Next we have Mark Nelson
from Radiant Energy Fund. I've known Mark since 2016 when we
worked together at Environmental Progress. Since then he has traveled the world. He's been seen on Bloomberg and CNBC
as an international nuclear energy expert. This is my very first time
at this conference. I am very excited for tonight when
for me it will be the second time I will view Frankie Fenton's
[Atomic Hope] documentary. I was lucky enough to be in the audience
in Toronto when it premiered. Sometimes you can forget
where you've come from. You heard a little bit from Eric about
my work with him back in 2016 when I made Excel charts
and crunched numbers. Since then it's been a whirlwind.
The world has changed. We've gone from being, you might say,
insurgents or loners weirdos... all the way to where,
more often than not, we'll find that we will try to
convince somebody about nuclear but they already know about it
and they're trying to convince us with the arguments that we
put online a decade ago. Congratulations to you all here.
You are now officially the cool kids. For me traveling around the world
is exciting, sometimes it is terrible. It was a precious thing for me to go to Toronto
and slow down and see the beginning. I had never actually realized the
importance of this conference. Even in my own life,
and I'll tell you about that. Radiant Energy Fund is my effort
to save nuclear plants from closing. Fortunately there's not as much of
that to go around these days. We have saved a lot of nuclear plants
in partnership with all of you. Many of the speakers we've heard today. And, we're moving on to
getting new nuclear plants built. So this was my coming out party to your world. I was a graduate student but left my graduate studies. More on that in a moment. I was trying
to figure out why it seems so clear to me that we should do nuclear, but almost all
of the experts seem to be saying we shouldn't. and I'm talking experts who weren't afraid of
nuclear they weren't worried about the waste I'm talking about experts that weren't really
worried about the safety. They were saying nuclear energy was too slow, too expensive.
I was in Cleveland Ohio trying to figure out how to access hourly electricity data. I made a chart.
I posted it to a closed a private Google group. Then Rod Adams, bless his heart, he took
my graphic and without my permission. That glorious bastard put it on Twitter,
a website I had never used before. Then he reports back says:
hey sorry I put your graph on Twitter I think you should see what's happening with it.
I think it's my best tweet ever. Then other people started posting it.
Michael Shellenberger posted it. It went boom. Again, I'm just trying
to figure out how to log on to Twitter. How to make a Twitter account.
I'm still kind of an unemployed bum on a couch in Cleveland trying to
figure out what to do after a failed PhD. Suddenly I have this chart which...
Have any of you seen this chart before? Some people have. This was showing how
clean two different nations's electricity was. This is not difficult.
This won't earn anybody a PhD. But at the time nobody had
bothered to do the simple math. That's where I thought I came from...
until I saw Frankie's documentary and I realized... that's not
where I came from... I came from this. I hear from your response that some of you
may know what YouTube video this is. I was a confused undergraduate
coming to the end of my studies in aerospace engineering and Russian.
Weird combo but it makes more sense now. I had no clue what I wanted to do. I wanted to do something big
and meaningful and somehow I sort of lost the desire to go into
space programs because I felt we had so many problems here that if
other people were taking care of space then I could turn my attention here. But I didn't know what I could do as
an engineer to make a real difference. One night while I was trying to figure out
what to apply to for grad school. I came across posts on a forum saying:
Hey guys check out this video And within about five minutes
of starting this video I decided right there,
and I've never changed my mind, to stay in nuclear energy my whole life. Further confusing you all by
jumping around in time last night I get to the hotel where I'm
staying with some of the other speakers and I talked to Gordon...
hey Gordon where are you? Ah. I talked to Gordon in the green shirt and
describing what I was going to talk about today about how I only recently realized just how
important it was that I saw this video when I did and it did come out of
the thorium community. and Gordon said:
Was that the Calgary event? I said:
I'm not sure I think so, 2011. Gordon said:
I got Kirk to come to Calgary. So I sat there last night
and realized, wait... Gordon, part of this group, a key member
of this movement, the thorium movement. Got that video on the internet and it changed the entire course
of my life in five minutes. That's when I realized that I had
to tell you, first of all thank you. Then I had to tell you what's about
to happen from that beginning. You are about to see what
you have started in the world. You may not know the full scope of what
this movement has done to change the world. I finished watching the YouTube
video then applied for grad school. I went to one of the oldest places in the world to
learn about humanity's newest energy source. A very weird vibe as soon as I arrived.
They said: Thorium's a waste of your time.
Don't study that. I immediately stopped thinking
about Thorium for many years. Don't worry everybody!
We're coming back to the good stuff. So this is the environment where
I started learning about nuclear energy. Where?
Sorry, this is Cambridge University. This is Pembroke College, one of the oldest colleges. Very close to the engineering department,
so you could be reading on the internet until 3 minutes before your lecture
starts and still make it there on time. And what will you read on the internet?
Everything nuclear. It wasn't just a grad program. I was absolutely obsessed, as I believe many of the
people in this room are. What might differentiate people in this room
from even the Professionals in the industry is the absolute obsession
with the idea that we're on the cusp of
something revolutionary. If we could just tell everybody...
If we can just get the word out... If we can just get moving
on the technology... in our own time, we can
see a new world. Am I right? Is that not the purpose
of this conference? So I dropped out of my PhD
and came back to America. Made that chart. Got recruited
to a think tank in the Bay Area. And then quickly switched over
to work with this gentleman, Michael Shellenberger
at Environmental Progress. Michael had a radical idea ... If nuclear plants were closing, what on Earth
did it mean to talk about building new ones? Let me clarify. If working, profitable, safe nuclear
plants were being shut down because of political obstruction, "environmental"
opposition and "market conditions" that were designed to be
the death of nuclear plants, then how could we claim that we could
learn how to build nuclear again? Establish the companies.
Gain the competence. Build the supply chains.
Construct the plants. Do all the testing.
Run them profitably in a world where we were shutting down
reactors that were already doing that today. We spent very hard years, often alone,
trying to save nuclear plants. when I say "often alone" I mean
the outside world wasn't with us. you know who was with us?
A lot of the people right here in this room. When almost nobody else
on the entire planet was with us. There's our staff.
This is going to have to live in our hearts It's closed, but what started there
and what started with Eric and Michael and a few other people
who aren't in this room, it's become one of the first truly
International pro-nuclear movements. I'm not trying to say that
this room isn't International, but there's a heavy
North American presence. And in North America, reactors were often
closing for different reasons than in Europe. What happened here is that we called
a meeting in Amsterdam in 2018 of as many people as could
get there from around Europe to figure out what on Earth
we're going to do about this massive wave
of nuclear plant closures. That turned into having a
pro-nuclear demonstration. A real man-bites-dog
moment for the world. A pro-nuclear demonstration in Munich,
now the heart of pro-nuclear Germany. 2018 to 2022 everybody. Obviously, events were on
our side, but this mattered. There are people in this picture founded
their entire movements after this point. Well, obviously Eric had
been working before that. But I see folks that have
founded the Replanet Network, one of the largest pro-nuclear
NGOs on the planet. I see people who are rising up in
position in international nuclear bodies. I see people who have started entire national
movements like some Finns in here. Somebody who started the movement in Norway.
We could go around the room. I've got a 30-minute talk about almost
every single person in this photo, and there's a hundred people
behind me in this photo. That's what got moving in Munich,
and here's what it's turned into. On a moment's notice we were able to
put around the world a message: We need to have a candlelight vigil 2021
December 31st, midnight your local time. Preferably at your German consulate. To commemorate the shutoff of
those three reactors that just closed a few months before the start
of the war in Ukraine. We were able to organize that so fast
because people have been there. They know the mission. They lead others.
They stand up, and they change the world. Here's what it now looks like. Each one of these is
a national movement now. And they're growing
and growing and growing. And now that "smart money"
...not smart money that it's early, but "smart money" that waited
for a global energy crisis. People are piling in
to work with the activists. Many of whom themselves are starting
companies or have nuclear educations, and are joining these groups.
That's what's growing. And that brings me back
to this group right here. The one that started the
journey for so many of us. This is a picture from April. I would like to introduce you
to what I'm holding in my hand, Does anybody here know
what that metal device is? Anybody who's not Canadian? What is this?
CANDU bundle! Yes it's a CANDU fuel bundle.
Sometimes in the thorium movement, people talk about reactors
we worked on back in the 50s. That's not impressive! I want to hear about
reactors we worked on back in the 40s! Why am I holding this CANDU
fuel bundle, and who's that? Mehul Shah, an Indian American
businessman now living in Chicago. He has built a number of companies
in chemicals and food supplies. In housing too,
he's been a home builder. Wherever he's gone he's found
a way to make a good business. Provide good service and
make some money doing it. Something crazy happened to him,
very unfortunate. He heard about thorium
over a decade ago, and he decided to make a company
to make an advanced thorium reactor. A molten salt thorium reactor. His reactor just wasn't getting
off the ground fast enough. And, this happened instead. If I had asked you which calendar
year profitable nuclear energy was going to be produced from thorium?
The element thorium. When was that going to happen? Let's look at the steps.
First you have to invent the reactor. Or dig up an old reactor and
get it ready for the prime time. Have to get the design licensed.
You need to get it built. You need to troubleshoot it. All of that
comes before you can start making any profit. I'm saying this word "profit". A lot of us come out of an NGO mindset
or a philanthropic mindset. But let me tell you, that if you make
a power plant that's making profit then you are doing the
right thing for the world. If you make a power plant
that's NOT making profit, you might still be doing the right thing
but it might not be long for the world. That's been the battle in nuclear, yes? So, what is the earliest year
somebody is willing to guess that we can make profitable
nuclear energy based on thorium? 35. 26. 25. What I'm going to show
you is a team effort involving some of the world's
leading nuclear engineers to get profitable nuclear power
from thorium energy by 2025. For those of you who do not know
about heavy water reactors This is a slide that the team
at Clean Core put together You may have heard about modular
reactors, but can you really say that your reactor is modular
if your core isn't modular? In fact,
what we learned at Vogel is that You're only as good
as your worst module. You're only as fast
as your slowest module. You might not be fast at all, you might
be slower because of modular building. Well, the CANDU system is interesting. CANDU is derived from some of
the oldest reactor systems ever invented. All the way back to before nuclear electricity.
And the idea is this... If you don't have access to heavy forging,
really large metal manufacturing where you stamp huge pieces of metal
over a number of years into giant shapes... (That's how we make our reactor pressure vessels.) If you don't have that heavy forging,
what kind of reactor would you design? What if you don't have enrichment facilities,
what do you use inside as your moderator? CANDU reactor, the CANadian Deuterium
Uranium reactor runs on natural uranium. It uses uses heavy water moderator
to squeeze every last bit of economy out of those neutrons bouncing around by avoiding the absorbent
effect of regular water. What this means is
that without enrichment, and by using a bunch of small pressure
tubes rather than one large heavy forging, you can fairly rapidly
make a bunch of reactors. And, if you're careful, you can refuel
them while the reactor is operating. And, if everything goes to plan,
and it took a long time for things to go to plan... You could run the reactor
for over 1,000 days straight at full power. Here's another thing. Imagine if you could set up
supply chains very rapidly? Where a large number of smaller,
lower-tech suppliers could produce these much easier to design, to manufacture,
and test, and qualify reactor tubes. That's the CANDU reactor. I'm just
describing it as if we just discovered it. Yeah, that's right,
you know how people say: If we just discovered nuclear today
we'd describe as a miracle technology. How some of those of us who come out of the
advanced nuclear design movement say: If we had just come to this reactor
model now, we'd call it "advanced". And we'd want to be using it. I'm here to say that CANDU is truly
an advanced reactor, it's just already here. It just has one little issue...
You have to fuel this thing all the time. It is hungry it's like a a vegan reactor. Constantly eating giant piles of grass, then
constantly putting out used freshly uranium. In fact, there's about seven times the fuel,
and the high level spent waste coming out of CANDU, compared to our
pressurized water reactors that we have today. There's also a few other things. As people who know almost nothing
else about nuclear can tell you after watching the hit
HBO show Chernobyl, there's such a thing as a
"positive void coefficient of reactivity" They don't know all four of the words,
but together they know it's bad. This is how many countries regulated
the CANDU out of their borders. They said because this reactor, even though
it basically physically cannot have meltdowns of the type that have afflicted some of
other designs in use around the world, because of this weird little quirk that
doesn't matter for protecting the public... You can't build it. USA is one of the countries.
You, at the moment, cannot build this reactor. If you could make a fuel that radically
reduces the loading and unloading? Reduce operating costs at the plant
slightly, saved everybody a bit of money? Eliminated plutonium production for those
countries worried about looking sketchy? Then, you might just have a winning play. It turns out what this requires
is thorium plus HALEU. HALEU is
High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium. Put into an essentially
unmodified CANDU fuel bundle. And placed into an unmodified
CANDU reactor. Quite astonishing. A few other things are happening at the
moment that make this very intriguing Here's one: Canada has worked to
refurbish almost all of its reactors. in fact, we've just had
an announcement that: Pickering nuclear, the only major power
plant that was not undergoing refurbishment, they are re-examining that
in light of the severe energy crisis and extreme pressure from some of the
extraordinary activists we have here today like Sean Wagner everybody.
One of the key players of C4NE Canadians for Nuclear Energy along with
Dr. Chris Keefer who's not here with us. If you're refurbishing a CANDU that
means you're making new internals. You know, that modular core? If you already have a factory set to make
some of the main parts of a CANDU, You're up and running already.
And you're already good at doing it. These refurbishment operations
are getting faster and faster. That starts to sound like
a revival of nuclear energy. Just one question: Is CANDU advanced?
It's about to be. I'm very happy to make this one
of the first public unveilings of ANEEL fuel. ANEEL is an acronym:
Advanced Nuclear Energy for Enriched Life. That speaks to Mehul Shah,
Clean Core's founder's experience where one of the things that would
bring down his companies is when he built factories and
gave out jobs and had guarantees that he would supply products
from one country to another and then the power went off.
You can't make your deliveries. You can't keep your employees.
You can't keep paying taxes to local government. It all crashes.
Development stops. Mehul Shah was forced to deal with
the problem of millions of lives derailed by power supplies that were
not constant enough, and not cheap enough. That's what what put the bug
in his head to go into energy. When he finally found that you didn't have to
reinvent the wheel just to make a better axle, he named his fuel after this original
desire to make lives better using energy. I think it's a message that
brings a lot of us here today. For those of you who are proper
nerds, the key thing here is that by adding a little HALEU
to a lot of thorium, and then being very careful how
you distribute the fuel in the bundle. And the bundles in the core. You can increase the burn up,
the fuel usage, by seven times. Meaning, the loading and unloading operations
that are one of the major burdens for the cost of operating CANDU which are
otherwise so simple, so reliable. You might say safe though
we probably overuse the word because existing reactors
are very safe already. Well, you just make about
everything better. You are able to rearrange your staffing.
You're able to refurbish equipment a lot less. And if you know that you're going
to save over a long period of time you have a potentially
transformative proposal that could help save plants like Pickering. Instead of just a few of the reactors
at Pickering, why not all of them? If cost of operation drop 5% or 10% that's
a game changer in the world of electricity. If it can come soon enough. Let's talk about the timeline. These fuel pellets are not theory. They have been manufactured
at Texas A&M last year. They are waiting to go into a test reactor
TODAY at Idaho National Laboratory. This is not waiting. This is advanced
thorium energy at our doorstep. Now we all have a problem in this country,
there are not enough test reactors. If we could ask you all for something, it is to
annoy the crap out of all your representatives for a lot more test reactor funding.
That would help everybody. Because we do have to wait in line for
critical uses like the the US Navy, right? Then when those fuel pellets go
in the reactor, there's a full contract that's been signed and sealed
with Idaho National Laboratory to undertake the highest irradiation
burnout testing EVER on thorium. Clean Core's team knows this because they have obtained all
the data from the most recent trials that got to the previous
highest burn-up levels. This is going to be fundamentally new
data and new science with thorium. I urge you all to stay in close contact as
we put it in the reactor andstart getting results. Idaho National Lab will be scraping it up and and looking at all the data
and looking at the isotopes produced and examining all the critical measurements
that are going to show to regulators that ANEEL is AT LEAST as safe, if not safer,
than the existing fuel for CANDU reactors. Then we work with Canadian utilities
and it's off-to-the-races. We're hoping 2025 for delivery of the first
commercial bundles for usage up in Canada. Who is now on board? I have to tell you something. When I was talking excitedly about this
technology to some folks in DC who are into advanced nuclear and working
on their own nuclear companies, they stared at me and they said: Mark Nelson, a Thorium Bro? And I said, well first of all
that's not quite fair... And then I realized, no wait... Let ME show YOU
who are about to become Thorium Bros: Some of the leading lights
of world nuclear science. Some of the highest level,
most experienced people in Canadian nuclear industry
have joined this team. So here's a question I got: Maybe this fuel is cool,
but the regulator will never approve it. I don't know, Canadian regulator
seems to think that they're going to improve entirely
new reactors several at a time I think that if we work well
with their regulator we're going to be able to make
very quick progress on an unmodified-except-for-the-fuel
CANDU bundle. So, Clean Core just decided
to work with the guy who is the leader of the entire
regulatory apparatus in Canada. There's a quick way to know
how to navigate the system. How about this: We need people who
truly understand fuel development. So they brought on
Dr. Koroush Shirvan from MIT, who's considered one of, if not the top, nuclear fuel expert in the world. That'll do it. Then we brought on people like Dr Anil Kakodkar.
He was one of the first people to join. He's one of the leading lights of
the entire Indian nuclear program. He's basically Weinberg. A live, kicking,
doing excellent work over in India, Weinberg. India? Here's an interesting thing,
when I ask people: Where are cheapest reactors
in the world are coming from? They say: China.
I'm like, well... Good reactors you know.
4 or 5 billion a pop. That's not bad. They say: What about Korea?
4 or 5 or 6 billion a pop? Not bad. They say: Russia?
Depending on who you are, 3 to 6 billion? Then they guess: USA? And I have to laugh.
Then they guess: France? I make a cringe. It's India.
They're building CANDU derived reactors, those so-called horizontal
pressurized tube reactors. India is building them cheaper
than decent coal plants. With entirely indigenous supply chain. They don't have and don't need
the heavy forgings, right? You can you can scale up the
supply for these types of reactors because it's a modular core. That's typically the longest lead
time and most difficult component. So, let me Pitch you on a vision: If India is ready to work to export
its outstanding reactor technology, and the world is wanting this,
and willing to work with India... and there's a fuel that can
stop plutonium production... (I don't have to sell this room on why
that's important to a lot of people.) Then you have a play: That with existing technology,
we might just decarbonize Africa. We might just decarbonize the world. With reactors that have never
had an irreparable core meltdown. Every CANDU reactor, to my knowledge,
that has had a little bit of... You know, a little bit of slumpage
or blockage or gets a little warm? You just replace the tube
and you keep moving. That sounds like Advanced Nuclear to me. If we're working in partnership:
USA, Canada, India... We have in our hands something
that could very well deliver the vision that you all have talked about at this
very conference for over a decade. We just have to reach out and grab it. Questions? 5% to 7% improvement on the cost
of energy from CANDU by doing this. You make it sound like it's a revolution. You use Alvin Weinberg's name,
but are completely missing the point of thorium energy in
molten-salt reactors. They are at least 10 times better than
what you can with thorium in CANDU. I'm not saying that we shouldn't do
thorium in CANDU. It is a good idea. But, just try to keep
things in perspective. Physics is not a charity. We often explain that point to friends
that like other energy technologies, right? The world is not a charity. You have to produce more than
you take, in order to continue. (In the long run, depending on
where you divide the system boundary.) Doing thorium in a way that doesn't pay
its own way? That's not good enough. That's not good enough. You've got to do thorium in a way that is
worth it, not just because it's thorium. We love the ideas that we talk
about when we talk about thorium The excitement we have when
we see any kind of breakthrough. But in the end, that truly doesn't
matter beyond excitement. We have to use Thorium in a way that pays
for effort you put into the thorium fuel cycle. Thorium has been attempted
many times. Usually very briefly. Unless you want your thorium revolution
to be something that happens very briefly then it's got to pay for itself. What I think
I've just presented is a compelling case: We've got something that
will pay for itself, plus some. The revolution that we want with thorium,
it already happened. It's all of you. You thought it was the reactor, it wasn't. It was you.
It was what you all started. It is what Gord started for me
in my life with that video The revolution has occurred. You have won...
the revolutionary part. Now comes the hard part. I would argue that one of the things
that has slowed us down in nuclear is being obsessed with the
technology instead of with people. What I tried to show you
with those slides is that: The revolution you thought was going
to come out of blueprints in some ways did. I'm here, and I've helped
build this world movement because of the the reactors
whose blueprints were shown in Kirk's Immortal video. That wasn't the real revolution. The real revolution was the hearts
we convinced along the way. It is the entire countries that
are seeing rapid increases in public support for nuclear this very day. Enjoy it. It's your victory. Now we
have to win the peace that may, or may not, involve different reactors
that we've learned to love in concept. It may or may not involve the reactors
that we used to love and forgot about. But the same things that
led to this social Revolution are going to be the types of thinking
and the group efforts that produce the successful novel and advanced
technologies of the future. I do appreciate the criticism, but don't
miss the victory that's already occurred. Another reason to proceed is: Thorium unlocks
rare earth metals market for the Western world. Right now, thorium is blocking the
ability to refine rare earths into metals. Which we all really want, if we want
electric cars and stuff like that. So near term, tons of thorium
will be needed in CANDU reactors. If that helps unlock rare earths
then that's outstanding. Could you explain your Excel slide please? Germany is red ugly and bad
and France is green orderly and beautiful. This is is how much carbon is put into the
atmosphere per unit of electricity generated. The graph looks almost the same for absolute
quantity how much carbon per hour. By happenstance France and Germany make
almost the same amount of electricity. This is the pollution to deliver
electricity in two different nations. Over what timeframe?
One year. That's 8,760 data points for
each country, so one per hour. When I show people this graphic, I like to ask:
What do you think the weather was like that day? A lot of people that kind of
think about it a little bit. Was it windy? Was it sunny?
Exactly. Windy. Sunny. Low demand.
That kind of stuff. Those are the days when it's
looking a little bit better in Germany But, as you can tell,
that's not happening all the time. And now if I put up like a 2021 or 2022 graph
it would look basically the same except Germany would look insane.
Just crazy gyrations up and down. Because they now have 140 gigawatts
of installed wind and solar capacity. I think the lowest hour we found
this year was 1.2 gigawatts. So it goes between radically more electricity
than Germany can use and almost none. That's what gives you the variation.
