We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC191 - Nuclear Power and Bitcoin w/ Ryan MacLeod (Bitcoin Podcast)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hey everyone, welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast. Today I have Ryan McLeod, a chemical technologist from Canada, will discuss the evolution of nuclear energy, its future potential, and how it intersects with Bitcoin and AI. Ryan shares insights on how Bitcoin mining can integrate with nuclear energy and the implications for energy economics. All right, so without further delay, here's my chat with Ryan.

Starting point is 00:00:27 Celebrating 10 years, you are listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. Hey, everyone, welcome to the show. I'm here with Ryan McLeod, and we are going to be talking nuclear. Brian, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. It's an honor to be here, Preston. These are my two favorite topics to talk about nuclear power and Bitcoin mining.

Starting point is 00:01:03 So I'm very excited to get into it with you. I have a funny story. So I was in Calgary and the stampede and there was a Bitcoin conference happening there. Ben Perrin was putting on. And I'm in the hallway and I'm chatting with some people. And I forget which show. I think it was maybe the one with Prince Philip that recently came out. And somebody saw in the comments of the Twitter conversation that you and I were exchanging

Starting point is 00:01:28 messages about nuclear. And I don't know who the person was, but they said to me, oh my God, you got to get this guy on your show. He knows so much about nuclear. he'd be such an amazing guest. And like my concern when people reach out as maybe potential guests on the show is how do they interview this and that? And the person's like, he's amazing.

Starting point is 00:01:47 You want to have them. So kudos to you for whoever the random person that I was talking to there. Sorry if I don't remember your name in Calgary. But yeah, I know exactly who that was. That was Cameron. Okay. All right. He's very excitable.

Starting point is 00:02:00 And yeah, we met for just randomly Bitcoin, randomly talking on Twitter and then found out we actually kind of bullet in Ontario when. And our employers kind of have a work relationship together. So it was interesting. So yeah, we pay kind of our roundabout way through Bitcoin. Well, Cameron, I apologize for not remembering your name, sir. Okay. So where I want to start is just with the big picture, because myself included, I am no expert

Starting point is 00:02:24 nuclear energy and just how this, you know, anybody that I talk to that deeply understands energy, they're just, all of them are saying, this is the direction that everything has to go because of the demands that are going to be coming from AI to whatnot. But for the audience, give them a little bit of an overview on the history of nuclear and then kind of maybe the broad brush point of view of why this is such an important topic right now. Yeah, nuclear power is definitely getting a lot of attention when it comes to grid reliability and energy sovereignty. That's been made very clear in recent years with recent geopolitical events.

Starting point is 00:02:58 All eyes are on nuclear and a lot of people want to know a lot about it. I myself, personally not expert myself, I just listen to our podcast and I have access to experts that can fill me in on a lot of this information. So I've gone down these rabbit holes quite simply, just like many of us, Bitcoin has gone down the whole money rabbit hole. So it's another industry to explore. And it's been an interesting development coming into these last two years. But to go back to the beginning, it was just Einstein theorized that the B-E-E-E-E-E-E-quels-M-C-square

Starting point is 00:03:29 equation. and then 40 years later, they discovered that you could harness the energy that's released when in atom visions. And we started to harness that capability to generate energy for weapons and then peaceful Uyghur power shortly afterwards. But to release that energy, it just requires unstable elements like uranium, put into a condition where when it's bombarded with neutrons, it becomes even more unstable and it breaks apart, releases lots of energy, creates a chain reaction which reduces more neutrons

Starting point is 00:04:04 to then interact with more uranium. And then the last reaction is sustained at a one-to-one ratio by various means to absorb those neutrons so that they can keep it under control. And then basically, it's just a very fancy way of heating water that is then transferred to steam, which then turns a termine, generates electricity. So in the early 50s, the industry learned that they can scale the technology up very quickly. They learned up to do it bigly. And then in Canada as well, we also learned how to do it.

Starting point is 00:04:34 They're having to enrich the uranium. We can meet the can do reactors to process uranium that is in its natural form. So it doesn't have to go through any further processes, which in recent times, that has the telecom for change because fuels, ours have been kind of disrupted by geopolitical events. in Russia as the rest of the Western world was now looking to fill in that gap by aggressively reinvigorating their few lines. Yeah. And then sometime around 70s is when they just slowed down and then into the 90s, there

Starting point is 00:05:07 was less and less nuclear reactors being built. And then the last two that were built in America were the ones that were just finished in Vogel. Canada built their last reactors in the 90s. There were clients to build more in the 2000s, but those never came through. Most of the world has just seen nuclear power kind of steadily holding. on to its role and providing our where it exists and slowly to bring off as more competition has been entering markets.

Starting point is 00:05:31 And there's a lot of reasons why it's happening so quickly and then we can get into more of the complex economics of how subsidies affected and just the general feeed incentives and the fact that the 70s was the significant period in time that Bitcoiners are very familiar with. So when you start seeing trends like instruction permits for nuclear reactors just ceasing entirely in the 70s, yeah, bitcoiners will obviously home to their VTF. I've been to 1971. So I'm still learning a lot of risk for myself, how to articulate it as best as I can. But yeah, in general, nuclear powers have ups and downs and had a good bull market in the 60th,

Starting point is 00:06:05 air markets are at 70s, a little bit of a bull during the 80s and 90s, and then we've kind of tapered off for the last 20 years or so. But now it looks like we are going to need so much power to fuel this high-tech society that we're building. We really aren't left with a choice, and especially if there's significant man to reduce either carbon from power in each generation, nuclear powers were reduced. the only technology that can fill that role. So there is a reinvigorated efforts to renew the human capital, the supply chain, capital, and just all of the resources needed to push

Starting point is 00:06:35 some new advanced reactors over the commercial development line and get this next phase of power really off to the races. This is my challenge. So whenever I talk with people about nuclear, If you lined up 10 people, seven of these 10, at least, are just going to say, yeah, but Ryan, it's dangerous. How do you respond to this? Because this marketing campaign or whatever it is that has generated this mine virus, that nuclear equals dangerous, it's quite the hurdle to overcome politically in any region that's trying to bring more of this into their region as the power source.

Starting point is 00:07:16 So how do you deal with that whenever you talk with family members or friends or whoever, and that's kind of their response? Well, you can always try to break it right down for numbers, but like that's always kind of cold, unemotional, but when you bring it down per chill a lot, like nupea power is by far the safest form of energy generation that we have. Despite the sensational events that happen, we would be hard-pressed to quickly, about 100 casualties involved in directly in those incidents. So it's relative to other industries, it's not.

Starting point is 00:07:46 as dangerous as the immediate narrative would lead us to believe. Because there's many other different ways to have industrial accidents. There was that fertilizer explosion that happened when they were poor a few years ago. There was actually a battery factory that had an explosion in South Korea just a few weeks ago where one each 30 people that died in. So there's industrial accidents happen in all industries and actually working in the nuclear industry. The injuries and anything related to safety issues, more comes from. working with electricity, working with hot steam,

Starting point is 00:08:18 and working with large moving parts, those are where most of the industrial accidents have been in nuclear, just like in any other industry, that is dealing with these large industrial processes. So there's that. And then like radiation itself is a poorly understand phenomenon that once you learn how to handle it and protect yourself harm, but it is actually just a reasonably manageable industrial hazards

Starting point is 00:08:41 that we can overcome and manage. And it does get into the environment. We do have the capabilities of cleaning it and remediating it. We've proven it a number of times. It does cost money when accidents like that do happen, and it doesn't clean up, and it does essentially affect the ability of certain reactors. There are incidents that need to be overcome and retrofitted to prevent it from happening again in the future. But we learn from these mistakes, just like any other industry.

Starting point is 00:09:07 We don't stop flying airplanes just because there's a few aircraft that go down. We learn from it. me put those new lessons into practice and then we iterate on what we learned and we move forward and we make it better and safer. Nuclear power, especially in this industry, like, they stress safety, like so much that sometimes it does impede actually like making progress on getting work done. So it is a catch-22. Like we want to be safe and want to prove that we're safe and sometimes going out of the

Starting point is 00:09:35 way to be safe. It does, it does have cost and ability to move forward efficiently and vector. So it's just such an awesome technology wants it operating. and portable. I've heard that in the past like 20 years, the safety on nuclear has gone almost parabolic compared to where it was, call it in the 70s. Is this something that is a true rumor or kind of some of your thoughts on the progression of the safety over the most recent times?

Starting point is 00:10:02 Well, the newest reactors are going to be designed to be most passively safe, so they would fail in a safe state, unlike what happened to the GMO where they lost tooling and then or weren't able to shut the reactor down safely. The Generation 4 are all going to be, basically part of their design basis and their regulatory requirement is that they're going to be able to shut down themselves. They lost power, it lost cool, or lost, but for any other reason, they would be able to, the physics of the reaction start to cool itself,

Starting point is 00:10:32 because they're using fuels that as they heat themselves up, it starts to reduce the aggressiveness of the reaction. And so it actually starts to bring itself. They're starting to use a lot more technologies, and then coolants, it'll be easier to pull away from the reactor core so that it can naturally let itself into a positive state and then they can just be left in that space indefinitely and then it'll be restarted then we can get higher. And for whatever maintenance operations that need to be done if that's what the case is. They're definitely taking this next generation of

Starting point is 00:11:03 reactors to a point where we won't have to have the same really aggressive safety the standards that we've applied to the previous generation reactors because I don't think we're going to need to apply the aircraft coercion standards to modern reactors that they had applied to the previous generation. So there's a lot of argument that some of these regulations that were felt appropriate for the technically are definitely need to be revised in modernized and updated for the new technology that's available and will be coming into the market and maturing and going through their licenses to get to that first domain what works is.

Starting point is 00:11:41 kind of a race right now because first movers will have a huge advantage in smart goods. So let's talk about the intersection of nuclear in Bitcoin. You're of the opinion that the Fiat system basically distorts the incentives of how power grids and all the infrastructure is being built out. Explain some of this opinion of yours. Well, we see it and like, others that are definitely smarter than you explain to the end. Ringing, where it is Anguance, but it's very good on this topic called shorting the grid. She goes into great detail that what happens when you have cheap heating sources of generation on a grid, if you say, deduct baselo generator, your whole plant, your nuclear power plants,

Starting point is 00:12:22 and then you have other sources of generation that is now coming online at an accelerated case or windmills and solar and a lot of them collect revenue outside of just selling power into the market. So they have renewable energy credits, production tax credit, all kinds of different revenue streams that are outside of that market. So when they bid into market or what they can earn, like, what they mean to be profitable depresses the prices in that market for the other generators they're on the market. So they can bid and still be profitable at less than zero in negative prices on these markets, whereas then that exposes your power generator to those negative prices at the same time because everybody base grid collects the same price. When the demand is low,

Starting point is 00:13:06 if you're pushing electrons out of the grids, you're going to get whatever the real-term prices, unless you are out with large PPAs and other day ahead agreements and whatnot. What kinds of different contract or anything that's going to made on these grids? It makes it difficult for your base load generators to then project their revenue margins because they're not being exposed to accurate price signals on these markets that would exist if they were actually in a free market that's what they're only competing and just selling electricity. and then out playing all these other arbitrage games and subsidy harvesting, where they can actually, like, that is their revenue model, where it's to collect those subsidies instead of playing in the market. And they actually have such a perverse incentives because the stipulations team, they have to be pushing electrons on the grid in order to collect some of these subsidies. So that's where a lot of people that really push aggressively for more investment and more subsidies for wind and solar to get them more on a grid, just build them fast and achieve. it works good because it's free electricity, they don't really take into forward out these second and third order effects.

Starting point is 00:14:11 They're having more wider impacts on the grid because you all start to consider that they start taking up a lot more land and they start taking up like lower quality land and you have to let her like more transmission infrastructure to actually get to them. So then they start causing jams interconnection cues. And then also when they're all pushing electrons on the grid at the same time, the grid can only take so on a bunch of that. So then it causes congestion and then how some of these generators take care tail. And then it causes many, many distortions in these grids when they are pushed on at a far greater rate than what the market would naturally allow for. Like, I'm not saying in any way that there's no price overwind and slur in these trades, but the way that they're being pushed at such an aggressive rate, like, it does give the vibe that something's being set up for a very big rubble. Because the chart is just exponential rate you're being installed.

Starting point is 00:15:01 That's not sustainable, especially if they hold their interest rate. higher because most of that growth came in that environment when they were exposed to serve. So, yeah, sad. But it was a huge impact on how quickly used to push on a bridge. And now that they are exposed to more realistic interest rates, a lot of these projects are not being able to prove that they can be economically viable without higher guarantees from utilities that they are trying to develop contracts with. So it's interesting to see then that this new reality seems like Bitcoiners are

Starting point is 00:15:35 are always ahead of the curve on when it comes to these financial aspects. The proponents of the wind and solar, they haven't really caught up to this reality yet. It just feels like they're in for a rude awakening as these start to taper off. We're not even talking about the CAPEX of all of this infrastructure, because a lot of it's been installed in the last 10 years. And so a lot of this CAPEX expense is going to really start to manifest itself in what I would say the coming decade. And at these higher rates, these higher Fiat rates, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:16:06 I think that maybe there's some of that that hasn't really even fully percolated up into the market as to the effects of some of these decisions, some of these policies, decisions that are incentivizing all this type of stuff. Are you familiar with the strong towns where he explains like the urban sprawl how it kind of goes in layers and they build new layers onto these cities in order to finance maintenance of the existing parts of the city? And then after like three generations, it essentially would collapse in us. is just layers of debt that keep having to be financed growth in order to finance the maintenance of what already exists.

Starting point is 00:16:38 And then he just falls in on each other. And basically he described best what happened to Detroit. Say the name of this again? Is this an article or a book? It's called straw. Terrell. But it was, Ben Sessions actually recommended the single one I did. Why are we bullets?

Starting point is 00:16:53 It was a long ago. But it was an interesting idea when I was reading through how he was describing it. It kind of described. It doesn't map on perfectly. but it did have interesting similarities to how they would, the way that they harvest the subsidies in some of these wind farms is what they'll do is once the subsidies expire, because they only last for 10 years, and the expectation is that the life of the windmill is about 20, 25 years, but if there's no tax credit to sustain them and they start getting exposed to real market

Starting point is 00:17:23 crisis, then they're not as competitive on markets, and then often they will just not operate anymore. So there's been instances where they will completely bulldoze and rebuilds just so they can restart subsidy cop again. And then I must have heard. I've also read other stories where that is when the transfer ownership to a local owner who is now responsible for the end of life and the maintenance and decommissioning everything. So it's no longer over their hands. They basically just, they pump their bags and then they find a new bag holder or they find a new way on their bags again. It bears an interesting resemblance to what I've learned a lot. about the shape of the market and chipcom promoting, but it's just, it seems because it's in the

Starting point is 00:18:02 real world, it's a little bit more slower acting. And I hope that it doesn't collapse anything too severe, but I do think that their expectations are in for a significant rugpole at the exponential rate that they haven't been growing, sustaining or at any time into the future. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right, I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is. From June 1st through the 3rd, 2026, the Oslo Freedom Forum is entering its 18th year bringing together activists, technologists, journalists, investors, and builders from all over the world.

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Starting point is 00:22:28 Back to the show. Talk to us about, and when you're building something that's so capital intensive to start off, like a nuclear power plant, you almost run into this chicken and egg problem where the nuclear power plant is going to be supplying so much more demand than maybe that local area can really handle. There's ways to basically sell that back into the grid. but some of that comes down to how far you're pushing the electrons that make it worthwhile to make such a large capital investment of building this power plant. What I find so fascinating about Bitcoin is it really kind of alleviates if you can get some type of private partnership with maybe a mining facility to step in. You have a buyer of last resort set up right there on the spot that can soak up a lot of that demand that they don't have to transmit it far at all. they'll literally soak it all up right there on site. Talk to us about this idea. Is it even more so with nuclear because of maybe the upfront installation cost is that much more than other power

Starting point is 00:23:27 plants? That's not something I'm well versed on. I'm just kind of curious to hear your thoughts on this moving forward in the coming 10 years as far as these relationships with Bitcoin miners with respect to nuclear. Yeah, they're definitely large capital intensive projects. And a lot of that It's front-moted even like, part of the decommissioning costs have to be incorporated into the initial planning of these projects. There's a lot of front-end engineering, all the licensing, like preparation. There is significantly more that goes into that than just fitting a natural gas plant. There definitely needs to be a vision for how they're going to get a return on this best. If there isn't, they're not even going to consider the project in the first place.

Starting point is 00:24:06 Like when the Vogel was first proposed, apparently there was like 26 reactors being proposed at the time. Only those two ever got off the finish line. And then with the other two that they started got stopped in South Carolina. But they definitely need to have certainty that they're going to have that demand. So my interest has been in the small market where I started to really take an interest in where Bitcoin mining can apply to this. Because companies that I work for, Canadian nuclear labs said, so disclaimer that these opinions are my own,

Starting point is 00:24:39 that my employer doesn't have an opinion on Bitcoin mining at least not yet. working on that. We're going to be hosting the first-to-a-clined pilot project of the size megawatts electrical reactor termed micromodular reactors. So it's the smallest category of the small modular reactors that they want to

Starting point is 00:24:55 apply to different categories. The larger ones there are, of course, 300 megawatt range. They want to use those to displace mostly coal generation and oil generation on grid in various industries that they can be applied to and then the smaller ones where we can start thinking about deploying their

Starting point is 00:25:11 power to off-grid scenarios. But like you said, if you're declining a significant amount of our capacity and you'd be not sufficient demands, consume all of that, you're going to have a lot of trouble convincing investors to invest in. So one study that might be actually did a scenario where they compared just the baseline, just diesel generation with diesel wind and diesel or all just nuclear and then a mix of diesel, wind, and nuclear and back. They tried a bunch of different scenarios with that. But the one point that they made when showing the nuclear scenario was that because they have to build enough to support peak demand, even though overall that peak demand is only

Starting point is 00:25:56 reached for a short period of time during the year, they're going to leave a significant amount of that capacity underused, which significantly compromised the economics case for building these in the first place. my proposal that actually the idea came from my wife, just a random conversation. I taught her about Bitcoin mining after I got right stated about it. And then she's reading about Elon Musk and pointed out that if his complaints is hydrocarbons fueling Bitcoin mining, then we should use nuclear power. And he had no idea how could sound of an idea that is that now is simply captured

Starting point is 00:26:28 my attention and put me into this space where I'm now the nuclear Bitcoiner guy, finding myself talking with guys like Resubition, safety in a loose. It's been a pretty wild ride. And yeah, it just spawned out of this idea. It's like, we're going to be building these small reactors where we have the technology to amplify them in a way that was inconceivable before Bitcoin mining exists. There is no load like this. There's a lot of exploration into companion loads by doing hydrogen electrolysis, doing desalination,

Starting point is 00:27:02 doing synthetic fuel production, boosting ammonia. There's all kinds of different things you can do with. power available to just have it fill in that extra margin of space between your average consumption and your peak consumption can curtail its load. But where Bitcoin mining beats them all is that it's dematerialized. It doesn't have any physical constraints on it. You don't need to store any feedstock. You don't store and transport any product.

Starting point is 00:27:27 You have a Bitcoin mine in Northern Canada that you get that your proceeds sent directly to your brain's wallet to your lightning wallet and you can spend it at the bar in El Salvador are within a few minutes. That is remarkably revolutionary in how we can arbitrage the value of power that's being stranded in the middle of nowhere. But because now we have this, we can start to conceive of much bolder strategies than building just enough power to sustain what we're going to need in the near term. We can start thinking about projections of what sort of demand to affect the future. And when we can build that in the present, and then the Bitcoin miners are the perfect placeholder. And then as

Starting point is 00:28:07 More sophisticated energy buyers enter the market. Bitcoin miners will inevitably be bid out because they're bottom feeders to just take whatever scraps are left and available for them. And they'll go find somewhere else to build a new energy or racist that eventually some other buyer will come in and build them out and they'll repeat this process. And basically what I just described is Brandon Quiggum's Pioneer's Vsysses. We can already kind of start seeing it play out in a way with what happened at the Susquehontont where TerraWolf had started the project where they built 50 megawatts of Bitcoin mining

Starting point is 00:28:37 behind the meter had a nuclear power plant at Slovenia, and then concurrently with the owner of that utility, they started building nearly a gigawatt data center campus that was recently acquired by Amazon Webster's. So they had an interesting foresight to know that there was, there's demand coming for this power. But now, whole nuclear industry is keeping an eye out first. They can see that there is going to be a massive rut on their power plants for the power. But one of the problems that now seems to the horizon is if you start pulling gigawatts off of grid, they're no longer contributing to delivery costs, which those fees contribute to the ongoing maintenance and operation of the transmission structure. So if you're pulling power behind the meter, they're not allowed to contributing to those funds,

Starting point is 00:29:28 which means that in order to fulfill the mandates for the revenue that it's needed to maintain transition infrastructure, it's spread across a smaller amount of customers, which means that they're more in more content. So there's utilities are starting to be concerned about this massive rush of power coming for their large generators. But then people are out of getting a rot deal lately because of the market dynamics that they've been dealing with. They are welcoming this guarantee power that they're going to get from these large data centers.

Starting point is 00:29:57 But then, on the other hand, yeah, the second order, actually, it has reverberating effects on the grid that aren't immediately apparent or we're just trying to look out for your own selfish interest as what power generate. It's a very complex system that is where we'll see like one major opponent shifts and then other gears start shifting. It's interesting to learn about because, yeah, I'm still the new in this stuff. It's very reflexive. It's very reflexive what you're describing as far as you move this variable, then this one over here moves, and then you have to address that. It's very reciprocal in nature, I guess, is what you're getting at there. So when I'm looking at this, and I'm saying long term, if I was going to be advising some smaller nation state, maybe that doesn't have a lot of power infrastructure,

Starting point is 00:30:43 and they're looking at where we're going to be in 10, 15, 20 years from now, obviously, they want to be a major player in AI. They want to be a major player in Bitcoin. The two innovations that I think are probably going to be the most paramount innovations for the coming decade. If you're going to advise one of these countries, and let's say they really want to be the world leader in AI, they have to have massive power infrastructure to run these data centers that are crunching out these models. Well, the only way you're going to do that is if you have all the power and infrastructure there. So how do you, back to the chicken and egg thing that we were talking about earlier, you almost have to have this relationship with Bitcoin miners initially to get all

Starting point is 00:31:28 of this enormous amounts of power and infrastructure in place. And then once you have it, then it's like, hey, Google or whatever company that is trying to be the market leader in AI, you can attract them down there because you have all this excess power that can then compete with the hash rate that's being pointed at Bitcoin right out of the gate. I think that any country that takes this on that truly understands where this is all going, especially on the AI front, and what's going to be required to be a market leader in AI, they have to understand Bitcoin and they have to understand nuclear first before they are even able to think about competing in that space. I'm curious if you agree with this. And if you do or don't, I'm just curious to hear the nuance or maybe the different

Starting point is 00:32:14 outside of this opinion that I have and how viable you think some of this is. Well, it definitely plays into the games area. If you want to control your own fate, you're going to have your own affairs in order. And yeah, making sure you've got your power game in line, that's going to be important, especially if you want to be participating this high-tech future. AI is going on astounding demands for power. I don't think anybody were ready for what we're seeing now. And I don't know, maybe it is just a bubble that's going to taper off and normalize,

Starting point is 00:32:50 or maybe this just keeps going. But it's incredibly invaluable pool in so many different ways. Like I only tinker was it a little bit like the image generation and chat bot, a little bit of recording stuff. Some of the stuff that I've heard about being applied with it is going to change how we interrimes. And yeah, some of immense ways. And then you winterly like Bitcoin into that. Well, make financial rails and then the sophomore war book behind me, I've read Jason

Starting point is 00:33:16 Lowry's thesis that inevitably when it's nation states start to crew into this game, like they're going to want to money all the Bitcoin within their jurisdiction. We heard that from the Orange Man just the other day. I love the guy's enthusiasm and not quite how it worked, but we'll see about that. Is this going to be an incredibly aggressive competition as more and more players start to actually understand gravity at this time? game we are playing. This is catalyst unlike anything we have other ever seen that's going to push our energy

Starting point is 00:33:47 generation to when it's like we have never had a customer power that we can just accompany anywhere with anything. Like not everywhere is blessed with hydrant. So nuclear power is pretty much the next best thing. Yeah. If you're trying to reduce your coal and natural gas. And I'm not detractor against coal and gas. because they're great reliable versus power,

Starting point is 00:34:10 and it's better than what comes before, burning wood and burning bio-laps to the one. That's reliability is at the top. Yeah, if you want to put green, if you want to prioritize this green number two, three, like above affordable, sure, whatever. But reliability always has to be number one, especially seeing what's happening in countries

Starting point is 00:34:29 where reliability is starting to wane. And we're seeing instances where once very high product, correct to civilization, that are now struggling to keep the lights on it sometimes during the day. It starts voluntarily and that it becomes involuntary and that it's scheduled to be only two hours and it becomes six hours. It starts becoming very difficult to plan an economy on those things, especially when you have a lot of infrastructure that was built with the assumption that you're always going to have readily available power. You start having to consider how we're going to keep freezers on long term and other refrigeration.

Starting point is 00:35:07 and actually just run a business in general. It became, was incredibly challenging. And then definitely, in those certain stances, whoever's investing in generated is going to be very well for themselves. And that causes other problems because then they're all mafias themselves around these little life because everybody comes to end and to arm these people that had the force states to actually build out this power. What little power in the structure they can have.

Starting point is 00:35:32 Well, the main grids are just total basket case. Yeah, so reliability can always be at the top of every one's list when they're considering these things. And getting into Bitcoin is going to make sure that they are able to have a reliable way to develop their infrastructure without having that just that an uncertainty to you that it's not going to be liable. Because when you can't turn your power plug, power clients can't make a profit. It won't operate. It's really as simple as that. If you can't pay for resources,

Starting point is 00:36:05 you're not going to happen. So it's very important. We find best strategy that we have to build to us to make sure that we can get to wherever we want it. Because there are a lot of places that don't have anything now. And that's why they're really working at nuclear power as an option. Because this next generation of smaller reactors, it lowers the bar for achieving your power because it doesn't require quite the same caliber of investment.

Starting point is 00:36:30 So that's why there's a lot of hope that has the countries that are already experienced. with nuclear power and develop this new technology, then it will be able to proliferate a lot easier and more safety to international markets because of the way that it is designed. So it'll be a lot more comfortable for the international regulators, one this next generation of the power blinds is available to the market. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up.

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Starting point is 00:40:18 The irony for me is if you're a minor, one of the huge risks that you run is where you set up shop, where you build out all this infrastructure, and whether politically you're going to be kicked out or they're going to have unfriendly laws and policies and regulations two years after you spend all that money building out the infrastructure. So there's an incentive for policymakers to find somebody that becomes the buyer of last resort for all this energy if they build a new power plant. So they want some type of long-term contract. I'm going to use the word contract. It's not the right word, but they want some type of a long-term public-private partnership, and the miners also want that. And so it's like this match made in heaven for a country

Starting point is 00:41:00 to build out all their infrastructure and have a buyer there ready to soak it up. And it's just, we really haven't seen it happen in a demonstrative kind of way. Why do you think that that's the case? And more importantly, what can we do to start informing and educating policymakers and miners alike to really kind of work harder at accomplishing this. And maybe it could be just my ignorance that I don't see this happening. I'm kind of curious what your thoughts are around that. Well, like, a lot of them don't understand a problem because it is a very complex system. Like, if you don't understand electricity and you don't. The first time you really start thinking about the electrical grid, when you start having stress into grid and blackouts, then, yeah,

Starting point is 00:41:42 most people don't start asking questions until it gets to that. When it comes to, yeah, attracting the Bitcoin miners to perform this role. It's still maturing technology. I've only been paying attention to the space since early 21, and it's matured significantly even since then. And hearing about is coming on the horizon, the type of basics that are going to be able to power that power scale dynamically and sync with any great signal.

Starting point is 00:42:09 They'll be able to just drop containers, a power generating plant, and just walk away and not even think about it. It's going to be so much easier. and accommodating for power plants when they are able to be a lot more like hands off. And then incorporating other ways that will make them feel a little bit more comfortable and trying to give the assurances that they're not going to have to deal with the volatility that comes with Bitcoin mining. It's like products like the hash price forward.

Starting point is 00:42:33 Luxor's has that's going to be a huge value to getting them a little more comfortable with these markets, this product they're familiar with from other markets. And our trading is they're familiar with hedging and all of these other strategies. to reduce their volatility and uncertainty in these turbulence times they find themselves in. Yeah, I think as this next cycle is going to play itself out, we're going to see a lot more maturity from the Bitcoin mining market, especially seeing how many of these companies, like Republic miners, they seem to manage that last fair market incredibly well. I heard that many Bitcoin miners went through the previous fair market.

Starting point is 00:43:12 So it's going to give the utilities and generators a lot more confidence seeing how well they are at managing capital, managing risk, and managing all of the other uncertainties that come with the turbulence of dealing with power markets and also the coin market, financial markets, all craziness that comes with that. And that's going to slowly start to bring them together. Like what I'm working on is hoping to kind of bear foot within the five to 10 year time frame as to small. watch the reactors start mature. So I'm in a relationship building mode where I'm building a network of Bitcoin Myers and getting to know as many of them as I can so that when I start having these conversations with the nuclear industry, I can introduce them to right people that I am seeing doing exactly what we need, providing the services, providing with flexibility as a service

Starting point is 00:44:03 and curate on these trades, and being a good anchor load no matter where they find themselves, whether it's in the middle of a jungle in Malawi or behind the leader in Pennsylvania or giant gigawatt site, Texas, they've been showing whites in a depth set of unique skills that generators and utilities are definitely going to start paying attention to because they absolutely need to embrace the flexibility that is offered by the Bitcoin miners as there's a lot more intermittency on the grids or uncertainty with power prices and fluctuations in the power market. that we're dealing with, because you never know what's going to happen in the future is, from what I understand, the strategic trolling reserves getting where we grow. So that's going to need to be rebuilt sooner later. And it just seems like such short-time thinking just to get very fiat-based thinking, yes. Yeah. Hey, so you have an opinion on kind of envisioning microgrids using fetaments with their power plants acting as a central finance, financial and power hubs.

Starting point is 00:45:08 This is a really interesting concept. I don't think every. Everybody that's listening to this might be familiar with Fetamints. So if you could give just a real generic overview of that and how it fits into this vision of financial hubs and power hubs. Yeah. So from listening to various casters and OBE talk about how frediments works, it just seems like a community bank type of structure where there'll be a few local individuals that are part of that community world essentially be holders or guardians or a larger mint where

Starting point is 00:45:40 where it would just be a pool of funds that are tied, that are peg one to one with Bitcoin, that the community can move. So one of these things I've been thinking about is, as these industries mature into each other, we're starting to see Bitcoin mining, working with power, and we're also seeing financial railroads all layered on top of that. Because as far as I can tell, it's, again, not a clean analogy,

Starting point is 00:46:03 but there's a lot of striking similarities between the way that the architecture of the power grid and the architecture of the lightning, it's just nodes and channel. If you think about it, a generators, node, transmission lines, channel, and substations. So the electrons flow, and then now we're also starting to see technologies

Starting point is 00:46:23 and services like Sonoda that are allowing sats to flow from a consumer to power generator in real time as to consuming electricity. So we could probably start seeing that with the other utility. And then a friend of mine working on a project where he's taking that in a reverse direction and using LN. Bits as a way to curtail power. He's tested it out where this, his idea was if you can turn things on,

Starting point is 00:46:47 like light bulbs or our dumbbell machines or what, shoot Peter McCorrah on state. Yeah, because Ben-Arc was doing a panel with them, and he was testing out some of the new capabilities. He'd been trying with LN. Bits. But anyways, my friend, Juan Carlos, he said here that if you can turn things on with it, you can also turn things operas. So he's been tibbering around with,

Starting point is 00:47:07 being able to send lightning transactions they can then turn down a thermostat or turn off the light. So he has this bold idea that he wants to create a software suite where utilities can then use that and create a bounty to incentivize consumers who portray their energy use for energy conservation programs. So he's working on something like that right now. I'm kind of the fanboy pitching it is where whatever it makes sense. Because that's just one of these tools. Now you've got Sonoda and now you've got a two-way lightning channel between utility and the customer. so they can actually flow status between them that way.

Starting point is 00:47:40 And it starts forming this web where power clients, if they start accumulating Bitcoin, they're going to be central financial homes in their communities because stats are going to flow through them. They're earning it through mining. They're going to be earning it. They're collecting revenue in Bitcoin. It's through Sonoda.

Starting point is 00:47:59 And it's also just going to be inevitable that Bitcoin's just going to be natural units that they start counting, for the treasury because sooner or later, the Michael Saylor strategy is going to find its way into a lot more than just a few small companies. And it's going to be interesting when large activities start seeing the value of having a reserve assets that can't be printed because they can literally create it with the product that they create, whereas the rest of us can inquire it by purchasing it or trading it for

Starting point is 00:48:32 a good and service. So they are in a very unique position as we start transferring. more towards this Bitcoinized future we are all looking forward to. What are some of the current challenges that you see moving forward for nuclear that some maybe aren't thinking about or that you think are probably the most important to address in the coming five to ten years? Human capital. More than anything, we need talented individuals of all kinds, whether it means like

Starting point is 00:48:59 not just nuclear engineers and nuclear physicists like thermal hydraulics, structural engineering, mechanical engineering. Every trade that you can think of is involved in the building and maintaining their power plants. So we need to have very aggressive engagements with the next generation forms present this technology as we're pursuing. And there's been positive sentiments I've been hearing people that are in these courses. Their courses numbers have doubled in recent years, which is a good sign, but we still are going to need a lot more where there's thousands going into, computer technology and finance, there's a few dozen going into nuclear technology. So it's a kind of disproportionate as to how many people are coming our way, but they're attracted

Starting point is 00:49:46 by where money is, obviously. So that's Fiat incentives are going to attract their most talented individuals to go wherever they will find the money. So that's been a tough thing because nuclear power. It's not baffy and amazing. Like when it's operating, it's actually really kind of boring. The only reason that people ever hear about nuclear powers when something goes well, it keeps the lights on in a lot of places in the eastern United States and Ontario and parts of Europe. In recent years, it's become very apparent that it's a very important technology to take serious and take good care of and capacity and stewardship of when you have existing operating reactors, as seen by Germany shutting down their very state-of-art nuclear fleet.

Starting point is 00:50:32 It's very sad to see because many of the reactors have been decommission to a point where even if they wanted to, they couldn't bring them back. It was very sad to see. And then it didn't manifest into what this utilian vision of was towered all with windmills and solar panels. Now, Germany is pursuing a lot more coal plants, which is the opposite of what stated intent. Exactly. Or pursuing the line they were working on. It's crazy.

Starting point is 00:51:00 And to top it off, what happened in Germany, a lot of people don't follow this space as immersed as I can get. The Green Party, it recently came out that they had presented fraudulent information when the commission to decide on whether to retire or extend the life of Germany's nuclear power plants was ongoing almost a decade or five, six years ago. So when they were making that decision, expert testimony was collected, and then Green Party actually fraudulently, manipulated what Piac Peresconi said in order to support the narrative that they were presenting, and nobody verified this. Nobody confirmed any of it. They just took their word for it. And then years later, now it's too late to even go back and revisit it, and it doesn't even matter, but that it is what it is. But as far as I'm considering, like, when these decisions are being made, they've shown that they have to be scrutinized very heavily when their opinion can significantly

Starting point is 00:51:55 sway a decision like shutting down higher nations nuclear power bascany. You had mentioned earlier the small modular units. I think it's GE that it's making these, if I'm correct. Oh, there's dozens. Oh, there's dozens of them. Okay. I'm curious, is that something that you're most excited about kind of moving forward on the innovation front or is there something else that you got your eye on that is really

Starting point is 00:52:20 exciting in this space? I want to see as much as possible get to the stage where they can I want to see more large reactors. I want to see more repeats of what was built at Ogle. I want to see more repeat of what was just built in Finland. I want to see Great Britain continue. I want to see big nuclear across the board. UAE wants to build another core.

Starting point is 00:52:42 Where I live in Ontario, we've got our large site. The burst reactor already has 800 megawatt reactors. And they want to add in their four to add an extra 5 gigawatts capacity on their site. So there's lots of enthusiasm for big nuclear, again, which is very reassuring. But there's also, yeah, small reactors are very interesting to me, most particularly because where I work, we're championing a microreactor, but then also simultaneously in Ontario, the Ontario power generation, our main power utility provider, is piloting the G.E. Hittachis 300 megawatt boiler water reactor at Darlington's site.

Starting point is 00:53:20 So that's going to be a first-so-kind project. on that reactor is getting a lot of attention. First of all, because it's going to be a lot easier to get over the regulatory processes and licensing because it's based off of the familiar oil water reactors that are already in wide use, it's a smaller version of their large gigawatt-sized reactor. So we'll make it a lot of easier in the markets are actually with that. So there's already a very large border book for this technology. I know at least a half dozen European countries are looking at getting at least four or eight of them.

Starting point is 00:53:51 Out west, Alberta and Saskatchewan and Canada are looking all departing the Brunsettys, Saskatchewan to replace a lot of their coal capacity. Alberta wants to deploy them up to the oil sands to use them for oil and mining and a lot of their displacing. There are oil use in those areas, and then there's that one, and then there's another one in a Brunswick. They want to build companies called Mold Text, and they're going to be using a molten salt reactor type of cooling, which will be able to recycle the fuel, the spent fuel from other conventional reactors. So we'll be able to get more useful value out of those fuel rods that still have usable power because the fuel rods that go through the conventional reactor only use like 5 to 8% of the

Starting point is 00:54:34 renewable power. It is in the uranium. And there's ways to further extract more in different types of reactors. And yeah, there's the one Westinghouse as small. It's going to be like one megawatt. It'll be able to ship rapidly on the back of the truck to very remote locations or like emergency uses. It just seems like everything become more modular.

Starting point is 00:54:57 And a lot of this, this is all within like the last five, 10 years that a lot of this is really starting to pick up pace. Yeah, it's definitely gained a lot of momentum. Canada's SMR action plan was put into action, 2017, 2018, where they started aggressively pursuing three different tracks for the larger SMR, the smaller SMRs, and others that you coolant and fuel types that don't be allow them to achieve much higher temperatures than just a standard boil water reactor because that's limited to just where you can borrow water at. Whereas with molten salt or high temperature gaseids or light cool, like they can

Starting point is 00:55:32 start an opportunity as high as 7, 800 degrees Celsius, which gives them a lot more industries that they can apply to. So there's still a significant range to the 12, 13, 200 degrees Celsius that there's still a long ways away from, but it can displace hydrocarbons from a lot of these industries. And as far as I'm concerned, it's not going to displace them entirely. It's just out of power and heat generation. So we're going to have more hydrocarbons available for transportation fuels, for every machinery fuels, for building more or complex hydrocarbons and using them as feedstock for doing all kinds of other products that have hydrocarbons at the base of them

Starting point is 00:56:07 store. And then because they're not being as used as much in our generation, they'll be more widely available and cheaper on those markets. Or the Jennings paradox just as they become more widely, they're more and cheaper. We're not going to use less. We're going to end up using more if we're going to end up using them more efficient. That's what we always end up doing. Ryan, this has been just very enlightening for me. I am, like I said at the beginning of the show, not really well versed on nuclear.

Starting point is 00:56:33 I find it fascinating, but I'm not really well versed on it. I really appreciate your time coming on. I know you're active on Twitter, X, whatever we want to call it these days. Your handle is Nuclear Bitcoiner, and we'll have that in the show notes. Is there anything else that you want to have in the show notes? Or we'll put the books that you mentioned in there. Anything else that you wanted to highlight to put in there, though? Well, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:56:55 There's a few good podcasts. If anybody wants to go down the nuclear rabbit hole, Chris Keeper hosts one called The Decoubled Podcast. He always has on great industry experts, great conversations, a great four-part series that explained the entire process of Vogel from start to finish and all of the trials and tribulations that they went through to get fed over the wrong struggles that they went through. Another one that I like is Titans of Nuclear and then Nuclear Bimerians.

Starting point is 00:57:19 Those are great for pure nuclear content. Another one that I like to suggest if you can check out, if you want to see the current state of small modular reactors, there's the Nuclear Energy Association, the N-EA, called the SMR dashboard. And it just covers the current technological readiness of 42, of these SMRs, they're on various different criteria. It's coming along slowly and gradually, and then before we know it within the next five or six

Starting point is 00:57:51 years, one after another is going to start reaching maturity and we're going to reach a state where nuclear power is finally kind of resurged to the point where it was kind of expected that we were going to get through many, many decades ago. The market does what the market does. And it's going to touch the log to get here, but it seems like demand for power is finally substantial enough that humanity is calling for nuclear. Demanding it. Build that role. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:58:19 It's very exciting. It's so neat to see all these things converging. The AI, Bitcoin sound money, on the energy front, nuclear. And you can see, I don't know, at least I feel like I can kind of see like this is all converging in the next 10, 15, 20 years. This is going to get wild. where this is all going. Yeah, well, just like Satoshi combined a bunch of other technologies that are listed into something new, like we're kind of doing, you know,

Starting point is 00:58:46 Bitcoin mining, some of our reactors, and a few other technologies, and then amplify what any one of them will be capable of on their own. Synergy to produce something far greater than what we could have can see. We were just pursuing our own individual past these technologies. They're going to have a great companion share. I can guarantee you all. Well, Ryan, thank you so much for making time and having on the show. This was a blast, very informative, and great having you. Yeah, thanks for

Starting point is 00:59:13 having you. It was a great conversation. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to follow Bitcoin Fundamentals on your favorite podcast app and never miss out on episodes. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only, before making any decision consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors podcast network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC191 - Nuclear Power and Bitcoin w/ Ryan MacLeod (Bitcoin Podcast)

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