The World Changing Podcast

Alan: [00:00:00] part of the reason I got nuclear is because when I left enterprise software, I was tired of building, products for other companies and, things that I didn't think mattered all that much.
Alan: And I wanted to do something that I thought mattered to me that was clean energy, mitigating climate change. And so I looked around and the thing, great thing about nuclear is depending on your metric, right? It's either, it's like 99% more safe than, your average coal or gas plant.
Greg: Welcome to the World Changing podcast. Was that too much? Yeah, that was probably too much, but let's keep it, we'll keep it anyway. How about this? If we do the podcast and the world doesn't change, Then we can take that out. Welcome to the World Changing podcast, where we deconstruct the projects and products that are moving us towards a decentralized and carbon-free future.
Greg: We'll talk to the skeptics, supporters, and innovators in the fields that depend [00:01:00] on electricity to run their industries, which is changing every single day. I'm your host, Greg Robinson, co-founder of Aston Labs, a decentralized infrastructure company, and on the other side of the camera here, we. Flo Lumsden our producer, and she will make sure that the train stays on the tracks while we do this.
Greg: So I met Alan a few years ago as he was wading into the energy market. After spending a, about a decade in enterprise software, I was immediately humbled by the fact that someone with his background would call me to get my thoughts on pretty much anything. His expertise in starting building and scaling companies coupled with his depth of knowledge and particle physics and nuclear energy, gives him an insanely interesting and to me -
Greg: a pretty important perspective on decarbonizing energy. Alan holds a PhD in particle physics from MIT. While getting that degree, he co-founded and built a software company to fix the big data problem that he and his [00:02:00] co-founders experience in their particle physics research. Alan and his team built the company to over a thousand customers before it was acquired by IBM after just six years .Following ibm
Greg: alan was the head of product for one of PayPal's major payments platforms, and most recently Alan was Chief of staff at Oklo, an energy startup that is at the cutting edge of small modular nuclear power plants. Please enjoy Alan's and my conversation where we dig into the challenges, the opportunities, and the renaissance of nuclear power. Are we recording? Okay, is it recording? Yeah. All good. Okay. Um, Now I forgot. Everything. I was gonna say
Greg: well, No, I was gonna sort of transition into, I was gonna say that the flow, we did this like intro for this podcast. Like the first time I hooked up a microphone and stuck a camera in my face and she said, [00:03:00] just start talking. And it was just like, I was like uh, I don't really know anything.
Greg: I stuttering and forgetting everything I was gonna say. So she politely said after we were, she edited that and spent an ungodly amount of time editing it. She's like, you should probably rerecord the whole thing. . ,
Alan: you have a, you get a greater respect for radio DJs, right? Who serious are very smooth.
Greg: Very smooth radio DJs. I I always wanted to do that in college, but I uh, I decided to major in physics. , So ,
Alan: that was, that was mistake. .
Greg: It's probably where we're gonna start today. But there's so many places we could start seeing as though I was just going through your bio or LinkedIn and it's like you've got sales, marketing, product company operations, founding startups, managing corporate technical teams, physics undergrad and particle physics.
Greg: Yeah.
Alan: So, A lot of that is, is [00:04:00] LinkedIn word salad of how do I make myself sound as attractive as possible too. as varied an audience as possible. but you know, I, I've touched on at least all of those at some point
Greg: in my career. Yeah. So let's start there. So why this is probably pretty self-serving for me, but , like why undergrad and physics?
Alan: So, I mean, It's a good question. I'd always been kind of a science oriented person, um, as a young kid you know, kind of a nerd, loved space and NASA and all of that. but what really got me into physics particularly was my dad who had read, I don't know, I was in like seventh or eighth grade, whatever.
Alan: And he read a brief history of time Stephen Hawkings and he said, this book is really interesting. I understood about half of it, and he gave it to me. He said, you should probably read it. And so I read it and I was kind of blown. In the way that I think everybody who loves science is a little bit blown away when you first encounter, the theories of special and general relativity.
Alan: Things like time dilation and things like the, the kind of, you know, the way [00:05:00] that space and time can change depending on your, your point of view and, and stuff like that. And it it kind of blew my mind, right? Like I was gonna, this is amazing and I wanna learn more. And so I, read a bunch of popular physics books in that vein.
Alan: And then, , when I was in high school, I had a really great physics teacher for both regular and AP physics. Um, And he was very smart and very witty and dry, and I really liked him and we got along really well. And then, because of that I decided, okay, I'm gotta go to college and I'm gonna study something.
Alan: And I think that I wanna study this with the intention of at some point becoming, an academic physicist, which certainly is not the road I took. But I did, I ran into the teacher, so I ran into that teacher, a number of years later, told him what I was doing at the time I was getting my PhD, and he shook his head and he was like, oh man, I blame myself, , that's uh, how I felt about it.
Alan: But yeah, I loved it. And I don't know if were around the same age. There was a program, a television program called, I wanna say it was called Stephen Hawkings Universe, and it was like a, 10 part series and it went through all the various. Thought experiments [00:06:00] and kinda the history of cosmology and general relativity.
Alan: And it was pretty well done for the time and they really got me excited about it. It was like, again, kinda that, that, that spark of discovery, like that that really, gets its claw in you. And that's how I got into it.
Greg: That's serious, man. Yeah. My, I guess had a similar entrance into physics.
Greg: It was a high school teacher, had him in middle school too for general science, and he was just like, I don't know, just, it was simple. Like it was like supposed to be the hardest thing and everybody was scared of it. Till you get into it.
Greg: And then there were some very offensive classes when I got into college . And it would make you feel Yes. Like, Oh, this should be simple and it's incredibly hard for you. , sorry about that. There's was were you . Certain at that point, like when you were graduating that you, you were gonna head into the next level and go get
Alan: your PhD?
Alan: Yeah, so I, my plan had always been grad school getting a PhD and going into physics and, as I said, [00:07:00] for my first couple of years in grad school, I thought that I would be able to, hack it as an academic physicist and maybe what you've observed in college is certainly the, I got that in, in on steroids in grad school where I came in and everybody was, oh, this is, this should be easy.
Alan: This is really trivial stuff, , and I'm like drowning. Especially some of the, , some of those uh, math heavy classes were were uh, a real gut check, yeah, got my ego, brought my ego down. But I was really, I was very intent on, on, on still getting my degree.
Alan: And so I, got through the club courses and the exams and then just spent, the next few years doing research. And when when I got to research, what I realized is that it's really, it can be really interesting and it can be really rewarding. And there are times when you're like staring at a plot that you've just created where you're the first person in the entire world to see this data, make this discovery.
Alan: And that's really compelling. But there is so much so many details and so much that goes into it that you don't get at the popular physics level that you really have to it's a little bit of a shock in that respect. That. [00:08:00] In general, you have this feeling that, of course these people are way more detail oriented, way smarter , but it was just uh, I figured out it wasn't for me.
Alan: I wasn't just, I was just not gonna be able to do it at that level. But I still wanted to my, get my, I still wanted to graduate, so I did, I wrote a thesis, and and then I left the world of physics forever. I call myself a lapsed physicist, . I still try to keep up with the research every now and then, but it's hard.
Alan: Yeah.
Greg: And so the way you and I originally met was through someone who was also going through, it sounded like a similar experience. So you're going through and you're getting your PhD, and at what point in that process, Do you meet the crew that it ultimately ends up saying, let's do this, let's do a software startup.
Greg: As if getting a PhD from m i t in particle physics wasn't, challenging enough. Did it overlap and at what point in that journey were you like, okay, we're gonna do this software startup thing? .
Alan: Yeah, so a, as you mentioned, we [00:09:00] met through one of my postdocs at my lab.
Alan: So it was the three of us. It was a postdoc, it was another grad student who was myself and the other grad student I met actually before we even got to, to m i t, we were at like a dinner for prospective students and we were sitting next to each other and, you know, we're both from the Midwest and we hit it off a little bit.
Alan: And then when we got there, I, you. He was in he was in the lab, the same lab as me. And so we we went through our tracks very closely. And then we had a postdoc who was, a few years older than us, but in the same place. And I think he, somewhere along the way, decided probably not gonna have a future in academic physics, probably want to start thinking about what could come next.
Alan: And he was really the impetus for us to um, he kind of had this, I forget what he called it, but it was like a working group, or the club. And it was just the three of us. And we would get together at lunchtimes and talk about things we wanted to do, and areas within technology that we thought we could add value.
Alan: And we thought we could, do something. And it really, he would hand out assignments oh, go read this and then summarize it, , stuff like that. And And we didn't really have a [00:10:00] great idea, but what we knew was we had been working with these incredibly large data sets. We were doing particle physics research at a collider on Long Island.
Alan: And, you smash protons into each other and you look at what comes out and there's just so much data, it's just incredible. And we had become experts in parsing that data, storing that data, managing it, analyzing it, all of those things. And we thought this is happening at the cutting edge of physics, right?
Alan: And you can just start of see, so this is like 2007, maybe you can see this problem is going to be, it's going to become a problem for all industry and you can just start to see it becoming a problem at the large tech company. So companies like Google and Amazon were.
Alan: Tackling some of the same problems that we had been tackling with what they call big data. And we thought that we could make a, we could take the skills that we used in our research and kind of apply those to the next level of companies. Like obviously the Googles and the Amazons of the world [00:11:00] are gonna be able to hire the great people and build these systems themselves, and they want to, but there's a whole host of companies that don't have the resources to do that, and they're going to be looking for experts to do that for them.
Alan: And that was the genesis of the idea. We went through a bunch of iterations after that, but there was a moment we were like, okay, we're gonna actually let's, we're gonna actually do this, right? remember talking to my dad and being like, is this crazy?
Alan: Should we, should I be taking this risk? And he was like you're young, I didn't have kids. You got much to lose. What happens if it fails? I was like, that's true. If it fails, it. It, it was a waste of a little bit of time, but you learn a lot and you move on.
Greg: Yeah. So as you were doing that going back to that experience, like at what point did did you get your first customer or what point did you know that it was like, oh, this is going to be a business?
Greg: Or for me, sometimes it's I already started doing this and I didn't even know I was doing it .
Greg: And then just to double back on that one point of were you still doing research work and trying to get your PhD finished up while you guys were doing these sort of [00:12:00] club Yeah.
Alan: Meetups and getting newest? Yeah. No, not from your friends . Not just the clubs.
Alan: I, I would not advise anybody do this. So we actually formed a company, we raised money from Boston, BC that was really great and was, and we said, we're gonna raise this money. We wanna do this company, but we also wanna finish our PhDs.
Alan: And they at least hid their shock well enough to say, okay, you could probably do that. And so we were working on both for, I was working on both for about a year while I was writing my thesis and then, doing kind of the initial startup of the company and then my co-founder and who was the CTO.
Alan: He he didn't take a leap of his absence cause he was still doing grad work, but he was focusing more on the company and, so he took another year after that to, to of finish up. So it was a, I mean, it worked out, but it was not the best decision. There was a lot of a lot of burning the candle at both ends for a couple years.
Alan: But it was very important for both me and Adam, my co-founder, to, to get our PhDs because we had put so much work in at that point. Yeah. We didn't wanna just, abandon it. [00:13:00] And Mike also finished, is that right? Mike was a postdoc. Yeah, Mike, he was a postdoc. So he had already had his PhD.
Alan: So you guys were already, but he
Greg: finished his, you guys were of struggling, struggling as he's just of sitting .
Alan: Yeah, I mean that's that's not fair. He was out there hustling, he got us our first he got us our first couple customers. He certainly was instrumental in the fundraising process.
Alan: Got it. Yeah. But even then it didn't feel real. It didn't feel real until, we had our first couple of hires, you we hired a couple of people outside and we had our first couple customers, and those customers were trusting us with their data. So it was a database is a service startup.
Alan: . And, there was times when things would break because things always break and you're on the phone with these customers and they're losing money because of us. That's a pretty, yeah. It kinda makes you b blanch a little bit. That, that, that's pretty stark.
Alan: Mm-hmm. .. And once that started happening, once you're like, oh no, we're responsible for other people's businesses and also we're responsible for our employees who. Many of which left much higher [00:14:00] paying jobs. That one of us convinced these people, oh, you gotta come work for us, and they have families and you have to take care of them. And then it becomes very real, very fast. Yeah,
Greg: man, I, as I was planning to talk to you today, I was thinking there's gonna come this moment where we have an entire podcast about starting a company, scaling a company, going into the software world.
Greg: But I really want to leapfrog over a lot of that and get into some of the more recent things because we've gone from, you're smashing protons together and collecting data. You go and and gonna go into the startup where all you scale the software. This is the montage part of this won't add to music where you're
Alan: training montage
Greg: Yep. And then a and you go through this, a career at at ibm, go on to PayPal, and then you leave the software business after all this time and you go and decide to go into, I'm gonna say energy, but go into [00:15:00] a sector of energy that definitely has an interesting history and . But so when we first talked, I wanna say Mike said, Alan's looking at nuclear, a nuclear energy and going to a nuclear energy company.
Greg: And at the time, What=
Greg: But, But it's becoming, nuclear energy is becoming a big part. We just saw this breakthrough in fusion and of course all of my, people who might have watched physics for general consumption, for the general population generally people don't really think, oh, that's fusion, or that's nuclear fission, or that's small modular reactor, or that's large reactor.
Greg: When people hear nuclear, they just think gigantic. Like the biggest thing on the horizon. I grew up near a nuclear power plant. I now live near one. You always see it when you're flying up. And so yeah. The
Alan: cooling towers are in the distance. The intro to the Simpsons, you get the power plant there, . That's what people think
Greg: about for most of our Yeah. [00:16:00] General knowledge of nuclear. But I'm, I think it's really interesting what you've gotten back into and the perspective that you have from the ground level of what's happening today in nuclear is super interesting.
Greg: One quote I heard one time was that opportunity follows policy and as an entrepreneur, like that makes me cringe. Like the idea that you can't walk outside and have an idea and be able to go after an opportunity, you have to wait for some policy to come up.
Greg: So What is the NRC and how powerful are they? And how much do they control sort of innovation in the sector? And We'll just start there.
Alan: Sure. You're right. So the energy space in general and nuclear energy in specific is a very highly regulated industry.
Alan: Which for good reason, when I started, I was like, boy, you wouldn't, you couldn't imagine the number of hoops you have to jump through to build a nuclear react. And then I was like, no, that's, wait, you probably could, right? [00:17:00] That's probably a good thing. So the nrc the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is an independent body within the government that is tasked with, they have a number of mandates, but one of them is the licensing of new nuclear power plants, new reactors.
Alan: Aside from that, they do safety inspections. They maintain the old fleet, they have some educational responsibilities. It is a large organization. A large government organization that, is one of the two government agencies that kind of, have the broad mandate of nuclear.
Alan: The other being the Department of Energy. And most of the things that they work on are either, weapons related or defense related. And are not, the NRC is more of the civilian side. And so it's what, it's a few thousand people. The heads of it are there are five commissioners, although right now they're only four.
Alan: They're political appointees and they have to be approved. But then underneath that you have a whole organization of people who joined the NRC and got into this [00:18:00] field because at some point in their life they got excited about nuclear, about the possibilities of nuclear energy. And so they. For the most part, incredibly smart people, technical very knowledgeable.
Alan: And they are excited about nuclear energy and they're excited about, what the role that can play. But of course, they have this job, and this job is to protect the public, right? It is, especially within, when you talk about new reactors and new technologies, right? They have to worry about that, and that becomes the probably overriding factor in what they do.
Alan: And so because of that, the process for licensing new technology, for constructing new technology for building a plant is incredibly onerous. I was, when I was preparing, I was reading it through some of my old, notes. And up until very recently, I think like last year or this year, the United States had not built a.
Alan: Built a new nuclear power plant from the ground up going through the whole process since [00:19:00] before the NRC was established. So that was like 19 74, 19 75. And for literally we're talking, 50 years there had been no new plants built. Everything had been come up before that. And and then but the, there's a new plant that turned on either this year or last year in Georgia which is exciting.
Alan: But it just goes to show you how, like, how hard it is to get some of this stuff built. Now, part of that is, public perception. There was a few very poorly timed awful events that, that have, colored that. And part of it is that the NRC takes as they should, they take safety very seriously.
Alan: But this is just my own opinion. I think that the safety of nuclear. Is taken to an extreme that other indu, other energy industries and other industries in general are not held to. And and some of the, externalities like most, most importantly, climate change are not considered right.
Alan: Part of the reason that I got into new, this is a rambling answer. Part of the reason nuclear was part of the reason I got nuclear is because when I left enterprise software, I was tired of building, [00:20:00] products for other companies and, things that I didn't think mattered as all that much.
Alan: And I wanted to do something that I thought mattered to me that was clean energy, mitigating climate change. And so I looked around and the thing, great thing about nuclear is it's incredibly safe, on a, depending on your metric, right? It's either, it's 99% more safe than, your average coal or gas plant.
Alan: Um, , , it is incredibly material efficient. One the amount of energy you can get out of one ton of uranium is it's like a hundred thousand tons of coal or something like that. It's just incredible. . And, it is and that's just for fission. And then in the future, you have technologies like Fusion, which really have the potential to completely redefine the world we live in.
Alan: And it's really exciting to see, as you mentioned the news recently about the the first time we've gotten positive energy out of a fusion reaction, which is really exciting. So that's how I got into the whole thing. Not quite sure what the point of that answer was, but no, that was awesome.
Alan: you know, I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to left Enterprise software, wanted to do something that was gonna help the world in the [00:21:00] future. And, And this
Greg: is what I found. Yeah. I wanna pull on one of the. , one of the threads there. So public perception so much. Now at least you have multiple conversations going on where some people are saying this is such a no-brainer, yeah. Whereas I think if we looked back, I guess even to like, when we were young, I don't think that would've been something someone would say. I don't think they would've said, no, this is such a no-brainer. This is what we should be building. But now, you have people talking about this, you have people, you have some people just saying, okay, just lift the regulations on these types of Yeah.
Greg: Of nuclear and let's get some stuff built, and what's been fascinating for me to go down this path and I have to confess something. So in physics, For anybody who doesn't know this undergraduate physics is like a business degree of science.
Greg: It's like you could choose , like what, where you want to go , if you wanna go into research and eventually you're gonna go into particle physics, like you should probably take some nuclear physics or other types of, that type of physics and undergrad. But for me, I of went the other [00:22:00] direction.
Greg: I went into atmospheric science and I took a lot of, different just electronics and some quantum physics. But I did, I stayed away from more or less stayed away from nuclear. And then as we've talked about this and as I've talked to, family or friends or whoever I realized.
Greg: Nuclears fractured into these different categories. It's not just as we said, as I said before, fusion versus fission. That's a sort of a simple one that you are starting to hear, public. The public is knowing more about the difference between those two things.
Greg: And we can touch on that, but I think more, more nuanced is this thing between the giant cooling towers and small modular reactors, we're seeing more companies getting funded and we'll call 'em like even startup companies getting funded where, venture capitalists who typically stay away from these long lead time heavy research type industries, they're starting to get into these, especially at smr, you're not gonna see a venture capitalist seed a giant mega scale, multi-billion [00:23:00] dollar giant cooling tower nuclear company, but they seem to be going into these small modular reactors.
Greg: So can you just set up. So we can help with the public perception, set up the difference between small modular reactor and what is moving in that world. Versus what maybe people see when when they're, driving out in the countryside and they see the giant cooling towers.
Alan: Sure. So I guess, so starting with the public perception piece of course if you go back even 10 years, maybe 15 years and before there's widespread, I would say, skepticism at the best, at the , at best skepticism about nuclear energy. Part of that, a lot of that has to do with the, the looming.
Alan: Nuclear disasters that happened. Things like, what happened at Cher Noble and later what happened at Fukushima. And so you have people in their minds tend to tie those together and say sure they're rare, but boy, if they happen they're, now we're talking, this could be the extinction level in some cases.
Alan: And I don't think that is true. I think[00:24:00] that, that looms large in people's minds. As over the past, really five years maybe a little bit more, you've seen a huge shift. Or I've seen a huge shift especially among younger people who instead of thinking about nuclear in terms of, meltdown or not, you know, giant, giant reactor or not, they're looking at it in terms of, trading off risks.
Alan: And the biggest risk to humanity. The existential risk we have is climate change. And we have to stop using fossil fuels and stop burning carbon to create our electricity, to create our power. And because of that, myself, and I think a lot of people my age and younger are looking at the land energy landscape and saying, we need a all of the above full court press solution to this problem.
Alan: Renewables are, renewables have to be a part of it. Wind and solar have to be a part of it. Hydro power, geothermal power and nuclear power, all, anything that is not. Burning carbon to create electricity we [00:25:00] need to use because it's that scale, the problem is of that scale.
Alan: And so technologies that people didn't consider, like nuclear fission have had sort of a renaissance. And now part of that is there are, there are what I call the old guard plants, which are called light. They're lightwater reactors. They use a low enriched uranium.
Alan: So that is a uranium that has been enriched to about 5%. And they are not inefficient, but they're less efficient than they could be. They require large amounts of water to cool the core. And when you have it something like a Fukushima, where that cooling is interrupted, that's when you get in trouble.
Alan: There's a hundred, about a hundred, maybe a little less of those in the United States currently running. And so like a tangent here is like, when you think about, when you think about the dangers of some of these things, you have a hundred power plants, a hundred nuclear power plants in the country.
Alan: They've been running for at least, 30, 40 years, right? These are long running things. And we've had no accidents [00:26:00] in this country ever. Or if you count three Mile Island since three Mile Island, which was in 1979, so you're talking at least 40 years that's an incredibly good record for even old nuclear technology, okay. But since then, there's been a lot of research and development on, what they call now advanced nuclear or gen four reactors. And these are different technologies. , there's a number of different ways you can build them. Some of them use boiling water as cool.
Alan: And some of them use liquids liquid metal or molten salts as the cooling mechanism. There are different fuel types that are being developed. And all of these have more, not just more safety features. They are intrinsically safe or inherently safe. Now I can't talk, I don't know, listeners might have probably have heard of Tara Power, which is Bill Gates's company that's building a large next generation reactor in Wyoming.
Alan: And there is a couple of other players, and I'm not. Intimately involved as or [00:27:00] know of those plans and what those reactors look like. But I did spend a little more than a year at a nuclear power startup called Oklo, that is building their version of an advanced reactor. And I am fairly familiar with that.
Alan: You can talk, about that technology. It is some would call it a small modular reactor, although modular to me means you can stack them up next to each other very simply. And that's not how they play. I would say that they build small scale nuclear power plants that are inherently safe, that are perfect for communities industrial applications and in some cases remote areas or places where it is a very expensive to get power otherwise.
Alan: So the core technology is efficient, it is similar to how it's been done for a long time. You get a bunch of, you get a bunch of uranium, you put it together, the, enriched uranium these, the, these atoms split up. They shoot out neutrons.
Alan: Those neutrons are fast enough that they hit other atoms. They shoot out more neutrons, and you get this chain [00:28:00] reaction that creates heat. And then you use that heat to do what we've been using heat to do forever, which is, boil water, turn it into steam, run it through a turbine, and get electricity.
Alan: , the scale of this sort of reactor is much smaller. When you're talking about the old guard, you're talking in the gigawatt scale, and this is more in the kind of, five to 50 megawatt scale. And because of its size, the problems that you had at other reactors, the things like a meltdown, just they can't happen.
Alan: We like to say we put the physics of safety on our side, right? These are reactors that are built that there's no, no water required. This is a wow reactor that is cooled by liquid sodium and there are no pumps required. It's a natural convection reactor.
Alan: And, in simulations and tests and things that we've looked at, you could literally lose all of your cooling mechanism and the reactor would slowly shut itself down. It has inherent negative feedback loops that would prevent something like a meltdown, prevent something like it getting too hot or, God forbid, exploding.
Alan: That's just it's just impossible. And these are the types of [00:29:00] technology that I think that. The younger generations are and people are gravitating to that see them as the safe and really the how to say the responsible alternative to fossil fuels. Yeah, it seems there are so
Greg: many things that we have that we use all the time that are incredibly dangerous , and over time because they've been allowed to be out there in the wild and there have been some problems, air travel, car travel, all of these things.
Greg: They're now, because we've applied smarter technologies to them, we can take out, and in a lot of cases, completely eliminate the risks, the known risks. But with nuclear, that has always seemed like a thing where it can't even be out in the wild. So it's really hard to , it hasn't been allowed to flourish and.
Greg: know, Even in remote places where you could isolate, problems it hasn't been out there. So people have had to be doing this like on the bench in the lab to see how to build these technologies. And I think, [00:30:00] yeah, like the, just to give anybody who's listening kind of an idea of the scale of this, like what size, so a five megawatt reactor that can run all the time.
Greg: I guess we could say, a typical like suburban housing development could run on one of those things, like Sure. For, I there are varying sizes of those developments, but let's just say a typical suburban development could run on one five megawatt. What is the size of one of those power plants?
Greg: Physically? Yeah, physical. The
Alan: physical size of so you're, if you're talking about like a building, if you can imagine, so imagine a building that is about, about has a footprint of about one acre. Okay. And then there's probably some area around that for, various equipment and cooling and stuff like that, but it is incredibly small compared to, what's out there now.
Alan: And yeah, as you said, one of these could power a community in perpetuity, but like literally with the fuel of a single core, that doesn't have to be replaced. You could run this for 10 or 20 years, right? The current fleet of lightwater reactors have to [00:31:00] replace their fuel. They have cycles of about 18 months, but the new generation of reactors, and I wanna say like nine of 10 of the top new designs use a fuel that is called, has a terrible acronym. It's called Halu High Assay, low Enriched Uranium, which of course doesn't mean anything, what it means is the, that the uranium has been enriched past 5% and up to around 20%.
Alan: Now I think this is important to understand the scale here because people can get, when you start talking about enriched uranium, people get nervous. So that fuels at 20%. There's a whole nother world of, nuclear weapons and weapons grade, uranium and weapons grade, plutonium.
Alan: And when you're talking about those, you're talking about, 99% enriched, right? So the gap between what is used to power civilian applications and what is used to power weapons is enormous, right? It's not like you can go, there, there are in some cases very justified fears of non-proliferation, right?
Alan: Nuclear weapons are a huge danger to humanity. But it's [00:32:00] in popular opinion. You can think of oh, they could just go in and take this and turn it into a weapon. It's that's not how it works. These, they're, in fact, somebody's gonna check me on this if , and I'll probably look stupid, but I don't think that any, that, no material that has ever been used in a nuclear reactor, a civilian, or even a nuclear power reactor, has ever gone into making a weapon.
Alan: I think the only materials that have gone into making a weapon were special purpose, built for that purpose, right? , you have to separate those two. But the great part about this new type of fuel and if you'll allow me to, I don't know, maybe geek out past your audience's tolerance here for a second.
Alan: Geek
Greg: away man. They're listening at all to me. Then they're they're already in trouble.
Alan: So low interest uranium, the 5% rich that we use now It uses what are called thermal nucl neutrons. So these are neutrons that have been slowed down, right? When they're ejected, they have to, they're objected at very high speeds.
Alan: They have to be slowed down in order to interact with the other fuel in order to create this chain reaction. And one of the ways they slow those things down is by, is using water, which is a [00:33:00] actually really great neutron moderator. And they, these neutrons go through the water, it slows down, and then they're able to interact well for halu fuel you can use what is called, what are called fast neutrons.
Alan: And this is in a different spectrum. And they, so you don't have to have a moderator. And because you don't have to have a moderator, like when you slow down neutrons, you are effectively, losing energy on purpose. And when you have fast neutrons and you can use those without slowing them down, one, you get a whole, your system becomes much more efficient because you have more, more phase space to work with.
Alan: But you're not slowing them down. You're not throwing away that energy and that allows you to do things, that allows you to be much more efficient with your fuel usage. As I was saying, it takes it from an 18 month cycle of fuel to literally decades. You can design cores that will last for decades without being opened.
Alan: Wow. And that can be a huge advantage for this next generation. Not only do you not have to switch out the fuel as much, you create much less waste. That waste can be repurposed in particular ways and recycled. And it's just a much more efficient use of nuclear material than we have, 50 years ago, which shouldn't be [00:34:00] surprising, right?
Alan: 50 years ago cars got, what, four miles to the gallon? Eight miles, something like that. Right? And now you know, we have electric cars, or hybrid cars that can get 50, 60, a hundred. It's technology moves quickly and we just haven't allowed that, those innovations to hit the market or to hit the public yet.
Greg: Yeah. It seems I'm going back to that tech, the march of technology. It's interesting that, you said there's this acronym and it's Halo Fuel, which is different than the other one. And typically, if we go to your kind of like sales and marketing and away from the science, it's like, Typically there's this idea that if you create a new product, this is the Proctor and Gamble move, right?
Greg: Like you can't call like dial soap, Colgate soap, because if you call it Colgate soap, then people are gonna think, oh, this is for, I was supposed to put this in my mouth and I didn't want you to put that in your mouth. So it seems that here in Nuclear, see these companies, these new startup companies, oh the nuclear [00:35:00] space is really, is really moving.
Greg: It's should we be changing the name of these things? These technologies are completely different to line extend them in a branding sense from nuclear of old to calling it nuclear again. It seems like it needs a new category. Is there any activity there where people are sort, trying to, I guess SMR maybe, but nobody
Alan: knows.
Alan: Yeah. SMR is one of those things like, people talk about advanced. Advanced vision reactors, to Okay. Get away from the old guard. But it does, I'd say that most nuclear scientists, if I can generalize, mocu nuclear scientists and I consider myself one, are not great branding people, right?
Alan: They're you're Madison Avenue types and they're not advertising. So, They tend to use, really obscure acronyms and jargon and things that the public, they're just eyes are gonna, so say that. So there should be some, we do have to have some rebranding of nuclear.
Alan: Now. I think what's cool is that, more and more people are learning the difference between things like fission and fusion and as I said, the, there's a large movement to develop these technologies in both of those cases. [00:36:00] So the, you do have. , you do have a changing of the public opinion.
Alan: But I agree if, if there's a pithy, there's a really pithy name for the fuel or the technology that that does this, you could probably get people to, to get behind it even though they, might not love the
Greg: word nuclear. Yeah. And non weapons grade isn't
Alan: exactly right on the box or Right.
Alan: You have to, of course, . No. I think, yeah, this is apocryphal, I think, but mri, the technology that literally saves lives and helps, countless people and is used for a lot of things. It's the original acronym was, and MRIs, nuclear Magnetic, resonance. And they had to drop the end because people got scared.
Alan: And it's okay, but this is a technology that we use all the time. That is very safe and helps save lives. And, but because it had the nuclear there, they had to rebrand it. Pretty effectively
Greg: actually when you find whoever that was, , I'm on the podcast and be like, Hey, have him on the podcast.
Greg: You're up again. , it's your turn again. We need to find out a new name for Yeah, it, so we've covered a lot of things that, about [00:37:00] the dangers and, I really think that, that's an open call to anybody who listens to this. If you have an idea of what this stuff needs to be called, besides what it's called today, it would be I just, I think what you said the whole, all of the above approach to going against climate change.
Greg: I think like it's pretty amazing that all skill sets, I don't care if it's deeply technical people or people in who are really great communicators or great in sales and marketing. It's like you really need all of the above. And really the, the goal of us, us having this conversation or having conversation with other people is to get that deep technical level connected with the marketing level.
Greg: Because I feel like that, that just, your point is exactly right, like just dropping nuclear from the mri. Now we can all see what's inside, but if we didn't do that, then we might not have ever been able to do that. Even though the technology is the same, sitting there and whoever, whoever brought it to be as a product, were like, oh, I did it.
Greg: I say I did the thing that [00:38:00] everybody wanted. And they're like, yeah, it's called the wrong thing. . Sorry. You're gonna have to go back . But I was just gonna ask about in terms of the timing, clearly the nrc, you said there's, these people are deeply technical people, they know.
Greg: Is the sentiment at the At the commission level that you have people inside the NR RRC saying, yeah, it's this, the SMR stuff, the one acre. To be able to power an entire neighborhood full of homes with zero carbon 24 7 for 10 to 20 years. That seems like this magic pill, let's call it, for everybody.
Greg: Are the people at the nrc? Are they sitting there and saying we know that this is pretty safe and that there are stops to make it even more safe. Are they really fighting public opinion? What takes them? So, What's that process? Do you have an insight into maybe we need to go ask one of them to, to kinda, sure.
Alan: I have some insight into the application process. So you have to, so as a company, if you want to either, build or operate or design a [00:39:00] nuclear actor that somebody will build or operate, you have to work with the nrc. And as I said before, these are people who are very smart and very technical, and they got into it because they are fans or they like your energy, right?
Alan: They're not nobody there, in my experience, is actively working against you, right? They want you to succeed, but they also have a safety mandate that is very onerous, as you said, more onerous than anything else that, we interact with on a daily basis. And the most, somebody's gonna check me, the most dangerous thing we do every day, I think is get into a car.
Alan: And we do it all the time without thinking, right? , the number of road deaths are, staggering. Even if, even as they're getting better, they're staggering and people do it without a second thought, right? But, and nobody would ever tell a car maker, your cars have to be a hundred percent safe no matter what.
Alan: You have to be able, like your car has to be able to withstand a, a three ton boulder falling on it and crushing it without killing people. And these are the kinds of things that people say about nuclear, right? For, for better or worse, because, you know of legislation, because of , the idea that you could create [00:40:00] something, a nuclear reactor that was not a hundred percent safe makes people, gasp.
Alan: Whereas nothing else is like that. So it takes a long time. It's an onerous process. One of the new, newer, advanced reactor companies called New Scale filed a what is called a design certification, which is basically like, this is our design for our reactor. And
Alan: this is how we wanna build it eventually. We're gonna work with partners to do that. And even getting that certification through the NRC took a decade. and cost a couple billion dollars. It's just insane the amount of money, upfront money that you'd have to spend to do this.
Alan: Now at the company I worked for they're reimagining the way to do that, and they're trying to bring that, that cost down. But even then, it, even then you're talking years and you're talking millions. And that's just to get through the first part of it, just get through that first application. Actually building it and running it is gonna be another years, right? It is an incredibly slow industry. When I move from software to this industry is, was the biggest surprise me was just how long everything took, right?
Alan: You're used to shipping code on a weekly basis, doing, multiple upgrades and updates to your [00:41:00] software every month, every year. And this is no, we're gonna put an application in and they're gonna review that application for. Three years. And then, and then we'll figure it out.
Alan: Like it's just, it's the time scales are pretty staggering.
Greg: Are some of these companies just deciding to go somewhere else in the world?
Alan: There are companies who are doing deals? Yeah, there are companies who are doing deals with other countries. The one I mentioned, new scale I wanna say has a partnership with somebody in kind of the eastern European world.
Alan: I forget who. But, and, so a lot of the other countries that already use nuclear, people like France, Germany England, who, spent a long time trying to shut those programs down and are now restarting those programs or revamping or revitalizing them. They have their own reg regulatory systems and those are often not any better.
Alan: Not any faster than ours would be. And other countries that don't have those, that history. A country that, that has never had a nuclear energy sector. They look to the US for, I [00:42:00] see regulatory standards, right? They say the NRC is the gold standard, and it is, and if you can get past them, then it's gonna be safe.
Alan: And so we'll look to them as our kind of our check on that. So it's not like you can run to, I don't know, some some country that has, no ties and no diplomatic ties and say, oh, we're just gonna build it here. It's not that simple. Yeah, I do think that there's a lot more excitement, there's a lot more excitement for nuclear power in Europe.
Alan: And recently, and part of that is because of the conflict going on between Russia and Ukraine. But I also think it's like these companies are realizing they, they cannot be, they cannot tie themselves to, Fossil fuels, especially fossil fuels that are, that they have to import, right?
Alan: Like energy independence is a big, a big buzzword among the these countries. And one way to be energy independent is to, produce all of your energy in your in your country with things like nuclear. Yeah. Yeah. That is
Greg: I think about going back to the thing about, cars and these different technologies that [00:43:00] are incredibly unsafe.
Greg: I have this conversation. a lot with people who see the world like through the statistical lens, where everything, in the world is a bell curve and it's perfectly distributed and oh, that's real. It's it's unlikely I would get struck by lightning and so therefore I'm gonna do dangerous things.
Greg: And the lightning sort, it's like I'm not really sure you understand how statistics work . It's like there are ways to sort of skew things in a more dangerous direction or a less dangerous direction. And now you've blown up your statistical odds. Like driving, for instance, is incredibly dangerous on the hall with everybody doing exactly the same in the car.
Greg: But if somebody's like doing their makeup and texting and drinking and totally distracted, it's like that skews things. You skew yourself to being one of the more dangerous people on the road. And so it was interesting what you said about , the ability to withstand these dangerous things like building technology specifically to withstand or to [00:44:00] essentially get rid of the chance of having a meltdown or having any of these dangerous things happen.
Greg: Do you feel like, as people are getting evaluated for these, is everybody getting thrown into the same bucket and being told like statistically speaking there's a chance of radioactivity, but are we starting to see standards coming out where it's if you had this type of fail safe mode, we can accelerate.
Greg: Are we always gonna be in this place where it's like, Nope everybody's a snowflake. Everybody , every new project is a snowflake.
Greg: You have to submit the whole thing. We have to evaluate the whole thing. Are we moving
Alan: toward, I mean, I think that there are there are some things we can do there. Unfortunately, a lot of it is, no, every, everything's a snowflake. There are some things you can do with if a reactor is designed and designed is licensed, then it really does, it cuts down a lot of it, right?
Alan: Because you can say, I'm using a standard design and design that the NRC has already approved, that they've given their blessing that this is a safe design. Of course, then the part is, [00:45:00] okay but where are you going to put it? And the interaction with the environment becomes a big part of the safety case.
Alan: , it's one thing to put a, I'm gonna just choose random places, but it's one thing to put a reactor, in the middle of Illinois where we have the most reactors in the country because Illinois a fairly calm state from a an earthquake point of view from, that you, nobody's gonna wanna put one of these things, on a fault line in a hurricane zone, right?
Alan: So you have to make those, you have to make those you have to make those judgements. And you have to make those, that's gonna be part of the application no matter what design you use. So it's hard to get around that, but you can make it faster, right? I think the people in nuclear, it's a little too.
Alan: People still think it, it's too dangerous to just have your local, your lo local person, come and do an inspection and give it the okay. And say, okay, yeah, that, that's good to go. We can't, local nuclear, we can certainly speed it up , right? We certainly can't speed it up.
Greg: Yeah.
Greg: Oh man. Every time I talk about nuclear, right? I have this one side of me that's just oh my gosh. It's I'm sure [00:46:00] people who are in like the biotech or like pharmaceutical space who might listen to this are gonna be like, yeah, finally there's another industry that takes undoubtedly amount of time and red tape to get their product out into the world.
Greg: But I'm always, I'm, I guess I'm always optimistic. I think the view of, needing all of these different forms of energy, different parts of the world, as you think of typically nuclear has been left out the side. Like when I first got into energy, it was like people would try to shoehorn nuclear energy into the renewable energy space because we're like it's, it doesn't emit carbon and be like, yeah, but it's nuclear, and that was the answer. It's not, now it's right. And now we're moving into that. Where it's accepted in the scene are we seeing any kind of activity? There's just so much influence and lobbying and, nonprofits that are really pushing, they've really pushed on solar and wind and the investment in these types of technologies, are there groups out there that are specifically pushing on [00:47:00] these types of standards and trying to get more sort of investment?
Greg: I don't know if it's in the form of tax credits or like some kind of greasing the skids to get the supply chain built. , that's the other trouble, right? Is like you come out Yes. And it's great, now we're there, we've got our standards, people have permits, we can now build it.
Greg: And now where's our fuel coming from? Like where's the actual supply chain being built? Are we, are you seeing any of that kind of activity in terms of greasing the skids for getting so prepared for when the nuclear reactors.
Alan: We are, it's not enough in my opinion, but we are, there are groups there are nonprofits, there are NGOs and there are also, groups within the government that are pushing for, pushing to create that, that supply chain pushing to create that environment where we can start to bring the costs down.
Alan: I mentioned this. I, you know, I probably, I should have talked about this when we were talking about halo fuel for these reactors is the biggest source of uncertainty and the biggest source of risk at this point, right? There it [00:48:00] requires, like anything else, it requires fuel. That fuel is, unfortunately right now, nobody.
Alan: Creates it in the United States, we do not have the capability to manufacture this fuel. That nine of the 10 most, advanced, the nine of the 10 advanced design rec designs are going to need. And they're gonna need a lot of it. And part of that is because no companies that have made the investment.
Alan: Cause it's a large investment to say, okay, we're gonna ramp up production of this very specific fuel. It costs a lot of money. There's a lot of equipment and a lot of training and a lot of people that need to be involved. And for most players it's just too risky. For a, return that is going to come in.
Alan: Five to 10 years or more, right? It is just there, there's a disconnect between the demand side and the supply side. In this case now we've been seeing, we've seen some interesting things about this, and one of the cool things, I think in the in the recent I r a bill that was passed they do have a substantial amount of money earmarked [00:49:00] for basically making the Department of Energy, the buyer of last resort for this fuel.
Alan: So what it's basically a way for the government to bridge that gap and say, look, if you make the investment and you create this market, and and you build the fuel and you create the fuel, we will buy it from you if nobody else will. So from, wanna say it's 2020.
Alan: 2027 for five years. They're, they have the earmarked, they said, we will buy up to 25 or 50 metric tons of this fuel from whoever makes it. So it incentivizes these companies so you can make these investments. We are de-risking that investment for you. Got it. Now, of course, that's a government contractor has to go through, the government contract, has to go through a contracting program, a bid.
Alan: They have to , pick people to do it. All of that is slowing things down. But there are people out there who care about this and who are pushing it through. For people who know the NGO space I wanna say the Breakthrough Institute the Nuclear Enterprise Institute.
Alan: Third way maybe there, there's a bunch of different kind of NGOs that are push. [00:50:00] Pushing government officials to realize this is a problem and then help solve the problem. Not by directly investing in creating fuel, but by de-risking it to build that supply chain. Unfortunately, you just can't.
Alan: This is an incredibly important fuel, and right now I think there's only one place in the world that there is a market for it, and that's Russia. And so we're not going to have enough to power the reactors that we're going to need unless we ramp up production. I Don't know enough about World War ii, but when they talked about, oh, we need to, we need to mobilize for that war, and we had to build a number of planes and tanks and stuff like that, and it was really seen as a a public duty or a, a public obligation to make these sacrifices, to build these things for this effort.
Alan: I would like to see the same sort of thing happening in energy. Not just in nuclear, but in, in all carbon free energy. Making those investments, greasing that skin. Yeah.
Greg: Yeah. So branding and and halo fuel, that's all. Yeah. We just put those two things.
Greg: That's all it takes, right? Yeah. I just, I thank [00:51:00] you again for talking through all of these things. I think there's a few things that I had written down that I know I'll take away, but just the general, I guess anybody who's sitting there as like an, as an entrepreneur who is gonna start something in this space.
Greg: It is a very daunting place. Most of the people who are doing things in the space have PhDs in particle physics or something like that from these where they've spent a lot of their life thinking about. Nuclear or they understand it at a level that it doesn't really scare them anymore.
Greg: It allows them to say, no, I understand this enough to start a business in it. So hopefully more people will start to get involved with varying skill sets, not only the PhD physicists and all that to make sure, cuz it really, I'm sort of an amateur energy historian and I like to read about ways that certain fuels were able to be scaled ways that and even in my career, gotten to see solar and the solar industry scale and how batteries are beginning to scale.
Greg: , seeing [00:52:00] how those certain technologies scale. There are quite a few lessons in those areas. So appreciate you taking the time to today. I have one other question that I, that we'll close with here. You mentioned at the beginning, An experience you had as a kid that sort of led you down this path of physics
Greg: but because, I had written down, sales, marketing, company operations, founding startups, I those are things that are not just, those don't come from reading a Stephen Hawking book. What was one or some of the unique experiences or experiences you had as a kid that sort of prepared you for, all of these different kind of ways that you've added value to companies over the years?
Greg: Was there some kind of unique experience that allowed you to have half of your, have one foot in this deeply technical space and then the other foot in sales and marketing?
Alan: wouldn't call it. in any way. My family as I said, my father gave me that book and, sparked that interest.
Alan: But, education, it's pretty banal. But spending a lot of time caring deeply about education and, having education be [00:53:00] the cornerstone of my youth really has prepared me more than anything else. One, not everybody is pushed in that direction.
Alan: And two, not everybody has the resources or the school districts or the teachers or whatever to make that happen. , but, this is why I'm, a huge supporter of public education, a huge supporter of, of teaching. And I'm also a huge supporter of these kind of,
Alan: Thinking big, And I'm thinking particularly of the, the moon landing and the Apollo Apollo program, those things that kind of, spark wonder in people. , get them thinking in in, in the big, those big things. I would love to have something like that in energy where it is a, nothing's as cool as people go into space, but you could do something where it's like you're, where you get people, young people, smart, energetic young people to care deeply about this and to want to learn more about it. Without that, I wouldn't have been, I wouldn't have been able to do what I do.
Alan: That said, before I started, My first company, I had no entrepreneurial experience. And I did not have an entrepreneurial network. Most of the people that I knew and that I was close with did not think of [00:54:00] that as a career path, . And so you don't have to have those connections right away to get into it, right?
Alan: You can build that up over time as you go, and get there. It's cliche, but you don't stay in school. Yeah. Stay in school, kids , stay in school kids. Read as much as you can and and yeah and keep that, the sense of wonder yeah. That that, that will push you forward.
Alan: I love
Greg: it. I actually lied to you. I'm gonna ask you two more questions. Clarifying questions. Can you briefly explain the difference between fission and fusion. Yes. As simply as you, you don't have to go into detail here, so every, anybody can look this up on Wikipedia, but if you could just high level describe the difference.
Alan: No I'll try to do my best. So yeah, there are two ways to create energy using the nucleus, using atomic energy, right? One is you take a very large atom like uranium, and you split it and it releases heat and it releases neutrons and it releases other products that create energy.
Alan: And that heat is where the energy comes from. The other way is to take very small atoms [00:55:00] like hydrogen and fuse them together into a larger atom like helium, right? And there's actually a really cool curve where you can see when it changes from which atoms can be fused to which atoms can be fissioned.
Alan: And I think iron is the one that's at the bottom, but the difference is that fission is splitting large atoms to create smaller atoms and energy and fusion is fusing small atoms together to make larger atoms and release energy. Fission is what happens in our current set of nuclear power plants.
Alan: Fusion is what happens at the center of the sun, right? And one of the reasons fusion is so difficult is that it's pretty hard to mimic the environment of the center of the sun here on earth, right? , you're talking extreme temperatures, extreme pressures and it's hard to create that.
Alan: It's hard to get all of that together in quite the way to fuse those atoms to create, to make them, create hydrogen, or I'm sorry, create helium out of hydrogen. So that's the difference, that's cool. One of the cool parts about fusion, and one of the reasons I really hope, I have a healthy [00:56:00] skepticism, but I really hope we get there is that it's.
Alan: The byproducts of that form of energy are, literally like helium water, right? But you're talking about, you're talking about, no emissions whatsoever. Now getting, putting the input to that has emissions, but it is a really clean and cool energy source if we can get there.
Alan: Yeah.
Greg: And then the last one is it halo Fuel? . I know we said that, we said the what the acronym means, but can you touch one more time on Sure. What is, and you can even go deeper, like what is what is the input for it? What is the actual, like what am I gonna take off the shelf I'm gonna put in through this process and I'm gonna get Halo on the other side.
Greg: What is that? Sure. Can you dig
Alan: deeper on that? Sure. So it all starts with uranium, naturally occurring uranium which is mined in, lots of places, but all over the world. Now that United States naturally anywhere in the United States. Oh, where's the Yes, there is, there are uranium deposits in the United States.
Alan: I, I forget where, Wyoming
Greg: or something like that. Yeah.
Alan: [00:57:00] Or, yeah. I, there's somewhere, there's not a lot. There's not a lot. But there, there are deposits in the United States. So naturally occurring in uranium is, I'm gonna get my isotopes wrong, right? The naturally there's one isotopic uranium that is stable and it is what makes up the vast majority of natural uranium.
Alan: And it is not radioactive. And then there's an isotope of that makes up about a little less than 1% of all natural uran uranium. And that isotope is radioactive. And if left long enough, it will decay. And when it decay, it, shoots out a neutron and and energy. So you start with natural uranium, which is like ninety nine one, let's just call it that.
Alan: You would call that 1% enriched, meaning the percentage of the, the radioactive isotope with the uranium is 1%, right? Yeah. When you want to power a light water reactor, you have to process that uranium in order to get it to 5% enriched, such that 5% of the uranium in there is that radioactive isotope.
Alan: And and then halo, you take that same [00:58:00] natural uranium and you process it until it's 20% enriched. 20% of the uranium is that isotope. Now, how this is done is actually, I find it fascinating. , the most efficient way we know how to do this right now is something called gaseous centri fusions, where you basically take uranium, you turn it into a gas, I think it's uran.
Alan: Hexafluoride maybe. You turn into a gas and you put it in these big machines that spin around really fast. Now the masses of the two isotopes are slightly different. And so one of the isotopes drift towards the top is you spin these things around one drift towards the top, you'll drift towards the bottom, and you can start leaching those off to create different concentrations of the two isotopes.
Alan: And so at the end of it, you've taken this natural uranium and you have a whole bunch of what they call depleted uranium, which is natural uranium that has been drained of its isotope. And then you have enriched uranium, which is what we use to power the, the reactors and to create energy.
Alan: I think it's fascinating. Yeah. It's some people, again, their eyes are gonna glaze over, but that's the process and that's how we, create this fuel.
Greg: So could you take depleted uranium and reen enrich it? [00:59:00] Like even if it has no iso, or do you need at least that 1% there?
Greg: You need the seed of that isotope to be able to enrich it.
Alan: I I think in theory you could mix. There are some places that do what's called down blending, which is when you have a very high enriched uranium, let's say you have uranium that's enriched to 50% or something for some reason. And then you can mix that with depleted uranium to create fuel right to, to lower.
Alan: It's not as simple as just taking a handful of here and a handful there and putting together, but it's that simple, right? Yeah. You mix it all up, the KitchenAid mix it the right ratios, right? Sure. But, you would never, you wouldn't take depleted uranium and then try to, enrich it through a traditional means.
Alan: It's just much more efficient to do that with natural grain.
Greg: Got it. So would we, is there hope to take some of these depleted uranium storage sites the used fuel from the past to re repurpose it into this new wave? Of nuclear.
Alan: I think that there is a lot of technology that is unexplored in the [01:00:00] world of, what I would call reprocessing fuel.
Alan: I don't particularly like the word recycling. People tend to misunderstand it. But taking, taking spent fuel from the current lightwater fleet, right? That right now is sitting in dry cas or sitting in long-term storage, and using that as an input for new fuel creation.
Alan: And there are, technologies to do that. And, again, they're nascent and expensive, but like everything else, that's na to do expensive. If you do it for long enough the cost comes down and it becomes, economical. So I do think that there is a path that one reduces the amount.
Alan: Waste that the US is storing, which is great, and two can create new fuel that is, less expensive and requires less mining and stuff like that. It, yeah. We need to be exploring those technologies in parallel to just designing new reactors. All of this stuff has to come together.
Greg: Amazing. We're gonna stop there. Thanks.
Alan: I really appreciate you having me on. I hope this hope this was enlightening in some respects. Super enlightening.
Greg: [01:01:00] Thanks for tuning into this episode of the World Changing Podcast. Be sure to follow us wherever you get your podcast. Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube to hear the latest episodes.