The Real Costs of Advanced Nuclear

Robbie Stewart

Friday, August 16, 2024

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:14:20

Unknown

you know, at first, Thomas, we tried to do an estimate of what it would take. What's the total capital required to get the first of a kind version of our reactor through detailed design and licensing? And we sort of always had this number, even from the very beginning.

00:00:14:20 - 00:00:40:19

Unknown

There was something on the order of $1 billion. and that was based on historical, reactor designs done, in the US and abroad was the national labs or through private companies. And late in 2023, we started comparing that number to other multidisciplinary design problems. Right. So, one interesting way to look at this is to say, well, what was the cost to design and engineer the model three from Tesla?

00:00:40:21 - 00:01:03:14

Unknown

And it's, you know, about $1 billion in design engineering. And this is an electric car, right? It's less parts than an internal combustion engine car. and that's a that's a lot of money for just the design engineering. Now, there's a lot of prototyping along the way. but that's what it was. And you can also look at how much, d.o.e. money was appropriated to Westinghouse to do the design of the Ap1000.

00:01:03:16 - 00:01:09:04

Unknown

And if you sum up the appropriations over, you know, 15 or 20 years, you get something close to $1.5 billion

00:01:09:09 - 00:01:46:18

Unknown

Welcome back to the couple. Today I'm joined by Robbie Stewart and Enrique Velez. Lopez. Robbie and Enrique, are both, academics or studying at MIT. co-founders of Boston Atomics. And today I'm really excited to chat with them, to gain a realistic picture of some of the financial and R&D challenges to bringing advanced nuclear to a state of commercial readiness, as well as some of their other activities, at MIT, including their nuclear plant cost modeling tool and tons of other insights they've got, from their backgrounds in the sector and their study.

00:01:46:18 - 00:02:07:09

Unknown

So great to have some nuclear academics, on the show. It's going to make it real spicy, I'm sure. Welcome, guys. Welcome. Good to be here. Yeah, good to be here. just, small note here. I don't consider myself an academic, in fact, because, I mean, I went to university as every other person, in the nuclear industry, doing engineering.

00:02:07:10 - 00:02:33:21

Unknown

I did master of the the beach. And, most of my life has been, in industry experience, more than working inside. Yeah. inside the university. And so but it is an interesting one because Enrique notably, instead of in lieu of a PhD, he did four master's degrees in civil, mechanical and numerical methods. so, you know, he has his time in academia, but I, I will accept his label of himself as a as an applied engineer.

00:02:33:21 - 00:02:44:21

Unknown

Yeah. So I mean, that technically makes me also sort of an academic, you know, to some extent I accept, you know, I, I like to think of myself perhaps wrongly, somebody in both worlds.

00:02:44:21 - 00:02:52:04

Unknown

Yeah, yeah. Do the crimes serve the time, man, you've been in there a long time. and, I mean, let's just get a little bit more of your your individual background.

00:02:52:04 - 00:02:54:04

Unknown

So you give us a little sneak picture there.

00:02:54:04 - 00:03:13:17

Unknown

and we could you want to kind of fluff it out a little bit more. So we have a sense of of church. Yeah. so and I worked for a number of years in the, nuclear industry in Europe before, coming to the US. then I did my, my undergrad, a master's in electromechanical engineering.

00:03:13:19 - 00:03:37:05

Unknown

I was working first doing Fukushima retrofit as a structural mechanics specialist in the Spanish nuclear fleet. then went to Belgium to work in an advanced reactor project for three years. in that journey, I realized that one of the hardest part, especially in advanced, we have to appreciate the more advanced the reactor is, the more difficult it is.

00:03:37:07 - 00:04:02:16

Unknown

Is multidisciplinary integration essentially making people from different disciplines speak to one another, reach agreement, collaborate towards the design to make sense as much as possible. Many times, which is that some discipline is more representing the team and outweighs the other, and that that may make hobby the the members of the team, because they're mostly specialized in that discipline.

00:04:02:16 - 00:04:25:22

Unknown

But that doesn't make the design better or easier for the future. So I decided to pursue education in many different disciplines, that I consider, very important for nuclear. That's why I came to my D for doing a master's in civil engineering and a masters in nuclear engineering. in that journey, we invented the the my the reactor.

00:04:26:00 - 00:04:38:14

Unknown

we by the 30th, we created Boston omics. this has been going on for the last five years, approximately. Robert will speak more about the history of Boston and Omics. Well, this is essentially my my.

00:04:39:01 - 00:05:02:14

Unknown

New trajectory. The embodiment of, yeah, of of systems analysis of multidisciplinary, multidisciplinary approaches, which seems really important because, certainly at least, you know, as a nonacademic, as an anthropologist of nuclear, you see lots of PowerPoints, lots of, you know, the focus is really on a this cool, shiny bit of technology, the and triple s, and not a ton of focus on civil works.

00:05:02:14 - 00:05:25:08

Unknown

And I think that's going to be a theme of, of our conversations today. Before we get there, Robbie, give us, you're back history. I know you worked on jet turbines. Yeah. So I, And or can you. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So I started in, mechanical engineering undergrad a masters, UT Austin and moved up to, Schenectady, New York and worked for GE Global Research Center.

00:05:25:10 - 00:05:46:14

Unknown

So I worked for their research center for 4 or 5 years, and most of my time were contracts with the Abg's aviation business, what's now called GE aerospace. I did a little bit of work along the way with, GE power, which is a land based gas turbine industry. But, all the things I did were turbine related, a lot of stuff in testing components for the hot gas path.

00:05:46:17 - 00:06:11:13

Unknown

This is like the turbine inlet where things are really hot and high pressure. and then I did a lot of, work in fleet modeling. So the end of my time there was how how to track how different airlines were operating their engines and how that would predict what their maintenance requirements would be. but I wanted to spend the rest of my career, you know, realize I was still a young engineer, and I had a lot of time to put forward towards climate tech.

00:06:11:15 - 00:06:35:22

Unknown

And I was trying to figure out where does my skill set and expertise match there. And so, I went to MIT to do my PhD in nuclear science and engineering. and it doesn't take long once you're in the, nuclear world, to realize that the primary challenges facing the industry and facing more deployments of technology, at least in the West, are cost and construction risk.

00:06:36:00 - 00:06:59:09

Unknown

and so I focused my PhD on that area. So, I built a cost modeling tool to sort of evaluate can small modular reactors overcome the economies of scale that they lose by reducing size through things like being a lower financial risk project, more extensive modularization and a number of other factors, built a tool to evaluate that.

00:06:59:09 - 00:07:21:10

Unknown

And that became my thesis. and then sort of, as Enrique alluded to, we met as students, and our first year working on our project, recommending new nuclear technology to Japan. and that was sort of cemented our, the reactor concept at the core of Boston Atomics. and we can get into that maybe in a second.

00:07:21:13 - 00:07:42:20

Unknown

Yeah, yeah. For sure. you know, I'm definitely interested in, the nuclear plant cost modeling tool, as a way to, I think kind of better inform the discourse again when trying to make decisions when when trying to design, reactors to optimize again, the non sexy things, the kind of labor needs and, and cost of, of civil work.

00:07:42:20 - 00:08:02:23

Unknown

So, is that like a novel tool? I mean, there must be previous attempts at this. what's what's new about you guys? Yeah. So, this tool was the first, I think, to try to do several different reactor concepts. There have been a number of academic papers in the last and the last 15, 20 years on estimating cost of reactors.

00:08:03:01 - 00:08:25:18

Unknown

So a lot of conceptual academic reactors designed in different parts of the U.S. and Europe, that there's always a cost model behind them. Right, justifying continuing to work on that technology. but it was very rare that you would see the model underlying that concept applied to other reactors. And at the same time, you see a lot of cost targets from, reactor developers.

00:08:25:18 - 00:08:48:07

Unknown

Right? People saying our reactor is going to be $1,000 kilowatt, $2,000 a kill, you know, whatever the number was. And it was hard to know what the basis underlying that assumption was. And so what we wanted to build at MIT was, a tool that could across all light water reactor concepts at the time. We've since expanded it, to some others, but across different reactor technologies.

00:08:48:07 - 00:09:10:14

Unknown

Do, have the same sort of assumptions, start from the same bases of what your concrete's going to cost, how much labor it's going to take to install that concrete and rebar and those components, and evolve that forward into a, cost roll up the same time you wanted to estimate, like, how much modularization was going to move your site work to a factory.

00:09:10:16 - 00:09:43:14

Unknown

And that's sort of the promise of SMEs and even large modular reactors, is that you're going to move a lot of that site work to the factory. And the question was, how much of that can you do? And even if you do a significant portion of that, how much site work are you left with? Right. If I move all of my nuclear steam supply work, labor to a factory and I don't have to do any labor for my nuclear steam supply system, does that dramatically reduce the total number of labor hours on site, or is there still so much other concrete, so many other systems, so many, so much other rebar that you

00:09:43:14 - 00:09:58:18

Unknown

end up with a significant onsite construction project anyway. So that was the goal of that tool. And, and it's a publicly accessible tool. You know, anyone can go download this tool on, on GitHub. MIT maintains a copy of it through, the nuclear science and Engineering department.

00:09:58:18 - 00:10:06:19

Unknown

So what sounds different there is you have, probably more sort of proprietary models used by reactor vendors to justify their cost estimates.

00:10:06:21 - 00:10:21:02

Unknown

and there's obviously a bit of a moral hazard there or, you know, some degree of self-interest, maybe to tweak the numbers a little bit is what's different here. This is kind of an academic, publicly accessible tool, with clear parameters of what's sort of spitting out the numbers at the end, but that you can apply more broadly.

00:10:21:02 - 00:10:38:08

Unknown

Exactly. So you can come in to the tool and, instead of telling me what your pressure vessel costs, you tell me how much it weighs. Instead of telling me how much your reactor building cost, you tell me how much, how big it is. And then I'm going to estimate the amount of concrete, the amount of rework required, the complexity of installing that, that concrete.

00:10:38:08 - 00:11:00:08

Unknown

And, because it's, I think, easy to sort of say if we build this nuclear project with costs comparable to, like a chemical engineering project, then maybe your reactor looks like it's going to be very cheap, very competitive. But the problem is, in reality, that's not you know, the concrete for nuclear projects is different. The the construction methods.

00:11:00:08 - 00:11:13:22

Unknown

You're doing the shack, you see, the traceability on all of your materials is different. And so you have to start from a basis of nuclear costs to do your estimate of your plant. and that's, I think, still up somewhat of a novel.

00:11:13:22 - 00:11:22:20

Unknown

Well, let's, let's get into that a little bit later. maybe as we talk about, you know, best practices moving forward, large modular, small modular.

00:11:22:22 - 00:11:41:21

Unknown

but I'm interested in hearing your guy's personal story, with Boston Atomics with minor, as a way to illustrate, I think what are often the kind of underestimated challenges of bringing, advanced or what I've called in the past failed to advanced nuclear reactor concepts, to the fore. I mean, we have things like the, what's it called again?

00:11:41:21 - 00:12:05:15

Unknown

The cooperative power reactor demonstration program that Nick Tron has went into, in the past. You know, a lot of a lot of these concepts are indeed back to the future. Reactors have been attempted, but. Or just operationally not so good. so, yeah. Curious curious about, your endeavors there and particularly, just to kind of mature, realistic sense of, you know, what it takes and what kind of capital can can meet that challenge.

00:12:05:15 - 00:12:27:01

Unknown

There's no doubt that we we need some of the promises that these technologies offer beyond just conventional light water in terms of process, heat and other applications. But, I think the challenges are often, underestimated. So, yeah. Interested in your guys path there however you want to? Yeah. Yeah. So so I will I will tell our technology story and then some of our commercial story as well.

00:12:27:03 - 00:12:52:06

Unknown

and I will tell our commercial, our technology story because I think it's helpful to see where we think innovation needs to happen. And nuclear, and that the focus of innovation, sort of in the idea of construct ability or value engineering, and multidisciplinary systems integration, which is a much harder, more nuanced problem to solve than like optimizing your core fuel or something along those lines.

00:12:52:08 - 00:13:15:16

Unknown

and so we started, like we mentioned, we were working on a project recommending nuclear technology to Japan if they were interested in to reengaging and new nuclear in the 2030s. and this project recommended three technologies. It recommended small modular boiling water reactors, high temperature gas reactors for a lot of the industrial processes that happen in Japan.

00:13:15:16 - 00:13:40:18

Unknown

And the last were micro reactors for some of the island communities. and at the time, this is like 2018, 2019, the most advanced EGR was the frame atom EGR. and this is a very large high temperature gas reactor. It is, 225MW electric. The vessel is, about the size of the a R or ESB vessel.

00:13:40:18 - 00:14:03:17

Unknown

So it just it's like a thousand ton vessel is, you know, three, three times larger than a reactor pressure vessel, but producing, you know, a fifth of the total power. So this is a massive vessel and an extraordinarily tall building. When we did an estimate of the volume of the seismic class one safety grade building volume, it was like half the size of the Empire State Building for this reactor.

00:14:03:19 - 00:14:21:05

Unknown

and this is a reactor. This is never been built. That concept. okay. And we were recommending this technology, at least, the faculty group in this research project were recommending this technology as part of what? Where, Japan should consider going. And that's, you know, there wasn't another EGR at the time that was has developed.

00:14:21:05 - 00:14:45:06

Unknown

2.2 and Enrique, as the, civil engineering master's student at the time, were coming to work on the project and with experience in mechanical and civil structures at both existing light water reactors and advanced reactors, looked at this and said, you know, if if we're having trouble and and Bill and trouble and Vogel and trouble and at all three, why are we going to go make everything so much bigger and more complicated and more difficult to install and more difficult to construct?

00:14:45:06 - 00:15:03:18

Unknown

And so he actually wrote this memo, this is, I think, in 2019 that, if someone goes to build this reactor, it's going to be, you know, 20 to $30,000 per kilowatt. And I is like, you know, I'm like nine months into my nuclear world coming from gas reactor, still trying to understand, I mean, this is going on very naively.

00:15:03:19 - 00:15:21:00

Unknown

Like, that's crazy. There's no way it could ever be that much. this technology is great. The US has invested so much in trying to get the fuel ready and, you know, evolve all the components through different, you know, National lab programs, you know, been working on this for like 40 or 50 years. It's got to be a better, better technology than that.

00:15:21:02 - 00:15:41:18

Unknown

And it was actually in the course of those two, those conversations that we had, sort of the breakthrough that became this in percentile. So we said, okay, if the problem is that the height of a structure determines how fast you can build it, how do you make it shallow? Well, you have to turn the whole system horizontally, and lay your reactor pressure vessel on its side.

00:15:41:18 - 00:15:53:14

Unknown

And so that was what the first sort of key innovation at Boston Dynamics was like, let's instead of going from a vertical vessel to make sure structure 80 to 100m tall, you have to lay it all flat. And then you can go to like a 15 meter tall structure.

00:15:53:14 - 00:15:58:15

Unknown

we love horizontal reactor, right? Yeah. You know, we were you I don't know.

00:15:58:15 - 00:16:16:02

Unknown

Sure. It really reduces the height of our reactors that much because we need this big steam. It's also a very interesting conversation on how to reduce the height of candles and make them more compatible. We have some ideas, but probably for another day you can drop the Russian or Russia has, horizontal steam generators, you know, so you could do a little.

00:16:16:04 - 00:16:31:10

Unknown

Yeah, I've heard that. And that makes their reactor buildings shorter. Actually, if you look at the levers, they have shorter reactor buildings. And it's. So this is generally, I think, assumed in construction, like if you're building a, you know, the, the line and regular tall the beginning is if you're building in Kansas, you don't build a skyscraper. So like you, you want to build something flat.

00:16:31:12 - 00:16:51:08

Unknown

and, no offense to my friends in Kansas, and there's just a lot of land, sir. Just. Just for people. But. Yeah. Yeah, it's just wide, expansive and sprawling horizontally. Okay. You don't need to build pencil towers, like. Like, exactly, exactly. And so, so the other innovation we did is Enrique looked at the cross vessel.

00:16:51:08 - 00:17:10:03

Unknown

So in a year, you kind of got this, like, vertical, reactor pressure vessel, and it's like, laterally and vertically offset from a steam generator. and there's a vessel between those two and installing that vessel, qualifying that vessel, because of the types of loads it sees in different accident scenarios, is actually really difficult. So the risk is like, well, can we get a can we get rid of this vessel?

00:17:10:03 - 00:17:31:15

Unknown

Can we integrate these two and sort of into a single long flange structure. and that became the the Nexus sort of the beginning of Boston Dynamics technology. and we had to go and convince, the, our faculty advisors at the time because we were students, this is like 2019 or students, that this was a good idea.

00:17:31:17 - 00:18:05:12

Unknown

And about six months later, the D.o.e. announced the advanced reactor demonstration program. So this was a program to develop and deploy demonstration advanced reactors. but there was a part of that program that was on sort of far out 20 year concepts. And so we convinced our faculty advisors to put in a proposal. Professor Caruso, Sherburne did a phenomenal job assembling a consortium of folks from MIT, University of Michigan, University of Buffalo, Argonne National Lab and MPR associates who put together this great consortium.

00:18:05:14 - 00:18:35:04

Unknown

And starting in 2021, we spent three years doing the sort of initial technology de-risking of the Boston Dynamics Monitor. And that program, if you note here, the first memo that they wrote on, the, the, cost, of course, was an extremely rough calculation, and was just aiming at, the order of magnitude. So I came up with 20 to $30,000 per kilowatt installed.

00:18:35:04 - 00:18:58:19

Unknown

But we acknowledge that it could be more than that or less than that. It could be then or 15. We just, I just wanted to to, you know, show that the, the projections that we were seeing bargain the dime for the year, that could be the Holy Grail and be extremely cheap and much cheaper than the other reactors were not based on actual engineering.

00:18:58:19 - 00:19:21:17

Unknown

They were based only on hopes, the have been extended overall, the industry. But that was in the Duluth when you could bring that type of design to a large engineering team with people from every discipline, each of them imposing their own conditions and each of them making the world a bit bigger, their building a bit taller. this pipe by way longer, more valves here, more redundancy here.

00:19:21:19 - 00:19:53:04

Unknown

what will happen is that you will get to a goal that nobody could guarantee that would be lower than this for, Like what? The reactor. In fact, it would probably be higher. so that was the whole point of them not actually gonna be coming up with, realistic or credible, cost estimation. the other thing that I wanted to mention is that, when we started working on my there and also this memo was totally out of the, of the project time out of the time that Midea was funding from us to do, the energy selection for Japan.

00:19:53:04 - 00:20:17:05

Unknown

So from the very beginning, we started doing this on in our free time during weekends. instead, hours, we brought it from here to try to convince the faculty, to vote this proposal for Boe to participate in the advanced. We have demonstration project. But before that, we we submitted a provisional license. There's a story also about how we submitted the provisional license to remedy that.

00:20:17:07 - 00:20:33:11

Unknown

That. Well, today the the the, patent is owned by Boston Atomics. And, that was, the story of how, you know that the company was created and, and the British started.

00:20:33:15 - 00:20:52:23

Unknown

Yes. It's interesting. I've I've toured, I think, well, few orders, a lot of calendars and actually got to tour Henderson be just one of the, egr the advanced gas reactors, in Scotland when we were up, at the climate conference in Glasgow and, you know, it was just this magnificent building. It was so tall. I think it was at least five, six stories.

00:20:52:23 - 00:21:14:14

Unknown

But the fueling machine was another three stories, because and these really long fuel elements and, refueling, a gas reactor was done under the water interface and, and all that shielding. And so the refueling machine was just bonkers in terms of the shielding, within, you know, this big tube that they swap out the elements with, it seems, you know, like the nuke industry.

00:21:14:16 - 00:21:46:07

Unknown

I think it's probably a product of having such siloed expertise, really, really smart people, but working in silos that there's the potential to, embrace the false paradigm, which is something you might need more of a kind of interdisciplinary systems, and kind of level analysis to, to pick up on and catch. and to me, that seems to be what's, what's driving, you know, a lot of the, the issues that you guys are finding, I think with your cost estimation tool of, okay, the whole paradigm, an idea here is to shift work into the productive factory, get it off the unproductive construction side.

00:21:46:07 - 00:22:04:21

Unknown

But but that's not occurring. that seems to be something, you know, you're done defying with the the high temperature dance director being recommended to Japan and trying to fix in your own model by making it horizontal. you know, how does it look when you, when you sort of put your own reactor through through the, the gantlet of your costs to me?

00:22:04:21 - 00:22:05:18

Unknown

Yeah, yeah.

00:22:05:18 - 00:22:14:14

Unknown

this is a really exciting question because, I love the, the, the, the property example here because, you know, while they were quote standardized, every age is different.

00:22:14:14 - 00:22:32:14

Unknown

You know, AGI engineers will tell you that they're like Swiss watches. These are like remarkably complex machines that, to operate and maintain and and to construct. They work. and you're the refueling machine is the perfect example for where I want to go with this. It adds so much building volume, because you have to be able to extract all the way from the base of the core.

00:22:32:14 - 00:22:51:00

Unknown

This, you know, I think it's like a, 12 meter long fuel assembly that you've got to pull up. and so you need all that space up above to, to pull the fuel assembly into. And when we first did, we did the first cost estimate of or we didn't have an, a sense of how our refueling process would work.

00:22:51:02 - 00:23:17:14

Unknown

and so we didn't we had a couple ideas, a couple of maybe conceptual ideas of, of how we would get fuel into and out of our reactor core. But we had no, you know, conceptual design of a system or a robot that would do that. So when we did the first estimate of the the miter, it came out to something, that was, you know, just marginally more expensive than, a for loop, sort of a traditional light water reactor.

00:23:17:16 - 00:23:36:00

Unknown

And then if you were March through our, our 20 program, that was our deal. We funded program where we evolve the design, we add detail, we make sure that all the systems can, you know, as much as you can in a $4.9 million project. We make sure that a lot of the systems can interface, are likely to be able to interface.

00:23:36:05 - 00:23:58:21

Unknown

If this were to proceed into detailed design. and we spent a lot of time not in that program, but as ourselves in Boston Atomics designing the robotic refueling machine that would do this. It would bring fuel blocks into the core for the audience. Our fuel blocks are, you know, they're like a rectangular prism. They're only maybe 30cm square and 60 to 70cm long or a little bit smaller.

00:23:58:23 - 00:24:20:17

Unknown

and you've got to we got to bring in somewhere between 5 and 800 of these into the core and out of the core for our refueling process. And our core is because it's horizontal. You you're reaching in with like a 12 meter cantilever in some places to grab these fuel blocks. It's a very difficult an engineering problem, machine design engineering problem.

00:24:20:19 - 00:24:43:18

Unknown

and so we hired a phenomenal engineer to work on this, Sam Quimby, who had experience in other sort of nuclear, robotic machines. and he did a great job getting to, pre conceptual version of what this machine would look like. But when he sketched out the whole process of what, how big the machine is, how it needs to reach into the core, where it's going to take the fuel afterwards, what the interim fuel storage looks like.

00:24:43:20 - 00:24:58:12

Unknown

You know, then we we did some analysis on how long does it need to be an interim fuel storage and where is it going to go in the plant after it's in interim fuel storage. And you draw this and you're building just grows like the reality is as you add detail in the design of your maintenance processes, the size of your structure is grow.

00:24:58:14 - 00:25:18:18

Unknown

And so whereas we were, you know, if we were like, you know, 1.2 to 1 on a large reactor cost comparison basis, in 2019, we did the first estimate were somewhere, somewhere closer to like 1.8 to 1 or 2 to 1. and today's basis, and that's just the reality. You know, it's not just the refueling machine.

00:25:18:18 - 00:25:49:00

Unknown

That's just the example I'm getting, but you sort of propagate that through the hundreds of other systems you have and reactors, and you lose that initial conceptual, you know, advantage that you thought you had. And I think this is, this is just the reality of detailed engineering, right? We're talking about incredibly complicated machines. And as you ask each of these disciplines to evolve their things towards a detailed performance, you know, whether it's going to be licensed to the regulator, it's going to be highly reliable.

00:25:49:02 - 00:25:57:12

Unknown

It's going to be easy to manufacture or construct. You know, you put all those constraints on it, and you just get a system that's much different than you're initially conceived. System.

00:25:57:12 - 00:26:19:22

Unknown

Yeah. It's interesting. reading, I guess it's still preprint now, but, the, the piece that you, James, and Garrett put out, and it's interesting seeing that Betamax 300 and it's to 2019 design basis in 2021 or 22 and just how much things had had grown, how much the embedded vessel had grown in volume, all the systems that had to be added.

00:26:20:00 - 00:26:44:22

Unknown

I think that's probably pretty universal, that you start off with some rose tinted glasses in terms of cost estimates, and then the detailed engineering always makes things complicated. Ravi, I wanted to chat with you a little bit because you have this experience, with jet turbines, and, you know, bringing these commercial products, to markets, you know, there's a lot of, advanced, nuclear companies claiming that's, you know, with $100 million, they're going to have their first commercial unit up and going.

00:26:44:22 - 00:27:00:17

Unknown

It may not be full sized or whatever. but in terms of the games that you need to play in terms of attracting capital, in terms of winning over investors in nuclear in particular, where you have such complexity and fine tuning as you, as you mentioned, from getting to a final design. walk us through through that a little bit.

00:27:00:19 - 00:27:04:22

Unknown

and again, touching on your experience with, with. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'll start with,

00:27:04:22 - 00:27:19:18

Unknown

00:27:19:18 - 00:27:45:17

Unknown

00:27:45:19 - 00:28:08:12

Unknown

00:28:08:14 - 00:28:14:02

Unknown

And if you sum up the appropriations over, you know, 15 or 20 years, you get something close to $1.5 billion

00:28:14:02 - 00:28:35:06

Unknown

that was awarded to Westinghouse. And a similar number, sort of is in the public data for what new scale spent for the design of their, their reactor, their Voyager 12, or what was the US 600? and then you can go it's almost it's almost incredible that that it's only billion or billion point five for Ap1000 and a billion for, for testing.

00:28:35:06 - 00:28:57:02

Unknown

Yeah. I guess I just I think that's the interesting thing to note. There is, you know, that was money spent up until 2012. And as we I think has been discussed exhaustively on this podcast, is the design was not complete in 2012 and I've heard numbers that it was between 20 and 80% complete at the time. So there's a ton of engineering left to happen even after that 1.5 billion.

00:28:57:04 - 00:29:16:01

Unknown

And if you compare that number to, like the Boeing 787, which at the time was the most efficient aircraft to be designed, and it was a 20 to $30 billion design and engineering effort to, to get there. and there's a lot of prototypes that happened along the way. But, you know, airplane prototypes are 300, $400 million efforts.

00:29:16:01 - 00:29:33:21

Unknown

Not what you see in nuclear, where you have sort of billion dollar prototypes along the way. So, and there's some nuance here where aircraft are heavily manufactured products and in heavily manufactured products, you're doing a lot of value engineering, you're doing a lot of manufacturing engineering. So you need to you're spending a lot more time on the engineering itself.

00:29:33:23 - 00:29:52:00

Unknown

Whereas in a constructed product, maybe you're going to let your contractor sort of figure out on site a bit more than you would in, in a manufactured product. but in nuclear, we're sort of in this weird in-between place where you can't just let your contractors figure out everything on site. You need to have actually a lot of regulatory basis for how things are happening on site.

00:29:52:03 - 00:30:22:16

Unknown

So your design cost well to a to a traditionally constructed product is going to be much higher. So if a traditional construction product is designed cost of 1 to 5%, you might be, you know, significantly higher than that on a on a nuclear project. Yeah. There's also, another aspect that is, interesting to remember and is the, the, relation between, the cost for engineering and development in, like what the reactor like the a, B 1000 and an advanced reactor, like, what's the difference?

00:30:22:18 - 00:30:49:19

Unknown

What we would expect, to change from one to another. and whether, whereas the, the A, b 1000, it's a more or less similar evolution to the previous contract before there was the for loop r when we think about some advanced reactors that are being proposed now are not such a small step with respect to what was done in the previous version of whatever they're starting from.

00:30:49:21 - 00:31:14:10

Unknown

And, you would you would argue, many people argue that, they are simpler, simpler systems. Therefore that makes the, the although design, development cost lower and that might be true. But then there's a factor working in the opposite direction that is well the little things that you are developing, how different they are from what was developed before, how much uncertainty does that have to to your development process.

00:31:14:10 - 00:31:47:18

Unknown

And that's a factor that upgrades the difference. So we believe that it may be that in many advanced reactors, the development cost is actually higher than, that 1 to 1.5 million that we were speaking about before. Yeah. And the other, great example here is the Pratt Whitney geared turbofan. So I just to lean into my, my jet engine experience of it so geared turbofan in jet engines, you actually want different parts of your engine spinning at different speeds because you want your tip speeds to be not transonic, not above the speed of sound.

00:31:47:20 - 00:32:11:17

Unknown

And you have but you have different diameters of things spinning in your, and your turbine. And so that's different for different places. So the way this, this kind of typically solved, by folks at GE is a double spore twin spool engine. So you have your high pressure compressor, high pressure turbine on one spool that's rotating either inside, or it's rotating outside of a second spool that's doing a low pressure compressor.

00:32:11:17 - 00:32:34:00

Unknown

And your low pressure turbine. and this is letting things spin at different speeds and all that's letting. And your low pressure turbine is also spinning your fan, the big fan you see at the front of your your jet engine, but your fan is much larger diameter than anything that's happening in your engine. So ideally you would even have a difference between what your low pressure turbine is spinning at and what your fan spin, what your RPM, your fan.

00:32:34:00 - 00:32:58:18

Unknown

So, and so you're just, you're operating sort of suboptimal to accommodate these engineering constraints. And so starting in the early 90s, NASA was funding work at friend Whitney to develop a gearbox that would let you sort of spin down the rate that your LPT is going to let your fan operate closer to its ideal fan speed. and, you know, NASA funded them for ten years to do that.

00:32:58:20 - 00:33:15:12

Unknown

They tried a commercial product in the late 90s, and they ended up not launching it. Then in 2006, they really doubled down and they said, we're going to do it. We're going to build the GTF. the printer, we need 1000, and it's going to be a geared turbofan. And the product finally launches in 2016, I think is the first delivered engine.

00:33:15:18 - 00:33:33:14

Unknown

So. Right. That's what that 1993 is the first work on it. 2016 is what it's finally delivered. It was a $10 billion design and engineering effort. And you could say at the surface, all they did was add a gearbox to a jet engine. Right. That would be a simple narrative to describe what happened to there. But it's it's never that simple, right?

00:33:33:14 - 00:33:56:21

Unknown

Like you're changing the speeds of things, which means you're going to change the aerodynamics of things. You're going to change the design loads of everything. So you're redesigning all of your parts. And in these highly multidisciplinary systems, one small effect, one seemingly small effect has long lifelong downstream consequences. And that's the challenge of reactor design in general. You have to base everything through the structure of multidisciplinary teams.

00:33:56:23 - 00:34:06:04

Unknown

well, hierarchically located in an organization that is very expensive to run. So even small changes are going to be expensive.

00:34:06:10 - 00:34:28:19

Unknown

Do you feel like coming from your respective fields, and in your case or outside of nuclear, that there's something unique in terms of like a kind of design restlessness in nuclear. This the sense that, you know, things aren't good enough. We need to constantly be iterating. you know, the r had just been, you know, the fastest constructed nuclear reactor, maybe in history, at least have a gigawatt scale reactor.

00:34:28:19 - 00:34:48:01

Unknown

And it was kind of like, we'll move on from there. I mean, I guess there were plans in the South Texas project to build a couple more. And maybe it's not fair to, to say it was just sort of passed over, but certainly, in the last 10 or 15 years where, there's not really been much active nuclear construction going on and a lot of, hype and a lot of discussion.

00:34:48:03 - 00:35:05:11

Unknown

you know, there's there's certainly this what seems to me to be this kind of restlessness of like, well, what we have isn't good enough. We need to make, you know, massive step changes in terms of thermal efficiency or safety margins or things like that. given given the massive cost of R&D and the relative weakness of the Western new industry, that seems odd to me.

00:35:05:11 - 00:35:29:06

Unknown

Yeah, well, you say the massive cost of R&D, remember, it's it's actually not that expensive to do a lot of conceptual design. Right? If your goal, right, from a national security perspective is just to maintain a strong nuclear engineering workforce, and you just want to fund conceptual design and design evolutions over multiple years, but you never actually want to build a reactor because building reactors are very expensive.

00:35:29:08 - 00:35:54:15

Unknown

They bankrupt companies, they bankrupt utilities. and so that, you know, it's one way to just sort of fund academic and national lab work to continue to do just to meet this design restlessness that you're describing. and so, if you're just trying to maintain a workforce, you could I think you can make an argument. And I don't know that anyone is actually thinking this way, but you could make an argument that if you're just trying to maintain a technical basis.

00:35:54:17 - 00:36:11:13

Unknown

and then the other thing I would say is like, we are nuclear engineers. and so we are going to come at when we see problems as engineers, we're going to come at them from design solution standpoint. Right. Like that is we're going to see, oh, there was a problem with this reactor. How do I think about solving that problem?

00:36:11:13 - 00:36:43:06

Unknown

Well, I'm not a, an operations engineer. I'm not a supply chain engineer. I'm a nuclear engineer. And so I'm going to think about like, well, what was the design problem that caused the thing that they observed? And the bulk of my energy I'm going to spend on, like, solving it from a nuclear engineering perspective. Now, if we were funding, you know, if there was Doe research funding into supply chain engineering or operations engineering on these sorts of plants, you might see a different set of problems scoped out as solving the the the cost overrun problem in the industry.

00:36:43:06 - 00:36:58:22

Unknown

So what was it? What was it like going to investors, and saying, hey, we're going to need like at least a billion bucks to to get this concept through to potential commercial operation or. Yeah, yeah, we actually got a vice. At one point. I was like, stop saying it's going to be $1 billion and design engineering to get to the first reactor.

00:36:58:22 - 00:37:17:19

Unknown

And it's because we really struggle. and it's not a I mean, we should just be, but it's not a compelling narrative to say that I don't need $1 billion today. But before I have a product that I can sell, I'm going to need to do $1 billion in design, engineering. And, you know, one of the other comparisons people make in nuclear is to space.

00:37:17:21 - 00:37:44:12

Unknown

And they say, look at how space took a highly multidisciplinary, a very expensive process. And we're able to sort of slowly de-risk and build up through prototyping, a product. But the first couple of Falcon one launches were something like $150 million or so. and so you're talking about they could they could fail three reactor three launches and then have a successful fourth launch, all for $150 million, and then nuclear.

00:37:44:14 - 00:38:06:08

Unknown

You know, you're not even close to the design of a new reactor concept at $150 million, let alone having prototyped an integrated version of your reactor. and so we wanted to be honest about what we thought the total capital required was because we didn't want to get into a situation where we had made some promise about how cheaply we could do it, and then we're accountable to that promise.

00:38:06:08 - 00:38:29:14

Unknown

When we had known that this was a much more difficult, difficult process. And so, we were sort of honest about needing at least $1 billion. And then, as I sort of alluded to, we realized late last year that the 1 billion was probably the flaw, and that the ceiling was, you know, obviously unbounded, but maybe close to between 5 and $10 billion in total design an engineering effort.

00:38:29:16 - 00:38:56:22

Unknown

and we think it's useful to talk about that point because we really like gas reactors. We think they fit a an important niche in decarbonization, industrial processes. We think they have a great safety case. and if therefore if you want an advanced reactor industry in a high temperature gas reactor industry, we need to figure we need to be honest about the cost of doing that so that we can create the programs, the R&D programs, the de-risking programs that can achieve that.

00:38:57:00 - 00:39:18:21

Unknown

And it doesn't help to sort of over promise what the or maybe underestimate the design costs to get there. It's like I've, I think I think we have a, a simple understanding of solving problems, which is quantify the problem and then go solve it. And a proper quantification of the problem is that this is a multibillion dollar design and construction effort.

00:39:19:03 - 00:39:48:02

Unknown

And therefore we need to fund it as, as so if, if we want an advanced reactor industry. And it's important to note here that the 1.2 to 1.8 times the cost of a low water reactor, that you at a degree that you first of all, it's a good model. And as such, it will probably be wrong, but it may be useful to quantify things, so on this, even if it's totally true, it's 1.2 to 1.8 times or even 1.8 times.

00:39:48:03 - 00:40:10:12

Unknown

Like what the reactor we believe. we said before that there are, obligations where it could feed and market, where it could feed. So what this 1.8 is a know a number that might not be the same for every place, for every project, for every subcontractor. and then there are obligations. Process heat. Where, it's it may be worth it if you're going above 300 t to build a plant that is 1.8 times more expensive.

00:40:10:12 - 00:40:43:10

Unknown

And that's how we initially got into. But it wasn't let's deploy this technology instead of like other reactors. Let's find out the not only that complement like what the reactor for supplying process heat. Because for for electricity it will probably make the most sense to be like what the reactors in almost most places, in almost every place actually, as well, doesn't mean that maybe a high temperature, actually upper atmosphere in the future may make more sense for some obligation and in some niche market, or for some reason.

00:40:43:12 - 00:41:09:07

Unknown

so why, I need to, for, process heat instead of, whatever. For instance, it was, high technology readiness level. And this connects to the goals of development that we were speaking about before that if you're very different with respect to what has been deployed industrially before, then you have a bigger gap there. And that 1 billion to 5 to 10 billion in high temperature gas reactors.

00:41:09:07 - 00:41:39:17

Unknown

We don't know how much it will be motors or reactors, but we saw more of a gap there because we've seen less demonstrations. There's not they are equivalent to molten reactors. there's not for some reason there's not AVR in Europe. There's not the mountains of Africa and so on and so forth. So we thought, well, the light water reactor is very well, populated by teams that have a lot of expertise at designing, like other reactors, major U.S. vendors, but also vendors in eastern countries.

00:41:39:19 - 00:42:05:14

Unknown

however, we're not seeing that sort of innovation that improves, high temperature gas reactors to a point where they could be competitive. And we believe that with our innovation, high temperature reactor can be competitive in those markets. So, we have, recently created a paper, in Naga that said that, my, there could probably be about 30% cheaper than, other high temperature gas water.

00:42:05:16 - 00:42:24:05

Unknown

We don't know if again, because it's a model, we don't know if it's 30, 20, 40 or 60, like from the beginning of the world. We think that it's in that range, and that makes it about 1.8 times bigger that, the radically, you know, what, what you could get, being reasonable with like, what the reactors would be.

00:42:24:07 - 00:42:45:09

Unknown

I mean, in preparation for this, you guys had a table and some documents you shared with me about. And I found this to be useful as well. It's not the kind of be all and end all, but reactors of operation certainly do give you a sense about technology readiness, troubleshooting that's occurred, optimization and capacity factors. And, you know, the water cooled fleet 17,000 years or something like that.

00:42:45:11 - 00:43:01:11

Unknown

and gas reactors, like a lot of it's the advanced gas reactor fleet in the UK that that when you actually pass it down to just the high temperature gas reactors, it don't look good. Like you have the what is it, the right and shaft versus reactor. I had to write it out in my notes because I'm just a lot of German.

00:43:01:11 - 00:43:21:20

Unknown

I know I could smash them consonants together, but I mean, that ran for 22 years. Not without problems. Water, oil ingress, fuel failures, but like forcing drain like 60% capacity factor. A lot of these, you know, only offered for a couple of years commercially before being shut down. Like, is that no daunting to you, like in terms of just the GR rather than just the gas?

00:43:21:21 - 00:43:52:13

Unknown

I mean, absolutely. I mean, and this is why, you know, I want to throw a lot of credit towards the Kairos engineering team because they they've clearly laid out that the way to get to operational excellence is building expertise by doing a lot of technology demonstrations over time. And if you look at the history of even the R and R experience, there were a ton of small reactor demonstrations that were in the what kilowatt megawatt size before we got to what we have today is sort of a 1000 megawatt lye water reactors.

00:43:52:15 - 00:44:21:07

Unknown

and those processes themselves took a long time to get to commercial builds. And so the, the proper program to deploy an advanced reactor is something similar to what you can observe Kairos doing, which is doing a lot of these technology demonstrations. But it takes a long time and it's very expensive. And Matthias has an engineering team of 4 or 500 engineers, which probably costs like, you know, $100 million a year or so, like, I don't know, you know, not seeing their accounting books, but I can estimate that's what it's been.

00:44:21:09 - 00:44:45:01

Unknown

and they've been running for four years near that level. And they the latest d.o.e. press release on this, on Cairo says that they will do a commercialization in the early 2030s. and so you're talking about, you know, the Kairos reactor was conceived that was conceived in the early 2000 at Oak Ridge. It was an academic and university research project for 15 years.

00:44:45:03 - 00:45:05:10

Unknown

Then it became the commercial product for Kairos in 2016, and then 16 years of development after sort of starting the company to get to, a commercial version of their reactor. And so that's like a very sober and like, right approach. This is going to take a lot of capital. It's going to take a lot of engineering demonstrations over time.

00:45:05:16 - 00:45:33:20

Unknown

But that's how we're going to overcome those capacity factor problems that you that you point out the sugars. Right. Like if you just try to jump in and say, we've never built anything before or a new organization and we're going to build a, you know, several hundred megawatt here, I think it's, you know, it's not out of, it's not crazy to expect that you're going to run into those capacity factor problems that you're expressing, you know, for saying, friend, there's only one reactor in the US before that was similar.

00:45:33:20 - 00:45:58:23

Unknown

And so it was sort of logical to say that this is a not just a demonstration of one technology for safety. It wasn't just an HG demonstration. It was a demonstration of new alloys. It was a demonstration of new fuel. It was a demonstration of new vessel types. It was a pre stress concrete vessel, new welding techniques, new, you know, so there's a, when, when you do all of those things at once, you run into those capacity factor problems.

00:45:58:23 - 00:46:30:04

Unknown

And that's why you really want to have a program that can say where we want to be in 15 years is this. And so we're going to have a focused and strategic vision over what we need to accomplish over those 15 years. and that's what we would hope for the advanced reactor industry. It's it's really unfortunate for the, HDR, community in the US that, there have been so these continuous efforts in the sense that we have, featured on them for some reason, then a few later.

00:46:30:04 - 00:47:02:16

Unknown

So not a few years of not much then in GMP that started building up, but then it stopped. And now we have a bunch of demonstration program. When we look at successful nuclear industries in other countries, what we see is continuing the over time continuity of effort and continuity of funding. And it's easy for, for these industries to justify so many more resources deployed into advanced reactors, probably because of, you know, how the countries where these industries run are built, and how it's are funded.

00:47:02:18 - 00:47:33:22

Unknown

but at the end of the day, if we want to have if we aim to have a successful advanced auto industry, we have to both commit and recognize. I mean, first recognize and then commit, to, to these long development timelines and these very high capital needs. And we just have to look at the French sodium fast reactors, the, the, Chinese, high temperature gas we have all of these are multi-decade programs with no stopping or almost no stopping governments have bought, more into these dollars.

00:47:34:03 - 00:47:57:00

Unknown

You can be sure that they are multi-billion programs. So it's going to be similar, right? Probably. And I guess yeah, it begs the question, I guess within the US where where that patient capital comes from, particularly in a context of, you know, negative natural gas prices in the Permian, or, you know, one to dollar, 1 to $2 per million BTUs, in other areas.

00:47:57:02 - 00:48:20:04

Unknown

what are your guys thoughts in terms of. Yeah, what a track that that patient capital can that be venture? Does it have to be government? you know, what are some examples internationally that might be pushing. Yeah, yeah. this is a great question. And I and I would say, like we all share our opinions here, and I would think that this is a useful conversation to have across the advanced reactor industry because it's such a it's so fundamental to its vitality.

00:48:20:14 - 00:48:41:21

Unknown

like the worst case scenarios in five years, we've sort of spent the capital, it's been deployed and we're sitting on half finished projects. Right. So how do we make sure we can get these things to completion? and there's different ways of looking at this. One is, as Enrique alluded to, government backed multi-decade vision products. projects.

00:48:41:23 - 00:49:07:22

Unknown

So that is there are, you know, Soviet and then Russian commitment to the BN series, lead cooled fast reactors. The French multi-decade commitment to the sodium cooled fast reactors, the China's current commitment to, as you know, they started with their test reactor in the 90s than they did, the M, which is like a 200 megawatt. And then they're working on an R 600, which would be a 600 megawatt version of the reactor.

00:49:07:22 - 00:49:29:02

Unknown

So that's that's a clear, R&D funded effort to get to what the commercial version of, of an HDR would look like, the light water reactor competitive version. but that's, you know, a 30 year effort for them to, to think about that. and so that's like sort of option number one is that we make Idaho National Lab what it was in the beginning, which is a reactor demonstration lab.

00:49:29:02 - 00:49:49:13

Unknown

It's building a lot of experiments that are it's building a lot of test reactors, and it's building experience and knowledge to get to commercial reactors. In doing so. that's one the second is sort of, the philanthropic billionaire approach. You know, we can give our own to Mr. Bill gates and this. Right, like, he is committed to, to Terrapower and backing that project.

00:49:49:15 - 00:50:06:18

Unknown

but I and I think that's a great way to get funding where you have a billionaire who is committed and has the capital to sort of do this on their own, but it's not scalable. Right? Like you're sort of subject to what this one individual wants to create. and then the last one is a successful light water reactor industry.

00:50:06:18 - 00:50:32:11

Unknown

Right. Like if you look at innovation in other industries where you have a successful car market or a successful gas turbine market, you can fund R&D off of the free cash flow of of a successful business. So if we can get to a significant number of new light water reactor deployments in the US, whether they are you 1000 or a cars or three hundreds or, you know, SMR 300, whatever they are.

00:50:32:13 - 00:50:55:08

Unknown

and if those can create healthy, financially healthy companies at GE, Westinghouse or whoever it is, then those companies can fund the R&D sort of off balance sheet to get to the next evolution. Right? When when GE goes to do an evolution of their gas turbine, they pre-sell commitments to help fund some of it. They, they get, hey, this is what the product's going to look like.

00:50:55:08 - 00:51:17:20

Unknown

It's going to have these attributes. And they get commitments from airlines to buy that engine. and that helps give them the confidence that they can justify spending the capital to do the design. And I think in the industry today, we have such a disconnect between successful building and deployments that there's really nobody you can go to and sort of trust that if you buy this product at some set of metrics, you're going to get that product.

00:51:17:22 - 00:51:28:05

Unknown

but if we could get to the LWR industry, to a, you know, a healthy construction and deployment rate, then there's space to do advanced reactors. And in the wake of that.

00:51:28:05 - 00:51:29:17

Unknown

yeah, I was going to say that,

00:51:29:17 - 00:51:47:05

Unknown

there's, an important advantage of having, successful water reactor industry for advanced, which I thought is that now we're showing so many products and so many companies are trying to develop their own advanced reactor, and there's no resources of every kind you can think of for bringing all those projects to reality.

00:51:47:08 - 00:52:10:06

Unknown

that that creates, a lot of entropy because those are teams, those are experts dedicated to a set that will never come to reality. And some of them don't even have a chance. So the bigger question looking at the big picture will be, how can we select those projects that really highlight terms that really are the best of their kind, that really have some, some reason to exist?

00:52:10:08 - 00:52:50:22

Unknown

as they are. Right. And maybe there's few more central reactor concepts that make sense in, us as projects. Maybe there's few. We started there because we thought is the HPR, concept that makes the the Monsanto, in other words, the best way to build an HDR would be murder. We don't have any doubt of that. we think that similarly for other projects, if there was an entity capable of pointing at the brightest that have the most sense and then kind of like in resources towards them, so that, you know, the breweries that don't have that much of a chance wouldn't get funded, and those projects that have a chance would get funded

00:52:51:03 - 00:53:12:12

Unknown

that would improve a lot. The the chances of the overall industry, the good thing of a low water reactor industry being successful is that you have that expertise in nuclear engineering, that deep expertise in in bringing a bridge to reality that is going to be big in the advanced reactor concepts that make the the most sense to complement their, like what, the reactor portfolio.

00:53:12:12 - 00:53:39:15

Unknown

So it will be big vendors like Westinghouse or General Electric with, lots of orders in their books for like what, the reactor that would say. And we're going to be developing as well, this reactor on this reactor, because they have the money to do so instead of relying on government funds. there's another version of this that is, not that like water reactor industry been successful where we rely for advanced reactor mostly on government funds.

00:53:39:17 - 00:54:01:14

Unknown

But then it would equally be necessary to have the same type of expertise that we have in the first scenario, unlike what the reactor vendors in the government for picking projects, for getting involved in projects very deeply to select which of them have a chance and invest very heavily and with a lot of continuity in those. So so they will have better chances to, to get to fruition.

00:54:01:19 - 00:54:18:22

Unknown

Yeah. I mean, I guess one model is, you know, you, and this is kind of the dynamic free market capitalist model where you, you know, have the market choose the winners and losers. But, you know, certainly the last several years, we've seen a plethora of, smart concept companies spring up. and as you're saying, it's a pretty disorganized approach.

00:54:19:04 - 00:54:47:20

Unknown

the other the other side would be some degree of central planning, whether that's government or just, you know, a large company, a large, healthy company like you or Westinghouse, potentially having, you know, I, I guess better tools with which to decide on, you know, which which concepts are more likely to be deployed. I think it was interesting seeing, great British nuclear narrowing down, their smart technology choices and basically limiting everything that was in the light water reactor.

00:54:47:22 - 00:55:15:02

Unknown

I'm not sure if that came as a shock to some, but, you know, certainly it was something that I, that I, that I notice and when you're looking and starting to look more at the economics and dollars and cents and likelihood of, you know, good operations in a project that that just makes sense. I think I think that brings us back a little bit, though, to, you know, your, your cost, estimation tool as well, like having trusted standardized tools that can be used, to make these kind of assessments, seem seem really important in this context?

00:55:15:02 - 00:55:42:04

Unknown

Yeah, absolutely. And, making those sorts of decisions. And one of the things that comes up when you do that for advanced reactors is and one of the novel aspects of the tool is that it's sort of assumes a base number of systems that you're going to have in your plant. And if you come at your advanced reactor concept cost estimate from, you only need to estimate the cost of these, you know, ten systems, because that's all my advanced reactor has.

00:55:42:05 - 00:56:00:11

Unknown

Well, then your cost estimates going to look great. But if you start to back out all of the, maybe regulatory requirements or just, you know, systems engineering type requirements that, that you need in your plant and you all of a sudden need Hvac and safety, Hvac and, you know, redundancy in some of your wiring and, you know, different rooms for those things to happen.

00:56:00:11 - 00:56:17:14

Unknown

And so that you have adequate fire production, you start applying all these other constraints. That first cost estimate that you had, you know, was was low because you underestimated the number of systems. So one of the things I think, you know, I can't speak to the to the British government, but I know some utilities who have used the cost tool.

00:56:17:16 - 00:56:46:12

Unknown

I developed, you know, when they approach a vendor and they say, give me the size or some metric of this system, they don't know because their design concept is so early, and it's actually a good tool for evaluating where somebody is in their design processes. Can you actually tell me what your flow rate through your helium purification system is, or the flow rate through your, you know, chemical and volume control system is or can you give me some sense of the necessary capacity for your service?

00:56:46:12 - 00:57:12:01

Unknown

Air, water and steam. And if you can't provide those things and you're just thinking you don't need them, then it's clear that your design is a very pre conceptual phase. And I think, as you know, as you start to get the experts in the room to analyze these things and make estimates of what should come next, you kind of approach, okay, maybe the next round of deployments really should be light water reactors because of just where they are in their, in their development.

00:57:12:03 - 00:57:32:09

Unknown

I don't know if this has changed in the last one month or two. but at least until April that I went to our conference where, they presented, there was still ongoing a program in the UK for developing type patch reactors, in collaboration with Japan. So been through that. They ruled out most advanced reactor concept, the big one.

00:57:32:09 - 00:57:54:03

Unknown

And this is exactly what I was speaking about. Like it doesn't need to be we were ruled out of the advanced reactor because all of them don't make sense. Let's concentrate on this in March or on the Or until and let's pick the few things that that, have a chance of being cost competitive at some market that is also big enough to justify the investment.

00:57:54:05 - 00:58:29:06

Unknown

and let's carry on with that. the UK, to my knowledge, they opened a program a few years ago, for developing HDR for, for the country, and there were four consortia, that were selected. One of them was led by the, National Research Laboratory from the UK. but there were also another, set of vendors, private companies, companies International, that won in collaboration with UK companies, these pre-feasibility studies for technology selection.

00:58:29:06 - 00:58:39:11

Unknown

And, I don't know, you know, they have narrowed it down to two less concept, but, until at least recently, they have some program for developing them, particularly at.

00:58:39:11 - 00:58:59:17

Unknown

maybe we'll we'll sort of wrap it up shortly here. But I wanted to get a sense from you guys. You're incubating mater. But what's, what's new. What are, what are you guys putting your efforts into now? Yeah, that's a great, a great segway for the roll out. So we are, incubating monitor and sort of still allowing for research collaborations on that front.

00:58:59:17 - 00:59:26:22

Unknown

Right. So if you're a university or national lab and you want to like, work on Advanced Reactor, we'd be happy to like, collaborate with folks in that space. but we think that the next big move, or I should say, I think that the next big move for the nucleus in the US is we need to deploy more advanced, more light water reactors, and that can come as you know, power upgrades of existing reactors, and as deployments of Ap1000 or AWS.

00:59:27:00 - 00:59:42:12

Unknown

and so the question is, how do we how do we get there? Like how do we make that happen? And I think there's a lot of questions there. There's still a huge gap. I think there's a missing business model that exists to get those things deployed, in the US as a missing group, to both manage the project.

00:59:42:12 - 01:00:04:04

Unknown

Well, absorb the risk, and capture the value from deploying that. You know, in the US right now, we have phenomenal tax support, tax credit, support for deployments of nuclear reactors. You know, 30 to 50% of your total capital costs can be basically refunded to you through an investment tax credit, depending on how much domestic content you have in the plant.

01:00:04:09 - 01:00:19:04

Unknown

And, that's like how much of the steel and rebar which came from the US and how many of the manufactured products came from the US. and if you're in an energy community, which is almost, almost all of the US is, an energy community. And so this, as you know, and if you don't want that, you can get a production tax credit.

01:00:19:04 - 01:00:42:15

Unknown

And then we have a lot of states that are willing to pay above market for clean firm power and a lot of customers. There's a lot of, you know, data centers and even other folks that are trying to get clean foreign power on their balance sheet, willing to pay above market for nuclear so that I think we're in a place in a moment that I would be, you know, disheartened to see if we missed it.

01:00:42:15 - 01:01:03:08

Unknown

On deploying new light water reactors in the US right now. And so, in that vein, we started working with, another group called Alva Energy to sort of expand, you know, deployment of, of light water reactors in the US. And I will say we'll give more clarity on what that looks like in the coming months.

01:01:03:10 - 01:01:11:13

Unknown

but, the goal is to get whether there, there or AP 1000, sort of under construction in the US.

01:01:11:14 - 01:01:16:19

Unknown

From your lips to God's ears. any any closing thoughts? Guys, before we, before we sign off.

01:01:16:19 - 01:01:35:11

Unknown

Now, this has been great. I really appreciate it. You know, I well, I guess my closing thought will be that one of the things I've valued a lot about decouple is that you've tried to have these heterodox, nuanced conversations about, and I think why we were comfortable coming on here and sharing what we think it takes to get an advanced reactor industry really rolling.

01:01:35:13 - 01:02:00:07

Unknown

As soon as we knew that that your audience is, is eager to hear that sort of thing, they're, like, willing to accept that it's maybe going to be more complicated than some are saying. That doesn't mean it's not worth doing. but let's be honest about the the problems and challenges of of getting this underway. And, so I would say shout out, to you and the decouple team for this, nuanced approach to all things nuclear and decarbonization, sharing it.

01:02:00:09 - 01:02:23:00

Unknown

You on your, on, yeah. and I also wanted to add, you know, thank you for having us here as well. this has been great. I listened to many of your podcast, I think you, bring up, a lot of topics that are not familiar to, to most people, in a really relatable, easy to understand way.

01:02:23:00 - 01:02:48:11

Unknown

And, it's always interesting to, to listen to because you bring in, last, last note on Boston Dynamics, something we had mentioned we're doing, we're incubating internally the mother concept, but we're also providing consulting and R&D services on, technology domain aspects that are not directly related to them, either to our reactors or to other HPR or to other nuclear technology.

01:02:48:11 - 01:02:55:19

Unknown

Okay guys. Great chatting today. Look forward to more of the same. Thanks, Chris. Thank you Chris.