Latest / Saving the World From Bad Ideas / Bad Idea #34 “Nuclear? No Thanks!" With Bryony Worthington

Transcript

Bad Idea #34 “Nuclear? No Thanks!" With Bryony Worthington · Saving the World From Bad Ideas

• 0:00
  I think I'm in favour of all nukes, actually.
• 0:02
  I don't have a favorite. I think once they're built and
• 0:04
  they're operating you, you're never going to regret it, right?
• 0:07
  They're just so reliable and they're so useful in what they
• 0:10
  produce because they don't just produce power at huge volumes,
• 0:14
  they produce heat. And increasingly when we get
• 0:17
  through this decarbonisation journey, we're going to have to
• 0:20
  deal with heat. And heat isn't easy because
• 0:22
  they've maxed everything out to the absolute Max.
• 0:23
  They couldn't shave off the impurities, so they rolled it
• 0:26
  anyway. And then famously the inspectors
• 0:28
  came around and went, hang on a SEC, the impurities level in
• 0:30
  this casing is slightly higher. Why is that?
• 0:32
  They went, oh, well, you know, we didn't do the normal shaving.
• 0:35
  It doesn't, it doesn't materially affect the steel.
• 0:38
  But in the world of nuclear, everything is micromanaged
• 0:41
  within an inch of it's life. And that that failure to take
• 0:44
  into account the fact that you need to take out the impurities
• 0:46
  by cutting the cutting the steel meant they had to start again.
• 0:50
  Kami, Can you imagine having to then do that whole industrial
• 0:53
  process one more time? Course it adds costs.
• 0:55
  It's completely ludicrous. Welcome to saving the world from
• 0:59
  bad ideas. I'm Mark Linus and I've had a
• 1:02
  few bad ideas in my time. I used to go out in the night
• 1:05
  time to destroy GMO crops and I also posed nuclear power.
• 1:08
  But then when I looked at the science I found I got it wrong.
• 1:11
  Oops. I've learned the hard way that
• 1:13
  none of us are right all the time.
• 1:15
  So now I'm here to challenge the assumptions that we all too
• 1:17
  often take for granted because the future depends on us getting
• 1:21
  it right. My guest today is Briony
• 1:23
  Worthington, AKA the Baroness Worthington of Briony.
• 1:27
  Where are you, Baroness of again?
• 1:29
  Well, Cambridge, but I don't use that because there's only been 1
• 1:32
  Worthington, so I'm the Baroness Worthington, so you don't need
• 1:36
  the of bit. Oh, I don't need.
• 1:38
  Oh, OK. I was thinking there was some
• 1:40
  town in England they were building a statue of you, but
• 1:43
  that's good. Yeah, well, they might do one
• 1:46
  day because you're the originator of the UK's Climate
• 1:49
  Act, which came about from a campaign that you worked on at
• 1:53
  Friends of the Earth when you were there and then later when
• 1:55
  you worked for the government. And you're now even more
• 1:58
  famously Co host with Michael Lebrike, who we've had on as a
• 2:01
  guest here of the Cleaning Up podcast.
• 2:03
  So welcome to saving and well from bad ideas.
• 2:06
  Thank you Mark here. Delight to be with.
• 2:09
  You. Well, it's even more of a
• 2:11
  delight to have you. And now it's safe to say that
• 2:14
  you're a long time enthusiast for nuclear power.
• 2:17
  And I thought since this is the season finale, we could go all
• 2:22
  in our nuclear and contest the bad idea that nuclear is not
• 2:26
  relevant, it's too expensive, it's not going to happen.
• 2:28
  The future is going to be all renewables.
• 2:30
  So if I be the kind of devil's advocate of that side, you've
• 2:34
  got an hour to convince me that nuclear is still in the game and
• 2:37
  still important. So are you up for that?
• 2:39
  Yeah, definitely. Yep.
• 2:41
  And maybe I'll start with the the renewables revolution, which
• 2:45
  is something that ember, you know, which is a think tank that
• 2:47
  you Co founded, they're calling the Electrotech revolution,
• 2:51
  which is a phrase I rather like. Solar and batteries are now
• 2:53
  growing so fast that, you know, it's pretty much exponential
• 2:57
  globally. They're on the sort of steep
• 2:59
  upward part of the S curve. And I just looked at the latest
• 3:02
  stats and solar was, I think it's grown by, it's been
• 3:07
  doubling every three years. It's the fastest growing
• 3:09
  electricity source in history. So when the Paris agreement was
• 3:12
  signed back in 2015, it was 1% of global electricity.
• 3:15
  And now in the first half of 2025, it's getting up to about 9
• 3:19
  percent, 8.8% of the last last count.
• 3:22
  And you know, that's only one part of the story.
• 3:24
  Perhaps just as significant as that batteries are now taking
• 3:27
  off 2 which combined with solar makes almost you know, solar
• 3:31
  plus batteries as as as base load, just like nuclear famously
• 3:34
  is and Ember calls batteries silos for sunshine, which is
• 3:38
  rather lovely. The latest figures show 160 GW
• 3:41
  hours of new battery storage last year and prices have fallen
• 3:44
  tenfold over the last seven years.
• 3:46
  So I'm beginning to sound a bit breathless with all of this but
• 3:48
  you know, are you on board with the Electrotech revolution?
• 3:51
  Do you think it's all as significant as it sounds?
• 3:53
  I. Mean, yeah, firstly, I should
• 3:54
  say I completely love what's happened in the the kind of take
• 3:58
  up of clean electricity. It's yeah, it is kind of
• 4:01
  breathtaking to watch. And Ember, you know, I've had a
• 4:05
  sort of front seat in terms of watching that data come through
• 4:08
  and the narratives emerge. I'm not in any way seeking to
• 4:11
  sort of suggest that this is, is going to be slowed down or
• 4:14
  wanting it to slow down. But S curves have a habit of, of
• 4:17
  having, you know, the top part of the S curve is when it
• 4:19
  flattens. And famously, the IEA was always
• 4:22
  predicting there'd be steep increase and then the flattening
• 4:24
  off and they got it all wrong. But it's not, it's not without
• 4:28
  potential to slow down. And the reason I say that is
• 4:30
  because if you look into the data, that's what Ember does.
• 4:34
  A large part of this story tracks back to China and the
• 4:37
  extraordinary pace at which China's been installing wind and
• 4:40
  solar, which has meant that it's now caught up and overtaken
• 4:43
  other sources of electricity provision.
• 4:45
  But it is a China story. And if China runs out of room,
• 4:49
  runs out of, I mean, metaphorical room for renewables
• 4:52
  or decides for other reasons to slow down you, then you could
• 4:55
  see that S start to flatten faster than you would want.
• 4:58
  Now, China's also exporting solar panels and batteries to
• 5:02
  the rest of the world, but there is no bigger market than China's
• 5:04
  own internal market. And and they also have the speed
• 5:07
  with which to move that other countries really don't have.
• 5:10
  So yeah, it's a very much a China story and what keeps me
• 5:14
  focus on other sources of technologies because China's not
• 5:17
  just doing wind, solar and batteries, it's all staying
• 5:19
  nuclear. It's also doing geothermal.
• 5:21
  It's also doing, you name it, it's doing it.
• 5:23
  And and that's what makes me kind of feel like if you
• 5:27
  understand China's energy demand needs and it's not just about
• 5:31
  electricity, it's also about heat, then you end up looking at
• 5:34
  nuclear again, thinking actually there is a really important role
• 5:37
  for it to play here. Your question was, do I think
• 5:40
  that the electrotech is as exciting as it as it seems to
• 5:43
  be. And I the answer to that is yes.
• 5:45
  I'm just a little bit perhaps sanguine about the
• 5:48
  breathlessness of this. All we need is these three
• 5:50
  technologies. I don't.
• 5:51
  I don't really subscribe to that.
• 5:53
  You've just been to China, so we'll come back to that and then
• 5:56
  talk in more detail about, about that because that really is the,
• 5:59
  the, you know, the, the centre of this massive electrotech
• 6:03
  revolution. But the issue seems to be cost
• 6:05
  curves, right? Solar, wind and batteries.
• 6:07
  They've they've come down and that's due to modularity and
• 6:11
  learning. And your your Co host Michael
• 6:13
  Liebreich always waxes lyrical about this.
• 6:15
  But staying with the big picture here, no one's seeing downward
• 6:18
  cost curves for nuclear, are they?
• 6:20
  Because, I guess because they're not actually getting built
• 6:23
  anywhere. Well, I mean, they are getting
• 6:25
  built places and they were built in places, right?
• 6:28
  So the, I suppose just to tell the story of nuclear then that,
• 6:30
  you know, it wasn't technology that was originally developed
• 6:33
  for weapons. We all know that.
• 6:35
  But it was quickly also understood that it could, could,
• 6:37
  could be commercialized for generating electricity and the
• 6:41
  famous phrase of, you know, too cheap to meter.
• 6:43
  And there was this kind of period of rapid development.
• 6:45
  It's particularly driven by the US and by the UK and Europe, but
• 6:49
  also latterly, yeah, now importantly being picked up by
• 6:53
  Asia and China. But the, the story of how was
• 6:56
  done that, you know, got dominated by the choice of
• 6:58
  technology. And we chose the pressurised
• 7:00
  water reactor because of that's where it originated out from,
• 7:03
  the sort of defence and and manufacturing of weapons.
• 7:06
  And the PWR, you know, hasn't shown itself to be very
• 7:10
  effective at coming down the cost curve.
• 7:12
  The French famously built out a huge number of them in a very
• 7:15
  rapid space of time. This is in the 80s during the
• 7:18
  oil shock period where just to get off a dependency on oil,
• 7:22
  France decided to go nuclear. And the MESMA plan saw a huge
• 7:25
  build out of nuclear in a very rapid space of time.
• 7:28
  So, so, so we got to quite a high level of global electricity
• 7:32
  production through this quite intense phase of build.
• 7:36
  And you're absolutely right, the S curves didn't show themselves
• 7:38
  to be as amenable to coming down as, as solar and and wind
• 7:41
  because they're much more modular.
• 7:43
  But there was this period where we didn't stop building.
• 7:46
  We built one, we carried on, we had this learning phase and then
• 7:49
  and the French did prove that it could be done in relatively fast
• 7:52
  and it's but then it stood the test of time.
• 7:54
  You think about nuclear is you once you've built it, it becomes
• 7:58
  infrastructure really. And it's there in the background
• 8:01
  producing heat and power reliably full up to 80 to 90
• 8:06
  years potentially. So we're starting to see, you
• 8:08
  know, some of these plants are coming off now because they were
• 8:10
  built in the 60s and 70s. But we've still got a big number
• 8:13
  operating around the world and producing not a small amount of
• 8:17
  electricity. For the longest time, hydro was
• 8:19
  the biggest source of clean electricity, followed by
• 8:21
  nuclear. And then the rest of renewables
• 8:23
  were just trailing, nowhere to be seen on the graph.
• 8:26
  Now we combine wind and solar, They combine, they're coming up
• 8:29
  and they produce more electrons, more terawatt hours than the
• 8:32
  nuclear does. But we forget that nuclear is
• 8:34
  just there in the background since that period, providing us
• 8:36
  with a reliable electricity. And over time, of course, it's
• 8:41
  relatively cheap because if you amortize those capital costs
• 8:44
  over 80 years per unit today, that's not that expensive.
• 8:49
  The problem is you've got the big high capital costs upfront
• 8:52
  that skews the investment case. And you know, that is not an
• 8:55
  insignificant issue. So I there is, I'm not saying
• 8:58
  there are no problems, but I think we sometimes treat nuclear
• 9:00
  a bit unfairly. We equate it all with the French
• 9:03
  project that's famously 20 years over over delayed and massively
• 9:07
  over budget. But that was a technology choice
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  and it was a particular build. And we should look at it more in
• 9:13
  the round of the history of nuclear, which if we hadn't had
• 9:16
  nuclear, we'd have had a lot dirtier air, there were a lot
• 9:19
  less clean electrons, we'd have a lot more fossil fuels that
• 9:21
  were burnt. So I'm glad that we did that
• 9:23
  phase and I think we're entering a new phase now where nuclear is
• 9:26
  being done differently. Nicely put and I agree about the
• 9:29
  past. And also I'm sure we agree that
• 9:31
  early shutdowns of fossil, sorry, early shutdowns of
• 9:34
  nuclear make make no sense at all.
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  I guess the question I've still got is whether there will be any
• 9:39
  more PWR belt, you know, these these pressurized water reactors
• 9:42
  you were you were talking about. I had as a guest on the show
• 9:45
  Julia Pike from Sizwell C and I think the numbers was like £38
• 9:50
  billion for Sizwell C And I think that's just the overnight
• 9:55
  cost, like just the construction cost.
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  And if you add in financing, it's pushing like 100 if you
• 9:59
  believe the Financial Times. I mean, you know, you're not
• 10:01
  going to get many of many more of those things built at that
• 10:04
  kind of cost, at least not to the extent that we need clean
• 10:08
  energy for for the future to decarbonize the whole energy
• 10:10
  system. Yeah, no, there's a whole debate
• 10:12
  to be had. I'm sure you had it with Julia,
• 10:14
  the the PWR in Britain story. I don't let's probably not
• 10:17
  rehearse it here again because I think that is just one lens.
• 10:20
  And if you sit in London or you sit in Brussels, maybe that's
• 10:22
  the only thing you see. But if you look a little bit
• 10:24
  broader, you see that Korea is building nuclear reactors for
• 10:28
  the Middle East or you see that Brazil has got a reactor and
• 10:31
  where they actually forged the vessel for that in, in
• 10:34
  Sheffield, it was a Sheffield Steel manufactured there.
• 10:37
  There are things projects going on.
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  China, as you've mentioned, is building 1 of everything and is
• 10:41
  testing out which one it thinks it can scale right now.
• 10:44
  And it's, you know, it's the one that's driving nuclear up still,
• 10:47
  whereas other parts of the world are shutting them down.
• 10:50
  So it seems like it's static and it seems like it's got some very
• 10:53
  high profile problems. But I think that's a
• 10:56
  simplification of where we are and we can come on to talk about
• 10:59
  this sort of now proliferation of different types of nuclear,
• 11:02
  which I think opens up some elements of modularity.
• 11:06
  I'm not saying it's ever going to be as quick as a as a
• 11:08
  silicon's solar wafer in terms of its its ability to innovate
• 11:13
  and come down the cost curve, but it certainly can't get any
• 11:16
  worse, right? So if you do modular and build
• 11:19
  more of them then we will get cost learnings.
• 11:22
  You can't get any worse. You heard it here first.
• 11:23
  I mean, that's the best best argument.
• 11:25
  And you can't get any worse, can't get any worse.
• 11:27
  And Flamerville, I think is fair to say you could be a problem
• 11:29
  with this tribute. Clear as the one that you peg
• 11:32
  yourself as not wanting to copy, basically.
• 11:35
  For those that don't know, Flamerville is the EPR, the
• 11:37
  European Pressurised Reactor that that they were building in
• 11:40
  France. I don't even know.
• 11:41
  I think it's up and running now or maybe they've already had
• 11:43
  some, some, some issues, but there is one, there is one up
• 11:46
  and running at Old Kiluoto in, in Finland, which I've actually
• 11:49
  been to. And I think they, they built,
• 11:52
  built some in China as well. And in China they're also
• 11:54
  building, is it called the Hua long one?
• 11:56
  I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that right, but there's a big,
• 11:59
  you know, so still building the big one, GW pressurized water
• 12:02
  reactors. So they seem to be able to do
• 12:03
  it. And do you know, I mean you,
• 12:05
  you're in China. Do you know anything about their
• 12:07
  their cost curves and, and and what what the latest looking is
• 12:10
  on that? Super hard right to get cost
• 12:13
  data out of China. The per MW hour price curves, a
• 12:16
  cost that they're quoting, I really wouldn't know.
• 12:19
  I would. I don't know them.
• 12:20
  So sorry. I'm much more interested in the
• 12:22
  politics of this and the narrative as well that we tell
• 12:26
  ourselves about success. And I think it's very easy to
• 12:30
  pick, to cherry pick really bad examples and say that was
• 12:32
  terrible. I mean, fundamentally the Eprs
• 12:35
  got massive right. There was this, there was this
• 12:37
  period where economies of scale ruled.
• 12:40
  So the bigger you build the reactor, the more units you get
• 12:43
  out, the more you can pay back. And I just think somehow the
• 12:47
  engineers were were sort of pushed to one side and the
• 12:49
  economists got hold of it and they maxed it out the absolute
• 12:53
  Max. So these things that you, you
• 12:54
  know, you visited one, they're like cathedrals in their scale.
• 12:58
  If you see a normal EPR, you know, I think it's a, is it each
• 13:02
  turbine is, is, you know, 1 is it .800 megawatts per turbine
• 13:06
  and they add 2 together to get 1.6.
• 13:08
  They doubled it. So you now have 1.6 per turbine
• 13:11
  times 2 = 3.2 gig. And that's an insane, an insane
• 13:16
  and undertaking really. It's like maxing out the
• 13:19
  engineering to its very, very limits.
• 13:21
  And what we saw with Framerville was, you know, that just simple
• 13:24
  stuff like when they rolled out the steel, when the steel was
• 13:26
  cast, you're supposed to roll and then you take off the edges
• 13:30
  of the of the steel roll because that's where the impurities
• 13:32
  gather. But because they've maxed
• 13:34
  everything out to the absolute Max, they couldn't shave off the
• 13:36
  impurities. So they rolled it anyway.
• 13:38
  And then famously, the inspectors came around and went,
• 13:41
  hang on a SEC, the impurity level in this casing is slightly
• 13:44
  higher. Why is that?
• 13:45
  They went, Oh, well, you know, we didn't do the normal shaving.
• 13:47
  It doesn't it doesn't materially affect the steel.
• 13:50
  But in the world of nuclear, everything is micromanaged
• 13:53
  within an inch of its life. And that that failure to take
• 13:56
  into account the fact that you need to take out the impurities
• 13:58
  by cutting the cutting the steel meant they had to start again.
• 14:02
  Cami, Can you imagine having to then do that whole industrial
• 14:05
  process one more time? Of course it adds costs.
• 14:07
  It's completely ludicrous. I just think these, these big,
• 14:11
  big, big projects are just a bit, probably it's too, you
• 14:14
  know, too much hubris and we perhaps need to stick to what we
• 14:17
  knew, which was the .8 MW, you know, the .8 gigawatts units.
• 14:21
  We'd built a number of them. It worked.
• 14:22
  Why? Why did we not just keep doing
• 14:24
  that? Well, I mean, these enormous
• 14:26
  projects, it's like the opposite of modular, right?
• 14:29
  And yeah, so the world is pushing towards in the nuclear
• 14:33
  renaissance, which is being being hyped a lot, small modular
• 14:36
  reactors, SMRS. So the M is M is modular, you
• 14:40
  know, is, is that something you see as being the next big thing
• 14:44
  or is it just another hype cycle?
• 14:45
  I don't know. I mean, I've, I think I'm in
• 14:48
  favour of all nukes actually. I don't have a favorite, I
• 14:51
  think. I think once they're built and
• 14:52
  they're operating you, you're never going to regret it, right?
• 14:55
  They're just so reliable and they're so useful in what they
• 14:59
  produce. And because they don't just
• 15:00
  produce power at huge volumes, they produce heat.
• 15:05
  And increasingly when we get through this decarbonisation
• 15:08
  journey, we're going to have to deal with heat.
• 15:10
  And heat isn't easy. It's, it's something that solar
• 15:13
  and wind and batteries don't really lend themselves to from
• 15:16
  a, just a pure kind of energy conversion basis.
• 15:19
  And if you've got something that's producing large amounts
• 15:21
  of heat, that's going to also be an asset.
• 15:24
  So I, I'm, I think the 500 MW is fine.
• 15:27
  Like, I don't know, I don't think we need to go down to
• 15:30
  micro mini nukes in everyone's backyard.
• 15:32
  I don't think that will lend itself to economies of scale.
• 15:36
  And I I don't know what's wrong with the 500 MW size because
• 15:40
  that's the one that fits in where the coal units currently
• 15:43
  operate and where the gas units currently operate.
• 15:45
  So if you're thinking about systems change the thing, if the
• 15:49
  thing you're replacing is as similar as the thing, you know,
• 15:52
  if you can match what you're replacing, that's probably a
• 15:54
  good, good benchmark. But I mean that.
• 15:56
  But then if someone wants to build hundreds of little ones,
• 16:00
  stack them all up and that makes sense economically, I don't have
• 16:04
  an in principle objection to it. I don't think it's the saviour.
• 16:07
  I think the core of nuclear is just the physics of it, right?
• 16:10
  That you've got. The nuclear bond is so energy
• 16:13
  dense, it contains so much energy.
• 16:15
  When you split that atom, you release an enormous amount of
• 16:18
  energy in a very small space. And that's the gift.
• 16:21
  And I think exactly how we configure it and exactly how we
• 16:25
  commercialize it, that I'm really open to someone making
• 16:28
  the case for any, any scale beyond this sort of, you know,
• 16:31
  so that we're going to be using the power of laptops.
• 16:33
  But the, you know, there's, but actually even there nuclear
• 16:37
  batteries is another really curious bit of modernity that we
• 16:40
  skip over. Why is the Mars Rover happily
• 16:43
  roaming around taking pictures? This is running on a nuclear
• 16:46
  battery. That's not a fission battery,
• 16:49
  it's just a nuclear decay. So it's a naturally decaying
• 16:52
  element that keeps a tiny little wattage running for a long, long
• 16:56
  time. But that's super useful if
• 16:58
  you're running a, you know, a mobile unit on, on a foreign
• 17:02
  planet. So that, so, you know, nuclear
• 17:05
  is just exciting. And I, and I said, therefore I
• 17:07
  can't, you know, can't imagine. Well, we won't be exploiting it.
• 17:10
  Nuclear for Mars, maybe not so much for Earth.
• 17:12
  We'll have to see. If you don't have a favorite
• 17:15
  SMR. I mean, there's so many dozens
• 17:16
  of competing projects out there like, you know, and some, you
• 17:20
  know, OCLO, which is probably one of the better known ones.
• 17:22
  I mean, their share price has gone through the roof.
• 17:25
  They're pretty close to, I think, to Chris Wright, you
• 17:28
  know, the current energy secretary, right?
• 17:30
  Closely, he's on the board, isn't he?
• 17:31
  I think. And in this world, conflicts of
• 17:33
  interest are no longer a problem, so of course he's still
• 17:36
  on. The board not for Trump, no.
• 17:38
  And the I think Sam Altman was who's, you know, the CEO of open
• 17:43
  AI was also one of the, you know, early, early investors in
• 17:46
  that. So, you know, you're in the US
• 17:48
  at the moment. Give us the kind of the American
• 17:51
  story because it's like that seems to be a bipartisan
• 17:53
  consensus. It certainly isn't on climate
• 17:56
  change and there certainly isn't on kind of on renewables, which
• 17:59
  the the Trump administration is trying to stop and block as fast
• 18:03
  as possible. But they've they are very pro
• 18:04
  nuclear. Maybe no one's told them that
• 18:06
  it's it's low carbon. You know, do you think, is that
• 18:08
  like a, is that like a bipartisan way through the
• 18:10
  current impasse? Oh, oh, yeah, absolutely,
• 18:12
  absolutely. Yeah, there, there is complete
• 18:15
  agreement that and because this is a country with a lot of
• 18:17
  nukes, right, the as I'm saying, in the 70s and 80s, right the
• 18:20
  way up to the 90s, they were building and they were.
• 18:23
  And so there are lots of people who operate them and they
• 18:25
  operate them brilliantly. And so there's no kind of,
• 18:27
  there's no German equivalent of like we must shuttle our nuclear
• 18:31
  down for political reasons. It just doesn't exist here.
• 18:34
  And so, yes, the building dried up mainly because of the big
• 18:38
  discovery of, of shale gas and the cheapness of the cheapness
• 18:41
  of fossil really that kept that kept them from building more.
• 18:44
  It just wasn't the economics didn't make sense for them.
• 18:47
  But now that geopolitics has changed, all fossils run out at
• 18:51
  some point, right? Even, well, especially the shale
• 18:55
  gas, actually, there's there'll come a point where it's no
• 18:57
  longer growing in terms of its capacity or we start to shrink.
• 19:00
  So what do you do then? Where does your energy
• 19:02
  independence come from? And yes, they're building solar
• 19:05
  and wind. And Texas famously is the home
• 19:07
  of all of these things. But the realization is that
• 19:10
  nuclear is such a strategically important source of once you've
• 19:14
  built it and once you've got your fuel supply chains in
• 19:16
  place, indigenous independent energy source, then there's no
• 19:20
  way they're not going to do it. And then so yes, there are lots
• 19:22
  of new actors coming into the place.
• 19:24
  I mean, you've still got people, big people like GE, who GE for
• 19:29
  Nova, who are the, you know, the big old industrial builders of
• 19:34
  note, these engineering companies, they've got their own
• 19:36
  reactor that they're building now, building the first one in
• 19:38
  Canada, second one will be in the USI think that's a 300 MW,
• 19:42
  could call it an SMR, but it's still 300 megawatts, decent
• 19:45
  size. You mentioned Aqua.
• 19:47
  I don't know how much of that is nice marketing and, and the
• 19:50
  reality of that reactor project, I'm not really across it.
• 19:53
  You've got Kairos based here in California.
• 19:56
  A lot of smart money says that Kairos is a really sensible and
• 19:59
  strong endeavour. They're doing their first build
• 20:01
  now in I think it's in Tennessee or no, it's, it's at the site of
• 20:06
  one of the big nuclear labs and the Midwest.
• 20:09
  And then you've got Bill Gates. Of course, he's got his own
• 20:12
  version as well, the Tara Power. Is it Terra power I get?
• 20:15
  Confused, I think. I think it either is or was.
• 20:18
  But yeah, they're actually starting to build, aren't they
• 20:20
  on on that? The gay story's interesting
• 20:22
  because he put his smartest people on it and they kind of
• 20:25
  went through a whole bunch of different nuclear designs.
• 20:27
  They settled on a kind of travelling wave reactor, which I
• 20:31
  don't know whether how much this was human intelligence or
• 20:33
  augmented intelligence, but anyway the computer said this is
• 20:35
  the one to do. And then it actually hit the
• 20:38
  reality of politics and regulation and it couldn't be
• 20:40
  progressed, not even. And then of course, he was going
• 20:43
  to try and do it in China and it couldn't be done there either.
• 20:45
  It's just very, very hard to get it through regulatory approval.
• 20:48
  So so he went back to the drawing board, went through
• 20:50
  another bunch of designs and came up with the nature and
• 20:52
  reactor. And that's now, yes, getting
• 20:55
  built in Wyoming, importantly in Wyoming, where it's an old coal
• 20:59
  mining state, lots and lots of blue collar jobs and and a kind
• 21:03
  of pride in coal and energy. And that's so that was
• 21:06
  symbolically chosen to sort of make this new, this new form of
• 21:09
  energy kind of politically relevant there.
• 21:11
  Yeah. So US, there's the stuff is
• 21:14
  being built, but it's being built quite small, quite slow,
• 21:17
  you know, meanwhile, China's just throwing them up very fast
• 21:20
  all over the place in all types of different designs.
• 21:22
  So yeah, it'll be interesting. And and then of course, because
• 21:25
  it's the US, the fact that China's doing it is also part of
• 21:27
  the narrative, right? If we can't have China to
• 21:29
  dominate the nuclear business, we have to get back in the game.
• 21:33
  Well, not given that they China dominates pretty much every
• 21:36
  other business now, all of the critical minerals, all of the
• 21:39
  batteries or increasingly more of the electric vehicles, solar,
• 21:43
  of course, wind. And you know, so in terms of
• 21:46
  the, the new energy economy, it's, it's all about China at
• 21:49
  the moment. And the US seems to be not just
• 21:52
  being left behind, but literally exiting the game and leaving,
• 21:55
  leaving the field open for the Chinese.
• 21:57
  And maybe, maybe nuclear is the one, the one space that the
• 22:00
  United States still is interested in having an
• 22:02
  industrial policy to occupy. But I'm not, I'm not so sure.
• 22:06
  It seems like it's going to be a long way off before any of these
• 22:09
  projects actually generate. I mean, at least a minimum of of
• 22:12
  10 years, probably 15, do you think?
• 22:14
  Or I'm like, I've been pathetic. Yeah, if you're just waiting for
• 22:18
  the terrible hours to start to flow, yeah, it's going to take
• 22:20
  time for them to do the test reactors and then they'll do the
• 22:22
  first commercial reactors and then they'll scale from there.
• 22:25
  But you know, as, as we said in the MESMA plan, once you've got
• 22:28
  a reactor that works and you decide to back it and you just
• 22:30
  roll through, you can do a lot in a decade, you know, and
• 22:33
  that's, that's, that's sort of the right timing rate.
• 22:35
  We've got a decade of wind and solar and batteries will take us
• 22:39
  through definitely to 2030. And by 2035, I think the nuclear
• 22:43
  phase build will start to pick up then if you know, that's one
• 22:47
  scenario and I think it's a credible scenario, but yeah,
• 22:51
  it's not, it's not today's solution for sure.
• 22:54
  But another scenario is that the wind solar batteries can do it
• 22:56
  by themselves. I mean, particularly, I think
• 22:59
  the issue there is batteries, right?
• 23:00
  If batteries come down enough in price and to be scaled up
• 23:04
  sufficiently that you can literally just dump solar into
• 23:07
  them and they can, you know, run pretty much a space load 24/7
• 23:12
  even with some seasonal storage, then it's over for nuclear,
• 23:15
  right? I mean, if that's, you know, it
• 23:16
  depends on the cost, but I think that's also a plausible
• 23:20
  scenario, don't you? Well, I, I think you can do you
• 23:23
  can do a huge amount, yeah, for sure.
• 23:24
  And let's just do it right. The costs are there.
• 23:27
  Let's get all the impediments out of the way.
• 23:28
  Let's go, go, go build, build, build.
• 23:29
  I think that is very likely to happen for the rest of this
• 23:32
  decade and are excited about it. It can it do everything?
• 23:35
  Well, no, not really, because certain things that the grid
• 23:38
  needs to move electrons and all I should say it's not just
• 23:40
  batteries though, it's transmission as well, right.
• 23:42
  So you can store it or you can move it.
• 23:44
  Those are the two things. Or you can shed demand, But you
• 23:47
  know there's going to be a lot of that happening to accommodate
• 23:49
  this new type of intermittent power.
• 23:52
  And that's all hugely exciting, but the reality is that we need
• 23:55
  a lot of heat, right? So, and this perhaps takes us
• 23:58
  back to China again, when I was working with this other project
• 24:01
  called Repower Initiative, we started in Poland, because if
• 24:04
  you look at Poland's use of coal, it's very different to
• 24:06
  Europe. EU KS use of coal, it was
• 24:09
  providing a lot of CHP services and a lot of heat.
• 24:12
  So you couldn't just say, oh, it's fine, just, you know,
• 24:14
  switch to wind, that'd be fine. CHP is combined heat and power.
• 24:16
  So that's like steam steam pipes going through the roads into
• 24:20
  people's houses and keeping the whole city warm, right?
• 24:22
  So you need a heat source for that.
• 24:24
  Or it's powering an industrial process or a manufacturing
• 24:26
  process or, you know, all sorts of stuff like that, which we
• 24:29
  normally use gas for. But they were, they were using
• 24:31
  coal. So, so there's this cold
• 24:33
  dependency, which wasn't just power.
• 24:35
  And so, so, so we started looking there about the role of
• 24:39
  nuclear and, and actually Poland did stand up for nuclear in
• 24:43
  Europe and stood up to the Germans.
• 24:45
  And there's the Austrians and insisted that they wanted to do
• 24:48
  this. And, and then partly the reason
• 24:49
  was they could see that Europe was becoming far too dependent
• 24:52
  on gas, right? That is the reality of when
• 24:55
  you're muddling through this transition with renewables, you
• 24:59
  need something to back up the renewables.
• 25:01
  Yes, you could try and build hundreds and hundreds and
• 25:03
  hundreds of batteries and we are doing that now.
• 25:06
  But initially it was just gas that was providing the backup.
• 25:09
  So the polls said, well, we're not so comfortable with that
• 25:12
  kind of combination. What if we do nuclear as well?
• 25:13
  So, so that's, that's why Poland's going for nuclear and
• 25:18
  Poland's conditions are quite similar to China's, just China
• 25:21
  is a vastly bigger, bigger space and a bigger, bigger challenge.
• 25:25
  So I think something like 60% of Chinese coal has a heat
• 25:29
  component that's used. So you it, you can't just say
• 25:33
  ah, wind, solar, batteries, It's not, it's not going to answer
• 25:36
  that problem. I think in Finland, Finland,
• 25:38
  they've got ASMR company that is designing small reactors
• 25:44
  specifically to provide heat at the municipal scale as well.
• 25:47
  So that's their, you know, their solution, which I imagine
• 25:50
  they're hoping to export as well.
• 25:51
  But to come back to China, then tell us, well, if you can, if
• 25:54
  you can, if it's not private, tell us, tell us what you're
• 25:56
  doing there and give us some kind of impressions of what the
• 26:00
  sort of energy landscape is there.
• 26:02
  Yeah, I was. I was over there for a few days
• 26:04
  for a meeting talking about this concept of how do you re power
• 26:10
  or kind of reuse your thermal assets and the infrastructure
• 26:13
  that's built up around your thermal assets, meaning your
• 26:15
  coal plant and switch them out to clean.
• 26:19
  It's slightly different. It's the kind of subtle
• 26:21
  difference between just build your windows zone or anywhere
• 26:24
  and then interconnect them to the grid and it'll all be fine.
• 26:26
  It's kind of looking at these assets as what are they
• 26:28
  providing currently, the full services that they provide and
• 26:31
  how do you switch them out? And it, it is facilitated by
• 26:34
  there being clean, large scale, clean source of heat.
• 26:38
  The so a nuclear reactor gives you that heat.
• 26:40
  It's that steam temperature. And the Chinese have developed a
• 26:43
  high temperature reactor. So we talked about PWRS.
• 26:47
  I mean, they're quite low grade heat, 300, four, 100° of heat.
• 26:51
  That's not enough to power a coal turbine really speaking.
• 26:54
  So the there are versions of nuclear that produce much more
• 26:58
  high temperature heat that can catch the exact steam that a
• 27:01
  coal turbine is running on. So that that was exciting that
• 27:04
  China has already built and is already operating efforts HTR
• 27:08
  the high temperature reactor. So that's one reason why this
• 27:11
  concept of switching the coal out.
• 27:14
  So for nuclear works in China. It's not just that though.
• 27:17
  You can also use concentrated solar power that's a source of
• 27:19
  heat and feed lends itself to that vast areas where you can
• 27:24
  put in CSP. And then you've got the advanced
• 27:28
  geothermal now where you can drill for heat anywhere because
• 27:31
  of the advances in drilling technologies.
• 27:33
  So that's another potential technology that's going to come
• 27:36
  in and provide us with these heat sources.
• 27:38
  So that's why I was there. I was just exploring all of
• 27:40
  that. And as is always the case with
• 27:42
  China, you go there and as we were prepping for going there,
• 27:44
  we just realized that pretty much everything we were going to
• 27:47
  say to them, they've already done, but they've just done it
• 27:49
  once or they've done it in one area or they've done an
• 27:51
  experiment pilot. They haven't codified it yet
• 27:54
  into a policy or really dumb, you know, not that we're aware
• 27:58
  of yet that the scenarios they're looking at to get to
• 28:01
  their very challenging net 0 targets haven't quite got this
• 28:05
  concept in there embedded in there of this reuse.
• 28:08
  So that's what we're excited about is if we run the scenarios
• 28:10
  again with this idea embedded, what does that do in terms of
• 28:14
  China's ability to do this affordably and reliably and
• 28:17
  securely, basically? Doesn't China already have a
• 28:20
  thorium reactor molten salt thing which is reached
• 28:25
  criticality? And I mean, did you get any
• 28:26
  Intel on that? So perhaps we should have
• 28:28
  started with this, the story of how I got interested in nuclear,
• 28:31
  because that was you. Were Thorium pro or SIS?
• 28:33
  I don't know what. The yeah, exactly.
• 28:36
  I was like authoriophile whatever.
• 28:40
  I'd come across Kirk Sorensen while I was, I did a piece of
• 28:45
  work for the Guardian actually, which was assessing world
• 28:48
  changing ideas that could beat climate change.
• 28:50
  And they selected the best 10 and they got brought the malls
• 28:53
  in Manchester and got them presenting.
• 28:55
  And, and to credit to them, they selected a nuclear project and
• 28:58
  it was Kirk's. And it was this idea that we
• 29:01
  could use thorium fuel as opposed to uranium and we could
• 29:05
  combine that into a molten salt cooled reactor rather than a
• 29:09
  water cooled reactor, which is what the traditional ones are.
• 29:12
  And the combination of the fuel and the different coolant would
• 29:15
  give you a really inherently safe and different reactor.
• 29:19
  And it had been trialled famously by Alvin Weinberg like
• 29:22
  in the 60s. And this was a revival of that
• 29:24
  idea. And yeah, so I, I thought that
• 29:26
  was fussy a, that there was a whole type of nuclear that I'd
• 29:29
  never heard of. And it had all these different
• 29:31
  attributes that meant that it, you know, it was no risk of a
• 29:35
  Chernobyl style reaction happening if you switch to the
• 29:38
  molten salts. So it's kind of an intriguing I.
• 29:41
  Think thorium was kind of a gateway drug for a few, quite a
• 29:45
  few people It it's yeah. So I mean, it seemed to me a bit
• 29:48
  of AI don't want to knock you down, but a bit of a cult.
• 29:53
  So enthusiastic. Well, people got so enthusiastic
• 29:55
  about it and the advantages seem to me didn't seem that
• 29:58
  significant over uranium. I mean, I know there's like 10s
• 30:00
  of thousands of years worth of thorium just lying around.
• 30:02
  But like, anyway, back to China. They've actually got one up and
• 30:06
  running. I read it somewhere.
• 30:07
  Did you did you hear any more about this and whether it's even
• 30:10
  true? Well, so they, it's the molten
• 30:12
  salts that they're testing and they're doing, I think it's in
• 30:14
  the Gobi Desert and it's run out of Shanghai.
• 30:17
  And there's a Shanghai University Institute devoted to
• 30:21
  this and they, they're not using thorium with it.
• 30:24
  They're using just uranium fuels to test the malt salts as the
• 30:28
  coolant and that's what's currently being built and I
• 30:31
  believe is gone critical and is operating.
• 30:33
  I did not get to visit it. It's in the middle of nowhere
• 30:36
  and it and you know, China's like any vast continent scale
• 30:41
  country where you know, information flows and slightly
• 30:44
  pocketed. So I was hanging out with the
• 30:45
  Tsinghua University people who are much more interested in the
• 30:48
  high temperature reactor and that's what they're following.
• 30:50
  So, you know, there's but yes, they have got that and they, and
• 30:54
  we've also got their first little SMR that's coming on
• 30:57
  board quite. There's nothing they haven't
• 31:00
  really thought of or aren't doing.
• 31:01
  So that's their nature. You know, they were what I found
• 31:04
  striking was in Europe or in perhaps even in the US.
• 31:07
  We'll run ahead with an idea and we'll set targets and goals that
• 31:11
  we're not quite sure how we're going to meet, but we set them
• 31:13
  anyway because the challenge of getting there is going to be the
• 31:15
  thing, right. We do this not because it's
• 31:17
  easy, because it's hard kind of thing.
• 31:19
  China's completely opposite. They'll only set a target if
• 31:22
  they're very, very confident they can exceed it, and they
• 31:25
  want to know in minute detail how it's actually going to work.
• 31:28
  So that's the cultural difference, I think, is that
• 31:31
  they're in their testing phase right now.
• 31:33
  They haven't announced, although their nuclear ambitions are vast
• 31:36
  compared to everyone else, it's still not.
• 31:38
  They're not at full speed. They're still testing is my
• 31:40
  impression. And of course, famously in the
• 31:43
  West, we can't actually build anything or anything large at
• 31:46
  cost, right, Whether it's a bridge or a high speed rail or
• 31:49
  anything. Whereas in China they don't seem
• 31:51
  to have that problem. And maybe maybe this the the big
• 31:54
  nuclear problems with big nuclear in the West are
• 31:56
  basically just just an extension of that.
• 31:58
  Oh, well, there's no doubt the big construction they've,
• 32:00
  they've got, you know, very good at it.
• 32:02
  And labour costs are different, land costs are different, their
• 32:06
  regulatory environments, different land, but cost of
• 32:08
  capital, etcetera, etcetera. All of that gives them an edge.
• 32:12
  I mean, yeah, just look at the high speed rail right here I am
• 32:15
  in California. How long have we been talking
• 32:17
  about putting high speed rail between the two biggest
• 32:20
  conurbations on the West Coast? And it's still inching forward.
• 32:23
  They've built thousands of kilometers that connected all of
• 32:27
  their conurbations now with an amazing network.
• 32:29
  And it's happened practically overnight if you consider it
• 32:33
  Western standards. So, yeah, there's definitely
• 32:35
  something about our inability to do infrastructure well.
• 32:39
  And I mean, and this, well, this is a big topic, right?
• 32:41
  Because part of what's interesting in the US is you
• 32:45
  think of the US as kind of like, well, worst deregulated
• 32:48
  environment. But certain states like
• 32:49
  California almost more regulated than Europe, right?
• 32:53
  If you want a nanny state, I love it here.
• 32:56
  It's amazing. But boy, do they like to choose
• 32:59
  and get involved and dictate and their law making process is kind
• 33:03
  of, you know, almost too easy. They can pass laws and spend
• 33:06
  money, but it doesn't require them to take a really long term
• 33:09
  view. And and there's a lot of
• 33:12
  hitching of agendas onto everything, right?
• 33:14
  If you're going to build a rail system, you better make sure
• 33:17
  that it ticks all the boxes of social justice and this that and
• 33:20
  the other. And I don't want to sound like
• 33:22
  I'm anti all of those things, but when you load it all onto
• 33:24
  infrastructure, gosh does it slow it down.
• 33:27
  And just finishing in China, are they planning to dominate on
• 33:31
  SMRS as well? Because, you know, their kind of
• 33:34
  domination of, of solar and batteries and EVs and critical
• 33:38
  minerals hasn't, hasn't come up by accident, right?
• 33:40
  That's been a, you know, a project of industrial policies
• 33:43
  stretching back, well, ten years or more.
• 33:45
  Do they have the same agenda and the same ambition when it comes
• 33:47
  to nuclear? Almost certainly, yes.
• 33:49
  I mean, and I just saw news article said that they're
• 33:52
  already trialling that they're going to have nuclear ships,
• 33:54
  right. So, you know, you've got to
• 33:57
  remember lots of driving factors.
• 33:59
  One, they have no oil and gas, right?
• 34:01
  So they cannot just sit back. They can use their own fuel or
• 34:04
  develop a fossil based economy. They've got a lot of coal, yes,
• 34:08
  but when it comes to transport particularly, they're very
• 34:12
  vulnerable. They're importing all of that
• 34:14
  oil. So of course they're going to
• 34:15
  push into everything that they can that makes it more secure,
• 34:19
  more domestic, build out the supply chains.
• 34:22
  So yeah, I think of course they'll do that.
• 34:25
  The other thing that's driving them is Chinggua University has
• 34:28
  100,000 people on that campus and they produce so many
• 34:33
  engineers and so many people are working really, really hard.
• 34:37
  Like the level of dedication to furthering yourself through
• 34:41
  education is incredible. Those people all got to find
• 34:44
  jobs in the economy. And the real kind of worry is
• 34:48
  that, you know, we're going to have unemployment or unrest or
• 34:50
  people working all their lives to get their kids into the best
• 34:53
  university to do really well and then no job.
• 34:56
  So, so they build out industries as an extension of that drive
• 35:00
  towards education and research and furthering things.
• 35:03
  It's, it's a completely made, there's lots of problems with
• 35:06
  it, but it's thought through, right?
• 35:07
  It's got it. They're playing chess, right?
• 35:10
  And I think unfortunately, if the US is playing chess, it's
• 35:13
  playing it like a gorilla would play chess, right?
• 35:15
  Just throwing the pieces everywhere, changing its mind,
• 35:18
  you know, just storming out the room.
• 35:20
  It's not. It's not.
• 35:21
  Doesn't have that long term measured, thought out, argued
• 35:26
  through and then implemented feel to it, does it?
• 35:28
  Yeah, I mean, here on saving the world from bad ideas, we're
• 35:31
  quite pro democracy and we've had quite a few guests talking
• 35:36
  about democratic backsliding and and the rise of authoritarianism
• 35:39
  and and obviously all of the problems there.
• 35:41
  And China is a pretty authoritarian country.
• 35:45
  It's even exporting authoritarian tech as well
• 35:47
  around the world, as well as nice things like solar and
• 35:49
  batteries. What kind of impression did you
• 35:51
  get of that? I mean, it's, it's one thing we
• 35:53
  we kind of it because they can take this very long term as
• 35:55
  view. That's because I've got like a
• 35:57
  single dictator at the top who whose ideas, you know, can just
• 36:01
  then be implemented throughout the rest of the Communist Party
• 36:03
  structure for the next decade or something.
• 36:05
  I mean, you're not, I'm sure you're not suggesting that's a
• 36:07
  superior way to organize affairs.
• 36:09
  But like, you know, having just been there, I haven't been to
• 36:11
  China for almost a decade. Like how?
• 36:14
  How does that feel? Well, I mean, it comes, you
• 36:16
  know, you see it, you know, if you want to get access to
• 36:18
  everything, you're used to being able to get access.
• 36:20
  You need a VPN, right? There are things that you
• 36:22
  cannot. Be on the Internet, you mean?
• 36:24
  Yeah. Yeah, exactly right.
• 36:26
  So the information environment is controlled and it is very
• 36:30
  paternalistic in that sense. And it's you'd think there'd be
• 36:34
  a lot of frustration. Maybe you'd talk to young
• 36:35
  people, They would chat to some of the students there.
• 36:38
  Do they feel hemmed in? Do they feel, you know, like
• 36:40
  angry that they can't get access to?
• 36:42
  And actually, quite often, while you'll hear, and of course this
• 36:44
  is parroting what they want you to, to say is, well, I don't
• 36:48
  want full freedom because it might, you know, I don't need to
• 36:51
  see everything. Something's harmful or I don't
• 36:53
  want to be, you know, I, I quite like the fact that I'm not being
• 36:58
  made to feel miserable or, you know, that because they pick up,
• 37:00
  of course, they get the, the, the, they have a window onto the
• 37:04
  West. They can see what's happening
• 37:05
  here too. And our version of freedom can
• 37:09
  look pretty dystopian at times. So it's a really big
• 37:13
  philosophical discussion, isn't it?
• 37:15
  Because absolute freedom doesn't work, right?
• 37:17
  Just doesn't. As Naomi Oreske's famously said,
• 37:21
  freedom for the wolf is slaughter for the lamb, right?
• 37:23
  So, so whose freedom are you protecting?
• 37:26
  In the US, we protect corporate freedoms more than any one thing
• 37:29
  else, right? Corporate ability to do
• 37:31
  corporates want is, is lionize. And that means that they survey
• 37:35
  the country's habits. They're watching what you're
• 37:38
  doing. They're but marketing to you
• 37:40
  that, you know, lots of stuff in the pursuit of shareholder
• 37:43
  value. China's doing all of those
• 37:46
  things and more in the pursuit of stability.
• 37:49
  That's what they would argue that they we create a society,
• 37:53
  they're stable. You can't really say that there
• 37:56
  aren't downsides to both, right? And.
• 37:58
  And what would be fun is if Europe could be a really good
• 38:01
  mixture of the two. I don't know that we've got the
• 38:05
  cohesion or harmony in Europe to do that.
• 38:08
  But yeah, neither is perfect by any stretch.
• 38:11
  And I don't know enough about the data.
• 38:15
  You can get a feel while you're there.
• 38:16
  It feels very dynamic. It feels well run.
• 38:20
  But you know, I've been in the big cities, actually did get
• 38:22
  out. I did get out into the
• 38:23
  countryside Great Wall and saw drove through the kind of more
• 38:26
  rural areas. But it's an impression, right?
• 38:29
  And so I don't really know. I'd love to dig into.
• 38:32
  Do you know the data by how would you find it?
• 38:34
  That's the question, right? Yeah.
• 38:36
  And of course, I'm asking you to sum up a country of 1.8 billion
• 38:39
  people in just 20 seconds, if that's all right and.
• 38:44
  Yeah. I mean, did you, did you get the
• 38:47
  sense that this is a project of climate change there sort of big
• 38:50
  clean energy build out? Or is it to do with air
• 38:52
  pollution? Or is this to do with just
• 38:54
  dominating the, you know, the, the, the economy going forward
• 38:57
  globally with exports and so on? Like what?
• 38:58
  What? What's the big?
• 39:00
  Why are they doing it? It's just energy security.
• 39:03
  It's, it's recognising energy as an input to the entire economy
• 39:06
  and that energy's a function of growth and development.
• 39:09
  And if you don't have it or it's too expensive or it's, you know,
• 39:12
  then you will, you can't do what you want to do.
• 39:15
  I mean, they more than anyone have had to work out like when
• 39:18
  they do, we're going to do EVs at scale now, you know, do it
• 39:22
  here. They have to, the access to
• 39:24
  energy is a massive part of that equation.
• 39:27
  So so yeah, it's it's about that.
• 39:29
  It's about being able to maintain prosperity, maintain
• 39:32
  independence, maintain affordability.
• 39:34
  Climate is in there. I mean, then they're, you know,
• 39:37
  very pro science, right? So they're not skeptics in any
• 39:40
  way on climate. And so, yeah, that definitely
• 39:43
  features air quality was a big driver, right, for the cities.
• 39:46
  But they they cracked that one by just moving the power
• 39:48
  stations further away and putting in HVDC cabling, which
• 39:51
  is actually also an amazing innovation that they did better
• 39:54
  than anyone else. So it's a combination of those
• 39:57
  factors. But the big one is not having
• 39:59
  any oil and gas. If you don't have access to your
• 40:02
  own oil and gas, you don't want to be.
• 40:03
  They don't like to be reliant on other people.
• 40:06
  And so self-sufficiency is the driver.
• 40:09
  And then maybe accidentally then they've made solar so
• 40:12
  unbelievably cheap with them currently, there's a lot of
• 40:14
  overcapacity in China that they're, it's just being,
• 40:16
  they're just dumping it on, on, you know, Pakistan famously, and
• 40:20
  other countries in the global S who, which are now building out
• 40:22
  solar. And, you know, it's a huge rate
• 40:24
  actually. And they kind of from the bottom
• 40:25
  up. This isn't like grid stuff being
• 40:27
  done by utility grids. This is householders literally
• 40:30
  just plugging in, right, which is an incredible, incredible
• 40:33
  shift and and is driven by, I don't know, accidental export
• 40:37
  imperatives from China, it seems.
• 40:39
  Yeah, Well, I mean, the the story is, you know, well, well
• 40:42
  told starts I think in the US with NASA, right.
• 40:46
  And then Germany goes, right, we're going to do solar and
• 40:48
  famously starts to manufacture it at scale, brings the cost
• 40:52
  down. And then China goes, oh, that's
• 40:53
  good. We we've got a lot of sunshine,
• 40:55
  we'll do that too. And then we can manufacture
• 40:56
  great, let's do it. And here we are now with this
• 40:59
  massive, massive, I mean, there's going to be quite a lot
• 41:02
  of oversupply in that market for sure.
• 41:04
  And there is, and people are predicting a slowdown.
• 41:07
  They're predicting a kind of falling away of demand from
• 41:10
  within the Chinese market. So what they do, they move out
• 41:13
  into export. And they're also got great
• 41:16
  relationships with lots of different countries.
• 41:17
  So I mean, great relations. That's the euphemism for kind of
• 41:22
  there's quite a lot of interdependency.
• 41:23
  And even though Nepal's a great example where suddenly everyone
• 41:27
  in Nepal's driving electric vehicles.
• 41:30
  Why is that? Because China just went, here
• 41:32
  you go, you're going to buy these now.
• 41:33
  And that is what they'll do. They'll they'll find out.
• 41:37
  And they already are they Southeast Asia, the uptake of
• 41:40
  solar and EVs is rapidly rising, right?
• 41:43
  And batteries combined. So the whole deal.
• 41:45
  And if you think about it, if someone turns up and says to
• 41:48
  you, hey, we get this is going to be a bit of upfront capital
• 41:50
  costs here, but hey, we can probably lend you the money.
• 41:53
  Once you've installed it, that's it.
• 41:54
  You just run it, right? You've got your solar on your
• 41:56
  batteries that is going to run your infrastructure.
• 41:58
  Someone else turns up and says, oh, I've got this really great
• 42:01
  fuel. You have to install lots of
• 42:02
  infrastructure to absorb it and to burn, burn it.
• 42:05
  And then once you've done that, you have to keep buying it from
• 42:07
  me continually forever, because as soon as you've burnt it, it's
• 42:10
  gone. That's such an unattractive
• 42:13
  proposition compared to the Electrotech proposition.
• 42:15
  And of course, it's course it's winning.
• 42:18
  Well, and in, in places like Africa, most obviously, I mean,
• 42:21
  particularly where there's no access to electricity at all,
• 42:24
  few solar panels and a battery and suddenly you've got a, you
• 42:26
  know, a small grid and they can get connected.
• 42:28
  And, you know, it's probably the quickest way to to get people
• 42:33
  to, you know, connected to electricity, at least at the
• 42:35
  outset, right. And the fact that China's got
• 42:37
  all these exports at such low costs is, is going to be a
• 42:40
  complete game changer for Africa, I think.
• 42:42
  But to go back to our, our favorite topic is the role for
• 42:46
  nuclear in, in Africa and, and in, you know, the poorer
• 42:50
  countries as they sort of industrialize and, and get more
• 42:53
  electricity for their, for their populations.
• 42:55
  It's a good question, isn't it? I mean, I think the place it
• 42:58
  lives starts and it and it will it'll win on veil in is, is the
• 43:03
  big is the really big countries who've got big enough markets to
• 43:06
  justify the regulation, the infrastructure, the fuel supply
• 43:11
  chains, the manufacturing, all of that.
• 43:13
  And that's, that's, that's going to be US China.
• 43:16
  I mean, we haven't talked about Russia, but Russia has always
• 43:18
  maintained its nuclear capabilities nucleus domestic
• 43:21
  commercial nuclear capabilities and they've been selling
• 43:24
  reactors. Rose Adam is the one that you
• 43:26
  know, goes out selling its wares to a lot of people.
• 43:28
  India famously signed a contract with 10 nuclear reactors prior
• 43:31
  to the troubles in Ukraine and the invasion, illegal invasion
• 43:35
  in Ukraine. So yes, so those are the, it's
• 43:38
  the big blocks that will do it now.
• 43:40
  Well to that then means there's an affordable reactor and A and
• 43:45
  a regulatory environment that can sustain it in countries
• 43:47
  which are, you know, earlier in their development curve.
• 43:50
  I don't know, it'll be an interesting thing to watch.
• 43:52
  I mean, certainly the Middle East is embracing nuclear and
• 43:55
  that's adjacent. Perhaps you don't need it if
• 43:57
  you've got transmission and you've got lots of distributed
• 44:00
  renewables. I think maybe I'm definitely not
• 44:02
  a nuclear everywhere person. I really don't want to be
• 44:04
  characterized as that I strategically think has a role
• 44:08
  to play. And I'm particularly interested
• 44:09
  in China. If Africa goes down that path,
• 44:13
  it'll only do so if it's cheap. And that's so that's the test,
• 44:15
  right? In 15 years time, will you be
• 44:17
  able to dial up and get a cheap nuclear reactor?
• 44:21
  I don't know, 30 years time maybe?
• 44:24
  It'll be too cheap to meter I. Don't know about that.
• 44:28
  I mean, interestingly, solar is getting too cheap to meter in
• 44:32
  the sense that it's now negatively pricing and there's a
• 44:35
  point at which saturation gets reached unless you're, you know,
• 44:40
  then you're then you're waiting for all these transmission lines
• 44:42
  to go in. Or, or if you bring, if you have
• 44:45
  enough batteries and you don't need transmission either because
• 44:47
  you can only you'll need to transmit then not when you're
• 44:50
  generating, but when, when there's the demand and you can
• 44:52
  do arbitrage and you know, sell, sell at high prices and load up
• 44:56
  your batteries at lower prices. And you know, I could even do
• 44:58
  that at the household level. You know, I've got a solar array
• 45:01
  here and even in the UK if I had, you know, if the batteries
• 45:04
  came down in costs efficiently for me to charge them up at
• 45:06
  night and then, you know, dump it back into the grid during the
• 45:09
  day. You know, and particularly if
• 45:10
  the whole thing is run by AI or something, you wouldn't want to
• 45:12
  do this by hand. And enough people are doing it.
• 45:14
  That's going to change the whole dynamics of how utilities and
• 45:18
  grids and everything operate. And I don't think, I mean, I
• 45:20
  sure as hell don't have a sense of how that's going to play out.
• 45:22
  I mean, I don't know if do you feel you do?
• 45:24
  No, not at all. And that's the interesting bit
• 45:26
  rate that there's this all this dynamic end of wire change
• 45:30
  happening where people are just going, oh, hang on a SEC, I've
• 45:33
  got sun and I've got a garage, I've got a battery in there and
• 45:36
  I've got my EV like a kind of detaching themselves from the
• 45:39
  old utility model. And for a period that was a
• 45:42
  problem because all that was happening was you're seeing
• 45:44
  demand distraction on the on the grid, like it just was showing
• 45:48
  up as negative demand. They were just disappearing.
• 45:50
  And then suddenly the cost base, you're having to spread the same
• 45:54
  fixed costs over smaller or smaller numbers of customers.
• 45:57
  So then prices start to rise and everyone's start.
• 45:59
  You know, it's sort of been happening, I think in an
• 46:02
  unplanned way, certainly. And now we've got people hanging
• 46:05
  solar panels of balconies in Germany wherever, you know, like
• 46:08
  Australia, suddenly rapidly, everyone's got a solar panel on
• 46:11
  every roof. And that really challenges the
• 46:14
  existing utility model. But what's changed there?
• 46:17
  And I think this isn't, you know, part of why I think the
• 46:20
  nuclear comes back is that demand is starting to rise
• 46:23
  again. So whereas demand was just being
• 46:25
  distracted, being destroyed or holdings holding steady, we're
• 46:29
  seeing demand rise because of the increase in use of it, of IT
• 46:33
  and data centres and and AI. And that is causing again about
• 46:38
  bigger projects, more investment into conventional generation,
• 46:42
  which was kind of frozen for the longest time.
• 46:45
  And of course, famously, you can get hold of solar panels and
• 46:48
  batteries faster than you can a gas turbine.
• 46:50
  At the moment, there's a big waiting list for gas turbines,
• 46:53
  so it looks like that's going to be a boost for renewables in the
• 46:57
  short term. But it also means that when you
• 46:59
  pitch your modular reactor to an utility, then you've got a
• 47:03
  strong case for it because the demand growth is back.
• 47:07
  I do want to talk about AI and data centres.
• 47:09
  I mean, Nucleus beginning to sound a bit like a niche
• 47:11
  product, though. It's like 15 to 30 years away.
• 47:14
  It's good for these, you know, heat things, powering cities.
• 47:18
  With these heat things, that is about 1/3 of primary energy so
• 47:21
  you know you can't just dismiss. It is.
• 47:23
  It is CHP 1/3 of primary. Energy.
• 47:25
  No, I mean heat is a heat is a, it is a big part.
• 47:29
  I don't know exact data. It's I can check for you, but
• 47:32
  you can't dismiss it because it's driving industry and
• 47:34
  manufacturing as well as heating buildings great.
• 47:37
  So it's it's a big portion. All right, all right.
• 47:39
  But is, is one of these niche applications, AI and data
• 47:42
  centres, because I know there's been some deals signed, haven't
• 47:45
  there with some of the big, big companies and some of the newer
• 47:48
  SMR companies. I mean, are these just like
• 47:50
  paper MO us or is some of it actually commercially relevant?
• 47:54
  Yeah. I mean, Google's been doing
• 47:55
  quite a lot of this, right? Trying to pull forward the
• 47:57
  supply curve with them, underwriting it with PPA, the
• 48:01
  power purchase agreements. And I mean, you know, I think
• 48:04
  that's a very good, it's a good thing, right?
• 48:06
  It's a, it's a, it's a way of getting over in the West.
• 48:09
  This problem you have between, oh, I've got my demo, but I
• 48:12
  can't get it out of the valley of death and commerciality.
• 48:15
  And so my first of a kind got to go to end of a kind.
• 48:17
  And how do I do that? And so Google and others, big,
• 48:20
  big buyers have been trying to solve for that.
• 48:22
  And yeah, their, their, their contract with Kairos is the one
• 48:27
  that the most, perhaps most relevant to the nuclear debate.
• 48:29
  And I mean, they did their homework.
• 48:31
  That's, it's, it's got a very, very talented team.
• 48:35
  It's, as I say, started. They've already broken ground on
• 48:37
  their test reactor. But also Google will be around
• 48:40
  the world trying to build things now, right?
• 48:42
  Not waiting for the five to 10 years it takes Kairos to get
• 48:45
  their reactors on the ground. And now they're probably doing
• 48:47
  geothermal and they may well then they'll be certainly doing
• 48:50
  batteries, certainly be trying to do wind and solar wire.
• 48:53
  It makes sense. And they'll probably be building
• 48:55
  gas as well, right. And that is the thing that is
• 48:58
  going to happen in the near term is we'll probably see a lot more
• 49:01
  gas burnt as well as everything else.
• 49:05
  Well, you mentioned geothermal a couple of times and that's
• 49:06
  another heat thing. So I'd like to put it, is that
• 49:09
  going to be something which is very geographically restricted
• 49:13
  and like tectonically hot zones or is it becoming something
• 49:16
  which can be deployed more or less anywhere now?
• 49:18
  In theory, you can deploy anywhere, you know, within The
• 49:22
  thing is that we can drill deeper and we can fracture the
• 49:26
  rocks and create heat stores in ways that we couldn't previously
• 49:29
  thanks to the, you know, unconventional shale gas
• 49:32
  developments. And so those drilling
• 49:35
  technologies are now coming across to geothermal and it is
• 49:37
  changing the game. So you can you can where you
• 49:40
  need to rather than wait where there's a happens to be a
• 49:43
  geological feature of of like wet rock heat, you can go to dry
• 49:47
  rock and you can start to draw. And I think probably I did, we
• 49:51
  did an episode of a Jamie Beard who works for this sort of
• 49:54
  geothermal house promotion of geothermal.
• 49:57
  And I and talking to her, she's got a really, really compelling
• 50:00
  story about how oil and gas service companies.
• 50:04
  So the Halliburtons and all the guys who, because the big named
• 50:09
  oil companies don't do their own actual infrastructure, they'll
• 50:12
  contract in and those contractors are now realizing
• 50:15
  they've got another, another potential buyer of their
• 50:17
  services and that's the geothermal.
• 50:19
  So that switch is happening. And I think although you could
• 50:22
  do it anywhere, I suspect where it will come first is places
• 50:26
  like America where you've got a lot of land, not many people,
• 50:29
  and a fairly light touch environmental regulatory
• 50:31
  environment, plus all of these people who've got these specific
• 50:35
  bits of kit and specific skills you can switch across.
• 50:38
  So I think geothermal could be quite significant.
• 50:41
  But yeah, it'll be, there'll be this interesting confluence of
• 50:44
  an existing workforce and an existing set of infrastructure
• 50:47
  that can be pivoted. Yeah, which isn't everywhere.
• 50:50
  What about nuclear fusion? I mean, I've, I've been a
• 50:53
  sceptic on this, but I keep reading headlines about new
• 50:55
  breakthroughs and I don't follow it closely enough really to be
• 50:58
  that informed. I mean, is, is it, is it a
• 51:01
  serious challenge of fishing in maybe 30 years?
• 51:04
  I don't know. I mean, I, yeah, occasionally,
• 51:06
  you know, you have every conference you go to, you'll
• 51:08
  meet a fusion person. Now I think it's a long way off
• 51:12
  and I don't, I think there are some fundamentals that make it
• 51:16
  incredibly, incredibly difficult, right.
• 51:19
  And and it, they, they sort of trade themselves as the clean
• 51:23
  squiggy, clean version, nuclear. But the truth is that, you know,
• 51:26
  if you're, if you're creating these fusion events, it creates
• 51:31
  radiation like there, there is a, there's an element of it
• 51:34
  which is just very hard to handle and contain.
• 51:37
  And I, I think in, I mean, you know, I don't want to say we're
• 51:41
  not going to do it. Maybe we will.
• 51:43
  I think it's being oversold somewhat right now.
• 51:46
  I think the problems are very, very challenging and let's see
• 51:51
  it, you know, and you've got different versions.
• 51:53
  I mean, you've got the sort of slightly small, some people
• 51:55
  saying, you know, we can get it down to a very small scale.
• 51:57
  And there's the top of Mac massively huge experiments going
• 52:01
  on. I mean, I'm all in favour of
• 52:04
  keeping the experiments going and I wouldn't want us to stop
• 52:07
  trying, but I, I'm not don't see it riding over the horizon to
• 52:10
  save us it. The time scales are just don't
• 52:12
  match up and the challenges are just too fundamental still I
• 52:17
  think. And the thing that bugs me about
• 52:19
  the argument for fusion is that the the reasons they they give
• 52:22
  for doing it are actually, well, the improvements they say are
• 52:25
  efficient actually are kind of imaginary anyway.
• 52:27
  I mean, it's it's like, oh, it doesn't produce waste.
• 52:30
  Well, I don't care about. Waste.
• 52:31
  No it does. It's pretty non.
• 52:32
  Issue and so well Even so nuclear waste and fission is
• 52:35
  like is not the issue that. It's Oh, exactly and even.
• 52:37
  So yes, there's two points. So what?
• 52:38
  Problem are you trying to solve even.
• 52:39
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, we haven't talked
• 52:42
  about in fact, which has been refreshing your skepticism of
• 52:45
  nuclear stems from speed and affordability rate and that is
• 52:50
  where the nuclear sort of skepticism is now retreated to.
• 52:54
  I get less and less people saying what about the waste or
• 52:57
  what about the accidents? And, you know, just that
• 53:00
  thankfully, I think we've got through.
• 53:03
  Hopefully people are real realizing that those were never
• 53:06
  really issues and we can make them feel like bigger issues
• 53:08
  than they really are. But what?
• 53:09
  To what end? Really.
• 53:11
  Yeah. Yeah, and I, I wrote a report
• 53:13
  for We Planet called Water Waste and I did some of the numbers
• 53:16
  for if you recycle spent fuel, how long can you right basically
• 53:20
  run the entire countries for centuries, even even, you know,
• 53:23
  the UK, US, everywhere that's, that's stored up quite a lot of
• 53:27
  spent fuel if you were to recycle it into a new generation
• 53:29
  of, of fast reactors. And interestingly, some of the
• 53:32
  SMR companies are now talking about this and they're talking
• 53:35
  about waste recycling as one of the products that they'll offer,
• 53:38
  which I think actually is really exciting because you've got the
• 53:40
  spent fuel from, you know, first couple of generations of, of, of
• 53:43
  pressurized water reactors hanging around.
• 53:46
  And either it goes into a big hole on the ground like the one
• 53:48
  they're digging in Finland, or you recycle it, which to me is,
• 53:51
  is a much greener, a much greener option.
• 53:54
  I don't know. Have you been following this?
• 53:56
  I saw a media report about the US, some of the companies
• 54:00
  looking at recycling waste. Do you think this is a big deal
• 54:03
  or not? I mean, to the extent that
• 54:04
  everyone was kind of woken up to the fact that some of our, you
• 54:08
  know, nuclear supply chain was not immune to the, you know, the
• 54:11
  problems that we experienced in the Ukrainian invasion rate.
• 54:15
  Russia is a fabricator of fuels. So there was a definite sudden
• 54:19
  focus on, hang on a minute, how, how, how can we diversify our
• 54:22
  nuclear fuel supply chains? And, and obviously where you've
• 54:26
  got stores of plutonium sitting there, that is a source to go
• 54:29
  look at. Again, I think I'm right in
• 54:32
  saying that the, the worries about the uranium supply chain
• 54:34
  have lessened. I mean, famously places like
• 54:36
  Australia are big, big sources of uranium and there are other
• 54:39
  places that that mine it too. So it's not, you know, that
• 54:42
  imperative of Oh my goodness, what if we get a squeeze on
• 54:45
  uranium is lessened, But there's still, yes.
• 54:49
  Your point is that you've got this stuff lying around.
• 54:51
  If you can reuse it, wouldn't that be a good thing?
• 54:53
  I think the cost of doing it versus just the natural, you
• 54:57
  know, enrichment of of uranium coming out of the ground doesn't
• 55:01
  stack up right now. But who knows, You know, going
• 55:03
  forward there is a but then maybe we'll do thorium, right?
• 55:07
  Because once you've got a lot of fissile material and plutonium
• 55:11
  is the perfect precursor for breeding thorium to make it
• 55:15
  fissile. It's fertile when it's in the
• 55:17
  ground, but it needs to be kicked started.
• 55:21
  I don't know as the honest answer, and I'm not enough of a
• 55:24
  chemist or an engineer to know how hard it is to process these
• 55:27
  fuels once they've been sitting there for a while.
• 55:29
  I suspect they're decaying into all kinds of bits of the table
• 55:33
  of elements. So it, you know, it is, it is a
• 55:35
  resource that's it's always, it's always treated as if it's a
• 55:38
  waste. But it's, it's contains this a
• 55:41
  huge amount of potential energy because the fuels, you're only
• 55:44
  allotting them, you're only using 2% of the fuel right
• 55:47
  before you have to take it out and store it.
• 55:50
  So yeah, still a lot of energy there.
• 55:53
  Yeah, and, and in plutonium in particular, I mean, I know
• 55:55
  everyone's terrified of plutonium, but actually it's a
• 55:57
  really great fuel. And actually the only, the only
• 56:01
  people who agree with us on this is the Trump administration.
• 56:06
  Yeah, very strange bedfellow situation.
• 56:08
  Which reminds me, I mean, the the the way they want to make
• 56:11
  nuclear cheap is to tear up all of the safety regulations and
• 56:14
  basically, you know, kind of, I wouldn't say destroy the Nuclear
• 56:19
  Regulatory Committee, the NRC, but at least defang it in terms
• 56:22
  of its ability to hold things up.
• 56:24
  What's your reading of that? I mean is that is that move in
• 56:27
  the right direction or are they, are they endangering the safety
• 56:29
  of the public? The safety of the public was was
• 56:32
  gold plated to such a degree that yes, it became impossible
• 56:36
  to do anything right. And when you think about our
• 56:39
  perceptions of risk that industrial accidents, nuclear
• 56:43
  got singled out and treated in such an extraordinary way that
• 56:47
  yes, in a way, the green movement got got to a point
• 56:50
  where it had convinced everybody that they need to regulate this
• 56:53
  to to a point where it's even safer inside a nuclear reactor
• 56:56
  than it is on public beaches in Turkey because the background
• 56:59
  radiation emitted from the planet is higher than the
• 57:03
  standards that they're required to meet.
• 57:05
  And then you've got the decommissioning requirements,
• 57:07
  which require it to go back to Greenfield.
• 57:10
  So, you know, back to as it was before even industrialization
• 57:13
  happened. When in reality, if you just
• 57:16
  leave a nuclear reactor alone for a while, take the fuel rods
• 57:18
  out, make it safe, leave it around, leave it around for a
• 57:21
  while, the longer you leave it, the easier it is to clean it up,
• 57:23
  right? So forcing us into these
• 57:26
  expensive overreactions to this radiophobia really, because
• 57:31
  people don't really understand radiation and it's a complex
• 57:35
  subject and energy ministers don't spend enough time thinking
• 57:38
  about it that we allow this kind of huge and regulatory burden to
• 57:43
  to be put onto the industry. I'm not saying be unmindful
• 57:47
  about safety, but we've, we've become so wedded to this, we,
• 57:51
  there's this theory, I'm sure you've covered it in other, in
• 57:54
  other podcasts about the, the exposure to radiation.
• 57:57
  Is it a threshold event or is it a linear exposure to risk?
• 58:01
  Like the meaning that does the risk just stay there forever
• 58:04
  until it tracks to 0? Or is there a threshold under
• 58:07
  which it can be deemed to be safe because it's within natural
• 58:10
  variability boundaries? And we don't regulate on a
• 58:14
  threshold basis. We regulate right down to 0.
• 58:17
  And that's what causes a bit of a crazy overreaction to
• 58:21
  radiation, which is, let's face it, hitting us from all angles.
• 58:24
  Comes out the rocks, comes out from your partner who sleeps
• 58:27
  next to you at night, and it comes from the sun.
• 58:30
  This radiation is everywhere. We evolved radiation and it's
• 58:34
  just the the sort of degree of power is not really warranted.
• 58:38
  Listen, we should, we should probably wind up there, but I'm
• 58:41
  trying to think, have you, have you convinced me that that we
• 58:44
  still need nuclear or we don't need nuclear anymore is a bad
• 58:47
  idea? I think for the moment, but I
• 58:49
  think we might have to, we might have to come back to this.
• 58:51
  And this is, you know, it's the situation that's just changing
• 58:53
  so rapidly all the time. I kind of, well, I'd say I keep
• 58:56
  changing my mind, but I think keeping an open mind is probably
• 58:59
  the right way forward. Would you really agree on that?
• 59:02
  Oh, no, no, totally. Yeah.
• 59:03
  I mean, I'm a bit like, you know, I like, I like to change
• 59:07
  my mind with evidence. And if it's shown to me that
• 59:10
  there's absolutely no role for in China is going to get off its
• 59:12
  thousand gigawatts of coal to provide 60% of which is
• 59:16
  providing heat that without, without it, then I'll be the
• 59:19
  first to celebrate. But they're building it, they're
• 59:22
  experimenting with it. It will speed up their
• 59:23
  transition. I suppose I'd like to sort of
• 59:26
  convey a sense of excitement about it because that is what
• 59:29
  got me. So yes, Thorium was the gateway
• 59:31
  drag. But then once I really
• 59:32
  understood just the inherent efficiency of this process, the
• 59:36
  kind of the land sparing nature of it, right?
• 59:39
  That these are these are very, very dense sites which produce a
• 59:43
  huge amount of power. And that that gives us more
• 59:46
  space in the in the world to do other things with the land that
• 59:48
  you would otherwise be carpeting with energy or digging fossils
• 59:52
  out of the ground perennially. I think it's got a very, very
• 59:55
  low environmental impact. And that's exciting.
• 59:58
  And it allows us to do things that like space exploration that
• 1:00:01
  we just can't do with anything else.
• 1:00:02
  So that's why I come back to it as just.
• 1:00:06
  It's part of human, it's part of our story of human development
• 1:00:09
  has been a part, is still a part and will be a part.
• 1:00:11
  And I think gives us kind of a hope.
• 1:00:14
  It gives me hope. And I I'm a very pro humanity
• 1:00:18
  environmentalist. So that's why it's in my basket
• 1:00:21
  of things I really get excited about.
• 1:00:23
  Well, Amen to that. And actually, I agree with you
• 1:00:25
  that nucleus the most environmentally friendly of all
• 1:00:28
  of the energy sources. But whether it's the cheapest is
• 1:00:31
  remains remains to be seen. This this is our season finale,
• 1:00:35
  I think. So I think we should from
• 1:00:38
  producer Rob, who's wearing his Santa Claus beard without you
• 1:00:43
  shouldn't dress up in red, at least producer Rob.
• 1:00:45
  But anyway, I think from, from all of us, it's happy Christmas.
• 1:00:48
  So from me, from Baroness Worthington, Happy Christmas.
• 1:00:53
  Yeah. Yeah, happy Christmas, looking
• 1:00:55
  forward to 2026. And yeah, let's revisit it again
• 1:00:59
  in a few years time and we'll see see how far we've got.
• 1:01:01
  But yeah, thank you so much for inviting me on and thanks for
• 1:01:04
  producing the podcast, Rob. Good to see you.
• 1:01:06
  Thanks Bernie and we'll see everyone in 2026.
• 1:01:10
  Goodbye. Thanks so much for listening to
• 1:01:15
  Saving the World from Bad Ideas, a Weplanet podcast.
• 1:01:18
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• 1:01:21
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