Mark Schneider, Nuclear Futurist and President Gen IV Nuclear Inc: How Nuclear Power Works

Mark Schneider is a Nuclear Futurist and a leading expert in emerging Gen IV nuclear power. He has a bachelor's degree in Nuclear Engineering Technology and has spent 20 years working with advanced small scale nuclear reactors within the U. S. Naval Nuclear Power Program. In this conversation, Mark and Anthony discuss all things nuclear power, how it works, and where the industry is going. CRYPTO. COM-----Crypto.com is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. With the vision of "cryptocurrency in every wallet", the Crypto.com App offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well designed UX and high security. It is the best place to buy, sell and pay with crypto. TAXBIT-----Refund-maximizing, cryptocurrency tax software you can depend on. Visit taxbit.com/invite/pomp and receive 10% off your tax plan today by signing up for a free trial. ETORO-----This episode of Off the Chain is sponsored by eToro, the smartest crypto trading platform, and one of the largest in the world. Join 11 million other traders and create an account at etoro.com and build your crypto portfolio the smart way.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Hey guys, in this episode I talked to Mark Schneider. He's a nuclear futurist and a leading expert in emerging Gen 4 nuclear power. He's got a bachelor's degree in nuclear engineering technology and has spent 20 years working with advanced, small-scale nuclear reactors within the US Naval Nuclear Power Program. Basically, he's way smarter than me. I really wanted him to come in and give me an overview on all things nuclear power, how it works, why it's important, and where the industry's going. This is a fascinating episode that I learned a ton from. Before we jump into the episode though, I want to talk about

• 0:42Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:23Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:07Anthony Pompliano?

  CPAs, and is quickly becoming the most Trusted cryptocurrency tax solution in the market. If you go to taxbit.com/invite/pomp, you can get 10% off your tax plan today with a free trial. So again, that's www.Taxbit.com/invite/pomp. The best part about it to me is they've got live support with experts whenever you need it. So literally, you can go and talk to experts who they have on hand, who have experience facilitating thousands of crypto tax filings and IRS crypto tax audits. Again, that's www.Taxbit.com/invite/pomp. Lastly, we got eToro. They're still here, man. These guys are animals.

• 2:48Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:30Anthony Pompliano?

  You click copy trader and all of a sudden eToro will mirror your portfolio to theirs. They buy an asset, your portfolio buys the asset. They sell an asset, your portfolio sells it. So head on over to etoro.com and sign up for an account. Let me know what you think about their social trading and copy trading features. And when you hit etoro.com, let them know that Pomp sent you. They really, really, really hate getting the customer service tickets and social media mentions about me. So you guys know what to do. And lastly, off the chain, don't forget, we don't only have the podcast. I really enjoy recording all of these episodes, but I also write the daily letter to investors. Most people would keep those letters confidential and private, but I allow anyone to subscribe to read the letters every morning.

• 4:10Anthony Pompliano?

  You could simply go to offthechain.substack.com and sign up today. Now let's get into this episode.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 4:42Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Mark here. I'm super excited to record this episode. The caveat to it all is until about 48 hours ago, I knew absolutely nothing about nuclear energy. I have spent a little bit of time Googling around, reading. I even listened to a Department of Energy podcast. Yes, the Department of Energy has a podcast. And so I've kind of done my best to get a base understanding, but I wanted Mark to come in and really give an overview of this power source, kind of how the science works, how the reactors work, and then talk through the pros and cons and what the critiques are and the responses, et cetera. And so, thank you so much for coming here to New York.

• 5:25Anthony Pompliano?

  His first time in New York City to do this.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. It's been fun finding out this city.

• 5:32Anthony Pompliano?

  I think he actually said to me, we were messaging and he said, "It's busy." I said, "Yes, that is an understatement." All right, so let's get started just with your background so people understand the perspective you're coming from. You spent 20 years in the Navy. Maybe tell us a little about what you did there and what you've done since you left the Navy.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I did 20 years in the Navy. I operated on, or I served on three different submarines and an aircraft carrier. So I've seen both the underwater and the surface side of the Navy. I also worked for an organization called Naval Reactors, which is kind of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission version for the military or for the Navy, providing regulatory oversight and construction and operation of the reactors. And then I have commercial power experience as well. And so that's kind of my overall, general, general background. And then in addition, you know, I'm a man of very few hobbies and my wife is a nuclear engineer too, so you know, I have the nerdiest pillow talk of anyone.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  So, you know, it's a lot of fun, but you know, we eat, breathe and sleep nuclear at my house.

• 6:41Anthony Pompliano?

  That's awesome. Did you guys meet Navy or outside or what?

• 6:44Speaker 02

  So my wife worked for the shipyard and we met on the USS California while she was under construction. We met in her instrumentation and control room. That's all the the equipment that controls the reactor itself. So that's where we met was literally in the room filled with all the equipment that operates the reactor.

• 7:01Anthony Pompliano?

  For two nuclear engineers, that's like a very romantic place to meet, right?

• 7:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was love at first sight.

• 7:08Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So let's get into a little bit. You know, you have a very unique background and experience in terms of not only are you very well versed in kind of the regulatory side and the construction of these reactors and kind of the oversight, but also having been on aircraft and submarines, you've seen kind of what I'll call the land-based reactors, then also what's powering some of these military vehicles and transportation, etc. How does nuclear work, right? I think is one of the things that I always get asked about now that people know that you're coming on and I say, I don't know, right? So kind of what's the best way to describe how nuclear actually works?

• 7:45Speaker 02

  So this is the way that it's described amongst the the super smart nerds that operate these reactors. And I love this because it's the it's the simplest explanation. And it's the magic rock gets hot, it boils the water, it makes the roundy roundy, which causes the arky sparky.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Which is fascinating. And basically to break it down and you know, is that you've got a reactor and what you use, you use a fuel and there's all sorts of different types of fuel and I'm not going to bore you with that. But it absorbs a neutron, it splits, that causes heat to be generated. That heat then used to boil water, it turns a turbine. That turbine can either, it can be used to make power in the form of a commercial plant, or it can be used to, you know, drive a propeller on a ship. And then the other thing is that steam for say, an aircraft carrier, at least the older, the I say older, last one was built not that long ago. But they'll use that steam to drive a piston that launches the aircraft off of them.

• 8:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so really what's happening is there's a reaction. That reaction causes heat, the heat boils water, water boiling creates steam, that steam is captured and spins this turbine that you're talking about.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 8:54Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that generally anyone who's spent some time on like how energy is produced, the idea that hot water creates steam through a turbine is used not just in nuclear, but in other forms of energy as well. Good.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I mean, and you know, it's funny because with the exception of solar, they you basically have a rotating piece of, you know, of equipment that is attached to a generator that makes your electricity. And how you rotate that, whether it's like a coal plant that uses the exact same style of steam plant, or not exact, but very similar style steam plant to a nuclear power plant, or you can do it with, you know, oil, you know, to heat that. Or if you say have, you know, like a diesel engine, or a gas turbine, or hydro, where you just have something else that's causing that rotation. You know, if you look at, you know, you go out on the street and you see the big light poles, that's literally just a mini power plant, right

• 9:48Speaker 02

  there. It's just it's using gas to drive an engine that causes a shaft to turn that's attached to a generator that, you know, is making electricity empowering that light pole. So the same concept works. It's just that in nuclear, you're doing it on extremely large scales.

• 10:02Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And the reaction that's creating the heat, I think, is the part that is kind of a black box to people, right? And so maybe describe a little bit about how that reaction is occurring from the actual science of it.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the way it works is that you have, you know, your fuel, and I'm just going to use uranium-235 is where you say, what's called uranium-235 is a fuel for this. That uranium absorbs a neutron, and then it splits. That's those are the fission products. That's part of the waste we talk about.

• 10:29Anthony Pompliano?

  And this is like a collision, right? Where basically uranium is sitting there, doing whatever uranium does in kind of its steady state, and then we're taking a neutron and we're creating that collision in a reaction, and that's where the heat comes from.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. And then what's happened is, is that when that atom splits, it splits into two fission products, and it also will release a number of neutrons. The average for uranium-235 is about two and a half. And now, if you can, if you do the math, right, if I have one atom, takes one, it generates two and a half neutrons. Well, now you can see you can develop an unself, you know, an uncontrollable reaction. So we have these things called control rods, or there's other methods to control the reaction. And so it's like a throttle on your car. So we basically want to control the amount of neutrons. They absorb the neutrons, these control rods do. And the neutrons get absorbed by that, so that you have basically every atom of uranium that splits, you have one neutron generated to go on to the next uranium atom.

• 11:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. And so

• 11:27Anthony Pompliano?

  As we take these neutrons, you know, create the collision with the uranium atom and there's that splitting, if this was to happen just out in the open and not a confined space, could be problematic because it's just uncontrolled. In this sense, what you're essentially doing is first, you're putting it all into a controlled area. And then what you're describing is in that controlled area, the science behind this is you can essentially use that throttling mechanism to make sure that every time an atom splits, there's only the creation of one new neutron on a net basis.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  Correct. Yeah, you've nailed it perfectly.

• 12:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. All right. I'm going to be a nuclear engineer by the end of this. And so going back to, so that's how nuclear works today. How does that reaction to heat, to steam, to the turbine, how does this work inside of like a nuclear power plant? So talking on land, you know, what most people would think of as like the large scale power plants? What's happening in those power plants? How do we go from that kind of one mechanism to the actual large scale facility?

• 12:28Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, you've just got a lot of, they're called fuel assemblies that are just made up of these little rodlets that are literally about the thickness of a large pen. And they're like several feet long, at least for US reactors. And they're, they're all filled with these and they're all filled with little pellets of uranium inside of there. And that, that reaction just occurring at a really large scale, you've got a lot of those reactions occurring throughout the entire reactor itself, that's generating that large quantity of heat. And so, yeah, so that's the basic thing. And then you, as far as it causes, you know, like a pressurized water reactor, that water gets really hot, it is pumped through what's called your primary loop into a steam generator. The steam generator

• 13:12Speaker 02

  generates steam, it pumps it into a, or the steam is sent to a turbine, spins the turbine, it's then cooled, using like a lake, a river, treated sewage like out at Palom Verde. And then it is condensed back into water, they pump that water back in, so you have a closed cycle.

• 13:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so in an average US reactor or power plant, how many of those rods are we talking about that could be at use at any one time?

• 13:40Speaker 02

  So, a 900 megawatt reactor has about 160 fuel assemblies in it. So fuel assemblies are about, it's your...

• 13:54Speaker 02

  14 to 18 inches square.

• 13:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, and inside of those fuel assemblies is a bunch of different rods.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's, yeah.

• 14:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so is that true, like we'll call it the US design, is that true internationally as well? Because the numbers that when I was researching, there's about 100 active nuclear power plants today in the United States. International, including international, you get to about 400 total globally, right? Is that generally about right?

• 14:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, we got, well, 460 globally right now with 56 under construction. But so the US, the pressurized water and boiling water reactors, that is the, that square assembly is, is true. I don't know a whole lot about most international designs.

• 14:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  But I do know, I believe that most Russian and Chinese design follow that same thing because they're very similar. There is an interesting design that comes, they're very similar between Russia and Canada. That they actually use shorter bundles that are round in shape because they use a heavy water style reactor. But they're, they're just round with a little short, but they can do online refueling, which is a little different than our plants. We have to shut our plants down to refuel them.

• 15:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so how does the land power plant differ from on a submarine or an aircraft, right? When it's what I'll call it mobile. Is it the same design, just on a smaller scale and in a ship or a submarine? Or is there some difference in the design there?

• 15:24Speaker 02

  There are, there are some differences, but overall they operate very much the same. And the differences are relatively cosmetic for this conversation.

• 15:37Speaker 02

  But yeah, they basically do operate, it's just a smaller version. It boils the water, makes the steam, and then it either it spins the turbine to make electricity or it spins the turbines to drive the shaft that puts, moves the vessels of the water.

• 15:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so throughout all of these different designs, these rods that have the uranium pellets. One of the questions that when I asked on Twitter, like, hey, what questions do we have? A lot of people were asking about our dependence on. Uranium, right? Obviously uranium is a key component of this. One question is just is uranium the only fuel source that can go into that? And then two, um, kind of how do you think about dependence on uranium? Our ability to, to find more and if that's a risk or not?

• 16:18Speaker 02

  So, um, based on a couple of scientific favors that I've seen, we have about a thousand years of uranium 235, which is the fuel that all US reactors use. Um, and we are very inefficient with our fuel use of that. We literally only use about half of it or so, maybe a little more than half. Um, and uranium 235 only makes up 0.7% of all natural uranium. So we're talking, we have a thousand years left of that type of uranium.

• 16:47Anthony Pompliano?

  And this is a thousand years left, but we have to continue to dig it up? Or we've already like captured and it's being stored somewhere?

• 16:54Speaker 02

  We have to dig it up. We have to mine all this.

• 16:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  And then now if we were to switch to a fast reactor, we could, it's called transmute. The uranium 238, that's the remaining 99.3% into plutonium, which could then, uh, which then if it receives the neutron will split. And one of the things that's fascinating about that is that we were talking about those control rods trying to get that magic one, well, in a, a fast reactor where you're creating your own fuels called breeding. You actually take one of those, your, your first neutron to keep the reaction going. Your second neutron actually is going to create your, your new fuel. And then you have to deal with whatever's left, a little, little, little extra.

• 17:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And, and so would it be fair to say that the uranium 235, that, that less than 1%? Is that harder to find than the uranium 238? And that's why there, there's such disparity in the, in the percentages? Or am I missing something there?

• 17:50Speaker 02

  That's just how it like, if you go pick up a chunk of uranium, you find, if I went out to a uranium mine and picked it up, it's just going to be comprised of 99.3% uranium 238, 0.7% uranium 235.

• 18:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  It's all, it's just how it is. With the exception, there is one location where it's different.

• 18:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  And that's the natural reactor that ran two billion years ago on 100,000 year cycles called Oklo out in, um, Africa.

• 18:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Wait, what is this?

• 18:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, literally, it's a natural reactor that ran for like a million years. And somewhere in Africa, I don't remember specifically, it's called Oklo. Um, there's a gen four company that takes that as their name. But it has lower levels of uranium 235 because it consumed it to op- to operate had literally, you know, two billion years ago, we had this natural reactor that operated before human beings existed.

• 18:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and so as we think through this, um, there's, it sounds like uranium dependency. We've got to continue to mine uranium. I don't think that there's a lot of people who are necessarily, uh, concerned about uranium existing. It's more so, we just got to go get it, right? And so there's, there's a cost of that, etc. Um, this other idea around this fast reactor is the ability to take the uranium 238 and change it into plutonium, I think you said, and then use that as the, the fuel source. Um, is there controversy around moving to fast reactors? Is it just a, an expense like, like what's the, why would we not do that?

• 19:13Speaker 02

  Well, one is the, the regulations under the Carter administration. Um, they, they, two things that they did, which kind of prevents us from, from going to fast reactors and reducing our waste stockpile. We can't reprocess waste and we're not actually allowed to use plutonium reactors.

• 19:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  There's a concern because when you hear plutonium, people think weapons. Um, the plutonium that, that the US has for weapons was generated in special reactors designed to make weapons-grade plutonium.

• 19:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  The plutonium that exists in, and we generate plutonium in our, in our current reactors. That's actually the waste that everyone's concerned about the last hundred thousand years. But it actually, um, is not comprised of the, it's not pure enough to be used for weapons. So.

• 19:54Anthony Pompliano?

  So it's non-weapons-grade plutonium?

• 19:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty much garbage if you want to make weapons with it. It would be a very expensive process that is actually very harmful and could be deadly. And, you know, it'd be easier to.

• 20:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Cost issues.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, it'd be easier to do a, create a reactor to, to make, if you want to make plutonium for weapons.

• 20:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so, so before we go deeper down the, the nuclear kind of rabbit hole, um, one of the things that fascinates me, right? So I came into this, I knew absolutely nothing about it. Um, and I really started to, uh, research and look into it is when I think of renewable or clean energy, I think of hydro, I think of wind, I think of solar, right? Um, that, that, there's plenty of others that, that, um, people put in that category, whether they should be or not, but. One of the biggest issues that I did not understand before I started looking at nuclear is there's a space and an environmental impact to implementing a lot of that stuff, right? And so, obviously, with solar, you need space to install the solar panels so that the sun

• 20:56Anthony Pompliano?

  can hit them and capture that energy. With wind, you need to clear out space so that you can put the turbines, right? So that they can spin and obviously capture the energy. Nuclear, and before we were talking, has a much smaller footprint. Maybe kind of just talk through what that footprint difference is and that we can get into some of the things that nuclear may solve that those others suffer even once they're installed.

• 21:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the, uh, the energy density, that's the, the US Department-

• 21:24Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a smart, intelligent way to say it, okay.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, that's what the, you know, the, if you go to the opposite nuclear energy, that's the term, you know, it's, it's good to be a little dense. That's, that's their, their comment. But, uh, you know, the fact is, is that, you know, if you take a one, you know, gigawatt, uh, you know, power plant, this nuclear power plant, and you want to build a wind or solar farm that's of equivalent nameplate capacity, it requires somewhere between 750 and 1,000 times the land space.

• 21:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. So if I have a, uh, one gigawatt nuclear facility and I want one gigawatt of wind or solar, I need 750 to 1,000x the amount of space in order to generate that much power?

• 22:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's, you need about 13 acres to do that with nuclear. So now you, you could do the more, you can do the math. But what a lot of people don't talk about, specifically the, uh, the wind and solar folks, is what's called capacity factor. Nuclear operates at 92% capacity factor and we can shut them down when we want to. Wind and solar operate at, well, wind about 25 to 40%, solar somewhere between 10 and 20%. So now if you want that same output capacity to match nuclear, right, you're looking for wind and solar, that's 750 to 1,000, now you're looking at, you know- What is that, five times, you know, five to 10 times that? And then for...

• 22:41Anthony Pompliano?

  And just so I understand, the capacity factor means that if the nuclear reactor is on 92% of the time, and it can do a gigawatt of power, then you can start to actually calculate, here's how much power it's going to generate over a year, over two years, five years, 10 years, etc. But on the solar or the wind, it can't generate power 100% of the time, right? And that's where those numbers you're throwing out, 10 to 20% for, I think you said, solar, and then 20 to 40% for wind. And so you actually have to have even more than just a gigawatt of capacity because the capacity usage is lower.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. And if you look at, you know, solar's not producing energy at night, right? I mean, and wind's not producing if the wind's not blowing, and if the wind's blowing too hard.

• 23:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, interesting.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, so wind, because you don't want the turbine blades turning too fast, and so they'll literally shut them down when it's too, when the wind is too fast, because it'll actually cause them to rip apart. There's some great videos on YouTube for that, you know, cows fleeing because of these giant wind turbines.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  And when you look at it, there's a great, and I'll have to shoot it to you, but there's a great infographic at a company called Thorcon that shows, I think, a 12-megawatt wind turbine, and the blades are longer than their 500-megawatt power unit.

• 23:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 23:55Speaker 02

  The blades are, I mean, if you stack the three blades together, it's bigger than their whole 500-megawatt unit, and it's like a 12-megawatt. And when you take the capacity factor, you know, you're looking at it, and going back to the capacity factor, right? You know, nuclear, when we operate it, we typically, you know, we ramp it up, put it to 100%, keep it there, it's our baseload energy in the US. And then wind and solar, as, you know, the wind starts blowing, the power comes up, when it stops, it comes down, so it varies. And then you have, you know, solar where the sun is shining, if it's a cloudy day, you're not producing as much energy. You know, if you get water spots on it, you start braising the surface, you know, they degrade over time, too. And one of the things about nuclear, a lot of people don't know, is that actually, over

• 24:39Speaker 02

  time, we have been generating more power with it, to the point where with 97 reactors in 2018... We generated more energy for with nuclear than we have in the history of the United States. And that even goes back to when we had 120 reactors.

• 24:56Anthony Pompliano?

  So we used to have 120 reactors. We're down, down, we're now down to 97, but those 97 are producing more power than we did when we had 120, which means that on a per power plant basis, we're actually having more efficient and more output per power plant.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Yeah, you got it.

• 25:11Anthony Pompliano?

  What was the reason to go from 120 down to 97?

• 25:14Speaker 02

  Well, um, you know, it's, it's interesting, you know, there, uh, there are many reasons why, you know, uh, competitive electricity prices driving, driving the, the plants out.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  So a lot of the, a lot of the plants that get shut down were the smaller, uh, single unit facilities. So if you look in the U.S., most, most of the facilities that stay running are over 800 megawatts and, uh, per reactor. Or you have multiple reactors, um, and because it comes down to, um, uh, you know, people thing. Now, if you look at a, like a, uh, a natural gas plant, 80% of your cost is equipment, 20% is people. If you look at a nuclear power plant, 80% of your cost is people, 20% is equipment. Because you have so many people operating these things, you know, if you look at a, um,

• 26:03Speaker 02

  uh, so there's a, I'll use Duke Energies, um, they have, uh, their smallest facilities in 811 megawatt power plant that has 780 employees.

• 26:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Lot of employees.

• 26:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, their largest power plant produces 2,069 megawatts and has 1,050 employees. Right? So for 300 extra employees are getting almost three times the power output. And so that's

• 26:28Anthony Pompliano?

  The baseline number of employees per power plant is just very high.

• 26:31Speaker 02

  Yes. So, and yeah, so you have to have a minimum number and then, you know, you can add more units, but you're not like, I don't need to have, you know, You know, I need to have reactor engineers that know how the reactors work. But I don't need to add, you know, if I have two, say for one facility, I don't necessarily need to add two for the next, for the next reactor. I might only need to add one because I designed my units to be the same. So, and then if I have a third, I might even, you know, if I have a three, you know, I might even need a third person.

• 26:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  Right? I can just, or a fourth person. I'm just fine with three. Or with operators, things like that. You know, you typically have a shift manager, a unit supervisor, and two licensed reactor operators per unit. Well, if I have a three-unit facility with one controller and I have one shift manager, three unit supervisors, right? Now I've reduced the number of people just by two right there.

• 27:17Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And, and so when I hear that, you know, we had 120, we're down to 97 now. 97, there's 50 states. I would have thought, oh, that's probably like two per state, right? Just easy math and, and probably a stupid assumption, but that would have been my assumption. When I was looking at it, it's actually only about 30 states have reactors. What is the logic behind those 30 states versus the other 20 not having it? Is it regulations? Is it something to do with the environment? What's the thought process there?

• 27:46Speaker 02

  So I can speak specifically about some states. So the state of Oregon had, used to have a plant, had one single-unit reactor called Trojan that was shut down in the 1990s. I could speak about it because I grew up in Oregon.

• 27:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 27:55Speaker 02

  And when it was shut, well, when it was operating, the Oregon legislation passed a requirement that for Oregon to build any new nuclear required a national repository. So you've heard of Yucca Mountain, right? So a national repository for spent nuclear fuel.

• 28:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, and this is a place to take the nuclear waste and put it somewhere away from people?

• 28:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so Yucca Mountain, you know, we were building it and then we shut it down, I think, 2009 timeframe. Shut down the process. And so there's several states that that's a requirement. Several states nuclear didn't make sense for, like Wyoming. Very sparse, you know, when you're talking these large plants, now you've got large transmission lines, when a lot of times it's better to do small. Right? So, you know, if you're looking, you know, say a small gas turbine, or when we get into the new nuclear, we could talk about, you know, there's these new nuclear, the way they can, you know, instead of a 800-megawatt module, they have 60-megawatt modules and they can come in single-unit, three-pack, six-pack, or 12-pack. So, and this is-

• 29:00Anthony Pompliano?

  It's like beer.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's new scales design. They're all about the beer.

• 29:05Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And so, okay, so there's certain states that have nuclear, there's certain states that don't.

• 29:12Anthony Pompliano?

  And you already kind of hit on it a little bit, right, is I think one of the biggest critiques against it, whether it's reasonable or not, or accurate or not, is people fear nuclear because they only know one of three things. Either they know nothing about it, and it sounds scary, right? You know, I've heard of nuclear bombs before, like, I don't want that near me. Two is they've heard of Three Mile Island, Fukushima, Chernobyl, right? These places where there's been issues. Or three is they actually are somewhat sophisticated, and their belief is, hey, we're great at having reliable power generation, but we don't know what to do with the waste. We don't have a great solution for the waste. So maybe let's go through all three of those things. But before I do that, just as a kind of like,

• 29:57Anthony Pompliano?

  to keep people understanding, this isn't a what are we going to do in the future, right? Nuclear energy is 20% of all electricity generated in the United States, right? It makes up more than 55% of all clean energy in the United States. And so it's not a thing of like, what are we going to do in the future? Like, it's already here. We're doing this, and we've been doing it for a long time. You know, you told me before, I was showing recording, 20% of the electricity in the United States since 1990, right? So it's been going on for a long time that we've been doing this. People just haven't talked about it, or just didn't spend the time to really learn about it, I think.

• 30:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, and that's true. And I think at peak, it was 40% of our energy production in the 70s, in the late 70s, early 80s, right around the time of the Three Mile Island accident. You know, you did a great job summarizing. I described the issues in three words, and that's waste weapons and meltdowns.

• 30:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, okay. Waste weapons or meltdowns?

• 30:47Speaker 02

  And so, all right, the waste, right? There's two responses to that. One is, is that the waste are stored in, you know, first, when it's pulled from the reactors, put in a spent fuel pool to cool down over time.

• 31:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What is a spent fuel pool?

• 31:01Speaker 02

  It's basically, it looks like a big giant swimming pool that has old used fuel rods in it. And it just sits in there to cool down, because you can't, you don't want them to get too hot.

• 31:10Anthony Pompliano?

  So these are the fuel rods that had the uranium in them that were in the reactor itself, right? We now take them and literally submerge them in liquid that literally looks like a swimming pool in terms of the size of the thing. But it's liquid that is being submerged to cool it off?

• 31:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's an Olympic, it's an Olympic swimming pool, and there's 20 feet of water over the fuel.

• 31:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, wow.

• 31:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, these are not small.

• 31:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, and so really, the reason for putting it into the spent fuel pool is to cool off the rod?

• 31:39Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah, so there's something called residual heat. So when the atoms split, you have these, they're called fission products. And those fission products take time to decay. This is the term people talk about the long-term of waste. Most of those fission products will be gone in 300 years, and we could talk about that as part of the waste solution as well. But those fission products, they generate heat when they are losing their radioactivity.

• 32:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  So that's the concern, the toxicity of the radioactivity that everyone talks about.

• 32:06Anthony Pompliano?

  So how long in the spent fuel pool, if I have a rod, I put it in there, how long do I leave it in there on average?

• 32:13Speaker 02

  It's typically about a decade.

• 32:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, wow. So is it, okay. I was thinking like, when you, you know, burn your finger and you run under cold water for two minutes in the sink, this is not that. This is, you're leaving it in there for 10-plus years to cool off.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  So, yeah, so typically they're in about a decade, and then they move them into a, what's called a spent fuel cask.

• 32:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, what is that?

• 32:35Speaker 02

  It's, it's, they look like giant pills for the most part, but they're, they're, they're, they have a stainless steel internal liner, they have concrete around that, and then stainless steel, they're welded, and then they're filled with helium.

• 32:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so one, it sounds almost like humans have caskets, these have these casts, right?

• 32:54Speaker 02

  That's, that's, it's a great analogy.

• 32:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, and so you put the spent fuel rods into this cast, and you close it up. Why is the helium going to it?

• 33:05Speaker 02

  Um, the helium goes in there so that, remember that, there's still some heat left.

• 33:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 33:09Speaker 02

  And if it was in a vacuum, it wouldn't, it would, it would, it would, there would be thermal, you know, insulation, and it would start to, it would potentially melt. Um, helium's a great conductor of heat, as a gas, and so they pressurize the helium so that it'll, it'll conduct that heat to the outside and cool it, but you've allowed them to cool sufficiently to where just the, you know, the air out in the middle of, you know, southern Florida, out in Miami, you know, will, is sufficient to keep them from having any problems.

• 33:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. So, I take the rods, I put them in this immersion pool, if you will, or whatever. I take them out a decade later, I put it into this cast. It's got all the fancy inner lining, outer lining, concrete, etc. I seal it with the helium. What do I do with that cast once I've got the rods in there?

• 33:55Speaker 02

  So, they all sit at the sites.

• 33:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, interesting. Is this controversial thing that from the critics of nuclear, do they not like that?

• 34:05Speaker 02

  I mean, that's, this is the waste that everyone is concerned about.

• 34:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, got it.

• 34:09Speaker 02

  And I mean, as far as the quantity of this, if you took all the casks and you brought them into, if you put them on a football field, it'd only be 50 feet deep.

• 34:18Anthony Pompliano?

  So I could cover 100 yards, 50 feet deep?

• 34:20Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 34:21Anthony Pompliano?

  It would be all of them?

• 34:21Speaker 02

  For all the spent fuel from commercial operations in the United States.

• 34:25Anthony Pompliano?

  And that's been how long?

• 34:28Speaker 02

  60 years.

• 34:28Anthony Pompliano?

  60 years, okay. So as you're putting those on site, is it, we don't have a better place to go put them? Or we actually think the best place to put them is on site?

• 34:38Speaker 02

  Well, we talked about Yucca Mountain earlier. They were supposed to all be shipped to Yucca Mountain, but since Yucca Mountain...

• 34:42Anthony Pompliano?

  The whole country was gonna go to this one location, Yucca Mountain?

• 34:46Speaker 02

  Yes, and, and the utilities actually funded Yucca Mountain.

• 34:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, interesting.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, so those, I mean, there was some taxpayer dollars to it, but it was primarily funded by the different energy companies that had nuclear reactors.

• 34:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you know why that place specifically was chosen?

• 35:02Speaker 02

  Um, it's...

• 35:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Or just far away from everybody?

• 35:04Speaker 02

  I mean, it was, it was in the Nevada desert in a mountain, in the middle of nowhere.

• 35:08Anthony Pompliano?

  I feel like the, especially Americans, we just feel like, uh, the desert inside of a mountain, like, I put Area 51, put the, put the cast, etc.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  Well, and we actually have a long-term repository. The government, they built one called, it's called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, Pilot Program. It's called the WIP facility. It's in Carlsbad, New Mexico.

• 35:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  And that's where the US sends its, um, waste from weapons production.

• 35:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  And now that's, we're not generating new material for weapons.

• 35:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 35:37Speaker 02

  But there's a lot of legacy waste. There's a lot of stuff in the news talking about that, uh, that sarcophagus thing out in, um, Marshall Islands. You've got Hanford, you've got, um, uh, the National Security Site in Nevada. There's, you know, the US has a lot of labs.

• 35:52Anthony Pompliano?

  We'll get to the weapons in a second. The, I got a lot of questions about the weapons. So, right now, I take the cast, I have the rods, steel with helium, I leave them on site. That's for a land-based nuclear power plant. What happens on the submarines and the aircraft?

• 36:06Speaker 02

  Um, the fuel is removed and, uh, it is shipped out to Idaho.

• 36:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And I'm assuming there's just one repository where all US military, whatever goes in?

• 36:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so, um... Why is it, once it's inside of that cast,

• 36:25Anthony Pompliano?

  it's on site, so is it safe? Is it a thing where people are worried about the seal may break? Like, what is the concern, I guess, on the waste side? And what happens if, let's say, a worker at the facility goes and picks up one and doesn't have protective clothing on? But like, walk me through kind of how radioactive are they? And then what's the concern from the critics?

• 36:48Speaker 02

  So you can walk up and hug them and receive?

• 36:50Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm not gonna do that, but you explain why.

• 36:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you'll get little to no dose. You'd probably get more radiation dose eating a banana than you would from hugging one of those casks.

• 37:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Really? And it's because not so much that the spent fuel rods don't have radiation, it's that they're locked into the actual cast itself. And so the outside of the cast is not seeing any of the radiation.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the stainless steel and the concrete are acting as shielding.

• 37:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it, okay.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  So, yeah, it's providing shielding for that. Now, if that fuel was unshielded, and you drove a truck up to, or drove a car at 55 miles an hour, you would not survive.

• 37:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so if it was just sitting on the side of the road, there was nothing protecting it, and you just drove right by it?

• 37:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's why we have the 20 feet of water over them. And, you know, the people that work on this stuff, they are very, you know, wary or wary. They're very sensitive to, yeah, sensitive to what they're doing.

• 37:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so you explained why the helium is locked in, in the cast. What's up with the water? Why is the water, is that a better protection than the

• 38:00Anthony Pompliano?

  than the inner lining, outer lining in the concrete?

• 38:03Speaker 02

  Should we talk about in the spent fuel pool?

• 38:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, in the pool.

• 38:05Speaker 02

  Well, it's readily available. The other thing is, is that when they're, when commercial reactors are, they're removing the fuel during their outages, and they have to do this every 18 months, 18 to 24 months. They have to literally take the whole reactor out. They take about, they swap, it's about a third swap. They take about, they bring a third new fuel in. A third of the fuel is completely consumed. And then they basically have to reassemble the reactor. Because of the way the rods are, to make sure you have the right, the right, you know,

• 38:37Speaker 02

  heat loading in there. So to do that, they literally fill the reactor, it's called the vessel cavity up with water. They pick the fuel rods up, they move it through water into the fuel building.

• 38:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, wow.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's all done underwater.

• 38:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Always, always in water?

• 38:54Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 38:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. It, it's fascinating to me how um the entire process, right, is so compartmentalized and, and, and at the end of the day, I, I think one of the things I took away the most from the research and, and the conversation I had with you is this is science. Right? And if we get the science right, then you get into how are the systems designed? What are the protocols that the humans have to interact with those systems? Uh, and we gotta make sure that we're right on the science, right? And if we do that, then we can create safe systems. Um, okay, so I think you've done a good job describing like how we deal with the waste right now. We'll come back to that in a second, but there's been these three big events where um there's been the issues, right? So uh, the waste is one, but these accidents is another. I forget the, the three words you used.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was waste weapons and meltdown. So this, this falls under your meltdown.

• 39:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Meltdowns, okay. So let's go maybe through the three, Three Mile Island, Fukushima and Chernobyl. And maybe just describe like what happened in each one of them.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  All right, well, I'm, first off, I'm gonna say that there have been eight meltdowns planet wide of commercial reactors total.

• 39:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 39:57Speaker 02

  So, yeah, so ever. And three of those are Fukushima and two of them were in France.

• 40:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  So at, on same site, right? So, so that covers five of the eight. And then there was Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. I believe Russia had one other. Now, we talk about Three Mile Island because that's the only true commercial meltdown. There were some test reactors that melted down, but these were, we were doing silly things at that point. We didn't know what we were doing.

• 40:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Cause that was like in the sixty, uh, seventy-nine.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, seventy-nine, yeah, so seventy-nine.

• 40:27Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm cheating, I have notes, you have your brain, I have notes.

• 40:30Speaker 02

  So Three Mile Island and you know, it's, it's theirs, it was, it was an operator error. The reactor was brand new and what I mean, brand new, it had gone online for the first time, two months prior to the accident.

• 40:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, wow.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  So, you know, you're looking at reactors, they're licensed for 40 years, we're extend most of them to 60 and now we even have some being extended 80 years and this thing lasted two months before we destroyed it. Um, but they had, uh,

• 40:57Anthony Pompliano?

  You think that guy got fired?

• 40:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Or he died?

• 40:59Speaker 02

  I don't, no one died.

• 41:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, okay.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, uh, no one died and the public only received about one, one dental actress worth of radiation.

• 41:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that a lot?

• 41:06Speaker 02

  No.

• 41:07Anthony Pompliano?

  No, okay.

• 41:07Speaker 02

  No, you get four typically when you go to the dentist.

• 41:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, okay.

• 41:11Speaker 02

  So, yeah, no, it's not a lot of radiation.

• 41:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I, I was asking now why it's on top of my head. Uh, somebody recently, a dentist actually recently told me that Grand Central has a lot of radiation because of the, uh, the materials that is used, uh, in the construction.

• 41:23Speaker 02

  For the granite?

• 41:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, he said it's like a big radiation box and now I'm like scared to walk through Grand Central.

• 41:28Speaker 02

  Well, um, there's actually a video and I tweeted out there of a, a nuclear engineer that has, uh, uranium oxide, which is the fuel, um, that we use, like literally he had nuclear fuel in his hand and it's in a powder form and he literally licks it and swallows.

• 41:41Anthony Pompliano?

  No, he does not.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  He does.

• 41:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Why, how can he do that?

• 41:44Speaker 02

  It's, it's radioactive, it's not that radioactive.

• 41:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, man, you're, you're getting me in a weird world now.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, all right, so let, let's go back to Three Mile Island. So, uh, I, like, um, operator error, there's radiation that goes out, but it's not that high in terms of,

• 42:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, so what they had was they had, um, they had a relief valve, they had, they had a relief valve, had a slight leak by and so there's a temperature indication down that's beyond that relief valve, so relief valve basically to keep the, make sure that you don't get too much pressure and then you cause a Chernobyl event, which is, you know, overpressurize your planet, steam explosion, it's bad.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  So this relief valve was leaking and so the piping downstream was getting hot. And so they had this indication that they were living with. And so when they had their problem, the relief valve lifted as it

• 42:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Should.

• 42:37Speaker 02

  Should, and then it didn't recede, so it didn't shut. And so they started basically dumping their water out of the reactor. And they actually lowered the pressure to the point where there's a piece of equipment called the pressurizer, which keeps, this is a pressurized water reactor, so the pressurizer keeps it pressurized. And it uses electric heaters to keep a much higher pressure. And basically they, what do they call it, transferred the bubble. So they basically moved the steam void in there, now steam does not conduct heat very well. And so they basically caused that, the fuel assemblies, the fuel rods, they got too hot and they melted.

• 43:11Anthony Pompliano?

  It's kind of like, you ever seen in Germany with the boots when they chug beer? And they have the bubble and as they turn the boots, right?

• 43:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 43:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, pretty similar. Okay, so that's Three Mile Island. I think that that's probably the lesser known of the three, right? And mainly just because Fukushima and Chernobyl have been more recent. And also Chernobyl now has a whole documentary series or whatever it was that was created on television. What happened at Chernobyl?

• 43:41Speaker 02

  All right, so Chernobyl, which happened in 86, is that they were running a test that was basically forced on them. Now, the Soviet Union, the former Soviet Union at that time, now Chernobyl is actually physically located in Ukraine. So, but the former Soviet Union, they wanted to run this test to prove, and this is the part that blows my mind, is it was to prove that in the event that they were to lose off-site power, as it's known, that as the turbine was spinning down, it could keep the reactor cool. So they were basically running this test to ensure that the reactor could not melt down. And it went way wrong.

• 44:17Anthony Pompliano?

  So bas- basically saying, uh, we're going to try to melt it down and show you that this system will prevent it from melting down.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  Essentially, yes.

• 44:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Geniuses.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, geniuses, yeah. Um, so what happened is that-

• 44:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, actually, they would be geniuses if it works.

• 44:34Speaker 02

  If it worked, yeah.

• 44:34Anthony Pompliano?

  If it doesn't work, then they're idiots, right?

• 44:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, um, so they had some design flaws. They were operating, um, at too low a powers. They had to withdraw these, these things called control rods. Uh, they had saw, uh, X, I think it was 48 that had to be completely inserted at all times and they withdrew them all. So they're violating their safety procedures. They're doing a test that the reactor engineers were completely against.

• 44:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Cause, cause you told me earlier that there was four separate teams or kind of divisions inside of Chernobyl. Three, the first three that they went to said, no way, I'm not running that test. They knew that it was a bad thing to do. And somehow the fourth, whether they were forced or agreed or whatever, they ended up running the test.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

• 45:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 45:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:15Anthony Pompliano?

  And they're running the test on, uh, my understanding is a different design than US-based reactors?

• 45:21Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah. So US-based, US reactors don't have that same flaw that exists. None, none of our reactors have that. So, and as they were running the test, they had what's called a power excursion, power circuit coming up, but they were at these such low powers that the equipment couldn't respond properly. And, uh, when they finally went to take some action, basically they had overheated the reactor to the point where it, I don't want a steam explosion. Right? So, you know, it's, if you take, you know, the best way to describe it is you just take a jar and you put some water in it and you seal it up and you put it on a stove. It's eventually going to, you know, explode, right? Cause you've developed too much steam in there.

• 46:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Don't try that at home, kids.

• 46:02Speaker 02

  Um, you put glass all over the place. Well, in this case, yeah, they literally, you know, they, they shot fuel all over the place, right? Going back to that whole, you know, drive a truck up to it and-

• 46:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  So now they-

• 46:10Anthony Pompliano?

  And so earlier you said Three Mile Island was one, whatever level of, uh, radiation. The dentist is four. I forget what the-

• 46:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, uh, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so one, one dental x-ray, which is about three miller rem and then as opposed to-

• 46:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, one dental x-ray.

• 46:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, one dental x-ray.

• 46:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. How much, uh, Chernobyl? I'm assuming way more.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  Um, well, the Chernobyl killed 31 people.

• 46:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, and those were all plant-based employees?

• 46:36Speaker 02

  Um, I, I, I don't know the specifics on each person. I think some were firefighters and...

• 46:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. But people who, th- they weren't civilians that live next door?

• 46:44Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 46:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And, um, so that 31 people that are killed, uh, one of the things I guess is how much of that is explosion-related, right? Like, there's this big explosion and they die in the explosion versus the actual radiation itself?

• 46:58Speaker 02

  Um, there were, I know that there were, there were several people that were killed, but the majority were from the radiation exposure.

• 47:05Anthony Pompliano?

  From the radiation. Okay. So, so basically, this is a perfect example of, hey, if things go really, really wrong and this stuff is not done correctly, if there is juvenile error, if the systems are, have design flaws, people can die because of radiation.

• 47:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, correct. Um, now, one of the things that's fascinating is, is that every reactor in the United States has what's called a containment.

• 47:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 47:25Speaker 02

  Right? So it's a, it's a big, it's a steel-lined, we're going back to the stainless steel-lined, with concrete, steel reinforced. Now, the rebar is literally, you know, about three inches in diameter. So this is not, you know, this is not the rebar you go buy at Home Depot. This is, you know...

• 47:39Anthony Pompliano?

  So, so what you're basically saying is just like that spent fuel rods put inside of the cast, basically the entire facility is put inside of a cast essentially?

• 47:48Speaker 02

  Essentially, yeah.

• 47:49Anthony Pompliano?

  There's an interlining, a s- concrete and outer lining?

• 47:51Speaker 02

  There's only an inner liner, there's not that. Um...

• 47:54Anthony Pompliano?

  And that's to contain anything that happens with inside of that?

• 47:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, so if, if, if US designs can't undergo a Chernobyl explosion, but if they did, it would be contained inside the containment. Now, that being said, the US actually had its, its own, uh, Chernobyl event that no one talks about.

• 48:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, really?

• 48:15Speaker 02

  Yes, there was an Army reactor, so I know you're Army. Um, there's an Army reactor.

• 48:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, this is where the Navy guy gives me a hard time.

• 48:21Speaker 02

  Don't worry, there was a sailor involved too.

• 48:22Anthony Pompliano?

  (laughing)

• 48:24Speaker 02

  Um, it was, it was called SL1, that was out in the...

• 48:26Anthony Pompliano?

  SL1?

• 48:27Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, and, uh, Stationary Light Water Reactor 1. And so they were running some kind of evolution. Now, this is so early on in nuclear that those rods I was talking about, like we use a switch that drives some motors and and it moves the rods up and down. They moved them manually.

• 48:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Probably not healthy.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  Well, it is really not healthy when, you know, he was told to withdraw it three inches and whether he just decided he didn't want to have his life anymore, or Ms. Herden tried to withdraw it 13 inches, but he, you know, we talked about they control that reaction, but you haven't, you're, you're relying on humans to do this, right?

• 49:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Not good.

• 49:08Speaker 02

  Our plants don't rely on humans to do that anymore. And that's one of those, those reasons.

• 49:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And this was a land-based power plant, or this was a, like a submarine aircraft?

• 49:17Speaker 02

  It was a, a land-based military reactor.

• 49:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. Okay. And so that happened.

• 49:24Speaker 02

  1961.

• 49:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. So this is way before even Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, etc. Got it. Yeah. Even when I was researching, I didn't see that at all. I wonder if it's because it's a military-based one or something.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's one of the fascinating ones that most people don't know about. And yeah, so that's, and it contained itself. All three of the operators were killed. It's the worst by-death nuclear accident in the United States. So.

• 49:50Anthony Pompliano?

  But because of that containment.

• 49:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was, everything was contained inside of it. That site's been cleaned up now. I mean, you know, it's, it's unfortunate that three people lost their lives, but.

• 50:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. So speaking of containment and the lack of containment, I think Fukushima is, at least in my lifetime, the only thing that we've known in terms of like, nuclear is bad, right? Type meme. What happened there? And then literally the only thing that I can remember when that occurred was, you know, people walking around in the white suits and with the gloves and the goggles and everything, right? And just like, it's like, everything's going to die there, right? And so I don't know what's fact and fiction and kind of how that occurred and was there containment, was there not? Maybe just talk through that with us.

• 50:34Speaker 02

  So, so the Fukushima reactors, we actually have this exact same design in the US in certain locations, right? So it's, they are a boiling water reactor, which is different than the Three Mile and Chernobyl. So instead of having, we don't need to go into that technical detail, but. So the earthquake happened and then the reactor, they shut down the reactors because of the earthquake. And they had a tidal wave come in and washed out their emergency system. So when the reactor shut down.

• 51:00Anthony Pompliano?

  So just real quick, this is really important, right, is this was not human error to start with. This was not system design flaw. There was a massive earthquake that then created a tsunami. That tsunami brought water, for those that don't know, a tsunami brings water, right? Brought water onto the plant and that's where some of these issues started.

• 51:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. So normally, because we were talking about those rods that are in the spent fuel pool. And we talk about, you know, that we got to worry about those fission products. They get hot for a long period of time. We keep them in there for a decade, right? So when a reactor shuts down, they have systems in place to start cooling, keeping that reactor cool. To cool it down, to keep that fuel from, you know, melting down. That's the whole purpose of these emergency systems. Well, the tsunami was so large at Fukushima that it actually exceeded what the Japanese nuclear regulatory requirements were. It was higher than that. So they, you know, it exceeded that, washed out all their safety systems. So they couldn't keep the reactor cool.

• 52:04Speaker 02

  And so that's what happened. Now, the explosions that occurred, which is actually funny, which is funny. It's interesting is that three reactors melted down and they operated, there were total six reactors. There were three of them were defueled, but they were in pairs. And one of the reactors that exploded actually had no fuel in it.

• 52:25Anthony Pompliano?

  How does that happen?

• 52:25Speaker 02

  So what happens is that when you get the fuel rods themselves, they're a tube. That outer tube is made with zirconium. And when zirconium is in contact with water at high temperatures above 2,000 degrees, it rapidly oxidizes and creates hydrogen gas.

• 52:45Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm not a scientist, but I know that that leads to bad things sometimes.

• 52:48Speaker 02

  And so the hydrogen gas was filling up their, yeah, it wasn't their containment, it did fill up their containment, but it filled up their reactor buildings, the auxiliary buildings. And then it got to an explosive level and exploded. The explosions were unnecessary if the Japanese government had allowed the, um, the operators to vent as they were requesting. The reactor buildings would not have, would not have exploded and the accident would not be as bad.

• 53:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so the tsunami hits, they wash out these emergency systems, right? Which basically the regulators had regulations in place, but they just never imagined a tsunami this big, etc. Um, when those emergency systems get washed out, how does the explosion interact with that washing out of the emergency systems? Like, what, like, is it the explosion then like breaks containment and then that's what happens? Or like, how does the explosion play?

• 53:43Speaker 02

  So the, so the explosion actually, so you have the, the, the containment is actually, it's a bit, it's shaped like a bullet.

• 53:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 53:50Speaker 02

  And it's inside their reactor building. It's on a boiling water reactor, that's how it is. And you have your, um, and so the hydrogen gas is being vented in there. So the, the cooling system is all down below all that stuff. And so the hydrogen gas is, hydrogen's lighter than, than air, so it, it goes up. And so it's rising into the, the reactor building itself. And that's when it exploded.

• 54:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And they wanted to vent it out and it would continue to rise out, but they weren't allowed to.

• 54:15Speaker 02

  And, and the reason why they weren't allowed to is because of this magical word called tritium.

• 54:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Tritium, okay, what is that?

• 54:21Speaker 02

  It's just a heavy, it's an extra heavy form of water.

• 54:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Tritium is an extra heavy?

• 54:26Speaker 02

  It's an extra heavy form of hydrogen.

• 54:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Of hydrogen, okay.

• 54:29Speaker 02

  Right? And, you know, tritium is generated naturally in the atmosphere. So you've got, I've got a glass of water right here. I'm going to consume some tritium in front of you.

• 54:37Anthony Pompliano?

  And why are people scared of tritium? Tritium sounds like one of those words that if people don't know what it is, it sounds scary, but what is the fear there?

• 54:45Speaker 02

  Well, the fear, well, one, it's radioactive, right? And everything radioactive just sounds scary because people don't necessarily understand what radioactive means. The other thing is, is that when you talk about a thermal nuclear weapon, so you've got, you know, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki, um, which were just atomic weapons, right? Well, the thermal nuclear weapon requires, um, fusion and tritium is the key for fusion. So basically you have more feels like bomb material.

• 55:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. Okay. And basically they didn't want to allow the tritium, right? Air quotes to go up into the air.

• 55:20Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 55:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Right. Okay.

• 55:21Speaker 02

  And potentially affect the population.

• 55:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, so we have the Fukushima event.

• 55:27Speaker 02

  And Fukushima killed zero people, by the way.

• 55:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. So nobody died?

• 55:30Speaker 02

  Nobody died.

• 55:32Anthony Pompliano?

  When that happens, what is the radiation levels outside of that containment? And then kind of why, and maybe this is just the salacious media, but why do we see on television? People walking around in the white suits and kind of all that stuff?

• 55:47Speaker 02

  So the purpose of the white suits is if you have, um, any kind of radioactive dust.

• 55:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 55:53Speaker 02

  That it stays on the white suit. So you take those off. Um, they're called protective clothing. And the idea is that I don't want to take that home.

• 56:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. So basically it's while I'm in a potentially radioactive area, I may, the suit isn't necessarily going to protect me from the radiation. What it's going to do is it's going to prevent me from transporting any radioactive material back to some other location.

• 56:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. So when, when a, a nuclear reactor undergoes an outage, um, you, you wear those, we, I mean, when you work, yeah, everyone puts them on there when you're, when you're working in the containment building.

• 56:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. Got it. And, and then, um, in terms of, uh, the actual damage that was created by Fukushima, right? To me it's, hey, there was this huge issue. Was there actually negative impact on the environment, on people, et cetera? Or was it all pretty self-contained and people just talk about it because there was an explosion, et cetera?

• 56:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I mean, because the fact there were three explosions and there were. Free reactors that were melted down and destroyed. Um, there. So you have the equipment aspect of it. There were.

• 56:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Which scares people in general.

• 56:54Speaker 02

  Yes. And, and then the, the fear of the radiation that the Japanese government amplified by forced evacuations actually caused, uh, I believe several hundred people that were, um, say, uh, elderly to, you know, when they went to transport them were not. They did it in a rushed manner and, and they, they lost their lives because of fear.

• 57:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 57:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. So.

• 57:17Anthony Pompliano?

  So there was people who lost their lives, but not because of radiation, lost their lives due to, um, elderly, I don't have medical care, et cetera.

• 57:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. Medical care. Well, you, you need intense care and then we're going to transport you in a rushed manner when you didn't need to rush it.

• 57:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 57:30Speaker 02

  I mean, the, the radiation levels that, uh, that are on the site are such that you could stand there for years and not have issues.

• 57:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm hmm.

• 57:40Speaker 02

  On the site.

• 57:41Anthony Pompliano?

  And so this is probably a good time to talk about, uh, again, I'm coming at this so uneducated, right? That, um, I'm looking at this as how to understand nuclear power generation and what it can do for the United States and other countries, but also understanding, you know, the other side of this where people are fearful, et cetera. What does radiation do to the human body at certain levels, right? Cause I'm assuming that it kind of ratchets, ratchets. If I go to the dentist, I get radiation, right? I joke all the time. I say, when you get on an airplane, get radiation. When you go through the thing that spins at security, you get radiation. So I'm still alive. You're still alive. Right?

• 58:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. Um, I mean, you're, you get somewhere between, depending on what source they talk about, somewhere between a hundred and fifty and 500 milligram a year from natural sources.

• 58:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. A hundred and fifty to 500 milligram.

• 58:27Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 58:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Okay.

• 58:28Speaker 02

  To give you an idea, to give you, you know, uh, a baseline, uh, in 20 years of naval service, I received 247 milligram from nuclear reactors.

• 58:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. So 100 to 500 is kind of average, just naturally.

• 58:43Speaker 02

  Naturally, yeah.

• 58:44Anthony Pompliano?

  240, and dumb question, but how do you measure that?

• 58:48Speaker 02

  How do?

• 58:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Can I, can I walk around with something that tells me how much radiation I'm?

• 58:51Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I mean, well, so, and it's funny, and I'll, I'll talk about that, is that we call, they're called TLDs, thermal luminosid dosimeters. It's the version ones we had that looked like little fat pens.

• 59:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 59:01Speaker 02

  And they measured everything. So when you wore them, you know, you got natural and unnatural radiation. You got all of it. The new ones we have, they're, they're little squares and they discriminate. So the first half of my naval career, we used the, the other ones.

• 59:16Anthony Pompliano?

  The pens.

• 59:17Speaker 02

  The pens. And so I would be in port on a shutdown reactor and my monthly exposure was about nine millirem. Underway, and I was the watch standard that sat, that was closest to the reactor as it was operating, I got four.

• 59:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 59:33Speaker 02

  And I wasn't getting any from that reactor when it was shut down. It was all from the, the sun and, yeah.

• 59:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Okay. And, and so, um, that's like, let's call that low level, no concern level, um, radiation exposure. What are the levels in which people should be concerned and like, what happens to the human body? Right? Cause in my mind, it's like, you get exposure radiation, you melt and like, you're dead.

• 59:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, um, it, it all occurs at the cellular level. And the way it was taught to me is they, we call it good daughter, dead daughter, bad daughter, no daughter.

• 1:00:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, explain that.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  So, um, what happens is that the, uh, the radiation strikes the, the DNA of the nucleus. And good daughter, the, uh, the cell repairs itself, divides normally.

• 1:00:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  All right. Then there's bad daughter, and this is the one that scares most people because it's hard to understand is that it, it, um, damages the, the, the DNA in the, in the nucleus of the cell. It splits and it's got a problem. This is the cancer that everyone's concerned about.

• 1:00:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. So, so there's some sort of mutation to the cells?

• 1:00:36Speaker 02

  Yes. Then there's the, uh, dead daughter, which is the DNA is damaged, cell splits, the cells both die. The new cells both die, the daughter cells do.

• 1:00:45Anthony Pompliano?

  And that's good or bad?

• 1:00:47Speaker 02

  Uh, it's.

• 1:00:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Neither?

• 1:00:48Speaker 02

  Neither. Um, well, and that, well, in radiation sickness, if you get large quantities of radiation, that's a problem.

• 1:00:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  Um, and then you have no daughter, um, which is that it just basically, radiation just kills the cell.

• 1:01:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 1:01:01Speaker 02

  So those last two are radiation sickness with the, and then you have the cancer for the, the bad daughter. Um, the way it was trained to me was that if you took a po- a group of 10,000 people, about 1,000 of them are going to die of cancer.

• 1:01:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:01:18Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:01:19Anthony Pompliano?

  At what level?

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  Um, just normal, natural, like just living a normal.

• 1:01:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, got it.

• 1:01:24Speaker 02

  If you took those same 10,000 people and you exposed them to one REM or 1,000 milligram of radiation over their lifetime, potentially 1,001 would now die of cancer.

• 1:01:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so, so there's a very small.

• 1:01:40Speaker 02

  Very small, yeah.

• 1:01:40Anthony Pompliano?

  So, to 1,000 milligram?

• 1:01:43Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:01:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Right, okay.

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  And when you think about Thirmal Island, people got three, outside of plant workers, right? Now, when you're talking cancer, it's two, there's so many variables, right? And people will say, well, there was increased cancer rates here. It's like, well, what chemicals were they exposed to? You firefighters, cancer is the number one killer of firefighters because they're inhaling smoke and all the chemicals associated with it. Um, these old plants used asbestos. This is the asbestos that they, that they breathed in that's causing the cancer. So, we don't know, you know, and if you look at a coal plant, they used asbestos and, you know, old plants use asbestos. So, it's not that, you know, the radiation is causing the cancer. There's lots of variables. We don't know.

• 1:02:26Anthony Pompliano?

  And, and this is timely because, um, uh, for those that listen to the podcast often, uh, Plina and Joe are here in the room and they're gonna start laughing when I say this, but, um, I've, uh, recently read a book, uh, called The Telomere Effect. And so, it's a, uh, a professor who did a bunch of academic research all around, uh, these telomeres. And telomeres are essentially on your DNA at the very ends. Think of them kind of like on your shoelaces, how you have that plastic cap.

• 1:02:49Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:02:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, they can start at a certain length and over the lifetime, they shorten and as you, they shorten, you look older, you age, right? Things get worse and eventually you die. And so, uh, one of the things that goes into that, other than, you know, how you eat, exercise, all things we all know, radiation. And so, what they've talked about is, uh, things like flying. Well, if you fly a whole lot, like your telomere shortened, right? If you stop flying so much after years of doing it, you can actually. Slow down the shortening of your telomeres. That has nothing to do with nuclear power plants, etc. That's just natural, human, um, kind of, uh, reaction or relationship with what the things that they're doing in the environment, etc.

• 1:03:28Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, um, of that, talking about the cancer, one of the things is if you continue to get exposed to that and your telomeres shorten, shorten, and shorten, there can be, um, kind of the, uh, continued growth of cells, etc. That's where you get the cancers from. And so, um, you know, this isn't, to me at least, kind of from an educated perspective, it's not just a nuclear power plant related type thing. This is just human body science and biology, how, um, you know, we interact with the things around us.

• 1:03:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, and an airline pilot gets more radiation being an airline pilot or stewardess, they get more radiation flying a year than a nuclear power plant operator gets operating a reactor.

• 1:04:05Anthony Pompliano?

  That's pretty crazy.

• 1:04:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Um, all right. Let's, uh, let's talk about the big topic, which, uh, I know everyone's all excited about, which is the weapons, right?

• 1:04:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:13Anthony Pompliano?

  So, uh, when people hear nuclear weapons, it's like, if you're a pro-conflict, pro-military, let's go fight everybody in the world, people get excited because it's, that's the aggressive, um, you know, most powerful weapons type approach. If you are, uh, let's de-escalate every situation and, and we don't want war, we don't want, you know, uh, issues, etc. Nobody should have nuclear weapons, right? Or kind of like that, the opposite ends of the spectrum there. What is a nuclear weapon, right? And, and how does that relate to nuclear power, etc.?

• 1:04:45Speaker 02

  So, um, you can, it requires the same fuels.

• 1:04:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, meaning the rods from uranium 235?

• 1:04:53Speaker 02

  Meaning, meaning the uranium 235 or the plutonium 239.

• 1:04:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:04:58Speaker 02

  All right, so, um,

• 1:04:59Anthony Pompliano?

  So that core fuel is

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:05:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Used for both power plants and for the nuclear weapon?

• 1:05:04Speaker 02

  But they are very different.

• 1:05:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:05:07Speaker 02

  So, um, a nuclear reactor does never, never, can never achieve the geometry is the, is the term they use.

• 1:05:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:05:14Speaker 02

  To have a nuclear explosion.

• 1:05:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, e- explain as best you can, kind of why that is.

• 1:05:19Speaker 02

  Um, you can't get the atoms close enough because they're at an oxide, they're in those, they're, they're in those rods, right? Whereas in a nuclear weapon, you actually, it starts, and, and, and I'm not an expert in nuclear weapons.

• 1:05:31Anthony Pompliano?

  That makes two of us.

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, yeah, we'll, we'll leave that to, and this, this really cracks me up, to Mark B. Schneider.

• 1:05:37Anthony Pompliano?

  No way.

• 1:05:38Speaker 02

  I'm not joking. B for bombs, E for energy.

• 1:05:43Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it.

• 1:05:44Speaker 02

  So, um, yeah, literally, one of the leading experts in nuclear weapons in the US.

• 1:05:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Is Mark B. Schneider. Oh, man, that's awesome.

• 1:05:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, so, uh, like, and the, the best way to describe this is talk about the, the atom bombs dropped on, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

• 1:06:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:06:02Speaker 02

  Cause Hiroshima was a uranium bomb, Nagasaki was a plutonium bomb.

• 1:06:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:06:06Speaker 02

  Alright, so the way that, um, the, uh, Hiroshima bomb was, was that it was, it's, it's a plug type. Meaning that it's a cylinder, like a, like a glass with thick walls.

• 1:06:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:06:17Speaker 02

  And they have a bullet of uranium and they use an explosion from, you know, gunpowder, whatever, drives it in there, you have enough, you hit your critical geometry, and it causes that uncontrolled reaction. We talked about the neutrons earlier, where the one causes, you know, the atom to split, generates a couple of extra, those split everything, you know, and then it just goes through all.

• 1:06:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, uncontrolled.

• 1:06:40Speaker 02

  And so you have an uncontrolled, you know, the massive amounts of heat generated, heat, light, energy. Um, so that's how the base of that, and a plutonium weapon, they're in a sphere and there's lots of explosions around it. And you have to explode them all into the center to get the right geometry in there simultaneously and cause that explosion.

• 1:06:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so the, I, I guess where some of the concern is, so to the uneducated, it's, hey, the word nuclear is in both and like, that's scary, right? Cause I, I saw on TV, there's this big explosion, I don't want that to happen down the street from my house or, you know, somewhere near me. Um, to the educated, it's, actually the fuel source can be the same, but the geometry is the, the big differentiator between the two of them.

• 1:07:21Speaker 02

  And you have to look at the concentration of the fuel too, right? We talked about the percentages. So in a nuclear reactor, a US reactor, we typically use about two to four percent enriched uranium-235, so meaning two to four percent of your fuel is, is uranium-235. In a weapon, it's greater than 90%.

• 1:07:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow. Pretty big difference.

• 1:07:42Speaker 02

  Yes, and same thing with plutonium, right? So, our reactors do generate plutonium. We talked about those excess neutrons, some get absorbed by that uranium-238. But it's about 1%. You still need that high 90% pure plutonium-239. The plutonium in our reactors is actually an 80/20 blend of plutonium-239 and plutonium-240. That 240 actually makes the reaction not viable for making an effective nuclear weapon.

• 1:08:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And is there a concern? I've never heard this, but this is just me thinking how others might be concerned. Is there a concern that countries that are pursuing nuclear power could use some of the learnings there and experience there to then create nuclear weapons? Or are those two so separate things that there's not really a concern?

• 1:08:29Speaker 02

  So typically, it's, there is a good overlap between them.

• 1:08:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:08:37Speaker 02

  Right, so now-

• 1:08:38Anthony Pompliano?

  From a scientific-

• 1:08:39Speaker 02

  From a scientific aspect. So now, to make a new, a uranium bomb, which is everyone's big concern with Iran right now. And by the way, Iran, I think is at 6% enrichment. So they've got another 84% to go before we should be concerned.

• 1:08:52Anthony Pompliano?

  When we say enrichment, what does that mean?

• 1:08:53Speaker 02

  That's the percentage of uranium-235 in the uranium.

• 1:08:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:08:58Speaker 02

  So they've gotten to, I think, to about 6% and they have, I think, 320 kilograms of this stuff.

• 1:09:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:09:04Speaker 02

  There's 3.2 million kilograms of spent nuclear fuel in Virginia alone.

• 1:09:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Much less.

• 1:09:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And we're at 100% enrichment?

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

  What's that, as far as?

• 1:09:15Anthony Pompliano?

  The US enrichment?

• 1:09:16Speaker 02

  No, that fuel is only enriched, well, the spent fuel is actually down to about 1%. Because we've consumed all the-

• 1:09:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, pre-consumption.

• 1:09:25Speaker 02

  Pre-consumption, it was 2% to 4%.

• 1:09:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it, okay.

• 1:09:28Speaker 02

  Right, so, so that fuel is, sorry, so Iran, Iran has a long ways to go before we should be concerned. In fact, actually, there's a, New scales is a company that they're gonna use a medium-enriched. They're gonna get a special allowance to go to 19.75% enrichment, so their reactors can last longer. So they only need to refuel every 12 years.

• 1:09:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:09:52Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, the concern with-

• 1:09:55Anthony Pompliano?

  A country doing nuclear energy related activities and then kind of pull back the curtain and oh, now we have a nuclear bomb. Is that more science fiction concern?

• 1:10:06Speaker 02

  So the, the, the two countries that, that are of concern are Iran and North Korea.

• 1:10:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:10:14Speaker 02

  Now Iran, um, you know, they have their centrifuges, right? That's what makes the, the, the enrichment happen and the uranium is the easiest method to make a weapon.

• 1:10:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:10:23Speaker 02

  Um, and then, uh, North Korea, however, they designed a special reactor. At least I believe this. I don't know everything. I don't know all the details of it and this is kind of, we're, we're delving far outside what I'm normally, um, you know, attuned with, but I believe North Korea, I'll use that word. I believe North Korea has a reactor they designed specifically to generate plutonium. Now that plutonium, you, if you keep it in, has to remain in a reactor for less than six months. We, the fuel in a reactor stays in there for four and a half years before you pull it out normally. Right? So that's the normal method. So if you, we got countries, I know that, um, United Arab Emirates is about, they're going to put

• 1:11:04Speaker 02

  on their Baraka Unit One, uh, will be, they'll be number 31 on the, uh, countries of nuclear power and they're going to bring theirs online, uh, and it's a South Korean reactor design. Um, and I, I don't think anyone should be concerned about them, you know.

• 1:11:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Creating weapons or anything, yeah.

• 1:11:20Speaker 02

  Whereas, you know, it, there's really, uh, you know, I like to break down the nuclear power program into, into, at least in the U S into three groups.

• 1:11:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:11:30Speaker 02

  You've got the commercial, which are your big scale reactors. Um, they do produce a lot of the nuclear waste, but it's benign from a weapon standpoint.

• 1:11:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:11:40Speaker 02

  You have the Navy reactors, which run on very pure fuels.

• 1:11:46Speaker 02

  But they're military, so they get exceptions for that. And then you have this third group, which is the Department of Energy. Those are your test reactors. And so those are the ones where I mean, you're making medical isotopes with it, but you're putting fuel fuels in and out of those things. If you were to, you know, you got to be concerned when nations are building test reactors. So if they're building commercial reactors, just let them build them all day long. They're not going to make, you can't make weapons materials from those. It's test reactors you got to be concerned about.

• 1:12:13Anthony Pompliano?

  And why is the test reactors? Is it because they aren't, they're more closely aligned with what's needed to make a weapon than with a commercial?

• 1:12:21Speaker 02

  Correct. Yeah. Yeah. So, so in a commercial reactor, it's this big ordeal to disassemble the reactor and pull the fuel out. Whereas in a test reactor, they might be like, they might never operate the thing hot enough to really boil water. Right. But they're generating tons and tons of neutrons to, you know, irradiate fuels or, I mean, they, you know, and they, they use that stuff for, for good. You know, but you know, anybody's

• 1:12:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, all test reactors aren't bad, but there's risk with this.

• 1:12:47Speaker 02

  Yes. But all test reactors could become made to do bad things.

• 1:12:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. Okay. I want to go back to, to the waste because I know that's, you know, when I think of like, what is the biggest critique? It's around this waste component.

• 1:12:59Speaker 02

  I would agree with that.

• 1:13:00Anthony Pompliano?

  And again, I think, you know, when I was reading online, I'm uneducated on the topic, right? And I'm trying to learn. And so, again, there's a spectrum of like, there's plenty of people who just yell and scream like Chernobyl, Fukushima, they don't, they don't know, right? And so like, you know, look,

• 1:13:15Speaker 02

  It's my favorite reply.

• 1:13:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. If you, if you don't know, it's scary, right? Because the radiation and all this kind of stuff, radioactive material, all this kind of stuff. But then there's the people who are actually super sophisticated. And I think that the very educated, sophisticated critic would say, okay, we go through this great process. We've produced tons of reliable power and electricity. We do, we're getting more efficient at it, right? It absolutely could be a great solution. Their biggest concern is once that spent fuel rod goes into the pool, then goes into this cast, we either, one, can't guarantee that the cast is sealed forever and kind of the life of the waste that we could talk about. But then also two is then we

• 1:13:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Leave this cast on site like we don't go put it anywhere. Right. We touched a little bit on like, where do we go put this stuff? And it sounds like, um, you know, there's been kind of initiatives to go put it in the mountain in the middle of the desert, et cetera. But in terms of the life of the waste, the number that I have always heard is a hundred thousand years this stuff stays radioactive for, right? And I'm sure that there's some decay in the radioactive, um, kind of levels that it has, but a hundred thousand years, I think, just scares people because that's a really, really long time. Right? How accurate is that? And are there things that we can do to just shorten the lifetime of the radioactive nature of this waste? And then two, like, how do we ensure that that, um, that helium sealed cast actually stays sealed?

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  Um, well, the first off, the casters are welded.

• 1:14:41Anthony Pompliano?

  They're welded.

• 1:14:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. So they're, yeah, it's not like they're, they're welded shut.

• 1:14:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. And, and so would you say that there's not really a concern that once it's welded shut, nothing's going to happen to it? Or is there still some concern?

• 1:14:51Speaker 02

  I would say the, the concern is extremely minimal.

• 1:14:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:14:56Speaker 02

  Um, I, I, I say that because I just don't want to be an absolutist.

• 1:14:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:14:59Speaker 02

  Um, I, I have, I personally have no concern, but you know, I want to be, you know, is trying to be honest here as well. Um, but is, uh, you had, you asked a really long question.

• 1:15:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Okay. So, so let me kind of walk through each one of them. So no concern if the cast just sits the right itself, it's welded shut, no problem. If there was an explosion in a plant or the cast usually held in an area where it could be affected by an explosion and would that cause an issue?

• 1:15:25Speaker 02

  That would not, no, because I mean, they're typically, they're, they're, they're stored far enough away from the plant. Um, and they're actually require less security than the reactor, than the reactor does itself. Because they're, I mean, these cats, they're not like, you know, a simple thing. They require special heavy cranes to, to pick them up and move them. So it's not like you can go throw one of these things in the bed of your pickup truck.

• 1:15:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. It's like an oil barrel.

• 1:15:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. Okay.

• 1:15:49Speaker 02

  Which, which is, that's what the image is, is always these yellow.

• 1:15:52Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a Simpsons.

• 1:15:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? The, the Simpsons, uh, the podcast I listened to from the Department of Energy, that actually started off talking about, there was this Simpsons episode all about, you know, radioactive material at a nuclear power plant and, uh, you know, all this stuff. Goes wrong etc and later on the Simpsons producer came out and apologized and said, look, you know, we're basically making jokes. We didn't understand what we were making a joke about and you know, we apologize. Um, okay. So that's first. The second is in terms of um, the human error that can get introduced in uh, with this way. So whether it's taking the spent fuel rod and putting it into the immersive pool or then getting it into the cast like, where are the failure points or potential failure points there and how big of a risk is that?

• 1:16:36Speaker 02

  Um, well, being is that uh,

• 1:16:40Speaker 02

  there are failure points, um, but the risk at this point is extremely minimal.

• 1:16:47Speaker 02

  Um, you know, right now, you know, basically a third of all the reactors in the US underwent an outage this, this fall.

• 1:16:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. And outage meaning?

• 1:16:55Speaker 02

  Outage meaning that they shut the reactor down. They pulled all the fuel out. They left a third of it in the spent fuel pool and they stuck a third new and then they put two thirds of it back together all in there. They've moved in, you know, these fuel assemblies. So there's, there's fail safes. There's lots of uh, experience and they're probably the worst location with regards to this is there's a, I can't remember the name of the plant and it's gonna, it's down, down near San Diego where the plant is shut down and they are in that final process of taking those spent, those rods that have been in there for a decade. So it's been shut down for that long and they're putting them in their final casks to then um, to, to put them, store them on site. So that's, that's probably your biggest risk.

• 1:17:39Speaker 02

  And there's, it's all over the place and you know, you have uh, the NRC is, is huge amounts of regulation, huge amounts of oversight. Fuel movement is one of the most um, you have special extra qualifications and I know this is not people, what people want to hear is because you're putting the human element in there.

• 1:17:59Speaker 02

  But there's

• 1:18:01Speaker 02

  The amount of times this is done, if there was a problem, you know, because the nuclear industry drives levels down, their problems down so low, that you don't bubble up the same kind of problems. Right? We're talking low order magnitude issues. Guy hung a tag on the wrong component. The plant shuts down for 24 hours to do a safety stand down to realign everyone. Meanwhile, you use the comparison of the oil and gas industry. You know, down in North Carolina, they have a guy operate the wrong valve, blows up three people. And you know him, bats an eye. Right? So there's a big difference in the way the, we regulate and we operate the nuclear industry.

• 1:18:43Speaker 02

  I like to say that after Thiruma Island, the commercial industry decided to, or made the decision to put the NRC out of business. Which the NRC is a nuclear regulatory, so they're the government oversight. And they created an organization called the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations.

• 1:19:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:19:00Speaker 02

  So the utilities fund this, so this is self-regulation. You know, hear about this often, but the utility funds this organization that goes around and graze each, each power plant. And they give, you know, guidance on how to operate this way. And they come in with giant teams. The NRC, you've got a couple of people that are there at the site at all times. Info brings in a team of 20 people and they're like, they're watching how you take your rounds. They're watching how you're, you know.

• 1:19:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Very thorough.

• 1:19:28Speaker 02

  Very thorough, yes. And it's, and it's not once or twice a year, it's five, six, seven, eight times a year. So, you know, the industry has radically over-regulated itself in a lot of ways. And people I don't think ever hear that, they only hear the, the horror stories. And, you know, one of the comments that someone made about Thiruma Island, and this is probably the, the best way to understand how the industry's improved, is that Thiruma Island wasn't the worst. It was the one that melted. There were other plants that were probably operating, because you know, the seventies and eighties were, we, I lovingly refer to as the wild, wild west of nuclear. Because we were operating, we as an industry were just operating.

• 1:20:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, a lot of industries were.

• 1:20:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And so around this waste component, right? So the 100,000 years, you mentioned earlier 300 years. Where's, how do we get that down?

• 1:20:22Speaker 02

  So the 100,000 years is actually based on the half-life of plutonium 239.

• 1:20:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so just literally take plutonium 239 and half-life it out.

• 1:20:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, you get about, yeah, it's about 120, 130,000 years or so. But yeah, that's, that's the typical number. The 300 years is based off of your fission products, right? So, so your, your, your heavy elements, you're, they're called actinids. I hate these terms because they're so overly technical.

• 1:20:50Speaker 02

  But your heavy elements have really long half-lives. Uranium is in the billions of years.

• 1:20:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, really?

• 1:20:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:20:57Speaker 02

  So like longer than the planet will be around kind of thing. And then, you know, plutonium's down at 24,000 years. And then when you're talking, you know, your cesium and rubidium and, you know, we're basically, I could just name off the chart of nuclei or chart of, periodic table and we could go through all that.

• 1:21:11Anthony Pompliano?

  I never memorized it.

• 1:21:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, neither did I.

• 1:21:15Anthony Pompliano?

  And so if uranium is a billion years and plutonium's 120, 130,000 years, how do we get it down to hundreds of years?

• 1:21:23Speaker 02

  So one of the things is, is that if we took our spent fuel and we put it into a fast reactor, we could consume the plutonium that exists in it. We could take all that uranium. We could transmit it into plutonium and then consume all that.

• 1:21:38Anthony Pompliano?

  So this is like the most fascinating thing to me. I told you before we got started that, Jason Williams, who's been on the podcast before, one of my partners, has a business, PRTI takes, car tires that are waste, gets paid to take them, puts them in these thermal, demanufactured reactors, basically breaks the car tire down at high heats, right? Creates oil, steel, carbon, syn gas, creates power, sells the oil and the steel. He's using waste product to create power. What you're talking about here with this quote unquote fast reactor, my understanding is you're going to run uranium-235 in a fuel rod through the traditional process. There's a waste output. That waste output is still uranium, right? It's just spent fuel rods, etc.

• 1:22:24Anthony Pompliano?

  You can take that waste uranium and put it to a fast reactor, turn the waste uranium into plutonium, and then use that to create power?

• 1:22:32Speaker 02

  Correct, you got it.

• 1:22:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Man, I told you I'm gonna be a nuclear engineer by the end of this. So why can we not do that now?

• 1:22:39Speaker 02

  So right now, we can't do that because there's two regulations that were put in place in the 1970s under the Carter administration.

• 1:22:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:22:46Speaker 02

  One is that we can't use fast reactors in the United States. And the other, at least at the commercial industry level, and the others, we can't process our spent fuel.

• 1:22:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so let's take those one at a time. Our fast reactors, obviously, they must have been around when Carter was president, right? So somebody created them before that.

• 1:23:03Speaker 02

  So Jimmy Carter was supposed to be the first engineer on the first nuclear-powered USS Seawolf, which was the only fast reactor that was ever put on a submarine. So Jimmy Carter actually...

• 1:23:13Anthony Pompliano?

  The world is so small, okay? And so when those got created, why did that administration say we can't use them?

• 1:23:22Speaker 02

  The concern is it's that plutonium word.

• 1:23:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:23:25Speaker 02

  Right, so it was all about weapons proliferation.

• 1:23:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. So basically, the idea that a fast reactor takes the used uranium in terms into plutonium immediately? No, we don't want to do that because that could lead to weapons creation.

• 1:23:38Speaker 02

  But that's also not understanding about that 80/20 blend that I was talking about. So if you use it in a fast reactor, such as the BN-800 that the Russians are using?

• 1:23:47Anthony Pompliano?

  So other people are using fast reactors?

• 1:23:48Speaker 02

  There are a couple, it's not many.

• 1:23:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:23:51Speaker 02

  But the Russians have their BN-800, which, so, I'm gonna use a couple of terms here. So the seed, which is the initial fuel for their, it's a plutonium reactor, was from weapons.

• 1:24:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, seed meaning this is the uranium 235 before it is used the first time? Or this is going into the fast reactor?

• 1:24:12Speaker 02

  This is going into the fast reactor. It's going in as plutonium and it's coming from...

• 1:24:16Anthony Pompliano?

  They used uranium created plutonium before it was in a weapon. Now they've taken the weapons-grade plutonium and they're putting it into the fast reactor.

• 1:24:23Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:24:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:24:24Speaker 02

  And so then it has...

• 1:24:25Anthony Pompliano?

  I can see why people are a little nervous about that.

• 1:24:27Speaker 02

  And then, and then they have what's called the blanket.

• 1:24:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:24:31Speaker 02

  So the blanket goes around the seed. And then the seed, as it's operating and making power, it turns the uranium around it into plutonium.

• 1:24:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting.

• 1:24:42Speaker 02

  And so that goes to that process that you explained very well. Six months after that reactor went online, there was no weapons-grade material in it remaining.

• 1:24:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 1:24:54Speaker 02

  Because there's too much plutonium 240 in it after six months.

• 1:24:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. So is it absorbing it?

• 1:25:01Speaker 02

  So not all the plutonium 239, or the uranium 238 absorbing a... Again, we go back. All the plutonium 239, if it absorbs a neutron, it doesn't necessarily always undergo a fission. Some of it will absorb that neutron and then it will remain as plutonium 240.

• 1:25:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow. It's crazy to me how... Do they expect that to happen?

• 1:25:26Speaker 02

  Uh, yes.

• 1:25:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so theoretically this was supposed to happen and then they look back months later and like, what we thought was gonna happen, happened.

• 1:25:34Speaker 02

  So when they first figured it out, no, they didn't expect that to happen.

• 1:25:38Anthony Pompliano?

  So it was a surprise?

• 1:25:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a surprise the first, when they first figured this out. But you gotta remember, we're talking 30s that they were figuring this stuff out.

• 1:25:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, okay. So this isn't like, even the 80s or 90s? We're talking literally...

• 1:25:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're talking, yeah, the inception of nuclear is when they figured that out. So...

• 1:25:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so there's a couple of countries that use these fast reactors. We here aren't. I'm assuming that there's efforts underway to get the approval to use fast reactors in the United States? Or is that idea dead?

• 1:26:05Speaker 02

  No, it's not. So there is, um, there's a couple of companies out there. Well, first off, the United States is gonna build a versatile test reactor, which is to test fast fuel.

• 1:26:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:26:17Speaker 02

  So it's going to be designed to test fuels for fast reactors. So there is a couple of companies. Um, one of them is probably, probably the biggest one that, that people know about is called TerraPower.

• 1:26:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:26:30Speaker 02

  And TerraPower has its funding source from none other than Bill Gates.

• 1:26:34Anthony Pompliano?

  I was gonna say, I think I just saw this in the Netflix documentary he was talking about.

• 1:26:38Speaker 02

  Yep, so.

• 1:26:39Anthony Pompliano?

  How does TerraPower work?

• 1:26:40Speaker 02

  So they have two different designs. One is a, a sodium cooled reactor, which it, it all comes, the coolants are what matter with this. The other's a molten salt reactor. Um, but they are going to operate in the fast spectrum. And when I say fast, it, it all comes to the energy of the neutron.

• 1:26:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:26:58Speaker 02

  So uranium-235 requires a thermal neutron, which means it's at a lower energy. Plutonium-239 requires a fast neutron. And then everyone loves talking about thorium. And if I don't mention thorium, you're gonna have 80 million people ask you about it.

• 1:27:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Hold on, before you talk about thorium, when you describe fast as, uh, as basically science, right?

• 1:27:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:17Anthony Pompliano?

  And the different, um, makeups, uh, it reminds me of this joke that if the government could, they would outlaw science.

• 1:27:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Just cause, cause you have people who usually aren't scientists who are making laws about science. And so if there's not an understanding, it's kind of hard to regulate and outlaw, et cetera, when no, you don't understand the science.

• 1:27:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's crazy. Um.

• 1:27:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, so thorium.

• 1:27:37Speaker 02

  So thorium.

• 1:27:38Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know what thorium is. I didn't know if it was a sci-fi character or it was a, something on the periodic table, but everyone was tweeting this at me.

• 1:27:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, thorium because Andrew Yang has made thorium popular.

• 1:27:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, alright, so let's, so TerraPower has two separate.

• 1:27:56Speaker 02

  Designs.

• 1:27:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Designs. One is that sodium-based one you just described. The other is thorium?

• 1:28:00Speaker 02

  Well, so.

• 1:28:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Base?

• 1:28:02Speaker 02

  This is why nuclear gets so confusing.

• 1:28:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:28:04Speaker 02

  Because there's coolant, there's fuel, there's fuel configuration, there's, um, you know, how, it's just, there's so many elements that go into it.

• 1:28:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:28:12Speaker 02

  So TerraPower is, you know, they have a design, one is called their traveling wave reactor that is specifically uses a, a seed of uranium-235 and then depleted uranium, which you were in the army, you know, tanks use depleted uranium for armor and for rounds, right? That's that leftover stuff from the enrichment.

• 1:28:30Speaker 02

  So that's the, so we could use that, right? We already have it mined.

• 1:28:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:28:34Speaker 02

  Um, about 10,000 years worth between depleted uranium and, um, our fuel. If we converted 100% to nuclear, by the way, in the US, 10,000 years of energy.

• 1:28:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 1:28:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, um.

• 1:28:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Government out long science. Okay, go ahead.

• 1:28:50Speaker 02

  So, uh, yeah, so, so, and I'm not, I don't have the details and when I talk to these companies, I don't ask for the specifics on their designs because I don't want to, to, to get into proprietary and, and I'm just kind of evaluating them from, from a standpoint, a different standpoint. I know that if you're using sodium, you're going to go in the fast spectrum.

• 1:29:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:29:09Speaker 02

  If you're using a molten salt, you can vary your spectrum, what you're doing, whether you're using, uh, uranium-235, plutonium, or thorium bred into uranium-233, and that's where it gets really confusing because uranium's involved in all of it. So thorium exists naturally, it's about three times as abundant as, as, uh, uranium.

• 1:29:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so, so it's basically like a uranium, it's just thorium?

• 1:29:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, if you want to go find thorium, just go out to Central Park, pick up some dirt, you'll find thorium in there.

• 1:29:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. Sounds like we just solved power problems.

• 1:29:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, uh, and there's about three quarters of a million years of thorium on planet Earth.

• 1:29:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow, okay.

• 1:29:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:45Anthony Pompliano?

  So why is, uh, Terra Power and Andrew Yang, wh- wh- why are they talking about thorium or using thorium?

• 1:29:53Speaker 02

  Um, so thorium doesn't have the negative connotation that plutonium and uranium have.

• 1:30:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, because thorium hasn't been used to make weapons? Allegedly.

• 1:30:04Speaker 02

  Well, there was one test bomb created that partially used uranium-233 in it. So could you make a not useful, a not so useful weapon out of it? Yeah, it's extremely difficult. So it's the hardest to make

• 1:30:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Weapons.

• 1:30:20Speaker 02

  Weapons out of is uranium-233. So thorium is, thorium-232, if you go to your periodic table, it is two below uranium.

• 1:30:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that like TH? Is that the sign?

• 1:30:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, TH, yep, yeah, TH, and so it's 230.

• 1:30:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Shout out seventh grade science.

• 1:30:34Speaker 02

  Yay. Um, so it absorbs a neutron like the uranium does, and then instead of becoming plutonium like uranium does, it becomes uranium-233. Uranium-233, it operate, has a larger range of, of energies that the, um, uh, that the neutrons can be at, um, but there's a lot of, we don't have a whole lot of experience with it.

• 1:30:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:30:56Speaker 02

  So, um,

• 1:30:57Anthony Pompliano?

  And Yang wants to use this because he just thinks that he's like anti-weapons and it's safer?

• 1:31:03Speaker 02

  I, I, I don't, I'm going to mind read a little bit here on Andrew Yang. I think he's using, he brought up thorium because it sounds smart. Right, and I mean, it is smart.

• 1:31:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:31:14Speaker 02

  It's talking about advanced things. It doesn't have a negative connotation.

• 1:31:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:31:19Speaker 02

  Right, and so it just...

• 1:31:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And it pushes nuclear...

• 1:31:22Speaker 02

  Exactly. And to the point where, you know, Elizabeth Warren, who has shut them all down, literally in the last debate, was, "We need to keep some nuclear reactors around." So if you've taken a hard, "Shut all nuclear reactors down" person and soften them, okay, I'll give Andrew Yang a lot of credit for that. And, you know, I've been walking around the city, and every person I have spoken to, there, I was concerned, you know, that they would be anti-nuclear. I don't... The sentiment of anti-nuclear, I think, is fading.

• 1:31:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and there's people who I see on Twitter talking about nuclear power, power generation, all this stuff, and thorium has never been in the conversation until I tweeted that we were going to do this interview, and then I felt like I had the thorium army come at me.

• 1:32:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. You're welcome, my world.

• 1:32:08Anthony Pompliano?

  But what's interesting to me, I think, is, similar to myself, people are learning more about nuclear, right? And they're realizing that it isn't the Chernobyl, you know, "Everyone's gonna die," and everyone's walking around with those protective suits on. It's, again, it's a scientific process, there's safety, that is a concern, but there's also things that are there to mitigate it, etc. And so if we can get reliable, persistent, clean energy, that's probably a pretty good thing, right?

• 1:32:34Speaker 02

  So, Ian, talking about that reliable, clean, safe, so there was a reactor that we built in 1965 called Experimental Breeder Reactor 2, it was built out in Idaho. And they put it through a Fukushima test on crack, like, it was way worse than what Fukushima had. It was a fast reactor, sodium cooled, right, much like the BA-800 I talked about earlier, and much like Terra Power's design. They shut off all the cooling, operating at 100% power. Fukushima was shut down when they lost their... when the tsunami hit. Right, so the reactor had already been shut down because of the earthquake, tsunami washed out their safety systems. They intentionally, in 1986, with this reactor operating at 100% power, turned off her cooling systems.

• 1:33:15Anthony Pompliano?

  What happened?

• 1:33:16Speaker 02

  It shut down after 300 seconds and remained there until they started it back up.

• 1:33:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Pretty impressive.

• 1:33:22Speaker 02

  That is impressive.

• 1:33:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:23Speaker 02

  And then we've had two, these are test reactors. We've had two sodium test reactors that underwent Chernobyl level events. And they literally pulled out the melted fuel and put in new fuel. And operated them for decades later.

• 1:33:36Anthony Pompliano?

  It's crazy.

• 1:33:37Speaker 02

  So, I mean, and that's, you know, we're talking back in the days of manual crane control rods, right? So, you know, you look at it now, we have automatic protection systems that take the human element out of there with redundancies and you'd be amazed at the amount of.

• 1:33:50Anthony Pompliano?

  So, let's go back for a second to, um, there's two reasons why the fast reactors aren't used, right? You said the first was, we can't use fast reactors. It sounds like, um, TerraPower, maybe some others are trying to get around that. How are they, like, if Bill Gates is investing, he's obviously investing in something, but if we can't use fast reactors, what exactly is he investing in? Are they doing it outside the United States or?

• 1:34:11Speaker 02

  Uh, I know that TerraPower at one point was working with China. Um, they were going to build some stuff out there and I, I spoke with Chris Lebec, the, uh, the CEO about it. And, uh, they were, the, the, the, the trade war actually shut their, down their operation out in China. Um, but with this, uh, I, I think that we're about to see the regulation change. Now, that regulation as far as using fast reactors, if reprocessing spent fuel, it switches about every eight years. So about every eight years, for some reason, it's in place and then it's back. And I mean,

• 1:34:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 1:34:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, or one will go and, you know, so it's kind of just bounces back and forth.

• 1:34:47Anthony Pompliano?

  And then what about the regulation that prevents us from using waste?

• 1:34:51Speaker 02

  Um, that, that one bounces with it too as well.

• 1:34:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so, so really the fast reactor is, there's two regulations. We can't use waste, we can't use the fast reactor. When they go to we can or we can't, is that political party divided?

• 1:35:03Speaker 02

  Somewhat, yes. Um, now, one of the things is that if we just go with the fast reactor, then we could use, say, a, um, a seed of uranium 235 and then we could generate plutonium after that. Um, and then you've got,

• 1:35:14Anthony Pompliano?

  So it doesn't have to be waste, but ideally it would.

• 1:35:17Speaker 02

  Ideally, it would be, yes, so that we could reduce our waste stockpile or at least not increase it, right? Um, because, you know, the fission products only last about 300 years. About one to 2% of those that do last that long. I mean, you pull, you pull, um, let's say we used a fast reactor. We used a thorium reactor, we used a pure uranium 235 reactor, and you consumed all the fuel in it. Right? You pull out that waste, 60% of it's not radioactive. Right? So already our waste stockpile is reduced by over half. And then, one to two years later, you've lost a 5%, and then it goes up over time. But, a lot of those constituents are actually useful with industrial and medical purposes. So, you know, you've obviously heard of radiation treatments for cancer, right?

• 1:36:01Speaker 02

  That's created from the nuclear industry. And we're actually causing radiation sickness in specific parts of the body where the cancer cells are. And so we can, you know, we need that for radiation purposes, things like barium treatment where they put a radioactive, a low a low radiation chemical in you so that they can track how your body's processing, how your kidneys are working. Or there's things like, it's called radiography. So like, you know, we're in this great building right here, we're what, 54th floor, I think? And you got all these, you know, these, these red pipes going all throughout this building. Well, those wells, you want to make sure that they're, they're going to hold. Especially if, you know, you have a fire up here on the 54th floor.

• 1:36:45Speaker 02

  Right? You're really concerned about the ones on the bottom when you have 54, you know, floors of, of, of water on top. But that's a lot of pressure on the bottom there. So we can take, it's basically like a super x-ray to make sure there's no flaws in the wells. So there's a lot of purposes, there's a it's right in the middle of the periodic table called technactium, it makes a great pipe coating. But we can't generate it nat-, it doesn't exist naturally, we have to generate it in nuclear power. So there's all sorts of things that if we could reprocess the waste.

• 1:37:14Anthony Pompliano?

  There would be benefits to it.

• 1:37:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, there would be benefits. And one of the things I like talking about is that if I went to a US reactor, anywhere in the US right now, and I could magically change it from being a thermal reactor to being a fast reactor, that fuel instead of lasting four and a half years, would last 500.

• 1:37:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Because why?

• 1:37:31Speaker 02

  Because we use so little of it.

• 1:37:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it, the fast reactor's more efficient with the use of the fuel.

• 1:37:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, because we use 100% of the uranium.

• 1:37:38Anthony Pompliano?

  And that would put less pressure on the uranium mining business.

• 1:37:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Because now we don't have to dig up as much of it, and at least we can extend the use of what, what we can dig up.

• 1:37:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, we have, we have about a quarter million years of uranium if we use fast reactors, thousand if we use thermal.

• 1:37:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Can we create these nuclear power generation or power plants, just like we have them on submarines and aircrafts? One of the questions I saw online was can we use it to, let's say, power this building or an apartment complex or a car, like kind of smaller scale type activities? Or are we just not there on the science side?

• 1:38:17Speaker 02

  Well, so the US Department of Energy is testing what they call microreactors.

• 1:38:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, what's that?

• 1:38:21Speaker 02

  So it's a reactor on an extremely small scale. So we're, so to give you an idea, the, the actual size of a submarine reactor, the actual physical reactor itself is only the size of a 55 gallon trash can.

• 1:38:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 1:38:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 1:38:35Speaker 02

  Now, that's not including the turbine and all that stuff, but that's just the power, the actual where the heat is generated is only about the size of 55 gallon trash can.

• 1:38:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 1:38:42Speaker 02

  There are microreactors that are being designed that are literally the size of a Charmin extra jumbo roll of toilet paper.

• 1:38:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 1:38:50Speaker 02

  So now it's not...

• 1:38:52Anthony Pompliano?

  And what do they want to do with those?

• 1:38:53Speaker 02

  Uh, put them on space probes.

• 1:38:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:38:56Speaker 02

  Space force needs some power.

• 1:38:59Anthony Pompliano?

  In terms, uh, and, and we're gonna get to space, but, uh, so this is probably the idea that if you send a probe out, you, if it needs fuel, that fuel will eventually run out, you have to put a human there to somehow regulate the fuel usage in some cases, and either the human will die or you'll run out of fuel and you can't get it back. So if you have nuclear, you can get much more life and power out of the nuclear...

• 1:39:23Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, the nuclear, you use, you know, a lot of these probes that we've sent out, right, they don't, they're, they're operating on very, very low power levels.

• 1:39:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:39:32Speaker 02

  You know, they're going way deep, you know, very deep, and you can send these things out, and if you're talking a small reactor like that, it could last for, you know, two, three, 400 years that way. Um, the other thing, going back to the waste, um, is that there's something called nuclear batteries.

• 1:39:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:39:46Speaker 02

  So as those, those, uh, those fission products decay, they release radiation, you can actually cause that radiation to interact, much in the similar way that a, a, um, uh, a solar panel works.

• 1:39:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:40:00Speaker 02

  You can have it generate electricity. So if you took radioactive waste that lasts for 300 years, you could probably have a battery that, now they're gonna overall, you know, they're gonna degrade over time, much like solar panels will, but, um, you know, you could have a, say, a battery that lasts two, 300, you know, two, 250 years that you, you know, design and build.

• 1:40:21Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the difference? I saw a bunch of people talking about fusion versus fission? Nuclear fusion, F U S I O N, I think it was. What is that?

• 1:40:30Speaker 02

  So, um, fission, we're talking about the splitting of atoms. Fusion is the combining of atoms. So you're, this is going to that, that tritium thing?

• 1:40:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Man, I really gotta go back to the textbooks. Okay. So the nuclear fusion, if you're not splitting the atom, or what exactly are you doing combining them?

• 1:40:46Speaker 02

  You're, you're taking, um, so typically the, the way that, like in the sun, it's typically a helium three and a deuterium atom, I think, that, that fuses.

• 1:40:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:40:57Speaker 02

  Um, to create the energy. That's how most of the sun is actually making its power through fusion. But here on planet earth, we would use deuterium and tritium. That's just hydrogen two and hydrogen three. It's just fancy, fancy forms of hydrogen. And so you would basically, if you used like, and I'm not smart on fusion, so there's-

• 1:41:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Don't worry, my, the Twitter trolls are.

• 1:41:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're way smarter than me.

• 1:41:18Anthony Pompliano?

  They've got thorium and they've got a fusion down.

• 1:41:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, um, so you can, you know, using whatever process and, you know, it's kind of the, you know, it's kind of the unicorn of the nuclear world, um, is fusion, which I mean-

• 1:41:32Anthony Pompliano?

  What would be the benefit of using fusion rather than fission?

• 1:41:35Speaker 02

  Um, well, when you shut a fusion reaction down, you don't have that decay heat, that, that heat that's-

• 1:41:40Anthony Pompliano?

  So then you wouldn't have to put the spent fuel rod into the water?

• 1:41:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, there would be no rod.

• 1:41:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. Oh, got it, got it, got it.

• 1:41:45Speaker 02

  But the only problem with that is that fusion requires fission because you have to generate a large quantities of tritium for it.

• 1:41:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:41:52Speaker 02

  Um, which-

• 1:41:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Going back to Fukushima, they were worried about the air and the venting, etc.

• 1:41:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, and you generate that in nuclear reactors.

• 1:41:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Has anybody done nuclear fusion at any level of scale, even in a test type environment?

• 1:42:06Speaker 02

  Well, the first test, we're out in the Marshall Islands called, you know, a place called Bikini Atoll, where we, you know, called the H-bomb. So, yes, we, we have done fusion. It's, it's, first tests were done with nuclear weapons. We have gotten nuclear fusion to work. Um, it just hasn't been, we haven't done it on a scale that's able to generate enough power to keep itself uh, sustaining without, you know, basically producing more power than it needs.

• 1:42:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. So the initial attempts at nuclear fusion were all weapons related?

• 1:42:38Speaker 02

  Same thing with, same thing with nuclear, uh, power too.

• 1:42:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep. So, so basically when we did that, the H-bomb and, and all of that, obviously again scary for some people, right? But the- The challenge there, it sounds like is we create too much power.

• 1:42:54Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, you.

• 1:42:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Or is unregul- unregulated amount of.

• 1:42:58Speaker 02

  Well, it's problem is not necessarily it's unregulatable. The problem is that it's making the reaction sustain. Right? So, right, it's with the the fission, you've got that you you you split the atom, it creates neutrons. Well, in this case, you have to you fuse the atom, it creates energy, which is going to drive outward. But you got to keep all that stuff together. So that you can keep your atoms close enough and I'm way not an expert in this and I'm sure there's some troll right now who's going out there going, he's got it all wrong and he's probably right. Um, and this is my understanding.

• 1:43:30Anthony Pompliano?

  People will tweet at us and.

• 1:43:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, yeah, they're gonna tweet fusion.

• 1:43:34Anthony Pompliano?

  I actually, I actually like when they tweet back because then I actually do learn. Now, they don't always say it in the nicest way, but I learned, so I appreciate it. Uh, all right. So last thing I want to talk about is I usually ask people about aliens on the podcast. Uh, I don't want to talk about aliens because, uh, as I was thinking through this, one of the things that I haven't spent a lot of time talking on that podcast, uh, but fascinates me is this idea of, uh, manufacturing in space. Right? So if you think about, can we send a bunch of stuff up to space and is it easier, faster, cheaper, whatever, to do manufacturing in space?

• 1:44:06Anthony Pompliano?

  That got me thinking as I was preparing for this. Why if, you know, has anyone looked at it? And if not, why not? Doing some of the nuclear power generation in space, whether it's testing, whether it's some sort of steady state, etc. Have people thought about that? Have has is the environment, is the scientific? You know, components different? What's going on with kind of the the intersection of space and nuclear power?

• 1:44:35Speaker 02

  Um, other than, you know, the fact that we we're testing it to go deploy it, um, I don't know.

• 1:44:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Testing it, meaning like the space probes.

• 1:44:44Speaker 02

  Power plants for the space probes and and deep, you know, and they're colony sized. Like if you're gonna put a colony on the moon or on Mars. You need energy and their nuclear is going to be the method for that.

• 1:44:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, really?

• 1:44:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. So that's that's part of the testing for all that stuff is is is to, um, and this is, you know, we're. rudimentary testing level for this stuff.

• 1:45:01Anthony Pompliano?

  But but there it would be testing of nuclear power to power colonization on Mars or the moon.

• 1:45:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, cuz then you know it's, once again, it's that small, compact, abundant energy, right? You know, if I can make it. Yeah, if I can make a reactor that like, you know, that you know, fits in a toilet paper roll that can power me for a while, right? Compare that to a solar panel where I gotta get how many of those things? You know, it's a weight cost, weight savings thing. Um, so there's a lot of that.

• 1:45:29Anthony Pompliano?

  It's clean. The aliens will appreciate it being clean energy.

• 1:45:32Speaker 02

  So if you want to talk nuclear and aliens, there is belief that the Tunguski explosion in the early nineteen hundreds in Russia was caused by an alien nuclear weapon. So there's your nuclear weapons and aliens.

• 1:45:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Wait, what is this?

• 1:45:43Speaker 02

  The Tunguski explosion in Russia.

• 1:45:45Anthony Pompliano?

  What is that?

• 1:45:46Speaker 02

  There was a big giant explosion, I think in like the night, early nineteen hundreds.

• 1:45:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:45:50Speaker 02

  Um, and it was.

• 1:45:51Anthony Pompliano?

  I've never heard of that.

• 1:45:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, it looks like a giant, it went, it was right in the middle of Siberia. And so there's beliefs that, you know, what are the, you know, the ancient aliens theories or whatever is that it was a, it was actually an, an alien that, that, that decided to, to test a nuclear weapon in, in Russia's backyard.

• 1:46:08Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I actually had a, a researcher, his name is Bruce Fenton, come on, he's a ancient alien researcher. And, uh, I, I could see the threads of like sixty, seventy percent of it. And then there were some that just, and I told him, I said, ah, you lost me on that one.

• 1:46:26Speaker 02

  The, the natural belief is it was an asteroid.

• 1:46:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. In the early nineteen hundreds.

• 1:46:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, wow. Uh, yeah, it just, to me, I, I guess there's pros and cons, right? If I had to conceptually think about, uh, it makes a lot of sense, hey, let's go test nuclear power for the colon, uh, potential colonies on, on these other planets, uh, or on the moon. But if it's lighter, could it be cheaper? You know, is there different, um, whether it's minerals or components or whatever in space that, that you could actually do nuclear, uh, in space? I guess the hard part would be how do you get it back, right? In, in terms of if you're doing power generation, or if you really have a way to.

• 1:47:02Speaker 02

  Want it back?

• 1:47:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, i- is there a way to actually bring it back?

• 1:47:04Speaker 02

  I mean, it could just be that you run a, uh, you know, cuz I mean, the space shuttles, you know, rest in peace. Um, you know, they, they actually were powered by hydrogen and oxygen.

• 1:47:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting.

• 1:47:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, so they're fuel, they're fuel cells, you know, they use hydrogen, oxygen, um, to, as their, their fuel. And so if you think about it, right, we could use hydrogen, oxygen generation at a, at a nuclear power plant as our method to, you know, shuttle things back and forth between, say, a nuclear powered space station. And then that way, you know, instead of having, you know, we're, we're using nuclear power, we're using it to create chemical energy.

• 1:47:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:47:38Speaker 02

  It goes into the carbon capture and...

• 1:47:41Anthony Pompliano?

  So, if we're talking about going up, let's talk about going down, why don't we just create nuclear power plants in the earth? Or like, under the sea? In terms of, so think about, uh, we're willing to, obviously, submerge them with submarines, etc., right? So we've figured out in some form or fashion how to do it on a smaller scale. Would there be either, um, mitigation of the waste argument, or some other advantage to building a nuclear power plant down inside the crust of the earth? Um, or in, inside of a mountain or something, uh, or under the sea?

• 1:48:17Speaker 02

  Um, I mean, there's, there's really, you know, you could put them basically anywhere. You just need some kind of, uh, whatever your cooling source is, uh...

• 1:48:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Some way to get the power.

• 1:48:24Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah, one. The big thing is, is that, uh, when you're talking any kind of a steam engine like that, you waste two thirds of your heat. Um, so you gotta do some of that heat. So that's the big thing, right? And, you know, we use, you know, whether it's the ocean, lakes, um, rivers, uh, or, you know, in the weird case, and I, I'll bring it up again, is, you know, Palo Verde out in Arizona literally uses Phoenix's, um, wastewater. They treat, the, the treated sewage goes out to Palo Verde, and that's what they use to cool their, their plants out there.

• 1:48:56Anthony Pompliano?

  It's crazy.

• 1:48:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:48:58Anthony Pompliano?

  What, um, last question for you. What are you most excited about over the next, let's call, 20 years in nuclear power?

• 1:49:06Speaker 02

  So I'm gonna give you that in in in bytes.

• 1:49:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:49:10Speaker 02

  So I'm excited for 2021 when Vogtle Unit 3 comes online. It's the first nuclear reactor that's gonna new construction nuclear reactor to be built. That's super exciting. 2022, new scale breaks ground in Idaho um to build their 12 unit facility called U.Amps.

• 1:49:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Same designs as older ones or these?

• 1:49:29Speaker 02

  This is, these are small modular reactors. They're gonna be factory built. So that's that's new and exciting. I think uh they're looking, I think Canada's looking to have a Gen 4 uh molten salt reactor design built by 2027. Um, so there's a lot of really, really cool stuff coming down uh the line with all this. So I'm super excited and and that's not even

• 1:49:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Any Bitcoin mining?

• 1:49:57Speaker 02

  Um, you know.

• 1:49:57Anthony Pompliano?

  What's going on with the Bitcoin stuff?

• 1:49:58Speaker 02

  Uh, you know, it's funny, I.

• 1:50:00Anthony Pompliano?

  I was gonna wait till the very end to ask.

• 1:50:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, cuz I know nothing about Bitcoin mining.

• 1:50:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 1:50:04Speaker 02

  I know nothing. I, you know, I, I, I literally, I, I got into Bitcoin because of Eric Finn. I met, I met him at an event. And he said he's creating this app. So soon as he had it, I got it and I started buying Bitcoin. Um, and I've had, I've heard about, there's literally a nuclear power plant that they, that a couple of workers got in trouble for Bitcoin mining.

• 1:50:21Anthony Pompliano?

  In Russia, I think, right?

• 1:50:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:50:23Speaker 02

  Russia, Ukraine, I remember. But I literally, I don't even know what Bitcoin mining is.

• 1:50:27Anthony Pompliano?

  So uh, I'll give you the two seconds. Um, think of uh, you need computational power to uh essentially solve a problem.

• 1:50:37Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:50:37Anthony Pompliano?

  When you solve that problem, you've mined a block. When you get that, there's a mining reward, right? Very overgeneralization of how it works.

• 1:50:43Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:50:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, in order to do this computational heavy work, you have essentially hardware that has software on it. And you need power to run it. The largest input cost to mining is the power cost. So think of it kind of like a traditional data center, but rather than me putting CPUs into a data center, I plug power in, I have space, I buy CPUs, and then I rent my CPU computing power out to a customer.

• 1:51:12Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:51:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get power, I'm gonna plug it into. A space, I'm gonna put either GPUs or ASICs, so different types of computers. And I'm not rent that computing power out to a customer. I'm basically gonna use it to uh run the software for these networks. Those networks will then pay me a very predictable, transparent way. So data center for cryptocurrencies, basically the easy description. Because of that, if you need low cost power, what do people do? They go look for renewable. And so what you see around the world is you see a lot of hydro. You see a little bit of solar, not so much. Uh, you see a little bit of wind, not so much. Uh, but you see excess hydro.

• 1:51:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, now you're starting to see people go down to like Texas, uh, flare gas. Um, the business I told you that my partner runs up here, TI, they take that uh car tire uh and that output of power, they actually use to mine uh Bitcoin and Ethereum. So they're using a uh self-contained power generation, right? That's vertically integrated to a cryptocurrency mind, etc. Naturally, as you think through that, well, what has persistent power is cheap, is clean, etc. Nuclear. Uh, my whole fascination with this was I had not heard of until the guys in Russia. Uh, I think it was uh anyone using nuclear power to mine Bitcoin. And so I was like, well, let me go learn about nuclear first before I even start with the with a Bitcoin mining.

• 1:52:38Anthony Pompliano?

  But I I guess it's not something that's been talked about in the in the power community, really.

• 1:52:42Speaker 02

  Well, and then what's fascinating is is that this is why you'd put them up north.

• 1:52:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Because it's self cooling.

• 1:52:47Speaker 02

  Because, yeah, well, and your nuclear is more efficient, the colder the water.

• 1:52:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, interesting. Yeah. And the machines are actually, they they stay cool. One of the the other large input costs is basically how do you cool the machines?

• 1:52:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:52:58Anthony Pompliano?

  So you stick them in Texas, it's much more difficult than if you do it in Iceland.

• 1:53:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, Iceland or, you know, say up in that Yukon or whatever, but or up in Alaska, right? You could use your nuclear power plant for your source of energy and then you've got natural cooling from, huh?

• 1:53:13Anthony Pompliano?

  So the nuclear or just power in general, right? So um if a company was to create self generate power, whether it's through car tires or anything else, they can usually sell it into the grid depending on, you know, with the location, etc. Let's call it three to five cents, right? Is kind of the the general uh take there. Um, then it's getting sold to consumers at eight, nine, 10, 12 cents, whatever it is. You could take that same power in the same environment and generate 30 or 40 cents in terms of mining cryptocurrency. So it's a pretty material, you know, step up in the revenue you can generate from that power creation. I don't know the economics of nuclear power, but my guess is that if you were able to divert some, you know, percentage of

• 1:53:57Anthony Pompliano?

  the power generation or excess power generation, right, that isn't able to be stored and you were able to mine Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency with it, you could actually make it incredibly profitable because that power is persistent, is clean, is cheap, etc.

• 1:54:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. So a 900 megawatt plant typically makes about a million dollars a day.

• 1:54:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, you're, that's.

• 1:54:20Speaker 02

  And, and that's profit.

• 1:54:22Anthony Pompliano?

  That's pennies compared to what they would make mining.

• 1:54:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's crazy. Wow. You know, it's, it's.

• 1:54:28Anthony Pompliano?

  If, if we talk to whoever owns that 900 megawatt facility, they might shut down and, or stop selling it into the, into the grid.

• 1:54:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. Wow. That's, you know, it's, it's funny, uh, cause I found this weird partnership. You know, you guys like you are reaching out to me and a lot of the crypto guys are reaching out to me, uh, talking about, and now that you've given me the, you know, the 411 on, on, on Bitcoin or crypto mining, it makes a lot of sense. And I knew there's a large power thing. The other organizer, the other group of people that are, um, uh, movers and shakers that are reaching out to me is the cannabis industry.

• 1:55:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh.

• 1:55:05Speaker 02

  Right now, now what's funny is that if you work a nuclear, if you pop on a drug test to include marijuana, you can't work a nuclear for five more years. So it's this really weird thing I'm in right now where it's like, you know, these, these, you know, these guys from the cannabis industry are reaching out to me. And I'm like, this is like this weird conglomeration. Well, and, and my cousin is actually kind of a mover and shaker, and I should probably get him in touch with you because you probably think, find him fascinating, talking about all his stuff with cannabis. But, um, you know, they're in that same type of thing where they look and they go renewables just aren't working because they want lights on 24/7, 365 to, in their grow beds. And they're working on, if you, when you talk, go back to Bill Gates, and he's, you know, whether you believe global warming or not, you know, the, the, the two biggest things you need to work on is soil.

• 1:55:51Speaker 02

  And energy, right? Well, nuclear solves the energy aspect and then the cannabis industry literally is taking it upon themselves to work on things like hydroponics and aquaponics to basically get, you know, crops into, say, a vertical farm that you can run lights on 24/7, 365. You gotta have the temperatures just right and you can do that with large amounts of energy in nuclear and it's, it's just fascinating.

• 1:56:15Anthony Pompliano?

  It, to me is, um, you get what tend to be technologists now are going into these industries and what they start to do is they start to look at vertical integration, right? And so they're realizing that just like in software where I used to have one layer of a technology stack, if I can vertically integrate, there's a lot of cost savings, efficiencies, etc. What I've seen on multiple occasions across industries is in anything that requires some level of power generation, you're starting to see this interest in vertical integration. Now, the difference is software is one thing, the ability to understand how to grow weed, you know, build, build a facility and also do power generation, those are pretty different

• 1:56:56Anthony Pompliano?

  skillsets. And so you've got to build teams or partnerships, whatever. The nice thing in crypto is if you're into computers and mining, etc., you actually probably have a pretty good understanding of power generation and really from an economic standpoint. How do I find the cheapest power? Where is it? How do I hook it up to these computers? And so I've heard a lot of people doing all kinds of crazy stuff. Never heard of nuclear until the one group got in trouble, obviously.

• 1:57:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:57:27Anthony Pompliano?

  But, but it just seems like it would be a natural extension of, of what they're already doing, but, but I just hadn't heard anything.

• 1:57:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, it's, it's, it's fascinating because I'm sure you're a follower of Scott Adams like I am and he talked about the floating city and I, I saw that and it literally, the first thing that popped in my mind was a company called ThorCon that their, their entire design is, is a floating power module. So you could literally, you know, build, build this, this power plant that's floats, right? With your floating city and I mean, you know, they're, they're, you know, not a very big size wise, but they put out 500 megawatts of power, very large amount of power on a relatively small item. You've got the ocean, which you've got unlimited cooling. The concerns of, of, you know, their design actually is safe from meltdown, can use any kind of fuel you want it to. And then, um,

• 1:58:19Speaker 02

  You know, the fact is, is that if you were concerned about meltdown, you've got an ocean right there. You could literally decouple it from your, your city and tow it away. Right? And you've got all the water you need.

• 1:58:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Power generation, if you can do it in a, either modulated way or in a mobile way is very, very powerful.

• 1:58:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 1:58:39Anthony Pompliano?

  So we'll, we'll, we'll talk more. Maybe we'll find a nuclear power plant and set up some, some Bitcoin mines.

• 1:58:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, it sounds good to me.

• 1:58:47Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, man. Listen, I really appreciate you coming to do this. Where can, where can people find you online? Or more about what you're working on?

• 1:58:53Speaker 02

  Um, so I typically am on Twitter and my handle is at sub Schneider because I was on submarine. So it's S U B S C H N E I D E R. Or you can also go out to my website, which is www.gen4nuclear.com. And that's gen, G E N I V, like the Roman numeral four and the nuclear, N U C L E A R.

• 1:59:13Anthony Pompliano?

  I, uh, I have not seen Roman numerals used in websites very often, but I love it. That's awesome. All right.

• 1:59:20Speaker 02

  And I normally capitalize it when I, when I write it out. So everything else is lowercase, except the I V.

• 1:59:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming to do this. We will definitely have to do this again. It's super, super fun for me.

• 1:59:30Speaker 02

  I appreciate it. It was fun to you. Thanks.

• 1:59:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Hey everyone, Pop here. If you like this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the apple, Spotify and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.