Discussing the Future of Energy (Key Takeaways)

0:00 Okay. Uh John uh K is on the line and we are recording a podcast for um our audience. This will be posted both on COMCAMIC channel and the Thor uh energy alliance channels and uh it's about uh where Thor energy is going to take us in the next uh 10 years or more. Um so uh John what is your take on what has been happening in the last uh I would say the last month in uh nuclear energy um the the last month uh for thorium from where I'm at you know and you can you can tell me to scratch it get your but but from where I'm at um thorium somehow ARPA

0:48 the advanced research projects agency in the United States that it's focused on energy. That's the E. Uh they are still stumbling along somehow uh through this uh new paradigm we're in. And uh the thorium uh is still being funded. Uh the policy at the Department of Energy is still to uh support funding uh of thorium and uh and research and just plain old uh getting to do the research with thorium which is a huge sea change. Uh before thorium was considered a second run fuel at best. It basically said if

1:36 you uh you know they they only wanted to fund uranium based products or or uh plutonium because it was a self-reerential thing. People people use uranium therefore we fund uranium and they realized that that was an unfair uh you know strictcture against thorium. So that's just in the last month we found out that uh there's some funding and some availability and just the general uh attitude has shifted. Uh DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency has just uh opened up funding for uh advanced energy sources, direct conversion of nuclear uh energy into usable energy and uh they've accepted

2:24 some thorium based uh research proposals that we've uh sent to them. So that's been very interesting. And then the number one project that Thorium Energy Alliance is involved with right now is standing up a company called the Thorium Products Corporation. And Thorium Products Corporation will own a license that allows us to accept thorium uh manipulate it, change it, you know, make different thorium based chemicals out of it and sell it to uh offtakers who want to use it for fuel and other applications. I do want to remind the audience maybe not all of them know sort of the uh sort of the physics difference between uranium and

3:10 thorium. So obviously most or all of the reactors in the world today they run on uranium 235 and most of those reactors needs enriched uranium 235 and uh and um so you cannot burn all of that fuel. You can only burn some of it and then the rest is called waste. It's not really waste. It's spent fuel or slightly used nuclear fuel. it can definitely be used some more but um but sort of most reactors in the world today they have a burn up of something like uh 40 to 60 gawatt days per ton of uranium and that's per ton of enriched uranium that you put in there um and the uh you can look up the price of enriched uranium and and I'll try to share uh just a screen with people here uh let me see uh

4:00 is anything coming up on your screen now it says you've started to Oh, there it is. All right. So, so this is one of these um websites where you can look up the the current price of enriched uranium. And in this case, I've just set the enrichment to 19.8%, which is Halo. And it says down here that uh at that at the current uranium market spot price, this is $18,000 per kilogram. Uh I do believe I set it to kilogram. Yeah. otherwise sometimes it's in pounds but um um yeah and actually so the uranium price was quite a bit higher just half a year ago so so it has come back down but of course the enrichment is still expensive um so so that's just

4:45 for people to know what is the price of enriched uranium and many of these reactors out there they need 200 tons of uranium uh just to get started uh so of course it's it's not cheap uh to to load a reactor with enriched fuel I I would say though now I what I had there on the screen was 19.8%. Of course you can change it to 3 or 4% or whatever your preferred lightwater reactor uses. Um but uh and then the the price is less than half of what we saw there. Uh but in comparison 1 kilogram of thorium only costs roughly $50 uh and it doesn't need enrichment. uh but of course thorium is a fertile fuel whereas what we were talking about before uranium is an uh file fuel so I mean they don't compare

5:31 it directly uh but I think this is one of the things we need to talk about today um Thomas I I think your best metric and the one that I use now because it is so shocking is that even though there's something on the order of four times more naturally occurring thorium in the earth's crust than uranium That's misleading in that there's thorium is 100% usable as a fuel where maybe what half a percent of naturally occurring uranium norm is usable on on average. There are some richer areas and less but uh you know so you're talk your metric of there's 2,000 times more

6:16 usable thorium on Earth than there is usable uranium and that that should wake people up. You know whenever I get people saying what's so what's the big deal about thorium? Why would we want to use it? And and I'm like cuz it's 2,000 times more available. You get it for free when you process rare earths, which we desperately need to do in the west. And you know, we could we could uh go down that memory lane of all the reasons why thorium is a superior material that we in a way we have no choice but to use it because if we want to get back into critical materials, we're going to be creating a large amount of actonides. Now, we have a way to get rid of the uranium that comes out

7:03 of rare earth production, but we better come up with a way to deal with the thorium. And if all we do is think of like ways to store it, that that is an utter lack of imagination, uh we're spitting in the face of God himself who gave us this energy source that could power, you know, humanity for thousands of years. And so uh you know and and you know on a very cogent point the national security interests of the western world and the economic interests of the western world you know are our adversaries in the world are going to use this material and if they are creating electricity and

7:51 heat for a penny or two per kilowatt and we are stuck making power for eight or 10 cents or 11 cents or 100 cents a kilowatt. We, you know, we're going to be a second or third world country, you know, and uh sorry to, you know, digress. I don't want to make it so draconic, but but uh let's let's keep it light and say that there's there's these different options and whether people choose to uh to use those options are basically up to them. I mean you and I are of course working towards getting thorium as an active active reactors that are using thorium so that we can create energy from that. We know that there's other good people out there also working on

8:37 that. Uh but but I just want to come back and and talk about those numbers. So okay so we already talked about the fuel price for Thorum. It's $50 per kilogram and actually for that $50 you can get 22 something. Let's say just 22 uh um gawatt hours per kilogram of heat out of that. Um if you take uh enriched uranium, let's take uh just the the regular run-of-the-mill four or 4% enriched uranium that they use in most of the lightwater reactors today. In that with you have if you have a 60 uh gawatt day burnup in that reactor, then it's roughly 1.4 um gawatt hours per kilogram. So you

9:22 know uh you know 15 times less per kilogram of uranium and then on top of that you have that big price difference that you talked about and on top of that you have that availability you talked about that there's thousands of times more thorium than is uranium. So there's a number of things uh that uh makes thorium a better fuel. Um on the other hand uh so if if we go back and look at Thor reactors uh you can make these molten or reactors that are actually not that big because they don't have uh this high pressure and they don't they have a better neutron economy. So the the size of the core is much smaller and therefore they need much less material to to build that reactor. So the cost of the reactor is also much smaller in the

10:07 order of uh 10 to 100 times smaller than for a lightwater reactor with the same output. Uh so there's very large savings on the reactor as well. And thorium is the only fuel it's the only fertile fuel that can create a breeder reactor and thermal spectrum. And because it's a fertile fuel you need to have a breeder reactor otherwise it doesn't really work. And that is why putting thorium in solid fuel reactors uh which have been done many times in the past doesn't yield all these positive benefits that we talk about here. You you basically need a moltar reactor to to release all those positive benefits. Uh and then on the other hand uh of course you can use uranium 238 and there's been many projects in the past more than 20 reactors have been built where they try

10:54 to use um uranium 238 or depleted uranium or natural uranium whatever you want to call it and for that to be a breather reactor you have to do it in fast spectrum and what those more than 20 reactors from the past showed is that it's it's not easy uh I won't say that it's impossible I I think it is possible but I think it's it's really difficult and I know that there's a number of companies out there trying to make close the fuel cycle with a fast reactor and uh you know eventually we will see if it if it works or not but while we're waiting for that uh you know my personal opinion is that it's there's lower risk in betting on the thermal uh neutrons or slow neutrons fuel cycle because uh it

11:39 has an inherent stability around it and the likelihood of something uh causing problems is much smaller. I mean if if you look at it so back when we were still using horse carriage we were able to build thermal cycle nuclear reactors with very very simple means that's back in the 40s and since then we've built hundreds if if you include the military reactors I think we are close to a thousand reactors that we've built in the thermal fuel cycle and literally all of them worked I mean some of them might have a few hiccups but literally all of them worked and then we built sort of a couple of handfuls of fast reactors and literally all of them failed. I mean there there is a fast reactor running in Russia. Uh but the BN800 is Yeah. But even the Russians admit that it's it's more expensive and not easy to

12:26 run. I mean they even they prefer their light water reactors over their fast reactors. So Oh yeah. Yeah. That's that's the that's exactly right. I mean that you know we are eminently optimistic people when we you know and but we're also realists you know like I think the people get too involved with like the the reactor and the cool things and the science project and they don't reduce it to like well is this going to make me electricity for a penny a kilowatt or thermal energy for a penny a kilowatt and electricity for two cents cuz that's coal right And we have to beat coal. And I believe we can beat coal. We've been able to do it for 50 years, maybe 75

13:13 years, you know, depending on, you know, when you put the flag in the ground of, you know, commercializable nuclear power. And you know, you you've done that great. you know, Copenhagen atomics. It's why I believe in Copenhagen atomics because it's based on economics and material usage and availability and you know the some of the some of the reactors out there and we can talk about uh some of the competitors. you probably don't want to do that. But there's there's some competitors out there that are just basically a step above a science experiment and their use of fuel and the creation of waste and

13:58 the complexity of their systems is laughably astounding, you know, and and it's like what what is their cost per megawatt? And they're they wouldn't they couldn't tell you because they don't care, you know, they just want to make a reactor and get government funding. But, you know, this is this is my admiration for Copenhagen, you know, and I'll show my cards, you know, you know, I I I believe in what you're doing, and that's why I'm on the podcast because it is the one of vanishingly few Western world reactors that could actually be deployed. I think, you know, I'm more optimistic than you, buddy. I think, you know, I think there's no reason you couldn't turn one of yours on in a year.

14:44 You know, if it became a priority for policy makers and funders and people who can supply you the the materials you need, the the restricted or, you know, controlled substances, whatever, you know, but I believe you could do it. I I seen your system and uh you know, it's it's a runner whereas other people have PowerPoint presentations. True. So maybe we should just uh explain that a little bit to the audience. So uh yeah, Cope Mega Atomics have built two uh full scale test reactors already. Uh those cannot start a few a real chain reaction, but the the third one that we're building now, maybe it could. Uh but number four definitely can. uh and

15:29 um and sort of the the way we build these reactors is we order all the components from existing suppliers in the steel industry and uh and currently we don't ask for end stamp you know approvals or anything we just buy regular steel stainless steel and so on and it's not very expensive I mean the the whole uh a whole test reactor without fuel just the the steel and the pipes and all that stuff cost uh roughly $6 million. Uh, and I mean when you look at some of these other reactors, it's because there's not that many tons of steel there and it's it's common steel. It's common stainless steel and it's heat exchangers that are off the shelf and so on and we built the pump ourselves. If you does 6 million include the labor to assemble it. Yeah. Yes, it does. But it doesn't it

16:15 doesn't include the the fuel salt. Um but if you if you look at the uh for example the the Hinckley point C is sort of the the the one reactor right now in Europe that we are building. Uh I last time I saw an article that it's uh the current estimate is that it will cost uh 62 billion uh US dollars to build those two units and and uh I looked up so they they publish how much concrete and how much steel they use for this project and and how how much uranium they need to fuel it to load and and if I if I look up all those numbers what it cost like all those raw materials without nuclear licenses of course just the the what steel and concrete cost and nuclear fuel it's sort of uh less than6 billion US

17:03 dollars h and uh so I don't know if you noticed but Elon Musk has this idiot index where he says you know what is the price of a product versus what is the cost of the raw materials uh and you can see here right away that the idiot index of that reactor is sort of a factor of 10 so you you pay 10 times more for the reactor than for the all the raw materials needed to build that reactor And um uh I think we can do better. I I I think all the nuclear industry and the people designing reactors should aspire to to do better job. It would be great if we can get it down to sort of a two times so that the the reactor including fuel and everything is twice as expensive as the as the raw materials. Um but of course right now we're not

17:49 there with all the cost of licensing but we can come back to that. But I I don't want to go into the all the licensing costs right now. Um well, what you could we could glance at it. I think it's important because you probably have smarty pants. If somebody's been listening this long, depending on how you've edited this video, if if somebody's been listening this long, they're either they're either uh fell asleep or they're drunk or they're they actually get what the uh what the what we're talking about. Um, and uh, I think one of the great things about the Copenhagen reactor, um, you know, I I think either should uh, go relatively big for your economy is scale, but what you've got is something that's uh, you know, uh,

18:38 in a smaller package so that once you get I'm going to be USAentric here hopefully If the NRC approves the system, they also are going to introduce fingers crossed that end of a kind just like every airframe isn't you know uh licensed one by one by one you know if you can get your system licensed then you can make a thousand Copenhagen reactor units or 300 or 100 or 50 and no one unit having uh economic failure. Something bad goes on. Somebody forgot to tighten a a hose clamp and the pumps, you know, empty the nothing. You don't

19:26 have an event there, right? You you have a broken egg in inside a container that can't get out, can't go anywhere else. Nothing's mobile. You're not, you know, fishing stuff and products and gases aren't going anywhere. It's a nice system from that aspect and that there's no one and there's no credible case where a bunch of Copenhagen units would, you know, pop their lids all at the same time. Even a missile strike, right? You know, wouldn't uh wouldn't take out more than one or two of your systems. So, I think that's an admirable aspect of of your system deployment design. And it it also allows an economic deployment. You know, if you deployed 20

20:12 of these, you know, then later on you can deploy 20 more and then 20 more. You can, you know, instead of doing 1,400 megawws all at once, you know, 3600 megawws thermal all at once, you know, you're doing a couple hundred, couple hundred, couple hundred. And it makes it a more economic uh proposition especially for developing industries or developing countries. You know, that'd be very inspiring for a country like Indonesia that I know you have a relationship with and and uh I I think that's that's been a that's one of the most admirable design aspects of the way you want to deploy your system. Yeah. And that I mean the um we referred

20:58 to this Hingley Point C before those projects are so expensive that it can only happen if you have government sponsors. But if you have these type of reactors like we have where you can get started for $100 million or something like that, uh then it opens up to a much much more broader market. uh and we can make the nuclear industry uh more uh funded by private individuals and private companies. It we don't have to have all these political uh agreements and political funding. Uh I I think it really opens up for many more uses of nuclear energy especially in the industrial sector. Uh so it can be used for hydrogen and ammonia and steel production and cement. Maybe someday

21:44 cement is a little bit more difficult but aluminum and all kinds of chemicals and uh oil refineries I mean there are so many industrial applications and if you if you look at the total market of those industrial applications that's actually a bigger market than the entire global market for electricity. So um so it's a huge opportunity to to sort of power that in the future. Um but I also want to talk about the data centers. We we talked about a little bit before we started recording and um and something is happening of course uh especially this year with data centers. Uh I I especially want to talk about this uh tweet or thing last week from Elon Musk where he said he was thinking about uh how he could stand up uh one terowatt of

22:31 uh energy uh or one teratt of compute in in a data center. And just for the audience, one ter watt is sort of all the electricity is in North America plus all the electricity in all of Europe and then some. So it's it's a you know if you look at all those there's hundreds of companies maybe even a thousand companies supplying electricity in North America and Europe combined and and he as a company or would potentially become a bigger customer than all of those. And I think the only way he can do that is if he gets involved in supply chain. Um but you know let's talk a little bit about uh how that could be done because obviously it's not going to be only thorium energy or only solar panels or

23:17 whatever. It's going to be a mix of different uh energy sources. Well, the uh uh you know his his uh when he when he talked about that he was talking about uh data centers which um we and uh I actually I have a feeling myself and I was talking to some of the Google folks that do their data centers uh you know they're they're the original data center centric company and And uh we were talking to uh uh some of the cloud-based companies AWS uh Amazon Web Services and and I was like, is it

24:03 really going to be like that? Because if we if we have artificial intelligence, you know, our our brains up here use about 40 watts of of power. So, and they're okay. You know, they're maybe they're not supercomputers, but they're kind of computers. and you know 40 watts and we have a pretty good cooling system and we we can work in pretty harsh environments. So I I have the feeling that artificial intelligence if it's really intelligent is going to be able to design you know itself and optimize itself. So I think in the future the data center power consumption would be mainly from using it more and you know it might it might cancel itself out. the more we use it, the better it gets at being efficient

24:49 about being used. And we're we're stupid monkeys who are just going to keep asking the same goddamn questions over and over again. So, it's going to be like, "Oh, I know the answer to that already. I don't have to ask the answer and use it again. Just going to look up in the little file system and be like, "Here, I've answered, you know, I've answered that 7,000 times already this hour." Um, yeah. I think the real dep and I'm sorry if you know if you're like god damn it coach follow the script but you know like like I think the real part to me that that motivates me to a huge extent is where you can use Copenagen atomic system in ammonia production operating petroleum creating synthetic petroleum products and greases and jet fuel things

25:38 that we cannot we absolutely cannot replace. Not in the foreseeable future. Maybe not ever. Ever. You You're not going to get me on a battery powered 747. All right. You can fly that. I'll meet you in you know, in New York, you know, and uh you know, hopefully you get there or you know, I'll throw some flowers in the Atlantic cuz you're going to run out of power about a third of the way into your trip and you're all going to die, you know. So, we need, you know, we have these chemical storehouses of energy that are phenomenal, but to make them economic, and I was looking up here on one of my other monitors to see if I could find, but right now, the electrolyers we're looking at at Thorium Energy Alliance are getting down to 36 kilowatts per

26:26 kilogram of hydrogen. And if you do a little math there, you know, the holy grail for hydrogen is $1. Henry Hub in the Gulf of of Mexico, America, uh, whatever we're calling it these days. Henry Hub in in New Orleans and and Houston area is $1 on average, depending on what natural gas is doing. We could make uh if if we're making hydrogen for 37 cents 36 cents a kilowatt and we're only paying 2 cents per kilowatt. We're at 70, you know, 72 cents a kilo a kilogram right now. Put some overhead in there and you know some water processing

27:12 because that's where you're going to probably get the hydrogen from by cracking water. But you're under a buck. So we've done it and you're under a buck. Here's the magic that everybody forgets about. Nuclear makes power very boring because it's going to make that power at the same way, at the same cost, at the same output for 80, 90, or a thousand years forever and ever. And so that's called beta risk, price risk, if you tell any product planner that you can tell them what they're going to pay for their energy inputs a decade from now, tears of joy would run down their face. Yes. you know, they would cry in your arms and they would literally be willing to pay twice the base price for the energy just to have product

27:59 stability cuz right now they're being whipsawed at 50 cents a million BTU one day, $15 the next, literally it could overnight like that. But if you told them 97 cents a kilogram for the next 40 years, you know, they it it it's the miracle of miracles. And data centers would benefit from that, too. You know, it nuclear energy is the most boring energy you can possibly imagine. And I am convinced I'll put on my tinfoil hat here. I'm convinced a lot of people don't like it because they love arbitrageing energy. They love seeing that a pipeline break and they can take a bet against natural gas. Or they see the weather's going to suck and they take a bet against solar. Or they see that like there's a wind drought in

28:46 Germany and they take a bet against wind. There's no betting against nuclear. Nuclear works in the shittiest weather and the nicest weather. It works 24/7 365 and at the exact same price. It's the most boring stuff in the world when you get it to work. And that's why the the arbitrage community does not like uh nuclear. So I firmly believe that uh I make a big argument and this is like another topic but anything synthetic will always eventually be better and cheaper than the natural analog. So synthetic diamonds are better and cheaper than real diamonds by a lot. and synthetic, you know, just go down

29:33 the list. At some point, we're going to crack the code on synthetic blood. And if you ever go into an operating room, you know, and they go, "Would you like blood from a drug addict that needed to get a fix or would you like this synthetic blood?" You're going to be like, "Give me the the synthetic blood." You know, uh, same thing with meat. I mean, I don't have anything against eating a dead cow, but you know, synthetic meat has the advantage that it doesn't have ecoli or lististeria, and you know, it's it's prepared in a super ultra clean facility, all that. So, and you can go down the list. Synthetic oil made from natural gas is much better than than fossil der, you know, normal fossil derived oil. the synthetic wood plywood is far more usable anywh who so

30:20 I think electric uses for like making hydrogen as an interstitial energy uh whether it's ammonia or straight hydrogen for things like direct reduced iron we're going to lower the cost of iron and steel and it's going to be better we're going to have cheaper better steel and we're going to have cheaper better petroleum products and we're going to have cheaper better plastics You know, and now I'm sure there's some green people out there who like tears of blood are running down their face saying, "No, we we can't have any more of that." But everything around you is plastic or synthetic chemicals. Our entire life today now, you know, that's probably causing havoc with uh, you know, our endocrine systems and we need

31:07 to solve that. you know, in terms of like artificial hormones and things like that that come from plasticizers. But the fact is from the paint on the wall to the clothes on your back, everything in our lives is plastic or synthetic chemicals. The medicine you take, you know, and we can make them better and we can make them more. But if we do it with nuclear power, essentially we're taking nuclear power and freezing it in the form of your plastic cup. We're taking nuclear power and freezing it in the form of aluminum and steel. But you're not going to make steel, aluminum, grease, medicine. You're not you're just not going to do it with

31:52 solar and wind. You know, if you want to use solar and wind for your, you know, occasional daily use or to keep your street light in the desert running, that's great. Good for you. You get a gold star for your green cred. But I want to lead a life of greater prosperity. And I want another eight or nine billion people in the world to live lives of, you know, c energy abundance and energy prosperity and energy opportunity, opportunities to create new jobs and new technologies. And that is the exact opposite of what's going to happen if we try and run industrial societies off of so-called renewables. You know, we are going to de-industrialize. We're going to close ourselves in. We're

32:39 going to limit what we can do with our ourselves and you know China China and India the words out of my mouth I mean it's exactly what I'm saying about the industrial uh sort of second or third or fourth or whatever revolution and uh I completely agree with you. So in the last 100 years uh we have increased the amount of energy available to humans by a factor of 10 and in the same 100 years we've grown from 2 billion people to 8 billion people and uh and a lot of people and every time I I talk to people I discuss with them you know what do you think is going to happen in the next 100 years and a couple of years ago or five years ago there was actually quite a lot of people who said ah it's not going to grow that much maybe you know maybe it's

33:26 if it's crazy. It's going to double. Uh, and some people back then said, "No, no, it's going to go 10 times in the next 100 years, just like it did in the last 100." And I've already always been a firm believer that it's going to go 10x. But now with all this hype about data centers and AI and so on, uh, there's people that I talk to, investors and other people that are starting to talk about 20x or 30x and and I think it's very uh interesting to do the the math and the physics behind that. forget about politics and how much money you need. But is it actually poss possible from physics to generate 10 times more or 20 or 100 times more energy and and clearly it is possible to generate 10 times more energy in in the next uh 100

34:11 years but it's not going to be from wind and solar. I mean, I'm sure we're going to have some wind and solar, and let's just be very uh uh friendly to wind and solar and say that maybe they can 10 take 10% of that. So, in the future, maybe wind and solar can take 10%. So, that's 10% in the future is all of the energy in in the world today. Right now, today, right now, today, uh wind and solar are taking sort of I don't know between two and 5% of global energy. And if they have to scale that to 100% of today, that is definitely going to take them 100 years. Um, and we talked about thorium energy. I've said many times that I think thorium energy is going to provide half of all energy when we get to year uh 2100, so 75 years from now.

35:00 Uh, and and many people say, "Oh, but we don't even use it today. How do you think it's going to scale and take half of it?" And I say, "Because price is king." And that's that's also what you said in the beginning. I mean, if we can get the price far enough down, we know that there's plenty of thorium and we know that we can build these reactors and assembly lines, you know, we can easily make 10,000 or maybe even 100,000 reactors in one year. So, it's going to be all over the place and we're gonna have so much energy for all the all the products you talked about before, all the synthetic products and and all the services we want to uh use whether it's self-driving cars or AI or Optimus or dude, you don't even need to like the self-driving cars and AI and all that.

35:45 That's that's that's us, you know, western world. There's only a couple hundred million of us, you know, there there's seven or eight billion people who live some form of energy poverty. So what if we brought air conditioning and refrigeration to the four or five billion that don't have it? That's the power suck, you know, not some data centers, let me tell you. You know, water treatment facilities for four or five billion people. And but here's the the super optimistic great news is we could generate that 30 times more energy for nine or 10 billion people less damaging. We can walk lighter on the earth by generating it with you know

36:33 10,000 nuclear reactors or or I should say we could easily install 5 10,000 1,000 megawatt installations. you know, if each installation, however you divide it, you know, your reactors are incrementally a little smaller. I'm a big fan of big reactors, too. You want to build some AP-1000s, super awesome. Good for you. You know, if if you want to build some can do reactors, whatever the mix is, if if we generally are making a gigawatt, we can do that easily. I mean, the Chinese built a thousand coal plants in 20 years, right? We did, too. There's three there used to be 3,000 power plants in the United States. It's a little So we did it. We when we talk

37:19 these numbers, people are like, "Oh, thousands." It's like that's, you know, that's the scale. So, we need to make 10,000 reactors every 20 years or so for, you know, if we want to transition the world from the most dangerous, most expensive, erratic, hard to get to, damaging energy to something that opens up a world of opportunity while making it possible to live on this earth without absolutely consuming it and choking ourselves to death, you know? I mean, it's it's polyianish. Like, that's like I'm a super optimist. I think we can cure the world and lift people up and provide opportunity and abundance to to humanity and uh uh I was going somewhere with that but

38:05 yes so so I think I think it's coming now. I mean we've been waiting for this for a long time. I talked about this almost 20 years ago but I think actually I sort of when I look at my crystal ball I see it happening within the next 10 years. I think especially in the US I think US will be a first mover. I think that the the total amount of electricity produced in the US will likely double in the next 10 15 years. I'm I'm saying 15 because um what is holding it back is sort of the regulations around nuclear and we need to solve that and we need I don't know I hope we can use the AI to figure out how to get around this regulations because that's really what's holding it back. back in in 1943 or 42 or 43 uh we built very large

38:53 reactors. So that one of the handford reactors is is a 2 and 1/2 gawatt thermal installation and they built that in 11 months and it worked for 25 years without any accidents or anything. I mean and back then some of the some of the components were delivered on horse carrots. I mean we you know of course we can do it today. I mean there's no doubt about it. engineers can easily build um thorium plants and and uh assembly lines that can make 100,000 reactors. And of course, there's going to be some resistance to making the grid I mean upgrading the grid. But I think uh you know if we if we upgrade all the existing grid lines to carry five times more electricity, I think that's probably possible in a lot of places.

39:39 You know, putting up new increasing the voltage and stuff like that. Yeah. Well, you're, you know, my hero and your dog, Alvin Weinberg, you know, he nailed it. You know, a pot, a pipe, and a pump, and a give me a reactor. You know, simplicity is safety. And we we lightwater reactors, you know, in a little brief side note here, they're they're complex and they have quadruple redundant systems because they're always ready to run out of control, right? And that's why you need control rods and shutdown rods and quadruple redundant pumps and valves for everything, you know, whereas molten salt reactors and Gen 4 reactors are inherently safe. Like

40:24 you pick one, pick a lead cooled one, pick your reactor, pick any and the the nature of the reactor, the number one aspect is they shut themselves down, right? They have a dead man switch. So that's that's the great optimism there is like why can we make 10,000 of these things? Oh, we don't have enough people. Where are we going to get all the operators? Well, we probably won't need the same amount of operators to to operate them because what you know if we walk away if there's a zombie apocalypse, they're just going to coast down to like self store, you know, situation. And you know, it it came back into my head. I don't have Alzheimer's, Thomas. I have someheimer. So, so, so, so I remembered what I was going to say.

41:09 And, and the thing about thorium is that unlike uranium, thorium has thousands of industrial uses. And how are we going to transmit five times more energy through the same wires? Well, maybe not five times, but I know one of the research projects that we initiated with RPE last year was thorating aluminum and copper. And thoriated copper can transmit electricity the same way silver can. And thoriated aluminum can transmit electricity at the same rate that copper can. So we don't have enough copper on this earth. So how do we extend what we have? Well, we use it by adding 1 or 2% of thorium to it. And now magic occurs and we can suddenly, you know, we we've

41:55 we've essentially doubled the amount of copper just by adding a dimminimous amount of thorium to it. And there's all sorts of thorium based solutions like that. The the the greatest optics in the world, you know, so our lasers and our fiber optics can become more efficient if we just thoriate them. You know, the the the the clarity of the glass, you know, would enable us to to have more efficient communications on and on. I won't bore the audience, but the highest temperature ceramics on Earth are Thoria. The scientists out there know that when you pick up a crucible, it's aluminum a lot of times. You know, sometimes you get a platinum crucible, but if you want a really badass crucible, you f you find somebody from

42:40 Russia willing to sell you a Thoria. And the Thoria crucibles are the highest temperature ceramics ever created. And you know, there's some reason to believe they're the highest temperature that can be created. They're the space shuttle tiles, right? They're the linings of jet engines to this day. You know, people don't like to talk about it, but every microwave when you go to heat your coffee, you're heating it with thoriated magnetrons. So, thorium's great uh astounding ability of our favorite little atom is that it acts like a refractory metal, a platinum group metal, and a lanthinum group metal, which is rare earths. that it it has natures of all of those and and it you know that's why I love this. It's it's

43:26 such an unbelievably missed opportunity to utilize this this material and so just besides the fuel the material uses of thorium are astounding. Yeah. And I'm very happy that you bring this up because I need we also need to spread that information. If we look back in history sort of the there was a whole century that was centered around making steel. So the the steam steam engine and the high-rise buildings and then the the next uh century was centered around making computers and radios and mobile phones. So the silicon age and I think this century is going to be all about Thorm. I think that we will be able to show that we can generate half of all energy in the whole world from thorium and all these different materials you talked about will also make the world a

44:12 better place. Yeah. I mean, the material uses of of thorium, I think you're right about the century. It's it's going to be an energy century, right? We've we've figured out how to build massive buildings and bridges and stuff. We we know, you know, we we had a history, not so much lately, but we had a history of doing mega projects. you know, we can we can engineer the earth in smart ways. Uh, you know, to, you know, hopefully accommodate people and make uh, you know, make animals and nature and and stuff live in live in harmony, man. You know, I I want all that, you know, and I think it can be done, you know, and we can do it without

45:00 it being like a, you know, 2049 apocalypse hellscape nightmare, you know. It's not going to be Mad Max. It's going to be Future, you know. It's going to be the um Tomorrowland, you know, and and uh I Well, those are our two choices really, right? You know, I mean, I believe we can do Tomorrowland just as likely as we could do something where we decide to collapse society, which would be, you know, it'd be this the dumbest decision. You know, we're we're we're hairless apes, so we we're good at making dumb decisions. But you know we have to realize we saw this during co that there are some people who have a sort of a mindset that they like to be told what to do and they like to have a

45:45 sort of a box kind of they have to live their life in this box and there's people who like that and I think they should be allowed to do that but there's also other people who have a who needs a bigger box bigger uh playground and and I think we can accommodate both of those uh types of people in the future and I think whenever ever somebody gets in a bad mood or depression or whatever, uh they can ask the AI and say, you know, I would really like to try something new and then the AI can teach you how to make poetry or play the guitar or whatever. And you know, it when I was a kid, it's very fun to learn all these new things, play the piano or whatever. Uh so I think a lot more people will use the AI to teach them stuff. And I already see my kids, they, you know, don't, you know, don't want to go to

46:31 school and sit at a university lecturing and have to read like a book. They they just ask the AI and then they get feedback and it's a much better way to learn. Yeah. And well what your like your European experiment has to teach the world is you know if if you give mothers and fathers time off to be with their kids or the availability to you know work and be with the kids at some reasonable amount you know and and they're not worried out of their minds about if their kids are going to have something to eat and whether they're going to have a place you know United States can be a very very rough place to be a young family and they wonder why like oh we don't know why no one's having any kids.

47:16 It's like it's like are you are you insane? It's you know it's the most frightening thing you could imagine. You know it's it's it's an 18-year prison sentence. You know to that's how people look at it like oh my god I've got this 18 20 year prison sentence ball and chain. If you had energy abundance that led to opportunities and employment and and gave if there was so much abundance that people had the ability to you know do the job of parenting you know we could shut down half of the prisons you know United States you know is its own example of you know we we've incarcerated way too many people uh and you know we've we've essentially

48:01 uh you know lost we've lost the plot. You know, the idea should be, you know, we we shouldn't need prisons because we're the land of opportunity and milk and honey and all that. So, why is it why is it such a, you know, rough place to grow up as a child? But I I think we could, you know, I don't know if we're wandering off the reservation there, but energy is life, right? I mean, if you stood up right now, you know, I bet the back of your shirt would say energy is life or prosperity, you know? And that's There you go. See, I I I know it. You know, we don't even practice that, but it's true. And so that's why it's I ar I I argue endlessly with everybody that energy is everything. It's civil rights. It's the legal system. It's water, it's

48:48 medicine, you know, it's transportation. There is nothing that doesn't start with energy. You know, energy is the uberis. It's the alpha and the omega. you know, if if you have en energy poverty is the worst thing in the world. It's slavery. It's, you know, uh abject, you know, misery and energy abundance is freedom to do and the and you know, the the ability to choose what you're going to do in life, you know. So, so that's why I'm so keyed in on this, you It's not that I got some Well, I do have a special heart place in my heart for for thorium and everything it can do, but you know, there's, as you brought up earlier, there's spent nuclear fuel. There's plutonium. We could we could,

49:36 you know, repeat the old American program of swords into plowshares where we took the Russian bombs and turned them into fuel. you know, 10% of all the energy in the United States for 30 years came from dismantled Russian nuclear warheads. It was the greatest peaceime thing ever. So, anyh who, I'll just shut up. Yeah, but but I absolutely agree with you. I mean, I usually say that um the Oh, sorry. I usually say that the energy is the fundamental fundamental building block of a prosperous society or a great society. and and people who want to tax energy are out of their mind. I mean, it's it's like taxing the most important tool to make a great society. You know,

50:22 you're you're crazy. And I I agree with you some of the things you said about the US and Europe, but definitely in Europe and there are some crazy people who are taxing energy. It's it's like when they do that, you know, right away there's no intelligent intelligence there. But, um but hopefully we can fix that. And I I totally agree with you that you and I are really good at engineering and building stuff and getting it to work and and stuff like that, but there's lots of other people in society who are good at solving those sort of social problems. The you talked about imprisonment and and there's many other uh problems that need solving. And I I really hope that we can free up people from having a stupid job in some office somewhere where they're typing on a Windows, you know, keyboard all day long. I mean they should be working on

51:08 fixing some of those social issues that we have both in the US and Europe. Um they they're just different issues and then we should stop taxing energy and make a lot more energy and also make sure that not only Europe and US has access but also Africa and Asia and everywhere else. Yeah. as the second, you know, the second we make nuclear power cheaper than coal. And this this might be a reason why, you know, it's got a lot of boat anchors attached to it. It makes it very hard to license and things cuz a lot of people's ax is going to get gored if if this happens. You know, it's not an if, it's when. China is doing it right now. our friend Kung Chen is, you know, working on on different projects

51:54 and, you know, the CNC is, you know, if Copenhagen doesn't get it done, it's going to get done, you know, and uh I would like there to be a western option, but uh power cheaper than coal is always going to win because it's an economic decision. You know, China and India and Indonesia don't burn coal because they love burning coal. You know, they burn coal because it's the cheapest option to pull their people out of poverty, you know, and if we can give them a hund times better option, they would flock to it in two seconds. It is the ultimate nuclear fuel because it is eminently non-prololiferating. So, it is the fuel you could trust to put in Gambia or El Salvador or Mexico

52:42 or, you know, pick your country that you're worried about. Oh, they're, you know, they're unstable, you know. Well, then give them a thorium reactor and let them run free with it and they maybe they'll become stable, you know, maybe their opportunity that, you know, they'll become an asset to the world instead of a pariah. You know, we should be sending thorium reactors to to Iran. you know, pick your pick your state that has a, you know, something problematic that you don't like and they're the ones that need energy, you know, more than anybody. But you're absolutely right. I mean, there's I agree with you. There's going to be a lot of countries with thorium energy and they are going to sell energy to their neighbors. There's also the fact that if we look at the world today, 60% of all steel in the world are made

53:29 in China. Why? Because coal is so super cheap in China. uh and also the um the China is the world's factory. They make a lot of the other products and export them all over the world. I think in the future the the countries who have lots of the amenity, they will be making steel and cement and aluminum and copper and all these other products and they will be selling those products to the countries who doesn't have it. And then the countries who do not have thorium amenity maybe they are very good at tourism or building boats or making poems or singing songs or well I think I think like uh uh in um I think I think actually if we provide energy to the world things like

54:14 manufacturing will become hyper localized and it'll and we'll through rapid prototyping or additive manufacturing and lowering the cost of highquality steel production and aluminum production and you know whatever else you you need. You know there could be an Indonesian car industry. You know, there can be a a Brazilian computing and they can have their own, you know, their their own their country just like food.