Renewable Nuclear: All about Breeder Reactors

00:00:02:18 - 00:00:23:19

Chris Keefer

Welcome back to the podcast Decouple. Of course. And we are back with Nick Touran, for a triumphant second visit, I think in, under a month. Nick, I realized how much I missed you after our sort of two year hiatus. yeah. Really enjoy having you on, man. the nuclear historian hat is, is one that, I like, I like seeing here on decouple.

00:00:23:19 - 00:00:25:01

Chris Keefer

So thanks for making the time. Yeah.

00:00:25:01 - 00:00:29:19

Nick Touran

No, thanks. So, absolutely. Always a great pleasure. Happy to be here.

00:00:29:21 - 00:01:01:01

Chris Keefer

Okay, so, you know, we've been, chatting a little bit, you know, I had, I had no rhetoric on recently. We were talking about process heat, and it led to a discussion that was pretty heavy on, on gas, gas cooled reactors. I have been wanting to tug on the thread of breeders. I have a friend, Nate Hagans, who's a bit of a nuclear skeptic, and he asked all kinds of wacky questions, like, what if there was like, electromagnetic frequency pulse, and every reactor on Earth was, you know, all their safety systems were scrambled.

00:01:01:01 - 00:01:17:01

Chris Keefer

He asked these kind of questions that I'm not used to really dealing with, because in my advocacy, we've even moved past a lot of the, you know, radiation fear mongering. We're solidly into questions of, of economics and speed of deployment, which I think the antis, you know, that's that's a fair ground for us to be responding on.

00:01:17:05 - 00:01:31:09

Chris Keefer

But, you know, one issue that comes up and I know you've dealt with it on your blog is, you know, how much if we did go as nuclear as some of the nuclear advocates want us to, again, whether that's, achievable in terms of construct ability and everything, we'll leave that aside. Would there be enough uranium?

00:01:31:09 - 00:01:53:04

Chris Keefer

And, of course, that leads into this this, breeder question. And I guess historically, that's why, we even talk about, or started talking about, you know, this miracle of a machine that can produce more, fuel than it consumes. So I've been curious about that. I've been guilty of not tugging on these threads. so I wanted to have you on for an episode on breeders.

00:01:53:06 - 00:02:10:02

Chris Keefer

so. Yeah, I know that's, something that I think you're pretty passionate about. And again, as the nuclear historian, you know, what's new is all that seems in, in nuclear, particularly kind of in the so-called advanced side. so, yeah, I'm curious about, about the whole topic. So I don't know where you want to jump.

00:02:10:03 - 00:02:13:04

Chris Keefer

Okay. If we want to go back in history, you take a yes.

00:02:13:05 - 00:02:32:13

Nick Touran

No, I, I guess we better just start at the beginning, which, we've talked about a little bit before, but it's worth going over again, I think. And, Yeah, at the, at the very beginning in the, in the Manhattan Project, after Hanford B came online, the team who had designed and built Hanford B started thinking about the future.

00:02:32:13 - 00:03:02:00

Nick Touran

What are we going to do with this amazing power source going forward? How do you do civilian power? And at the time, they really were under the basically false impression that there was just a few thousand tons of uranium ore on the planet, and they really thought it was a very limited resource. And so they thought, well, the only possible way to make any meaningful amount of civilian power from this technology is to use a breeder technology, which they had realized was possible back in 1942 before Cpf1 turned on.

00:03:02:02 - 00:03:21:10

Nick Touran

but so they a lot of the early concepts in the early thinking were really about breeder reactor is how do we get breeders? And that was targeting civilian power because of this perception that uranium was very, rare. And that's why, I mean, one of the first, the first reactor that ever made a certain amount of electricity, everyone lit up those for light bulbs.

00:03:21:10 - 00:03:42:06

Nick Touran

That was a breeder reactor because they were trying to develop it again for civilian power. That was, it turned out, just fast forwarding. In the mid and late 50s, we discovered vast quantities of uranium ore, all around the world, in the American West, for instance, in many other places. And so pressure on uranium are really reduced.

00:03:42:06 - 00:04:02:01

Nick Touran

And it was okay to be much less efficient than you can be with breeders and make a significant amount of civilian power. And so it turned out, breeders were a they're a bit challenging to build and operate. They have complications. And so it was okay and appropriate to just build a fleet of non breeder reactors, which is what we've done today.

00:04:02:07 - 00:04:25:08

Nick Touran

And and so and that's that's been okay. We haven't really run low on uranium yet. But I mean we only make 4% of the world's primary energy right now. And so it's still a concern. So when you start saying like, okay, well let's make 50% of the world's primary energy, now you can start saying, okay, at some point, uranium ores will become a little bit depleted, and we're going to have to deal with increasing uranium prices.

00:04:25:08 - 00:04:41:19

Nick Touran

And at that point, reading reactors all of a sudden become interesting again. And so looking at a large scale expansion of nuclear really makes breeder reactors a necessary and important topic to to develop and talk about. That's the that's kind of the initial cut.

00:04:41:21 - 00:05:08:06

Chris Keefer

Yeah. No, that's that's a great sort of backgrounder. yeah. I mean, one of the selling points of nuclear is, you know, that there's this high capital cost, but the fuel costs are so low. were prices for uranium, you know, very high early on. And and how inefficient, our, our light water technologies and I guess, or heavy water technologies as well when it comes to actual fuel utilization and, and compared to what's possible, in a, in a breeder.

00:05:08:08 - 00:05:27:04

Nick Touran

So yeah, fuel cost was significant in the beginning. I mean, it was it was all in the early days. It was all owned by you couldn't even own nuclear fuel. You only could lease it from the US government. That's in the US at least, and similar in other places. I mean, it was extremely expensive and it was a major impact on economics.

00:05:27:07 - 00:05:45:21

Nick Touran

That's kind of changed. I mean, since we've gotten we found more uranium now, large fleets. I mean, we heard, at one point the French fleet was saying uranium prices like 5% of their total cost. It was like basically not trivial, but and it's higher than that in some places. And then, I mean, and it's been increasing more recently.

00:05:45:21 - 00:06:08:11

Nick Touran

So it's but anyway, it's certainly not the majority of the costs like for a, for a fossil type plant, which is all fuel cost. in general we use we get about 1% of the total energy out of the mined resource. So if you look at the whole fuel cycle, you dig up a bunch of uranium, you then enrich it, and you get all these tails, and then you take that enriched part and you burn maybe 5% of the enriched part.

00:06:08:11 - 00:06:27:18

Nick Touran

But if you include the tails, you've only really gotten about 1% of the total energy out of the stuff that you pulled out of the dirt. Whereas if you do go ahead and recycle and use breeder reactors, you can take all that uranium 238 or thorium 232 if you're using thorium, which no one's doing. But anyway, and you can get like 90% of the total energy out, there's out.

00:06:27:18 - 00:06:51:13

Nick Touran

You'll never get 100% because there are process losses. When you do recycle, you're going to have some streams or you didn't get every single actinide back into the reactor. So 90% is kind of a reasonable goal. That's definitely achievable with recycling. but yeah, we get about 1%, maybe a little bit less, in the current fleet. And that's similar for, for LWR as well as cantus.

00:06:51:15 - 00:07:14:16

Chris Keefer

So, you know, another rationale you hear for breeders is that it can minimize, nuclear waste, I guess, from its own, power production, but also potentially by consuming the waste of, other reactors. You mentioned those tailings, and that seems like, you know, some low hanging fruit of U-238 to turn into you. 239 talk us through a little bit about that, because that's certainly a, you know, the waste side.

00:07:14:16 - 00:07:17:04

Chris Keefer

It seems to be a big part of the rationale.

00:07:17:06 - 00:07:37:17

Nick Touran

Yeah. This is a major sort of interesting thing that you can do, if especially fast neutron reactors. So, there's two there's kind of two big waste to waste streams. There's the tailings from the enrichment plant, which are just uranium 238. It's not high level nuclear waste. it's a low level industrial waste, certainly is, you know, problematic.

00:07:37:22 - 00:07:42:22

Nick Touran

It's chemically toxic, for one thing. And we know that stuff. And.

00:07:43:00 - 00:07:46:01

Chris Keefer

Yeah, it's toxicity. Okay.

00:07:46:03 - 00:08:20:09

Nick Touran

yeah. And I don't think it's quite as neurotoxic as lead, but, I'm not 100% sure on that. But yeah, I mean, think of it like lead. because of the radiation has a, it's mildly radioactive as a 4 billion year half life. So it decays very slowly, meaning it's not shooting out energy very fast. But anyway, so that's one way stream and yes, through breeding by taking that and load it into a breeder reactor, converting that into plutonium 239 and then and then fission in the plutonium 239 you can turn that sort of industrial waste resource into a vast amount of energy, which is exciting and interesting.

00:08:20:11 - 00:08:40:07

Nick Touran

but it's not nearly as interesting as the other. The other part of it, which is to take spent nuclear fuel, highly radioactive, high level waste out of a light water reactor, for instance, and then recycle that back into a fast neutron reactor. Now something really interesting happens. Not only can you get more energy out, you got 5% first go around and you can get more and more.

00:08:40:09 - 00:09:06:02

Nick Touran

But a lot of the really long lived parts of nuclear waste, photonic, americium, neptunium, curium, those are heavy nuclides. Those are the uranium didn't split sometimes. And neutron goes into uranium atom and it becomes the next thing up. And it just kind of goes to these very large actinides. We call them transuranic or minor actinides. And those are the dominant heat source in the long term nuclear waste repository design.

00:09:06:02 - 00:09:27:03

Nick Touran

Those are the 100,000 year, the 10,000 year nuclides and a fast neutron. It comes along and hits those. It can directly fission them. and so you can actually fission those minor actinides trends or to get more energy out of those. And when you do that, you change them into fission products, which only have, you know, up to a 500 year half life.

00:09:27:03 - 00:09:53:03

Nick Touran

And so the repository, the, the, the demands on the repository become much more practical. Like, you, you don't have to design a repository that's going to last for 10,000 or 100,000 or 1 million years. You only need one that's going to last 500 or 1000, because you're new clouds are detained much faster. And so this is this sort of partitioning and transmutation concept, where you can really reduce the overall radio toxicity versus time of nuclear waste itself by directly splitting it.

00:09:53:03 - 00:10:03:04

Nick Touran

That's that's intriguing to people. It kind of sounds like we're just solving the nuclear waste problem. And so that's really, inspired a lot of interest in, in fast reactors.

00:10:03:06 - 00:10:25:02

Chris Keefer

Not to go too off track, but I've seen some research. I think it's Canadian, you know, because we have these insane or grades up in the Athabaskan basin, I think the world average is probably under 1%. uranium and the ore and we get up to 20%, and there's even pockets within those, those areas which are like 60, 70% pure uranium in, in, in the Athabaskan region.

00:10:25:02 - 00:10:49:00

Chris Keefer

So there's some analysis of looking at, you know, putting spent fuel back underground and at what point it reaches a similar level of radioactivity, because it's I think after 600 years, it's mostly driven by transuranic decay very slowly and are basically just giving off alphas. and that's an interesting way to think about sort of, you know, this circular economy, if you will, or a circular waste stream of kind of returning it to, to the land.

00:10:49:01 - 00:11:06:02

Chris Keefer

but but I don't want to jump off too much on, on that trend. And you describe sort of two potential, you know, enormous sources of fuel, the tailings versus the spent, waste, which is highly radioactive. One of those sounds a lot easier to handle. Do you feel like the discourse. Because waste has been made into such a boogeyman?

00:11:06:04 - 00:11:30:21

Chris Keefer

the focus has been maybe too much on. Well, let's let's reprocess, you know, spent fuel from from our late water fleets, and not enough on the trans urine or on the, the tailings. I know Edward Teller would walk around these areas where there tons of, you know, U-238, tailings, and from the enrichment process and say, hey, man, we've got gazillions of years of nuclear fuel here.

00:11:30:23 - 00:11:58:08

Nick Touran

Yeah. I mean, it's kind of hard to do. It's hard to get the energy out of the tailings of the U-238 tailings without doing that, the high radiation recycling. There's some ways you can talk about doing it with like deep burn ones through cycles, but those are in development, require very fancy materials. The traditional idea is you load it up in the fast reactor, you build up some plutonium, and then you move it into the chemical plant that does hot chemistry on it.

00:11:58:08 - 00:12:20:11

Nick Touran

It melts it down, separates it into its constituents, and then re fabricates new fuel, very radioactive. So this whole process is under extreme high level waste radiation, constraints. And so you really can't get you can't access the energy without doing, without doing the recycling that you would do with the light water reactors fuel anyway. So they aren't super decoupled.

00:12:20:11 - 00:12:41:21

Nick Touran

I mean, you really need to have, a recycling plant like that up and running in order to fully utilize, that the tailings. So I don't think you could just say like, oh, let's just, grab the tailings and breed off of that, without without being able to do the light water recycling as well. Again, except in the exception of the once the deep burn once through cycle.

00:12:41:23 - 00:13:04:18

Chris Keefer

I was just looking into this, prepping for this interview, looking at the Phenix and Super Phenix program in France. And interesting how it sounds like, you know, the original rationale for breeders was that perceived shortage in the 50s. but I think the OPEC crisis trauma was so deep in France, and maybe they were thinking about being cut off from their African colonies, in terms of that source of uranium that they renewed interest in breeders at that time.

00:13:04:19 - 00:13:23:18

Chris Keefer

And I may have misread this, but they were, I was reading some documents which are saying that, you know, if they just had 20 breeder reactors, they could make enough fuel for their light water fleet. So a breeder is not just about running a reactor kind of forever, because it makes more than it produces, but also providing fuel potentially for, for their their traditional light water fleet.

00:13:23:19 - 00:13:27:06

Chris Keefer

So they have that synergistic, synergistic possibility.

00:13:27:07 - 00:13:51:06

Nick Touran

Yes. That's that's what I would kind of call the traditional fuel cycle view with breeder reactors. And many countries have considered exactly that. It's sort of been acknowledged that, okay, the fast breeder reactors with somewhat exotic coolant and an extra loop, are are complicated. They're generally considered more expensive to build and operate than like a light water reactor, which it's with its nice, simple water coolant.

00:13:51:08 - 00:14:13:00

Nick Touran

and so what people imagine is exactly what you described, a fleet of light water reactors, and then a certain number, a smaller number of fast reactors providing fuel cycle services, as they call it. And that would be. Yeah, you take the waste out of the light water reactors, you're fabricate it, put it into the fast reactors. You do that transmutation to make the waste last longer, and you also do breeding.

00:14:13:00 - 00:14:34:16

Nick Touran

You breed additional fissile material, and then you pass that back into the recycling plant. And then that plant can be fabricating fuel for the light water reactor fleet and for the reader reactors. And so you get this situation where that, that, those fast reactors are really extending the uranium resources dramatically. a lot more than they can do without reading reactors.

00:14:34:16 - 00:15:01:03

Nick Touran

I mean, you go from that 1% to the 90%, and you still operate a bunch of light water reactors because they're relatively reliable and easy to operate. But you just fuel them with this bread fuel amplified by a smaller fleet of, of breeder reactors. And yeah, the number it depends, you know, what type of breeder you have. Well, there's different conversion or breeding ratios that say how much plutonium you get versus how much you put in.

00:15:01:03 - 00:15:20:14

Nick Touran

And so you can have like a ISO breeder, which just makes the same amount that just you put in one, plutonium and you get one out, or you can have like the big breeders with big breeder, breeding ratios where you get 20% or 30% more fuel out every time you do it. And depending on which one of those you do that will determine how many breeder reactor is.

00:15:20:14 - 00:15:40:14

Nick Touran

You need to have to service a whole fleet. And yeah, that's that's been the plan. I mean, France had that plan. The United States had that plan with our clinch River program, which was a massive program. And, pretty much the Russians have a similar plan with their beavers. They want to do a fleet of beavers with a few burn fast reactors providing fuel cycle services.

00:15:40:14 - 00:15:43:03

Nick Touran

So, yeah, that's that's the plan.

00:15:43:05 - 00:16:03:23

Chris Keefer

Okay, so you said it's the plan. And listen, this virtuous cycle sounds pretty amazing. it also sounds incredibly complex in terms of what I'm guessing, are they kind of the hot cells to do this work, the chemistry. And I guess, some of the concerns are, proliferation actually, led to this being squished a bit by, Jimmy Carter in terms of, the, I believe the one, two, three agreements.

00:16:03:23 - 00:16:23:12

Chris Keefer

Could you go a little bit, a little bit into that? And then I think we'll talk about why, if the dream is so amazing, it hasn't really materialized. or I'd just like to know how far it has gone in, in certain countries. And it seems like Russia's the most advanced, with really the only commercially operating, fast reactors in the form of, of again, that in series of sodium, fast reactor.

00:16:23:14 - 00:16:45:03

Nick Touran

Yeah. So yeah, I mean, you're you're absolutely right. There are concerns and issues. And when we in the United States, when we decided, okay, we're going to dedicate our full industrial resources to the development of the breeder reactor in 1968 or so, and the entire Atomic Energy Commission shifted all of its resources to develop this clinch River breeder to make this kind of thing happen.

00:16:45:05 - 00:17:12:18

Nick Touran

Well, yeah. The biggest concern that came up was the one you mentioned, which is a proliferation concern, where if you are if you do have a facility that can take nuclear fuel and melt it down and separated into its different elements, and then you'll have one batch of that which is plutonium separated plutonium. And if somebody comes in there and grabs that, that's weapons usable plutonium, even if it's slightly, you know, if the if there's the isotopic, you don't have to be perfect for plutonium to be weapons usable.

00:17:12:18 - 00:17:27:17

Nick Touran

And so there's this huge concern that, well, I mean, obviously the United States already has weapons, so who cares? But if we go and do this and say, this is our energy future, then that's going to inspire other countries who are going to want to go recycle. And so let's just not do it at all as an example.

00:17:27:17 - 00:17:47:03

Nick Touran

And then we'll be able to say, oh no, you don't need reprocess. Seem to have a, an energy future. And so we that really became the major political opposition to the concept of breeding. people called it that plutonium economy. and that really I mean, that took a lot of the, the wind out of that particular program in the United States.

00:17:47:03 - 00:18:10:19

Nick Touran

And similar things happened elsewhere. I mean, in France. yeah. Phenix was built and operated well at Super Phenix, which is four times bigger, a gigawatt scale sodium cooled reactor, had unbelievable opposition. 60,000 people protesting in the street. I mean, it was the it was the heyday of anti-nuclear ism at that point. It was extremely unpopular. And there were technical challenges as well.

00:18:10:19 - 00:18:36:12

Nick Touran

And those things came together and basically shut down fast reactor programs basically around the world. Russia is the exception. I mean, they they have maintained their operation of sodium cooled fast reactors throughout. I mean, since the beginning. I think their first one was in the mid 50s, and they've maintained operating fast reactors ever since. And they now, have the only commercial operating sodium cooled fast reactors.

00:18:36:18 - 00:18:47:03

Nick Touran

And but again, their plan is still they don't necessarily plan on just doing all breeder reactors. They plan on using a few of those to provide fuel cycle services for the v r LWR fleet.

00:18:47:03 - 00:18:56:14

Chris Keefer

So so they plan on it. I mean, have they done it yet? Has this dream, this virtuous cycle, materialized yet? They. Yeah, it's been demonstrated or it's still theoretical.

00:18:56:16 - 00:19:17:14

Nick Touran

They I think they just recently load it up, recycled MOX fuel into the vans that came from AVR. So it's been like token demonstrated like it's not really up and and running. in full swing. Certainly. they don't have enough fast reactors to do it in full swing anyway. But so yeah, it's it's certainly conceptually proven.

00:19:17:14 - 00:19:37:04

Nick Touran

It's very it's like clear that it's possible there's no major technical thing in the way that needs to be demonstrated. It's just, I mean, another thing that should be said is like, it's expensive. if you take if you are taking highly radioactive material and melting it down and separate it to its constituents, it's a it's not just a hot cell.

00:19:37:04 - 00:20:00:01

Nick Touran

It's like a hot cell factory, like a huge hot cell. there's a small example in Idaho that you can take a tour of, very expensive, complex remote machinery doing complex chemistry and fabrication. And so the, the cost of that is, is just not very high. It's much, much cheaper to just go mine cheap uranium and rich it, fabricate it no radiation.

00:20:00:01 - 00:20:24:09

Nick Touran

And then, run it in the reactor and then put it in the dry cask, like, that's cheap, relatively cheap. If you put in this other the recycling RI fabrication step more than doubles the total cost of fuel. And so as long as uranium is plentiful and cheap, there's really no economic reason to do the recycling. The waste thing is cool, but it's like, not essential.

00:20:24:09 - 00:20:46:07

Nick Touran

I mean, the the waste repositories that people are designing are perfectly capable of handling non transmuted, longer lived waste. And so that's an okay option. And until uranium becomes very expensive because it gets rare or whatever. the economics of recycling just don't really work out. So that's those are the two major kind of concerns. That's why we aren't seeing it.

00:20:46:09 - 00:21:01:01

Nick Touran

A lot of people say, oh, we should be recycling all the time because it's more efficient. It's like, well, do we need to double the cost of nuclear fuel right now? Is that what the nuclear industry needs? Like? Probably not. Like we might want to ramp it up demand first.

00:21:01:03 - 00:21:25:20

Chris Keefer

And it's interesting. like just when we talk about economic cost and it's all abstracted into, you know, monetary instruments and, you know, imagine tokens of value like, dollars and euros, but like what I see pragmatically in the trenches advocating for nuclear, working with labor or working, you know, consulting with government, etc. is, you know, monetary research is not the only thing human resources are a major, major constraint.

00:21:25:20 - 00:21:52:12

Chris Keefer

Like here in Ontario. We're talking about running 4 or 5 refurbishment processes simultaneously, like nationally and internationally, building a bunch of summers, potentially building a bunch of new large reactors. you know, we've got a pretty hot supply chain and a decent number of nuclear professionals, but imagining, you know, just the human resources that that ultimate currency, I think that that makes the whole thing work until our AI, you know, driven robots can sort of do all the work for us.

00:21:52:14 - 00:22:13:21

Chris Keefer

that that's, that's a big constraint. so we've talked a bit about the political barriers, the proliferation barriers, some of the economic barriers. What about the technical barriers, like what's been the performance? and I guess we're talking basically exclusively about sodium, although I guess there's a bit of lead, but, you know, to not complicate it, let's let's focus on the, the operational experience of, sodium fast reactor.

00:22:13:23 - 00:22:45:02

Nick Touran

Okay. Yeah. And yeah, there's a kind of two, there's the reactor performance and then there's the recycling and prefabrication performance. So let's focus on reactor performance. It's been mixed. I mean, the you know, there's about 500 reactor years of experience with sodium cooled reactors. The vast majority of them have been fast neutron reactors with no moderator. There have been two, sodium cooled, three sorry, four reactors, four sodium cooled reactors that had a moderator, two for submarines, two for power.

00:22:45:02 - 00:23:13:08

Nick Touran

But those are kind of niche. Those are those sodium graphite reactors. but yeah, overall, many countries US, Russia, France, UK, Germany, Japan, Italy, India, China have all built and operated sodium cooled fast reactors. The first one, well, it wasn't sodium. The first liquid metal cooled reactor was the clementine in the United States, which was started up in like 1946 that formed the basis of liquid metal cooling.

00:23:13:10 - 00:23:36:18

Nick Touran

everyone in the early 50s was cooled with Nak, sodium, potassium, you technic. So you just mix the two metals and it ends up, melting at a much lower temperature. So you don't have to keep it as hot. a Fermi one. I mean, there's a bunch of reactors. Let's start with some bad experiences. I mean, everyone did demonstrate breeding as a concept, so we knew that we could actually breed, which is great.

00:23:36:18 - 00:23:38:01

Chris Keefer

This was the four light bulbs.

00:23:38:03 - 00:23:56:18

Nick Touran

Yeah, yeah. The four light bulb reactor in Idaho. Great museum in Idaho. Definitely recommend going. It's only open in the summer, I think. But, anyway, that reactor operated okay. It did have a core melt. It melted of its whole core. Melted as small as, like a basketball sized core. they suffered a car melt for various reasons.

00:23:56:18 - 00:24:24:14

Nick Touran

They recovered it. They pulled it out and put a new core in. Fermi one was a big effort by 23 utilities. As I was saying last time, to to build a commercial reactor in Detroit. And this is the we almost lost Detroit reactor. They also suffered they had very poor operational experience, lots of problems, lots of leaks, lots of issues just dealing with I mean, sodium is is not a coolant that people have dealt with nearly as much, especially back then.

00:24:24:14 - 00:24:45:01

Nick Touran

And so just figuring out how to keep everything sealed and keep air out and have leak detection. And if you have a sodium water steam generator, heat exchanger and there's a leak, you have to be able to detect that leak quickly and put that to about a commission. And so there's all sorts of challenges just plumbing and exchanging heat with this kind of a coolant.

00:24:45:03 - 00:25:20:22

Nick Touran

and so that that had a bad experience. There have been good experiences too. I mean, ever ev2, which is also a relatively small experimental reactor, operated great. It was it was a beautiful reactor. It was the first one to demonstrate passive safety, which we all sort of know and love as the foundation of Gen four type safety systems, where they did this amazing test in 1986, where they just, they invited a bunch of people out and they did a test or they, they just turned off the primary pump and did not insert any control rods in the reactor with its passive safety, went down to really low power and cooled itself.

00:25:20:22 - 00:25:28:12

Chris Keefer

This is before after Chernobyl. Because because you hear about, like, the sort of cowboy ism of the Chernobyl accident, you're like, man, it seems like a lot of people are doing this time to time.

00:25:28:12 - 00:25:46:00

Nick Touran

It was it was literally two weeks before Chernobyl. Wow. So, I mean, it was this great success and everybody was, it was much more carefully done. I mean, it was very well analyzed. And everyone, they had their predictions and they anyway, and they did another test where they shut down the, the heat removal system as well.

00:25:46:00 - 00:26:00:23

Nick Touran

And it did the same thing. But, it was basically a revolutionary safety performance, but no one ever heard of it because Chernobyl happened two weeks later. And so the the news of this great safety of a nuclear reactor got basically washed out. but yeah, that one didn't.

00:26:01:03 - 00:26:18:23

Chris Keefer

So we hear we hear about that, that passive safety. But it sounds like there's the problem with, sodium fires. you're, I think often separated by a couple loops. but you end up having a water interface at some point where there's the potential for some, I guess, mechanical breakage and, and, sodium and water are exciting.

00:26:18:23 - 00:26:21:00

Chris Keefer

I remember that from chemistry class.

00:26:21:02 - 00:26:43:06

Nick Touran

Yeah, it's less exciting if there's no air, but, yeah, I mean, like, it's certainly an exothermic reaction. It's a it's basically considered an operational experience these days. Like we have dealt with sodium fires for many years. All, most of these reactors have had dozens of small sodium leaks. And, there's inverted cells. I mean, the concrete there's a there's a sodium concrete reaction as well.

00:26:43:06 - 00:27:08:19

Nick Touran

So like, the concrete is lined with, with liners that prevent that. There's inert, double walled pipes. There's leak detection, acoustic leak detection, different ways to isolate it. There's sodium fire protection system. So it's it's kind of like a thing like you can deal with a sodium fires to a degree. whether or not that's that, it's whether or not it's going to be reliable and fleet mode is to be determined.

00:27:08:20 - 00:27:27:12

Nick Touran

We just haven't built enough of them in fleet mode to say that, like, even though there can be a sodium fire, we think we can handle it at a rate that sufficient to get a high capacity factor. That's kind of like up for debate. There certainly are examples where a small sodium leak led to major outages, like at Manju in Japan.

00:27:27:15 - 00:27:47:04

Nick Touran

There was a little thermocouple sticking in a pipe, and it was vibrating in the flow and eventually sprung a leak. And they had a ten year outage just to deal with that sort of small thing off in a secondary loop. And so that that was kind of challenging. And Rickover has a bunch of, kind of classic quotes about using sodium in a submarine.

00:27:47:06 - 00:28:09:15

Nick Touran

always fun to go read those because they did the the Seawolf was the sodium cooled, moderated reactor, where it was beryllium moderated where they were attempting to get high thermal efficiency. and be able to run without, mechanical pumps because you can pump liquid metal with like magnets instead of pumps, which is cool. but boy was it hard.

00:28:09:15 - 00:28:30:14

Nick Touran

I mean, in a, in the confined space of a submarine, it just is not practical. And he kind of ripped into it as they dealt with various maintenance issues. It was just so much easier to send people in to go in and fix little issues that happened with water coolant than with the sodium system. So it's like it's pretty clearly not good for a manned tiny compartment deep under water.

00:28:30:14 - 00:28:43:12

Nick Touran

But that doesn't mean that doesn't necessarily mean it's not good for a terrestrial plant. So anyway, I would say certain fires are a concern, but they aren't a showstopper like we don't. We consider them a thing that we expect and plan for and design for.

00:28:43:14 - 00:29:01:06

Chris Keefer

And you mentioned, you know, trickier. I think we've talked about this in a previous episode, but, a little trickier to maintain than, than water because water is such an amazing shield in terms of refueling and other issues. like what I saw, I like looking at I think it was a Super Phenix. I mean, they had miserable capacity factors.

00:29:01:06 - 00:29:19:06

Chris Keefer

A lot of that was administrative and protest related. And I think in their final years they got up to sort of 90% capacity factors. The Benfleet, I think is it's certainly not as economic as the Beaver fleet. And I think cap factors are kind of 80s. what what explains that. Because I think there is online refueling with a lot of these reactors.

00:29:19:06 - 00:29:23:11

Chris Keefer

So they hypothetically know the.

00:29:23:13 - 00:29:37:19

Nick Touran

The I mean, the refueling is actually more complicated because of what you said. Like with water, you can just open up the vessel ahead and go down in there and you can see how the fuel in, you can go down with cranes and pick it up and move it around. But with sodium you have a sealed system. It has to stay sealed at all times.

00:29:37:19 - 00:29:56:07

Nick Touran

So you when you're moving fuel around and you do, they don't have online refueling. They okay. As far as I know, they've all had manual fuel management roughly. And I mean, Phenix had to refill every two months. But it was a small sort of research reactor. but yeah, you can expect refueling outages every 18 months or so in a typical SFR.

00:29:56:09 - 00:30:16:07

Nick Touran

And they have they basically have like a sealed a really big, complicated, sealed head that rotates. And within there's this big rotating wheel. And then within that wheel there's like other wheels that rotate inside of it, and there's these machines dangling off of them that can kind of like traverse the whole core underneath. And so you can kind of go down there with a computer, right?

00:30:16:07 - 00:30:37:09

Nick Touran

It's opaque. So you can't actually see through sodium like you can with water until you're going down sort of with computers and, and sensors to try to figure out like which, which assembly you're going to pick up. And then you pick it up and you have to transfer it to this. You bolt a thing onto the top of the head, and you pull that assembly up into this cask, and then you can kind of pop that off and move it to some other place.

00:30:37:09 - 00:30:53:20

Nick Touran

So I mean, it's the fuel management field transfer stuff is all way more complicated with sodium than it is with water, which you can just, again, open up, have direct access to and see. And so that's that's one major. I mean, if you're doing a lot of fuel management, it can take a really long time. So that's that's one thing they could explain.

00:30:54:00 - 00:31:16:11

Nick Touran

You know longer outages. But also there's just more equipment. I mean if you have is as you said, there's more loops you have like a primary sodium loop, that primary sodium becomes extremely radioactive and neutrons get absorbed by sodium and become activated. And then you say you don't. And then if you're going to a water heat exchanger, you can handle the chemistry between sodium and water.

00:31:16:12 - 00:31:38:17

Nick Touran

But it's too much to handle chemistry. Plus radiation. So if you have a sodium leak and it starts a fire in a steam generator, you don't want that to also be a radioactive sodium fire. And so they always do an intermediate loop where you have you transfer primary radioactive sodium to secondary non-radioactive sodium. And then that secondary non-radioactive sodium goes to the steam generator.

00:31:38:19 - 00:31:59:20

Nick Touran

And so when you have it, you know, BWR just goes water to turbine, air goes water, water turbine. This goes sodium sodium water, turbine. So there's a third loop and that has more instruments. It has more valves, pumps, things that can go wrong, things that need maintenance. It's just more equipment. So it's additional capital costs, it's additional operations, maintenance.

00:32:00:00 - 00:32:13:15

Nick Touran

And so that thing, that additional loop has been in the literature blamed for like a roughly 20% overall increase in total cost. That's kind of those are the main explanations.

00:32:13:17 - 00:32:35:05

Chris Keefer

And I've heard that there's hope with the again, economies of scale. moving to the b n 1200, I guess it's gone like 365 to 6 to 800 to 1200 that you might start to achieve some economics that are kind of on par with, with, all the light water reactors that those rumors you've heard as well.

00:32:35:07 - 00:32:52:23

Nick Touran

Yeah, I've also I've heard the same thing. And. Yeah, I mean, you'll never find a reactor team that says a reactor just is never going to be economical. They always say, well, if we just do this one thing, it'll then become economical. And so yeah, right now the the, the Russians are basically saying like, yeah, our current being reactors are not going to compete with the Vars on economics.

00:32:52:23 - 00:33:13:00

Nick Touran

But yeah, maybe if we go to 1200, that's when we think breakeven might actually happen. And then they're also saying like well maybe lead will be better. And so they're building a lead cooled reactor as well. And so those are kind of their that's their like fork in the road in terms of, you know, seeing what they can do in terms of improving overall, economic performance.

00:33:13:02 - 00:33:29:02

Nick Touran

So we'll see. I mean, you can never it's it's feasible. It may make sense, but you cannot know those kind of things without building it and operating it for in basically in fleet mode for a couple decades. So it's it's a hard thing to, to verify.

00:33:29:04 - 00:34:05:15

Chris Keefer

So I have build I have this thesis. And again, you know, I'm a non-expert, and often I'm pretty insecure in my opinions, although I, I guess I have strong opinions loosely held, hopefully. but, you know, in terms of just like, you know, what I'm most familiar with looking at Candu development, starting with this kind of Manhattan north, not as big of an investment for for Canada and the European partners as the US made with the Manhattan Project, but a huge mobilization of financial resources, which in turn, you know, also human resources and development of those human resources, iteratively led to, you know, series of reactors that prove the

00:34:05:15 - 00:34:34:12

Chris Keefer

concept of, you know, heavy, heavy water, you know, moderation, you know, moving from a, you know, national power demonstration of 20MW up to a commercial plant that, you know, wasn't all that economical at 200MW to 500 and onwards and onwards. but a process of like 50, 60, 70 years. and, you know, I see and I had this, this tweet, about, you know, reactors that have advanced versus, you know, should probably be what we call advanced reactors.

00:34:34:12 - 00:34:55:13

Chris Keefer

But, you know, I see other other, you know, chemistries and approaches, and I just don't see that they're anywhere near being commercially viable. And, you know, thinking about molten salt reactors, for instance, where the entire sort of operational experience has been with the national labs, where there's been a lot of troubleshooting and like there should be a lot more troubleshooting, and hopefully we can figure it out eventually.

00:34:55:15 - 00:35:18:18

Chris Keefer

But it seems to me naive to think that we can leap from a national lab to a commercial operation, you know, with a with a startup company driving that. And it seems like the sodium fast reactor, experience is illustrative that as well. I mean, the Russians have been at it since the 50s. And there may be, you know, in the next 20, 30 years might achieve economic parity with an LWR if they get the b n series up to, you know, a really massive size.

00:35:18:20 - 00:35:51:21

Chris Keefer

that may just happen, but to me, that just seems kind of illustrative of the march of, technology development is required, but it also poses major questions in terms of who pays for that cost. you know, the initial addition to the initial sort of national lab, work in Canada, obviously it wasn't commercial. The development of a national power demonstration reactor and even Douglas Point, and we're not exactly in a heyday of investment, particularly state, you know, run investments and kind of blue sky R&D that doesn't demand a return on investment horizon.

00:35:51:23 - 00:36:09:00

Chris Keefer

and so it just seems like it's a very hard moment for some of these other advanced technologies to to come into being and to try and get to commercial deployment. This is a bit of a long commentary slash question, but does that, does that ring true for you in terms of, what we're seeing here with the development of of sodium fast reactors?

00:36:09:02 - 00:36:32:00

Nick Touran

It's it's it's kind of like it's I mean, sort of I would say I mean, it takes time and money. Developing reactors to commercial viability takes time. Smart people and a lot of money. And where exactly that money comes from doesn't totally matter. I mean, if you have people who want to if you have private investors who are willing and interested in throwing in a lot of money to do development of reactors, then that can work just fine.

00:36:32:02 - 00:36:49:08

Nick Touran

it'll take a long time. They may not see a return ever, or it may take a very long time for a return. But they can understand that risk. But because the you know, maybe the upside is so great, if it works out that they're really excited about it, it's a meaningful thing to do to try to, you know, solve major world energy issues.

00:36:49:13 - 00:37:08:01

Nick Touran

And so, I mean, who's to say like, yeah, it's private finance can do whatever they want. And if they want to throw money into advanced reactor development, that's awesome. And I will happily help out. yeah. On the other hand, what's the like. Where's the limit? Like, it is very expensive and it takes a very long time.

00:37:08:01 - 00:37:28:21

Nick Touran

So how many people are going to be able to take this to fruition? you kind of start when you first get into nuclear, you think about nuclear. So cool. the people who did it in the past didn't know what they were doing. They didn't think about economics very well. And so, like, why don't we just do this one cool trick, you know, the certain combination of fuel, moderator, coolant, whatever, and like, it's just going to woo it's going to be great.

00:37:28:21 - 00:37:47:13

Nick Touran

And so I think there is a, a risk that people think that it's going to be fun and easy to develop nuclear. But I mean, all the history shows that it's not it's very hard. once you it doesn't get hard until you're up and running. Construction shouldn't be hard, but it I mean, it is anyway. But even after construction, that's not even the hard part.

00:37:47:13 - 00:38:08:09

Nick Touran

The hard part is after you turn that thing on, achieving efficient and reliable, maintainable operation. That's the real challenge. And like, nobody's I mean, all the the startup folks aren't there yet. Like everybody's sort of in the design licensing construction phase. So we haven't even gotten to the hard part. And like the real question is, once you get into that, will you survive?

00:38:08:09 - 00:38:26:05

Nick Touran

Like, will the money keep flowing? will people lose interest? There's all sorts of cases for a reactor started up and it was just performing pitifully, you know, against all expectations. People thought, oh, the you know, whatever we talked about in last time, the super heat reactor is going to solve all of our economic issues. Well, it didn't, it operated terribly.

00:38:26:05 - 00:38:43:10

Nick Touran

And then the people financing it shut down. So whether it's government or private finance doesn't really matter. It's just who's going to be able to keep interest long enough to get it over that hump. And then I mean, you can ask like, well, we already got over that hump and I know we we talk about this all the time, like cantus and livers are already over that hump.

00:38:43:10 - 00:39:07:00

Nick Touran

You know, they can operate reliably. And so there's some reasonable statements to be made about like, well, for if decarbonizing is a major emergency, like, let's just build a bunch of those to kind of get that taken care of. Well, in the meantime, working on the tech development and working on, getting a couple of these prototypes up and running and, and vet it out and see how well they can be maintained and operated.

00:39:07:00 - 00:39:13:05

Nick Touran

So and if you're like a taxpayer, that may be a more appropriate type of approach.

00:39:13:06 - 00:39:30:03

Chris Keefer

And it's interesting I mean, I love this. Like, you know, there's the challenges of of construction and the real challenges being in operation. But I mean, even an additional challenges, can you squeeze more than 30, 40 years of life out of your reactor? And I think that's been not the only curse of the advanced gas reactor fleet in the UK.

00:39:30:05 - 00:39:48:14

Chris Keefer

you know, not a fantastic operational record, but certainly I think if Candu could be refurbished, that would be a reason to say, you know what, let's toss these in the can and we'll just go, the LWR route. But because we have that opportunity for refurbishment, we can make these assets, you know, much more economic because upfront costs are huge, and nuclear.

00:39:48:16 - 00:40:14:11

Chris Keefer

yeah. I mean, it is it is interesting, I think the the money coming in and God bless it for coming in and doing this work. you know, as is coming in, perhaps making that category or of the kind of, development piece, that's possible with things like consumer electronics or, or tech or software. and like, does it have to be so slow and nuclear, is that just a reality?

00:40:14:13 - 00:40:22:20

Chris Keefer

in terms of, you know, the size of the asset, the complexity, of the work that needs to be done, the maybe the human resource, bottleneck.

00:40:22:22 - 00:40:26:06

Nick Touran

well, no, it it definitely doesn't have to be. I mean, the.

00:40:26:09 - 00:40:29:17

Chris Keefer

Regulation, overregulation and like, what's, what's what's.

00:40:29:18 - 00:40:47:06

Nick Touran

I don't think so. I mean, people want to build, product like people no one wants. It's not as exciting to say, like, let's go build a little prototype reactor in at the national reactor testing station, which no longer exists. I mean, it's Idaho National Lab now, but, like everyone, people want to like it, right? To the.

00:40:47:06 - 00:41:11:21

Nick Touran

It's like, if we don't decarbonize in six years, you know, we're all screwed. And so we need to be pushing out commercial entities. And so there's a lot of focus on like just get to commercial like right now. And there isn't there isn't really a venue at the moment where you can say like, let's build five, five megawatt reactors of all the different advanced types in a place, you know, where the same team can kind of go and learn from each other and try them out and see how they operate and iterate on them quickly.

00:41:11:23 - 00:41:29:03

Nick Touran

That's just isn't the thing we're doing right now. We certainly could. And, there's nothing really holding us back. And that is just not where the money is focused. Like the government grants that come through are like, I want something that's commercialized, like right now. there isn't a lot of motivation to just go off and do like, let's do Reactor Playground.

00:41:29:06 - 00:41:47:21

Nick Touran

They aren't cheap. I mean, operating even small reactors will be expensive and if they don't have a revenue stream, like okay, they aren't going to pay for themselves. But that's how you could certainly get a lot more operational experience and and relearn, you know, how to operate a bunch of different reactors quickly would be to build little small ones in sort of a remote area.

00:41:47:21 - 00:42:01:15

Nick Touran

And so just like finding where to fund that from is the big challenge. Nobody wants to fund that right now. But there's no like technical or, regulatory reason why you couldn't do that. I think that'd be cool. But, I mean, I'm a nuclear engineer, so of course I do.

00:42:01:19 - 00:42:16:21

Chris Keefer

So one of the things I hear a lot, and, you know, it helps to be a Canadian here and maybe have a perspective that's a little bit removed. But, you know, in terms of what comes out of the d.o.e., there's a bit of a concern. I mean, there's the strength of the American nuclear sector is operations of the existing fleet absolutely phenomenal.

00:42:16:21 - 00:42:34:16

Chris Keefer

And I mean, not unique in the world, but but amazing. Definitely a weakness is is construction and, another strength that's toted. And I think historically this is very true is like, listen, we we developed the basic reactor technology that now underpins everything but the Candu, well, not everything, but you know what I mean. The LWR fleets, which have come to dominate in the world.

00:42:34:16 - 00:42:59:18

Chris Keefer

And so I think there's a desire and that insecurity is like, yeah, but we're not actually constructing everything, and we're actually facing major difficulties. There's a desire to sort of salvage that the same. But yeah, but we're still, you know, at the forefront of, of developing novel reactor technology. do you feel that's that's true. And the other part of the question, I guess, is the sort of, the tacit knowledge of actually, you know, running a variety of these reactors as the Russians are doing with the inside.

00:42:59:18 - 00:43:20:15

Chris Keefer

And then, yeah, we're developing a lot of reactors here in the West and maybe at the forefront of some of developing some of the gen4 concepts, but we're certainly not actually getting them constructed and built and, and accumulating that tacit knowledge, that operational knowledge of, say, the Chinese are with their hldgs and molten salt reactors. And, and I think even they've got an operating sodium reactor like all the sodium reactors in the West.

00:43:20:17 - 00:43:28:04

Chris Keefer

not a few of them were commercial. Most of them were research. And they're gone from my from what I understand, from my brief Wikipedia research.

00:43:28:06 - 00:43:50:04

Nick Touran

Yeah, that's true. That's accurate. Yeah. I mean there's no there's no you cannot argue today that the US is at the forefront of operating advanced reactors. Certainly. I mean, China built a thorium molten salt reactor that they're about to turn on. And they've got the the HCG, as you mentioned, and they have C4, and they're constructing two big 600 megawatt sodium cooled fast reactors.

00:43:50:04 - 00:44:11:00

Nick Touran

Well under construction in Russia's operating sodium cooled reactors and so on. So like yeah, there's just it's just obviously the case that they have more, up to date operational and construction information about those types of advanced reactors outside of this country. We may have more, people working on it with more startup companies, more papers and so on.

00:44:11:00 - 00:44:15:05

Nick Touran

But, in terms of actually building and operating or certainly behind.

00:44:15:07 - 00:44:34:18

Chris Keefer

Yeah. And this this raises kind of broader questions. And I think we discussed this a little bit, previously in our innovation episode, but just about, you know, which sort of political systems are most conducive to innovation. And I guess, you know, I think you could probably make a solid argument that, you know, liberal democracy, free market systems, excel.

00:44:34:19 - 00:44:52:10

Chris Keefer

but perhaps not if if you don't actually have, you know, some blue sky state funded research or there's just not the dollars to do it. Ultimately, if there's some money to make it happen, that probably would be one of the key variables to actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Liftoff as liftoff is such a buzzword these days.

00:44:52:12 - 00:45:07:21

Nick Touran

Yeah. But I mean, yeah, I mean, the the innovation that we did in the United States in a liberal democracy in the olden days, it's just astounding as we talked about, I mean, there's just dozens and dozens. We built all sorts of crazy reactors and operated them and got all sorts of experience and repaired them. And it was it was just fantastic.

00:45:07:21 - 00:45:25:23

Nick Touran

The innovation and development that we were that we pulled off was truly astounding. And yeah, it's just it's the funding source. Like the the Atomic Energy Commission is highly funded, and it was tasked with developing commercial nuclear power for the good of the nation. And that was a big amount of money. And a lot of work was done because of that.

00:45:25:23 - 00:45:35:18

Nick Touran

And a bunch of super smart people and lots of other great resources were thrown at that problem. And so it's yeah, it just comes down to like, what are you what are you going to fund?

00:45:35:20 - 00:45:50:20

Chris Keefer

And that's that seemed like it was it was still capitalism back then. But nowadays, like if you were to have that kind of level of public investment and you have screams of, an accusations of, of, not just kind of Bernie Sanders socialism, but probably, probably communism for.

00:45:50:22 - 00:46:10:04

Nick Touran

I mean, yeah, nuclear became very unpopular. Like, it's hard to do publicly funded nuclear on or publicly funded R&D on a technology that is deeply unpopular. And so it really has to do with just like what people, how people feel about it. And so, you know, maybe not right now, nuclear is becoming much more popular, driven largely, I think, by concerns about climate and energy scarcity.

00:46:10:04 - 00:46:22:15

Nick Touran

So, you know, it's we could get back into that. But you it really is coupled to like public perception. Like no taxpayers are paying a lot of money for something that they think is horrible or, you know, bad for the environment.

00:46:22:17 - 00:46:39:18

Chris Keefer

So, I mean, I really do want to I really do want to drill down again a little bit on on sort of the operational experience and your sort of level of, of optimism and pessimism, because it does seem like, and I'm very curious about this, that the Super Phenix did get up to a pretty decent capacity factor, at least for the final year of operation.

00:46:39:20 - 00:46:54:13

Chris Keefer

it is possible to run a sodium fast reactor. Well, although I guess still not know. Kind of hitting economic parity with AWS, but but is it trickier to get there again, just in terms of, again, the stuff that we don't like to think about, the human resources, the tacit knowledge, the lived experience that leads to good operations?

00:46:54:15 - 00:47:11:22

Nick Touran

Yeah. I mean, it's hard to say. It's a tough question. I mean, it's absolutely there have been well-run, certain reactors. Another example is FTX, which is out right here in Washington state. I've talked to people who are part of that reactor, and they said it was the most boring reactor you could imagine operating and just responded quickly to any changes.

00:47:12:00 - 00:47:29:21

Nick Touran

It was single phase flow instead of boiling water or, you know, anything steam and so on. And it was just super easy to operate and work great and they really did operate that thing. Well, it was not a commercial reactor. so yeah, we certainly know that it is possible to run a certain code fast reactor in a way that works.

00:47:29:21 - 00:47:46:17

Nick Touran

Well, what we don't know is what the fleet performance is like. If you build 100 of them, what's the what's the average capacity factor that just can't be known? There's plenty of reason to believe that it can be brought up to be reasonably high now. And I also want to mention there's other types of breeder reactors as well.

00:47:46:17 - 00:48:08:21

Nick Touran

I mean, ones we haven't talked about at all are the slow neutron breeders, which use thorium. If you use thorium, you can breed with slow neutrons. That's the unique thing about thorium. And we've built numerous, thorium breeder reactors. Indian Point one, a quark was a breeder reactor using thorium in that initial core. the Germans had that gas cooled thorium reactor that Noah was talking about.

00:48:08:23 - 00:48:30:00

Nick Touran

and, the molten salt breeder reactors are all graphite moderated, intending to use thorium to breed, and in fact, shipping part Rickover did a huge project called the Light Water Breeder Reactor Project. Using shipping for is the first core, where they demonstrated that you can actually breed in a you are if you put thorium in it.

00:48:30:04 - 00:48:51:06

Nick Touran

And so there are a bunch of other approaches to get this capability of breeding, where you extend the natural resources out by a factor of, you know, 100 or so, using other types of reactors. And so those are all still kind of like in the mix. Like certainly we know we can operate as well. And that was sort of Rick recovers argument was like, well, sodium might work, but it also might not.

00:48:51:06 - 00:49:10:23

Nick Touran

And wouldn't it be nice to have a backup plan with a reactor that we all know and love? The art, which he obviously, you know, is a big part of? So, it's a fair point. And having that as like an option is certainly useful. So it's there are ways to operate other types of reactors in a breeder mode, that aren't necessarily sodium cooled fast.

00:49:10:23 - 00:49:33:18

Nick Touran

So it's kind of like, yeah, we know we can build sodium fast reactors that operate reasonably well. We think it's reasonable to think that they can compete with like an LWR, but it hasn't really been proven beyond any reasonable doubt. It's certainly proven a lot more than reactors that haven't been built or operated. But, and there are reasons to think that like, well, it is challenging and there have been lots of problems.

00:49:33:18 - 00:49:51:04

Nick Touran

It's not a slam dunk, like if you start up a new sodium cooled reactor, you don't know if it's going to be having all sorts of operational boondoggles or if it's going to be running smooth, like it's kind of a crapshoot at this point. Like you can I'm sure there's ways to do it. Well and to do it poorly, but knowing that in advance is very challenging.

00:49:51:06 - 00:49:56:13

Nick Touran

so anyway, that's sort of my I just mentioned other types of breeders before we got to the for sure.

00:49:56:14 - 00:50:06:13

Chris Keefer

No, that and I agree, that sounds like it's, it might be simpler to leverage the, the existing, you know, proven technology, but I guess the rationale is just not there because there's not the constraint on on field fuel costs aren't high enough. Yeah.

00:50:06:13 - 00:50:29:05

Nick Touran

And also and the and the thorium breeders breed less quickly. So the breeding ratio is lower. Fast neutrons can breed more atoms. per reaction. So that's, that's kind of what held them back. It was like, well, if we're going to do breeders, let's do the ones that can ramp up really quickly. But if you need to ramp up, if you want to ramp up a little bit slower than those slow neutron breeders are perfectly sufficient.

00:50:29:07 - 00:50:48:10

Nick Touran

But yeah, I mean, again, the major constraint has always been it's just cheaper to mine enrich uranium ore, not just mine uranium put in the reactor and and get rid of it like the one through cycle is simpler and cheaper than breeding. And until uranium gets more expensive, that's probably how it's going to be. That's the that's like the real major conclusion.

00:50:48:10 - 00:51:05:15

Nick Touran

And there have been studies that say like, well, how expensive does uranium have to get before recycling and breeding makes sense. And so people have come up with estimates like three times or six times, whatever the current price is. And that would be the break even point. So as that happens, we'll see more and more people get interested in breeders.

00:51:05:15 - 00:51:23:01

Nick Touran

We also have I mean, France was interested, as you mentioned. They just don't have a lot of natural resources of uranium at all. India has basically no uranium, but they have tons of thorium. And the only way to utilize thorium appropriately is with a breeder reactor. And so they want to get into breeding for that reason.

00:51:23:03 - 00:51:42:19

Chris Keefer

All of a sudden unfortunately does seem like nuclear already does suffer from I mean, in, in terms of the operational economics that suffers, particularly when there's a glut of natural gas and, you know, distorted energy only markets with, zero marginal cost renewables jumping on and whatnot. but it does seem like this will ultimately drive up price.

00:51:42:19 - 00:51:59:00

Chris Keefer

Like there's there's still you know, I know I think it was Levi Strauss who said at the too cheap to meter thing and it's been sort of used to target, nuclear by holding it up to these impossible standards. Like it was one guy that said that, as far as I know. but, I mean, we all dream about, you know, a cheap, abundant, affordable.

00:51:59:02 - 00:52:19:13

Chris Keefer

You know, I think limitless is a bit silly, but, you know, nuclear energy in order to sustainably power, you know, a high living standard for all of humanity. but it just doesn't seem like there's a necessarily a cheat code there, despite how much we kind of desire it. if we do end up breeding and reusing, fuel and, and using tailings, likely it's going to add to the cost.

00:52:19:13 - 00:52:20:14

Chris Keefer

Not not lower it.

00:52:20:14 - 00:52:42:02

Nick Touran

Yeah. Yeah. And again yeah, it's like oh if fuel or cheap or free that wouldn't reduce cost by 5%. Is like I mean yeah the operating the machines is the hard part. in nuclear. So yeah, it's not like reading is just going to bring in the too cheap to meter thing that old, you know, old Louis Strauss.

00:52:42:02 - 00:52:59:08

Nick Touran

He said that to us, to the science writers dinner. And he was like, he's like, we'll do supersonic underwater travel and we'll cure all diseases, and electricity will be too cheap to meter. And like, no journalist ever says, oh, nuclear, you know, too cheap to meter. They never say like, oh, diseases once touted as, you know, diminishing forever.

00:52:59:08 - 00:53:26:19

Nick Touran

Like I that always annoys me. But anyway. No, you're right, breeders are not like a free pass to economical nuclear. They allow a large expansion of nuclear without depleting the resources. They make nuclear effectively renewable. You can you can use super low grade fuels like seawater, uranium, or the uranium in granite. there's 20 times more energy per kilogram in granite than in pure coal.

00:53:26:21 - 00:53:43:09

Nick Touran

if you use breeder reactor. So you can literally. So Weinberg famously said, well, burn the rocks. and he meant we'll just take the trace uranium and thorium out of the rocks and burn and breeders, it will last forever. And if you just mined granite, you could power the whole world. moving less rock than we currently move for fossil fuels.

00:53:43:09 - 00:54:02:22

Nick Touran

So it's like, it's really an incredible resource. It gives us an insight. It allows us to grow and say that nuclear is completely sustainable and will be forever. but it is not. It isn't. It doesn't bring you cheap operation. And right now our big problems are construction and operation costs. And so those really have to be the focus.

00:54:03:00 - 00:54:25:11

Nick Touran

and if we do get like this 5 or 10 expansion or even A2X expansion of nuclear worldwide, then, I mean, then we're going to really have to start considering breeding. And so it's appropriate and right for people to be thinking and working on breeders. Now, it shouldn't it probably shouldn't be that the major focus of the overall industry, like someone should be working on breeders, but it shouldn't be everybody working, for eaters, which I think is roughly how it is.

00:54:25:11 - 00:54:43:02

Chris Keefer

So that's this was interesting because this, this did come up at the Net-Zero nuclear Summit on the sidelines of Cop 28. I was given the opportunity to moderate the piano, the piano, moderate the panel, with, Tim gets to live Cameco and Clay cell of X energy. And part of it is going to test my memory.

00:54:43:02 - 00:55:01:06

Chris Keefer

Dan Portman of Senators and Boris. Oh, God. Boris. Sorry. In your name? of, or uno or your uno? No. Okay. I've reached my limit. But that was the question being posed. You know, like, if we are going to, you know, meet this pledge of three, nuclear energy, like, how is that going to work on the fuel side?

00:55:01:06 - 00:55:08:21

Chris Keefer

So you were saying, if we double or triple, you know, before long, we would have to start thinking about breeding. Is that is that accurate in terms of.

00:55:09:02 - 00:55:11:05

Nick Touran

Well, yeah. Yeah.

00:55:11:07 - 00:55:13:06

Chris Keefer

I know, I know, there's a lot of variables with.

00:55:13:07 - 00:55:31:20

Nick Touran

Yeah, yeah. With mining, with mined resources. Like when the price goes up people go looking for it and inevitably they find more. So there's estimates right now they're in this thing called the Red book that say how much uranium reserves every country has. And it has been famously wrong. Like every single time someone goes out looking for more uranium because the price goes up, oh, they find a bunch more.

00:55:31:20 - 00:55:57:23

Nick Touran

So there's very likely a lot more uranium than we even know about today, that just it's kind of how things tend to happen. And that's the history of what happens. Whenever we go looking, we find more. That obviously won't happen forever. So is it 23X23X we can handle without transitioning over to breeders? I'm guessing. but if you're talking 510, you know, going up to half the world's energy, then you absolutely are going to need to do something with breeders.

00:55:57:23 - 00:56:20:09

Nick Touran

So, I mean, I think I don't know exactly where the cutoff point is in terms of like what level. It does make sense, but it's going to be coming along and it'll take time to, to develop those breeders and get the fleet experience. So like, we should be, you know, building and operating again, handfuls of them, so that we can make sure we can get them up to that economic, so we can operate them well, when they're needed.

00:56:20:11 - 00:56:36:16

Nick Touran

and if it turns out that they operate better than, like, water reactors, great. We'll just build more. So like, it's it's an important it's important for people to be working on them now. But again, yeah, it just shouldn't. It doesn't really matter until we're at least three x. Probably more like 5 or 10 x is eventually going to be needed.

00:56:36:18 - 00:56:54:15

Chris Keefer

That's that's yeah. I think that despite, you know, it's hazy and it's as you're saying, it's very hard to predict, you know, given, the more we like, the more refined. But I think that's important for the listenership to hear, the kind of time horizons for the necessary development of, of this technology. That was fascinating.

00:56:54:15 - 00:57:14:13

Chris Keefer

I learned a ton. I, I've been engaging more with sort of Gen four stuff recently, and it's it's it's been useful. It's it's an important context. it certainly, you know, consumes a lot of hot air in terms of, you know, what we end up discussing. And maybe for that reason, I've been prioritizing other things, but very grateful, to have your, encyclopedic knowledge there to, to get a deeper understanding.

00:57:14:13 - 00:57:19:14

Chris Keefer

I'm sure my listenership is grateful, too. So thank you once again, my friend, for making the time.

00:57:19:16 - 00:57:21:18

Nick Touran

Absolutely. Thanks for having me on.

00:57:21:20 - 00:57:22:07

Chris Keefer

And it's a.