TITANS OF NUCLEAR

Olivia Columbus [00:00:59] So we are here today on Titans of Nuclear with Katie Silver, who is the Project Director for Nuclear North America and Energy Transition at Reuters Events. Katie, welcome to Titans.

Katie Silver [00:01:11] Thank you so much. Thank you.

Olivia Columbus [00:01:14] So we're really excited to have you here today to talk all about the Reuters SMR and Advanced Reactor Conference that's coming up. But first, let's learn a little bit about you. Where'd you grow up and kind of what's your background? How did you get into energy?

Katie Silver [00:01:26] So I'm from London, and I suppose I've always had like a deep connection with nature, just sort of the way that I was raised and my family. And so I then went to Newcastle University to study geography, and then I started at Foster + Partners, which is an architecture firm, and then WSP, which is an engineering firm, and sort of used my interest in geography for both of those roles. And then I was a producer for health and social care, which is quite a different role, obviously, but I realized my interest in production there. And then from that, I wanted to challenge myself a bit further and started at Reuters with Energy Transition for Asia-Pacific. And then in December after that, I was given Nuclear Energy for North America and internationally. So that's what I'm working on at the moment.

Olivia Columbus [00:02:24] Very cool. And so when you were working on energy transition, what kinds of projects and events were you working on there?

Katie Silver [00:02:30] It was just a kind of macro, top level discussion about infrastructure, technology, hydrogen and all those sorts of things that are key within the energy transition space, but with a view of Asia-Pacific, specifically. So that was really, really interesting. And we're doing that again this year. But yes, as I said for the moment, it's nuclear for me. So, yes.

Olivia Columbus [00:02:54] That's really great. And so what was it like when you sort of were given that task of the nuclear events? Was there sort of a learning curve you had to go through. What was that like?

Katie Silver [00:03:06] Yeah, absolutely. So energy transition, obviously nuclear plays like a key part in net zero. So there is quite a link between the two areas. But I didn't have as in-depth knowledge, I suppose, of nuclear. So that was quite a learning curve kind of going into that. And I didn't know what SMR stood for in December, and now I'm running the SMR and Advanced Reactor event. So obviously that's quite a jump, but I've learned a lot and we do a lot of in-depth research for our events, maybe 40 hours plus and 30 calls with speakers, so you learn a lot very quickly, and people are always willing to share their knowledge. So that's great.

Olivia Columbus [00:03:49] So you mentioned the SMR and Advanced Reactor Conference. We're really excited for the upcoming conference; we're going to be there recording Titans episodes. And Bret has spoken at this conference before. It's very well-regarded to the industry. Tell us a little bit about the conference, how it started, sort of the history of it.

Katie Silver [00:04:08] Yeah, sure. So it was previously known as Nuclear Energy Insider. I believe there were like nine events previous to 2019. That was the last in-person event. So yeah, we're really excited to be back in person again. And obviously a lot of momentum has built within the industry since that time with lots of new licenses and progresses in deployment and commercialization. So it's going to be really interesting to see everyone come together and talk about all these recent developments. We've seen so much interest already. It's really, really great. So yeah, we're looking forward to it.

Olivia Columbus [00:04:48] Yeah. And so the conference is in Atlanta this year. Why the United States and why Atlanta?

Katie Silver [00:04:54] So the United States, just because there's a lot of movement there with the likes of NuScale and so on. And they're a key market in terms of SMRs and advanced reactors. We are also going to have a lot of U.K. Interest as well because we have the likes of Rolls-Royce SMR attending too and speaking. So it's a focus on North America but also with other countries participating too.

Olivia Columbus [00:05:23] Yeah, I know you guys have... U.S., Canada is a big one. I know you guys have some folks from there and then and in the U.K. So tell us a little bit about who's going to be speaking at the event and some of the major topics you guys are hoping to cover.

Katie Silver [00:05:37] Yes. So we have amazing speakers this year, like really, really high caliber. We have C-suite speakers from NuScale Power, Constellation Energy Corporation, who were previously Exelon. We also have the CEO of Rolls-Royce SMR. We also have the chairman of the USNRC and the president of CNFC, Energy Northwest. I mean, we also have... We have so many people I could go on and bore you with my voice, but we have Ms. Liddy Ebrod as well from the International Energy Agency. So that's amazing. She's the Deputy Director General. And we just haven't seen such a high level, I think, since the event began. So yeah, it's super exciting.

Olivia Columbus [00:06:25] That's really exciting. So you know, obviously there are a lot of different folks who are coming into these conversations. What are some of the main topics that you guys are hoping to to cover, whether it's financing or licensing or technology? Where are you trying to focus these conversations?

Katie Silver [00:06:45] So I guess the main kind of focus is the short and long term future of nuclear, which is obviously very broad. So we've broken it down into technological, regulatory and investment news. And then we've kind of got five key pillars, the first being commercialization, generating investment, and then key steps and learnings for SMR development. And then we have recruitment flows and kind of nuclear and talent. And then to end, we have playing our part in the transition. So where SMRs fit into net zero and the future energy mix.

Olivia Columbus [00:07:21] Very cool, very cool. Well, that sounds like a really exciting conference. Which of those conversations are you most looking forward to?

Katie Silver [00:07:31] I think all of them, but I'm biased. I suppose also for me it would be playing our part in the transition, obviously coming from that space initially. It's interesting to kind of see what people think about their role in net zero and the impact they're actually going to have. So that's exciting in itself.

Olivia Columbus [00:07:51] Yeah. And so, how are you sort of helping to frame these conversations within that broader energy transition movement? You know, nuclear is one very important part of that movement, and sort of how do you work that in?

Katie Silver [00:08:08] So I suppose you have to think about the different kinds of elements that come into play in terms of the transition itself. That could also mean, I suppose, energy equity and giving people access to energy such as kind of local communities or alternative communities that are off the grid. So that's one element. And then also kind of like where do you put these SMRs? You could use old coal sites; that's a really good use of space and kind of old fossil fuel, kind of changing that up to be more beneficial. So yeah, there are lots of ways that you could look at it, I suppose.

Olivia Columbus [00:08:48] That's really exciting, yeah. And so I know, one thing you're really interested in is women and energy and sort of bridging that divide. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Katie Silver [00:08:58] Yes, definitely. So I think representation is obviously really, really important. And one of the calls that I had with Diane Cameron from the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, she said that at one event she was the only woman, I think. And I just think it can feel so isolating, I suppose, if you're in an industry and you just see one one woman at the top. And a lot of times, that doesn't even reflect the industry. I just think if you look hard enough, you'll find them. And if you maybe take speakers that aren't CEOs, but you involve VPs and so on, then you're more likely to get a fairer representation. So that's personally really important to me, and important to Reuters Events as well. So yeah, we've got some amazing women on board.

Olivia Columbus [00:09:49] That's really exciting. And you know, definitely, I think representative of maybe some of our experiences, it's definitely a male dominated industry, but we've been seeing so many, especially young women getting really involved in nuclear. It's really exciting to see, to go to some of these big industry conferences and see the number of young, not just female nuclear engineers, which is so great, but also women working in other areas related to nuclear. That's just been such an exciting change for us to see.

Katie Silver [00:10:25] Yeah, I just think the role of... If you have a position in your job to kind of move the needle and you have a say in who's being represented, then it's really important to act in it. Obviously I'm in a position where I choose the speakers and I choose the agenda based on a lot of research, but if you're in the position than I think it's your responsibility to actually follow through. We also believe in not having any "man-els." That's what we call them. So like, no all male panels.

Olivia Columbus [00:10:58] That's really great. Yeah, I love that. And that's something that is so important. How have you guys sort of managed... Obviously, we're in totally new times dealing with a pandemic and that is such a huge challenge for people who are running events. How have you guys managed that and worked around that?

Katie Silver [00:11:25] So obviously we're paying attention to the government guidelines and so on, and we run events all over the world. So it very much depends on the rules there. For example, in Atlanta versus APAC it would be very different, but this year is the first time we're going back to in-person events. I mean, there was one in Houston in November I think, and that went well. We've got good onsite health and safety measures and so on. So yeah, it's just kind of being flexible, but also moving forward now that everyone's a lot safer, hopefully. We feel a lot more confident about being back in person.

Olivia Columbus [00:12:04] That's great. We're really excited about the conference and we can't wait to do interviews at the conference. Definitely if people are there, they should come find us, come say "hi" to Titans of Nuclear. So let's talk a little bit about nuclear more broadly. You're from the U.K.; obviously, it's a really important energy source for the U.K. and the U.K. has been so sort of dominant in emphasizing the importance of nuclear to reach those net zero goals. What do you kind of see as the future of nuclear? Let's start in the U.K.

Katie Silver [00:12:43] So the key player at the moment from where I'm standing is obviously Rolls Royce SMR. They have gotten a lot of funding from Saudi Arabia, from the British government and from Qatar. So that's a lot of progress there. And I think investment shows a lot about kind of the way that an industry is moving, and that's a lot of the reason why there's so much momentum at the moment within SMRs, it's just so much money is being thrown at it now after such a long time of not really seeing much development. Also, I know that NuScale is planning to deploy a SMR by 2029 in Poland. So it's not just the U.K., it's more and more places every day. So that's really exciting to see. But yeah, it's great to see the U.K. play a big part as well.

Olivia Columbus [00:13:39] Yeah, I mean you mentioned Poland. Nuclear not only offers net zero energy, but it also offers that energy security aspect which is so important and something that we're thinking about every single day, how important it is for a country to be in control of their own energy. And that is just such a sort of wonderful additional aspect of it and something that I think we're seeing as really important.

Katie Silver [00:14:08] Yeah, definitely.

Olivia Columbus [00:14:09] Yeah. Great. So then let's kind of talk more broadly, globally. Where do you sort of see the value of nuclear?

Katie Silver [00:14:17] That's such a big question. There's so many great benefits. I suppose, as I mentioned before, sort of the impact on local communities and those that are not necessarily connected to the grid. I know the SMRs have been used by the navy maybe since the '50s or so, so actually a long time, but commercially, they're becoming more viable for these sorts of people that couldn't access energy to begin with. So that's going to be great for equity. And as I mentioned as well, the coal sites and replacing those, I suppose, negative uses of the land into something more positive. And also in terms of investment, they're a great opportunity for a lot of private investors to make a lot of money because there's so much interest in them being so rapidly developed. Another great thing about nuclear that I've noticed since I started working in it is how it's not a clear cut ecosystem of vendor and end user. There's lots of people interlinked. So I suppose with the development of an industry like that, it brings up a lot of companies along with it, like the manufacturers and software developers and things like that. There's so much opportunity for growth that it's really going to have a great impact.

Olivia Columbus [00:15:43] No, it's true. I think we definitely see an opportunity for maybe industries that have historically been producing equipment for, you know, quote unquote, dirty energy sources to sort of transition along with nuclear. There's an opportunity for a lot of that equipment to be used in new nuclear development and sort of bringing everyone along so that no one is left behind and everyone is able to really go through this equitable clean energy transition together and hit those net zero goals. And that's just so important and offers so many opportunities not just for decarbonization of communities, but industry as well. That's a huge part of that net zero issue that I think we don't talk about enough, how do we decarbonize hard to, you know, high energy intensive industries? Nuclear offers that as well, the base load power issue, things like that. So, so important.

Olivia Columbus [00:16:47] I'm going to leave you with the final word. What haven't I asked you that you wish I had?

Katie Silver [00:16:54] I don't know, you've asked a lot of great questions. I don't know; we've kind of covered everything, to be honest. I suppose the key points for me are just like, there's so much value in in thinking about SMRs at the moment. And also the fact that we're back in person. We're really, really excited about that. We've seen so much interest and we just can't wait to have everyone there with us to discuss this important industry.

Olivia Columbus [00:17:28] So where can people find you guys? How can they learn more about the conference?

Katie Silver [00:17:33] So if you type in Reuters Events SMR and Advanced Reactor, we'll come up there, and I suppose there will be a link in the description of this episode as well.

Olivia Columbus [00:17:47] Great, yeah. So everyone should definitely go check out the conference, attend if you can, and enjoy and learn from this awesome, awesome industry experience.

Katie Silver [00:17:58] Yeah. Thank you so much.

Olivia Columbus [00:18:00] Thank you so much, Katie, for joining us today on Titans.

Bret Kugelmass
We are here today with David Krum, who is a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of 10 books, the latest, "Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy" - David, thank you and welcome to the podcast.

David Frum
Thank you so much.

Bret Kugelmass
Super excited to chat with you. I've been reading your writings and I personally have been trying to become a better writer, so at some point in today's conversation, I'm gonna have to ask you how you've become so articulate and such a good style writer. But we'll get to that. Before that, I'd just love to learn about you as a person. Who are you? Where are you from?

David Frum
I was born in Toronto, Canada. And my- almost all of my family is Canadian. They were, before that, immigrants from Eastern Europe. On my father's side, they left Eastern Europe just in the nick of time. The great majority of my father's family was murdered by the Nazis during World War II. My mother's family arrived earlier. I was educated in the United States. I went to law school in the United States. I've been working- I served in the George W. Bush administration in 2001-2002.

Bret Kugelmass
Speech writing?

David Frum
That's correct. And I have been working at the Atlantic since 2014.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, pretty amazing. I have a great deal of respect for speech writers, just because I know how hard it is. But tell me, what originally got you into journalism? What drove your attention?

David Frum
I grew up in the 1970s and I was, as a teenager, very caught up in the fears and emotions of that era. And I began looking for answers to problems like inflation to problems like the Soviet threat. I think my own family's disaster had made me very alert to the importance of freedom in the world. And not just freedom as an abstract, but to make sure that freedom is backed and defended. Because on its own, freedom will be just a victim of other people's power. So I became involved with the conservative movement that was touching so many young people at that time and it quickly became apparent that what I could contribute- I was not an organizer. I was not a- I was a writer. That's what I could contribute. I could contribute words. So I began. I turned to journalism not to be a journalist, but to express certain beliefs about the values of the world and began writing and writing and writing. I went through - I will spare you all the details, I'm not sure how interesting they are - but I went through a lot of- I worked through just about every conservative institution there was between 1982 and about 2010. So that's what drew me into journalism. What drew me into government was the opportunity to see things from the inside, to understand at a deeper level how these institutions I wrote about, how they really worked. It was an incredibly valuable experience. Then what happened - and maybe this is also worth saying here - is the world changed and a lot of the issues that I caught up with and the Cold War ended, the problems in the 1970s were resolved in one way or another. I wrote a whole book about it called "How We Got Here," a history of that period and its problems. And then I began to find that the values I had were increasingly at odds with the politics I espouse. I found myself beginning, after I left the government in the early 2000s, but especially since the world financial crisis of 2008-2009, moving in a way farther and farther away from organized conservatism.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, I've seen that in some of- even just in the titles of your articles. You kind of pick up on that. But before you got there, before you like where this well-respected writer who kind of like people looked to and you really knew what you're talking about, was there a moment that would- I'd love for you to describe that moment before you even had the self-confidence. Like when you knew this was your thing. Was it-

David Frum
-No, I don't think- I often joke to young people who are aspiring journalists, you can't just decide to be a journalist. You have to fail at a lot of other things first. I stumbled around a lot. I went to law school. And I remember at the end of Thanksgiving break of year one, semester one saying to the person- we had assigned seats in those days and saying to the person, my seatmate on the right or left, I forget now, Well, I'll see you on Monday. And he said, No, you won't. This sucks, I'm leaving. And I never had the moral courage to do that, so I finished the course and I realized pretty quickly I did not want to be a lawyer. So I stumbled around a lot. In a way I'm still sort of stumbling around. I do lots of other things. I should mention along the way, I mean, between 2012 and 2016, I had a business career. I've just stumbled around a lot of different things. Journalists tend to be seekers. It's not something that you wake up and say, That's what I'm going to do. At least with most of the journalists I know, that's not how it happened.

Bret Kugelmass
And how much of your time is that seeking versus the actual writing part? Is now the writing is so easy for you comes out and most time is spent like thinking or investigating? What's the balance between those?

David Frum
Everyone has their own method, so I can't recommend this. The way I work is, I do not begin writing unless I know at least the first sentence and the last sentence of the article. I know where I'm starting, I know where I'm going, and I have a rough idea of what I need to cover. And at this point I no longer really separate the research from the writing process as cleanly as I once would have done. But I think- I mean, I write in my head, and when I'm at the keyboard, I'm transcribing as much as I am writing. I find that a lot of the difficulties that people have is they're actually- they're doing the thinking part at the keyboard and they're then being frustrated when the thinking is not complete. And then they blame themselves and they get impatient and then they try to write ahead of the thought. That's just a formula for misery.

Bret Kugelmass
And the topics that you write on, I've noticed the consistency theme of politics. Have you gone in other directions?

David Frum
Yeah. I've written- I just finished a huge article about - which is not yet published - but about the issue of returning art to Africa that was taken by colonial powers. I spent a lot of time in Nigeria this year. I write a lot about- I have an amateur interest in history. Actually, this is a book I'm reading right now, which I strongly recommend. It's Kyle Harper's history of the interaction of pathogens and human history. He wrote a great book about the intersection of pathogens and fall of Rome. It is very topical. And I'm very interested in the history of art. I'm very interested in economic issues. I write a lot about defending free trade, which is something where, as much as the parties disagree, as much as Trump and Biden have disagreed on so many issues of fundamental value, to my mind, very unfortunately, the one thing that has been most consistent from one administration to the other is American opinions moving away from the vision of a world that trades in peace and freedom. I write a lot about that, both directly and indirectly.

Bret Kugelmass
Do you find yourself like as an independent thinker, kind of often writing against the prevailing trends or some- is it just depending on the topic, sometimes you're aligned with the majority consensus, sometimes you're against?

David Frum
Well, if you're validating majority trends then who needs you, right?

Bret Kugelmass
Good point.

David Frum
Dogs are wonderful. Do you need me to tell you that? I don't think so. And there are a lot of subjects- and one of the things that is, I think, especially true in this age of social media, is I like to distinguish from issues that are highly important and issues that are highly salient. An example of that, here's a good example of this. I mean, so people in Texas had just come through this horrifying winter of misery and cold and suffering and loss of life, because of the problems of the Texas power system. How many journalists spend time writing about electrical grids? Very few. How many spend time writing about gender and bathrooms?

Bret Kugelmass
A lot.

David Frum
A lot. I don't want to say that any issue is unimportant. But I just- one of the things I noticed as a journalist is when you notice everybody's crowding the gunnels on one side of the boat, that that's a good sign that maybe you could do something more useful if you go to the other gunnel and talk about the electrical power grid or the issues that people are not talking about. Not the issues that get them excited, but the issues that they really need to know more about. And one of the values of a magazine like The Atlantic is we are- because we're a little off the news, we can step back a little bit and say, Here are some things you need to be thinking about, aside from the excitement of the moment.

Bret Kugelmass
Which is why I love the Atlantic, by the way.

David Frum
Thank you.

Bret Kugelmass
And I was just gonna- you jumped to my next question. Does that mean that you can only find so many publications that you can work with having that theory of what's important to write about? Because others don't think the same way you do.

David Frum
Yeah. Well, I mean, social media has- there's a lot of good about it. I mean, I can't imagine- what I find, with the social media I consume is it's a fantastic resource inbound if you use it directly. I mean, there's just- they way I- how do I know who to- if something happens and I want to know more about it, the way I start is by - I notice and I follow a lot of journalists and academics - something happens. The Texas power grid, just use that example. And I then look at who are they reading? And then you start reading all the people that they're reading. And then you say, Okay, the people that they read, who do they read? And pretty soon you have, with a little bit of judgment - because I don't advocate that people carelessly do their own research and find themselves in the grip of cranks and cooks - but with a filter of good judgment, you can pretty soon find yourself on your way to some very, very extra people. And then you have to use that other indispensable tool of the journalists, the telephone, and you call them, because the world is full of people are brimming with knowledge who are eager to share it. The generosity of knowledgeable people is one of the most important resources that every journalist has. And I think a lot of people have this model that what journalists do is we're always trying to entrap liars to get their secrets out of them. And yeah, sometimes that happens. Most of the time what you're doing is saying, Here's something that people really need to know about. And there are a number of- there's a range of people who have really useful things to contribute and they are just so ready to help. All you have to do is talk to them. Read their stuff first, don't call them without reading, because then- otherwise you don't know what to ask. It's not respectful of their time. But do your reading first and then get them to help you think through things and then test your ideas on them.

Bret Kugelmass
So that's like- I mean, I love that you said that, but oftentimes I mean- so I've interacted with the media here and there, because like- so first off, the process that you were just describing, that picking up the phone and calling people, that's exactly what this podcast is. Podcasts, in general, have been a great tool for that, because it's kind of like a low burden way to get an expert on. So we've been doing this now for years, four years. Interviewed over 350 experts and put together some of our own thesis about what's happening. And by the way, the article that we're about to get to that you wrote about is just so dead on, which is why I was just so excited to talk to you. But every now and then a journalist will call me to be like, Hey, what do you know about nuclear? And I don't think they've ever written up my thesis on nuclear, even though I've collected 300 subject matter expert conversations that are like an hour long. So you are still a rare breed of people who will actually take the time to listen and synthesize.

David Frum
Well, a lot of that is the credit of the Atlantic that they give us more time. And a lot of is just my own approach. And there are other approaches. But one of the things- I mean, I often will tell people when I'm interviewing - I'm working on an article right now that is also about energy issues, but slightly removed from the nuclear issue - and I'm talking extra people and what I always say to them is, I'm not here- I'll tell you, If you say anything I want to quote, I will show it to you and you can revise it, because I'm not here to embarrass you. I want to know what you know and I want to be enlightened by you. It's absolutely true that I could make- a certain kind of journalist can make a certain kind of Under Secretary of Energy's life a living hell for a week. But if that Under Secretary makes a mistake, what's the point of that? What's the point of that? All you've done is done harm to some person who's trying to do the job the best they can. And for what? And you haven't- you usually haven't left the public any wiser about anything they really need to know.

Bret Kugelmass
Let's talk about your interest in energy and then how you found your way to the nuclear topic itself?

David Frum
Well, I've been interested in the nuclear topic for a long time, partly by happenstance of when I was a college student in the late 70s, Three Mile Island happened. And I was at that time rooming with someone whose father was an important executive at one of the major energy companies. My roommate was in full-scale rebellion against his family, so he became active in all kinds of protest movements - and I probably shouldn't say this, but it's the truth and I shouldn't be ashamed of that- he had a very great magnetism for attracting the attention of women. So it always seemed to be a good idea to be wherever he wanted to go, it always seemed to be a good idea. And I lacked this talent. So to follow him, and just stand nearby and see what- you know, if lightning struck. He went to a lot of these anti-nuclear protests, so I went to a lot of them. I didn't have any- as I said, I was there for other kinds of reasons. I didn't have any special interest. But I began realizing that it was pretty obvious that none of the people who are at these things really knew what they're talking about. The slogan of the time - now, this is slightly before the carbon era - but one of my favorite slogans was "Split wood, not atoms" and I remember thinking, I mean, one of my bedrock career convictions is free trade, a world united in prosperity and peace, economic development, the tremendous importance of raising living standards, especially-

Bret Kugelmass
I'm so glad you said that prosperity word, because to me, when I look back at what the environmentalist movement was, it was almost an anti-humanist, anti-prosperity movement.

David Frum
Exactly. So if you want all that split wood, really? And I knew enough history to know, you know what happens when - I didn't know at that time much about carbon - but you know what happens when you burn wood inside a confined space? The people get tuberculosis. That's what happens when you burn wood inside a confined space.

Bret Kugelmass
And by the way, it's still happening to like a billion people around the world today.

David Frum
So I sort of found this. This was obviously a bad- I didn't meet any girls either. The whole thing, it was just a complete, just a complete failure. So I bracketed this, but then in the early 1990s I was working at the Wall Street Journal on the editorial page. This is at the time the first interest in the carbon issue was emerging. Margaret Thatcher gave her speech to the United Nations in 1987 or '88. I guess she spoke first to the Royal Society in '87 then at the UN in '88, that's the first. And by 1992 the first Bush administration is beginning- is pondering action on this. I got quite interested in this subject. The Journal was very anti the real process, but it just came out that there's something here. This carbon stuff, this does seem to be an issue. And maybe it can easily be exaggerated, you do quickly pick up when you deal with this that there are people who see decarbonisation as a new justification for the thing they really want to do, which is stop material progress.

Bret Kugelmass
Yep. Yep. Couldn't agree more.

David Frum
But it's not that- unlike the anti-nuclear people, it became clear that the carbon people did know what they were talking about. While I'm no kind of scientific expert, I got drawn enough to say this is something that is worth more and more attention. Through the 90s, I followed the issue more closely - I wouldn't say very closely, but more closely - and then I got involved with the- when I joined the Bush administration in 2001, I became friendly with two people who were carbon activists inside the 2000 Bush campaign. George W. Bush, people forget this now, had delivered a speech at some point during the campaign of 2000 which he committed to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant, but he wanted to do it in a more market friendly way than Al Gore did. Then there was a big battle when the administration formed as to whether or not this promise would be honored or not. These two people, Gary Edson and John Bridgeland, were the leading advocates for honoring the pledge. I ended up working with them, helping them to draft a lot of their materials and going to the meetings that they were conducting. I really became convinced. Okay, this is real, it's a problem. Al Gore may have overstated- it's not the imminent end of the world, but it's a big deal. And at that point sort of coalesced in my mind, and the only way you're going to make progress on it without plunging- without arresting the world's progress was by finding non-carbon energy sources and there's one obvious answer to what that would be. Since then I've gotten more and more interested in the nuclear issue.

Bret Kugelmass
Wow. That's pretty amazing. And then, so okay. I've been moving throughout the nuclear industry now for the last- I only got involved four years ago, once again, from a clean energy, future prosperity mindset is how I stumbled also to nuclear. And then since then, I've been very involved in the community. The story that you tell in your article, your recent article in The Atlantic about Germany's decision, this is a story that people talk about, like at cocktail events or conferences or whatever, so I've heard these elements before, but I've never seen anyone articulate it outside of the nuclear industry. Where did you get the spark of the idea to articulate it this way? Who did you talk to? How did it come together? And what time period was this?

David Frum
I've covered German politics. I don't speak the language, but I spent time there. And I've been involved with a lot of the things that the Merkel government has done, for good and for ill. I want to stress they've done a lot of good things. But I just ended up speaking to a lot of people who told me stories about the thought process. One of the advantages, again, of the Atlantic is, if I worked at The Washington Post or the New York Times, I would have to go back through those now dozen years of conversation and find someone who's willing to be recorded saying it. And then ideally, I would use that person's name. If not, I would play the recording to my editor and I'll get the editor's agreement about how that person was to be identified to conceal the person's identity. What I'm allowed to do is just say- it's just my editor. I've been working with the same person for a long time. We've gone through many files together on many different stories, so my editors know that I know people who are familiar with the way Angela Merkel makes decisions. And without making overbroad claims, I don't know exactly, but what happened there was the- the two biggest decisions of her career, both the nuclear issue and the refugee issue in 2015, are both made in the same way. They're both made with very little consultation and very rapidly and both very much driven by immediate political needs, without a lot of thought to how is this going to work out in the long term. With the refugee issue of 2015, actually that was an issue where a lot of the costs arrived early. The difficulties of integrating this population, problems of order and crime, but the damage it did to other governments in Europe. It was her decision in 2015 that- the Orbán government in Hungary had been in trouble before then. Poland had had liberal governments. They were defeated in the first election after- she makes a decision that summer 2015 and in October 2015, the far right takes over in Poland and has governed Poland ever since. It was a stimulus to far right governments in the rest of Europe. It had a part in electing Donald Trump here. That said, over the long term, slowly that population is being effectively absorbed. They are helping to replenish the creativity and dynamism of Germany. Famously, the whole world owes the first of the effective anti-COVID vaccines to a company owned by two children of Turkish immigrants to Germany. They were not only the owners, but the researchers. We owe that not only to Germany, but to these children of Turkish immigrants to Germany. Thank you. But nuclear was the opposite. Nuclear was one where she got the political bump immediately. She had been- Merkel inherited from her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, a very tough but necessary set of economic reforms to get Germany hiring. It had been- there were many barriers to job creation and Schröder bit the bullet and fought them and then as his reward immediately lost the next election. But the reforms remained in place and Merkel got the benefit of them, so she was quite popular during her first half dozen years as Chancellor. Then comes to the euro crisis, then the need to bail out the economies in southern Europe. That's quite unpopular and her numbers go down. She always had good numbers. The nadir of her approval is 2010-2011. When the Japanese nuclear accident happens, knowing how unpopular nuclear energy was with mainstream German opinion, this was an easy way to put a point on the board. And it worked. I mean, her numbers went back up again. It worked, at least, from that- politically, it worked.

Bret Kugelmass
That's the story that I've heard before, that she used it as a political tool, because her numbers weren't doing too good. I guess what I don't understand is - and you mentioned in your article, too, you called it out - she's a physicist. It's like- and this is, people pull their - especially the physicists in the nuclear industry - pull their hair out over this contradiction in terms. There's a scientist as a leader of a country and yet she makes this what everyone in nuclear thinks is the biggest bonehead decision ever. How did she not do it in a way that was a little bit more reversible, where she got that benefit in the short term, but didn't have to actually commit long term.

David Frum
Because Germany is governed by coalitions and she found herself dependent, especially as her government aged, on the coalition support of people who had conscientious opposition to nuclear power. This takes us more into German politics then we need to go, but the-

Bret Kugelmass
I'm interested, please.

David Frum
Okay, so the two historic German parties are the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats. But both of them have been bleeding support, especially among younger people.

Bret Kugelmass
Because they're more center-ish?

David Frum
They're just old fashioned. They are- the thing that makes you a Christian Democrat was you were someone who went to Catholic- you were a Catholic who went to church a lot and you were influenced by the political teaching of the Catholic Church. The thing that made you a Social Democrat was you grew up in this labor… and belong to the Institute of the Social- there were Social Democratic birdwatching clubs. There were Social Democratic choirs. There were Social Democratic insurance funds. You grew up in labor. That was your home. And you had the- you could tell almost by the way someone dressed when there wore a certain kind of cap if they were Social Democrat or not. If you wore a cap, you were a Social Democratic. If you wore a hat, you are probably a Christian Democrat. This is all in post-World War II Germany. But the Social Democrats are one of the oldest continuing parties in Europe. All of this is obviously out of style. So what has been happening is that the parties have been bleeding support, and the people- the children and grandchildren of people who were Christian Democrats have tended to gravitate to the Greens. The Greens are ideologically a left party, but they are culturally a party of the educated and affluent. And so while the Christian Democrats and the Greens differ on many issues, they are people who are home one with another. So it's- the coalitions have begun to work and the Greens had the strong view against nuclear power. They have another strong view - and we're paying the price for this one in foreign policy - which was they were so offended by America's fracking that they resisted the importation of liquefied natural gas from the United States. It didn't help that Donald Trump was pushing so hard for it with an eye to his reelection.

Bret Kugelmass
That makes them reliant on the pipeline gas?

David Frum
And that makes them reliant on pipeline gas from Russia. And that's the other choice they have been making since 2010 is that- one of the things you might have said is well, you want it to be a clean energy transition. You want to get to the renewables, especially wind, the renewable that's going to work best in Germany. You can't do it overnight, so you need a program where you'll be using more and more wind. You'll be using, one hopes- phase out coal as fast as possible, as the British have done. You’re a manufacturing country, so you'll need some electricity. And on your way to the transitions for the energy sources of the future, you want to have natural gas that doesn't come from Russia. So that's gonna mean- there other places you can get liquid natural gas than United States. You can get it from Norway. You can get it from Qatar. You can get it from Nigeria. In fact, if you have liquid natural gas ports, you have a lot of options about who your suppliers are, which, for a country that depends on trade, it's good to have that choice. Don't rely on the piped Russian gas and don't rely on coal.

Bret Kugelmass
It almost seems like between these two decisions, they've almost given up sovereignty in a certain way. By giving up their ability to independently produce energy through nuclear power and the energy security that comes with it, and now relying on this pipeline, as opposed to- I think what your point is, when you go liquefied, you're exposing yourself to a free market of many different places. You've got options, whereas the pipeline, it's coming from one place.

David Frum
Right, right. Yeah, that's really been a bad story. The other thing she could have done is- you know, the question about whether nuclear energy is going to be an energy of the future, I think that's a matter that is going to be decided by Mr. Market. The issue there is, I mean, the upfront costs are very, very big. They are recouped over a long period of time. And although we live in an era of historically low interest rates and that kind of investment makes sense, there is a market decision about whether this- whether nuclear makes sense to build in the 2020s. But the issue - and I want to separate out this - the issue of do you build nuclear in the 2020s, especially if you're a developed country whose energy use isn't going up very much- I mean, it makes sense that China, which is still two-thirds burning coal and India, which is almost three-quarters burning coal, I don't see a future for them without new nuclear power. But I can see why mature economies might say, I mean, it is an enormous check that you have to write at the beginning. Maybe this doesn't make sense. But that means you need more gas to get you from here to there and I think everybody agrees the future is we are going to be relying on the renewables. More wind, more solar. Good. Fusion if it ever comes along, terrific. But how do you get from here to there in a way that sustains and how do you do it? And what is your advice to India and China? And that's part of the story that I think doesn't get enough attention. India is literally, it's 70, more than 70% of its power comes from coal.

Bret Kugelmass
I think people tend to- well, once again, this comes back to an earlier part of our conversation where we're really questioning the motives of people from the environmentalists or the climate activists. They're able to overlook certain facts like, Hey, we all live on one planet and carbon from anywhere is gonna have an effect. You can't design your policies just at the local level. You've got to be thinking more broadly about the total global picture.

David Frum
One of the reasons I like politicians as a class of person - they need the movement people - but politicians are people who are professional trade-off artists. And we need them. We need them to say- when someone says that- the environmentalist who goes through why everything is bad- and everything, you know what? Everything is flawed, nothing is perfect. You need them to say, Okay, so are you recommending, are you recommending that Africa stay poor forever?

Bret Kugelmass
The other huge inconsistency in their arguments. You're absolutely right to call that out. Yeah.

David Frum
And just like- and the answer is they don't think about it. What they really think is, Well, material things are detract from happiness. And I have no- we've all been watching Succession. We can see there comes a point where, yeah, it probably would be better to have 1/100th as much money as the members of the Royal family do. And then you probably would be- if they- if 99% of their money had never been given to them, they would all be happy. But if 100% of their money and they were living in a hut without running water, exposed to infectious disease, losing seven out of nine children, they wouldn't be happy.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah. I know. Most people don't realize even if the developed world reduced its consumption down to the minimum amount that anyone would think possible, but you were able to bring up the poorest people to that same level - that minimum standard that we consider a good life - that the emissions would be out of control, even with our current approach. We need to actually think about- there are really two problems to solve. It's not just reduction. It's you create clean energy, but also create it in an abundance. That has to be part of it.

David Frum
There's one more thing - I wrote about this in the last book - is it may be, depending on the way the transition happens, if China and India continue to emit over the next 15 years at their current pace, it will be a catastrophe. We may need a program to get carbon back out of the air.

Bret Kugelmass
Oh, I think we're already at that point.

David Frum
And if we're going to do that, we need a massive power source that doesn't burn carbon itself to suck the carbon out - I talk about that in the last book - and that's going to have to be nuclear power. Because it's the only kind that produces so much energy on such a scale without any carbon that can help you with the process of carbon removal, which is, as I understand it from, again, just from what I talked to you on the phone is technically possible, but very expensive and depends on electricity on a scale that it's hard to imagine coming from any anywhere else.

Bret Kugelmass
So true. Though, one thing you said that I take a little bit of issue with, kind of coming back to your last comment you made is the expense of nuclear. I think people take it for granted that nuclear has to be expensive. And I'm not about to go down the route of advanced technologies. I'm actually not a big supporter of that. But if you just look at historical data about- actually, it was in the 60s. If you inflation adjust all the costs and everything, nuclear was the cheapest energy source to produce. And that didn't- and that's not because the plants weren't safe or anything like that. It has a lot to do with other things such as market incentives. How Western construction companies profit these days. A lot of forces like that that are not inherent to nuclear technology. And I feel like that conversation gets totally overlooked. We do have a way to create almost unlimited amounts of power at prices that are cheaper than anyone has ever seen before.

David Frum
But it is still, even if you could think of ways to make the upfront check smaller, it's still a big upfront check.

Bret Kugelmass
Still a big upfront check. But just to give you a for instance, a gigawatt-scale nuclear plant today, the sticker price is let's say $5 billion dollars, right? But in today's money, if you go back to the 1968 price, $700 million for that same gigawatt. Yeah, $700 million is still a lot, but after you do that a few times and the investor starts seeing the payback, boy, there's a lot of capital out there that can be dumped into this. Anyway, that was my soapbox.

David Frum
Okay, that's interesting. That's something I need to know more about.

Bret Kugelmass
Well, yeah, I'd love to continue a conversation with you just to kind of pick your brain off of a combination of your knowledge about both politics and economics and energy to see what we can come up with. But one other thing I wanted to ask you about, just since we're on the topic of European politics - which I'm still trying to get my head around more - is I understand how that coalition approach drove Germany's own decisions on what to do with nuclear. What's the forcing function for why Germany is trying to influence nuclear decisions, especially with EU green taxonomy for all of Europe. Where does that come?

David Frum
That comes from, again, domestic politics in Germany. And, of course, the Green Party is more powerful than ever. I think one of the ways to understand what's going on here is to look at the difference in history between the countries that are more nuclear open - France and Sweden, in the first place, also Britain - and those that are more nuclear negative, led by the German speaking countries. And maybe the France Germany contract- the French was sold so strong in nuclear power and it remains popular because- it was an adjunct of the French commitment to national sovereignty and military power. France wanted to be a nuclear power. Unlike Britain, it had no help from the United States. The Manhattan Project was a three-way project involving Canadian, British, and American resources. The British commitment, especially, was so large that they knew how to make an atomic weapon. And then it was just a question of do they want to spend the resources to do it. And they decided they wanted to. But the French had been locked out of that process when France was occupied during the war. And so, after the De Gaulle insisted that as an aspect of French sovereignty and greatness, they would re-dedicate themselves. And they didn't get a bomb until the late 60s. It took them almost as long as it took Communist China. But nuclear power has always been associated France with the idea of French independence, whereas nuclear power- Germany, which was on the receiving end of so much destruction in the last days of World War II and for which anything military, such a traumatic thought that it's part of their- and through most of the Cold War, they were aware that if there were a great power war, it will be fought on their territory with them as the casualties, that as part of the repudiation of all this- I think that's one of the reasons why the anti-nuclear movement got such a grip on them in a way that it didn't get a grip on other people. And Sweden is an interesting contrast here, because Sweden, of course, is a country that has, until very recently, had a very robust self-defense capability. They stayed neutral through two world wars. And that took a certain amount of porcupine like spikey-ness that it would be costly to try to tamper with us. That meant they're not a nuclear power, but they have a lot of military capabilities and nuclear then became interesting to them as part of being a- of paying the price of neutrality, which was sovereignty.

Bret Kugelmass
Wow. Okay, you've got clearly a huge cultural knowledge bank to pull from this historical. That's pretty amazing. We only have a few minutes left, so I just want to make sure to give the floor to you to kind of either reiterate any themes from the article that you really want the audience to take away or just kind of- and also, I want you to look forward into the future and maybe give the world some advice on where to go,

David Frum
I think the main thing I would want to say is to- I think environmentalists need to take more seriously how much cleaner you get when you become richer. I think a lot of environmentalists carry in mind a vision of a world that was pre-industrial that didn't have the smell of factory smoke in the air. But if you were in the pre-industrial world, there was feces everywhere, human and animal. Any place where there was human habitation was foul. And it was choked with wood smoke and wood smoke is incredibly dangerous. The beauty of the natural world that you see when you step into a park, that is a creation. Yes, you could have it maybe if there were no human beings at all or hunter gatherers. But even there, the hunter gatherers, everywhere they left, they would leave a trail of filth behind them, but they just had a lot of everywhere to go to. But when you walk- the beauty and cleanliness of your environment, that is the product of tremendous wealth and development. If you want to restore Africa to being the kind of game park that it once was, you need to make the Africans richer. That's how you get to and- there's no going backward ever in history. There's only going forward, so we're going to need new development, which means new energy sources. We're not going to be able to keep our standard of living for ourselves alone. The rest of the world won't put up with that. The most powerful insight of the ecological mindset is we're all in this together. There's no throwing anything away, because there is no away in which to throw the thing. Everything is here. And everything comes with a trade-off and nuclear unquestionably has trade-offs, but so does everything else. And the current live alternatives to nuclear, the trade-offs depends are the coal with all of its horrific cost to the environment, or natural gas pipelines that put one country at the mercy of another or else making the investment to do liquefied natural gas. But even gas, although less polluting than coal, remains a carbon source, too. If you want to get to a post-carbon world, you have to accept some other kinds of trade-offs and nuclear is going to be a candidate.

Bret Kugelmass
David Frum, everybody.

David Frum
Thank you.

This transcript is pending

Jadwiga Najder
Hello. Today I am together with Thomas Jam Pederson who is the Co-Founder of Copenhagen Atomics. Hi, Tom.

Thomas Jam Pederson
Hi.

Jadwiga Najder
Hello, so happy to have you here. So, Thomas, right now you're a successful businessman being the co-founder of one of the startups in nuclear. You're passionate about nuclear topics. However, you're living in one of the profoundly skeptical countries in terms of nuclear. It sounds like a pretty… Actually, what I could see from your bio, you are not a nuclear specialist. You're rather a software specialist. So how did it start with your career? Where did you study? What was your early career?

Thomas Jam Pederson
Yeah, so it's true. I'm an engineer and I've worked most of my life in software engineering and mathematical modeling. And then, actually, around the time that I learned about Thorium, the first time, I was working as a consultant for a big energy company, utility company, doing simulations of their energy feeds. And, anyways, I've always been interested in energy, because energy is such a big part of what we humans do. All products are made using energy and everything we invent and everything we do is dependent on having access to energy. And that's also why the population of the world exploded when we got lots of energy in the- from coal and oil and so on early on. Anyway, so yeah, I'm not- I don't have a degree in nuclear engineering, per se, but of course I've had a lot of experience with physics and things, so it was easy for me to pick that up. And we- early on, I met with other people in Copenhagen that had a background in chemistry and nuclear physics. And as you might know, molten salt reactor is very dependent on corrosion and clean salts and things like that. I also had a background in manufacturing company with stainless steel, sort of mechanical engineering, so we were a good fit, those four co-founders, when we met.

Jadwiga Najder
Great. Actually, what I normally see among my friends is nuclear people running away to IT fields, not the other way around. Interesting. How did it come to you? When was this moment when you said, Okay, let's focus on nuclear in my career, rather than pursuing this software, this IT topic?

Thomas Jam Pederson
Throughout my career I've been part of several startup companies that did sort of high tech stuff. I've also worked for Google in the past - or with Google. Anyways, for me, I like to explore new topics and I'm very interested in new technology that can transform the way society develops. And when I heard about for many years, I just- I didn't think that I would go into nuclear. I just was very intrigued. How does this work? And in the beginning, I was sort of just studying it to understand for myself like, why am I not using it? Is this the next big thing out there and so on. And then I got to know more and more and I got more and more interested. I started going to conferences around the world where people talk about molten salt reactors and thorough amenity and things like that. And at some point, I got a very good network with people around the world, especially in the US and Canada, who were working on these things and I got chances to ask them on all my questions and I found in the end that I had a fairly good understanding of how everything worked. Sometimes maybe even better understanding than some of those people. But I've also spent a lot of time on it. So you could say up to sort of taken a whole nuclear degree on my own. And that's one of the things that is really great today is, you know, back in the day when I went to university, you had to read all the books and stuff. But nowadays, you can follow like a whole course of nuclear engineering at MIT OpenCourseWare or something like that, which is very helpful. And it is especially helpful if there's some specific topic you're searching for, then you don't have to like take a whole course. You can just take those two classes that talk about exactly what we're fiddling with right now, so I've done that a lot.

Jadwiga Najder
That's really interesting, because it shows that you don't need to be a specialist to be pro-nuclear. Or that you do not need to have much money to get enough knowledge to become actually a professional. Which makes me wonder, what is happening with our societies right now in countries like Denmark, who even managed to implement a law that is anti-nuclear, that forbids the building of nuclear. Is it- do you think the access to knowledge about these topics is limited or people are just not interested? Or people have their own agenda or the view that they do not listen to the facts? In Denmark and in general.

Thomas Jam Pederson
Yeah, I mean, Denmark, I think a little bit of special case, because the position of Denmark is very good for wind power. And from very early on, like for the last 40 years, we've been building a lot of wind energy. That's also part of the reason why the Danish Parliament chose not to invest in nuclear, which I had hoped they would do. But I mean, it's not like we are lacking energy here. And we have- we're in a perfect position, because we're right next to Sweden and Norway, where we can use those countries for storage. There are links to their energy grids. And Sweden has a lot of nuclear power. And actually, the statistics show that the Danish grid has 13% of nuclear power, because we get it from Sweden. So I mean, it's a more complex story. But back to the question about sort of the democracy or like democratization of information, I really think- now there are suddenly roughly 20 startups doing small modular reactors or some sort of nuclear. And I don't think that was possible 30 years ago. I really think that's because of the internet that has become possible, because now you can find all this information. You need much less resources to build something and study these a little bit more exotic or complex topics. I used to also work in a company many years ago where we would design PCBs or print cards for computers. And I mean, the amount of resources you need to design a card and the you had to go to libraries to find the information and look it up in big books. Now, everything is just one click away and Google is very efficient in helping you find it. So today, I mean, that one guy can do the same amount of work as what it took 10 or 20 people back then to do. And I think the same is true for nuclear power. That's such a complex topic. You cannot know everything in your head. You have to look it up. And when that time it takes to look things up is 10 times faster or 20 times faster and our simulation tools are much better today than they were in the past, I think this is what enabled actually that. We can have startup companies that wants to build nuclear, because 30, 40 years ago, it was sort of a thing that only big countries could do.

Jadwiga Najder
Yeah, that's amazing. And actually Denmark has not one but several startups. There is Copenhagen Atomics, there is Seaborg close to Copenhagen. And how do you feel of the people, the Danish people approach nuclear? Like when you talk to your neighbors when you- I don't know, when you have some meetings with your private friends and acquaintances? Do they really understand what you're doing? Or do you need to explain yourself and you're a party pooper every time?

Thomas Jam Pederson
No, well, not everybody understands. But I guess that's the same in the US. I've lived quite a bit of my life in the US. Of course, when you meet with people who are working in the energy space, or especially if you work with people who are engineers and interested in in energy related topics, they usually know and they're very interested and they want to know more. But you're also right that, if you had a family reunion or something and some of those people who do not have interest in in energy or interest in nuclear engineering in general, they don't really know what it's about and they don't really understand it. But I mean, there are many topics in society that not everybody understands, so that's okay. In relation to Denmark, I know that if you're from the US, you sort of think of the US as your primary market. But because Denmark is such a small country, we are only 6 million people, we wouldn't think of Denmark as our primary market for this technology. I think that gave us a little bit different outlook. And also right now Europe is sort of in a terrible state with the- yeah, everything is declining. Not everything. But there's at least- there's no growth in Europe. And that means that we don't need to build new power plants or anything. And you know quite well then in Germany, for example, is shutting down power plants and also in other places. So even Europe is not a great market for us, and therefore we looked around the world and looked at where the big needs for energy are really big. And, of course, Asia is by far the biggest market for energy installation. It's actually, if you look at all new energy power plants being built, more than 90% of those are being built in Asia today. That's sort of the main driver of the market. And of course we're eager to see if we can supply our technology to those markets out there.

Jadwiga Najder
You told me a lot about your market right now, but maybe before we go deeper into it, I think you need to pitch your reactor. What does it say about- what is the main point of this being designed and not using the other reactors that are already available on the market or thought of before? Please tell us.

Thomas Jam Pederson
Yes, yes. Well, we are four founders that started Copenhagen Atomics. And when we got together and started thinking about how would we start a company and build a reactor, we agreed that it would be great if we could make a technology that could be a true alternative to fossil fuels. You might know already, today 5% of global energy comes from nuclear energy. And we thought that, yeah, we can go ahead and build Light Water Reactors, but I mean a startup company doesn't really want to build Light Water Reactors when you're in competition with even companies like Korea and Russia and China, whatnot, US brands and so on. And then we said, Okay, if this is going to change the world, not just a little bit, but significantly change the world, then we need to find a way to mass manufacture nuclear power plants. And of course, we looked towards France, where they have built many power plants of the same design. We also looked towards what Korea is doing now in the Emirates where they're building four copies of the same plant. And we said, but that's not enough. I mean, in order to sort of push fossil fuels out of the picture in the next 100 years, we need to build not thousands of reactors, but millions of reactors. It's really on that scale if we want to eliminate fossil fuels. And when you start to think about it that way, like how can you build a million reactors? The model that is used in France, for example, okay, that was in the 70s. But still, it doesn't- it's not viable, right? You must manufacture this on an assembly line. And the problem with Light Water Reactors is that all that pressure and all those- the pressure, the high pressure sort of makes it difficult to make it on an assembly line and it sort of drives the size of those big buildings and one gigawatt power plants and so on. But we realized quite quickly that if you use molten salt reactors, you get some great benefits, because you don't have the pressure, so you can build it much smaller and it requires less steel and so on. But also when you have molten salts, you can actually remove the fission products from the reactor, or from the core, while the reactor is running and that means you get much better neutron economy and therefore much better efficiency out of your fuel. So suddenly, things become much better. Not just like 20% better or 50% better than Light Water Reactor. It becomes an order of magnitude better. And that's really what we're shooting for, because to be honest, nuclear energy, if we want to grab sort of the main market for energy installation in the future, we need to get the price down by almost a factor of 10. And we also need to get the time it takes to build the reactors up by a factor of 100 or even more. So that was sort of what we were looking for. In the beginning it was just discussing would that be possible. And I truly believe that it is possible with molten salt reactors. And one of the other things that we've done at Copenhagen Atomics is that we said we want to try the thorium fuel cycle. And the reason we want to do that is because we humans have built lots of reactors in the past, more than 400 commercial reactors. But all of those were thermal reactors. There have been a lot of money invested in fast reactors, but none of the fast reactors has become a big commercial success. And I believe it's because fast reactors are much harder to build than thermal reactors. It's not as hard as fusion, but it's sort of halfway towards fusion in terms of difficulty. And if I'm going to invest my own money, I don't want to take that risk of trying to develop something that other people have already spent 20 billion or more trying to do and they have not been super successful. So from the beginning, we said, it's got to be a thermal reactor. And the only way you can make really, really good neutron economy in a thermal reactor is if you use thorium, because with a thorium fuel cycle and thermal spectrum, you can have a breeder reactor and suddenly that changes everything. And you cannot have a breeder reactor, or at least you cannot have a breeder reactor with good doubling times, if you were to build sort of a solid fuel reactor. You really need to remove those fission products in order to have super good neutron economy. But when we put those things together, molten salt reactor, remove fission products, no pressure, that means small as possible to make it on an assembly line and then you can have a super good neutronic economy. We thought that is a reactor that can scale and we can build thousands of these or even more. So that was sort of the starting point. And then we quickly realized that, in order for nuclear to gain some popularity again in the world, we sort of have to do something about the cost, the time it takes to build, and something about the waste, because a lot of people are worried about the waste, even though it's- I mean, it's a little bit of a communication problem. But anyways, we thought it would be great if we could take that fuel from spent nuclear fuel in classical reactors and burn it one more time and get even more energy out of it. And that's what we tried to do with it our Copenhagen Atomics waste burner, which is essentially taking the all the long-lived actinides from spent nuclear fuel and extracting that chemical and put it into thorium salt. And then we can use that long live actinides or especially in plutonium in there, as kickstart a fuel to get the process up and running. And then once it starts converting the thorium to uranium-233, we actually get a positive feedback and we can sort of burn the majority of those actinides out of the salt and end up with fission products, which has a half-life of only- or not a half-life, but it needs to be stored for 300 years. So that we thought was a unique way to sort of show the public or the general public that they shouldn't worry that much about nuclear waste. It's not that big of a problem and we can remove most of it in these type of reactors while producing even more energy. And of course, when we came around to the business model and sort of how can we make money, it seems that we can get paid to take that spent nuclear fuel from countries and then we can process that or license our way of processing that to those countries and help them reduce their waste problem. Not only do we make money from the electricity we make in the end, but we also make money by removing the spent nuclear fuel problem for some countries. And you might know that there are several countries who already have billions of dollars in the bank to solve that problem. That's what we are pursuing.

Jadwiga Najder
That's great. I can almost imagine you being like a service company. You have this reactor somewhere in the corner and advertising to countries like we can take your waste and make electricity out of this and what is the best for you. You just magically remove the waste from your country, which would be an amazing argument for all the antis, as you mentioned it already were the first question is what about the waste? Before anything else is asked about the characteristics of electricity, production of nuclear and so on, the first question is always, what about the waste? Can you imagine this kind of business model like really being the service company for different countries?

Thomas Jam Pederson
Yeah, that's exactly what we want to do. I don't think it's that simple that you just drive a garbage truck over there and pick it up. But yeah, it's definitely- we want to make agreements with countries that have spent nuclear fuel and help them solve that problem in collaboration with them. I believe that their national lab will also be involved and it's not like super simple, but of course that's the way we like to explain it to the public. But anyways, it's never simple to make either if you want to do uranium mining and enrichment and make nuclear fuel. No matter what you want to do, it's complex. So of course, this is also sort of complex.

Jadwiga Najder
Talking about the fuel cycle, maybe it would be interesting to share a little bit with our listeners and watchers about some details of the thorium cycle. Maybe not everybody's aware of this. Could you explain a bit how come that we can make electricity energy out of thorium by replacing this what we normally know that it should be uranium?

Thomas Jam Pederson
Yes. So uranium-235, you can get that out of the ground and you can burn it right away. It can turn into a fission reaction or a chain reaction on its own, so that's simple and that's of course where we started as humans. But there are two other isotopes that can sustain a chain reaction. One is the plutonium-239, which is not available in nature, and the other one is uranium-233, which is also not available in nature. In order to make those two work - the plutonium and uranium-233 - you need to take an element that is in nature and then you need to sort of upgrade it to one of these isotopes. And for plutonium, we take the uranium-238 and you allow the uranium to capture a neutron and then it's through a cycle that turns into plutonium eventually, and then plutonium will fission, and fission in a way where you get extra neutrons so that you can use those extra neutrons to upgrade the next uranium-238 atom. It's the same with thorium. Thorium is found in nature and it's actually- the great thing about thorium is that it comes out of the ground when we do mining. And we already get so much thorium out of the ground when we mined for other materials that it would be enough to power the entire world with all its electricity, just from the mines that we are already doing today. So we don't even need to open new minds. I think that's really great. And it also shows that- that's the reason why the thorium is never going to be very expensive. And we also know that there's enough form on this planet for thousands of years of energy production, so we won't run out of i tany anytime soon. Anyways, back to the- so you take that uranium out of the ground and then you put it in your reactor and then it is- the thorium out of the ground, put it in a reactor, and it's upgraded to uranium-233 by capturing the neutron and some decays and then it's uranium-233. And uranium-233 is actually capable of doing a breeder cycle in thermal spectrum, whereas uranium-238 is not able to do that. That's really great, because we humans, we started building reactors back in the 1940s. And already, the very first reaction- I mean, the physicists back then, they were pretty smart, but they didn't have computer simulations and they didn't know half of the physics that goes into running a nuclear reactor. But still, I mean, they were able to build it and when they turned it on, it worked right away. It's like sort of amazing. When we look at how difficult it was to just get the first fast reactor running, it's amazing how simple and easy it is to build a thermal spectrum reactor. And of course, this is the same here. So now you can actually take a fuel that is plentiful, thorium, and you can make a breeder cycle in thermal spectrum. And then- well, that's only possible if you have a molten salt reactor, because you need to remove the fission products from the core while you're running. Otherwise, you won't be able to breed. And if you want to make a really nice breeder that has a doubling time of 10 years or 20 years, I mean, that's the time it takes to double the amount of fissile inventory, then you really need to have a great neutron economy and that's going to be difficult. But I believe over a decade or maybe several decades that will be possible. And that's at least what we're shooting for at Copenhagen Atomics. But then when you do that, you have to think about how to manage all those neutrons and try to lose as few of them as possible. And that's also the reason why we're using heavy water in our reactor design. And that's a little bit untraditional, I would say. Most people who are talking about molten salt reactors, they want to use graphite as the moderator or even use fast reactors with molten salt. But the problem as we see it with graphite is that, after you've run, it can only sit in the reactor core for some years. Let's say five years or seven years or even 10 years. Then it starts to swell so much that you cannot use it anymore. Then you have to take it out and now you have some super radioactive graphite that you need to get rid of. It's not impossible, but it's another step and an additional cost. First, you have to pay for that super expensive nuclear grade graphite, and then afterwards you also have to pay to get rid of it in some way. But if you can use heavy water, that heavy water can be reused again and again for hundreds of years. It's not consumed and it's not damaged by the reactor. It's a much better investment. There's a little bit of investment upfront in buying heavy water, but then you can use it for such a long time and it doesn't degrade. But of course, then your problem is that we don't want to have that headwater under pressure, because we don't like things under pressure. So we have to have heavy water in the core at say, 50 degrees Celsius right next to pipes that are full of molten salt at 700 degrees. There will be some thermal transfer from the hot pipes of salt over to the water. But actually, when we started to do the the engineering or the math and simulations, it turns out that the majority of the heat that goes into the heavy water is not from thermal convection. It's from the neutrons that the heavy water needs to slow down. Actually, that would happen anyway, even if it was at high temperature. The majority of the heat that goes into the heavy water comes from the neutrons and then you get some from the gammas. And then finally, you get some heat from the molten salt, normal heat radiation. But the way we've constructed is that we have two barriers between the hot salt and the water. It's made in a way where we pump the water into the core all the time and then it runs out and we cool it down and pump it back in. So if the pump starts- sorry, if the pump stops running, then the water will automatically drain out of the core quite quickly. And actually it's the same with the salt. The salt is also pumped into the core and if the pump stops, the salt will automatically drain out of the core. So that's a very simple way of- some of the other people who are working with molten salt reactors, they use a freeze plug. But we don't need that, because as soon as we- a freeze plug works in a way where if you cut the electricity to the cooler, then the freeze plug will heat up and melt and it will dump the salt. But in our case, as soon as you cut the power to the pump, the salt will dump out right away. And it only takes a few seconds. It's much quicker than having to melt every spot and we believe that it's also a more reliable method. Anyway, so that was a little bit of some of the highlights or introduction to how we made the reactor design. I want to say one more thing about the sort of- the way we think about these reactors. Of course, from very beginning, we wanted to manufacture these on assembly lines or mass production. And so we want to put everything inside a box and then seal that box shot at the factory. Then when it arrives at the site where it's going to sit inside a nuclear power plant, we're not supposed to make any modifications to it there. The only thing is that we need to load the fuel. And that can- of course, it's a molten salt, so that can be done through pipes. Basically just load the fuel from another container into the reactor, basically the dump tank inside the reactor, while it's molten and then you shut that pipe. Once it's loaded, you shut that pipe, for example, by welding the end tight. There is some other mechanism, but that's sort of the simple explanation. And then you can start up the reactor. And what comes out of the reactor is hot salt that goes to heat exchangers and generates electricity and comes back cold again and then we heat it up one more time. But the salt that goes out of the reactor is, of course, not radioactive. Now we have all the radioactive components inside a sealed box and that box is roughly the size of a 40-foot shipping container, so it fits on the back- on a stand-up truck, so it is really easy to move around. And once you can sort of finalize everything at the factory, you can ensure the quality and you don't have to rely on educating people in whatever country and make sure that they assemble it exactly correctly. You can do all your quality control at the factory where the experts are working on it, so that's different. It's a very different way of constructing nuclear power plants than what we used to. And then the next thing I want to say is that we want to have a business model where we don't sell those reactors. We actually build, own, and operate the reactor and then we sell the heat that comes out of them and we sell that energy as service contracts. So the power plant utility or the company who operates the power plant, they don't need to worry about anything nuclear, because we take care of the whole. We take care of the fuel supply. We take care of the licensing. They only need to take care of running the power plant. And usually those companies, they're used to running coal-fired power plants and gas-fired power plants, so they feel confident about that, because they've done that for many, many years. And they don't need to learn about this new nuclear technology, molten salt reactors, what is that and train their staff and take risk and all that stuff. We don't only bring a new type of reactor design to the market. We also bring a new business model to the nuclear industry.

Jadwiga Najder
Yeah, I mean, the only place that I know that is going to operate in a similar way is the new plant that is being built in Turkey. Similar idea, selling the electricity by Rosatom without the need to provide the huge stuff that nuclear normally needs. What I imagine is that, since the design that you have is a burner, it's in your interest to be located with your reactor somewhere close to the actual waste supplier, we could say. I can imagine that you're looking at the countries that are already nuclearized that have some reactors that could provide the waste for you to manufacture the fuel for your reactor. Am I right?

Thomas Jam Pederson
Yeah, that's partly correct. It's true that we are definitely focused on starting the first reactors on this from spent nuclear fuel. And there are right now 31 countries that have commercial nuclear power and therefore they also have nuclear- has spent nuclear fuel. So you're right, those countries would be sort of a first choice. But for example, in Europe, it has happened many times that people transport spent nuclear fuel from one country to the other. So I mean, it's not that it's impossible. We've also seen Japan transport spent nuclear fuel to France and so on. It has been done many times before and maybe in a little bit more distant future we could imagine that some of those countries who have spent nuclear fuel today, we would reprocess that spent nuclear fuel in their country and then take these parts that we need as a kickstarter fuel for our reactor. Then we would be allowed to transport that, of course, under heavy surveillance, but transport that to the site in another country where we're going to start the reactor. I do think that will be possible, maybe not from day one, but a little bit down the road. And that's of course because some of the countries who need the most energy in the future are not the ones that have a lot of spent nuclear fuel on the hands. So I think it'll make sense for the world, if we want to see this green transition, that we allow this to happen. And like I said it's already happening today. For example, Denmark, like you said, there's a law against nuclear. We do not have any commercial nuclear power plants here. But still, I know that they are transporting uranium through Denmark from the Netherlands to Sweden on a regular basis. I've seen those trucks every now and then. So that happens. I assume we could do the same.

Jadwiga Najder
I can see that you are providing- you're planning to provide many services, not only in the design of the reactor, but also operating, cooperating with utilities. And now we're talking about the fuel. Do you team up with other companies who can take over part of this workload or as Copenhagen Atomics, you plan to provide everything under this one shield as wanting to provide all this set of- this complex set of services for the plant?

Thomas Jam Pederson
Definitely for the fuel recycling, I mean, taking spent nuclear fuel assemblies and turning them into fuel for molten salt reactors and storing the fission products, we will definitely partner with other companies. But I'm sure also with the installation of the nuclear power plants in these big buildings where you have the steam turbines and generators and all that, of course, we will also partner with companies who are used to building those and operating those. And whether it's new plants being built or it's existing coal-fired power plants being refitted, we will do that in close collaboration with those type of companies. But also, we need lots of parts for our reactor. We already have more than 500 suppliers even today and I imagine that we have even more suppliers in the future. That whole supply chain is also part of the of the whole system that needs to be in place before this can happen. But of course, most of those suppliers are suppliers of parts for pumps and valves and heat exchangers and so on. So it's companies who already have business in those areas. But also what we're doing right now, we have done a huge amount of testing of components that are going to go into our first reactor. That's actually one of our claims to fame is that we've already built those components for the first reactor and we already tested those for more than a year, some of them for several years. And at the moment, we have done more than 20 years of test time in our factory of all these different components. We will continue to scale up our testing, because if you want to build molten salt reactors on an assembly line, you better make sure that all the components work perfectly. So there's lots of testing going on. And I believe that Copenhagen Atomics have done more tests on components for molten salt reactors than all the other startups around the world combined. And as we're ramping this up heavily right now, I hope that we can continue to have- to take the leadership in that area. But of course, we are very interested in in seeing nuclear energy having a sort of a rebirth or revolution again and get back in the marketplace. And therefore, I'm pretty sure that even if we're very successful, Copenhagen Atomics could never supply all those millions of nuclear reactors that I talked about in the beginning. So we do want to have competitors, because I think the chance of each one of those 20 startup companies that are there now, the chance of those surviving is better if several of the companies are successful. It's actually in our interest to see many of the other companies succeed. And therefore we also are very interested in working with them and helping them. One of the things we do is we manufacture a lot of these salts that are needed in a very clean- a clean type of salt that minimizes your corrosion and we are selling those salts to some of the, you could say competitors or colleagues. And we are also selling those salts to universities and national labs. Because we needed a lot of salt ourselves to do our own testing, we ended up setting up quite a large salt production and I think we will be one of the key suppliers for the salt for many of the other companies in the future. And not only that, we also supply some of the test equipment, for example, we have what we call a molten salt loop, which is basically just a setup where you can test components, pumps, and valves and so on. And we've already sold a number of those to competitors and universities and so on who also use them for testing. And I think it's important for us as an industry to work together to make sure that that we actually can get nuclear back in business. And we want to support that as much as we can.

Jadwiga Najder
That's it. Around site we are talking a lot about the whole industry is responsible if one company fails in something, but it also works the other way around. The whole industry experiences a victory if one company delivers something new. It may arrive to some innovation. So I can see that this is what you're seeing here in the startup world. That is needed and that should be pursued. And that one success of one company can drive the others to be more successful as well. Would you go as far as saying that the innovations and inventions in this field should be, let's say, open source or part of like scientific heritage? Or are you rather going towards, Okay, let's patent everything, because this is my success that I invented.

Thomas Jam Pederson
I mean, we have patented some stuff and we've made some of our software and some of our hardware open source, so we're sort of doing both. I think we are one of the more open source companies. Some of the other companies are very aggressive in taking lots of patents. And I think it's also to some extent that is- the driver of that is the investors saying, If I'm going to put my money in that company, you better get some patents. And so it's a sort of a- yeah, there are some great things about open source, but there are also good things about getting investments and having patents. I think if somebody invented something really unique, I think it's fair that they can patent it and sort of keep those rights for 20 yours or whatever. And then of course, the other companies, they can license those rights if they want to use the same invention. And I do hope that we as nuclear industry do not start to fight each other over patents. That would be a waste of money, because the only ones who win from those fights are the lawyers. It's much better if we can sort of find ways to license things to each other, if needed. Right now, I don't think we need any licenses from the other companies, but might happen in the future. And I do believe strongly in open source. If you make something that can be used - not only in the nuclear industry, but maybe also in other industries - I think you should open source that, if at all possible, because that helps everybody around the world. And I've used lots of open source both hardware and software in the past. And let's be honest, I mean, if we look back in the world and how things were developed -cars, airplanes, everything - engineers, they borrow ideas from each other. They sort of look at what other peoples did and they try to improve it. The whole way of sort of sharing design, that helps everybody. And if those who share the design, if they even make it so easy as to share their drawings and the software as a source code and so on, I mean, it just makes that whole cycle of improving things faster. And I think that benefits everyone.

Jadwiga Najder
Talking about crossing the industries. Do you think that the startups that you had in the past that were not necessarily related to nuclear, is this experience able to help you in the current endeavor that you have? Or is nuclear a totally different world that does not really have anything to do with the IT world?

Thomas Jam Pederson
No, no. What I learned in the past from the other jobs I had and other startups that I was part of, it is definitely very, very important experience. And I think every engineer, they learn stuff where they work and they bring that knowledge to their next job. I've had the great fortune to work for some very exciting cutting edge technology companies. Of course, I had an opportunity to learn lots of things that I used today. I learned to weld, TIG welding, like 20 some odd years ago and I'm still using that every now when we are in the workshop and we're setting up experiments and many other things like that. And also, the important thing is not only what you have learned, but it's also the people. I've- for this company, I've hired some of the best people that I I have worked with over the years in other companies, because if you get to know a guy or a girl and they are really clever and good at what they're doing, that's really valuable. And of course, we would like to work with them again, because they're nice to work with and they have great skills. And of course, in a nuclear company like ourselves, we need lots of skills. We need mechanical engineers. We need software engineers. We need electronics engineers. We need nuclear engineers and people who are good at simulations, whether- there are many different types of simulations, not only sort of criticality simulations, but yeah. So we have a whole team of people doing simulations. And that's similar to what you do in other companies as well.

Jadwiga Najder
Looking at the close future, for the startups like Copenhagen Atomics and other startups that are working as hard as you to achieve success in the next generation of reactors, what do you think would need to happen in the politics, in maybe humans' minds to help you to accelerate this process? Or at least not to slow it down in the coming years?

Thomas Jam Pederson
There's an important community of people who are building stuff. And that's like what we do and other companies as well. That is very important. We need to have that. But it's also important to have people around that emerging industry to support the industry and explain what is this we're doing. And we have a lot of people who are sort of fans of what we're doing or really like what we do and they communicate what we do to their colleagues and friends and family and so on. And I've even had people who are sort of, we have a number of- we have more than 1,000 small investors. I've had some of them come to me and say, Can I borrow some of the slides from your slide deck, because I would really like to do a talk about this at my, whatever, workplace or somewhere. And I think that's really helpful when thousands of people go out there and talk about what nuclear can do for society. Because I think that's more trustworthy than if some corporate thing does it or even if a government tried to push this down your throat. I think it's much more believable when the guy you worked with for 20 years, he's actually spending his time to try to explain to you, I've learned about this, this is how it works, this is something we should look at as a society. And it's not enough if just one guy does that. But I believe that in three, four, five years from now, we will have 100,000 people around the world trying to communicate about these new types of small modular reactors and these new type of reactor designs that are much better than what we had in the old days. And I really believe that is what is, in the end, going to change the fate of nuclear and get it back in- get trust back into society. There will always be some people who are against it and who are afraid of it. But I do believe that we will, within the next five years, I do believe in many countries, we will reach more than 50% of the population who are in favor of nuclear and want to build more of it. And of course, the green transition is also part of that, so I see a great future for nuclear companies and especially ours, because I think we are in a great position to scale up this technology.

Jadwiga Najder
So what should I wish to Copenhagen Atomics for the coming years?

Thomas Jam Pederson
I think you should cross your fingers that we will be allowed to start our first test reactor by 2025, because that's our next really big milestone is to have the first test reactor online and operating by 2025. And there are still a number of technical hurdles and approvals and things that need to happen for that. And I think, again, that will be a big step, at least for us. There are not many startup companies around the world that have managed to build a nuclear reactor and get approval to start them. And I hope that in the next 10 years, we will see four or five or six companies do that. And I think that will be great.

Jadwiga Najder
I think this is exactly what I want to wish you then. Thank you very much for your talk. It was amazing to hear you, your opinions and I wish you all the best for the future.

Thomas Jam Pederson
Thank you.

Bret Kugelmass
So we're here today on Titans of Nuclear with Jeff Chamberlain, who's a Deputy at the US National Nuclear Security Administration's Material Management and Minimization Office. Jeff, great to have you here.

Jeff Chamberlain
Great to be here, Bret. Thanks.

Bret Kugelmass
Awesome. So as we like to do before we get into the very weedsy topics, we would just love to hear a little bit about you. Maybe tell us where you came from and how you got into the sector.

Jeff Chamberlain
I grew up in a small town outside of Boston, about 30 miles northwest of Boston called Groton, Massachusetts. I was born and raised there and I did my education up in the Boston area and then, eventually, after graduate school, as many people do, migrated down to the DC area in 2003. And I've been here ever since.

Bret Kugelmass
Okay, well what topics were of interest to you? How did you decide what to study and what your early career was focused on?

Jeff Chamberlain
Well, I came from a family of teachers. My dad was a middle school social studies teacher for 39 years. I always had a lot of history and social studies type stuff in my house growing up. I studied political science as an undergrad and then, after living abroad for a couple of years, I came back and went to grad school for an international relations degree, so security studies and international law graduate school. Kind of a generalist degree. And I came down to DC. I really was interested in public service and that's what many people do. That's what brought me down to DC and there's then a winding path of career choices that got me to the nuclear field as kind of a newbie in nuclear stuff in 2007.

Bret Kugelmass
I want to hear a little bit about that winding. So after you got your degree and you've got some academic studies under your belt, what was your first real experience? What job did you take on it and what were some of the projects that you had to get involved in?

Jeff Chamberlain
I came into the government as a presidential management fellow. And I had the opportunity early on to do a three month rotation at the Office of Management Budget in the White House complex and ended up back there in a full-time job after I did the rotation. I was working at OMB as their program examiner for Army investment programs. At the time, the OMB examiner for the National Nuclear Security Administration sat across the hall from me and I was looking to, at some point, move out of the 35,000 foot view level of government that OMB provides - which is a fantastic experience - but really get down into program management. And I was poking around on job postings one day and I saw this job posting that kind of set the light bulb off in my head. I was like, Oh, that's why I went to grad school. I didn't know that at the time, but that's what I went to grad school for. And it turns out it was a posting for an NNSA job and what was then the Global Threat Reduction Initiative. They were looking for a certain skill set that matched some of the stuff I was doing at OMB. And I talked to the OMB examiner at the time and she said, Oh, this is an up and coming program and a really great place to be and recommended it. And so I was lucky enough to apply for the job and get accepted, but without a lot of background in kind of the weeds of nuclear affair. I had a lot of other skills, but the nuclear stuff was very new to me.

Bret Kugelmass
What were the issues? What were the pressing issues when you took on this new role? What did they have you working on?

Jeff Chamberlain
It was actually the program that was- we were renamed and reorganized in 2015. But it was really a lot of the programs that I'm now responsible for managing with my team now. That was in late 2007 that I went to NNSA and at that time it was still fairly soon post 9/11. The Global Threat Reduction Initiative and NNSA were really focused on securing vulnerable nuclear materials around the world, weapons and materials from civilian applications so that they couldn't fall into the wrong hands and be used for malevolent purposes against the United States or our international partners and allies. There was a big focus on securing vulnerable nuclear material.

Bret Kugelmass
Securing vulnerable nuclear materials... what would that be? I mean, would that just be like research reactors that had higher level of enrichment in the core?

Jeff Chamberlain
Yeah. So after 9/11, the US really- and there was some of this work being done prior to 9/11, going back even into the late 70s started up. But we really focused on - yes - converting research reactors from highly enriched uranium to low enriched uranium, so reducing the demand for HEU in civilian applications. And then in tandem with that- and we're still doing these things overseas. To this day, we still have a number of projects going on in these areas. Also, removing nuclear material from countries, trying to clean countries out of highly enriched uranium in their research and civilian applications, while helping them be able to do those things with low enriched uranium. And then we return the HEU either the United States or work with the Russian Federation.

Bret Kugelmass
Are there other applications other than research reactors where you had highly enriched uranium? I don't know, like medical this or that?

Jeff Chamberlain
Yeah, actually, that's a great question. Yes, we also have worked very closely over the last 10 years to convert the global production of molybdenum-99, a critical medical radioisotope use in thousands of patient procedures a day here in the US. We've worked with the global producers of moly-99 to convert their production from HEU to LEU and we're also supporting US companies to stand up non-HEU based moly-99 production in the United States.

Bret Kugelmass
Maybe if we can just kind of like rewind in history a little bit. How come we were so free to just let highly enriched uranium around the globe before? Obviously, they knew that - we'd built the bomb, so they knew that this kind of stuff can be used in malicious ways - but they didn't think it was that much of a risk, I guess, before? What was the operating theory then - and I understand 9/11 happened - but what actually changed about the threat mode that precipitated this type of action?

Jeff Chamberlain
Well, it goes back to the Atoms for Peace program. And the US exported metric tons - a lot of metric tons - of highly enriched uranium between the 50s and the 80s to support countries to stand up peaceful nuclear programs, in exchange for not standing up weapons programs. That was a very successful program. It made all the sense in the world at the time. And I think with the Nonproliferation Treaty in the 70s and the ARC conversion program actually started in the late 70s. US kind of started dipping its toe into the waters of, Hey, we should be figuring out ways to help research reactors operate with LEU, but then of course, like it did for many things, then 9/11 really changed the perspective on the outsiders and organizations such as that in the world of focus at that time and still is really on making sure they don't get this material to do things that would harm the United States with it. So the threat perception has changed by 9/11 a lot and we're dealing with the legacy of the Atoms for Peace program, which was a great positive program. It made sense at the time.

Bret Kugelmass
And is the concern state actors or non-state actors, specifically, when it comes to using the highly enriched material that's out there? Because I feel like it would be beyond the capability of a non-state actor to even take a research reactor that had let's say 90% enriched and actually do anything real with it.

Jeff Chamberlain
Again, there are kind of limits to what we can say on this show.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, don't go into detail you can't.

Jeff Chamberlain
Our program is one within a number of programs within NNSA's Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation, or DNN as we call it. DNN is concerned with the threat of both state actors and non-state actors and we do a variety of things across the spectrum of nuclear security and nonproliferation to address both threats. I think, broadly, you can say that the hardest thing for a non-state actor to do would be to get the material to make an improvised nuclear device. Our concern has always been going- and our program is really focused on getting to the material and making sure it's secure. We have folks that install security upgrades of facilities. We have a Office of Global Nuclear Material Security that does that. And then we try to work with the material and also just provide novel solutions to new solutions, so that LEU, we hope, can be the material of the future for research reactors.

Bret Kugelmass
Cool. And does LEU- what does that go up to? Is that just 5%? Or can you go up to 20% and still be proliferation resistant?

Jeff Chamberlain
We've converted- all the reactors we've converted have been below 20%, most of them in the 19.75% range. So we convert them to high-assay LEU and that's kind of a sweet spot for a place where most reactors can still do science they want to do, but also, it's obviously far preferable from a proliferation perspective than 90%.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, of course. And one of the constraints here, as I understand it, is that you want to keep the form factor of the reactor, the same- the literal geometry that the fuel has to sit into. And if you have lower enriched, that means you've got a density issue with how many 235 atoms you can pack in there, so you might have to then switch from one form factor of fuel to another. Is that the technical way that it's managed? You switch from some sort of higher enriched ceramic to lower enriched metallic form or something like that?

Jeff Chamberlain
I'll caveat right off the start that I'm most definitely not a nuclear engineer, but I've learned enough in this job to be dangerous. And I know you've had some folks from our program on in previous episodes over the years, too. But it depends on the reactor. We've been able to convert a lot of reactors around the world with LEU fuels that already exist. And our engineers have found really smart and creative ways, in a lot of cases, to tweak the geometry of the reactor for add beryllium or add- do things and tweak the reactor core in ways that you can get the flux you need using existing LEU fuels. There are what we call the high performance research reactors in the United States and Europe, primarily, that are going to require new high density LEU fuels that our programs are supporting the development of that will pack more uranium into a single fuel assembly and allow these reactors to get the flux they need with LEU. Those fuels are still in process of being qualified.

Bret Kugelmass
And has there ever been a consideration of saying, instead of swapping out the fuel, we're just going to build a brand new building. It's going to have the latest and greatest in security. We're going to- it's going to be like, we'll invent a new type of low enriched pool type reactor, so you can- we'll just give you a new reactor and a new building and a new security protocol altogether. We'll build it on the same camp- we'll tear down what you got, we'll build it on the same campus, and it'll be better than ever. And maybe that won't even cost that much, because we'll just do the same thing every time. Like this will be our standardized "let's give them a research program" building.

Jeff Chamberlain
No, we haven't gone that far. And I think probably a lot of it's cost and a lot of its the face that we've been able to find, again, creative and novel solutions for the existing research reactor fleet using LEU. So we haven't had to go there, because we've been able to work with reactors. We have 75 reactors we've converted around the world that are now operating successfully with LEU. I think we just haven't needed to go that far.

Bret Kugelmass
Right, if you got it working, just stay with what works. So 75 down, how many to go?

Jeff Chamberlain
I don't have the exact number in my head, but we're definitely down to the harder cases again, these high performance reactors that require new fuel. For example, in the US, there are 28 facilities in our scope and we've converted 20 of them and the ones that can convert with existing fuel, they're all converted in the United States.

Bret Kugelmass
Oh, you're converting US reactors also. What's the proliferation concern in the US?

Jeff Chamberlain
First of all, first and foremost, it's a lead by example issue. We're out preaching the gospel to the world of HEU minimization in civilian applications. And, hey, we need to do this and you need to do this. And so the best way to lead and really create momentum for that is to lead by example here at home. So that's one thing and we've been very successful in that. And we've gained a lot of credibility overseas, because we can say to people, Hey, we're doing it in the US. Also, HEU is a finite resource. It's not going to last forever. We don't have any HEU enrichment capability. So long term too, there's a material issue with highly enriched uranium. And it's going take more enriched HEU than it will the high-assay LEU, for example.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, absolutely. Cool. Okay, great. Anything else on that overhaul program that we should cover?

Jeff Chamberlain
No, I don't think so. I think we may touch upon some more of it as we go into the other stuff, but we're proud of it. And I think we have a great team that does great work.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, it's great. And I think it's probably a lot of fun for the- how many reactor designers out there actually get to design reactors that then get built? Because in the academic world, there are so many paper reactors and it's all fantasy, but this is like a chance for like a real core designer to do something really novel and see it implemented in practice. How often does that happen?

Jeff Chamberlain
Absolutely. These projects, we found the facilities love them, because it's a unique once in a lifetime project for the facility. And I'd also add that our program in the US has produced dozens of PhD students and nuclear scientists and engineers who have done work on our program. We're proud of the contribution we've made to nuclear education and the next generation of nuclear experts in the complex.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, I think, just for that reason alone, it's probably worthwhile. It's definitely a worthwhile program, I should say.

Jeff Chamberlain
Oh yeah, we think it's definitely worthwhile.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah. Oh, but there's one more little quick question on that topic. Does the host country get to participate in the reactor redesign, also?

Jeff Chamberlain
Absolutely, very much so. It's a very- we're a cooperative program. May be an obvious point, but we only work with countries that allow us in and want to partner with us. And so it's a very iterative process. We have our experts at Argonne National Laboratory and the other national laboratories that do safety analyses and - excuse me - all of the thermal hydraulics and neutron physics work, but they- a lot of the original work is done by the facility experts themselves. And then it's an iterative process between them and our laboratory experts to go back and forth, validate each other's modeling, validate each other's calculations, and work to make sure that yes, the LEU fuel we're going to put in there is going to work. We can get it approved by the regulator. It's going to be safe and it will do the science- enable the facility to really do the science they want to do. So it's a very kind of cool, iterative, intellectual academic process to convert a reactor.

Bret Kugelmass
Cool. I love it. Double thumbs up for me. Alright, so next project. What else you working on?

Jeff Chamberlain
In very close connection with everything we just talked about, but also with the larger portfolio of programs I mentioned within the DNN, within the NNSA Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation. We identified a couple years ago that, Hey, with the oncome of the advanced reactor industry, it's really important to figure out how to engage our NNSA and DNN programs with advanced reactor companies and vendors. And this kind of goes to this- I think maybe we can say a gap in some respects that's existed at times between the nuclear energy and nonproliferation communities over the years. And so we think it's important that we work and that we engage and work with companies to make sure that safeguards and security and export control, they're all being considered by US companies as they develop advanced reactor technologies and look to especially export them, which is where we come in, because we're an international program by nature. And so a couple years ago, we identified that we really wanted to start engaging with this community. We actually had a funny interaction. I did a coffee break at an industry group presentation we made and one of the companies came up to me, a member representative of a company came up and said, Hey, we're really glad to NNSA's here, but you guys are kind of a mystery to us and we don't know much about you. So we've undertaken an effort in DNN - and this is across all of our program offices, not just the one I work in in my day job, too - over the last couple years to really kind of try to demystify NNSA - and that's an ongoing process - but to really promote cooperative engagement with industry, because we support the successful deployment of US advanced reactors. It's going to be good for nonproliferation. It's good for our international relationships. It's important for us to have those long, enduring relationships with countries around the world that nuclear energy provides. We want to help this and support them and we have a lot of skills and expertise developed over the last few decades in what we do that we think can support what they're trying to do.

Bret Kugelmass
So what's the manifestation of this? How is this taken form, this actual support?

Jeff Chamberlain
We've been excited to announce recently via press release - and we've been making the rounds with industry to let them know about it - what we call our new US Nuclear Nexus web portal that has been developed and is being managed for us by Argonne National Laboratory. It's a portal we developed to facilitate that deeper and broader engagement between our programs and advanced reactor companies, especially.

Bret Kugelmass
What's the website? Just in case people are following along and they actually want to go to it and visit it as we're talking? This is the US Nuclear Nexus. What's the website?

Jeff Chamberlain
It's anl.gov/nuclear-nexus.

Bret Kugelmass
Got it.

Jeff Chamberlain
Or you can Google Nuclear Nexus and it'll come up. The website is hosted by Argonne National Laboratory and they do the management for us, but yeah, that's the web link for those folks.

Bret Kugelmass
Perfect, can you give us maybe a couple of case studies of how participants or stakeholders have used this web portal so far?

Jeff Chamberlain
Sure. Well, it's really new. We're still- we've been really encouraged early on by the number of hits we've gotten. We're getting early on around 1,000 hits a day and we're in the hundreds every day now. So that's been really encouraging. What companies can do is they can come to the site and right now it's sort of a couple of purposes. It's a repository of information on safeguards, security, export controls, proliferation resistance for companies. Especially newer companies that may not be used to working with the federal government or especially NSA can come and just get basic information on things they should be considering in terms of safeguards and security. But then the second function is also there's a very user friendly function where they can contact us. And they can contact through Nexus to say, Hey, I have this question about safeguards, or I need to know X about security. The way we set up the website is to basically say, Hey, I'm an A and I'm looking for B, or I'm X and I'm looking for Y. And the website's goal is to help facilitate their connection with our experts that sit in the laboratory complex to get the information they need to help them move forward.

Bret Kugelmass
Very cool. And what are some of those topics that are covered? Give me the kind of like the high level big branches of types of information people are searching for her.

Jeff Chamberlain
International nuclear security is a big one and also international nuclear safeguards. Those are two areas where, especially, we want to urge companies to engage with us early in their design processes.

Bret Kugelmass
And actually, can you just - for maybe some of our newer audience that doesn't understand the distinction between the two - can you just spell out what is security and then what is safeguards?

Jeff Chamberlain
Yeah, and I'll say this in my layman's terms, because I'll admit I don't work in either on a day to day basis. And I'll defer to our experts to correct me if I'm wrong, but security is a wide suite of things in terms of securing a facility, both physically, but in cybersecurity, looking at insider threats and sabotage. And so the whole spectrum of things that we consider, ensuring that that material can't be used or diverted from a level and purposes and the facilities here. Safeguards is actually our ability to count the material and track the material in the facility and know if it's gone missing or not. And so the two are very complementary, but that's a really good question. And I apologize in advance to my folks at NNSA if I botched their official deputy,

Bret Kugelmass
As far as I understand it - and maybe you can just correct me if I'm wrong - security is about protecting the facility from some sort of intrusion or attack of any sort. And then safeguards is about protecting the use of the material, making sure that the material isn't used in a malicious way,

Jeff Chamberlain
Making sure that we know we can account for it all and know if it's if something has gone missing, we'll known. Safeguards are designed to let us know.

Bret Kugelmass
Got it. Okay, cool. All right, what are some of the branches of topics on the website?

Jeff Chamberlain
Another big, really big one - it's critical for all companies to really understand well, understand both responsibilities and how we can work with them - is export controls. That's going to be huge. And anybody who's going to be eventually looking to sell reactors overseas is going to work closely with our export control folks. We have a regulatory function there, but there's also an educational function and we have a lot of expertise in our offices to handle that. So Code of Federal Regulations Part 810 that governs exports of sensitive technology, for example, is a big one that companies need to consider. We have the folks at NNSA who can help them work through those issues and explain to them and work with them to understand those issues better. And then another, the last one that we really focus on the website - it's a newer one for us and that we're still flushing out - is this idea of proliferation resistance. And it's building on some experiences, actually, that we had in our reactor conversion. We're working to figure out how we can work with facilities overseas and we're starting with research reactor designers to essentially figure out how we can help their new research reactor designs make less of the bad material that we're concerned about from a threat perspective, while helping them optimize the performance to do more of the good things they want to do with the facility. And we have some experience doing this out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action working through that. We had a successful case study in that and we're looking to- it's kind of at the intersection of security and safeguards and fits right into that as well. So we have that up on the website and we're looking to figure out how we can engage with companies to help them better.

Bret Kugelmass
When you say, "make less of the stuff that we're worried about," what are some of the strategies there? Is it just find a way to increase the ratio of plutonium-240 to plutonium-239 over the lifetime of the reactor? What are the potential strategies?

Jeff Chamberlain
Or if a facility is designed in a way that might produce a little more plutonium than they really need to or use materials that are producing more plutonium than they need to and we can figure out a way to use material that are less plutonium, and able to do the same science, let's look at how to do that. Again, it's that same type of creative thinking about reactor core design, fuel geometry that our nuclear engineering experts in the lab complex are really good at and it comes out of decades of experience converting research activities. It's directly related. So that's one example. I mean, is a facility the right size? For example, is a facility being built with the right size hydraulic pumps and hot cells that are commensurate with the mission it stated it wants to perform? So that if- a concern is if the country say had a government coming someday who wanted to use it for different purposes, we would like them to have a facility that they couldn't use for those level of purposes or change of routine or something like that. There are a lot of possible scenarios. But at the end of the day, we really want to help facilities do the science they want to do. And in the case of the advanced reactor companies' work, it remains to be seen how this might apply. Because they're not doing science, they're producing energy. But I think some of the same principles may apply. And we'd like to engage with companies to have this discussion.

Bret Kugelmass
That's awesome. Okay, cool. And that's part of the more broader function of your organization, not just the website. The website, the portal helps put person A from the private sector and person B from the government in contact with each other, has a list of topics. But then at the end of the day, it's that direct communication once they're together that's really helped the commercial sector understand what the requirements are.

Jeff Chamberlain
Correct. I'll also add, too, in the portal. This is an experiment for us. We've never done something quite like this. We state in every industry presentation we do, we encourage industry to give us feedback, because the goal is for it to be helpful to them and engaging with us. We also envision that at some point when our programs have solicitations they want to put out to engage with industry with with funding resources that we would have those solicitations up on a site, that's a place that you'd come to access those. We're also closely linked with the DoD GAIN website and GAIN has a link to us. We have monthly meetings with them to make sure we're fully coordinating with GAIN and supporting what they do, because they're really the big portal of entry, I think, for advanced reactor companies to engage with DoD. We want to be linked with them.

Bret Kugelmass
It's great, great. I think it's a great project. I think that it's important to have this online resource that people can go to be able to kind of even figure out what their next steps are. I think this has been a great step that you guys have taken. Are there other projects that we want to chat about or highlight today?

Jeff Chamberlain
I think those are the big ones. Nexus is really what we wanted to highlight. That's our new thing that we've just recently put out. And, again, a lot of it is the challenge of getting the word out, so thank you for helping us do that. Again, because it's only as useful as it is known and available and people come to it right. And we also want to improve it as time goes on. This is definitely Rev 1 that's out there now and we hope to add to the content and broaden it to make it more useful for industry and helpful. This deployment of US advanced reactor technologies is a many years project ongoing, so we want to be there side by side to support that.

Bret Kugelmass
We've got like an audience of at least 50,000 nuclear enthusiasts, so hopefully this brings some attention to your project. I mean, I just think it's so important. Anything that breaks down the barriers of communication and any barriers that exist towards new reactor deployment, I mean, that's what - to put our cards on the table - that's what we're all about. How can we help the next generation of nuclear companies ramp up to the point where we can actually address our clean energy challenges, at a global scale. Obviously, there are a lot of American design companies that need this kind of information to make their vision a commercial reality. I just think it's great what you guys are doing.

Jeff Chamberlain
We want to say thanks, I appreciate that. We want to stress, too, for all the areas that there is just inherently and naturally friction between the nuclear energy and nonproliferation communities, but just by virtue of the seats we sit in, I view this and I think we do in DNN as one of those areas where we really have overlapping and mutually reinforcing interest here. We all want to see success here. I think it's exciting to me from that perspective. I feel it is a really an issue where we can bridge some of those divides between the energy and nonproliferation community that really work together, hopefully, in an effective way. Because we all want to see this work in the US back out there in the world on this stuff.

Bret Kugelmass
Awesome. All right, I'm gonna put you on the spot now, before I let you go. We always like to end with someone giving us their vision for the future and the one rule is it has to be optimistic. So tell us, what does the world look like- the nuclear world look like 10, 15 years from now?

Jeff Chamberlain
Sitting from the seat I sit in and we sit in in DNN, we certainly want to see US companies back out there. We want to see US products out in the world. We want to see them have the products that have the best standards possible, security and safeguards incorporated. We think that's an area that we're really good at in the US. And that should give- should be a positive for the products that our companies deploy. Other countries that we're competing with don't do that as well, don't care about it as much. So worldwide, our companies are starting to succeed out there and it's being done with safeguards and security incorporated into it and would be a really huge step forward in 10 or 15 years if we can be close to that goal.

Bret Kugelmass
Jeff Chamberlain, everybody. Thank you so much.

Jeff Chamberlain
Thanks, Bret. I really appreciate it.

Michelle Brechtelsbauer
So today we're here with Jean-Michel Hoorelbeke, the Senior Advisor for Foresight and Strategy at the French National Radioactive Waste Management Agency, Andra. Great to have you here, Jean-Michel, at the World Nuclear Exhibition 2021.

Jean-Michel Hoorelbeke
Thank you. I'm happy to.

Michelle Brechtelsbauer
Excellent. I'd love to start off by talking about your background and how you got into nuclear energy and waste management in the very beginning.

Jean-Michel Hoorelbeke
Sure. Maybe I should start with I have 40 years of background and experience in nuclear waste management. Not only nuclear, but waste management. This is my expertise. In the very beginning, I worked with the French Atomic Commission-

Michelle Brechtelsbauer
CEA, right?

Jean-Michel Hoorelbeke
CEA, yes. But afterwards I joined Andra and has been with Andra for maybe more than 30 years.

Michelle Brechtelsbauer
Excellent, excellent.

Jean-Michel Hoorelbeke
At that time Andra was not as it is today. Today it is an independent government agency, independent from waste producers. At that time, when I started work with Andra, Andra was a department within the CEA, within the French Atomic Commission.

Michelle Brechtelsbauer
And what has your role- what was your role when you first joined Andra? Were you- what were you doing when you first started out, back when it was part of CEA?

Jean-Michel Hoorelbeke
My personal history is that my education was mining engineer. Education, not professional experience. Maybe I have six months professional experience in a uranium mine. That's it. But that's- this expertise interested at that time the CEA, because the CEA started a program on geological disposal of nuclear waste. So they thought at that time that a mining engineer with some knowledge in geology could be interesting. So that's the reason why I started with the CEA 40 years ago.

Michelle Brechtelsbauer
Yes. And so back when you began working with CEA and Andra- I guess today, we're just starting to have the first steps towards making a concrete project for geological disposal. Can you talk us through the history of seeing this project come to life through your career?

Jean-Michel Hoorelbeke
Yes, this project is going to be- well, actually, I hope it will be licensed maybe in five years or something like that. And afterwards, we will start construction. But for me, it's not the first step towards concrete things. The first step was in 2000 with the construction of the Underground Research Laboratory in Bure. That was a good long history which started in 1991.

Michelle Brechtelsbauer
And what were the objectives of the underground research laboratory?

Jean-Michel Hoorelbeke
To assess the feasibility of a safe geological disposal facility. It was research, research and development. From 1991 up to 2006 - 2005 - Andra was only in charge of the research program on the feasibility of geological disposal. And we needed this laboratory, underground laboratory, to characterize a potential host rock and to assess that we could be capable- we can be capable to construct underground openings in this geological formation and that this geological formation would be capable to contain radionuclides for a very long time That was the objective of this- the initial objective of this laboratory. But afterwards, in 2005, we provided the government - and the country I would say - with a feasibility report, conclusion that was that it is possible to construct, to build, an industrial scale geological disposal facility in this geological formation, and that this disposal facility will be very safe. That means that it will be capable to contain radionuclides for hundred thousands of years, several hundred thousands of years. And we provided the government with this conclusion in this report and this report was reviewed by many people and in particular the French regulator. Afterwards, an act was voted to declare that the reference route for the management of high-level radioactive waste is surgical disposal. And I would say our real project for an industrial scale, this geological disposal facility started in 2006 or 2007. We passed from a pure research phase to the preparation of an industrial project.

Michelle Brechtelsbauer
And that project is the Cigéo-

Jean-Michel Hoorelbeke
-Cigéo. The name was given to the project, I think, in 2009 or something like that to highlight that we were passing from research phase to an industrial phase of project.

Michelle Brechtelsbauer
And so, as you said earlier, this project is I believe in the permitting phase-

Jean-Michel Hoorelbeke
Yeah, yeah.

Michelle Brechtelsbauer
-for getting construction licenses, but it'll be at the same site as the laboratory.

Jean-Michel Hoorelbeke
It's close. It's not the same facility, it's not exactly the same site. The underground research facility was designed only for research. It is impossible to put waste, projective waste in the URL. It's too small and it's clear. But on the basis of this underground research laboratory, we were in position to characterize a regional area around the laboratory around 250 square kilometers. And we said in 2006, we explained that this 250 square kilometers area was- is similar to the underground laboratory and if we build a repository in this area, we can use-

Michelle Brechtelsbauer
All the data.

Jean-Michel Hoorelbeke
-all the data gained in the laboratory. And then a new siting phase started in 2006 within this 250 square kilometers area. The result is the underground facility for Cigéo is maybe five kilometers far from the Underground Research Laboratory, but we will have an inclined drift between the future underground facility and the surface to ship the underground, the waste packages, waste. And the location of this inclined drift is very close to the location of the Underground Research Laboratory. That's the reason that they're very close. But they are close on the surface, not so close underground. A few kilometers distance between both. This is the result of our siting campaign, which included, of course, technical issues, but mainly social issues.

Michelle Brechtelsbauer
I'd love to hear about some of the public kind of engagement that you all have had been able to do, obviously, because the laboratory has been there for so long, but also now that we're in the planning phase, kind of what the public engagement and the public sentiment have been.

Jean-Michel Hoorelbeke
We have performed a number of consultations with local public. In the very first phase, that was around 1993 or something like that to implement the URL, because the siting of the URL was based on voluntarism. At that time, we were not directly responsible for the siting. The siting was made under the auspices of a member of the Parliament at that time. But of course, that was based on voluntourism. Later, from 2006, we were in charge of the siting of the Cigéo project itself and we have made a number of consultations with the public, with the local stakeholders, local elected people, and the public to define where the facilities should be to optimize everything, including the relationship with the local communities. And today, we still have consultations with the public to define some concrete aspects of the project such as how to transport with packages, how to provide power, how to provide water. And so we have a consultation on the future governance of the facility itself, how we will govern the successive phases, which will occur when we will be licensed.

Jean-Michel Hoorelbeke
I would love to talk to you about that idea, the successive phases, the kind of stepwise development plans. I'd also like to kind of hear your perspective on some of the innovations that this facility has built into its design, into its planning, the idea of reversibility for example.

Jean-Michel Hoorelbeke
Yeah, reversibility is a key word, but this word is relatively old. The French government decided that the geological disposal should be investigated in the logic of reversibility. They decided that in 1998, but we had to transform this very general world into concrete solutions. And it's clear that the stepwise development is a key point. We have had a number of milestones, decision milestones from 2006 up to now and this very stepwise process will continue. After the license, we will start a so-called industrial pilot phase.

Michelle Brechtelsbauer
And what does that entail?

Jean-Michel Hoorelbeke
It includes the verification that everything works as planned. That we can construct full size openings from the shaft inclines raised and underground drifts, underground vaults for the disposal for the placement of the waste packages. That we can also implement mechanical systems to transfer underground waste in a very safe manner. And finally, that we can place the waste package in a very safe manner and also that we can retrieve it if decided and of course to monitor everything to check that there is no particular problem compared to what is planned. This is the pilot phase. And during the pilot phase, we will, at the end of the pilot phase - or I would say the second period of the pilot phase - includes the waste package in placement tests. Firstly, with mockups, but afterwards with real packages. It's an industrial phase. It's very similar to an industrial operation. So during this pilot phase, we will dispose of- we will emplace waste packages. We will then place intermediate level waste packages and also some high-level waste-

Michelle Brechtelsbauer
You'll do HLW?

Jean-Michel Hoorelbeke
Yes, small amount of high-level waste, because it's mainly to check that everything works as planned. And at the end of this pilot phase, we will have to report if everything is okay or not. Normally a new act is required will be required - to decide to go to the next phase. And the story will not stop at that time, because we still have other milestones. In particular, after the pilot phase, we plan to emplace ILW mainly, or I would say only intermediate-level waste to around 2080. And then or around 2080, we will have to decide if we dispose of high-level waste I see. The most important part of the hazardness of the hazards of the waste is in the high-level waste. And so I think we will have a very long experience of geological disposal before deciding to dispose of the high-level waste around 2080. During the transition phase from now to 2080, the radioactivity of this high level with decreases with thermal decay. At that time, the high-level waste will be compatible with the long-term safety of the repository with respect to its thermal output.

Michelle Brechtelsbauer
And so this repository will be able to house all of France's intermediate level waste as well as its high level waste.

Jean-Michel Hoorelbeke
Yeah.

Michelle Brechtelsbauer
Great, great.

Jean-Michel Hoorelbeke
All the- it is designed to accommodate all the intermediate level and high-level waste that already exists that were produced from- and also those which will be produced by the actual power plants in France, up to their shutdown-

Michelle Brechtelsbauer
End of their lifetimes. Excellent. And so I, of course, in addition to this kind of stepwise development plan where we have all these milestones for testing and verification, something I also thought was really interesting about the project is how its funded, and how there's particular attention paid to ensuring that the funding is coming from current-

Jean-Michel Hoorelbeke
The funding does not come from the government. It does not come from the taxpayers. The funding comes from the waste producers. Waste producers are responsible for all expenses for the dismantling of their facilities and the management of their waste. But to be sure that we will have the money in the future, today they prepare, they make financial provisions which are very safe, which are very controlled, so that we are sure that we will get the money when we need it for the pilot phase, but also for the phases after.

Michelle Brechtelsbauer
And so it's kind of coming back to your role in all of this, in this project. And of course, just in the organization in general, as you are Senior Advisor for Foresight - looking into the future - and Strategy - so as a kind of the current the current vision of the organization - where do you see yourself? What is the most interesting thing to you that you're currently working on?

Jean-Michel Hoorelbeke
First, I consider I think the most important part of my career was a 15-year period where I was project manager for this Cigéo project. That was between 1993 and 2006. I was the project manager, so that was very fun, very, very nice, because we had to develop the safety strategy. How to develop the safety strategy of the safety case of this project. How to develop reversibility to go from a single word to concrete solutions. And so, to design facilities in this very- in this clay formation. It's clay, some granite. We have to adapt to the- we adapt the design to the geology. If you compare the Cigéo project and the Swedish project, for instance, you can see differences. This is due to very different geological formations. So all this was made during this period where I was project manager. And afterwards, I've had several various positions in Andra program management, safety, environment, and now Foresight and Strategy, how we imagine the future, but clearly is on the basis of my background.

Michelle Brechtelsbauer
Yes, yes, absolutely. I mean, it sounds like it's been a really fascinating career to get to take something that was just a vision and a request of government and to turn it into something very real that is going to be impactful for enabling clean energy used by the future generations and the safe storage of the waste produced by that energy production.

Jean-Michel Hoorelbeke
In my country we have a very wide range of nuclear waste, where 90% of the volume of waste which is produced today is disposed of by Andra in near surface facilities. The very high-level waste, the waste with the highest hazard, will be disposed of. I hope that they will be disposed of in Cigéo. But we also have in between waste and we are now thinking of graded solutions for disposing these in between wastes that are not compatible with near surface disposal, but we considered that Cigéo is not adapted to this in between waste. And we have significant programs in France and with Andra to develop new solutions for these wastes.

Michelle Brechtelsbauer
Could you give me an example of that- the type of waste are you talking about. Objects or equipment that have been exposed to radioactive sources? Or what are these types of wastes that you're speaking of?

Jean-Michel Hoorelbeke
This in between waste? Graphite waste from the very first generation of nuclear plants in France, radium bearing waste - they are not, some are nuclear, others are not from the nuclear industry, radium bearing waste. Also, uranium conversion waste. You turn a yellowcake into UF4 before enrichment. You generate uranium bearing waste that are in between. And as so, we also have another category of waste we're working on, it's depleted uranium. Depleted uranium can be recycled in the future in fast breeder reactors, but to be sure that we take into account all possibilities in the future, we also have to imagine how we could dispose of this depleted uranium in the case it would not be recycled in the future. Also, it's an in between waste.

Michelle Brechtelsbauer
And this will also- this is something that you're currently exploring to be- for Cigéo to house this type of waste as well.

Jean-Michel Hoorelbeke
Cigéo can maybe be an option for disposing this, but we are also investigating other options which may be more graded options, graded to the intermediate level of hazard of these in between waste. So we are working on shallow depth solutions and it's a long history. So research and development is not finished today in France with the engagement of Cigéo project. We have to continue research for the future phases of Cigéo, but we also have to continue research for developing new solutions for waste management.

Michelle Brechtelsbauer
Yeah, so I guess we'll kind of wrap up. I'd love to hear in a few sentences what you see as the future of radioactive waste management in France and the leadership role that your country and your organization are playing this space.

Jean-Michel Hoorelbeke
The future is- the best wish we can have is that in maybe one decade - or yeah, one decade, I would say - we have solutions for all waste. Today we have solutions for 90% of the waste, 95% if we consider all Cigéo. But my wish is that we will have a solution to all the waste. Maybe- it will be a stepwise process, system to develop new solutions. I think we will progress significantly in the next five years, but afterwards we will have to go on.

Michelle Brechtelsbauer
Oh, that's fantastic. And it's great to see that you are- you have that foresight and you and your organization are leading the way and France is leading the way in this. So thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.

Jean-Michel Hoorelbeke
Thank you.

Michelle Brechtelsbauer
Thank you.