From Microchips to Atom Splits

00:00:04:14 - 00:00:37:15

Chris Keefer

Welcome back to decouple. Today I'm joined by Nathan Myhrvold. Nathan is the former CTO of Microsoft, co-founder of Intellectual Ventures. Relevant to today's discussion on nuclear. A vice chairman at TerraPower. And of interest to me. Principal author of Modernist Cuisine. Nathan, you were a few different hats. Today we're going to be talking a little bit about, I guess, what the nuclear sector can learn from the innovation that has occurred in one of the most disruptive areas within tech Silicon Valley.

00:00:37:15 - 00:00:45:09

Chris Keefer

So a warm welcome to decouple in a warm welcome to the net zero nuclear summit here at COP 28 in Dubai.

00:00:45:11 - 00:00:49:06

Nathan Myhrvold

Excellent. Happy to be here.

00:00:49:08 - 00:01:17:04

Chris Keefer

Likewise, sir. Likewise. So, I mean, let's just get right into the topic at hand. Silicon Valley, obviously characterized by a very rapid pace of innovation and technological disruption. A lot of interest, I think, amongst the sort of techno optimists that would find themselves in such a place within nuclear yourself. Again, a vice chairman at TerraPower. Tell me a little bit about how you developed an interest in nuclear and then we'll get into maybe some of the frustrations with the pace of innovation.

00:01:17:06 - 00:01:44:07

Nathan Myhrvold

Well, before I was a software guy, which is what I'm known most for, you know, being a former CTO at Microsoft, I was a physicist. I got a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University. And so I was very comfortable with physics and also very interested in technology of all sorts. Not just computers. Computers is where I spent most of my career, but interested in everything.

00:01:44:09 - 00:01:55:16

Nathan Myhrvold

So I approach it both from the perspective of physics and also how we can get serious about changing our energy system.

00:01:55:18 - 00:02:04:19

Chris Keefer

And tell me about that journey, though. You were working in computers for quite some time. How did you end up as vice chairman on TerraPower? I'm really interested in how you developed that.

00:02:04:22 - 00:02:33:11

Nathan Myhrvold

Well, I after retiring from Microsoft, I set up a company, Intellectual Ventures, where we did a lot of work in inventing in any area that we thought was really important. But we did a bunch of energy inventions. And if you look at the problem of climate change and how we can really revamp our entire energy system for the planet, it's impossible to ignore nuclear.

00:02:33:13 - 00:03:05:05

Nathan Myhrvold

Nuclear is a non-carbon emitting, incredibly efficient source of energy in some parts of the world, like France. It's the dominant majority form of electrical generation. It clearly works. If you say we're in a climate crisis and you're unwilling to use something that clearly works and it's already available, then you're not really serious about it. Then you're saying it isn't a crisis.

00:03:05:07 - 00:03:36:11

Nathan Myhrvold

Now, conversely, if you looked more deeply at nuclear, you find that nuclear has had a stagnation in its development relative to what could have happened because of, you know, 30 some years ago, we got the willies. We got afraid of building nuclear plants. When I say we, I mean the United States. But the U.S. being out of it also put a chilling effect on nuclear from all countries.

00:03:36:13 - 00:04:06:00

Nathan Myhrvold

And as a result, the pace of innovation that normally would have occurred in that industry didn't. It's also true that people will look at nuclear as even though it works very well today in places like France and in many others around the world, The existing plants the U.S. worked very well, have an excellent safety record. Despite that, people will say, nuclear isn't really ready.

00:04:06:02 - 00:04:28:23

Nathan Myhrvold

And they'll say, well, we're worried about the waste or we're worried about safety or worried about something. And a lot of that potentially could be addressed by innovation. But if the largest single market for nuclear for most of the last 30 years start building plants, then you're not going to have that innovation.

00:04:29:01 - 00:04:40:05

Chris Keefer

Right? Right. I think you characterize this as slide rule. Nuclear computing has come along. Go ahead. Computing has come a lot. And so you Go ahead. Go ahead.

00:04:40:06 - 00:05:13:23

Nathan Myhrvold

Sorry. You know, the Fukushima plant was commissioned in 1971. It was designed in the 1960s. It literally is a slide rule era plant. That doesn't mean every calculation on the slide rule. But since if you look at automotive safety, the automotive world is not as rapid the pace of innovation as computing. But the highway deaths per mile driven have dropped by a factor of five since 1960.

00:05:14:00 - 00:05:57:01

Nathan Myhrvold

And so that's a large scale industrial thing, and they've got a factor of five. So if you say, well, is nuclear so simple that innovation won't help or computing won't help? No, actually the opposite, right? Because nuclear physics of reactors is very complicated. It's very expensive to design new things and to test things. So the ability to use computing and other modern electronics, all of the panoply of technologies that we have, the ability to do that, to improve a plant is very substantial.

00:05:57:03 - 00:06:00:03

Chris Keefer

And you're not seeing that happening as that's well.

00:06:00:08 - 00:06:30:15

Nathan Myhrvold

Something that historically didn't happen from, you know, the the last plants being built up until now and not all the way from the 1960s, but the fact that we froze nuclear innovation by stopping the building of plants, that that stopped the investment in people developing new designs. Why would you design something afresh if you wind up never having to build it?

00:06:30:16 - 00:07:00:00

Nathan Myhrvold

Right. So there's a huge amount of things you can do with this new technology to a nuclear plant. Now, you could also say, can't we just deploy the best of today's technologies? But the funny thing is, even deploying the best technology we have today is stymied. That's why the Fukushima plant was still online and where there's lots of similar era plants online around the world, nuclear work.

00:07:00:00 - 00:07:28:11

Nathan Myhrvold

So people didn't want to shut it off, but they also didn't want to replace it. They didn't want to improve it because, my God, that will open up the whole can of worms and there'll be all these public demonstrations. So anyway, that was we got interested in TerraPower because we realized there was a tremendous amount you could do with innovation in nuclear.

00:07:28:13 - 00:07:53:08

Chris Keefer

Some, I think, would say that there's the potential for a category error with someone coming from Silicon Valley where the innovation has been occurring at the chip level, within computers, within software development, and that the product is very different coming out of nuclear, and it's more governed by these harder laws of physics. You know, maybe it's more similar to thinking about innovation within a semiconductor fabrication facility.

00:07:53:08 - 00:08:01:07

Chris Keefer

Maybe that's a better sort of category, that much to put innovation of a nuclear plant. How would you respond to those kinds of criticisms?

00:08:01:09 - 00:08:08:19

Nathan Myhrvold

Well, look, nuclear is each technology in its details is different. Of course it is.

00:08:08:21 - 00:08:32:14

Nathan Myhrvold

That's why I used cars as an example for safety. If I said computers from the 1960s have had an improvement of several million fold, say, wow, okay, but that's not fair because that's got this magic computing technology and chip stuff. But cars don't. And now does that mean that nuclear is that and cars are equal? No, they're not.

00:08:32:14 - 00:09:03:23

Nathan Myhrvold

None of these problems are exactly equal. And, of course, there are both hard laws of physics, which I do know something about. And there are the labyrinth of regulations in part meant in the best of intentions to make sure that we have excellence, safety in nuclear plants. And some of the regulatory and legal framework is frankly, was designed to thwart nuclear.

00:09:04:01 - 00:09:28:18

Chris Keefer

What do you think are some of the biggest roadblocks in terms of innovation? I know TerraPower was looking at deploying a half scale model of one of the reactors in China that fell through or merging into this multipolar world. We're seeing challenges with. Hey, Lou, I mean, I think the theme here is the kind of collapse of a kind of unipolar order and some of the challenges that's putting within nuclear as a part of a globalized world.

00:09:28:19 - 00:09:36:06

Chris Keefer

For you looking forward now, what are some of the challenges that we're facing in terms of the pace of innovation you'd like to see?

00:09:36:07 - 00:10:06:01

Nathan Myhrvold

Well, look, nuclear is a technology that besides it's the theoretical aspects. There's many practical constraints. There are legal constraints, there are strategic and political constraints. You know, our project in China didn't fail technically. A project in China was canceled by the U.S. government as part of a broader issue with US-China relations. You know, that comes out of left field.

00:10:06:06 - 00:10:37:18

Nathan Myhrvold

Now, if you work in nuclear, you have to realize things like that can happen. But it was not a problem with us or with our Chinese partners. It was the larger political sphere. And that can happen. You know, there's a couple of plants in the United States that were built and never turned on for effectively spurious political reasons, like cloaks of safety, cloaked as environmental, cloaked as some other thing.

00:10:37:19 - 00:11:05:01

Nathan Myhrvold

But fundamentally, it was a political decision. And all of those things add up to the fact that you really shouldn't approach nuclear as, Hey, I'm sure if I build a better mousetrap, the world will be the path to my door. Yeah, they might. But it's also true that they might sort you just be, you know, because of some perceived fear that's never been realized.

00:11:05:03 - 00:11:27:22

Nathan Myhrvold

And, you know, frankly, we wouldn't have done this if it wasn't that there was the imperative of change in our energy system, climate change and so forth, you know, to the degree that we actually become serious about that, which, frankly, we have not. When I say we, I mean the world broadly or the United States has not really been serious.

00:11:28:00 - 00:11:34:08

Nathan Myhrvold

But the degree that we ever get serious, we're going to have to use nuclear.

00:11:34:10 - 00:11:45:04

Chris Keefer

So, again, beyond beyond the innovations within the individual designs, I'm thinking about the enabling infrastructure, things like the versatile test reactor.

00:11:45:06 - 00:11:58:15

Chris Keefer

What sort of infrastructure is you think is becoming necessary, particularly if, you know, the U.S. needs to be able to do all of this within its own borders because it can't depend upon being able to get fuel from Russia or build prototypes in China.

00:11:58:17 - 00:12:27:09

Nathan Myhrvold

Well, another part of the shameful retreat from nuclear is that the U.S. wound up closing a lot of national lab facilities that in the past had been used both by the government, also by academics and by industry to learn new things. So FTF was the fastest rate. The reversal test reactor was a replacement of this thing that they never should've shut down.

00:12:27:11 - 00:12:59:07

Nathan Myhrvold

And it was shut down purely as a political issue sited on a national lab. It's not a it really was there was no safety concern. There were no economic concerns. It was a national lab facility. We first started TerraPower. The fact is there was no way to get fast neutron empirical data in the United States. So we had to go around the world looking for places that had fast neutrons that we could say, hey, you know, it's like borrowing a cup of sugar from your neighbor only.

00:12:59:09 - 00:13:43:15

Nathan Myhrvold

Hey, can I borrow some 14 million neutrons? I need a vast flux. It's embarrassing. The United States made those critically bad decisions because as a government facility, as a thing for research, as a thing for understanding, they would have put our country in a better position. But they the simplest thing at those points wasn't to look ahead and say, I better take a little bit of a short term political pain in keeping this thing alive, rather than appeasing some vocal minority of folks that are upset about it.

00:13:43:17 - 00:14:11:15

Nathan Myhrvold

Let me appease them because, you know, we're never going to need this again. You know, we're always going to have peace in the world. We are The Russians will always share their fast reactor facilities with us. Well, not it didn't turn out that way, but more generally that if you took any part of American life or world wildlife doesn't have American, I'll start over.

00:14:11:17 - 00:14:52:15

Nathan Myhrvold

If you took any aspect of life and said, okay, right, we're going to stop doing this for 30 or 40 years, the world really rusty at it. You know what? If you start building airplanes, no more airplanes, all right. Or no more cars are normal. I don't care what it is. If you have an effective moratorium on not only the construction, but the intellectual capacity and the facilities that you would need for doing research and development, you shouldn't be surprised if it goes away.

00:14:52:17 - 00:15:20:05

Nathan Myhrvold

You know, the popular one that people talked would talk about before this is after the Apollo program ended. They put aside the plans for the Saturn five and the know how of how to build the Saturn five. And we had this embarrassing thing where for years and years and years people said, hey, we once were able to build a rocket that can go to the moon, but we lost it.

00:15:20:07 - 00:15:51:03

Nathan Myhrvold

Now what happens that lots and lots of hard work and innovation, new technology in the form of, you know, both commercial efforts and government efforts is we are starting to field heavy lift rockets that are is bigger, bigger than the Saturn five. So eventually that one got solved. But there was a long period where if we'd had to go to the moon, we wouldn't have been able to because we'd made a political decision to stop a program and just let it all go to hell.

00:15:51:05 - 00:16:08:17

Chris Keefer

I think we're entering into it's not an unprecedented moment, but it's a bit of a political joke. But for the first time, and as long as I can remember and I'm younger than you are the Republicans and Democrats seem to be agreeing on something, and that is that they both now like nuclear. It seems like there's a big opportunity moving forward here.

00:16:08:18 - 00:16:21:17

Chris Keefer

What would be your wish list in terms of unleashing this innovation that that you so desperately want within the nuclear the nuclear scene, maybe within the U.S. or more broadly with the U.S. and its allies?

00:16:21:19 - 00:16:59:18

Nathan Myhrvold

Well, I think the U.S. political structure has made some very important steps in recognizing, saying that if we need to change our climate system, nuclear is absolutely part of the solution. And leaving it out makes absolutely no sense. It's a great first step. But as we've just been discussing, there's 30 or 40 years of rot in the fact that our infrastructure for making things, for testing things for that's all gone to hell.

00:16:59:20 - 00:17:26:19

Nathan Myhrvold

We also don't necessarily have yet a regulatory environment or a willingness to say, yeah, we're going to go build new reactors. You know, China has 14 reactors under construction or something like that. The United States only has a couple. And the only reason they're still under construction is because of enormous amounts of obstructionist lawsuits, things that tied them up needlessly.

00:17:26:21 - 00:18:19:03

Nathan Myhrvold

You know, the the AP 1000 reactors that are being built, there was a delay because someone decided, you know, instead of having a crash of a 737, we better make it a 747. So, okay, now we have to redo the design. So the original design, so it can take the impact of a. 747 Well then someone says, but now for the seismic test, the roof is too heavy because you made a really heavy roof to keep out the 747 And you know, at some point those things because they sap enormous amounts of capital and they create a perceived risk, they make the nuclear plant economics look bad.

00:18:19:05 - 00:18:44:20

Nathan Myhrvold

You know, the fundamental difference between a coal plant and a nuclear plant, besides the internals of how they work or emitting CO2, the biggest thing is for a nuclear plant. You have a larger capital cost up front, but then the ongoing running is cheaper. So there's lots of things in life that say, Yeah, okay, if I buy my house, then in the long run that's cheaper than me renting.

00:18:44:22 - 00:19:09:02

Nathan Myhrvold

But because of the crazy risk premium, that's been put on on that upfront investment you have to make in the nuclear plant, the fact that it's cheaper to run long term, you never get to do that because the investors are saying, well, what about those plants that they constructed completely and they were all approved and then they wouldn't let them turn them on.

00:19:09:08 - 00:19:41:11

Nathan Myhrvold

What if that happens this time again? Oops. And no investor wants to make an investment like that. So I think what we have now is some smart people in both sides of the aisle have realized that nuclear has two strategic really be part of what the United States is involved in. It's almost criminal that we allowed our technological prowess there to decline, but we did.

00:19:41:13 - 00:20:06:22

Nathan Myhrvold

We need to fix that. There's strides are being made. We need to encourage companies like TerraPower, but also competitors and future start ups, not just the grants that we need to encourage them, that this is a market that they can actually make investments with their intellectual investment and that their investors money. And then we need to build a bunch of plants.

00:20:07:00 - 00:20:28:07

Nathan Myhrvold

And it would even if you weren't building light plants, if you're building somebodys plants and there were 14 of them under construction around the country, I would feel better both about the energy security of the United States and I feel better about climate change and better about saying we'll find maybe my plants didn't win this time, but we're going to try in the future.

00:20:28:09 - 00:20:45:19

Chris Keefer

Let's shift focus back again to this question of innovation. Artificial intelligence is very much in the news these days because people talking about solving climate change with artificial intelligence. What does it have to offer nuclear? What are its limitations? What's the hype? What's the hope? Can you help us understand that?

00:20:45:21 - 00:21:23:22

Nathan Myhrvold

Well, you know, A.I. is a very has always painted a compelling vision that we could have machines that were either we are able to offload work that would otherwise go to humans or would maybe increase our awe of all our capacity. Now, of course, computers already do math better than we can do in our heads. And you couldn't design the latest Boeing jet or the latest nuclear reactor if you're using reasonable approaches without having incredible computing capabilities.

00:21:24:00 - 00:21:59:14

Nathan Myhrvold

So we are using that already. Then when A.I. comes up and, you know, there's been tremendous progress in A.I. in just the last well, it was become public in the last 12 months, really, that chat GPT We can have language skills that are amazingly better than any previous computer program. But you have to remember what Jackie Beatty is doing there is it's trying to replicate a language facility that you and I and almost every person is born with.

00:21:59:16 - 00:22:27:23

Nathan Myhrvold

You know, little kids learn language and they learn to speak not because we send them to speaking school. They learn to speak by listening to their parents and they pick it up. And they're insanely good at learning that computers weren't. But just because we are able to take this language skills that humans have and finally, after 50 years of trying, we have computers that are not as good, but they're they're getting there.

00:22:27:23 - 00:23:04:07

Nathan Myhrvold

It's it's impressive. That doesn't mean that suddenly nuclear physics is something that the A.I. can instantly take on. It's particularly true because the way Chat GPT and other large language models work is by taking billions and billions of examples and learning from them. We don't have billions of examples in nuclear physics. Yeah, periodic table only has like 100 elements on there's, you know, not that many nucleons, there's not that many things.

00:23:04:09 - 00:23:36:19

Nathan Myhrvold

We can't use the same approach. And of course that isn't how we learn physics. We don't learn physics by, by looking at lots of examples, we learn physics by learning abstract principles, then learning how to apply those abstract principles to experiments and figuring, you know, validating which parts of our knowledge is correct and which isn't. So I'm quite skeptical that success in one part of AI instantly means we can solve nuclear with it or solve any aspect of climate change with it.

00:23:36:21 - 00:23:57:08

Nathan Myhrvold

But look, if you want to make a limerick and then translate that limerick into the voice of a pirate or iambic pentameter. my God. GB And the Bing search. And that's the way to go. Okay, I can do it better than I can do it. But that doesn't mean that suddenly all of our problems can be put there.

00:23:57:10 - 00:24:28:15

Nathan Myhrvold

It's certainly will be part of the mix. But for almost any energy problem, it will be computing advances in doing highly mathematical things like modeling the physics inside a reactor or modeling the combustion inside a more efficient engine or turbine or things of that sort. That is the ways that computing will help climate change in the foreseeable future.

00:24:28:17 - 00:24:32:07

Nathan Myhrvold

Someday, in the distant future, who knows?

00:24:32:09 - 00:24:58:05

Chris Keefer

There's data out of MIT looking at overnight construction costs of nuclear, and that the nuclear steam supply system is often only 20 30% of the overall cost. It sounds like a lot of the innovation has to be happening in areas as routine and boring as as the construction, those sorts of innovations. And I think that's probably an example of how A.I. is not going to, you know, swing to the rescue and solve all of those construct ability issues.

00:24:58:07 - 00:25:25:02

Nathan Myhrvold

Yeah, it's funny when you look at the cost of a reactor, particularly a large reactor that you're building entirely from scratch, you'd expect uranium that's going to be like our big cost item. No, it's cement. There's a lot less uranium than there is cement. But so but in the cement is way cheaper per pound. But boy, there's a lot of it.

00:25:25:04 - 00:25:55:11

Nathan Myhrvold

And that's why we're looking at it currently. And I think the future of nuclear is going to be in part repurposing facilities that had coal or other power plants because you already have all the wires running there. You've got all of the electrical connection to the grid already there. You've got most of the concrete that you need. You still have to make your we call the nuclear island where the the nuclear stuff goes.

00:25:55:13 - 00:26:36:00

Nathan Myhrvold

And you're also you're right that the ability to build things efficiently and effectively is a key skill here. Nuclear plants have historically been treated as extremely complicated, one off construction projects, and those are way less efficient than something that you build many of. And so if you look at modern airplanes or trains or automobiles or any other very complicated large system, those have a huge amount of upfront engineering costs.

00:26:36:00 - 00:27:03:14

Nathan Myhrvold

But then they do that to make a much more efficient system downstream. And we've never had that economics working in nuclear the way we need it to. And I think our next the next episode of Nuclear for the World has got to be based on more efficient manufacturing and construction of the plant on a with some of that being on site and some of it being in factories.

00:27:03:16 - 00:27:26:01

Chris Keefer

So you now have, I think, more than a decade behind the helm to some degree at TerraPower. Lots of hands in that time. I'm sure some of that hope has been frustrated by by events such as the the export controls on the technology to China. But what's giving you hope looking forward when it comes to innovation in the nuclear sector?

00:27:26:03 - 00:27:52:12

Nathan Myhrvold

Well, I mean, the biggest thing is what you had mentioned earlier, that on both sides of the aisle in the United States, there is very strong support for nuclear, perhaps not as strong and as widespread a rollout as as we're going to need. But people have realized that nuclear has got to be part of the solution. And people in power that is have realized that.

00:27:52:14 - 00:28:35:14

Nathan Myhrvold

And I think that's a huge reason to be optimistic both TerraPower and other companies are making lots of progress on innovative designs. Characteristically, we've all chosen different technologies, different design points, which is great. You even have people working on nuclear fusion, which is an interesting technology. I'm a big fan of future of fusion working, but there's a giant difference between a technology that already works and powers most of the country of France and, you know, 15% of the United States.

00:28:35:14 - 00:28:59:09

Nathan Myhrvold

It works at enormous scale versus something that's never once worked. But we will get it to work someday. It's just it's extremely hard. You know, we figured out how to make fusion work super well for a millisecond in a bomb. And of course, the sun without anyone designing it. The sun figured out how to do it just great.

00:28:59:09 - 00:29:25:15

Nathan Myhrvold

But it helps it. It's 93 million miles away, so you can't put that in someone's backyard. We'll see how fusion goes. But I'm still encouraged by the fact that there are people who are trying to solve problems like that and trying to solve them in private companies, as well as big national labs. So even though it's not ready for prime time, it's encouraging.

00:29:25:17 - 00:29:59:16

Nathan Myhrvold

I'm also encouraged by all of the other interest that's gone into revamping our energy system, whether it's in renewables or other things. You know, I'm a fan of renewables also. You just have to recognize that the way we use electricity and the way the grid is currently structured, having baseload power that's clean is absolutely vital. You know, building out wind plants that every time you build out the wind plant, you have to add an equal amount of capacity.

00:29:59:16 - 00:30:06:00

Nathan Myhrvold

And natural gas isn't really going to solve our crisis.

00:30:06:02 - 00:30:27:03

Chris Keefer

What do you view as the ultimate or the or the best sort of synergy between institutions in order to deliver on innovation? Obviously, early days of nuclear, we had the P.W. are scaled up from a submarine users to shipping. Port Rickover played a major role there, a strong personality. We always tell a history of of great man theory of history.

00:30:27:05 - 00:30:37:03

Chris Keefer

There's more to it than that. How do you think our current sort of innovation environment compares to to the glory days of the 1950s and sixties?

00:30:37:05 - 00:31:12:10

Nathan Myhrvold

Well, look at the film. Oppenheimer is grossed $1,000,000,000 worldwide. I think if you'd told Oppenheimer that during his lifetime and say, Hey, it's going to be tough going for a while, but you're a biopic on you will be $1,000,000,000. Hey, that project, the Manhattan Project, controversial because its outcome was destructive, but that was the smartest set of people that ever got together in under one project in the history of mankind in nothing.

00:31:12:10 - 00:31:39:02

Nathan Myhrvold

No company will ever match that because you have the crazy imperative of this insane war, you know, probably a more clear delineation of good guy versus bad guys than ever before. And as they make the point in the the the movie Hitler's own biases and the Nazi isms biases, you know, motivated a huge number of the scientists involved.

00:31:39:02 - 00:32:26:16

Nathan Myhrvold

They were Jewish. They'd left Europe being persecuted and they didn't want the Nazis to win. So you'll never beat that again. So far as I know, unless humanity is really pushed to the edge. Let's hope that doesn't happen. And then the story of both the nuclear Navy and the commercial. Nuclear is also extraordinary. So without Rickover and that combination of a can do attitude and all just a lot of brainpower, but also a lot of effectiveness and efficiency, well, you know, who knows whether we would have commercial nuclear power today in the world.

00:32:26:18 - 00:32:57:01

Nathan Myhrvold

So I think that was a fantastic thing that it occurred. And again, very hard to replicate that there was, although the National Emergency in the 1950s was not the same as the the dire straits we were in for the Manhattan Project, Rickover had a huge ability to say, look, this is important. We're competing with the Russians. The Cold War is upon us.

00:32:57:03 - 00:33:28:23

Nathan Myhrvold

We need to revamp the Navy. It that drive is also very hard to imagine in contemporary society. I really don't want us to go into a situation that is so dire that we need that again. But you can make lots of progress, even if you don't have the threat of losing World War Two or the threat of losing the Cold War over your head.

00:33:29:01 - 00:33:58:14

Nathan Myhrvold

And the computing industry is a great example of that. That's one where without there being a top down command, without there being a national emergency, without there being infinite amounts of government money, something really incredible happened and government was still important. You know, the DARPA, the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, put tons of research money into computer science very early on.

00:33:58:14 - 00:34:30:11

Nathan Myhrvold

That was very helpful in not saying government was not involved. But progress doesn't always occur from the one secret crazy project in the New Mexico desert or the tyrannical admiral trying to revamp the Navy's propulsion and the world's power. Those are were amazing episodes and we need to learn from them. But that isn't the only way to have innovation, and that's what the computing industry has shown us.

00:34:30:12 - 00:34:50:12

Nathan Myhrvold

That's what the new AI industry has shown us. It wasn't even all the rich companies that succeeded in making it. It was a team of people at Openai that at the time they had 40 employees when they they really got to. The point is that now we're working, we have to double down.

00:34:50:14 - 00:35:16:22

Chris Keefer

Well, we're in it. We're in different times. You know, people have been faulted for characterizing moments like these as nuclear renaissance as before. So I think there's a more cautious language being used. But, you know, referring back to that time of Oppenheimer and Rick over the world's brightest minds were going into trying to solve this problem. And I think there's an excitement in the air now where a lot of young people are looking towards nuclear, are excited by it, excited to make their contribution.

00:35:17:00 - 00:35:28:10

Chris Keefer

What advice would you have to to young people wanting to tackle the climate crisis using nuclear? And we're interested in innovation. If you and just wrap this all up.

00:35:28:12 - 00:36:09:20

Nathan Myhrvold

The way we the way mankind has always gotten out of crises is through ideas, politics, warfare, things like that. At best, those protect the ideas that you have and they they protect your freedom and your ability to go to go capitalize on it. But it's ideas that matter, you know, whether it was our hunter gatherer ancestors learning about agriculture and inventing agriculture or any of the other technological innovations, whenever we're really stuck, we think our way out of it.

00:36:09:22 - 00:36:45:06

Nathan Myhrvold

It's a not a popular perspective with some environmentalists who think that technology is the root of all evil. But every aspect of the way this is being our interview is being done remotely, it's being recorded, it's playing back again. Every aspect of our lives has been touched with us thinking through it. The only way we're going to solve the climate crisis is by rolling up our sleeves and using our best ideas and our best knowledge to figure out a way forward.

00:36:45:07 - 00:37:13:22

Nathan Myhrvold

And nuclear engineering is absolutely one of those things. It's not the only thing. I mean, better batteries are also great and there's a ton of other areas in engineering, but my chairman of TerraPower, Bill Gates, is fond of saying We just need a few more miracles. And there are some folks who don't like that because they want to say, no, we've got everything we need now because they're afraid of saying we need miracles.

00:37:14:00 - 00:37:41:07

Nathan Myhrvold

But if the progress in technology or medicine or almost any other part of life shows us we can go and create miracles. It takes lots of effort, takes some money, it takes people dedicating their lives to trying to go do it. But if you do, you can make huge inroads, whether it's against cancer or heart disease or against the climate crisis.

00:37:41:09 - 00:37:55:10

Chris Keefer

Okay. Well, Nathan, thank you so much for making time out of your schedule. Appreciate you coming on. Decouple and coming remotely like this to the cup. Tony in Dubai. I'm sure people here would love to get to meet you, shake your hand, ask more questions, but maybe we'll have you back for a follow up.

00:37:55:12 - 00:37:56:17

Nathan Myhrvold

Okay Great.

00:37:56:18 - 00:38:02:16

Chris Keefer

All right, Nathan, thanks so much. Bye. Stay on the line for just a second. You're 99% uploaded, but.