to teach them how to use it. Cause it is a valuable tool if it's used correctly, like don't make it do the work for you, but kind of like help use it to teach you how to do the work that you want to learn how to do. But then it's also like, why would I want to learn how to do coding languages now

when I can just give a description to a robot and it does this stuff for me? Like it seems like we are just seeing all of these little pieces being built and the different people building them, because like the Bitcoin space gives you a pretty broad perspective of a lot of different things going on. And it just seems like sooner or later, there's just going to be some critical piece that just snaps it all together, like the AI, all the Bitcoin, the user experience is just going to finally make that the smartphone moment where you can barely remember that time before we didn't all have these goddamn things in our hands every fucking second. And like, yeah, like that was only not even 20 years ago. Yeah, you're 100% right.

I'm right at the cusp of that generation that I was like the last generation that grew up remembering a time before the internet. And it's weird raising children in this new era because things are moving faster than I am prepared to even know what to do with. And it's just like give them some tools and hope that they can, hope you've prepared them enough that they can figure it out for themselves because it's a weird and wacky world

and it's nothing like the one that I came into. Yeah. Does Bitcoin fit in there? Yeah, we kind of get derailed with the AI. So I was just saying the on-grid stuff, the big nuclear, they're interested in AI, they're going to be playing with a lot of these AI contracts. That's kind of what's going to push them afloat. But my interest is more on the off-grid, on the remote applications, on the small markets, like what we want to do with these micro-reactors.

They're a little bit more complicated because at least when you're building the big reactors, even if you have a large load from your data center, you still have connection to the grid. But even then, this thing at Susquehanna is making other companies like the Microsoft Three Mile Island, they're just like, well, maybe we just won't connect it to the grid and we'll just keep it all for ourselves.

Because it's complex getting connected to the grid, especially that kind of power, and they have to do studies and it's like, are you flexible or are you just taking a glut of power? What happens if your on-site primary power goes down or you're just going to flash on hundreds of megawatts onto the grid, and now the grid's got to be like, what do we do about this? Are you going to have backup on hundreds of megawatts onto the grid? And now the grid's got to be like, whoa, what do we do about this?

Or are you going to have backup generators that can keep you cool? Are they going to be diesel, gas, what have you? You have to think about all of those redundancies. Whereas then the Bitcoin miners, they're a lot more rugged. We can put them in really wacky places where nobody in their right mind would consider building a Tier 1 or 2 data center. We're talking Tier Sub-Zero. They say a standard data center wouldn't want to be less than 99.98% uptime, but the Bitcoin miners, depending on your efficiency, and it seems like that's what what marathons kind of intention is, is,

is if you have different power generation assets that have different like supply and demand kind of just curves to go with them, like you can play either as just like a base load demand with the you have the best miners on the market. They're always on like you only turn them off in extreme circumstances, like the big winter storms that rolled through Texas. Whereas they also bought a wind farm where they know

that that's going to have like a capacity factor of like 50% at best. So they're not going to put their newest miners. So that's where they're like, they're going to put their S21s where they're getting good solid base load. And then they'll retire their S19s instead of selling them on the market, they'll just be like sending them to a state up, up, yeah, send them to a farm farm upstate and they'll, they'll find a good home. Cause technically at this point, like because the efficiency gains

are not as rapid as they were at the previous generations, that is a viable option now. So no ASIC is really retired until there's no real good use of it. Like, I don't know if you can hear, I've got an S9 humming behind me. He's a great little space heater. And that's the other thing that we get into too, is like, we want to deploy power to the north. We also want to electrify heat. So we have a perfect heat source. So I was just reading, there's a report my company did about just like the future electrification and energy plans for Canada and like

multiple times through there. It's just like electrifying every appliance we possibly can and trying to move away from natural gas. Like gas is great when it where where it is where it's available, like it's reliable, and we have great infrastructure, especially here in Ontario. But there's some places where that's not always viable and you don't always want to be like, and if you have to ship diesel into the north, like you'll want to make the most use out of that. So if you have alternative power plant options, so you have a nuclear power plant, you'll probably still want to keep your diesel generators there. You don't want to completely retire it. But then you save that for

emergencies and then you use the electricity to pump the electricity or yeah, pump the electricity straight into people's homes and then you can put the electrical heating source right where you want it to. Or you can do like what they're doing in Finland where they're just heating large bodies of water and then that's used for local district heating systems. But you also have to have the district heating system already in place. Like Finland already has these district heating systems. They're dispersed all

through their country, they have good population density, and the climate works perfect for it. And they've just been swapping out their electrical or their hydrocarbon based heating for Bitcoin miners. And I think that it's all like 2% of their entire district heating is Bitcoin mining at this point. So there's no reason why we couldn't start doing that in Canada. We don't have a lot of population up there, but we still have population up there.

They're very dispersed and it's very difficult and expensive to get reliable, affordable energy to them. So that's why these SMRs are like a very strong consideration for doing just that. And then my idea is we use the Bitcoin mining as the anchor load so it doesn't limit us to just enough power to support the local community like just now. Because if you're going to do strategies that involve just a nuclear power plant with a diesel plant for base load and peaking, or the SMR with batteries for just kind of like load shaving, all of these other strategies,

they kind of limit the grid to just enough to cover peak load, and any overbuild that you put into it is just wasted capital potentially potentially if you don't have a use for it. So what Bitcoin miners unlock is that you can now far exceed what you need for local capacity now and you can build what you want to project for the future. Like say you're expecting 5% load growth from this community and you also know that there's going to be a project that's just going to like increase it by like a lump of two or three megawatts.

And you can model and project around that. And then you can have the Bitcoin miners just as that placeholder from day one, generating revenue from day one, even though the local capacity factor and load factor is only 30%. But over time, as they grow up to 50%, 60%, 70% of taking that power, you taper off the Bitcoin miners and you send them elsewhere.

And then at the same time, you can use those different efficiency tiers in the same way that you would use a base load power generator and a peaking power generator. You use your high efficiency miners as your base load, always on, and then you use the lower tiers that are less efficient as your load following load. There is a little bit more complexity because now you've got different types of miners in place, so you'd have to make sure that you have the resources to maintain their operations and whatnot, but there's no reason why you couldn't fill one shipping container full of S21s and then another shipping container full of S19s.

And they perform different roles, but it's perfectly catered to what the supply and demand profile looks like for any given community or industrial process. And then you're also, yeah, then you got the heat in it. But I think it's just it's an unlock that now we can build more units. So then we also have the redundancy so that, so like if you're building just enough for the community, if you were to lose one of your power generation assets, then you don't

have a backup for it. Whereas if you have an extra unit that's just completely occupied with Bitcoin miners, if you lose one of your primary units, you just take one of your secondary units, stop mining, and you put it into primary use. So it gives that added level of redundancy as well. So it's, it, I think it's got a lot of potential. This is what I'm kind of shopping around within the nuclear industry. And I'm, I'm, I'm really hoping that it starts catching on.

Like I've been running models and I'm hoping to get a proper, something with numbers to show that there is something here and just find that inflection point where when you can sell power to something in a remote scenario, how much does it have to be paying you before it just says, instead of just building just enough, just max it out. But then you also have to have the constraints, because that was the first thing I ran into, is just as soon as it reached a certain threshold

of how much power or how much revenue you can generate per kilowatt hour, it was just like, just go off scale, build as much as you want. But I'm trying to model a community in Nunavut that's about five megawatts. I don't want to install two gigawatts. So please limit it and constrain that a little bit. So just refining and tuning and just finding the right variables to work into these models. Because Bitcoin mining is its own monster and then projecting what it's going to do in the future.

I just kind of ripped off Sailor's model to project Bitcoin price into the future. But then I was like, well, how do I project the difficulty? So then I just copy pasted the price one. And then I just made it into a difficulty projection tracker as well. And then I can put the price and the difficulty and I made it into a difficulty projection tracker as well. And then I can put the price and the difficulty and I can change them at different rates and then they spit out different hash prices and then I've got the different machines that run at different efficiencies. So then when you take a hash price and you take a machine efficiency, you get dollars per kilowatt

hour and then you just subtract your operating costs. And like it's really simple math to work out the profitability on these things It's just is Bitcoin going to do what we expect it to do because like everybody seemed euphoric that when we hit 100k we were going we were going straight to 200k and now we're at 80k and and everyone's upset, but like It's a bit crazy times. I mean, I think now we're approaching 12 Terra hash person watch per tera hash, sorry. Something like that. I think I saw Bitdeer was saying that their new seal miner is

going to be like less than 10. So that's 50% more efficient than the S19. It's a very good S19 models that came out just a few years ago, so and but the The rate of efficiency like if you compare like say an s 9, but I know an s 9 came out Eight nine years ago now eight years ago But yeah, if you've got two cents kilowatt hour or you you're using a space heater anyways That's nice. Great. I agree if you're going to heat your, your, uh, area with electricity,

like why wouldn't you plug in one of these units? It just don't totally make sense. Ryan though, but you know what? Like we've done this for an hour or it's not waif approved. We've been doing this and I know you have constraints here. So I know this is, it's fucking awesome talk and I could go for another hour. Um, I have one question for you, though. I guess for one more, because I really want to know your colleagues, you're a chemical technologist and you must be talking to them

and also engineers and everybody else in the field of nuclear nuclear energy about Bitcoin mining. What are they saying about it? Are they on board or are they very skeptical about what you're bringing to them? Well, they're not as enthusiastic as me because I'm a crazy person and I will I've accepted that But they're definitely curious. They see me like tinkering away at this spreadsheet and then like well make like updates And I'll show them like a new graph. I'm like look what I made it do and they're like, that's that's great It's like here. Look look see if Bitcoin appreciates at this Cagger for this many years,

look how big the number gets. Like, yes, that's great. It's like, how can we lose? But yeah, like there's, there's, there's, there's been some, a little, like a little bit of, um, like it's, it's like, it's, it's the same old FUD that everyone's heard about just like, just like, oh, but people with criminal intent might use it. It's like, well, everybody uses money, so get over that. Or it's too volatile to be money. Well, I'm not really suggesting we use it as money. I'm suggesting we use it as a power load that's going to pay us more than zero.

I really don't care if it's going to pay out three cents or six cents. Obviously more is better, but it depends on the circumstances. As long as it's more than zero, because otherwise your options are you don't sell the power to anybody, or you're dealing with negative prices, which are bad economics.

So it just changes that game. But it's catching on, and I'm going to get some opportunities to pitch it to some more like higher up like management VP types in the not too distant future. So we will see how it sits with them. Like some of them are vaguely aware of what I've been up to. Like I got a funny phone call from or an email from comms when I did the first Bitcoin conference because they clearly scour the internet for things about their employees.

And then they saw Ryan McLeod talking at the Canadian Bitcoin conference. So then just the comms guys just like, should we know anything about this? It's like, well, I don't speak on behalf of CNL and I know none of that stuff. I'm just, these are my own ideas. And I'm just going, I was invited to talk about these ideas because nobody else was talking about these ideas. And I, I seem to have just fallen into the place of being the guy that talks about these ideas and pushes these ideas.

And it just kind of got obsessively into my head. And, and it feels like I have to create this report and just get this out of my head so that it will stop bothering me. And I can move on to something else or at least build upon it but I need to at least get get get this math that's stuck in my head out because I don't know I used I used to be like a big math kid and then I just yeah I've spent too much time in the lab and too much time as a parent and now I found a math puzzle to solve and it's it's it's gotten I know it's it's it's probably it's a healthy obsession yeah

yeah so I mean I don't want to keep you too long for your family because you we only scheduled an hour for listing max an hour past it and you're gonna be taking Canadian can Bitcoin conference again this year as well I'd like to I'd hope to you spoke in the last two I believe. I've been at the last two. I've already been invited to speak at the the learning Bitcoin one in Vancouver. So there's that and then yeah I was in El Salvador for the last adopting Bitcoin. I had gotten to go to the International Youth Nuclear Congress in Abu Dhabi in, what is that, September, October. That was quite the adventure.

And like, yeah, and there was another one in Toronto about the disruptive, innovative, and emerging technologies in the nuclear sector. And so they invited the Bitcoin guy. And they was mostly, it was mostly talk about AI and like digital twins and robotics and a lot of stuff like that. But then I was like, that's great. But you need to make sure that we can for this stuff

because investors aren't going to pay for things if we can't prove a solid investment case. And if our like a cost of energy is gonna be through the roof and we don't have like an anchor load to bring it down and basically yeah basically I want to rip off what gridless is doing and apply it to small modular reactor microgrids and yeah so that that's essentially my plan and if anyone's not familiar with gridless they're they're taking small hydro in the middle of Africa and

making it economically viable by attaching Bitcoin miners to it and making sure that it's a hundred percent all the time. Ryan, I really appreciate you taking time out of your family to come and talk to us. Well talk to me. Oh, it's fun. Well past an hour and I'm sorry for that. It's good. I haven't had a Bitcoin or chat in a few months now so it feels like I needed a fix. Like I said, when I DM'd you I said anytime

you want to come on and I mean it though and I got another one coming up I Joe Burnett invited me to do his one yes next week I think right I think we're frozen yeah sounds like we're looks like we're frozen kind of back yeah there we are yeah yeah yeah yeah so I mean you you're going to do Joe Burnett. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, you're going to everyone like, we'll leave it at that. Ryan, before we sign off, I just want to hand a baton to you. And maybe you could just indicate where people could find you in case they want to reach you. Oh, no. Looks like we lost Ryan. The last moment too at that. I'll leave it at that.

So ladies and gentlemen, I, so if he doesn't come back, I'll just end it at that. And just, we'll just cut this short. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Ryan has been an awesome guest. And like I told him, he's welcome to come back anytime he wants.

And I hope to have him come back in a very near future. So with that, you take care and we'll be back at this again Monday without Ryan, of course, we'll be with my joy myself, but Ryan, buddy, appreciate you coming on the show if you listen to this. And with that, take care and have a good weekend.