TITANS OF NUCLEAR

Bret Kugelmass [00:00:59] Okay, so we're here today on Titans of Nuclear with Tammy Ma, who is the Lead of the Inertial Fusion Energy Initiative at Lawrence Livermore National Labs. It's so great to have you on. Thank you so much for joining us, Tammy.

Tammy Ma [00:01:10] Thank you so much, Bret. It's an honor and a pleasure.

Bret Kugelmass [00:01:13] Yeah, well obviously, some great news has come from your facility over these last few weeks and I'd love to get into that. But before we do, we'd love to learn about you as a person. So start off by telling us, where did you grow up?

Tammy Ma [00:01:26] Oh, I actually grew up here in the Bay Area in northern California, in Fremont actually, which is just over the hill from the lab. It's about 20 miles away. So in high school, I actually got to participate in some of the lab's outreach events. They used to do something called... We actually still do something called Science on Saturday, where scientists give public lectures about their work. And I do remember hearing a talk about the National Ignition Facility and huge lasers and fusion. And at the time, I didn't understand a whole lot, but I got inspired by the idea of doing like big science, working on big teams, and knew I wanted to come back to the lab, come work at the lab someday. And so I've been very lucky that that's the way it's worked out. My family's still here in the Bay Area, so I get to live close by to them.

Bret Kugelmass [00:02:20] Who are some of the early influences in your life that got you excited about science and engineering and technology?

Tammy Ma [00:02:25] Oh, absolutely my parents. My dad was an electrical engineer. My mom was not a scientist. But they just would get so excited about science breakthroughs and take us to science museums. They loved science and so that actually trickled down. Both my brother and I are now physicists, actually.

Bret Kugelmass [00:02:45] Oh, that's so cool. That's something I always like to hone in on because like for some people it's kind of unfortunate. Like, if you don't have an engineer in the family, sometimes you don't even know what engineering is. And I think we definitely have to increase people's exposure. I mean, I think they've done a good job getting STEM more on the agenda in general, but it often is that some of the best engineers had family members who were engineers that coached and guided and pushed them from a very early age.

Tammy Ma [00:03:10] Yeah, I mean, I completely agree. I had no idea what research meant. You know, it was a combination things, parents, but also like I had some really great science teachers in middle school and high school, and that makes all the difference too.

Bret Kugelmass [00:03:27] Did you do competitions like Science Olympiads and stuff like that?

Tammy Ma [00:03:28] I did not. I did not. It wasn't big at my school at the time.

Bret Kugelmass [00:03:35] Now your school, Freemont, that's where the big automotive manufacturing facility was, right? Did that trickle into the school system and stuff?

Tammy Ma [00:03:41] Yeah, so actually my dad worked at the Toyota plant, which has now turned into that Tesla plant. I think it's not just that factory, it's just being in Silicon Valley also. There's a lot of educated people, there's always a lot of new breakthroughs and excitement around tech and science, and I think that seeped into my bones personally.

Bret Kugelmass [00:04:04] Sure, sure. Okay, great. And then so, walk us through your academic experience a little bit more as well. Where'd you go to school, grad school, all that stuff?

Tammy Ma [00:04:12] Sure. I did my undergraduate at Caltech, the California Institute of Technology.

Bret Kugelmass [00:04:17] Quite a school.

Tammy Ma [00:04:18] It was hard. I have to say I cried a lot. But I picked to go there because I wanted to be an aerospace engineer. And Caltech happens to run and operate the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is the national laboratory in charge of all non-manned missions. And so for me, that was just like a dream, right? And so I did major in aerospace and then decided to go to graduate school and I thought I was going to do work in plasma thrusters because I had done a little bit of summer research as an undergrad. I was looking around for advisors, ended up going into plasma physics. And with plasma physics, there's all different applications of plasma physics in different regimes, and I ended up going into fusion. And so I did my graduate school at UC San Diego. So you can see there's a pattern. I've stayed in California pretty much my entire life.

Bret Kugelmass [00:05:20] And did they have experimental facilities there or is it more theoretical at this point in your experience?

Tammy Ma [00:05:26] Well, so we at San Diego did not have big lasers. There were smaller labs, of course, but not big lasers.

Bret Kugelmass [00:05:37] So still experimental and not theoretical physics.

Tammy Ma [00:05:38] Experimental stuff. But what I ended up doing was actually traveling around during my graduate years to different laser facilities, including here at Livermore, to do experiments.

Bret Kugelmass [00:05:46] How did that happen? Did the school sponsor that? Was it a specific program, or did you just make it happen on your own?

Tammy Ma [00:05:51] It's, you know, the professor gets his funding grants from NSF or Department of Energy or whatever, and that pays for the execution of these experiments. And you can have money to actually send students to travel around to do that work.

Bret Kugelmass [00:06:07] And what was your thesis specifically?

Tammy Ma [00:06:10] It was on... I think the title of it was "Transport of Energetic Electrons for Fast Ignition Fusion." What that means is you take a laser, and if you shoot, say a solid, the laser is so intense that it liberates the electrons from the rest of the atom. Basically, you generate... and those electrons get accelerated, get very high energy, and you can use that as a heater for different fusion mechanisms.

Bret Kugelmass [00:06:41] Cool. And when the electrons emit, is it directional or do you just very quickly control the direction with like a magnetic field?

Tammy Ma [00:06:54] Well, no, that's a great question. They're somewhat directional. They also have like a spectrum of energy. So it's not one single energy. So the name of the game is exactly that. How do you control what energy comes out? How do you control where those electrons go? And so work on that is ongoing. It's a very difficult problem.

Bret Kugelmass [00:07:16] Can you help describe, since you probably spent a lot of time thinking about this, can you help me create a a visual understanding or an analogy for what an electron actually is? Protons and neutrons, I got it. I think of like a small circle closely packed together with mass. What is an electron?

Tammy Ma [00:07:38] So an electron is a negatively charged particle.

Bret Kugelmass [00:07:42] And it's a particle? It's actually a particle. Are we sure?

Tammy Ma [00:07:45] Yes. Oh, am I sure? Are we getting theoretical here?

Bret Kugelmass [00:07:49] Because it's just so small, and it doesn't have much mass. I mean, how do we really know?

Tammy Ma [00:07:53] No, no, it's definitely a particle. And so, what's interesting about the electron is, like you said, the protons and neutrons are packed close together, creating the nucleus. The electrons, you know, kind of circle around the nucleus and they contain a ton of energy and they actually form a little more of a cloud rather than having discrete places that they always are. But what's interesting about electrons is they are despertized in their energy in the sense that once you liberate...It takes a very definite amount of energy to pull an electron off, and then you very specifically might emit X-rays or other signatures that that happened. And then each electron in its particular place also has a very specific energy. And so you can do very, very cool physics with that if you can record as you're pulling electrons off or adding electrons back in, what's actually going on in the core of this atom.

Bret Kugelmass [00:09:00] And okay, one more question on electrons for now. This idea of them existing in this cloud, that's more of like a probabilistic interpretation of their position. How do we describe their motion though? Is it an orbit or are they just like randomly appearing in different places at different times?

Tammy Ma [00:09:20] I mean, we still call it an orbit, but it's not... You know, in your high school textbook, we draw these little circles. Rather than a 2D circle, it's actually a 3D sphere that electrons are moving in. And so it's still accurate to call it an orbital. Where that electron actually resides is a function of the coulomb energy, the attraction and repulsion forces that sets exactly kind of where the electron is with respect to the nucleus.

Bret Kugelmass [00:09:59] But it is moving within that orbital? Or it is appearing and being in places within that orbital?

Tammy Ma [00:10:06] It is moving in that orbital.

Bret Kugelmass [00:10:06] It is moving. Okay, okay. So there is motion. Okay, cool. Great. All right. That was just a personal curiosity satisfied. All right. Now, let's continue on to what happened post-grad school.

Tammy Ma [00:10:16] Sure. So I did both my master's and my Ph.D. at UC San Diego. Again, like I said, I was traveling around. I think towards the end, the last two-ish years of my graduate school, I actually moved up here to Livermore to work more closely with the scientists here and the facilities we had on site. And then I graduated in 2010, which was fortuitous because the National Ignition Facility, the world's largest and most energetic laser, was just coming online. We had just completed construction of the facility, we were just starting experiments. We needed experimentalists to develop and do experiments there.

Bret Kugelmass [00:10:59] And what was the purpose? When Congress was first asked for money for the National Ignition Facility, what was the intended purpose of it?

Tammy Ma [00:11:07] Multiple folds, certainly. But the main purpose is what we call science-based stockpile stewardship. This is almost a little bit of a change of topic, so bear with me. What science-based stockpile stewardship means is that, in 1992, we put a moratorium on underground explosive nuclear testing. This is the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and it is something that we, the U.S., and many countries around the world agreed to. We're not going to test anymore. However, we, the U.S., and many other countries still have nuclear arsenals. And what that means is that nuclear weapons that we had previously built are buried under the ground. Okay, cool. So they're there, but we can't explode one every once in a while to see if they still work, so how do we ensure that that stockpile stays safe, secure and effective, you know, if God forbid, we did need to use it? But more importantly, to use it as a deterrent. Their usage as a warning other countries completely disappears if we don't know if they work or not. And so the NIF was constructed to feed into this because with the NIF, we can generate conditions, the very high temperatures, densities, pressures similar to what you have inside nuclear weapons at a very tiny scale. But to be clear, we are not generating, we're not building new nuclear weapons. We are not detonating bombs. We can just study similar physics on the NIF. And that same physics we can then feed into our simulation computer codes and make sure that our codes are accurate against the physics. And those same codes are what we use to ensure that the stockpile is safe and effective.

Bret Kugelmass [00:13:09] So let me try to paraphrase for our audience. In order to not have to do experimental testing, we want to do this analytical testing on a computer. But these computer programs, especially physics simulators, are really quite complex. Like, they are hard even for the best coders and best physicists to compile these computer programs. And so, often we have to benchmark the results against something in reality to fine tune, you know, twist this dial a little bit, change that algorithm a little bit. And so rather than testing them against blowing something up, we're testing them against something that is still in the same realm of physics, but is wholly different. And that's what the NIF facility is.

Tammy Ma [00:13:48] That is exactly right. Thank you, that was a great explanation.

Bret Kugelmass [00:13:53] No, it came from you, I was just trying to learn it.

Tammy Ma [00:13:55] Yeah, that is exactly it. And then the other point is to train up people like me and my colleagues who are the stewards of this physics. You know, how do we make sure that we have those exquisite skills that also tend to be a little bit unique and make sure that we have that continuing. And that also is a deterrence to our adversaries because it's a very visible signal of the expertise that we have in this arena.

Bret Kugelmass [00:14:30] Yeah. To keep smart people, you need to give them toys to play with.

Tammy Ma [00:14:33] Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

Bret Kugelmass [00:14:34] Okay, great. So now, teach me about some of these experiments that happened throughout your career, and what culminated in this momentous occasion?

Tammy Ma [00:14:46] Yeah, absolutely. So the NIF runs 24/7. It is, like I mentioned before, the world's largest, most energetic laser. It is actually 192 separate lasers. Each one alone is one of the most energetic. So you can imagine, when we're combining 192 of them, like you said, Bret, it's a pretty cool toy, right? And the building that it's housed in is the size of three football fields, side by side, ten stories tall. So it's enormous. And the reason the building is so big is we have to house thousands, thousands of optics for each of these lasers. And those optics are what we use to amplify the lasers up in energy. So we are not talking about your typical little laser pointer, we are talking about "ginormous" lasers. What we do then is we take all of this laser energy and we're going to shine it back down on a tiny target. And this target contains our fusion fuel, which for us is deuterium and tritium, these isotopes of hydrogen. And the target sits in a tiny capsule about two millimeters in diameter. And that capsule sits in what we call a hohlraum, it's a little canister, something that is made of something that's high Z, so high up the periodic table.

Bret Kugelmass [00:16:16] High Z, that described like the weight of...

Tammy Ma [00:16:20] High Z, exactly. So gold, for us, or depleted uranium. The idea is when you use these high Z materials, we're going to take the laser energy, shine it on the hohlraum, and then the hohlraum generates X-rays. And so, back to our earlier conversation about electrons, when you use a high Z material, something far up the periodic table, it means there's more electrons. More electrons you can liberate and therefore you get more X-rays.

Bret Kugelmass [00:16:48] But the X-rays are not a particle.

Tammy Ma [00:16:49] The X-rays are not. No, that's right. So the X-rays then kind of fill this little canister and we generate an X-ray oven. So like your oven at home, where the idea there is you're trying to get uniform heating all in a small space so that you cook, for us, we're using X-rays to cook our little capsule. And the capsule, that little shell that I talked about, which is typically plastic or some sort of carbon, it ablates. So it blows off super fast. And it's a rocket-like reaction. So by conservation of momentum, you're blowing up the shell super fast. The rest of it wants to compress in really quickly, and then that's how we compress the fusion fuel up to high density. It will also get incredibly hot. And then if it's hot enough, dense enough, and you hold it just long enough together, then you get fusion ignition, so more energy out than you put in. And that is the name of the game, and that's what we achieved last December.

Bret Kugelmass [00:17:55] And just so our audience can visualize like the physical parameters of the system, so we started off with this three football field, ten stories high, houses all of this laser equipment. The final layer of optics of all of these lasers, how close do they sit to the target?

Tammy Ma [00:18:16] Yeah, great question. So the lasers are going to be bouncing back and forth in this "ginormous" facility, getting amplified up, then they all get pointed around this target chamber. So it's this enormous vacuum chamber that is spherical, it's a huge ball and it is 10 meters or 30 feet in diameter. And it's held at vacuum because our lasers need to propagate in vacuum, otherwise they would get disturbed, basically. And this target chamber basically weighs, it's made out of aluminum, 130,000 pounds. It was so big we actually had to put the target chamber in first and build the facility around it, to give you a sense of size.

Bret Kugelmass [00:19:09] That's awesome. Okay, and then how is the pellet suspended? I'm assuming it's in the middle of this chamber, this vacuum chamber? How is it suspended in the middle?

Tammy Ma [00:19:19] I love how you're breaking this down. The target sits on this enormous boom arm that pushes in and out of the target chamber. So I said before that the chamber is 30 feet in diameter. In order to hold the target in the middle, that boom has to be at least 15 feet, the radius. And so it's this arm that is incredibly stable. Can you imagine like holding your arm out and you have to hold that target to a precision of about 20 microns, so that's about 1/10th of a human hair in precision?

Bret Kugelmass [00:19:55] Wow. Are you using a lot of like piezoelectrics at the very end to get that final positioning or something?

Tammy Ma [00:20:00] I don't actually even know. I think so, yeah. There's piezoelectrodes farther back too, like that hold the arm very stable. And then each laser, as it approaches the target chamber gets focused down. So each laser comes down to about 200 microns, so two human hair-ish size, pointed very specifically on a certain location on that target. And so not only is the NIF the biggest laser in the world, it's also the most precise laser in the world in many different ways.

Bret Kugelmass [00:20:40] Cool. And then does that boom arm interfere with the... because I assume... And I understand this is more like a test facility rather than a prototype of a commercial power production facility, but would that perhaps be an engineering complication? I assume you probably want to have as few materials as possible as close to the source of the reaction. How do you deal with extra materials in your neutron envelope?

Tammy Ma [00:21:18] For these particular experiments, you're exactly right. It's a scientific demonstration facility. The boom is what it is, and then there's different parts holding the target farther out. The target gets obliterated every shot. We make sure of that, in fact. You don't want chunks of debris actually falling back onto the laser and the optics.

Bret Kugelmass [00:21:41] How big is the target again?

Tammy Ma [00:21:43] The little sphere that I was talking about is two millimeters in diameter. The hohlraum that it sits in is about a centimeter in length and half a centimeter in diameter.

Bret Kugelmass [00:21:51] Oh, the hohlraum is that small. That's the thing that translates your laser energy into gamma energy. Or you said X-ray.

Tammy Ma [00:22:00] It is X-ray. So you can imagine that target being so tiny that the lasers have to be super precise so you can hit it, right? We have an analogy that the lasers are equivalent to a pitcher standing on a pitcher mound at Giants Stadium in San Francisco and then pitching a perfect straight down at Dodger Stadium in LA, to give you a sense of scale.

Bret Kugelmass [00:22:33] That so good, that's so good. Cool. And then that little pellet, what are the materials in that pellet again? Is it pure DT?

Tammy Ma [00:22:44] Yes. So it is deuterium-tritium. What we have to do is right before we push the target into the chamber, we have to fill that pellet with the DT fuel. And so there's actually a little straw that sticks in to the capsule. We feed liquid DT in at 50/50 concentration. What we actually have to do then is actually bring the temperature down and freeze that DT into an ice. So just like water ice, H2O ice, in this case, it's just DT ice.

Bret Kugelmass [00:23:24] And is that because in order to increase the probability of a reaction, you want the atom distance from one to another to be closer physically?

Tammy Ma [00:23:35] No, actually, it's not close enough at that point. It's actually because we need to pack enough fuel in there that you could have propagating...

Bret Kugelmass [00:23:47] The density of fuel.

Tammy Ma [00:23:47] Yeah, but there's also a trick. What we do is we hold them... We bring the temperature right down to around the triple point. And so actually there's a DT ice layer, but right in the center it is actually gas. And so gas is more compressible. But we need that ice layer to pack...

Bret Kugelmass [00:24:04] Triple point of hydrogen?

Tammy Ma [00:24:05] Of the deuterium and tritium fuel mixture.

Bret Kugelmass [00:24:08] Okay. Are there any other elements in there?

Tammy Ma [00:24:12] No.

Bret Kugelmass [00:24:13] But there kind of has to be some small percentage, right? Because your tritium has, what, like a two year half life or something? So, like, it can't be pure in the sense that from the time that you made it to the time you get it in there, there's got to be some other stuff mixed in, right?

Tammy Ma [00:24:27] So it's about, I think it's a 12.3 year half life. You get a little bit of decay, like you get beta decay, so you form other particles, but it's not other atoms. There are no other materials. It is pure deuterium and tritium. And then the capsule around it...

Bret Kugelmass [00:24:48] Oh right, because you're so low on the periodic table anyway, there's not much else that could become in your decay.

Tammy Ma [00:24:54] Yeah, that's actually right.

Bret Kugelmass [00:24:56] Yeah, I understand. Okay, and then what percentage of your mass actually gets converted in this reaction when you fire?

Tammy Ma [00:25:15] The amount of fusions that you have, because you're going to fuse deuterium-tritium, and in that reaction you generate a helium nucleus, what we call an alpha particle, and that energetic neutron. So the number of fusions that we actually create is directly related to the amount of energy you generate. For us, on that December shot where we got ignition, we actually burned through just 4% of the fuel. You can imagine if you could have a more efficient reaction and burn through much more of that, how much more energy would you generate.

Bret Kugelmass [00:25:52] Or could you repeat the laser shining process... I'm calling it shining, sorry, it's probably the wrong word... On that same pellet to eject, to like eek more out of it?

Tammy Ma [00:26:02] Oh, so you can definitely change the behavior of the laser. So for us, when we say we shine the laser on, it's not again, like your laser pointer at home, where you turn on and off. For us we can very carefully modulate the power output as a function of time. So we actually do little bumps up in laser energy. We turn it back down, little bump up, big rise up. And what that does actually is sends shockwaves, very precisely, due to compression.

Bret Kugelmass [00:26:33] And when you say it sends shockwaves, I'm thinking of like, you know, those funny experiments that you see where people like use sound waves to make like water move and you can create different... Is this essentially, is it that you are trying to have the shock waves intersect at a point?

Tammy Ma [00:26:52] Yeah, exactly. We're doing a spherical compression. So we're sending in spherical shocks to fully compress that capsule down.

Bret Kugelmass [00:27:01] Got it, got it. And it's that compression that increases the probability that your deuterium and your tritium will interact with each other. Or it's actually overcoming the coulomb energy?

Tammy Ma [00:27:16] Yeah, I would say we do the compression to get up to the densities and generate the heat that we need to overcome the coulomb repulsion between the deuterium.

Bret Kugelmass [00:27:28] So it's all about overcoming the coloumb energy.

Tammy Ma [00:27:30] Yeah, it is.

Bret Kugelmass [00:27:32] For DT, what is that? It's like 100 million degrees or something? What is it?

Tammy Ma [00:27:38] Well, it's a spectrum, right? It becomes more probable the hotter you get.

Bret Kugelmass [00:27:47] Where's the peak?

Tammy Ma [00:27:48] It's around 10 keV. So I think that's 100 million degrees Celsius if I'm doing the math right in my head.

Bret Kugelmass [00:27:57] Okay.

Tammy Ma [00:27:58] 10 keV is right though.

Bret Kugelmass [00:28:00] Cool. And then how do you measure again? How do you measure the energy output?

Tammy Ma [00:28:07] So the energy comes out in that energetic neutron that is generated in the fusion reaction.

Bret Kugelmass [00:28:14] And how many neutrons? I don't remember your initial mass, but you're getting 4% of it. So how many neutrons total are coming out in this event?

Tammy Ma [00:28:22] Oh, for that big ignition shot we had over 10^17th neutrons.

Bret Kugelmass [00:28:31] Cool.

Tammy Ma [00:28:32] That's a lot of zeroes, right?

Bret Kugelmass [00:28:33] And then you're able to count them by essentially having a detector over a certain area at a certain distance away, and then it's just, you just count?

Tammy Ma [00:28:39] Exactly, exactly. And we have more than one detector, certainly. They're arrayed all around the chamber. We know the solid angle that that detector is measuring over. We see the number of neutrons that arrive there. And then just like you said, we can then recalculate the total number and verify it among different...

Bret Kugelmass [00:28:56] Yeah, I was about to say. And what is the difference between... What is the sensitivity of any given one sensor? Do you have to do some math on top of multiple sensors to figure out what the right number is?

Tammy Ma [00:29:06] Yes. So we have 120 different instruments arrayed around the chamber. They're not all for measuring neutrons, but a good number are. The detectors, they measure neutrons of different energies as well. They're located at different places and in different distances from the center of the target chamber. And what you want to do is measure the neutrons coming at the detector right there and make sure that you are consistent across all the detectors. And of course, you're not going to get exactly the same number for all of them, but then you get an error bar on your measurement.

Tammy Ma [00:29:45] The other thing, one very accurate way that we also measure the neutrons is by activation. And so certain materials... It's as simple as just a little solid foil. It could be copper, it could be tantalum. They're arrayed all around the chamber and they get activated. When the neutron comes in, that material gets into an excited state, and then it has a half life of decay that you can measure very accurately over time, and then use that also as a detector. And those decays actually do take time though. Sometimes hours, sometimes weeks. And so that's why right after a shot we know something big happened, but it still takes time to verify the number. And as scientists, we want to be rigorous and make sure we also have good error bars and understand the uncertainty in the number that we quote.

Bret Kugelmass [00:30:39] And then, these neutrons, they're non-directional. Is it equal? Does a neutron emit in every direction with an equal probability?

Tammy Ma [00:30:52] For our fusion reactions, yes, because it is a thermal reaction. We just have a pellet that is spherical, that's filled with deuterium-tritium. And so the fusion should happen in a way that neutrons are omnidirectional in how they are emitted. However, they should be. Not always, because what happens is when you do that compression, you're not always perfectly symmetric and spherical, right? It's like compressing a balloon in between your fingers. It's really hard; anywhere it can, it's going to push back out, right? And for us, it's a similar thing. We have 192 lasers. It's still not, you know, enough. It's tough. It's really tough to squeeze something symmetrically. But that's important. It is a signature for us. We can measure the neutrons and we can see the asymmetry, and that's the signature for us where we might need to improve the implosion on the next experiment.

Bret Kugelmass [00:31:50] Cool. So cool. And then, how do you deal with neutron scattering, like as it intersects with that boom arm or other parts of your equipment? The neutron is going to, some are going to scatter, some are going get absorbed. How do you account for that? Or at least mathematically, how do you model or understand where they went before they hit your final detector?

Tammy Ma [00:32:11] Right, that's a great question. We can model, first off, with very good simulations. There are very good neutron particle scattering and computer simulations that you can model all of this and know kind of what to expect. And then we can also do test shots where we know we're emitting a certain number of neutrons. Let's see where they go. Make sure that our diagnostics are calibrated against things like scattering or the spectrum being a little bit different from what we expect. And so all of that is taken into account mathematically as we do the analysis.

Bret Kugelmass [00:32:53] And this goal of getting more energy out than you put in, how long has that been the goal of this particular apparatus? Or was it even? Or is this just a fun experiment on top of it?

Tammy Ma [00:33:09] It absolutely was a goal. The idea of getting more energy out than you put in through a fusion reaction with lasers has been going on for over 60 years now.

Bret Kugelmass [00:33:21] 60? Six zero?

Tammy Ma [00:33:23] Six zero, since the laser was invented. About two days afterwards, one of our former lab directors actually came up with the idea of, "Well, why don't we use lasers for fusion?" And so, here at Livermore, and we're not the only ones doing laser fusion, but here at Livermore, we've had a series of bigger and bigger, more energetic lasers. Now the NIF itself, we started construction in 1997, we completed in 2009, and so we've been doing experiments from then through to today, which is about 13 years. And yes, it's always been a goal because once you achieve ignition, you are in this different plasma regime where it's like you light a match, right, and that little flame propagates. For us, that propagating burn puts us in what we call the burning plasma regime, and you can generate huge amounts of what we call high yield, lots of neutrons that you can use for other experiments. And furthermore, it opens a path towards fusion energy as a viable energy source someday. Of course, if you can generate more energy than you put in, if you can turn that up even more, very easily you can see how maybe we can start feeding that out to the grid.

Bret Kugelmass [00:34:44] And then the key is how do you make it self-sustaining? Because you don't want to have to power up the laser every time for every shot, right?

Tammy Ma [00:34:51] No, we would power the laser up every shot. So, the NIF, like you alluded to earlier,Bret, is a scientific demonstration facility. We do an experiment once every 4 to 8 hours or so by design. And our experiments are very complex; everyone is a little bit different. In a fusion power plant, we would need to repeat the reaction about 10 times a second.

Bret Kugelmass [00:35:18] To create like what power level of thermal energy output?

Tammy Ma [00:35:23] The plans that we have now would be to generate a gigawatt type power plant similar to our coal powered plants of today.

Bret Kugelmass [00:35:34] So 10 shots a second can theoretically create a gigawatt or three gigawatts thermal?

Tammy Ma [00:35:44] Yeah, about a gigawatt, gigawatt electric. So there's still many, many challenges ahead. Not only would you have to do it 10 times a second, we would need quite a bit higher gain than we've demonstrated so far.

Bret Kugelmass [00:36:03] And how involved is your group with the effort to commercialize this technology for power production verses scientific achievement?

Tammy Ma [00:36:19] Yeah, not just scientific achievement, but also what we call the stockpile...

Bret Kugelmass [00:36:24] I should have started with that. Yes, yes, I didn't mean to...

Tammy Ma [00:36:33] I just started a new job, actually. And my job is the Lead of Inertial Fusion Energy Initiative here at Livermore, which is exactly that. You know, how do we take this and translate it into what could be a viable energy source?

Bret Kugelmass [00:36:48] And what was your job before? Right before?

Tammy Ma [00:36:50] And I'm still doing it. I run a scientific group using these very high intensity lasers to do, you know, cool physics with fusion physics, what we call high energy density experiments, shock physics, all kinds of things.

Bret Kugelmass [00:37:06] Okay, so now I want to ask the question more about you than about the science. How did you step into this role, both from a qualifications perspective, but also from an interest level perspective? What made you the perfect fit?

Tammy Ma [00:37:22] I had done experiments on the NIF for years and years in support of inertial confinement fusion, which is exactly... It could be exactly the approach that you would want to use for fusion energy. So right now, these different missions that you and I have talked about, Bret, stockpile stewardship, energy, even just some of the discovery side itself, are all aligned. It's exactly the same right now. And then there's different applications, like so many of our different technologies, right? We are at the point where if we want to go towards fusion energy, a lot of different technologies now need to be developed.

Bret Kugelmass [00:38:03] Like the engineering part, not just the...

Tammy Ma [00:38:04] Like the engineering, and that's going to be a hell of a job, exactly. And so, for me, I started getting more into policy work a few years ago. Going to D.C. And working with our program managers at DOE headquarters and talking to staffers on the Hill to both share the work that we do here on the NIF, communicate the science, which is always super important, but then to start laying the groundwork for the future. There were a lot of skeptics, but, you know, here at Livermore, here at NIF, we believed we would get ignition, it was going to be imminent. Then what's the next step? We have to be ready. And so starting a few years ago, I got very involved in that communication, working with the community to put together reports to Congress or to DOE to say, "Here are the challenges that we see in the next few years. This is where we would like to see investments to push the field forward." And so that's how I got more involved in really growing this new program, which turns out is more policy than it is technical, as I'm finding out.

Bret Kugelmass [00:39:27] Well, you seem quite capable of both. So how do you balance... Okay, this is more to like the social aspects of it than... How do you balance the excitement around the achievement with... One thing that I'm afraid of is... I mean, this is amazing in the sense that we got so much positive press. I mean, every newspaper reported on this. But then, the reality of the engineering challenges to turn this into a commercial power production facility could take how long? You fill in the blank for me.

Tammy Ma [00:40:11] Yeah. That's absolutely true. What we've accomplished on the NIF is a huge scientific breakthrough, no matter what. What we've been trying to do with our communications is be completely transparent and be very rigorous in how we talk about the science. We're not claiming that you could plug the NIF into the grid and pull energy out. We've been trying to articulate the many different challenges that are there, not just in the science and technology that still needs to be developed, but also the support that we need from government and private companies and all these different stakeholders and use that, in fact, as a way of of trying to communicate that we still need investment and we still need policy to be developed in a way that sustains this new technology. And then making sure also, for us, the U.S. is the leader in inertial confinement fusion. That's undisputed, right? Yes, we would love to have fusion energy available to everybody around the world because it's such a clean, abundant, wonderful source of energy if we can make it work, but the U.S. has the leadership now. We need to maintain that leadership, to capitalize on it, to make fusion energy work.

Tammy Ma [00:41:38] In the meantime, there are all these technology spinoffs. There's just overall scientific prowess we need to maintain. And so it doesn't benefit us to make promises that cannot be met. We need to articulate the challenge. We don't even have the staff right now, the workforce, to put multiple power plants on the grid any time soon. It takes years to build that up. For me personally, I find that inspiring. And we hope that also is the message that can get out to schoolchildren today. But at the same time, when the media gets excited, that's great too. But we do try to stress that it will take probably a few decades to make fusion energy something that is ready. But you know, that timeline very much, very, very much, depends on the actual investment and the will. If the U.S. makes a strong commitment now, we can move a whole lot faster.

Bret Kugelmass [00:42:57] Other than understanding the physics, which you guys have demonstrated incredible prowess at, what are those next areas of focus that will enable a commercialization of this technology? Is it a set of material science challenges for the enclosure? Is it a way to make the laser optics more efficient? What is the next set of technical challenges that you'd like to see investment in?

Tammy Ma [00:43:19] Yeah, absolutely. You totally hit the nail on the head. Materials is a big one. We need materials that can withstand huge fluxes of being irradiated or particled for what would be the chamber walls of the reactor. We need materials that are hardened. So, the optics that deliver the laser. You can hide a lot of those optics in other places and shield them. However, at some point, the laser needs to meet the target chamber and there has to be a final optic. How do you protect that? How do you prevent damage?

Bret Kugelmass [00:43:58] Especially with those damn omnidirectional neutrons.

Tammy Ma [00:44:00] Yeah, exactly. Those neutrons, they're tough, right? And so materials is the big one. And there's work that needs to be done with tritium processing and recycling.

Bret Kugelmass [00:44:20] Because you've got the fuel source.

Tammy Ma [00:44:20] The fuel source itself, right. So tritium is a limited resource. So in a fusion power plant... You asked a little bit earlier about how much of the fuel do we actually burn up. You do not burn up 100% of the fuel. It is really tough to burn all that fuel up before the pressures get so large, it just like re-expands. And so you would want to recapture any of the fuel that doesn't get used and repurpose it and recycle it and send it through the system again. So there's a decent amount of work that needs to get done there. It is not an easy problem because you are working with the tiniest atom, the smallest atom that we have on the periodic table. It seeps into everything. That's one of the challenges. There are challenges with automation and bringing in machine learning and AI. So automation, you would drop a pellet in 10 times a second, the lasers need to track it and shoot it. But things are moving so fast, you can't have human intervention, right? Everything needs to be controlled remotely. Also because it's a power plant where there's lots of energy flowing in all different kinds of directions.

Bret Kugelmass [00:45:44] You just brought up something. You used the words "drop it." And that does actually beg the question, given how precise you are already with your timing of the lasers, why hold the pellet instead of just dropping it and timing the lasers to meet? Because the speeds are relatively slow of it dropping and easy to calculate with gravity relative to your lasers. Why not just let it drop and hit it right when centered?

Tammy Ma [00:46:09] So in a power plant we would, but right now for the scientific facility, we're only doing a shot every couple of hours. And so it doesn't make sense at this point to add that additional level of uncertainty. But you're right, it would not be the most difficult subsystem that we need to bring up. There's work that needs to be done, but we've got that challenge down, I think.

Bret Kugelmass [00:46:32] Does this laser driven approach work with other fusion reactions other than DT?

Tammy Ma [00:46:44] Yes.

Bret Kugelmass [00:46:44] Specifically a neutronic reaction, would be my net follow on question.

Tammy Ma [00:46:49] There are certainly some private companies looking at the neutronic reactions. Anything that is... DT has the highest cross-section.

Bret Kugelmass [00:46:59] It's easy.

Tammy Ma [00:47:00] It is the easiest one. And it already took us 60 years to get it, right? But it is the easiest one. As you try to fuse other elements because they are bigger, heavier than hydrogen, you need to put more energy into the system to even start those fusion reactions. So it just adds an additional level of difficulty.

Bret Kugelmass [00:47:24] Yeah. I mean, where I was just thinking about it though, it's like now that you demonstrated the concept, rather than tackle the engineering... There are going to be a lot of engineering challenges dealing with neutrons. Now you've demonstrated the concept to instead work on the challenges, just get more energy into the system and not have to deal with those pesky neutrons, maybe that's an easier problem in the long run to solve.

Tammy Ma [00:47:50] Potentially, potentially. But there are a lot of trade offs that you have to kind of look at there.

Bret Kugelmass [00:48:01] Can you actually talk about a couple them? You don't have to go super deep, but I would love to hear how you think about the trade offs.

Tammy Ma [00:48:06] Yeah, sure. So for a couple of the candidates, you're probably thinking of D-helium3, can fuse, DD can fuse, deuterium-deuterium, or P-boron. So a proton to boron. With P-boron, you have to get... We said that the peak... Let's get nerdy here. So the peak of the DT cross-section, so where we get the most fusion happening... Or the probability of fusion is the highest for DT at around 10 keV. For P-boron, it's 100 keV and the cross-section there is still 1,000 or 10,000 times lower. So even if you can get up to 100 keV, even then, the probability of getting fusion to happen is much lower. So there is that complication.

Bret Kugelmass [00:49:09] People are trying to do P-boron reactions out there, right?

Tammy Ma [00:49:12] Absolutely. Yeah. And you can get P-boron to fuse, right? That's been demonstrated; you can make it happen. But it's just like us, until this big shot that we had in December... We had plenty of DT fusion, you just don't have... What you need in most cases is what we call propagating burn. You need to spark that and then get the burn to feed on itself. That's the only way that you can actually make the energetics, the equation work out to have more energy coming out than you put in.

Bret Kugelmass [00:49:46] Okay, so there is a bit of a chain reaction happening.

Tammy Ma [00:49:48] Yeah, there is a little bit of a chain reaction. That is true, yes.

Bret Kugelmass [00:49:57] Okay, cool. And then, maybe talk just a little bit more about how your program is going to interact with commercial efforts moving forward. Is it that they come to you guys for advice? Is it that they want to use your physical equipment for experiments? How do you do this? Do you call it technology transfer, or how do you do it?

Tammy Ma [00:50:23] Yes, it is tech transfer? Yes. It's a little bit all of the above. Right now, for the Department of Energy, public-private partnerships is a big thrust. Not just in fusion, but kind of across the board in all different technologies, particularly energy and climate security type research. And so right now our job as a national lab is to do exactly that -- technology transfer. So we are not a production facility. We typically do things once. After they get solved, they get passed over to either private companies or other institutions, commercialized. And so with these private companies, there's a number of different ways. We do collaborate with them; we share expertise. But there are also tools that we have built up over the decades, and these include the computer simulation tools and the facilities and then other component technologies that we might have here as well. And so, we sign contracts with some of these private companies where they contract us to help develop a specific thing they need, or we build up a collaboration with multiple private companies and we say, "Hey, guys, what do you all need in common?" What we call pre-competitive technologies, technologies that everybody will need at some point, those are the type of technologies we focus on at the national labs to develop and then everybody can use them equally.

Bret Kugelmass [00:52:01] Cool. Great. Okay, well, we're running low on time, though. You covered so much material in an hour, it was just amazing talking to you about this. But I'm going to give you the final word though. What else would you like our audience to think about, know about, understand, or you can even end just with what your hopes for the future are.

Tammy Ma [00:52:20] We're so hopeful about fusion and its potential. What we're trying to do now though is develop the fusion industry, the ecosystem, in a way that is equitable, diverse and just. And that means not just developing workforce that is diverse, but really thinking about now like, where would you site a nuclear fusion power plant? You know, they're safe; their footprint is no bigger than probably what a coal power plant would look like. So hopefully people are amenable to having that in their backyard, but we need to communicate out what those benefits are. And then the other way we're thinking about it, back to the equity thing is, where would you put these plants that are most beneficial to society? We don't want this to be an energy source that only benefits the rich, the privileged folks. It is something that could really be an enormous step change in lifting the standard of living of folks everywhere, especially in developing countries as well. I guess what I'm trying to get to is we need help not just on the scientific and technical side, but on the policy side, understanding what the user base is and working with communities and outreach. And so, we're just starting out now. It's a really exciting time, and we hope people will consider fusion as a career and join us in this challenge.

Bret Kugelmass [00:54:00] Tammy Ma, everybody.

Bret Kugelmass [00:00:29] You're here today with Bob Gallucci, who is the Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Political Military Affairs. Bob, thanks for joining us today.

Bob Gallucci [00:01:18] My pleasure, Bret.

Bret Kugelmass [00:01:20] Well, I'd love to... You know, obviously, it'd be great to capture your perspectives. I mean, with having such a career, it's a real honor to have you on the show, but I'd first love to learn a little bit about you as a person if that's okay. Can we start off with where were you born?

Bob Gallucci [00:01:35] I, like a lot of people, I was born in Brooklyn, but I actually admit it. And I grew up mostly on Long Island, went to a local public high school and schools, and then went to the local university, Stony Brook State University.

Bret Kugelmass [00:01:52] That's also my alma mater. Yeah, I grew up in Baldwin. Where town did you grow up?

Bob Gallucci [00:01:55] In Brentwood.

Bret Kugelmass [00:01:57] Okay, great.

Bob Gallucci [00:01:59] Lifeguarded at Heckscher State Park for three or four years. And did graduate work at Brandeis, M.A. and Ph.D., and then had a start on an academic career, teaching.

Bret Kugelmass [00:02:14] And were there any formative experiences that you can relate to us that put you on that career path specifically?

Bob Gallucci [00:02:22] Yeah, I think it relevant to the conversation. I watched another of your podcasts. I think you were at Johns Hopkins Lab and you were focused on the fallacy of the safety issues with nuclear energy. And I thought there was a parallel to the security issues... international security issues. There are some fallacies there. And interestingly, it seems like nuclear engineers are at the heart of both problems, and maybe we can get to that. But let me say that I was smitten very early on with a kind of nuclear bug. I was, as a high schooler in the early 1960s, I was taken with the concept of nuclear war, which was not common for my colleagues. But I think I was the first person to take a book out of the high school library by Herman Kahn entitled On Thermonuclear War. And it, in a way, guided me through my undergraduate focus on foreign policy, international relations. And when I got to graduate school... And by that time, the Vietnam War was well underway and War and Peace was in the air. As you may have read, you wouldn't remember, but you may have read. It was much protest over the war. Much conversation. And I ended up doing my Ph.D. thesis on the conduct of the war, the ground strategy and the air war... Less than on the philosophical questions of whether this was in the national interest or not. I thought it was not. But that was not the point of the book. But the nuclear issue has remained with me so that when I began teaching, I focused on that. When I was teaching something other than general survey courses, I focused on nuclear deterrence and and the theory of deterrence. I got very interested in the way nuclear weapons work, particularly simple ones. And I ultimately ended up doing something I'm still doing, which is consulting at Lawrence Livermore Labs with something called Z-Division, which some people know about. It's the intelligence portion of Lawrence Livermore and focuses on nuclear issues of other countries. And that, through my career, after I left academia and went into government service, I went into the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. And there I focused particularly on nuclear energy issues, particularly nuclear proliferation, the spread of nuclear weapons to other countries. And so that led me sort of naturally at the time this was the mid seventies, 1970s. It led me to focus on the nuclear fuel cycle, which was not common for people in security affairs unless they were in the nonproliferation world. It turned out that after the original five states acquired nuclear weapons, nobody else was announcing that they were pursuing nuclear weapons. They were all pursuing nuclear energy for nuclear power purposes. And so if you think of the next four or five countries, first think about Israel and think about India, think about Pakistan, think about North Korea, think about South Africa. None of their nuclear programs were nuclear weapons programs in a sort of de jure or announced fashion. They all were nuclear research or nuclear power programs. And so understanding the peaceful nuclear fuel cycle seemed like a natural thing to do. And the arms control agency was, in a way, set up in a sort of checks and balances way to balance what was then ERDA, became Department of Energy, where we had the home of those who were enthusiastic about a full fuel cycle. I mean, that phrase "fuel cycle" for some people doesn't mean terribly a lot. But to those of us interested in the weapons danger, the security danger, if you embraced a cycle and you were insistent that we not waste that wonderful material plutonium, then you were in deep trouble. And if you could avoid that, you could be in no trouble at all...

Bret Kugelmass [00:07:18] I just want to take a pause there so everyone understands what you're saying. What you're saying is... if you're not trying to eke every little bit of economics out of the fuel, it's not that hard to make it proliferation resistant.

Bob Gallucci [00:07:37] Let me put it... The answer's yes. You said it much better than I did.

Bret Kugelmass [00:07:42] No, I still need to, like, say it two or three more times just to make sure I even fully... I just want to make sure everyone's getting what we're saying. Yeah.

Bob Gallucci [00:07:48] If I fast forward from the 1970s to the 1990s, I was part of a team that negotiated with... led the team that negotiated with North Korea. And as we proceeded in those discussions which occurred in Geneva, the North Koreans at some point, somewhat to my amazement, the head of their delegation... We were just having lunch, the two of us and our interpreters, said that, you know, "This whole problem that we're talking about could go away if you could help us get light water reactors." And, you know, and I was stunned even to hear him use the phrase because they had a small graphite moderated reactor that was a plutonium producer, as many of them were. And that's what we were focused on in terms of where they would get the plutonium for their first weapons. And here he was saying that he had a problem. And that is that there was a nuclear establishment in North Korea and you can't just shut it down. I mean, I felt like I was talking to a colleague about the Atomic Energy Commission. It was interesting to me...

Bret Kugelmass [00:09:00] That's so incredible. Can actually I just pull on the sociological aspect of that for one quick second before we get back to the technical? This is going to sound so naive. I almost like regret saying it out loud... But like, how do North Koreans know anything about the outside world and like how stuff works given how closed off they are?

Bob Gallucci [00:09:23] Here's the problem with me answering that question. You may have noticed already that I'm bold and my information is dated. So I'm talking about an exchange that happened 30 years ago.

Bret Kugelmass [00:09:39] I see. So the closed-off-ness of North Korea that I've always grown up with was not always the case, is what you're saying.

Bob Gallucci [00:09:43] I mean, it was closed off at the time, and the team that we negotiated with, the North Korean side, had very ill fitting suits. And, you know, it looked... They looked very kind of Eastern European Asians. I mean, in a funny sort of way, that's not true anymore. They have been around and they are... Kim Jong un, the grandson, the son of the guy who was running actually when I started the negotiations, it was the current leader's grandfather, Kim Il Sung, who ran North Korea. This is not the same country. It's a different country now and it's not a country I know terribly well. But there are a lot of people around who do know it well. It's not the hermit kingdom anymore. Lots of people have been there. I have never been to North Korea. I negotiated with them for two years, pretty hand to hand contact. But I don't know the modern North Korean state terribly well. I read a lot. I know what I can do from that, but I don't have the contact I did at the time. At the time, your image would have fit fine, but you would have to revise it to capture the current reality of North Korea, as I've come to understand it.

Bret Kugelmass [00:10:54] But you're saying even back then they knew enough and had enough contact with the outside world to understand and communicate that a light water reactor was inherently proliferation-proof?

Bob Gallucci [00:11:06] Here's what Kang Sok-ju... Kang Sok-ju was the deputy foreign minister, and he was my negotiating partner. He led the North Korean delegation. What he said, this is not... I can't say this is a quote, but it's something like, "Look, we know that you have the most modern technology." I mean, he didn't say that Westinghouse licensed Framatome for the French and GE did Siemens for the Germans. I mean, he didn't do that, but he knew that the designs that were American designs back in the day when we were building reactors, as you well know, that we had the technology. And it became an issue of... After, I mean, it was very much of a struggle for me to send the reporting cable back that night and get on the telephone with a couple of undersecretaries, one an Undersecretary of Defense, the other, an Undersecretary of State, two very smart guys whom I had known for a long time, but they were really worried that I had lost it somehow and had something bad to drink because they said, "Wait a minute, you want to help the North Koreans get nuclear power reactors?" They said, "You got to be kidding." I said, "No, you don't understand. And with all due respect, you guys, you don't know about nuclear energy and you don't know that nuclear power, if you're just talking about the reactor, is not risky from a security perspective."

Bret Kugelmass [00:12:29] Yeah. So though, like Eisenhower kind of knew that because he was the one who was like, "Let's give everyone little reactors, too." I understand the reactors he gave them actually could have different uses. But at least the philosophy of "we want to give people nuclear technology so it becomes a peaceful technology, not a weapons technology" had that been floating around for a while, right?

Bob Gallucci [00:12:51] Yeah. You got the phrase Atoms for Peace and all. But you got to remember when you do this, because I got to worry a little bit here because I fought against what was first the Atomic Energy Commission, then ERDA, and then the Department of Energy, because of their continuing enthusiasm for a full fuel cycle, for recovering the plutonium and for using it in the current generation of reactors, and much worse, a new generation that weren't thermal reactors, they're going to be fast reactors.

Bret Kugelmass [00:13:22] Yeah, I'm against all of this, too, by the way. I think you and I probably on the exact same page. I'm like, I just don't see the economic... Given our, especially today, how cheap it is to mine your normal uranium. Get it to 5%. I just don't... Nobody can argue to me the case for completing the fuel cycle with a mathematical model. I don't see... I don't see... I'm sorry, I don't see it.

Bob Gallucci [00:13:47] Well, you shouldn't see it. It's not there. But it also hasn't been. And you know, as the costs rise of a full fuel cycle and of reprocessing, which is you know... We know countries are... Russia is still reprocessing, still trying thermo recycle. I don't know exactly where the Japanese are now after their Fukushima experience. But there's still some enthusiasm out there and there's still a worry that I have that we're going to rediscover the recovery of plutonium. And I don't... I think that is the risky part. And if we could stick to thermal reactors... store spent fuel. You got... You know the way you were arguing about the safety? You know in my mind of course the loss of cooling accident, the China syndrome, all of that is what informed us back in the day. And it all came from the nuclear engineers. Well, where does the full fuel cycle come from and the need to recover plutonium? It comes from those engineers who see the elegance of a closed fuel cycle. Well, forgive me, but its elegance is overcome by the risks that are associated with it.

Bret Kugelmass [00:15:02] Yeah. And well, I mean, I think... Not to like bash on engineers too much because I come from that cloth also... And also, by the way, I find like I'm actually quite sympathetic because I fall, I find myself falling victim to the exact same mentality of this, like "drive towards optimization for optimization sake..." Here's the problem, it's actually bad engineering because good engineering actually is a more complex optimization. It's not an optimization across a single variable, which is fuel economics. It's optimization across multiple variables with your desired outcome probably being lowest cost of energy. At least that's my desired outcome. And if you were to look at it from that perspective, you would not over-optimize your reactor. You would optimize on things like constructability or availability of supply chain or availability of material or de-risking investment through standardization. Like those are things... You can still be a good engineer and optimize across different variables, but it's just very tempting and alluring to pick one and just drive towards perfection on that. So I'm sympathetic, but it is a problem.

Bob Gallucci [00:16:11] It is a problem. It is. It is a problem. And when I have visited other schools with, that have engineering schools... Where I teach now, Georgetown University does not have an engineering school, but I've been to engineering schools elsewhere in other universities. And that instinct to recover plutonium is still there. I mean, it is still there. And even the urge to design reactors that would require highly enriched uranium is still there. And none of this is necessary. I mean, you can settle at 3.5% enrichment level and the enrichment services can be had on the open market. There's no reason to spread the technology around any further than already is. So you can... I was prepared for the battle, which I had to fight for the deal that I cut with the North Koreans and we ultimately accepted with the North Koreans. I was prepared for the attack from the right that, you know, "You're naive, you're trying to do a deal with North Korea..."

Bret Kugelmass [00:17:20] So what was the outcome of that battle? Can you explain that battle and what the outcome was?

Bob Gallucci [00:17:22] Yeah, well, that I mean... There were those who when I went up to the Hill, particularly both in the Senate and the House, to defend what was called the "agreed framework" with North Korea. And I explained that, you know, "We are crushing their plutonium program. It's going to end. We're going to shut down their one site." And at that time, there was one site, Yongbyon, and it will be no more. And we'll be replacing them with safe, proliferation resistant. You know, like the wristwatch isn't waterproof, it's water resistant. Well, that light water reactors are proliferation resistant. If there is no reprocessing plant, there's no recovery of the plutonium. There is no proliferation risk from the light water reactor. And indeed, the requirement for enrichment means that if you don't permit enrichment in the country, they are forever dependent upon an international market. So this is a good deal from proliferation perspective. However, if you start from well, "Wait a minute, I don't like deals to deal with a problem like North Korea. I'd much rather a military solution." I said, "Actually, you wouldn't. You do not want to go to war with North Korea. We've done that." You know...

Bret Kugelmass [00:18:33] Have you ever been to a subway in South Korea? Something that stood out to me was they have gas masks at every subway stop because they are on alert for a war with North Korea. That does not seem pleasant.

Bob Gallucci [00:18:44] If you lived in Seoul, you would be on alert, too. I mean, the rhetoric... It comes out of Pyongyang and it's coming out right now, as a matter of fact, is awful. Right. And it is provocative. And it... When you live as close to the DMZ, to that border with North Korea as you are when you are in Seoul, you don't take these things lightly and you don't dismiss them. So this is a serious security issue. So the idea that we were going to try to solve it by providing North Korea with two 1000 megawatt light water reactors... Initially, the North Koreans would not accept South Korean reactors. And I explained that a lot of countries want to provide these reactors, but nobody wants to pay for them. The South Koreans will do it. South Koreans took on the most of the burden. The Japanese agreed to take on and a part of that that burden. So that's what the deal was for the agreed framework. But the argument that I was referring to before was with both the right and the left. The right... Just simple. "I don't like deals as a method of solving a problem with North Korea. I'd much rather a military solution." My answer is "No, you wouldn't if you knew what you were talking about." Second, the tack from the left came from those who are in the nonproliferation community, for whom I have great affection and respect, but it stops at the water's edge because they turn out to be against nuclear energy, against nuclear power, because of the association for decades with the proliferation of nuclear weapons. And I said, "I got it." And I mean, one of my critics who's actually quite a good friend, you know, pointed out that the amount of plutonium produced in 2000 megawatt light water reactor was enormous compared to what that little graphite moderated research reactor could produce. So we'd be giving them huge plutonium production. And I said, "Absolutely true, but no way to separate the plutonium from the spent fuel, no way to enrich their own uranium. So we've got them. It's fine."

Bret Kugelmass [00:20:56] Yeah. I mean, the argument that I always have to clarify to people is, plutonium is not one thing... You have, you know, your fissile plutonium 239, that's we got to worry about. But then the natural build up of plutonium 240 in a light water reactor is essentially a poison that prevents you from using that plutonium 239. So it's like that's what's so great about a light water reactor.

Bob Gallucci [00:21:21] No. Bret, it is with great reservation that I am going to disagree with you.

Bret Kugelmass [00:21:26] No... Please. Educate me. Educate me.

Bob Gallucci [00:21:29] Because your argument... I last confronted full blown from someone from Kojima from the French side of this and it was at the first meeting that the Obama administration had on nuclear terrorism and the security issue with nuclear energy. And the French were making the argument that the reprocessing is not a problem because it's a self-limiting thing for for the terrorist concern. That's not true. Now, the reason it's not true cannot be fully explained outside of a classified environment, but it's not true. In other words, when I teach this, I start with where you started. You know, that there are different isotopes of plutonium, which have a different propensity to spontaneously emit neutrons and therefore create different kinds of problems for the nuclear weapons designer. And high quality plutonium, if you're a weapons designer, is in fact, much like highly enriched uranium. It's highly enriched in the... It's not enriched, but it's highly focused on plutonium 239 rather than the even isotopes. And that means low burn up fuel. That does not mean a light water reactor. Got it. Understand? The next thing that should be said, however, is that all plutonium is fissile. All isotopes are fissile. If you ask the question, "Can you design a bomb with any plutonium?" The answer is yes. And you need to understand that. No one can... and no one can go any further than I just did. I don't think. Yeah, I've been around the block on this. I can't explain why. I can't talk about why. But we worry about all plutonium, not just the high quality stuff that the weapons designer would most like to have.

Bret Kugelmass [00:23:28] Okay. That was a little unsatisfying to not get the details. But maybe when we step into a classified environment, I can learn a little bit more on this one. Okay. Fair enough. So then what you're saying is... So then what's the method by which you would secure... Let's say you gave them two gigawatt scale... Actually, first start off with with the conclusion. How did those negotiations end?

Bob Gallucci [00:23:57] I mean we concluded the negotiations. I signed for the United States of America, Kang Sok-ju signed for the DPRK, the formal name of North Korea, and that was done in 1994. And for the next seven, eight years into the early Bush administration, nothing happened at Yongbyon. There was no work on plutonium. That's the good news. What they agreed to do there, they did. The bad news is they were hedging. They secretly made a deal with the Pakistanis. You may have heard about the A.Q. Khan network and initially transfer of gas centrifuge technology. Ultimately, the transfer of, we understand, actually gas centrifuge equipment from Pakistan, from that network to North Korea. So that the Clinton administration became aware of this secret activity, but decided not to tell the North Koreans we knew what they were doing. And then the plan was, at the early part of the Gore administration, which you may have noticed we didn't actually reach, the plan was to go and confront the North Koreans. There was something called the Perry Process, led by former Secretary of Defense Perry, in a review of our policy with North Korea. And that endorsed the idea of continuing because at that point in the late nineties, technology had been passed, but we didn't think there was actually any construction. As best I remember, there was any construction of a gas centrifuge plant. Early in the Bush administration, of course, they were briefed by the Clinton folks. They looked at this and they decided to let it go as well until really the... I guess it was the summer of of 2001. The Bush people decided that too much stuff was being transferred and they sent in Assistant Secretary of State Kelly to Pyongyang and he confronted the North Koreans with our knowledge of their... to put it bluntly, their cheating. And the North Koreans denied it. Kind of denied it. And we stopped the construction of the reactors. There was something called KEDO, the Korean Energy Development Organization, that had been created by the South Koreans and the United States and the Japanese to build those reactors that would call for a decade earlier when we did the Agreed Framework, and we stopped that construction. As soon as we stopped the construction, in January of the next year, the North Koreans said, "Fine, you're stopping construction. We're out of the deal. We're going to build nuclear weapons and test them." And indeed, in 2004, they tested... or in 2006... they tested their first nuclear weapon.

Bret Kugelmass [00:26:53] And they did this all with the gas centrifuge?

Bob Gallucci [00:26:56] Gas centrifuge.

Bret Kugelmass [00:26:57] Gas centrifuge.

Bob Gallucci [00:26:59] Yeah, I mean, they had of course, eventually, as they do now, they have both highly enriched uranium from their gas centrifuge program. And they started up the research reactor again.

Bret Kugelmass [00:27:14] They have a research reactor. Right, because Iran has a real power reactor. Right? In addition...

Bob Gallucci [00:27:20] But Iran is an interesting counter case because Iran had a structure and it was to be built by the Germans and in the Iran-Iraq war it was bombed. The Russians came in and said, "We'll finish that reactor." Actually, what they did is build a whole new reactor for the Iranians. And it has been operating, but it is a light water reactor.

Bret Kugelmass [00:27:42] And that's why we blow up their centrifuges, because they're not using the light water reactor for weapons production...

Bob Gallucci [00:27:50] We haven't blown up anybody's centrifuges. I mean, what we did is...

Bret Kugelmass [00:27:56] Somebody blew up some... Or not blew them up, but spun out of control or something.

Bob Gallucci [00:28:00] Okay. Yes, yes. You're talking about messing with them. That's a yes. Who exactly did that? The Israelis. The Americans, the Ugandans. You know, who knows? But the point the point is, nobody blew anything up. But our concern about the centrifuges was reflected in the JCPOA. The deal we cut 2015 with the Iranians, which in his wisdom, President Trump pulled us out of. And we have been trying to regenerate that because we'd like to stop that enrichment program.

Bret Kugelmass [00:28:32] But I guess what I'm saying is that the real learning here is that they feel like they need to build the centrifuges because they can't use their light water reactor to produce weapons grade material.

Bob Gallucci [00:28:45] Yeah, well, two things are true...

Bret Kugelmass [00:28:47] If they could, they would. And then they wouldn't need the centrifuges.

Bob Gallucci [00:28:49] That's right. Sort of. I mean, I think that's not bad reasoning. But I'm not sure it's the causal connections are as you described them. The reasoning's right. What the Iranians did somewhat to our confusion was they began producing, building a heavy water production facility. Now, this was interesting to us because they had no heavy water reactor. The Russians had built them a light water reactor, a Russian style light water reactor. They had no heavy water reactor, but they were building a reactor. And we were concerned that that reactor would be a source of plutonium. So as part of the JCPOA, they had to redesign that reactor so it produced less plutonium and less of a concern and had to exclude the manufacture of a reprocessing facility that might have extracted the plutonium from any spent fuel that came out of the reactor.

Bret Kugelmass [00:29:48] How do you... How do these negotiations happen between our scientists here and their scientists there in terms of communicating enough technical information to stop something from happening? Without that information that's being communicated, teaching them how to do something?

Bob Gallucci [00:30:04] Yeah. I mean, I think what you have to accept is that countries that are serious about a nuclear weapons program, and I would put North Korea and Iran in that category, they both are quite serious about their nuclear weapons program... Both countries have had longstanding nuclear weapons programs. They know a lot. Right. It's not like we're about to teach them something in the negotiation and they understand when we say, "No, you can't do X." They understand why you don't want them to do X. So...

Bret Kugelmass [00:30:41] Once you have the enriched material, is there another hard part in terms of making the bomb? Or once you have the enriched material, it's easy from there on out?

Bob Gallucci [00:30:48] Right. If you just made this simple, you got two things to make a bomb. You got to have your fissile material and you got to have a triggering package. The triggering package can look like a ball. It can look like a tube. It depends on what your fissile material is, what the package is going to look like, and how sophisticated it is. But a country like Iran needed to do two things. Any country would, and Iran did need it to have a whole program to build that implosion system, because they were going for the implosion system because it's much more efficient than the gun type device that we first dropped on Hiroshima. The bomb that we dropped on Nagasaki was an implosion system. It looked like a soccer ball kind of in its configuration. So they had a whole program involving high explosives, a lighting system, as they call it, or electrical system and other elements of that implosion system. On the one hand, which you can use a dummy in the... As a replacement for the fissile material. And then you have quite separately, a program to develop fissile material. And if it's going to be gas centrifuge, it's got to go to high levels. And there are other ways of doing it. But right now, that technology of choice, whether it's commercial or whether it's for bombs, is a gas centrifuge. It's not gaseous diffusion anymore for either.

Bret Kugelmass [00:32:12] Yeah. Got it. Got it. Got it. Okay. So... If we could just come back to the light water reactors and how they're proliferation resistant then if not due to the isotopic difference. What is the... Is it just it's hard to remove the plutonium from the rest of the ceramic pellets? Is that the challenge?

Bob Gallucci [00:32:43] Let's think about this for a moment. If you have a small research reactor like the North Koreans do and it's a gas graphite reactor, not only, you know, for your point, do you have low burn up fuel, you can pull that fuel out, you know, whenever you want to. Right. You just move the machine over the top, pull out some rods and and you go and do the chemical separation to pull the plutonium out. Got it. But think, is what I would I was trying to tell the senators and congressmen when I was testifying, defending the deal, think about what a light water reactor, a thousand megawatt reactor looks like. It's a huge bloody thing. And it has fuel assemblies that weigh tons and it has a big fuel machine. The reactor has to shut down in order to pull the fuel assemblies out so no one's going to sneak off with the plutonium.

Bret Kugelmass [00:33:35] Right but coudln't they just after the first couple of years, then they've got them sitting in a spent fuel pool. You're saying they're not a risk there? Or they are a risk there, or we would take it...

Bob Gallucci [00:33:45] They are in the pool. But, you know, what do you what do you got? You've got fuel assemblies that are made... I mean, what is the metal they're encased in? It's titanium... Right. Zirconium? And the zirconium has to be chopped up. The material has to be leached out. It's a messy chemical process. You can't build a reprocessing plant to deal with light water reactors' spent fuel without everybody in the universe knowing you're doing it.

Bret Kugelmass [00:34:17] I see. What you're saying is getting the plutonium out of the pallet in a way that it's usable and chemically distinct, even if it's not isotopically distinct is still an extremely advanced, sophisticated, difficult process.

Bob Gallucci [00:34:30] And it will take years. And everybody will know you're doing it and the international community can respond. And by the way, they can also shut down your reactor by turning off your access to enriched uranium if you don't have an enrichment facility.

Bret Kugelmass [00:34:44] Yeah. Okay. Got it. Got it. Got it. Okay. And then I think we should just... The other thing that I personally just think is the greatest fallacy in terms of these advanced reactors is the thorium based fuel cycle, because there you are intentionally separating U 233, which as far as I know, is even worse than plutonium when it comes to... Is that your understanding as well that this thorium thing is a total nightmare?

Bob Gallucci [00:35:13] I, to my knowledge, the only country that has run with the idea of running a thorium based U 233 recovery is India. And that's because they have, you know, so much thorium. It's not the only country that could, but it's the only country that has, I think, moved very far down the road. But they still haven't moved very far down. I mean, you still have to do lots of things that are different and then you would do it if it was a uranium based system. And I don't think there's much of an angle in it from the Indian perspective eithe for a thermal thorium fuel cycle for recovery of U 233 for their nuclear weapons program, which is really based on plutonium. And they have reactors that are dedicated for plutonium production for their weapons program and separate reactors which are for the generation of electricity and are inspected by the IAEA.

Bret Kugelmass [00:36:17] Yeah, yeah. No, I think it's a dead end, too, just from an economic perspective, but a lot of people advocate for it. And then I just am like... It doesn't make any sense to produce a bunch of U 233. Like that doesn't make any sense.

Bob Gallucci [00:36:28] I don't think... I mean, it's like a lot of ideas that are floating around, you know, that attract the attention of everyone from Bill Gates to to your next door neighbor who, you know, hears about a traveling wave or a molten salt or some other kind of thing, in my own view here, which is not... I'm not a technical person. [00:36:51]My own view is that if we could keep it simple, we will be much better off. We'll be better off in terms of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and we'll be much better off in terms of safety and in every other way. [13.0s] And if we can keep spent fuel as spent fuel and not open it up, we can do what... You know, back in the day when we were still talking enthusiastically about the full fuel cycle, the Canadians, who of course, are running heavy water reactors, the CANDU reactor, they were putting the spent fuel at White Shell in these cylinders, these cement cylinders, the same cement cylinders that we have to make bigger because our fuel assemblies are bigger, that we are putting spent fuel in co-located at the reactor. So we're rediscovering something that's 50 years old, essentially that the Canadians have been doing all along because there's no angle for the Canadians to separate the plutonium. So the question was, what do they do with the spent fuel after they take it out of the pond? They put it in cement. Well, how long will the cement last? A long time.

Bret Kugelmass [00:37:55] Yeah, yeah. I never understood... The whole waste thing is just another thing that makes absolutely no sense. But, you know, it's... I think, I just wanted to add maybe a fine point and I think something we're both saying when we like critique the nuclear engineers' enthusiasm, I think it's... I think it's all incentive based. I don't think people realize they're doing it, but I think like the incentives drive it. So like people who are grant funded at universities to study solutions for nuclear waste, you know, and then develop an expertize in how do you make nuclear waste last a million years? They don't want to say that nuclear waste isn't really a problem or doesn't need to be solved for a million years because that's how they fund their research is making it an ever more difficult problem. And then it goes beyond the academics. Then it goes to industry. When industry wants to collect some of those decommissioning funds that rich, you know, $50 billion pot or to study Yucca mountain for... Why 1 million years? Oh, because it's going to be a really hard problem to solve. That means a lot of money for the people who are going to solve it. And but I don't actually think the individuals realize that they're caught up in this trap. I think it's just all incentive driven. And then they rationalize based on like these incentives that they've been driven towards through their whole career.

Bob Gallucci [00:39:09] I'm prepared to believe that's true. Not being one of those people myself, I don't know what it feels like to them. But I know that it's frustrating, if you're not technical and you look at this and someone tells you... I'm imagining some judge who's being told in a court case what a half life is and the half life of the actinides are 20,000 years and all of a sudden, well, you got to have a 20,000 year solution to this problem. I mean, you end up making it non solvable.

Bret Kugelmass [00:39:40] I know, I know, I know. I know. That's how my... at least my communication strategy has been like radically shift the Overton Window to the point where... Because people... Yeah. A judge or anyone or policymaker is not going to understand. They're not gonna take the time to understand technical arguments. And even if they do, they might not be convinced because like the social aspects are just the fact that more people live close to them or telling them something different might overrule their own, like technical understanding of it, as hard fought as that would be to gain. And so, I mean, my thinking has just been you just have to shift the Overton Window. You just have to, with the most confidence humanly possible, say we need not just 100% nuclear, we need 200% nuclear. The light water reactors are the simplest, easiest, most proven thing that are awesome. Let's just do tens of thousands of gigawatts of them. And then people read that emotionally. And that's a more convincing argument rather than saying, "Here is how a light water reactor works."

Bob Gallucci [00:40:39] So let me ask you... Is it okay for me to ask you a question?

[00:40:42] Yeah, sure.

[00:40:42] So I heard you make the argument for what I think are called SMRs, small modular reactors. Yeah. And this all sounds good to me, but I generally think I want something that's really, really, really easy for the NRC to license. And I... what I wondered about was whether you thought this would be easy to license if you're, if you downscale. And I can understand why.... Capital costs of these large reactors and who's building reactor vessels as you correctly point out these days. So you might end up with something smaller. But is there a licensing issue with with a smaller vanilla light water reactor?

Bret Kugelmass [00:41:26] Okay. Yeah. So maybe let me lay out maybe a few different components to my answer. The first is that I am actually a big fan of big reactors too. I just think that the nuclear industry has lost its way in terms of the institutional knowledge necessary to do things cost effectively. And so in order to build back up that knowledge, you need to do the same thing over and over and over again. And in order to do the same thing over and over and over again, given today's like capital market constraints, the best way to do it is start small, so build 1000 small reactors, and then you can build a thousand big reactors. That's like my general philosophy on why small first. Now I'm coming to license-ability issue. The license-ability issue with the NRC as totally distinct from the license-ability issue globally. The NRC in their entire operating history, 47 years... Or actually I should say 48 years now, has never seen a full application through from start to finish. Ever. Ever. Not a single nuclear installation in this country was licensed by the NRC. Every single one of them are grandfathered in from the Atomic Energy Commission and Vogtle will be the first that has started with the NRC and will come online with the NRC. And so there's a big license-ability issue with the NRC, irrespective of your technology. Let's start with that. When it comes to the global licensing consideration, I believe that small light water reactors are the easiest because it's a technology that they're already intimately familiar with that we have a lot of operating experience with. However, you can vary many of your... Let's say safety margins and ratios to create a better scenario. So for instance, if you have a smaller core but still a bunch of steel in your reactor vessel around it, the amount of energy that is necessary to melt through that vessel proportional to the vessel thickness is much better in an SMR scenario. As such, it's much easier to prove things or have longer time periods to move energy from point A to point B with a small light water reactor to the international licensing community. That's my thesis.

Bob Gallucci [00:43:38] Uh huh. Makes sense. Makes sense. Okay.

Bret Kugelmass [00:43:43] Yeah. But no, I think... Yeah, I think we need tens of thousands of gigawatts. I think that we can make thousands of small reactors on the way to make thousands of medium reactors on the way to make tens of thousands of large reactors. And I think that's the pathway to, like, fully overhaul Earth's energy supply in a couple of decades.

Bob Gallucci [00:44:08] I like the argument that should appeal to anybody concerned about climate change that you can't get whatever you think is really possible with renewables. It's not possible in the next couple of decades. And unless something dramatic happens, the way I have learned about this with batteries, there is no way to provide baseload other than nuclear without a carbon problem.

Bret Kugelmass [00:44:40] Oh, totally. And I think the other component there is, I mean, the renewables industry has done such a good job branding themselves as the only problem is cost. And look at how well we're doing on the cost decline and look at how well batteries will follow in our footsteps. So that's their branding. What they're failing to ignore or they're failing to represent, I should say, what they are ignoring, is that on a per energy delivered basis, you are using a thousand times as much material for this like battery renewable combo as nuclear would. So although you're calling yourselves low carbon, you're not zero carbon. And when you add in the carbon footprint of storage and carbon footprint of renewables, it's not... I mean, it's yeah, it's about four times better than combined cycle natural gas, but it's not nothing. So like you still got a carbon problem. Like, you're not solving the problem that you set out to solve. So... But yeah, nuclear solves all that. Bob, we just have to get over this great stagnation.

Bob Gallucci [00:45:47] I'm for that.

Bret Kugelmass [00:45:49] All right. Any other... You're the guest, so I should get off my podium. What are the thoughts? What do you want to leave our audience with?

Bob Gallucci [00:45:58] If there are reasons why we haven't had reactor starts in the United States over the last bunch of decades... Usually the reasons that people allude to are safety first. Sometimes that spreads to not only the operation of the reactor, but waste and security. And I think what you have been doing is a very good job of addressing the first couple. And [00:46:31]what I would want people to understand is that there is such a thing as, from the perspective of international security, safe nuclear power. [8.6s] One has to be careful about what one does, but that doesn't mean we can't. And we have at least one negotiated agreement that did just that with respect to light water reactors. And that would have been a fine solution had the North Koreans not cheated on the enrichment area. But they did. And so it was not the solution. But I think I would want people to understand that running away from nuclear energy is a mistake. They need to understand a little bit more about it. And it is not as mysterious as people make it out. I mean, I teach this course to undergraduates and to the graduate students. The first half of the course, we don't talk about countries. It's only technology. It's the nuclear fuel cycle. It's the design of nuclear weapons. It's the intersection of those things. And the case I want to make is that you can... You need to be careful with nuclear energy, but you can produce safe and nuclear establishment that will deliver the kind of energy you want without the carbon footprint.

Bret Kugelmass [00:47:56] Bob Gallucci, everybody. Thank you so much.

Bob Gallucci [00:47:58] Thank you.

"If you enjoy this Titans of Nuclear episode, listen to our interviews with Lou Qualls (Molten Salt Reactors, Technical Director, Oak Ridge National Labs), Robert Hargraves (Co-Founder, ThorCon), and Thomas Jam Pederson (Co-Founder, Copenhagen Atomics.)

Bret Kugelmass [00:00:26] We're here today with Mikal Bøe, who is the founder and CEO of CORE POWER. Thank you so much for coming to the office. Happy to have you here.

Mikal Bøe [00:00:31] Pleasure to be here, Bret.

Bret Kugelmass [00:00:32] Yeah. So, as we love to do on Titans of Nuclear, I would love to get to know you as an individual before we get into the work that you're doing today. So, please start us off with where were you born and what was it like growing up?

Mikal Bøe [00:00:43] Well, I'm from Norway originally, and you know, was born in Norway, grew up in Norway until we moved to England when I was a teenager. I grew up in London, so I think of London as my home.

Bret Kugelmass [00:00:54] And why did your parents come to Norway or move from Norway to London?

Mikal Bøe [00:00:57] So, it was my father had a job in the city. And, you know, we moved over as a family and the family moved back. And I stayed, went to college, started my first business, got married, had children...

Bret Kugelmass [00:01:07] Wow, okay. You're racing way too fast! What did you end up studying in college?

Mikal Bøe [00:01:12] So, I studied performing arts to start with.

Bret Kugelmass [00:01:15] Okay, great.

Mikal Bøe [00:01:16] And then I went off and did an MBA realizing that performing arts was never going to...

Bret Kugelmass [00:01:20] Pay the bills.

Mikal Bøe [00:01:21] It was going to be too much fun and too little money. So, I did an MBA and then started my first company back in the 19... mid-1990s, 96, 97.

Bret Kugelmass [00:01:33] And what was that first company?

Mikal Bøe [00:01:35] So, that was for shipping. So, we started the dot com for the shipping industry, the first of the dot coms. That was when Yahoo! was a small company. So, we were really, you know, early at that stage. And it's still actually one of the few last surviving dot com companies for shipping.

Bret Kugelmass [00:01:50] Amazing. And what were some of the influences on your life leading up to that point that gave you that entrepreneurial spirit?

Mikal Bøe [00:01:57] Well, so my father was an engineer and my mother was a teacher. And, you know, we grew up, you know, in a time when, you know, Norway was... Actually now we think of Norway as one of the richest countries in the world. When I was little, it was one of the poorest countries in Europe.

Bret Kugelmass [00:02:15] And this is all just because of the oil boom?

Mikal Bøe [00:02:16] All because the oil boom.

Bret Kugelmass [00:02:17] And was your father in that type of engineering?

Mikal Bøe [00:02:20] So, he was in shipping. So, he was an engineer working in shipping.

Bret Kugelmass [00:02:23] Shipping runs through the family for you.

Mikal Bøe [00:02:25] Absolutely. And that's what we do. Norwegians, we're either in energy or shipping. That's kind of it. So I ended up working in shipping myself when I came out of college and, you know, had my first job back in the early nineties, you know, working for one of the big tanker organizations.

Bret Kugelmass [00:02:42] What did you do for them?

Mikal Bøe [00:02:43] So, I was selling market intelligence information on risk management, and I was quite interested in the risk management side of this business because shipping is one of those... markets where, you know, everything changes all the time. You know, the amount of risk that a shipping company faces, you know, out at sea and in the market. There's nothing like pretty much any other industry out there.

Bret Kugelmass [00:03:10] And what are the big risks? Is it risk of delay of shipment? Risk that the ship won't even make it there? What are the risks that are trying to most commonly be modeled in the shipping industry?

Mikal Bøe [00:03:21] I would say, Bret, that it's probably the most... one of the most if not the most competitive and unregulated industries in the world.

Bret Kugelmass [00:03:31] Wow.

Mikal Bøe [00:03:32] So it is a dog eat dog market. You know, it's never been a team sport. It's every man to himself. And you're basically trading for cargoes that make up global trade on a daily basis. So, you know, long term investments in technology and then trading the variability in the market's on top of those investments in, you know, a completely deregulated, completely global and, you know, entirely international market, you know, you're competing with people from all over the world doing, you know, with completely different standards than the ones that you might have set for yourself.

Bret Kugelmass [00:04:12] You're competing to do what? To get some good from point A to point B? So what's... But then tie me back to the risks specifically that are worth being modeled than the industry. Is it just risk of a commodity price changing before you get something from A to B?

Mikal Bøe [00:04:29] So, you know, I actually came into the... came into the business working with risk management. I spent about 30 years working risk management in shipping before I started CORE POWER. And it's predominantly... it's a technology risk and counterparty risk market. So, you know, the investments in technology that you make are large capital expenditures and they tend to be... They tend to be risks that you don't necessarily get paid for. So you go in and you spend a lot of money on investing in good quality technology and maintenance of that technology, ships and machinery, etc.. Even terminals. And there's always somebody out there who can do it cheaper and not necessarily better but certainly do it cheaper. So you have this constant market risk. You have counterparty risk because the number of counterparties that you're dealing with that are not in your jurisdiction. But, you know, from somewhere else in the world.

Bret Kugelmass [00:05:29] I see. So you're talking about... When you talk about risk, you're talking about the part of shipping that is selling ships or building terminals, not necessarily getting goods from point A to point B.

Mikal Bøe [00:05:38] No, the whole thing.

Bret Kugelmass [00:05:38] The whole thing. Okay.

Mikal Bøe [00:05:39] Yeah, literally it pervades the whole thing. I mean, if you look at what's happened to the Americans or the US shipping industry, it's, you know, it's a shadow of its former self.

Bret Kugelmass [00:05:47] Yeah. Why is that?

[00:05:48] It's been out-competed by the rest of the world. You know, you've got high regulatory barriers around the American shipping industry. You've got high costs that come from the way that things have been set up here. And you've got a government that's not necessarily supportive of that industry in the way that you find in other places. It's not the appreciated if you like. The value of the industry isn't so appreciated. So it's kind of lost its allure, but it's, you know, it's the same that's happened... Same happened here as it's happened in Europe. You know, we've kind of lost that competitive advantage to Asia. It started with the Japanese, then it was the Koreans and now it's the Chinese. And then we'll see what happens next. But it's predicated on this idea that, you know, or rather this fact, not an idea, this fact that the technology that we use today in shipping is the same as what we used 110 years ago. It's just ships are bigger, but they're the same, you know, nothing... So imagine if we had cars... Driving around in cars in Washington, DC today that were literally pretty much exactly the same as they were in the 1930's.

Bret Kugelmass [00:06:43] I mean, isn't that kind of the case? Up until the electric cars, we've had mostly internal combustion engine cars for 100 years. And is there anything wrong with that? Because I assume on ships, the engines keep getting better and better to run the ships, too. Right. So then is there a need for innovation in ships?

Mikal Bøe [00:06:59] Well, so what happens with this is that the competitive advantage that you get from investing in good technology, you know, well-built ships, ships that are well maintained, that are built to a high standard, is eroded because you can always find somewhere that will do it cheaper. And it's a race to zero. It's a race to the bottom. So quality becomes a secondary consideration. The environment becomes a secondary consideration. And it's extremely difficult to compete in a market where, you know, apart from in the US shipping industry, which is regulated, which is a closed market and outside companies can't compete here. But then it becomes smaller and smaller as time goes by.

Bret Kugelmass [00:07:43] And so what happens then? Just, I guess different countries become good at different parts of the technology stack. Some become the shipbuilders, some become the ship software maintainers, some become the risk management companies. Is that how then it works? And just kind of different countries based on whatever their industries are, just take on a different part of the shipping industry?

Mikal Bøe [00:08:05] I think what we've seen, Bret, over the last 20 years is we've seen China becoming the predominant player in this. You know, you've got a huge amount of new shipyards that are being put up. You've got very cheap labor operating under pretty appalling conditions most of the time with cheap steel, with, you know, cheap designs, sort of, you know, designed in a hurry, built in a hurry type designs and then operated by large Chinese companies who fed the enormous influx of commodities and goods into China. So, China's been a big factor in this. But of course, it started with the Japanese, then the Koreans, and then now the Chinese. Now the Japanese are starting to find themselves in a situation that, you know, similar to the situation that the US and Europe found itself in sort of 20 years ago, which was, you know, the competition is getting too heavy. It's not about competing for quality, it's about competing for price. And you can always, you know, you can continue down that route and eventually you're going to have to you know, your standards are going to have to, you know, have to be compromised. So, I think, you know, this is the exciting thing about the shipping industry is that, you know, it is 85% of global trade. You know, it is an incredibly vital component of everything that we do. I mean, you know, what you wear, what you have in your house, what you come in touch with every single day, has some sort of ocean transportation component in it.

Bret Kugelmass [00:09:27] You know, it's amazing.

Mikal Bøe [00:09:28] The trousers, corn flakes that you eat in the morning or shoes that you wear. You know, there's something in the house or the apartment...

Bret Kugelmass [00:09:35] It's truly amazing, and I've heard the same thing said about energy, and obviously that makes sense. So let's tie these two together. When did you decide to change your focus from strictly the shipping industry to becoming part of the energy industry?

Mikal Bøe [00:09:46] Well, let's see. So, I was working as Chief Risk Officer for a reasonably large dock-listed shipping company in New York and also in Singapore. And it was around about the sort of mid 20's... So around about 2015, 2016, when it became quite clear that decarbonization of the shipping industry was going to become a real thing. And we'd all looked at it and thought surely not, I mean, of all things, why? Why would you... Why would you stop? Why would you stop global trade? Why would you... You know global trade is driven by the big diesel engine. It's the beating heart of global trade. Why would you stop that? And you see the International Maritime Organization, which is the UN Agency for Maritime Regulation, see the member states, they're pushing very hard for this drive to zero in an industry that basically is the waste management stream of the global oil industry. Remember that ships burn the stuff that's left over...

Bret Kugelmass [00:10:45] The bunker oil.

Mikal Bøe [00:10:46] Yeah, the bunker fuel. That's right. The stuff that's left over at the end of the refining process. So we are sort of, you know, waste to energy. Right. But it's happening and it's being pushed harder and harder and harder. And these limits are being set for 2030, 40 and 50 where the industry said, ""Well, you got to get to zero."" Well, you know, these ships, Bret, are huge.

Bret Kugelmass [00:11:06] Yeah.

Mikal Bøe [00:11:06] I mean, you're talking about 400 meter long ships that, you know, carry hundreds of thousands of tons of cargo.

Bret Kugelmass [00:11:12] Yeah. It's amazing.

Mikal Bøe [00:11:13] It's very difficult to imagine how you were not going to run an efficient energy system on board those.

Bret Kugelmass [00:11:17] Can I ask a silly question before we get to the solution that I think everyone knows that we're getting to? Let me just ask a silly question first. The shipping industry used to be powered, totally renewable, right, through wind. Right. That was... The original ship propulsion technology was sails. How come that never evolved to just make like giant sails or some other type of like, wind... I mean, there's plenty of wind out in the ocean, right? So, how come... Or like directed wind funnel energy, I mean, how come that science never advanced? Because you figure, ""Yeah, they got a lot of wind out there and it started off that way.."" That someone would invent some sort of new sail technology.

Mikal Bøe [00:11:56] Well, there's no such thing as a silly question, isn't it, Bret? You know, but to be fair, until steamships and the big diesel engine came along, we didn't have globalization. You had some... You had some international trade on small wooden ships. I mean, you look at the biggest sailing ships in the world as they were in the 1870s. And you know, they're smaller than yachts these days, right. So you'd move a few hundred, maybe a few thousand tons of cargo around very slowly, and you'd have to sit and wait for the wind to turn in order to be able to leave the harbor. Now, with the dawn of the steam engine and the diesel engine came after that, you know, you then had this opportunity to keep goods moving and you could then start, you know, properly exporting from one country to the other countries that were exporting raw materials to places where you'd started adding value to them. You know, steel industry started coming through... The Industrial Revolution. You started seeing a lot of movement of coal for energy. And, you know, we're digging coal in our own backyard before then... Now, we'd start importing it. We had grain transportation. You had the transportation of, you know, durable consumer goods as the container shipping industry started coming through in the 1970s. So, you know, it enabled a huge amount of innovation and it gave us globalization. If we stop that, you'd have to say, ""Right. Globalization is over."" You know, small wooden ships that bob on the top of the sea with big sails. Yeah, fine. But if we've got a 400,000 ton ship carrying iron ore from one part of the planet to another, you know, no matter how much wind you put, it's not going to go very far.

Bret Kugelmass [00:13:35] Okay, great. So then you probably need something a little bit more power dense. That's what brought us to fuels. And now to the next generation, so tell us about that. Tell us about how nuclear gets applied to the shipping industry now.

Mikal Bøe [00:13:47] So there's two sides to this. And what we were talking about earlier on was just this idea that, you know, as the industry's sort of competitiveness drives the costs, there's a race to zero. It becomes very difficult to be competitive. So we need to find new way to be competitive. And that comes from innovation. That comes from a new way of doing things, the same as when we went from sail to steam and from steam to diesel. Something else has to happen, and it's being driven by this global community's wish to go to zero. So if you're going to have zero emission vessels, well, you're going to have to abandon combustion. If you're going to abandon combustion, what have you got left? What can you do? There has to be a nuclear component in it. So... I think the way we see it, Bret, you know, we don't see a hundred thousand trips out there with the reactors on board. Certainly not for propulsion. I don't think that's really the way that this is going to go. I think we're going to see a sort of bifurcation. You know, the very largest ships out there could benefit enormously from nuclear propulsion.

Bret Kugelmass [00:14:55] How many cargo ships are out there in the world?

Mikal Bøe [00:14:57] About 100,000.

Bret Kugelmass [00:14:58] 100,000 that do like... What I would think of, like shipping containers.

Mikal Bøe [00:15:01] Yeah and bulk cargo, dry bulk cargoes, liquid bulk cargoes and then break bulk, you know, things like cars and trucks, etc.. And then you have containers.

Bret Kugelmass [00:15:10] And what is the history of nuclear power in the shipping industry? Because there had been prototypes, experiments, full ships that have done this before? Tell me about that.

Mikal Bøe [00:15:19] Well, you know, so the... all the reactors operating in the world or have operated in the world today, you know, more than half of them have been at sea.

Bret Kugelmass [00:15:26] Yeah. Like submarines.

Mikal Bøe [00:15:27] Submarines, you know, naval vessels. But it's a very different thing. You know, we can't use naval technology in civilian shipping. It's inappropriate. It just doesn't... It's not fit for purpose. It's good for the Navy. It's not good for the civilian industry. And the examples we've seen of commercial vessels or demonstration vessels, there was one here in the US back in the 1950s  and sixties called The Savannah... She's moored in Baltimore's, she's a beautiful ship. The Atoms for Peace ship. She was... But she was a demonstration of you know what nuclear could do as a civilian industry rather than as a weapons industry. And, you know, in order to move this reactor around the world and show the people, they had to put it on a ship. So they created this beautiful ship... But she wasn't really a commercial ship. She wasn't meant to make money.

Bret Kugelmass [00:16:15] But how come it didn't catch on, then? If obviously the technology works at sea, the submarines have it. And they had this... They had the idea back then. What stopped it from maturing?

Mikal Bøe [00:16:26] So, I think what's happened is that we've only really had access to or we've only really had one technology that we could conceive of using at sea, which is the, you know, pressurized low water reactors, pressurized water reactors, naval reactors, effectively. And there's a massive barrier. There's a regulatory and legislative barrier to the civilian industries, commercial shipping industry, using naval reactor technology because it's the domain of the Navy. And you know that part rightly so. They don't want to share that with anybody. They run on high enriched uranium. Very high...

Bret Kugelmass [00:16:59] The naval ships or the naval submarines used high enriched uranium? Right. Okay. So that's out.

Mikal Bøe [00:17:04] So that's totally off. So now you're going to use low enriched uranium in these reactors, which is perfectly feasible. But then you've got a refueling cycle, which is every 18 to 24 months.

Bret Kugelmass [00:17:13] And what's wrong with that?

Mikal Bøe [00:17:14] So by extension, what you would have is you'd have vessels having to be refueled either at very... A lot of refueling stations around the world, but the infrastructure would have to be built out full or you'd have to do it in ports. And now you've got nonproliferation and you've got... You know, you've got security issues and all these sort of things with, you know, refueling a reactor in a commercial port. The second thing, which I think is key, is that all of these pressurized reactor systems require an emergency planning zone around them that are by extension quite large.

Bret Kugelmass [00:17:48] And why is that different for non pressurized reactors?

Mikal Bøe [00:17:51] Because in a non pressurized reactor you have the, in theory at least, you have the possibility of shrinking that EPZ down to the boundary of the vessel. If you've got a low source term and you've got an ambient pressure reactor, you could then contain that reactor, you know, on board a vessel and not have the EPZ extend beyond the boundary. And that changes the liability regime around it...

Bret Kugelmass [00:18:16] Though I'm not quite following the logic there. What does that have to do with pressurized technology? To me, my understanding is irrespective of how you split the atom, you are left with a certain amount of radioactive material. They actinides or fission products. That's every single technology. So, you have the source term there. And then the emergency planning zone, as far as I understand it, is about in an emergency, the movement of that source term. And so there are different types of emergencies that might get created. Some of them might have to do with the pressure, but most of them, as far as I understand from a licensing perspective, don't have to do with pressure. It's a matter of what if someone attacks your equipment? Whether you are high pressure system or low pressure system, you have a collection of radionuclides and the thing that attacked your system could spread that same source term out an equal distance, whether or not it was a pressurized reactor versus a non pressurized reactor.

Mikal Bøe [00:19:24] So with pressurized reactors, of course you have the potential for the formation of a plume. So if you have water cooled reactors with a high pressure steam inside, you have that potential formation of a plume that you can contain that. But, you know, the... But the rules or regulations I see today is set that emergency planning zone at a certain size around.

Bret Kugelmass [00:19:41] But why would another technology not have a plume?

Mikal Bøe [00:19:44] If you have a non pressurized reactor and you have no formation of any hydrogen from water that's cooling that reactor or any... any high pressurized gas that's in there, then even if you have a leak, you will not have... It will not have a plume that would come from that system.

Bret Kugelmass [00:20:04] Hmm. Maybe we'll come back to that because I do want to hear more about the launch of your technology. So, tell us what your solution is.

Mikal Bøe [00:20:09] So we've been working with literally looking across the whole spectrum of different types of technologies that are out there and seeing which ones are the ones that can meet these key criteria for maritime. And the key criteria for us to be able to use this in maritime, and this we're talking propulsion now, which of course, has other the challenges too, not least export control, but also for use in floating nuclear that can... you can use to create synthetic fuels for the industry of ports around the world. The three criteria that we've identified together with the industry that need to be met in order for this to succeed, is that we need, first of all, to be able to create a system that has an emergency planning zone that is small enough for us to be able to shrink the liability around moving these reactors in and out of ports and moving up and down waterways. Because an emergency planning zone that extends into a port or a port city, it's basically a public... an unlimited public liability that no commercial civilian shipping company would be able to or even be allowed to take on. So, you know, this is why this naval technology, for the most part, you know, has a nation standing behind it and you know, that's the guarantee. The second one is that we have to be able to make these reactors affordable. So we have to go from that. You know, I think like so many people who have come on this podcast before, probably said, you know, you need to go from a sort of project to a product. We need to be able to manufacture these reactors in a way. So you have to have the manufacturability, the modularity and the manufacturability. I think you guys are working on this too, you know, to be able to do this and it has to be small enough then to be able to fit and give the right kind of power. And the last thing is, I would like to see us running very long fuel cycles. So the idea that we don't have to stop reactors and refuel them in ports around the world, but rather have reactors that can function for a very long time without refueling, potentially with inline refueling, so that you're topping up at full power rather than stopping and taking and replacing the fuel. It gives that potential for a sort of upfront CapEx on the energy system that lasts for the lifetime of a ship, which is usually between 20 and 30 years.

Bret Kugelmass [00:22:52] Okay. And so this led you to which technology?

Mikal Bøe [00:22:55] So then we looked through pretty much everything that's out there. And we came down to the conclusion that the two ones that really meet these criteria, there are those that could potentially meet this as well, but the ones that meet them the best is the molten salt reactor. And, of course, there are different types of molten salt reactor designs out there as well. And the second one is the heat pipe... micro heat pipe reactor, which we think is a very interesting potential to do this. It's sort of more like a sort of battery type thing rather than just a reactor. The molten salt reactor is one that we thought was or we still think is probably the one that has the ultimate solution for this. But in looking at then who's developing molten salt reactors, who's looking at different types of designs and what they're doing... You know, it's you get down to the second set of criteria that we haven't talked about, but which I'll bring up now. The second set of criteria is really if you're going to do this, I mean, the most important thing is that there is a feasibility in execution. Can they actually be built? Are the guys that are building these things... Do they have the facilities? Do they have the people? Do they have the skills? And do they have that awesome financial firepower behind them that you need in order to get to a point where you can not just demonstrate but commercialize this technology? And I think that's the big issue for Gen4 reactors today is, you know, it's getting the investments in behind the technology, which is driven by a customer base that, you know, actually has demand and offtake possibilities for this technology and getting them interested and excited in this on the basis that, you know, they can see quite clearly that, yes, the team that's building this has the capability and they have the support and the financial firepower to be able to actually do it. Because I think all of these reactors will work somehow. They will all function if you build them, but you know which ones are actually going to get built? So we've chosen then to work with, you know, certain select parties. And, you know, we're very pleased with the way things are going.

Bret Kugelmass [00:25:05] So which select parties meet that criteria?

Mikal Bøe [00:25:08] So we're on the team with TerraPower and Southern Company to develop the molten chloride fast reactor, and we've chosen that for two reasons. One is that the molten chloride fast reactor, which no one's ever built before. So it's, you know, it's a technology risk right there. But, you know, the fact that it's a molten salt reactor without a moderator, tends to be a graphite moderator, enables us to avoid that issue of exchanging that moderator... every six, seven years. Again, a big issue for the reliability and the sort of maintainability of a marine system. So if we can get the molten chloride fast reactor to function properly, and we can get it to work as a long term, reliable machine, then, you know, it is, you know, potentially the ultimate solution for the shipping industry.

Bret Kugelmass [00:25:54] And so you said you started to work with TerraPower. So what's the division of responsibilities between your company and their company?

Mikal Bøe [00:26:01] So, you know, it's a team effort. So we operate under this risk reduction award that was issued by the Department of Energy under the... advanced reactor demonstration program. And the Risk Reduction Award is really there to eliminate some of the key risks that sit in developing this type of technology, you know, corrosion and erosion, thermal hydraulics, etc., which we need to be done. I mean, there's still a long way to go. Now, there's three companies in this group. It's TerraPower, it's Southern Company and it's CORE POWER. And we all have, we all bring something to the table. TerraPower, of course, are the reactor designers and the builders of this technology... Phenomenal capability. Southern Company are the ones that have, you know, the nuclear operating experience, that bring the licensing and regulatory side of it, as well as the operational side of it. And we are bringing, if you like, the market. We're bringing the customer demand for this and bringing that manufacturability, the capability and manufacturability of these systems for a larger market. And that focus is not on propulsion, that focus is then on floating nuclear. So if we can demonstrate that we can make these reactors work in a marine environment, which is a dynamic environment, it's pitching, it's rolling to an extent. Then, you know, we're creating a reactor system that would also be perfectly happy on land, so if it works at sea, it works on land, but not necessarily the other way around. So if we can demonstrate this as a floating reactor system where you're basically taking the idea that you're manufacturing reactors in an environment either in or near to a shipyard, a shipyard that is specifically set out to build floating nuclear power stations. You know, we could create a manufactured floating nuclear power station product that instead of having a workforce of thousands of people that are moving from project site to project site, they're not staying in the same place and building the same machines all over, you know, again and again. So we can then float them out to where they need them...

Bret Kugelmass [00:28:05] So is that what you guys do? You take the core technology that TerraPower is building for their land machines and you're adapting it? And are you custom designing a ship that goes around it as well?

Mikal Bøe [00:28:16] So we're custom designing the floating nuclear power stations around that. So we're not focusing on the ships. That's something that could come later on. Remember, we have something called the International Trade in Arms Regulation, ITAR, that sits here in the United States, part of the US munitions list where naval nuclear propulsion is an item and it's not an exportable product at this point. So ITAR stands in the way of us being able to promote this as a propulsion product. Unless of course it's entirely a US fleet operating in U.S. waters, which is perfectly possible and we could potentially get to that. But at this point, we're focusing then on getting these reactors out on a floating path. So you have, if you like, mobile power stations that you can manufacture in one place and then move to a static place or a site where they would sit feeding, you know, coastal industry, feeding power to the floating systems that would desalinate water and create green hydrogen so they could... synthetic fuels, etc.. That would either feed land based transportation or ocean transportation. Or they could be used as part of an energy system where you load following for offshore wind, for example, in front of a land based energy system.

Bret Kugelmass [00:29:32] But I guess maybe I'm still having trouble understanding what exactly is your product? What does it look like? It's a power plant wrapped around TerraPower's core that goes on a ship?

Mikal Bøe [00:29:43] We think of it more like in a modular fashion. So the power plant itself, the power station itself, it's a... So I mean, I wish I could show you here, but, you know, we have several designs. One of them is a... what's called a spa design. So it's a circular hull with a skirt underneath it that is very, very stable hydro statically. And it's perfect for places like the US Gulf, the Atlantic and other places used in the offshore oil and gas industry a lot. And it is a phenomenally stable and large scale steel structure. And we would then... We then, looking at how we could then fit the reactor, the reactors themselves, you know, pre-manufactured into these in a modular fashion. So in a sense, they're manufactured separately. So we're not building the power station around the reactor, but rather building that power station, that floating power station, with all of its power conversion systems, turbine technology and its electrical systems, and then having the reactors then fitted to that. But, you know, in these specialized shipyards, that we're looking to establish.

Bret Kugelmass [00:30:53] And... But does TerraPower have to redesign their core technology to fit in your application? How big is their standard power block? How much power does it create?

Mikal Bøe [00:31:06] So, it's still early stage, right? So, we're still in the risk reduction awards parts of this. So that's still to be determined. But we could get this up to I mean, I think, you know, the sort of the standard large design version of this machine would be 720 megawatt thermal.

Bret Kugelmass [00:31:22] Okay. So you're going to build... And so that's your concept then. You're going to take their 720 megawatt thermal reactor core, and then you are going to build something around that to create power on the ocean.

Mikal Bøe [00:31:35] Yeah.

Bret Kugelmass [00:31:35] Okay. And then that's your part of the product, is you build that system that integrates into their standard core. But they've got to get it to you somehow, right. So they're shipping... Where are they producing their core?

Mikal Bøe [00:31:47] So, the concept here, Bret, is that we would produce these two in the same place.

Bret Kugelmass [00:31:53] Okay, so you're teaming up with TerraPower to create a new manufacturing facility that is going to make both their core and also your balance of plant, for lack of a better term, that goes around it, that is an ocean worthy structure, and then you're going to drag it, float it, move it to whatever your customer is.

Mikal Bøe [00:32:16] That's the concept.

Bret Kugelmass [00:32:17] And when? Give me the what... the when and how much question everyone always wants to know. So when would the first one be built and operational and how much is it going to cost?

Mikal Bøe [00:32:27] It's difficult to answer those questions, actually, because we don't know. But I'd say that the earliest that we could possibly do this is in the mid 2030s. You know, we need to be able to demonstrate that technology works, we need to be able to demonstrate that it works, you know, in the floating environment. We need to be able to demonstrate to the licensing authorities that this is the right kind of approach to this and that they would be happier for us to do this. That's not a trivial matter. And then if we can start demonstrating this in the early to mid thirties, not to the full commercial scale, but in a small scale system, I think we can start getting these out there in sometime in the 2030s. I mean, if we have a full scale one out by 2040, I'd be very pleased. How much is going to cost? You know, that's, a lot of that is guesswork at this point. But we've looked, rather than the actual costs of everything, we've looked at the comparative costs between building a similar sized power station on land in the way that you would do with large construction project, lots of concrete, lots of people, etc.. You know, we've looked at the efficiencies of doing this in the shipyards and we've got a number of large shipyards as our shareholders and, you know, who help us with understanding what their various processes are, etc.. And we've looked at all of the various component processing, creating these power stations the same way that you would do ships. You know, you don't build one and then you start on the other, you start with one, you move that portion to the next part of the shipyard, then you start again with that. So you're constantly building. So you could potentially build nine at the same time, but slightly just behind each other. So I think we can get the cost of construction down to less than 50% of what the standard cost is today. And we can get the time of construction down substantially as well...

Bret Kugelmass [00:34:19] 2040 for the first commercial scale one seems pretty far out and it seems like a pretty high price to pay for the technology decisions that you've made about the potential plume or whatever it was or the long fueling cycle. Why not build something that could be built in just three or four years and just get something up and running and sacrifice maybe some of your initial criteria, not have it last 20 years, but have it refuel every two years. I mean, normal plants refuel every two weeks. So like, why not lean up on some of your initial criteria just to get a product out the door faster?

Mikal Bøe [00:34:53] Well, I mean, you know, that's the beauty of doing it this way. I mean, we're all contributing towards, if you like, a sort of an ultimate solution, we think, for a sustainable energy system. But each one of these components can be used in many different ways. So that floating power plant that we're designing, it's not designed specifically for this technology, but it's designed with that technology in mind. So you could potentially put a BWR or a high temperature gas reactor or whatever you wanted on this. I mean, that's really up to the operators.

Bret Kugelmass [00:35:25] But why not make that the original plant? Since your company's primary IP is not the reactor core and you've got a business to run, right? And you've got this grand vision about, you know, decarbonizing global transportation, energy, which I love. I think that's just an amazing vision to work towards. So like, kudos to you and your team, but why not just take whatever the most off the shelf reactor is right now, whatever the Russians are doing with their icebreakers, the KLT 40S or whatever it is.... Why not just start with that, you know, get them to build you... Or not the Russians, but someone who can build whatever they built for the KLT, you know, hire Westinghouse, hire GE, hire Babcock and Wilcox, BWXC, sorry, hire someone who can just make the simplest... Hire the Argentineans who have an SMR, you know, it's like... and then just put that on some sort of metal skirt platform that you're talking about and just get something going, you know, get the first ten, you know, up and running in the next three or four years and just put them in not every application, but an application that works.

Mikal Bøe [00:36:31] That could well happen, Bret. That could well happen. You know, look, I think we have to approach the way that we build a business in this area. No one's ever done this before. So we have to approach the way we build a business in this, taking pretty much everything into account. And I've got a fondness for working backwards. Now, our ultimate aim here is if we can do this, is that we can get reactors out as propulsion units on large ships. So the... back to the propulsion part of this, you know, out of the 100,000 ships that we're talking about, about 7,000 of them consume 50% of all the fuels in the world. So, you're not talking about that many. It's not a very large portion of the fleet that would basically cut emissions in half and substantially change the competitiveness of our industry. I think if we work, you know, sort of one step forward at the time in whatever is the easiest way and whatever the easiest win is for each step that we take and we move forward in that way we'll end up going down routes that and avenues that are not going to get us to the target. I like to think of the big prize here which is that new, exciting, never done before technology solving these massive problems that we have in our shipping industry and the loss of other industries as well. And then rather think backwards from that. So if we then through those steps start going forwards again and said, well, ""What can we use with each... What can we do with each one of these component parts?"" Small power stations that are built in shipyards, large power stations, medium power stations, whatever, other floating concepts, all of that can be used for different technologies with different vendors, with different jurisdictions, etcetera, etcetera. But absolutely. But I think the way to get there is not to pick one and go for it, because we end up going down this cul de sac of developing that system. And that's it. That's how this industry needs to work. You know, you find a solution, you go for it. That's it. That's the direction you go. We've got our eyes on a big prize here, which could be a very long term. It could be something that we achieved long after I've gone.

Bret Kugelmass [00:38:44] But you said it out loud first, not me. But doesn't that scare investors? Doesn't that scare employees? Like, how do you create the momentum to sustain your company and raise the capital when the first product is going to be almost 20... Like the first commercial product will be almost 20 years from now. Like, I guess that's the... I mean, once again, I can't tell you how happy I am there are people like you in the world that are, you know, trying to take, you know, bite off these, like, huge projects and really just important problems. But it just makes me so nervous any time someone in the nuclear industry is willing to wait ten years to see their product come to market, because to me, ten years might as well be never, because, yes, you might be trading off some risks, but you're taking on just like the every day, you know, capitalization of your company risks and motivation of the employees risks. How do you deal with that?

Mikal Bøe [00:39:43] So it's interesting, you know, because when you think of investors in companies like ours and yours and other companies out there, you tend to think of venture capitalists, you tend to think of the sort of professional investors that are looking for a short term return. We have never spoken to a venture capital firm. We don't have any venture capital investors in our company. Our company is invested in by those that effectively will form the order book in the future. So this is the shipping industry. We've got large household names from the shipping industry, shipbuilding industry, big industrial corporations that make their living off the shipping industry, investing in us because they have a different outlook on these things. They don't think about the return over the next three or four or five years. They think in terms of... well, they obviously do... But, you know, in terms of when they're investing in us, they think about, you know, the next step beyond that. I mean, let me give you an example. So, the vast majority of all shipping companies in the world are family owned companies, and they passed from generation to generation in an extremely slow manner. Some person started this company 100 years ago. It's been passed to the son or the daughter, and it's going to continue happening for generations. And when the handover happens... it comes with a brief job description. And that job description has just two items on it. And the first one is, don't lose the money. And the second one is, make sure that by the time it's your turn to hand over the reins of this empire, that we're future ready. So make sure that you've gotten into the emerging technologies and emerging markets that we need to be able to be in so that, you know, in 20, 30, 40 years time when this company passes over to the next generation, you know, we can do this. That long term thinking, that extreme conservatism that so many people are afraid of is actually a fantastic benefit to firms like us because, you know, we've got these, you know, billionaire families that are saying, look, we understand this is going to be the solution, because what else is it going to be? Is somebody going to come up with some magic thing that's going to... that's going to drive this forward... Transportation, ocean transportation, global trade? It's not going to go away. It's going to continue to grow. And it's going to be an extremely important part of the global economy. And these guys are the guys who sell it. So I think that's... we approach that differently and that works really well. I mean, we just literally closed, you know, the third round of funding now... record amount of time, record short amount of time, I should say. Sorry. And we brought in some unbelievably large cap companies into our entire company.

Bret Kugelmass [00:42:36] And how much did you raise and how much do you need to raise?

Mikal Bøe [00:42:39] We raised 100 million.

Bret Kugelmass [00:42:40] We raise 100 million...?

Mikal Bøe [00:42:41] In this last round.

Bret Kugelmass [00:42:43] Great. And what does that 100 million get you to? What's the next milestone?

Mikal Bøe [00:42:47] So that, I think, gets us to the back end of this molten chloride reactor experiment that, you know, we're in the DOE program with TerraPower and Southern Company. It enables us to stand up to all of the obligations that we have to fund our part of that and to continue to expand our system around it. And then obviously, the studies on manufacturability, the investments in the kind of teams and engineering capabilities that we need to be able to create these designs, to bring these designs forward, to start doing testing on some of these designs, start doing some of that maritime regulatory work that's required to do this, that will.... That's all fed by this. It's certainly not the end of it. But, you know, I'm very confident having being able to do this. You know, we're a four year old company, right. You know, and we've gone from... We've gone from what was effectively a, you know, a crazy idea on an airplane to where we are today. And we just raised $100 million. And I think we can continue to do that because the spread of the investors in this round is not like somebody has come in and put in 90 of the 100. I mean, there's a lot of big companies who come in and, you know, taking a chunk of it with the idea that they would come in and follow that money and support us as we reach milestones, as we develop this business.

Bret Kugelmass [00:44:08] And so tell me just a little bit more... with a little bit more granularity that $100 million, what are you conducting physical experiments? Are you funding licensing exercises? How do you spend that money to move forward? Head count? Where does it all go?

Mikal Bøe [00:44:22] Very large part of it, of course, goes into our cost share of the reactor development program.

Bret Kugelmass [00:44:29] And... Break that out for me. So you put money into this consortium with TerraPower and Southern and you own some part of the IP that comes out of it. Is that the idea?

Mikal Bøe [00:44:41] So the idea is that we share the ownership of the technology once it's built...

Bret Kugelmass [00:44:46] So you have a perpetual license to use it?

Mikal Bøe [00:44:48] Yeah.

Bret Kugelmass [00:44:49] Can you also re-license that technology?

Mikal Bøe [00:44:53] No, we would be a partner in, you know, the joint venture that would sit around this technology and that joint venture would be responsible for licensing. So we would probably be a, you know...

Bret Kugelmass [00:45:05] But that joint venture owns IP as well, it's not just a project entity to build something?

Mikal Bøe [00:45:14] Correct.

Bret Kugelmass [00:45:14] Okay, great.

Mikal Bøe [00:45:14] So a large portion of the money goes into our portion of the cost share and developing that technology. And then it's... and then there's sort of two big parts that come on the outside of that, which is really on the Marine side. One of them is that engineer... engineering and designing that we do. We have an in-house naval architecture studio that works with, you know, the shipyards that we have as shareholders and others, you know, to develop the designs of various floating solutions from very small to very large and everything in between and all of the component parts of that. Then there's a lot of engineering that goes in behind that. That's engineering design, a lot of it's testing, a lot of it's... It's the kinds of things that we do at this early stage. We haven't built anything yet that floats. And then the second part of it is really the regulatory side, because licensing and and regulation on the nuclear side, of course, we leave to the team. I mean, we've got Southern Company on our team there. You know, can't think of anyone better at doing that. And we certainly wouldn't want to get involved in that process within NRC, etc.. But on the maritime side, you know, we've got the US as a flag state, we've got the UK as a flag state, we've got Japan as a flag state. These are all members of the International Maritime Organization and at the International Energy Agency in Vienna there's collaboration between the IAEA and the IMO on what happens in the floating domain. There's many people talking about floating, but, you know, we're actually, you know, building... designing solutions for this. So making sure that we can support those... the agencies of those member states to be able to drive the right kind of rule changes and modernization of existing rules. I mean, there are rules that have been in place since the 1970s for floating, but they're kind of old, you know, they're a little out of date now. They don't really reference all the... all the latest rules and regulations in the IAEA and in the IMO and anywhere else for that matter. So we support them. We work through NGOs here and in Europe to make sure that we can support all the right kind of documentation, data and everything else that gets behind making sure that we have appropriate rules by the time we get to build these. And you know, my hope and aspiration is that new appropriate versions of these old rules are available for scrutiny at the IMO already in 25... 24, 25.

Bret Kugelmass [00:47:53] And tell me more about the nuclear licensing component. I know that's not going to be your domain, but do you have some estimate as to when that will be complete? So then you can start informing the rest of your business growth?

Mikal Bøe [00:48:04] No, not at this point.

Bret Kugelmass [00:48:06] Okay. Before the end of the decade or  not until 2030s, do we think we'll have a nuclear license on that core part?

Mikal Bøe [00:48:12] We'd like to hope that this is a process that's already started. It's a process that, you know, I mean, every regulator that you go and speak to say, ""Please come to us first, come to us at the beginning, come and talk to us from the start so we can understand what it is that you're doing."" Rather than come towards the end and say, ""Look, this is what we've built, can you take a look at it?"" So I think that long term process with the primary regulator, which is likely to be here in the United States is something that's... discussions have been going on for some time, and they will continue to evolve into what is effectively a licensing process, but we're not there yet.

Bret Kugelmass [00:48:46] Okay, great. What else should we know about your business?

Mikal Bøe [00:48:51] We are a four year old business and we have set up here in Washington DC. So we're growing our presence in the American market. We have a small office here run by our trusted colleague Tony Houston, who's actually sitting in the room with us, and we're building a team here as we speak. We're going to be opening an office in Tokyo in the summer, probably in June. We'll see. But it's going to be May or June. And those are the three sort of centers that we're going to be working in. So we have a business that's split across marine engineering, naval architecture and regulation, client programs. You know, we've you know, not only are we building technology for this market, but we're also building a market for the technology. This demand from the global shipping industry and ocean transportation is not one that is identified easily. So we've been building, you know, specifically a client program for shipping companies and industrial companies and energy companies to come in and be part of this process. And it's going extremely well. Great.

Mikal Bøe [00:49:55] Yeah.

Bret Kugelmass [00:49:56] And any final words for our audience?

Mikal Bøe [00:49:58] Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Bret Kugelmass [00:49:59] Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming in, telling us about your very exciting company. And where can people go to find more information, do you have a website or a URL we should share?

Mikal Bøe [00:50:11] Yeah. Corepower.energy.

Bret Kugelmass [00:50:11] Corepower.energy.

Mikal Bøe [00:50:12] So yeah, come and talk to us. Always happy to have discussions with anyone. Thank you."