The Pomp Podcast - Mark Schneider, Nuclear Futurist and President Gen IV Nuclear Inc: How Nuclear Power Works

Episode Date: January 8, 2020

Mark Schneider is a Nuclear Futurist and a leading expert in emerging Gen IV nuclear power. He has a bachelor's degree in Nuclear Engineering Technology and has spent 20 years working with advanced small scale nuclear reactors within the U.S. Naval Nuclear Power Program. In this conversation, Mark and Anthony discuss all things nuclear power, how it works, and where the industry is going. CRYPTO.COM-----Crypto.com is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. With the vision of "cryptocurrency in every wallet", the Crypto.com App offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well designed UX and high security. It is the best place to buy, sell and pay with crypto. TAXBIT-----Refund-maximizing, cryptocurrency tax software you can depend on. Visit taxbit.com/invite/pomp and receive 10% off your tax plan today by signing up for a free trial. ETORO-----This episode of Off the Chain is sponsored by eToro, the smartest crypto trading platform, and one of the largest in the world. Join 11 million other traders and create an account at etoro.com and build your crypto portfolio the smart way.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Hey, guys. In this episode, I talked to Mark Schneider. He's a nuclear futurist and a leading expert in emerging Gen 4 nuclear power. He's got a bachelor's degree in nuclear engineering technology and has spent 20 years working with advanced small-scale nuclear reactors

within the U.S. Naval Nuclear Power Program. Basically, he's way smarter than me. I really wanted him to come in and give me an overview on all things nuclear power, how it works, why it's important, and where the industry is going. This is a fascinating episode that I learned a ton from. Before we jump into the episode, though, I want to talk about our three sponsors for today. The first is Crypto.com. It's a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. That's right. They got a vision to put cryptocurrency in every wallet.

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They really, really, really hate getting the customer service tickets and social media mentions about me. So you guys know what to do. And lastly, off the chain, don't forget, we don't only have the podcast. I really enjoy recording all of these episodes, but I also write the daily letter to investors. Most people would keep those letters confidential and private, but I allow anyone to subscribe to read the letters every morning. You could simply go to offthechain.substack.com and sign up today. Now let's get into this episode.

Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys, bang, bang. I've got Mark here. I'm super excited to record this episode. The caveat to it all is until about 48 hours ago, I knew absolutely nothing about nuclear energy. I have spent a little bit of time Googling around, reading. I even listened to a

Department of Energy podcast. Yes, the Department of Energy has a podcast. And so I've kind of done my best to get a base understanding, but I wanted Mark to come in and really give an overview of this power source, kind of how the science works, how the reactors work, and then talk through the pros and cons and what the critiques are on the responses, et cetera. And so thank you so much for coming here to New York, his first time in New York City to do this. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. It's been fun finding out the city. I think he actually said to me, we were messaging and he said, it's busy. I said, yes, that is an understatement. All right. So let's get started just with your background so people understand the perspective

you're coming from. You spent 20 years in the Navy. Maybe tell us a little about what you did there and what you've done since you left the Navy? Yeah, so I did 20 years in the Navy. I operated on, or I served on three different submarines and an aircraft carrier. So I've seen both the underwater and the surface side of the Navy. I also worked for an organization called Naval Reactors, which is kind of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission version for the military or for the Navy, providing regulatory oversight and construction and operation of the reactors. And then I have commercial power experience as well. And so that's kind of my overall general background.

And then in addition, you know, I'm a man of very few hobbies. And my wife is a nuclear engineer, too. So, you know, I have the, you know, the nerdiest pillow talk of anyone. So, you know, it's a lot of fun. But, you know, we eat, breathe, and sleep nuclear at my house. That's awesome. Did you guys meet Navy or outside of it? So my wife worked for the shipyard and we met on the USS California while she was under

construction. We met in her instrumentation and control room. That's all the equipment that controls the reactor itself. So that's where we met was literally in the room filled with all the equipment that operates the reactor. For two nuclear engineers, that's like a very romantic place to meet, right? Yeah, it was love at first sight. All right. So let's get into a little bit, you know, you have a very unique background and experience in terms of not only are you very well versed in kind of the regulatory side and the construction of these reactors and kind of the oversight, but also having been on aircraft and submarines, you've seen kind of what I'll call the land-based reactors, then also what's powering

some of these military vehicles and transportation, et cetera. How does nuclear work, right? I think is one of the things that I always get asked about now that people know that you're coming on, and I say, I don't know, right? So kind of what's the best way to describe how nuclear actually works? So this is the way that it's described amongst the super smart nerds that operate these reactors. And I love this because it's the simplest explanation

and it's the magic rock gets hot, it boils the water, it makes the roundy roundy, which causes the archy sparky, which is fascinating. And basically to break it down and, you know, is that you've got a reactor and what you use, you use a fuel and there's all sorts of different types of fuel and I'm not going to bore you with that but it absorbs a neutron it splits that causes heat to be generated that heat then used to boil water it turns a turbine that turbine can either

it can be used to make power in the form of a commercial plant or it can be used to you know drive a propeller on a ship and then the other thing is that steam for say an aircraft carrier at least the older the I say older last one was built not that long ago but they'll use that steam to drive a piston that launches the aircraft off of them got it and so really what's happening is there's a reaction that reaction causes heat the heat boils water water boiling creates steam that steam is captured and spins this turbine that you're talking about um i think that generally anyone who's spent some time on like how energy is produced the idea that hot water creates steam through a turbine is used not just in nuclear but in other forms of energy as well good yeah i mean

absolutely i mean and you know it's it's funny because with the exception of solar they you basically have a rotating piece of you know of equipment that is attached to a generator that makes your electricity and how you rotate that whether it's like a coal plant that uses the exact same style of steam plant or exact but very similar style steam plant to a nuclear power plant or you can do it with your oil you know to heat that or if you say have um you know like a a diesel engine or a gas turbine um or hydro where you just have something else that's causing that rotation um you know if you look at you know you go out on the street and you see the big light poles that's literally just a mini power plant right there it's just it's using gas to drive an

engine that causes a shaft to turn that's attached to a generator that you know is making electricity and powering that light pole so the same concept works it's just that in nuclear you're doing it on extremely large scales for sure and and the reaction that's creating the heat i think is the part that is kind of a black box to people right and so maybe describe a little bit about how that reaction is occurring from the from the actual science of it yeah so the way it works is that you have you know your your fuel and i'm just going to use uranium-235 is where you say what's called uranium-235 as a fuel for this that uranium absorbs a neutron and and then it splits that's Those are the fission products that's part of the waste that we talk about.

And this is like a collision, right? Where basically uranium is sitting there doing whatever uranium does in kind of its steady state. And then we're taking a neutron and we're creating that collision in a reaction. And that's where the heat comes from. Yeah, absolutely. And then what's happened is that when that atom splits, it splits into two fission products. And that also will release a number of neutrons. The average for uranium-235 is about two and a half.

And now if you do the math, right, if I have one atom takes one, it generates two and a half neutrons. Well, now you can see you can develop an uncontrollable reaction. So we have these things called control rods, or there's other methods to control the reaction. And so it's like a throttle on your car. So we basically want to control the amount of neutrons. They absorb the neutrons, these control rods do. And the neutrons get absorbed by that so that you have basically every atom of uranium that splits, you have one neutron generated to go on to the next uranium atom okay and so um as we take these

neutrons you know create the collision with the uranium atom and there's that splitting if this was to happen just out in the open and not a confined space could be problematic because it's just uncontrolled in this sense what you're essentially doing is first you're putting it all into a controlled area and then what you're describing is in that controlled area the science behind this is you can essentially uh use that throttling mechanism to make sure that every time an atom splits there's only the creation of one new neutron on a net basis right yeah yeah you've nailed it perfectly got it all right i'm gonna be a nuclear engineer by the end of this and and so going back to um so that's how nuclear works today how does that reaction to heat to

steam to the turbine how does this work inside of like a nuclear power plant so talking on land And, you know, what most people would think of as like the large scale power plants. What's happening in those power plants? How do we go from that kind of one mechanism to the actual large scale facility? Well, I mean, you've just got a lot of they're called fuel assemblies that are just made up of these little rodlets that are literally about the thickness of a large pen. And they're like several feet long, at least for U.S. reactors. And they're all filled with these and they're all filled with little pellets of uranium inside of there. and uh that that reaction just occurring at a really large scale you've got a lot of those

reactions occurring um throughout the entire reactor itself um that's generating that large quantity of heat um and so yeah so that's the basic thing and then you uh as far as uh it causes in like a pressurized water reactor that water gets really hot it is pumped through what's called your primary loop into a steam generator the steam generator generates steam it pumps it into a uh or the steam is sent to a turbine spins the turbine it's then cooled uh using like a lake a river treated sewage like out at palo verde and then um it is condensed back into water they pump that water back in so you have a closed cycle got it and so in an average u.s uh reactor power plant how many of those rods are we talking about that could be at use at any one time so um

a 900 megawatt reactor here has about 160 fuel assemblies in it so fuel assemblies are about uh it's your 14 to 18 inches square okay and inside of those fuels assemblies is a bunch of different rods yeah there's yeah got it and so um is that true like we'll call it the u.s design is that true internationally as well because the numbers that um when i was researching there's about a active nuclear power plants today in the united states international including international you get to about 400 total globally right is that generally about right yeah we got well 460 globally right now with 56 under construction um but uh so the the u.s or the pressurized water and boiling water reactors that is the that square assembly is is true um i don't know a whole

lot about most international designs okay but i do know i believe that most uh russian and chinese design follow that same thing because they're very similar uh there is an interesting design that comes that are very similar between russia and um canada that they actually use shorter bundles that are um round in shape uh because they use a heavy water style reactor um but uh they're they're just round with little short but they can do online refueling which is a little different than our plants we have to shut our plants down to refuel them got it and so how does the land power plant differ from on a submarine or an aircraft right when it's what i'll call it mobile um is it the same design just on a smaller scale and in a ship or a submarine or is there

some difference in the design there there are there are some differences but overall they operate very much the same um and the differences are relatively cosmetic for this conversation um but yeah they basically do operate it's just a smaller version it boils the water makes the steam and then it either it spins the turbine to make the make electricity or it spins the turbines to drive the shaft that puts moves the vessel to the water got it and so um throughout all of these different designs uh these rods that have the uranium pellets uh the one of the questions that when I asked on Twitter, like, hey, what questions do we have? A lot of people were asking about our dependence on uranium, right? Obviously, uranium is a key component of this. One question is just

is uranium the only fuel source that can go into that? And then two, kind of how do you think about dependence on uranium, our ability to find more and if that's a risk or not? So based on a couple of scientific favors that I've seen, we have about 1000 years of uranium 235, which is the fuel that all u.s reactors use and we are very inefficient with our fuel use of that we literally only use about half of it or so maybe a little more than half and uranium-235 only makes up 0.7 percent of all natural uranium so we're talking we have a thousand years left of that type of uranium and this is a thousand years left but we have to continue to dig it up or we've already like captured and it's being stored so we have to dig it up we have to mine all this

And then now if we were to switch to a fast reactor, it's called Transmute, the uranium-238 that's the remaining 99.3% into plutonium, which then, if it receives the neutron, will split. And one of the things that's fascinating about that is that we were talking about those control rods trying to get that magic one. Well, in a fast reactor where you're creating your own fuels called breeding, you actually take one of those. your first neutron to keep the reaction going your second neutron actually is going to create your your new fuel and then you have to deal with whatever's left a little little little extra got it and so would it be fair to say that the uranium 235 that that less than one percent is that harder to find than the uranium 238 and that's why there's such a disparity in the in the percentages or am i missing something that's just how like if you go pick up a chunk of uranium

you find if i went out to a uranium mine and picked it up it's just going to be comprised of 99.3 uranium 238 0.7 uranium 235 got it's just it's all that's just how it is with the exception there is one location where it's different okay and that's the natural reactor that ran two billion years ago on 100 000 year cycles called oklo out in um africa wait what is this yeah literally there's a natural reactor that ran for like a million years and uh somewhere in africa i don't specifically it's called oklo um there's a gen 4 company that takes that as their name but it has lower levels of uranium 235 because it consumed it to opt to operate had literally you know two billion years ago we had this natural reactor that operated before human

beings existed yeah and so as we think through this um there's it sounds like uranium dependency we've got to continue to mine uranium i don't think that there's a lot of people who are necessarily uh concerned about uranium existing it's more so we just got to go get it right and so there's there's a cost to that etc um this other idea around this fast reactor is the ability to take the uranium 238 and change it into plutonium i think you said and then use that as the the fuel source um is there controversy around moving to fast reactors is it just an expense like like what's the why would we not do that well one is the the regulations under the carter administration um they they two things that they did which kind of prevents us from from going to

fast reactors and reducing our waste stockpile we can't reprocess waste and we're not actually allowed to use plutonium reactors okay there's a concern because when you hear plutonium people think weapons um the plutonium that the u.s has for weapons was generated in special reactors designed to make weapons grade plutonium got it the plutonium that exists in and we generate plutonium in our in our current reactors that's actually the waste that everyone's concerned about the last hundred thousand years but it actually um is not comprised of the it's not pure enough to be used for weapons so it's non-weapons grade yes yeah it's it's it's pretty much garbage if you want to make weapons with it it would be a very expensive process that is actually very harmful

and could be deadly and you know be easier to cause issues yeah it'd be easier to create a reactor to to make if you want to make plutonium for weapons okay so before we go deeper down the the nuclear kind of rabbit hole um one of the things that fascinates me right so i came into this i knew absolutely nothing about it um and i really started to uh research and look into it is when i think of renewable or clean energy i think of hydro i think of wind i think of solar right um there's plenty of others that that um people put in that category whether they should be or not but one of the biggest issues that i did not understand before i started looking at nuclear is um there's a a space and an environmental impact to uh implementing a lot of that stuff

right and so obviously with solar you need space to install the solar panels so that the sun can hit them and capture that energy with wind you need to clear out space so that you can put the turbines right so they can spin and obviously capture the energy um nuclear and before we were talking um has a much smaller footprint maybe kind of just talk through what that footprint difference is and then we can get into some of the things that nuclear may solve that those others um suffer even once they're installed yeah so the uh the energy density that's the the that's a smart intelligent way to say it okay yeah that's that's what the you know the if you go to the opposite nuclear energy that's the term you know it's it's good to be a little dense that's

that's their their comment but uh you know the fact is is that you know if you take a one you know gigawatt uh you know power plant that's a nuclear power plant and you want to build a wind or solar farm that's of equivalent nameplate capacity it requires somewhere between 750 and a thousand times the land space okay so if i have a one gigawatt nuclear facility and i want one gigawatt of wind or solar i need 750 to 1000 x the amount of space in order to generate that much power yeah and it's you need about 13 acres to do that with nuclear so now you you could do the you can do the math but what a lot of people don't talk about specifically the the wind and solar folks is what's called capacity factor nuclear operates at 92 capacity factor and we can shut

them down when we want to wind and solar operated well wind about 25 to 40 solar somewhere between 10 and 20 percent so now if you want that same output capacity to match nuclear right you're looking for wind and solar that's 750 to 1000 now you're looking at you know what is that five times you know five to ten times that and then for and just so i understand that the capacity factor means that if the nuclear reactor is on 92 percent of the time and it can do a gigawatt of power then you can start to actually calculate here's how much power is going to generate over a year over two years, five years, 10 years, et cetera. But on the solar or the wind, it can't generate power a hundred percent of the time. Right. And that's where those numbers you're throwing out 10 to 20

percent for I think you said solar and then 20 to 40 percent for wind. And so you actually have to have even more than just a gigawatt of capacity because the capacity usage is lower. Yeah, absolutely. And if you look at, you know, solar is not producing energy at night. Right. I mean, and wind's not producing if the wind's not blowing and if the wind's blowing too hard. oh interesting yeah so wind because you don't want the turbine blades turning too fast and so they'll literally shut them down when it's too when the wind is too fast because it'll actually cause them to rip apart there's some great videos on youtube for that uh you know cows fleeing because of these giant wind turbines um and when you look at it there's a great and i'll have to

shoot it to you but there's a great infographic at a company called thorcon that shows uh i think a 12 megawatt um wind turbine and the blades are longer than their 500 megawatt power unit really the blades are i mean if you stack the three blades together it's bigger than their whole 500 megawatt unit and there's like a 12 megawatt and when you take the capacity factor you know you're looking at it um and going back to the capacity factor right you know nuclear when we operate it we typically you know we ramp it up put it to 100 keep it there it's our base load energy in the u.s and then wind and solar as you know the wind starts blowing the power comes up when it stops it comes down so it varies um and then you have you know uh solar where the sun is

shining if it's a cloudy day you're not producing as much energy um you know if you get water spots on it you start brazing the surface you know the they degrade over time too and one of the things about nuclear a lot of people don't know is that actually over time we have been generating more power with it to the point where with 97 reactors in 2018, we generated more energy with nuclear than we have in the history of the United States. And that even goes back to when we had 120 reactors. So we used to have 120 reactors. We're now down to 97, but those 97 are producing more power than we did when we had 120, which means that on a per power plant basis, we're actually more efficient and more output per power plant.

Absolutely, yeah, you get it. What was the reason to go from 120 down to 97? Well, you know, it's interesting. You know, there are many reasons why, you know, competitive electricity prices driving the plants out. A lot of the plants that get shut down were the smaller single-unit facilities. So if you look in the U.S., most of the facilities that stay running are over 800 megawatts per reactor, or you have multiple reactors, because it comes down to a people thing. Now, if you look at a natural gas plant, 80% of your cost is equipment, 20% is people. If you look at a nuclear power plant, 80% of your cost is people, 20% is equipment, because you have so many people operating these things.

You know, if you look at a – I'll use Duke Energies. They have – their smallest facility is an 811-megawatt power plant that has 780 employees. A ton of employees. Yeah. Their largest power plant produces 2,069 megawatts and has 1,050 employees, right? So for 300 extra employees, you're getting almost three times the power output. and so that's the baseline number of employees per power plant is just very high yes so and yes you have to have a minimum number and then you know you can add more units but you're not like

i don't need to have you know you know i need to have reactor engineers that know how the reactors work but i don't need to add you know if i have two say for one facility i don't necessarily need to add two for the next for the next reactor i might only need to add one because i designed my units to be the same so and then if i have a third i might even you know if i have a three you know, I might even need a third person, right? I can just, or a fourth person, I'm just fine with three. Or with operators, things like that, you know, you typically have a shift manager, a unit supervisor, and two licensed reactor operators per unit. Well, if I have a three-unit facility with one control room, I have one shift manager, three unit supervisors, right? Now I've

reduced the number of people just by two right there. For sure. And so when I hear that, you know, we had 120 we're down to 97 now uh 97 there's 50 states i would have thought oh that's probably like two per state right just easy math and and uh probably a stupid assumption but that would have been my assumption when i was looking at it it's actually only about 30 states have reactors what is the logic behind those 30 states versus the other 20 not having it is it regulations is it something to do with the environment what's the thought process so i can speak specifically about some states so the state of oregon had used to have a plant had one single unit reactor called trojan that was shut down in the 1990s i could speak about it because i grew up in oregon okay

um and uh when it was shut well when it was operating the oregon legislation passed a requirement that for oregon to build any new nuclear required a national repository so you've heard of yucca mountain right so a national repository for spent nuclear fuel Okay. And this is a place to take the nuclear waste and put it somewhere away from people. Yes. Okay. Yeah. And so Yucca Mountain, you know, we were building it and then we shut it down in the 2009 timeframe, shut down the process. And so there's several states that that's a requirement. Several states nuclear didn't make sense for, like Wyoming, very sparse.

You know, when you're talking these large plants, now you got large transmission lines when a lot of times it's better to do small. right so you know if you're looking you know say a small gas turbine um or when we get into the new nuclear we could talk about um you know there's these new nuclear the way they can you know instead of a 800 megawatt module they have 60 megawatt modules and they can come in single unit three pack six pack or 12 pack so and this is beer yeah exactly yeah that's new scales design they're all about the beer um for sure yeah and so okay so there's certain states that have nuclear there's certain states that don't um and you already kind of hit on a little bit right is i think one of the biggest critiques against it whether it's uh reasonable or not or accurate or

not is people fear nuclear because they only know one of three things either they know nothing about it and it sounds scary right you know i've heard of nuclear bombs before like i don't want that near me two is they've heard of three mile island uh fukushima chernobyl right these places where there's been issues uh or three is they actually are somewhat sophisticated and their belief is hey we're great at having reliable power generation but we don't know what to do with the waste we don't have a great solution for the waste so maybe let's go through um all three of those things but um before i do that just as a kind of like to keep people understanding this isn't a what are we going to do in the future right nuclear energy is 20 of all electricity

generated in the United States, right? It makes up more than 55% of all clean energy in the United States. And so it's not a thing of like, what are we going to do in the future? Like, it's already here. We're doing this and we've been doing it for a long time. You know, you told me before I was recording 20% of the electricity in the United States since 1990, right? So it's been going on for a long time that we've been doing this.

People just haven't talked about it or just didn't spend the time to really learn about it, I think. Yeah, I mean, and that's true. And I think at peak, it was 40% of our energy production in the 70s, in the late 70s or the 80s, right around the time of the Three Mile Island accident. You know, you did a great job summarizing. I described the issues in three words, and that's waste, weapons, and meltdowns. Oh, okay. Waste, weapons, or meltdowns. Okay, all right, go through them. And so, all right, the waste, right? There's two responses to that. One is that the waste

are stored in, you know, first when it's pulled from the reactors, put in a spent fuel pool to cool down over time. What is a spent fuel pool? it's basically it looks like a big giant swimming pool that has old used fuel rods in it and it just sits in there to cool down because you can't you don't want them to get too hot so these are the fuel rods that had the uranium in them that were in the reactor itself right we now take them and literally submerge them in liquid that literally looks like a swimming pool in terms of the size of the thing that's but it's liquid that is being submerged to cool it off yeah it's an olympic it's an olympic swimming pool and uh there's 20 feet of water over the fuel oh wow yeah these are not

small yeah we're talking okay and so really the reason for putting it into the spent fuel pool is to cool off the rod yes yeah so um there's something called residual heat um so when the atoms split you have these they're called fission products and those fission products take time to decay this is the term people talk about the long term of waste most of those fission products will be gone in 300 years and we could talk about that as part of the waste solution as well but those fission products they they generate heat when they are losing their radioactivity okay so that's the concern the toxicity is the radioactivity that everyone talks about so how long in the uh spent fuel pool if i have a rod i put it in there how long do i leave it in there

on average typically about a decade oh wow so is it okay i was thinking like when you you know burn your finger and you run under cold water for two minutes in the sink this is not that this is You're leaving it in there for 10-plus years to cool off. Yeah, so typically they're in about a decade. And then they move them into what's called a spent fuel cask. Okay, what is that? They look like giant pills for the most part. But they have a stainless steel internal liner.

They have concrete around that. And then stainless steel, they're welded. And then they're filled with helium. Okay, so one, it sounds almost like humans have caskets. These have these casts, right? that's that's a that's a great analogy okay and so you put the spent fuel rods into this cast uh and you close it up why is the helium going to it um the helium goes in there so that remember that there's still some heat left okay and if if it was in a vacuum um it wouldn't it would be good

it would it would it would it would there would be thermal you know insulation and it would start to it would potentially melt um helium is a great conductor of heat as a gas and so they pressurize it helium so that it'll it'll conduct that heat to the outside and cool it but you've allowed them to cool sufficiently to where just the you know the air out in the middle of you know southern florida out in miami you know will is sufficient to keep them from having any problems got it so i take the rods i put them in uh this immersion pool if you are whatever i take them out a decade later i put into this cast uh it's got all the fancy inner lining outer lining concrete etc i seal it with the helium what do i do with that cast once i've got the rods in there so they all

sit at the sites oh interesting yeah this is this controversial thing that from the the critics of nuclear do they not like that i mean that's this is the waste that everyone is concerned about okay got it and i mean as far as the quantity of this if you took all the casks and you brought them into um uh if you put them on a football field it'd only be 50 feet deep so i could cover 100 yards 50 feet deep yeah it would be all for all the spent fuel from commercial operations in the united states and that's been how long 60 years 60 years okay so as you're putting those on site is it we don't have a better place to go put them or we actually think the best place to put them is on site well we talked about yucca mountain earlier they were supposed to all be shipped

to yucca mountain but since yucca mountain the whole country was going to go to this one location yucca mountain yes and and the utilities actually funded yucca mountain oh interesting yeah so those i mean there was some taxpayer dollars to it but it was primarily funded by the different energy companies that had nuclear reactors do you know why that place specifically was chosen um it's or just far away from everybody i mean it was it was in the nevada desert in a mountain in the middle of nowhere i feel like the especially americans we just feel like uh the desert inside of a mountain like put area 51 put the put the cast etc well and we actually have a long-term repository the government they built one called it's called the waste isolation pilot

plant pilot program it's called the whip facilities in carlsbad new mexico okay and that's where the u.s sends its um waste from weapons production okay and now that's that we we're not generating new material for weapons but there's a lot of legacy waste you're there's a lot of stuff in the news talking about that sarcophagus thing out in Marshall Islands. You've got Hanford. You've got the National Security Site in Nevada. The U.S. has a lot of labs. We'll get to the weapons in a second. I got a lot of questions about the weapons. So right now, I take the casks that have the rods sealed with helium. I leave them on site. That's for a land-based nuclear power plant. What happens on the submarines and the aircraft um the fuel is removed and uh it is shipped out to idaho got it

and i'm assuming there's just one repository where all u.s military whatever goes in yeah got it and so um why is it once it's inside of that uh cast it's on site so is it safe is it a thing where people are worried about uh that the seal may break like what is the concern i guess on the waist side and what happens if let's say a worker at the facility goes and picks up one and doesn't have protective clothing on but like walk me through kind of how radioactive are they and then what's the concern from from the critics so you can walk up and hug him and receive i'm not gonna do that but you explain why yeah but there's you'll get little to no dose um you'd probably get more radiation does eating a banana than you would from hugging one of those casks really

and it's because not so much that the fuel the spent fuel rods don't have radiation it's that they're locked into the actual cast itself and so the outside of the cast is not seeing any radiation yeah so the the stainless steel and the um concrete are acting as shielding got it okay so yeah it's it's providing shielding for that now if that fuel was unshielded um and you drove a truck up to or drove a car at at 55 miles an hour you would not survive okay so if it was just sitting on the side of the road yeah there was nothing protecting it and you just drove right by it yeah that's that's and that's why we have the 20 feet of water over them um and you know the people that work on this stuff they are very you know wary or wary they're very um

sensitive to yeah sensitive to what they're doing got it um and so you explained why the helium is locked in in the cast what's up with the water why is the water is that a better protection than the um than the uh inner lining outer lining in the concrete so talk about in the in the spent fuel pool in the pool um well it's available it's readily available um the other thing is is that when they're when uh commercial reactors are they're removing the fuel during their outages they have to do this every 18 months 18 to 24 months they have to literally take the whole reactor out they take about a they swap it's about a third swap they take about a they bring a third new fuel in a third of the fuel is completely consumed and then they basically

have to reassemble the reactor because the the way the rods are to make sure you have the right the right you know heat loading in there um so to do that they literally uh fill the reactor it's called the vessel cavity up with water they pick the fuel rods up they move it through water into the fuel building oh wow yeah so it's all done on always always in water yep yeah it's fascinating to me how um the entire process right is so compartmentalized and and at the end of the day i think one of the things i took away the most from the research and the conversations i have with you is this is science right and if we get the science right then you get into how are the systems designed what are the protocols that the humans have to interact with those systems

uh and we got to make sure that we're right on the science right and if we do that then we can create safe systems um okay so i think you've done a good job describing like how we deal with the waste right now we'll come back to that in a second but there's been these three big events where um there's been the issues right so uh the waste is one but these accidents is another i I forget the three words you used. Yeah, it was waste, weapons, and meltdowns. So this falls under your meltdowns. Meltdowns, okay.

So let's go maybe through the three, Three Mile Island, Fukushima, and Chernobyl, and maybe just describe what happened in each one of them. All right, well, first off, I'm going to say that there have been eight meltdowns planet-wide of commercial reactors total. Okay, ever. Yeah, so ever. And three of those are Fukushima, and two of them were in France. Okay.

So on the same site, right? So so that covers five of the eight. And then there was Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. And I believe Russia had one other. Now, we talk about Three Mile Island because that's the only true commercial meltdown. There were some test reactors that melted down, but these were we were doing silly things at that point. We didn't know what we're doing because that was like in the 60, 79. Yeah, 79. Yeah. So 79. I'm cheating. I have notes. You have your brain. um so through my island and uh you know it's it's there's it was it was an operator error the reactor was brand new and when i mean brand new it had gone online for the first time two

months prior to the accident oh wow so you know you're looking at reactors they're licensed for 40 years or extend most of them to 60 and now we even have something extended 80 years and this thing lasted two months before we destroyed it um but they had i think that guy got fired Or he died? No, no one died. Oh, okay. Yeah, no one died, and the public only received about one dental x-rays worth of radiation. Is that a lot?

No. No, okay. You get four typically when you go to the dentist. Oh, okay. Yeah. No, it's not a lot of radiation. Well, I'll just ask you now why it's on top of my head. Somebody recently, a dentist actually recently told me that Grand Central has a lot of radiation

because of the materials that it's used in the construction. Right, the granite? Yeah, he said it's like a big radiation box. So now I'm, like, scared to walk through Grand Central. Well, there's actually a video, and I tweeted it out there, of a nuclear engineer that has uranium oxide, which is the fuel that we use. Like, literally, he had nuclear fuel in his hand, and it's in a powder form, and he literally licks it and swallows. No, he does not. He does.

How can you do that? It's radioactive. It's not that radioactive. Oh, man. You're getting me in a weird world now. Oh, yeah. Okay. All right.

So let's go back to Three Mile Highland. so uh like um operator error there's radiation that goes out but it's not that high yeah so what they had was they had um they had a relief valve they had a had a relief valve had a slight leak by and so there's a temperature indication down that's beyond that relief that's a relief valve basically to keep the prep make sure that you don't get too much pressure and then you cause a chernobyl event which is you know over pressurize your planet steam explosion that's bad um so this relief valve was leaking and so the the piping downstream was getting hot and so they had this indication that they were living with and so when they had their problem

the relief valve lifted as as it should should and then it didn't recede so it didn't shut and so they started basically dumping their water out of the reactor and they actually lowered the pressure to the point where uh there's a piece of equipment called the pressurizer which keeps is a pressurized water reactor so the pressurizer keeps it pressurized and it it uses electric heaters to keep a much higher pressure and basically they what they call it transferred the bubble so they basically move the steam void in there now steam does not conduct heat very well and so they basically cause that the the fuel assemblies the fuel rods they got too hot and they melted it's kind of like um you ever seen uh in uh germany with the boots when they chug

beer and they have the the bubble and as they turn the boots right yeah yeah yeah pretty similar um okay so that's three mile island i think that that's probably the lesser known of the three right and mainly just because fukushima and chernobyl have been uh more recent and also chernobyl now has a whole uh documentary series or whatever it was that was created on television what happened at chernobyl all right so chernobyl which happened in 86 um is that uh they were running a test that it was basically forced on them now the soviet union the former soviet union that time now chernobyl is actually physically located in ukraine okay so um but the former soviet union they wanted to run this test to prove and this is the part that blows my mind

is it was to prove that in the event that they were to lose uh off-site power as it's known that as the the turbine was spinning down it could keep the reactor cool so they were basically running this test to ensure that the reactor could not melt down and it went way wrong so basically saying uh we're going to try to melt it down and show you that this system will prevent it from melting down essentially yes geniuses yeah geniuses yeah um so what happened is well actually they would be geniuses if it works yeah if it doesn't work then they're idiots right yeah Well, so they had some design flaws. They were operating at too low of powers.

They had to withdraw these things called control rods. They had – it was 48 that had to be completely inserted at all times, and they withdrew them all. So they're violating their safety procedures. They're doing a test that the reactor engineers were completely against. Because you told me earlier that there was four separate teams or kind of divisions inside of Chernobyl. three the first three that they went to said no way i'm not running that test they knew that it was a bad thing to do and somehow the fourth whether they were forced or agreed or whatever they ended up running the test yeah absolutely yeah got it yeah and they're running the test on

my understanding is a different design than u.s-based reactors yes yeah so u.s-based u.s reactors don't have that same flaw that exists not none of our reactors have that so and as they were running the test they had what's called a power excursion power circuit coming up but they were at these such low powers that the equipment couldn't respond properly and uh when they finally went to take some action basically they had overheated the reactor to the point where it i don't want a steam explosion right so you know it's if you take you know the best way to describe it is you just take a jar and you put some water in it and you seal it up and you put it on a stove it's eventually going to you know explode right because you've developed too much steam in there

don't try that at home kids um you put glass all over the place well in this case yeah they literally you know they shot fuel all over the place right going back to that whole you know drive a truck up to it and got it and so earlier you said three mile island was one whatever level of uh radiation the dentist is four i forget what the uh yeah yeah so yeah so one one dental x-ray which is about three mil a rem and then as opposed to one dental x-ray yeah one dental x-ray got it How much at Chernobyl? I'm assuming way more. Well, Chernobyl killed 31 people.

Okay. And those were all plant-based employees? I don't know the specifics on each person. I think some were firefighters. Got it. But people who, they weren't civilians that lived next door. Correct. Got it.

And so that 31 people that are killed, one of the things I guess is how much of that is explosion related, right? Like there's this big explosion and they die in the explosion versus the actual radiation itself. Um, there were, I know that there were, there were several people that were killed, but the majority were from the radiation exposure from the radiation. Okay. So, so basically this is a perfect example of, Hey, if things go really, really wrong

and this stuff is not done correctly, if there is human error, if the systems are, have design flaws, people can die because there's radiation. Correct. Um, now one of the things that's fascinating is, is that every reactor in the United States has what's called a containment okay right so it's a it's a big it's a steel line going back to the stainless steel lined with concrete steel reinforced now the rebar is literally you know about three inches in diameter so this is not you know this is not the rebar you go by at home depot this is you know so what you're basically saying is just like that spent fuel

rods put inside of the cast basically the entire facility is put inside of a cast essentially essentially yeah there's an inner lining a concrete and outer line there's only an inner liner there's not that um but that's to contain anything that happens with inside of yeah so if if if u.s designs can't undergo a chernobyl explosion but if they did it would be contained inside the containment now that being said the u.s actually had its its own uh chernobyl event that no one talks about oh really yes there was an army reactor so i know you were army um there's an army reactor this is where the navy guy gives me a hard time don't worry it was a they were involved too um it was it was called sl1 that was out in the sl1 yes yes uh stationary

light water reactor one um and so they were uh running some kind of evolution now this is so early on a nuclear that those rods i was talking about like we use a switch that drives some motors and and it moves the rods up and down they moved them manually probably not healthy well it's really not healthy when you know he was told to withdraw at three inches and whether he just decided he didn't want to have his life anymore or um misheard and tried to withdraw at 13 inches but he you know we talk about they control that reaction but you haven't you're you're relying on humans to do this right our plants don't rely on humans to do that anymore and that's one of those those reasons got it and this was a land-based power plant or this was a like a submarine

aircraft it was a a land-based military reactor got it okay and so that happened 1961 okay so this is way before even uh through my island chernobyl etc got it um yeah even when i was researching i didn't see that at all i wonder if it's because it's a military-based one or something yeah it's it's one of the fascinating ones that most people don't know about um and uh yeah so that's and it contained itself all three of the operators were killed it's the worst by death nuclear accident united states um so but because of that because as the containment yeah it was everything was contained inside of it that site's been cleaned up now um i mean you know it's it's unfortunate that three people lost their lives okay so speaking of containment and the lack of

containment i think fukushima is at least in my lifetime the only thing that we've known in terms of like nuclear is bad right type meme what happened there and then literally the only thing that i can remember when that occurred was you know people walking around in the white suits and with the gloves and the goggles and everything right and just like it's like everything's gonna die there right and so i don't know what's fact and fiction and kind of how that occurred and was there containment was there not maybe just talk through that so so the fukushima reactors We actually have the exact same design in the U.S. in certain locations. So they are a boiling water reactor, which is different than the Three Mile and Chernobyl.

So instead of having—we don't need to go into that technical detail. So the earthquake happened, and then the reactor—they shut down the reactors because of the earthquake, and then they had a tidal wave come in, and it washed out their emergency system. So when the reactors shut down— Just real quick, this is really important, right? is this was not human error to start with this was not system design flaw there was a massive earthquake that then created a tsunami that tsunami brought water for those that don't know a tsunami brings water right brought water onto the plant and that's where some of these issues

started yeah absolutely so normally because we were talking about those those those rods that are in the spent fuel pool and we talk about you know that we got to worry about those fission products they get hot for a long period of time we keep them in there for a decade right so when a reactor shuts down they have systems in place to start cooling keeping that reactor cool to cool it down to keep that that fuel from you know melting down that's that's the whole purpose of these emergency systems well the tsunami was so large at fukushima that it actually exceeded what the uh japanese nuclear regulatory requirements were it was higher than that so they you know you it exceeded that washed out all their safety systems wow so they couldn't keep

the reactor cool um and so that's what happened now the explosions that occurred which is actually funny which is funny it's interesting is that three reactors melted down and they're they operated there were total six reactors or three more defueled but there are in pairs and one of the reactors that exploded actually had no fuel in it how does that happen so what happens is that um when you get the the fuel rods themselves they're they're a tube that outer tube is made uh with zirconium okay and when zirconium is in contact with water at high temperatures above 2 000 degrees it rapidly oxidizes and creates hydrogen gas i'm not a scientist but i know that that leads to bad things sometimes and so the hydrogen gas was filling up their

yeah it wasn't their containments it did fill their containments but it filled up their reactor buildings the auxiliary buildings and then it got to an explosive level and exploded the explosions were unnecessary if the japanese government had allowed the um the operators to vent as they were requesting the reactor buildings would not have would not have exploded and the accident would not be as bad okay so the tsunami hits they wash out these emergency systems right which basically the regulators had regulations in place but they just never imagined a tsunami this big etc um when those emergency systems get washed out how does the explosion interact with that washing out of the emergency systems like what like is it the explosion then like breaks

containment and then that's what happens or like how does the explosion so the so the explosion actually so you have the the the the containment is actually it's a it's shaped like a bullet okay and it's inside their reactor building it's on a boiling water reactor that's how it is and you have your um and so the hydrogen gas is being vented in there so the the cooling system is all down below all that stuff and so the hydrogen gas is hydrogen is lighter than air so it it goes up and so it's rising into the the reactor building itself and that's when it exploded and they wanted to vent it out and they wanted to continue to rise out yes and they weren't allowed to and and the reason why they weren't allowed to is because of this magical word called tritium

tritium what is that it's just a heavy it's an extra heavy form of water tritium is an extra sorry it's an extra heavy form of hydrogen of hydrogen okay right and you know tritium is generated naturally in the atmosphere so you've got i've got a glass of water right here i'm going to consume some tritium in front of you and why are people scared of tritium tritium sounds like one of those words that if people don't know what it is it sounds scary but what is the fear there well the fear well one it's radioactive right and everything radioactive just sounds scary because people don't necessarily understand what radioactive means the other thing is is that when you talk about a thermal nuclear weapon so you've got you know the hiroshima nagasaki

which were just atomic weapons right well the thermal nuclear weapon requires fusion and tritium is the key for fusion so basically you have more feels like bomb material got it okay and basically they didn't want to allow the tritium yeah right air quotes to go up into the air yep right okay and potentially affect the population now so we have the fukushima event and fukushima killed zero people by the way okay so nobody died nobody died when that happens what is the radiation levels outside of that containment and then kind of why and maybe this is just the salacious media but why do we see on television people walking around the white suits and kind of all that stuff so the purpose of the white suits is if you have um any kind of

radioactive dust okay that it stays on the white suit so you take those off um they're called protective clothing and the idea is is that i don't want to take that home okay so basically it's while i'm in a potentially radioactive area i may the suit isn't necessarily going to protect me from the radiation what it's going to do is it's going to prevent me from transporting any radioactive material back to some other location yeah so when when a nuclear reactor undergoes an outage um you you wear those we i mean when you everyone puts them on there when you're working in the containment building okay got it and then um in terms of uh the actual damage that was created by fukushima right to me it's hey there was this huge issue was there actually negative

impact on the environment on people etc or was it all pretty self-contained and people just talk about it because there was an explosion etc yeah so i mean because the fact there were three explosions and there were three reactors that were melted down and destroyed um there so you have the equipment aspect of it there were which scares people in general yes and and then the fear of the radiation that the japanese government amplified by forced evacuations actually caused i believe several hundred people that were um say uh elderly to you know when they went to transport them or not they did it in a rushed manner and they lost their lives because of fear really yeah so so there was people who lost their lives but not because of radiation lost their

lives due to um elderly i don't have medical care etc medical care well you need intense care and then we're going to transport you in a rushed manner when you didn't need to rush it got it i mean the radiation levels that uh that are on the site are such that you could stand there for years and not have issues on the site and so this is probably a good time to talk about uh again i'm coming at this so uneducated right that um i'm looking at this as how to understand nuclear power generation and what it can do for the united states and other countries but also understanding you know the other side of this where people are fearful etc what does radiation do to the human body at certain levels right because i'm assuming that it kind of ratchets it ratchets i go to the

dentist i get radiation right i joke all the time i say when you get on an airplane get radiation When you go through the thing that spins at security, you get radiation. So I'm still alive, you're still alive, right? Yeah, I mean, you get somewhere between, depending on what source they talk about, somewhere between 150 and 500 millirem a year from natural sources. Okay, 150 to 500 millirem. Yes. Right, okay.

To give you an idea, to give you a baseline, in 20 years of naval service, I received 247 millirem from nuclear reactors. Okay. so 100 to 500 is kind of average just naturally naturally yeah 240 and in the dumb question but how do you measure that how do how do i can i walk around with something that tells me how much radiation i'm oh yeah i mean well so and it's funny and i'll talk about that is that we call they're called tlds thermoluminescent dosimeters it's the original ones we had to look like little fat pens okay and they measured everything so when you wore them um you know you got natural and

unnatural radiation you got all of it and the new ones we have they're they're little squares and they discriminate so the first half of my naval career we used the the other ones the pens and so i would be in port on a shutdown reactor and my monthly exposure was about nine millirem underway and i was the watch standard that sat that was closest to the reactor as it was operating i got four wow and i wasn't getting any from that reactor when it was shut down it was all from just the sun and yeah yeah okay and so um that's like let's call that low level no concern level um radiation exposure what are the levels in which people should be concerned and like what happens to the human body right because in my mind it's like you get exposure radiation you melt and like

you're dead yeah so um this all occurs at the cellular level and uh the way it was taught to to me is they we call it good daughter dead daughter bad daughter no daughter okay explain that so um what happens is that the uh the radiation strikes the the dna of the nucleus and good daughter the uh the cell repairs itself divides normally okay all right then there's bad daughter and this is the one that scares most people because it's hard to understand is that it it um damages the the the dna in the in the nucleus of the cell it splits and it's got a problem this is the cancer that everyone's concerned about got it so there's some sort of mutation to the cells yes then there's the uh dead daughter which is the dna is damaged

cell splits the cells both die the new cells both die the daughter cells do and that's good or bad uh it's neither neither okay um well and that what in radiation sickness if you get large quantities of radiation that's a problem yep um and then you have no daughter um which is that it just basically radiation just kills the cell got it so those last two are radiation sickness with the and then you have the cancer for the the bad daughter um the way it was trained to me was that if you took a pot a group of 10 000 people about 1 000 of them are going to die of cancer okay all right at what level um just normal natural like just living a normal okay got it if you took those same 10 000 people and you exposed them to one rem or 1000 milleram of

radiation over their lifetime potentially 1001 would now die of cancer okay so there's a very small very small yeah so to 1000 milleram yes right okay and when you think about through my island people got three outside of plant workers right now when you're talking cancer it's too there's so many variables right and people will say well there was increased cancer rates here it's like well what chemicals were they exposed to you firefighters cancer is the number one killer of firefighters because they're inhaling smoke and all the chemicals associated with it um these old plants used asbestos this is the asbestos that they that they breathed in that's causing the cancer. So we don't know, you know, and if you look at a coal plant, they use asbestos and,

you know, old plants use asbestos. So it's not that, you know, the radiation is causing the cancer. There's lots of variables. We don't know. And this is timely because for those that listen to the podcast often, Polina and Joe are here in the room and they're going to start laughing when I say this, but I've recently read a book called The Telomere Effect. And so it's a professor who did a bunch of academic research all around these telomeres and telomeres are essentially on your dna at the very ends think of them kind of like on your shoelaces how you have that plastic cap yep uh they can start at a certain length and over the lifetime they shorten and as you they shorten you look older you age right things get worse and eventually you die and so uh one of the

things that goes into that other than you know how you eat exercise all things we all know radiation and so what they've talked about is uh things like flying well if you fly a whole lot like your telomere shortened right if you stop flying so much after years of doing it you can actually slow down the shortening of your telomeres that has nothing to do with power plants etc that's just natural human um kind of uh reaction or relationship with what the things they're doing in the environment etc and so um of that talking about the cancer one of the things is if you continue to get exposed to that and your telomeres shorten, shorten, and shorten,

there can be kind of the continued growth of cells, et cetera. That's where you get the cancers from. And so this isn't, to me at least, kind of from an educated perspective, it's not just a nuclear power plant-related type thing. This is just human body science and biology, how we interact with the things around us. And an airline pilot gets more radiation

being an airline pilot or stewardess. They get more radiation flying a year than a nuclear power plant operator gets operating a reactor that's pretty crazy yeah yeah um all right let's uh let's talk about the big topic which uh i know everyone's all excited about which is the weapons right so uh when people hear nuclear weapons it's like if you're a pro conflict pro military let's go fight everybody in the world people get excited because it's that's the aggressive um you know most powerful weapons type approach if you are uh let's de-escalate every situation and we don't want war we don't want you know uh issues etc nobody should have

nuclear weapons right or kind of like that the opposite ends of the spectrum there what is a nuclear weapon right and how does that relate to nuclear power etc so um you can it requires the same fuels okay meaning the rods from uranium 235 meaning meaning the uranium 235 or the plutonium 239 okay all right so um so that core fuel is yes used for both power plants and for the nuclear but they are very different okay so um a nuclear reactor does never never can never achieve the geometry is the is the term they use okay to have a nuclear explosion okay explain as best you can kind of why that is um you can't get the atoms close enough because they're at an oxide they're in those they're they're in those rods right whereas in a nuclear weapon you actually it

starts and and i'm not an expert in nuclear weapons that means two of us yeah well yeah we'll leave that too and this this really cracks me up to mark b schneider no way i'm not joking b for bombs e for energy i love it so um literally one of the leading experts in nuclear weapons in the u.s is mark b oh man that's awesome yeah um so uh like and the the best way to describe this is talk about the the atom bombs dropped on uh hiroshima nagasaki okay because hiroshima was a uranium bomb nagasaki was a plutonium bomb okay all right so the way that um the uh hiroshima bomb was was that it was it's it's a plug type meaning that it's a cylinder like a like a glass with thick walls okay and they have a bullet of uranium and they use an explosion from you know

gunpowder whatever drives it in there you have enough you hit your critical geometry and it causes that uncontrolled reaction we talked about the neutrons earlier where the one causes you know the atom to split generates a couple extra those split everything you know and then it just goes through all this you have uncontrolled and so you have an uncontrolled you know the mass amounts of heat generated heat light energy um so that's how the basis of that and in plutonium weapon they're in a sphere and there's lots of explosions around it and you have to explode them all into the center to get the right geometry in there simultaneously and cause that explosion got it and so the i guess where some of the concern is

so to the uneducated it's hey the word nuclear's in both and like that's scary right because i i saw on tv there's this big explosion i don't want that to happen down the street from my house or you know somewhere near me um to the educated it's actually the fuel source can be the same but the geometry is the the big differentiator between the two of them and you have to look at the concentration of the fuel too right we talked about the percentages so in a nuclear reactor a u.s reactor we typically use about two to four percent enriched uranium-235 so meaning two to four percent of your fuel is is uranium-235 in a weapon it's greater than 90 percent wow it's pretty big difference yes and same thing with plutonium right so our reactors do generate

plutonium we talked about those excess neutrons some get absorbed by that uranium-238 but it's about 1%, you still need that high 90% pure plutonium-239. The plutonium in our reactors is actually an 80-20 blend of plutonium-239 and plutonium-240. That 240 actually makes the reaction not viable for making an effective nuclear weapon. Is there a concern? I've never heard this, but this is just me thinking how others might be concerned. Is there a concern that countries that are pursuing nuclear power could use some of the learnings there and experience there

to then create nuclear weapons? Or are those two so separate things that there's not really a concern? So typically, there is a good overlap between them. Okay. Right? From a scientific perspective.

From a scientific aspect. So now to make a uranium bomb, which is everyone's big concern with Iran right now. And by the way, iran i think is at six percent enrichment so they've got another 84 to go before we should be concerned when we say enrichment what does that mean that's the uh the percentage of uranium 235 in the uranium okay so they've they've gotten to i think to about six percent and they have i think 320 kilograms of this stuff okay there's 3.2 million kilograms of spent nuclear fuel in

virginia alone much less yeah yeah um and we're at 100 enrichment what's that as far as uh the u.s enrichment no that fuel is only enriched well the spent fuel is actually down to about one because we've consumed all the yeah pre-consumption pre-consumption it was two to four percent got it okay right so um so that fuel is uh sorry so the so iran iran has a long ways to go before we should be concerned um in fact actually there's a new scales a company that they're going to use a medium enriched they're going to get a special record allowance to go to 19.75 percent enrichment so their reactors can last longer so they only need to refuel every 12 years okay um and so the concern with a country doing nuclear energy related activities and then kind of pull back

the curtain i know now we have a nuclear bomb is that more science fiction concern so that the the two countries that the that are of concern are iran and north korea okay now iran um you know they have their centrifuges right that's what makes the the the enrichment happen and the uranium is the easiest method to make a weapon okay um and then uh north korea however they designed a special reactor at least i believe this i don't know everything i don't know all the details of it and this is kind of we're delving far outside what i'm normally um you know attuned with but i believe north korea i'll use that word i believe north korea has a reactor they designed specifically to generate plutonium now that plutonium you if you keep it in has to

remain in a reactor for less than six months we the fuel in a reactor stays in there for four and a half years before you pull it out normally right so that's the normal method so if you we got countries i know that um united arab emirates is about they're going to put on their baraka unit one uh will be they'll be number 31 on the uh countries of nuclear power and they're going to bring theirs online uh and it's a south korean reactor design um and i i don't think anyone should be concerned about them you know whereas you know it there's really uh you know i'd like to break down the nuclear power program into into at least in the u.s into three groups Okay. You've got the commercial, which are your big scale reactors. They do produce a lot of the nuclear waste, but it's benign from a weapon standpoint. Okay. You have the Navy reactors, which run on very pure fuels, but they're military, so they get exceptions for that.

And then you have this third group, which is the Department of Energy. Those are your test reactors. And so those are the ones where, I mean, you're making medical isotopes with it, but you're putting fuels in and out of those things. If you were to, you know, you've got to be concerned when nations are building test reactors. So if they're building commercial reactors, just let them build them all day long. They're not going to make, you can't make weapons materials from those. It's test reactors you've got to be concerned about.

And why is the test reactors? Is it because they're more closely aligned with what's needed to make a weapon than with a commercial correct yeah yeah so so in a commercial reactor it's this big ordeal to disassemble the reactor and pull the fuel out whereas in a test reactor they might be like they might never operate the thing hot enough to really boil water right but they're generating tons and tons of neutrons to um you know irradiate fuels or i mean they you know and they they use that stuff for for good um you know but you know anybody's all test reactors aren't bad but there's risk with yes but all test reactors could become made to do bad things got it okay uh i want to go

back to uh to the waste because i know that's um you know when i think of like what is the biggest critique it's around this waste component i would agree with that and uh again i think you know when i was reading online i'm uneducated on the topic right and i'm trying to learn and so uh again there's a spectrum of like there's plenty of people who just yell and scream like chernobyl fukushima they don't know right and so like you know look my favorite reply yeah if you if you don't know it's scary right because the radiation and all this kind of stuff radioactive material all this kind of stuff um but then there's the people who are actually super sophisticated and i think that the very educated sophisticated critic would say okay we go through this great

process we produce tons of reliable power and electricity um we do we're getting more efficient at it right it absolutely could be a great solution their biggest concern is once that spent fuel rod goes into the pool that goes into this cast we either one can't guarantee that the cast is uh sealed forever and kind of the life of the waste that we could talk about but then also two is then we leave this cast on site like we don't go put it anywhere right we touched a little bit on like where do we go put this stuff and it sounds like um you know there's been kind of initiatives to go put it in the mountain in the middle of the desert etc but in terms of the life of the waste the number that i have always heard is a hundred thousand years this stuff stays

radioactive for right and i'm sure that there's some decay in the radioactive um kind of levels that it has but a hundred thousand years i think just scares people because that's a really really long time right how accurate is that and are there things that we can do to just shorten the lifetime of the radioactive nature of this waste and then two like how do we ensure that that uh that helium sealed cast actually stays sealed um well the first off the casters are welded they're welded yeah so yeah it's not like they're they're welded shut okay and so would you say that there's not really a concern that once it's welded shut nothing's going to happen to it or is there still some concern i would say the concern is extremely minimal okay um and i say

that because i just don't want to be an absolutist yep now i i have i personally have no concern but you know i want to be you know trying to be honest here as well um but is uh uh you asked a really long question now yeah okay so let me kind of walk through each one of them so no concern if the cast just is the right itself it's welded shut no problem if there was an explosion in a plant are the cast usually held in an area where it could be affected by an explosion and would that cause an issue that would not know because i mean they're typically they're they're they're stored far enough away from the plant um and they're actually require less security than the reactor than the reactor does itself because they're i mean these cats they're not like

you know a simple thing they require special heavy cranes to to pick them up and move them so it's not like you can go throw one of these things in the bed of your pickup truck yeah it's like an oil barrel yeah got it okay which which is that's what the image is is always these yellow simpsons Yeah. Right. The Simpsons, the podcast I listened to from the Department of Energy actually started off talking about there was the Simpsons episode all about, you know, radioactive material at a nuclear power plant and, you know, all this stuff goes wrong, et cetera. And later on, the Simpsons producer came out and apologized and said, look, you know, we're basically making jokes. We didn't understand what we were making a joke about. And, you know, we apologize. guys. Okay. So that's first. The second is in terms of the human error that can get introduced in with this waste. So whether it's taking the spent fuel rod and putting it into the immersive

pool or then getting it into the cast, like where are the failure points or potential failure points there and how big of a risk is that? Well, being is that there are failure points, but the risk at this point is extremely minimal um you know right now you know basically a third of all the reactors in the u.s underwent an outage this this fall okay an outage meaning the outage meaning they shut the reactor down they pulled all the fuel out they left a third of it in the spent fuel pool and they stuck a third new and then they put two-thirds of it back together all in there okay moving you know these fuel assemblies so there's there's fail safes there's lots of uh experience and they're probably the worst location with regards to this is there's a

i can't remember the name of the plant and it's gonna it's down down near san diego where the plant is shut down and they are in that final process of taking those spent those rods that have been in there for a decade so it's been shut down for that long and they're putting them in their final casks to then um to to put them store them on site so that's that's probably your biggest risk and there's it's all over the place and you know you have uh the nrc is is huge amounts of regulation huge amounts of oversight fuel movement is one of the most um you have special extra qualifications and i know this is not people people want to hear is because you're putting the human element in there um but there's the amount of times this is done if there was a

problem is you know because the nuclear industry drives levels down their problems down so low that you don't bubble up the same kind of problems right we're talking low order magnitude issues guy a tag on the wrong component the plant shuts down for 24 hours to do a safety stand down to realign everyone meanwhile you use the comparison the oil and gas industry You know, down in North Carolina, they have a guy operate the wrong valve, blows up three people, and no one bats an eye, right? So there's a big difference in the way we regulate and we operate the nuclear industry. I like to say that after Through My Island, the commercial industry decided to

or made the decision to put the NRC out of business, which the NRC is a nuclear regulatory, so they're the government oversight, and they created an organization called the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations. So the utilities fund this. So this is self-regulation. You don't hear about this often, but the utility funds this organization that goes around and grades each each power plant and they give, you know, guidance on how to operate this way. And they come in with giant teams. The NRC, you've got a couple of people that are there at the site at all times. INPO brings in a team of 20 people and they're like they're watching how you take your rounds. They're watching how you're, you know, very thorough, very thorough. yes and it's it's not once or twice a year it's five six seven eight times a year so you know the industry has radically over regulated itself in a lot of ways and people i don't think ever hear

that they only hear the the horror stories and you know one of the comments that someone made about through my island and this is probably the the best uh way to understand how the industry is improved is that three mile island wasn't the worst it was the one that melted there were other plants that were probably operating because you know the 70s and 80s were we i lovingly referred as a wild wild west of nuclear because we were operating and we as an industry were just operating yeah like a lot of industries were yeah yeah yeah um and and so uh around this waste component right so the hundred thousand years you mentioned earlier 300 years where's how do we get that down So the 100,000 years is actually based on the half-life of plutonium-239.

Okay, so just literally take plutonium-239 and half-life it out. Yeah, it's about 120,000, 130,000 years or so. But yeah, that's the typical number. The 300 years is based off of your fission products, right? So your heavy elements, they're called actinids. I hate these terms because they're so overly technical. But your heavy elements have really long half-lives. uraniums is in the billions of years oh really yeah okay so like longer than the planet will

be around kind of thing um and then you know plutonium is down at 24 000 years and then when you're talking you know your cesium and rubidium and you know we're basically i could just name off the chart of nuclei or chart of uh periodic table and we could go through all that i never memorized it yeah um and so if uranium is a billion years and plutonium's 120 130 000 years How do we get it down to hundreds of years? So one of the things is that if we took our spent fuel and we put it into a fast reactor, we could consume the plutonium that exists in it. We could take all that uranium.

We could transmit it into plutonium and then consume all that. So this is like the most fascinating thing to me. I told you before we got started that Jason Williams, who's been on the podcast before, one of my partners, has a business, PRTI, takes car tires that are waste, gets paid to take them puts them in these thermal uh d-man uh d-manufactured reactors basically breaks the car tire down at high heats right creates um oil steel carbon syngas creates power sells oil and steel he's using waste product to create power what you're talking about here with this quote-unquote fast reactor my understanding is you're going to run uranium-235 in a fuel rod

through the traditional process there's a waste output that waste output is still uranium right it's just spent fuel rods etc you can take that waste uranium and put it to a fast reactor turn the waste uranium into plutonium and then use that to create power correct yep you got it man i'm gonna i told you i'm gonna be a nuclear engineer by the end of this so so what why can we not do that now so right now we can't do that because there's two regulations that were put in place in the 1970s under the carter administration okay one is is that we can't use fast reactors in the united states and the other at least but at the commercial industry level and the others we can't process our spent fuel okay so let's take those one at a time our fast reactors obviously

they must have been around when carter was president right so somebody created them before that so jimmy carter was supposed to be the first engineer on the first nuclear-powered ussc wolf which is the only fast reactor that was ever put on a submarine. So Jimmy Carter actually— God, the world is so small. Okay. And so when those got created, why did that administration say we can't use them? The concern is that plutonium word.

Okay. Right? So it was all about weapons proliferation. Got it. So basically the idea that a fast reactor takes the used uranium and turns it into plutonium immediately. no we don't want to do that because that could lead to weapons uh creation but that's also not understanding about that 80 20 blend that i was talking about so if you use it in a fast reactor such as the bn 800 that the russians are using the other people are using fast reactors there

are a couple that's not many okay but um the russians have their bn 800 which so i'm gonna use a couple of terms here so the seed which is the initial fuel uh for their because it's a plutonium reactor was from weapons okay seed meaning this is the this is the uranium 235 before it is used the first time or this is going into the fast this is going into the fast reactor it's going in as plutonium and it's coming from uh they they used uranium created plutonium before it was in a weapon now they're taking the weapons grade plutonium and they're putting it into the fast reactor yep okay and so then it has why people are a little nervous about that and then and then they have what's called the blanket okay so the blanket goes around the seed and then the

seed as it's operating and making power it turns the uranium around it into plutonium interesting and so that goes to that process that you explained very well six months after that reactor went online there was no weapons grade material in it remaining why because there's too much plutonium 240 in it after six months got it so is it absorbing it so not all the uh the plutonium 239 just or the uranium 238 absorbing a or yeah because we go back all the plutonium 239 if it absorbs a neutron it doesn't necessarily always undergo a fission some of it will absorb that neutron and then it will remain as plutonium 240. Wow. It's crazy to me how, do they expect that to happen? Uh, yes. Okay. So like theoretically

this was supposed to happen and then they look back months later and like what we thought was going to happen happened. So when they first figured it out, no, they didn't expect that to happen. So it was a surprise. Yeah. It was a surprise. The first, when they first figured this out. Um, but we've got to remember we're talking thirties that they were figuring this stuff out oh okay so this isn't like even the 80s or 90s we're talking literally yeah we're talking yeah the inception of nuclear is when they when they figured that out so okay so there's a couple of countries that use these fast reactors we here aren't uh i'm assuming that there's efforts underway to get the approval to use fast reactors in the united states or is that idea dead no it's

not so there is um there's a couple of companies out there uh well first off the united states is going to build a versatile test reactor which is to test fast fuel okay so it's going to be designed to test fuels for fast reactors so there is a couple of companies um one of them is probably probably the biggest one that people know about is called terra power okay and terra power has its funding source from none other than bill gates i was going to say i think i just saw this in the netflix documentary he was talking about okay so um how does terra power work so they have two different designs one is uh a a sodium uh cooled reactor which it all comes the coolants are what matter with this the other is a molten salt reactor but they are going to operate in

the fast spectrum and when i say fast it all comes to the energy of the neutron okay so uranium 235 requires a thermal neutron which means that a lower energy plutonium 239 requires a fast neutron and then everyone loves talking about thorium and if i don't mention thorium you're going to have 80 million people hold on before we talk about thorium when you describe fast as uh as basically science right yeah the different um makeups uh it reminds me of this joke that if the government could they would outlaw science yeah right just because you have people who usually aren't scientists who are making laws about science and so if there's not an understanding it's kind of hard to regulate and outlaw etc when no you don't understand the science yeah it's it's crazy um

all right so thorium so i don't know what thorium is i didn't know if it was a sci-fi character or it was a something on the periodic table but everyone was tweeting this at me yeah well thorium because andrew yang has made thorium popular okay all right so let's so terra power has two separate designs designs one is that sodium base when you just described the other is thorium well so base this is why nuclear gets so confusing okay because there's cool there's fuel there's fuel configuration there's um you know how it's just there's so many elements that go into it okay so terra power is you know they have a design one is called their traveling wave reactor that is specifically uses a seed of uranium 235 and then depleted uranium which you

were in the army you know tanks use depleted uranium for armor and for rounds right that's that leftover stuff from the enrichment so that's the so we could use that right we already have it mind yep um about 10 000 years worth between depleted uranium and um our fuel if we converted 100 to nuclear by the way in the u.s 10 000 years of energy wow yeah um government outlawing science okay go ahead um so uh yeah so so and i'm not i don't have the details and when i talk to these companies i don't ask for the specifics on their designs because I don't want to get into proprietary, and I'm just kind of evaluating them from a standpoint, a different standpoint.

I know that if you're using sodium, you're going to go in the fast spectrum. Okay. If you're using a molten salt, you can vary your spectrum, what you're doing, whether you're using uranium-235, plutonium, or thorium bred into uranium-233, and that's where it gets really confusing because uranium is involved in all of it. Okay. So thorium exists naturally. It's about three times as abundant as uranium.

Okay. So it's basically like a uranium, it's just thorium. Yeah, I mean, if you want to go find thorium, just go out to Central Park, pick up some dirt, you'll find thorium in there. Okay. Sounds like we just solved power problems. Yeah.

And there's about three quarters of a million years of thorium on planet Earth. Wow, okay. So why is TerraPower and Andrew Yang, why are they talking about thorium or using thorium? So thorium doesn't have the negative connotation that plutonium and uranium have oh because thorium hasn't been used to make weapons allegedly well there was one test bomb created that partially used uranium-233 in it so could

you make a not useful a not so useful weapon out of it yeah it's extremely difficult so it's the hardest to make weapons weapons out of is uranium-233 so thorium is thorium-232 if you go to your periodic table it is two below uranium is that like th is that the th yep yeah th and so shout out seventh grade science yay um so it absorbs a neutron like the uranium does and then instead of becoming plutonium like the rain does it comes uranium 233 uranium 233 it operate has a larger range of energies that the um uh that the neutrons can be at um but there's a lot of we don't have a whole lot of experience with it okay so um and yang wants to use this because he just thinks that he's like anti-weapons i'm it's safer i i i don't i'm gonna mind read a little bit here

on andrew gang i think he's using he brought up thorium because it sounds smart right and i mean it is smart um it's talking about advanced things it doesn't have a negative connotation right and so it just and it pushes nuclear exactly um and to the point where you know elizabeth warren who has shut them all down literally in the last debate was um we need to keep some nuclear reactors around so if you've taken a hard shut all nuclear reactors down person and soften them okay i'll give andrew yang a lot of credit for that um and you know i you know i've been walking around the city and every person i have spoken to there i was concerned you know that they would be anti-nuclear i don't the sentiment of anti-nuclear i think is fading

yeah and um there's people who i see on twitter talking about um nuclear power power generation all this stuff and thorium has never been the conversation until i tweeted that we were going to do this interview and then i felt like i had the thorium army come at me yeah you're welcome but um what's interesting to me i think is uh similar to myself people are learning more about nuclear, right? And they're realizing that it isn't the Chernobyl, you know, everyone's going to die and everyone's walking around with those protective suits on. It's, again, it's a scientific process. There's safety that is a concern, but there's also things that are there to mitigate it, et cetera. And so if we can get reliable, persistent, clean energy, that's probably a

pretty good thing, right? So in talking about that reliable, clean, safe, so there was a reactor that we built in 1965 called experimental breeder reactor 2 is built out in idaho and they put it through a fukushima test on crack like it's the it was way worse than what fukushima had it was a fast reactor sodium cooled right much like the bn-800 i talked about earlier and much like terrapowers design they shut off all the cooling operating 100 power fukushima was shut down when they lost their when the tsunami hit right so the reactor had been shut down because the earthquake tsunami washed out their safety systems they intentionally in 1986 with this reactor operating at 100 power turned off her cooling systems what happened it shut down after 300 seconds and

remained there until they started it back up pretty impressive that is impressive yeah and then we've had two these are test reactors we've had two sodium test reactors that underwent chernobyl level events and they literally pulled out the melted fuel and put in new fuel and operated them for decades later it's crazy so i mean and that's you know we're talking back in the days of manual crank control rods right so you know you look at it now we have automatic protection systems that take the human element out of there with redundancies and yeah you'd be amazed at the amount of so let's go back for a second to um there's two reasons why the fast reactors aren't used right you said the first was which can't use fast reactors it sounds like um

terra power maybe some others are trying to get around that how are they like if bill gates is investing he's obviously investing in something but if we can't use fast reactors what exactly is he investing in are they doing it outside the united states or uh i know that terra power at one point was working with china um they were going to build some stuff out there and i i spoke with chris lebec the uh the ceo about it and uh they were the the the trade war actually shut they're down their operation out in china um but with this uh i think that we're about to see the regulation now that regulation as far as using fast reactors and reprocessing spent fuel it switches about every eight years so about every eight years for some reason it's in place and

then it's back and i mean got it yeah or one will go and you know so it's kind of just bounces back and forth based on what about the regulation that prevents us from using waste um that that one balances with it too as well okay so so really the fast reactor is there's two regulations we can't use waste we can't use the fast reactor when they go to we can or we can't is that political party divided somewhat yes um now one of the things is that if we just go with the fast reactor then we could use say a um a seed of uranium 235 and then we could generate plutonium after that and then you've got it doesn't have to be waste but yeah ideally it would ideally it would be Yeah, so that we can reduce our waste stockpile, or at least not increase it, right?

Because, you know, the fission products only last about 300 years. It's about 1% to 2% of those that do last that long. I mean, you pull, let's say we used a fast reactor, we used a thorium reactor, we used a pure uranium-235 reactor, and you consumed all the fuel in it, right? You pull out that waste, 60% of it's not radioactive, right? So already our waste stockpile is reduced by over half. and then one to two years later you've lost say five percent and then it goes up over time but a lot of those constituents are actually useful with industrial and medical purposes

so you know you've obviously heard of radiation treatments for cancer right that's created from the nuclear industry and we're actually causing radiation sickness in specific parts of the body where the cancer cells are and so we can you know we need that for radiation purposes things like barium treatment where they put a radioactive a low a low radiation uh chemical in you so they can track how your body's processing how your kidneys are working um or there's things like it's called um radiography so like you know we're in this great building right here we're what 54th floor i think and you got all these you know these these red pipes going all throughout this building well those welds you want to make sure that they're they're going to hold especially if

You know, you have a fire up here on the 54th floor, right? You're really concerned about the ones on the bottom when you have 54, you know, floors of water on top. That's a lot of pressure on the bottom there. So we can take it basically like a super X-ray to make sure there's no flaws in the wells. So there's a lot of purposes. It's right in the middle of the periodic table called technectium. It makes a great pipe coating, but we can't generate it. It doesn't exist naturally.

We have to generate it in nuclear power. so there's all sorts of things that if we could reprocess the waste um there would be benefits yeah there would be benefits one of the things i like talking about is that if i went to a u.s reactor anywhere in the u.s right now and i could magically change it from being a thermal reactor to being a fast reactor that fuel instead of lasting four and a half years would last 500 because why because we use so little of it got it the fast reactor is more efficient with the use of the fuel yeah because we use 100 of the uranium and that would put less pressure on the uranium mining business right because now we don't have to dig up as much of it and at least we can

extend the use of what what we can dig up yeah we have we have about a quarter million years of uranium if we use fast reactors thousand if we use thermal can we create these uh nuclear power generation or power plants just like we have them on um submarines and aircrafts one of the questions i saw online was can we use it to let's say power this building or an apartment complex or a car like kind of smaller scale type um activities or are we just not there on the science side well so the u.s department of energy is testing what they call micro reactors okay what's that so it's a reactor on an extremely small scale so we're um so to give you an idea the the actual size of a submarine reactor the actual physical reactor itself is only the size

of a 55 gallon trash can really yeah wow now that's not including the turbine all that stuff but that's just the power the actual where the heat is generated is only about the size of 55 gallon trash can wow there are micro reactors that are being designed that are literally the size of a sherman extra jumbo roll of toilet paper wow so now what do they want to do with those uh put them on space probes okay uh space force you need some power in terms uh and we're gonna get to space but uh so this is probably the idea that if you send a probe out you if it needs fuel that fuel will eventually run out you have to put a human there to somehow regulate the fuel usage in some cases and either the human will die or you'll run out of fuel and you can't get it back

so if you have nuclear you can get much more life and power out of the nuclear yeah the nuclear you used to you know a lot of these probes that we've sent out right they don't they're they're operating on very very low power levels you know they're going way deep you know very deep and you can send these things out and if you're talking a small reactor like that it could last for you know two three four hundred years that way um the other thing going back to the waste um is that there's something called nuclear batteries okay so as those those uh those fission products decay they release radiation you can actually cause that radiation to interact much in the similar way that a a um a solar panel works okay you can have it generate electricity

so if you took radioactive waste that lasts for 300 years you could probably have a battery that now they're going to overall you know they're going to degrade over time much like solar panels well but um you know you could have a say a battery that lasts two three hundred you know two 250 years that you you know design and build what's the difference i saw a bunch of people talking about fusion versus fission nuclear fusion f-u-s-i-o-n i think it was what is that so um fission we're talking about the splitting of atoms fusion is the combining of atoms so this is going to that that tritium thing man i really got to go back to the textbooks okay So the nuclear fusion, if you're not splitting the atom, what exactly are you doing in combining them?

So you're taking—so typically the way that—like in the sun, it's typically a helium-3 and a deuterium atom, I think, that fuses to create the energy. That's how most of the sun is actually making its power through fusion. But here on planet Earth, we would use deuterium and tritium. That's just hydrogen-2 and hydrogen-3. It's just fancy, fancy forms of hydrogen. and so you would basically if you used like and i'm not smart on fusion so don't worry my the twitter trolls are yeah they're way smarter than me they've got thorium and they've got uh fusion down yeah so um so you can you know using whatever process and you know it's kind of the you know

it's kind of the unicorn of the nuclear world um is fusion which i mean what would be the benefit of using fusion rather than fission um well when you shut a fusion reaction down you don't have that to k heat that that heat so then you wouldn't have to put the spent fuel rod into yeah there would be no rod got it oh got it got it got it but the only problem with that is that fusion requires fission because you have to generate large quantities of tritium for it yep um which going back to fukushima they were worried about the air and the venting yeah so and you generate that a nuclear reactor has anybody done nuclear fusion at any level of scale even in a test type environment well the first test we're out in the marshall islands called you know place

called bikini atoll where we you know called the h-bomb so yes we we have done fusion it's it's first test we're done with nuclear weapons we have gotten nuclear fusion to work um it just hasn't been we haven't done it on a scale that's able to generate enough power to keep itself uh sustaining without you know basically producing more power than it needs okay so the initial attempts at nuclear fusion were all weapons related same thing with same thing with nuclear power power yep so basically when we did that the h-bomb and and all that obviously again scary for some people right but the the challenge there it sounds like is we create too much power well i mean you there's an unregulated unregulated amount of well its problem is not necessarily

it's unregulatable the problem is is that it's making the reaction sustain right so right it's with the the fission you've got that you you split the atom it creates neutrons well in this case you have to you fuse the atom it creates energy which is going to drive outward but you got to keep all that stuff together so that you can keep your atoms close enough now and i'm way not an expert yes and i'm sure there's some troll right now who's going out there going he's got it all wrong and he's probably right um and this is my understanding i've been people will tweet at us and yeah i'm sure yeah yeah they're gonna tweet fusion i i actually i actually like when they tweet back because uh then i actually do learn now they don't always say it in the nicest

way but i learned so i appreciate it uh all right so last thing i want to talk about is i usually ask people about aliens on the podcast uh i don't want to talk about aliens because uh as i was thinking through this one of the things that i haven't spent a lot of time talking on a podcast but fascinates me is this idea of manufacturing in space, right? So if you think about can we send a bunch of stuff up to space and is it easier, faster, cheaper, whatever to do manufacturing in space? That got me thinking as I was preparing for this, why if, you know, has anyone looked at it?

And if not, why not doing some of the nuclear power generation in space, whether it's testing, whether it's some sort of steady state, et cetera, have people thought about that have has is the environment is the scientific you know components different what's going on with kind of the the intersection of space and nuclear power um other than you know the fact that we we're testing it to go deploy it um i don't know testing it meaning like the space probes yeah power plants for the space probes and and deep you know and their colony size for like if you're to put a colony on the moon or on mars you need energy in their nuclear is going to be the method for that oh really yeah so that's that's part of the testing

for all that stuff is is is to um and this is you know we're rudimentary testing level for this stuff but there it would be testing of nuclear power to power colonization on mars or the moon yeah yeah because then you know it's once again it's a small compact abundant energy right you know if i can make it yeah if i can make a reactor a lot you know that you know fits in a uh a toilet paper roll that can power me for a while right compare that to a solar panel where i got to get how many of those things you know it's a weight cost weight savings thing um so there's a lot of that it's clean the aliens will appreciate it being clean energy so if you want to talk nuclear and aliens there is belief that the tuguski explosion in the early 1900s in russia

was caused by an alien nuclear weapon so there's your nuclear weapons and aliens okay what what is this the tuguski explosion in russia what is that there was a big giant explosion i think in like the night early 1900s okay um and it was i've never heard of that yeah it looks like a giant it went it was right in the middle of siberia and so there's beliefs that you know one of the you know the ancient aliens theories or whatever is that it was a it was actually an an alien that that decided to test a nuclear weapon in russia's backyard i uh i actually had a uh a researcher's name is bruce fenton come on he's a ancient alien uh researcher and uh i i could see the threads of like 60 70 percent of it and then there were some that just and i told him i said ah you lost me on

that one yeah but the natural belief is it was an asteroid got in the early 1900s yeah yeah wow uh yeah it just to me i guess there's pros and cons right if i had to conceptually think about uh it makes a lot of sense hey let's go test nuclear power for the colon uh potential colonies on these other planets we're on the moon but if it's lighter could it be cheaper you know is there different um whether it's minerals or components or whatever in space that you could actually do nuclear uh in space i guess the hard part would be how do you get it back right in terms of if you're doing power generation or if you really want it back yeah is there a way to actually bring back i mean it could just be that you run a uh you know because i mean the space shuttles

you know rest in peace um you know they they actually were powered by hydrogen and oxygen interesting yeah so their fuel their fuel cells they use hydrogen oxygen um to as their their fuel and so if you think about it right we could use hydrogen oxygen generation at a nuclear power plant as our method to you know shuttle things back and forth between say a nuclear powered space station and then that way you know instead of having you know we're using nuclear power we're using it to create chemical energy yep it goes into the carbon capture and so if we're talking about going up let's talk about going down why don't we just create nuclear power plants in the earth or like under the sea in terms of so think about uh we're willing to obviously submerse them

with submarines etc right so we've figured out in some form or fashion how to do it on a smaller scale, would there be either, um, mitigation of the waste argument or some other advantage to building a nuclear power plant down inside the crust of the earth, um, or inside of a mountain or something, uh, or under the sea? Um, I mean, there's, there's really, you know, you could put them basically anywhere. You just need some kind of, uh, whatever your cooling source is, uh, some way to get the power. Yes. Yeah. One, the big thing is, is that, uh, when you're talking any kind of a steam engine like that you waste two-thirds of your heat um so you got to do some of that heat so that's the big thing right and you know we use you know whether it's the ocean

lakes um rivers uh or you know in the weird case and i'll bring it up again is you know palo verde out in arizona literally uses phoenix's um wastewater they treat the the treated sewage goes out to palo verde and that's what they use to cool their their plants out there it's crazy yeah what um last question for you what are you most excited about over the next let's call 20 years in nuclear power um so i'm going to give you that in in in bites okay so i'm excited for 2021 when vogel unit 3 comes online that's the first nuclear reactor that's going to new construction nuclear reactor to be built that's super exciting 2022 new scale breaks ground in idaho um to build their 12 unit facility called uamps same designs as older ones or these this

is these are small modular reactors they're going to be factory built so that's that's new and exciting i think uh they're looking i think canada's looking to have a gen 4 uh molten salt reactor design built by 2027 um so there's a lot of really really cool stuff coming down uh the line with all this so i'm super excited and that's not even a decade any bitcoin mining um you know what's going on with the bitcoin stuff you know it's funny i was gonna wait till the very end to ask yeah because i know nothing about bitcoin mining really i know nothing i you know i i literally i got into bitcoin because of eric finn i met i met him at an event and he said he's creating this app so as soon as he had it i got it and i started

buying bitcoin um and i've had i've heard about there's literally a nuclear power plant that they that a couple of workers got in trouble for bitcoin mining in russia i think right yeah yeah especially ukraine i remember but i literally i don't even know what bitcoin mining is so uh i'll give you the two seconds um think of uh you need computational power okay to uh essentially solve a problem when you solve that problem you've mined a block when you get that there's a mining reward right very over generalization of how it works but uh in order to do this computational heavy work you have essentially hardware that has software on it and you need power to run it the largest input cost to mining is the power cost so think of it

kind of like a traditional data center but rather than me putting cpus into a data center i plug power in i have space i buy cpus and then i rent my cpu computing power out to a customer okay now what i'm going to do is i'm going to get power i'm going to plug it into a space i'm going to put either gpus or asics so different types of computers and i'm going to not rent that computing power out to a customer i'm basically going to use it to uh run the software for these networks those networks will then pay me a very predictable transparent way so data center for cryptocurrencies basically the easy description because of that if you need low cost power what do people do they go look for renewable and so what you see around the world is you see a lot of hydro you see

uh a little bit of solar not so much uh you see a little bit of wind not so much but you see excess hydro now you're starting to see people go down to like texas uh flare gas um the business i told you that my partner runs up here ti they take that uh car tire uh and that output of power they actually used to mine uh bitcoin and ethereum so they're using a self contained power generation right that's vertically integrated to a cryptocurrency mind etc naturally as you think through that well what has persistent power is cheap is clean etc nuclear uh my whole fascination with this was i had not heard of until the guys in russia i think it was uh anyone using nuclear power to mine bitcoin and so i was like well let me go learn about nuclear

first before i even start with the with the bitcoin mining but i guess it's not something that's been talked about in the in the power community really well and then what's fascinating is is that this is why you'd put them up north because it's self-cooling because yeah well and your nuclear is more efficient the colder the water oh interesting yeah and the machines are actually they stay cool one of the the other large input costs is basically how do you cool the machines yeah so stick them in texas it's much more difficult than yeah do it in iceland yeah yeah iceland or you know say up in that yukon or whatever but or up in alaska right you could use your nuclear power plant for your source of energy and then you've got natural cooling from

huh so the nuclear or just power in general right so um if a company was to create self-generate power whether it's through car tires or anything else they can usually sell it into the grid depending on you know with the location etc let's call it three to five cents right is kind of the general uh take there um then it's getting sold to consumers at eight nine ten twelve cents whatever it is you could take that same power in the same environment uh and generate 30 or 40 cents uh in terms of mining cryptocurrency so it's a pretty material you know step up in in the uh revenue you can generate from that power creation i don't know the economics of nuclear power but my guess is that uh if you were able to divert some you know percentage of the power generation or excess

power generation right that isn't able to be stored and you were able to mine bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency with it you could actually make it incredibly uh profitable um because that power is persistent as clean as cheap etc yeah so a 900 megawatt plant typically makes about a million dollars a day oh you're that's and and that's profit that's pennies compared to what they would make money. Yeah, that's crazy. Wow. You know, it's, it's, if we talk to whoever owns that 900 megawatt facility, they might shut down and, uh, or stop selling it into the, uh, into the grid. Yeah. Um, wow. That's, you know, it's, it's funny. Uh, cause I found this weird partnership, you know, you guys like you're reaching out to me and a lot of the crypto guys

are reaching out to me, uh, talking about, and now that you've given me the, you know, the four one on on on bitcoin or crypto mining it makes a lot of sense and i knew there's a large power thing the other organization the other group of people that are um uh movers and shakers that are reaching out to me is the cannabis industry oh right now now what's funny is that if you work a nuclear if you pop on a drug test to include marijuana you can't work a nuclear for five more years so it's this really weird thing i'm in right now where it's like you know these these you know these guys from the cannabis industry are reaching out to me and i'm like this is like this weird conglomeration well and my cousin is actually kind of a mover and shaker and i should probably

get him in touch with you because you probably find him fascinating talking about all his stuff with cannabis but um you know they're in that same type of thing where they look and they go renewables just aren't working because they want lights on 24 7 365 to in their grow beds and they're working on if you talk go back to bill gates and he's you know whether you believe global warming or not you know the the two biggest things you need to work on is soil and energy right well nuclear solves the energy aspect and then the cannabis industry literally is taking it upon themselves to work on things like hydroponics and aquaponics to basically get you know crops into say a vertical farm that you can run lights on 24 7 365 you got to have the

temperatures just right and you can do that with large amounts of energy and nuclear and it's it's just fascinating it to me is um you get what tend to be technologists now are going to these industries and what they start to do is they start to look at vertical integration right and so they're realizing that just like in software where i used to have one layer of a technology stack if i can vertically integrate there's a lot of cost savings efficiencies etc um what i've seen on multiple occasions across industries is uh in anything that requires some level of power generation you're starting to see this interest in vertical integration now the difference is software is one thing the ability to understand how to grow weed you know build a facility and

also do power generation those are pretty different skill sets um and so you've got to build teams or partnerships whatever um the nice thing in crypto is if you're into computers and mining etc you actually probably have a pretty good understanding of uh power generation um and uh really from an economic standpoint how do i find the cheapest power where is it how do i hook it up to these computers um and so i've heard a lot people doing all kinds of crazy stuff uh never heard of nuclear until the one group um got in trouble obviously yeah um but but it just seems like it would be a natural extension of of what they're already doing but uh but i just hadn't heard anything Yeah, you know, it's, it's, it's fascinating, because I'm sure you're a follower of Scott Adams, like I am. And he talked about the floating city. And I saw that. And it literally, the first thing that popped in my mind was a company called Thorcon, that their entire design is a floating power module. So you could literally, you know, build, build this, this power plant that's floats, right with your floating city.

and i mean you know they're they're you know not a very big size wise but they put out 500 megawatts of power very large amount of power on a relatively small item you've got the ocean which you've got unlimited cooling the concerns of you know their design actually is safe from meltdown can use any kind of fuel you want it to and then you know the fact is is that if you were concerned about meltdown you've got an ocean right there you could literally decouple it from your your city and tow it away right and you've got all the water you need power generation if you can do it in a either modulated way or in a mobile way is is very very powerful yeah that's crazy so we'll talk more maybe we'll find a nuclear power plant and set up some some bitcoin mines yeah sounds

good to me all right man listen i really appreciate you coming to do this where can where can people find you online um or more about what you're working on um so i typically am on twitter and my handle is at sub schneider because i was on submarine so it's s-u-b-s-c-h-n-e-i-d-e-r or you can also go to my website which is www.gen4nuclear.com and that's gen g-e-n-i-v like the roman numeral four and the nuclear n-u-c-l-e-a-r i uh have not seen roman numerals used in websites very often, but I love it. That's awesome. All right.

And I normally capitalize it when I write it out. So everything else is lowercase except the IB. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming to do this. We will definitely have to do this again. It's super, super fun for me. I appreciate it. It was fun too.

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