Solving AI’s Energy Problem with Kathryn Huff

Is nuclear power the key to sustainability? With data centers consuming massive amounts of energy, can we keep up? Neil deGrasse Tyson & Paul Mecurio discuss the physics, safety, and future of nuclear reactors in a world of increasing power demands with nuclear engineer Kathryn Huff.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gentlemen, it looks like we may need nukes to realize the future we all imagine for ourselves.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The flying cars, you still want those?

• 0:08Paul Mecurio?

  I want flying cars, I want moving sidewalks, I want portability of nuclear reactors.

• 0:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Data centers are starting to chew up their share of the energy.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  And they're gonna continue to.

• 0:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  AI and Bitcoin mining.

• 0:18Paul Mecurio?

  And the right color bag to put your nuclear waste in when you put it out on a Sunday.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Important.

• 0:23Paul Mecurio?

  I'm not touching it, I got a guy that does that.

• 0:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've got one of the world's experts on those very subjects, coming right up.

• 0:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk, special edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, you're a personal astrophysicist, and of a special edition, you know what that means. We've got Gary O'Reilly.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Hi Neil.

• 0:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hey, former soccer pro.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Soccer announcer.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 0:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we're borrowing you from your soccer people.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. And in special edition, we think all about the human condition.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And all that matters to make that work. And since you have been an injured soccer player in your life.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know about the human condition.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  I do, and the suffering therein. Although I'm not gonna place it above or beyond anyone else's suffering, but we get a chance on special edition just to gaze into some interesting topics.

• 1:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes, and I love it. And I've got with us Paul Mecurio.

• 1:32Paul Mecurio?

  Nice to see you guys.

• 1:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's back.

• 1:34Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah.

• 1:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 1:34Paul Mecurio?

  Always fun.

• 1:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, you were a former stockbroker or attorney?

• 1:39Paul Mecurio?

  Mergers and acquisitions, which is hilarious, and...

• 1:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you became a comedian after you were mergers and acquisitions?

• 1:46Paul Mecurio?

  Well, I'm like, how can I give my mother an instant heart attack? I know.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:50Paul Mecurio?

  When I did say it, she said to me, I'm gonna leave, I said, I'm gonna leave Wall Street to be a comedian. She went, she looked me right in the eye and she said, that better be your first joke.

• 1:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, good one.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Clever mom.

• 2:00Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah.

• 2:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like that.

• 2:01Paul Mecurio?

  And then, yes, and then made a right turn and got into comedy.

• 2:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Emmy and Peabody award winning. I mean, at Peabody, that's coveted.

• 2:10Paul Mecurio?

  That's highfalutin'.

• 2:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A highfalutin'.

• 2:12Paul Mecurio?

  It's that little Sherman Peabody.

• 2:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't know you would add highfalutin' here.

• 2:15Paul Mecurio?

  From the cartoon character.

• 2:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you also work The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

• 2:19Paul Mecurio?

  Work on The Late Show with Stephen, we go back to The Daily Show together.

• 2:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stephen, his first name.

• 2:23Paul Mecurio?

  Stephen Colbert. Oh, yes, sorry.

• 2:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stephen Colbert and the rest of it.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Unlike me. He's that guy on the TV. I know who you are, but I don't know your name. Yeah.

• 2:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Paul, you're so highfalutin'. Like, do you still even do stand-up like regular comedians?

• 2:37Paul Mecurio?

  I'm so highfalutin'. You're not supposed to look me in the eye when you're talking. That's highfalutin'.

• 2:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have to avert. I heard rumor you have a Broadway show, a state show.

• 2:45Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, called Permission to Speak, and it involves, we're all disconnected and divisive, but if we get together and share stories, realize we have more in common than we think. So it's me involving, yeah, it's born out of my stand-up and liking to talk to audience members, and it's grown into the show. And the great Frank Oz is directing it, which still blows my mind.

• 3:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'd love me some Frank Oz.

• 3:04Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, I know.

• 3:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's been a guest on our show.

• 3:05Paul Mecurio?

  I know.

• 3:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 3:06Paul Mecurio?

  He's constantly backwards talking, though, with that Yoda thing. It's extremely annoying. No, it's been really cool. We're taking it around the country, and folks can go to my website to check it out, where we're gonna be, paulmccurry.com. But it's been really cool and a sort of a breakout from my stand-up.

• 3:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, cool.

• 3:19Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Gary, you and your producer put together this topic.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  We did.

• 3:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I love me, it's nukes.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love me some nukes.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  Not the missile kind.

• 3:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nukes predate missiles.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  Okay, good.

• 3:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you know.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  As long as you're not.

• 3:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When I say nuke, I mean the nucleus of the atom.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the energy contained therein.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  It's the O.G.

• 3:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What you do with it after, that's your problem.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  That is, okay, so.

• 3:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Set up this show. What do you have?

• 3:46Speaker 01

  AI data centers. Well, we know what they are. What we don't quite know yet is how we are going to supply their rapidly increasing energy demands with reliable and clean energy. So where do we look? Fossil fuels are being phased out. Well, maybe. Sustainables do not suit everyone, and who needs a giant nuclear power plant in their backyard? So what are our options? Climate change means our energy must be clean, reliable, economically viable, and socially acceptable. The way I see it, this requires some clarity, some science, and an expert with both. So Neil, would you like to introduce our guest?

• 4:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would be delighted.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Good.

• 4:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love my physics peeps when they're out there.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  And we have one.

• 4:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have one. Join me in welcoming Catherine Huff. Catherine, welcome to StarTalk.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  It's great to meet you. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 4:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I gotta do it in the voice. Welcome to StarTalk.

• 4:39Speaker 03

  Excellent.

• 4:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's for the first time you gotta get one of those. You are Associate Professor in the Department, no, this is a mouth, this is like a business card's worth of, in the Department of Nuclear Plasma and Radiological Engineering.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 4:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which means she glows at night. Mm hmm. At University of Illinois, at Champagne Urbana.

• 5:01Paul Mecurio?

  Hang on, flip the card, now it goes to the back of the card.

• 5:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, it keeps going, yes. So your PhD is in nuclear engineering, but not only that, you've actually had a tour of duty serving the federal government. You were Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy in the Department of Energy, 2022 to 2024. So you did a little tour of duty there. So you, you've seen it all. So Catherine, could you just remind everybody the difference between fusion and fission?

• 5:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, so in fission, which is conventional nuclear power here in the United States and around the world, you separate, you break apart, a heavy atom like uranium-235 or plutonium-239, whereas fusion gains energy from the binding reaction between two light particles fusing, and these would be isotopes of helium or hydrogen typically. And so you're talking about completely different ends of the periodic table, the forces that hold a nucleus together, the binding energy of that nucleus. You can achieve a net increase, a net sort of output in energy by coming down the isotopic

• 6:11Speaker 03

  curve by splitting a big atom, or by coming up it, by fusing two light atoms. And that's because of the shape of the binding energy curve for the nucleus.

• 6:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, and we know in astrophysics, the peak of that curve, or depending if you plot the other way, the base of that curve is iron. And stars give up the ghost when they hit iron, because you can't fizz it or fuse it and get energy out of it. It sucks energy, and stars in the business of making energy. It hits iron, that's all she wrote. It collapses and then explodes in a rebound as a supernova. So we know all about this in astrophysics. There's quite the relationship between what nuclear physicists do and what we do thinking about stars in the universe. So let's, let's try, let me just open this up, because after Chernobyl, and after Three

• 7:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mile Island, and after Fukushima, you know, nukes just left a bad taste in people's mouths. They all, it was always that way, and these then just became evidence for it. And so there's a lot of re- Branding that's going to have to happen going forward if nuclear energy is going to rejoin the conversation. So what are your challenges? Squaring that circle from the sources of energy people typically talk about, especially in the green movement and nuclear energy as a kind of wannabe as part of that conversation?

• 7:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of it's around numerics, right? Talking to people about the metrics that matter. If you're worried about safety, the metric that matters is deaths per terawatt hour generated.

• 7:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have that? That's a statistic you guys have?

• 7:59Paul Mecurio?

  Can I just say, I would be, can I just say, I'd be very concerned about that statistic? The death, the death part? Yes.

• 8:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's just weird to count deaths by how much electricity has been produced. Nuclear energy, you'll only die once in a while. No, but, but does that exist for coal?

• 8:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's only interesting as a metric if you're using it to compare energy sources. And so a number of different data sets have been formed, a number of deaths per terawatt hour from solar, wind, coal, et cetera. And nuclear is way, way, way down at the bottom near, you know, slightly below solar and wind, actually, even if you include Fukushima and Chernobyl, interestingly, you know, deaths at Three Mile Island. And you have, you know, geothermal, I think, is one of the only ones that is lower than nuclear in terms of deaths per terawatt hour. And it's construction projects, there's serious issues maintaining wind turbines, like putting things on roofs and installing. That sort of thing doesn't happen on a nuclear construction site because of the incredible amount of regulation.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  And so you really are left with like accidents. And so there's plenty of lifecycle analyses of deaths, but also, you know, carbon for per terawatt hour. And the reality is nuclear, in terms of generation, is higher, and so the denominator is huge.

• 9:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What, higher as a, as a return, it's, it's hot?

• 9:22Speaker 03

  There's more power generated.

• 9:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Per, per whatever, per anything?

• 9:26Speaker 03

  So the terawatt hours are higher?

• 9:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 9:29Speaker 03

  By a long shot.

• 9:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. Oh, so that's how it wins? I get it. She pulled some fast denominator numerator math there. Did you stay with that?

• 9:40Paul Mecurio?

  Pulled the right turn on you.

• 9:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, because if you're, if you have gerbils on a treadmill, producing your energy, and it kills a thousand gerbils, they didn't make much energy to begin with, right? So the death rate relative to the energy return, that ratio is, is bad for you. Again, correct me if I'm wrong, Catherine, nukes are so potent in the capacity to produce energy, that whoever died, doing whatever, there's so much energy produced at the other end, it compensates for that.

• 10:13Paul Mecurio?

  It's, it's, it's, it's a relative number.

• 10:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a relative correct.

• 10:16Paul Mecurio?

  But doesn't it beg for more regulation and sort of renewables? Like, you're right about solar, like, you know, some guy that was working at Jiffy Lube is now selling you solar panels and putting it up half drunk, like, isn't it?

• 10:27Speaker 01

  That sounds like a bad experience on your behalf.

• 10:30Paul Mecurio?

  We call him my uncle.

• 10:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Way too precise an example.

• 10:34Paul Mecurio?

  My Uncle Archie, just sending anything and any, but it, doesn't it sort of beg for that on some level, sort of, if there's that level of sort of death rate relative to renewables?

• 10:45Speaker 03

  So interestingly, renewables, like wind and solar and geothermal and nuclear, they're all in the same category, which is just magnitudes and magnitudes lower than fossils. And, you know, nuclear ends up winning because historically, nuclear has been the largest source of carbon-free, emissions-free power, right? And it's those emissions from the fossils and, you know, that, that really takes them to a completely different order of magnitude in terms of deaths per terawatt hour. And so I would say that renewables are safe, nuclear is safe, geothermal is safe, it's really the fossils you need to be worried about when you're talking about safety, because they impact human health in a really demonstrable, clear way.

• 11:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How many people ever have died mining coal?

• 11:26Speaker 03

  It's a great question, right? The WHO has estimated all kinds of things for full, total cost and deaths of the fossil industry and separates it into particulate-related premature deaths and whatnot. I don't know the exact number for people dying mining coal, but it's not zero.

• 11:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 11:43Speaker 03

  It's pretty high.

• 11:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, when a business says not zero, it doesn't mean it's one or two.

• 11:50Speaker 03

  It's pretty high, right? Like, you would lose people in collapses.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Okay, we've got clean, high-energy production in totality with fusion and fission, but we still have some radioactive material. That is going to make people unhappy. More than zero.

• 12:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not in my backyard. Don't put it there.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  You and the NIMBYs, there they are. I mean, that's why they're all spelt in capitals, because they want you to know that's what it's about. So it doesn't sound so clean.

• 12:17Paul Mecurio?

  But can't you point to the fact that nuclear power's been around for years, and people have accepted the fact that there's radioactive waste sort of hanging out anyway? Like, it's not a completely new concept?

• 12:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're not accepting that it's there. They're accepting the disposal plans that Catherine just told us about.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  And Paul's right, that, you know, it hasn't been a huge impact on humans' day-to-day lives, because it's an incredibly small volume of spent fuel from fission reactors. We have 60 years of spent nuclear fuel. You know, it has been producing close to 20% of our electric power in the United States. And it's produced enough material to, if you sort of ignore the packaging and focus on the uranium, fill a football field. Not very tall, you know, a few meters high.

• 13:03Paul Mecurio?

  And what people seem to ignore is if you put it in the right bag on Sunday nights when you put your garbage out, it's radioactive material, they'll pick it up.

• 13:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right.

• 13:12Paul Mecurio?

  Put it in the blue bag.

• 13:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And put it on Staten Island.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Remind me not to live in your neighborhood, ever.

• 13:17Paul Mecurio?

  Exactly. There's the glowing Paul house.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the thing is, this stuff gets buried so far deep into...

• 13:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, but you're mixing...

• 13:26Speaker 01

  In the middle of nowhere.

• 13:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're mixing two things, and I think they're separable variables. You're saying nukes are dirty because fission is dirty.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Okay, but fusion isn't so dirty. I understand that much.

• 13:37Speaker 03

  That's true. It just doesn't happen yet.

• 13:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Catherine, are you, in your world of thinking about this, combining them together as a solution going forward? Or are you totally leaning fusion, excited by the recent sort of ignition tests that went on at the Livermore Labs?

• 13:53Speaker 03

  I'm a fission girl. I'm a sort of classic nuclear energy fission person. I have great optimism for fusion, but it will take quite a long time. And interestingly, you probably know this, that NIF test is an inertial confinement fusion experiment. A lot of the commercial proposals that are attempting to commercialize fusion in the near term are more like the Eater device in France that is a magnetic confinement fusion. It's a slightly different approach, and seeing real breakthroughs in the Eater device may be quite a few years from now. So, you know, we await some breakthroughs in things like the first wall protection, things like that. But for me, I'm here about kind of conventional nuclear energy and advanced fission energy that's sort of on the horizon right now.

• 14:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we are correct to fold that into the conversation. And I'm still waiting for Mr. Fusion, the home fusion from Back to the Future.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the thing is, we, it seems like we don't quite have a handle on fusion to make it operate the way we really want to.

• 14:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not yet.

• 14:54Paul Mecurio?

  But is this an extent, is it an extension of this plasma fusion, which has a, which has a break even issue, right? More heat goes in to get the heat out. And that's an extension of traditional fusion process, right?

• 15:08Speaker 03

  So there are no operating fusion reactors. There like could be someday.

• 15:14Paul Mecurio?

  Maybe if you guys tried harder, there would be.

• 15:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm not a fusion scientist. I like work in a nuclear plasma.

• 15:20Paul Mecurio?

  Here we go. Here we go. Okay. Went that way. By the way, when you were at the Department of Energy, when you left your office at night, would you turn the thermostat down? I'm just curious.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 15:29Paul Mecurio?

  Okay, good.

• 15:30Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Every light switch has a little don't forget to turn me off like sticker.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Okay, so what are going to be the major consumers of our energy going forward? AI data centers for sure. Then we look at maybe quantum computing. We've got bit mining. Throw in the development of electric vehicles. I mean, we may have already calculated, because I've joined the DOE, obviously, we have may have calculated already. But have we calculated enough the terms of how exponentially this consumption is going to go?

• 16:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's totally data centers and things like that, but it's also increased electrification like for EVs, but all kinds of other things as well. And an increased sort of revival of industrial manufacturing that requires not just electricity, but heat. We see carbon-free steel companies wanting to start up in the United States and they don't have enough heat. Where do you get heat? Usually you burn fossil fuels. Very few clean energy sources are available to provide that direct heat. Nuclear is there for it. So yeah, we have a huge amount of demand. Are we even factoring it in? You know, the projections for how much new gigawatt worth, you know, many tens of gigawatts worth of capacity are going to be needed to support data centers in the coming decades to support these kinds of endeavors. They grow and grow every time you look at the news.

• 16:46Speaker 03

  And so we are in a position where the existing clean energy infrastructure has to expand to support those data centers, especially data centers that need 24/7 reliable, always-on power. If you own a multi-billion dollar data center, you don't want it to be running at 2% capacity because the wind stopped blowing. You need 100% power 24/7 regardless of weather.

• 17:09Paul Mecurio?

  And the issue there is in sort of these data centers, which are going to are and will continue to be everywhere. And the scaling of traditional power plants, nuclear power plants, you have to get to SMRs, right? Which are not fully developed yet. Paul, could you tell the rest of us what SMR means? Uh, small modular reactors. Did he get it right, Catherine? Yeah.

• 17:28Speaker 03

  He did.

• 17:29Paul Mecurio?

  Catherine, do you know how exhausting it is that I have to carry this guy all the time? But in that sense, the proximity is an issue, right? Because if your data centers are too far away from the source, the nuclear source of energy, you're going to have loss of data, loss of energy. And so it becomes sort of being able to build a lot of these SMRs, which are smaller and can be closer to the data centers.

• 17:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're absolutely right. Transmission, especially building new high-voltage power lines to move gigawatts of power from a generator to a consumer is expensive. It, you know, cuts through land that usually needs permits. Sometimes it can be very slow. So co-locating data centers with smaller modular reactor builds has an advantage. The more modularity in these builds is certainly also supposed to contribute to the speed and reliability with which we can deploy them. The idea being that it takes a really long time to build a gigawatt scale nuclear power plant, but if you build a 30% You know, sized 300 megawatt reactor. Then maybe you can build a few more of them, get some lessons learned.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  They maybe move a little faster. You might be paying slightly more per kilowatt hour, but you should be able to deploy them quicker and learn faster thereby coming down the cost curve of those construction learnings.

• 18:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a whole future there that has not yet been realized.

• 19:04Speaker 04

  I'm Nicholas Costella and I'm a proud supporter of StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  We've probably had the last major nuclear power plant built 30 something years ago.

• 19:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the United States?

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Yes, in the United States or around developed nations. Now you're saying, what are the new technologies? Small modular reactors?

• 19:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  SMR.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  SMRs to some. Advanced reactors. So you've, you've got these microreactors. You've had all these different sort of acronyms going on. Where are we right now with the technologies? And what are our options for fission and for fusion going forward? As you know, what? You've got to have them close. The NIMBYs are going to dance up and down and scream, I'm merry hell. We know that. So how are we going to sort this out? And with what technology?

• 19:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think we have technologies at all sizes in the advanced reactor space. The most recent two builds in the United States were the Vogel unit three and four. Those are AP 1000s from Westinghouse. They're big, like conventional nuclear reactors, but they incorporate some passive safety. And so they're kind of a generation three plus design at the sort of big gigawatt scale. They were built pretty over schedule and over budget. And so there's a lot of trend towards shrinking that kind of design. A light water reactor that's just smaller. You've got designs from Whole Tech and GE Hitachi. Westinghouse has a strong conversion of the AP 1000 called the AP 300. Yeah, you've got NuScale is one of those small modular light water reactor designs.

• 20:42Speaker 03

  But then in addition to that, you can also build small modular advanced reactor designs. And there are a number of companies pursuing commercialization of that with two deployments already happening with the support of the Department of Energy. These would involve more advanced coolants and fuels like sodium, which is a liquid metal.

• 20:59Paul Mecurio?

  Is that the moan salt?

• 21:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:01Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, MSRs, yeah.

• 21:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What does sodium do for you?

• 21:04Speaker 03

  So sodium has a couple of cool features as a coolant. It's highly conductive and so it's extremely performant to move the heat from the fuel to where you need it in the turbine, through an exchange process eventually, but that conduction is really useful, but it's also very helpful for the neutronics control of that criticality that I talked about earlier.

• 21:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it absorbs neutrons?

• 21:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it keeps the neutrons fast by not moderating them. If you combine that with a metal fuel, sodium cooled fast reactors have an opportunity to be quite passively safe using reactor physics and negative feedbacks from the expansion of the fuel and the expansion of the coolant and a sort of neutronic behavior of the coolant to drive power down if power goes high, keeping things balanced.

• 21:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Regulated.

• 21:52Paul Mecurio?

  Isn't there a practicality issue though, because corrosion is a problem with that process, right?

• 21:57Speaker 03

  So critically, sodium in this case is a liquid metal. When it's combined with something else, it becomes a salt. There are salt reactors, we can talk about that. But yeah, sodium itself is also somewhat corrosive. You can't see through it because it's liquid metal and it is pyrophoric. So when it gets wet, it tends to burst into flames.

• 22:15Paul Mecurio?

  Good.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  That's good to know.

• 22:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just if it gets wet. But just, just, just spend a quick second reminding us. I don't want to simplify it too much, but correct me if I've done so. In the end, all you're trying to create is a source of heat to raise the temperature of water that will spin a turbine that has magnetic fields and coils in it to generate electricity. That's the same way we've been making electricity since Faraday.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Half of it's old school.

• 22:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that correct? Half is old school.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that correct?

• 22:52Speaker 03

  Yes, it is almost exactly like a coal plant. You're just boiling the water in a different way.

• 22:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In a different way.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Using steam.

• 22:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Different source of heat.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  I mean, is the goal to get even higher temperatures? I mean, are we aiming for a building a star on Earth here? What are we doing?

• 23:05Speaker 03

  So star on earth would be pretty hard with fission. We await our fusion colleagues for that matter. But the fission reactors that are being deployed with some of these advanced coolants will get much, much hotter safely than conventional reactors. We're talking 800 degrees Celsius, really high temperatures, which is quite a bit more than the 300 degrees C we would usually see from conventional light water reactors.

• 23:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the higher temperature of the water, I mean, it's under pressure, I guess, right?

• 23:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. And if you're going to use that heat directly, then it's very useful for industrial applications like, you know, reducing steel, reducing iron for the steel making process.

• 23:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rather than making electricity out of it through a turbine.

• 23:45Speaker 03

  Right. And rather than burning natural gas or coal to make direct heat. The first application of the Xenergy high temperature gas reactor will be at a Dow chemical plant where they'll use both the direct heat and the electricity that they convert. Some of that heat straight from the reactor won't be converted at all into electricity.

• 24:04Paul Mecurio?

  Well, with temperatures that high, can't you generate electricity that is more robust, for lack of a better term, and that can travel farther distances without loss?

• 24:12Speaker 03

  Not exactly the way we convert heat into electricity, but it is certainly the case.

• 24:19Speaker 03

  It is the case that high temperature. Heat is higher quality because it is easier to convert. You have a little bit less loss.

• 24:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, very good. Very important point.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  Okay, what I hear now, Neil, is this is the is the next iteration of the smartphone, right? So you've got these big clunky cell phones that we used to have back in the 80s.

• 24:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The shoulder mounted one that they used in.

• 24:40Paul Mecurio?

  The one that Magnum P I would have.

• 24:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, or Gecko in.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  Right, right. So now.

• 24:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Shoulder mounted cell phone. I remember.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 24:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  1987, I was saw the movie in real time. And I'm looking, I said, gee, I wish I was rich.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I had a phone like that.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  I could have a phone in a suitcase. So now they're getting smaller and smaller, but we're getting higher temperatures out of them. It sounds a lot like the smartphone scenario. And how much they cost and who's paying for it?

• 25:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, just, I think you confused two things there. What's also happening. Is chips are getting more efficient.

• 25:15Paul Mecurio?

  Right.

• 25:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So your laptop used to burn the top of your thighs. It doesn't do that anymore.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  What were you putting it?

• 25:21Paul Mecurio?

  Exactly. Exactly. And why was it on your thighs?

• 25:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Catherine, if we have quantum computing, which does much more computing in less time, ultimately, that's less consumption of energy, isn't it, or not? Hmm.

• 25:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, one would hope, right? And then you can use that energy for other things that will advance human prosperity, right? Uh, we can also use it to displace the kinds of fossil energy that we still rely on and contributes to the climate crisis.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  So these small modular reactors, as I said.

• 25:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  SMR.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Thank you for reminding me.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  How much do they actually cost? And who is writing that particular check?

• 26:03Speaker 03

  It remains to be seen precisely how much each design will cost. But we're looking at a scenario. I would, I would refer you to the liftoff report that D O E put out, but it estimates that new nuclear power, you know, is going to be in the order between a hundred and twenty dollars per megawatt hour for the first of a kind, all the way down to nth of a kind, maybe in the sixty dollars per megawatt hour range. That's a big range, but it's very similar to the kinds of ranges we're seeing when we look at, you know, renewables plus grid scale storage, which is the only comparable reliable 24/7 clean energy when, that involves renewables, right? Alternatives would be new natural gas with carbon capture.

• 26:45Speaker 03

  Cheaper, certainly, maybe between a hundred at the high end and sixty dollars per megawatt hour at the low end. Geothermal has a very, very big range, but very similar to nuclear, you know, a hundred and thirty at the high end, fifty seven at the low end. Hydro power is always cheap.

• 27:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was recently in Iceland. They're nearly a hundred percent geothermal. I mean, they're sitting on top of multiple volcanic.

• 27:07Paul Mecurio?

  Hmm. But isn't the issue here partly like there's two streams of technology battling each other? In other words, demand for energy, right? Like in the year 2060, there's going to be 12,230 streaming services alone, right? Okay, you're going to have house plants that self-water, self-fertilize and can talk to you, right? And my.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  I hope so.

• 27:27Paul Mecurio?

  Can we, in all seriousness, can you keep up with that? With, you know, these lazy fusion people that clearly aren't pushing the envelope and just, you know, are phoning it in. No, in all seriousness, so can you, can we develop energies fast enough to keep up with these incredible demands that are?

• 27:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But we have, we have become more efficient. Like, I would say the total wattage of all light bulbs in my house is probably 100 watts. That's, I got 50 light bulbs and they're all LEDs.

• 27:57Paul Mecurio?

  Okay.

• 27:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So Catherine, I don't even have, shut off lights before you leave the room, because I don't need it.

• 28:05Paul Mecurio?

  But, but the advances, I mean, there's, there are guilt inducing mirrors that are going to come out soon, where you just stand in front of it and say, really? That's what you want to eat? Like, like, so, well, I seem to hit a nerve with you on that one. So, can?

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Or are you talking about your own life?

• 28:20Paul Mecurio?

  Exactly, exactly. But so can, in all, in all seriousness, can, can the technology that's needed, is it there to keep up with the demands and the new demands that we haven't even foreseen yet?

• 28:31Speaker 03

  It's a great question. DOE has estimated that if we want to hit net zero by 2050.

• 28:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Net zero what?

• 28:38Speaker 03

  Net zero carbon.

• 28:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Carbon, thank you, okay.

• 28:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. We will have to build at least 550 to 770 new gigawatts of firm, clean power. Some of that'll be hydro or, you know, geothermal and things like that, battery storage, but at least about 200 gigawatts of that will need to be nuclear. And we're not the only ones that made that calculation. Across the world, dozens of countries has, have committed to tripling nuclear energy in their countries.

• 29:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But just since, since we have flat earthers among us, don't say across the world, say around the world, okay? Just re, just re, give me that sentence again.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  I had to get that in, didn't I?

• 29:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I had to get that.

• 29:16Speaker 03

  Absolutely, yeah. Around the world, dozens of countries have committed to tripling nuclear power.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  All right, so we, we have a football field a few meters high worth of spent nuclear fuel, right?

• 29:27Speaker 03

  Correct, yes.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  How are these, are, are these new advanced modular, small modular reactors, our good friends, the SMRs? Are any of them going to be able to recycle that spent fuel?

• 29:40Speaker 03

  Some of them could. You know, I mentioned sodium cooled fast reactors earlier, which have metal fuel. And while TerraPower isn't currently planning to recycle in the United States, it is an amenable technology for the kinds of recycling that other nations do. France, for example, recycles a great deal of their spent nuclear fuel, resulting in lower volumes, lower masses, and much shorter lifetimes of long-term radioactivity by putting the longest-lived and most useful isotopes back in the reactor. We could do that, but in the United States, we don't currently have the infrastructure to do that. So it would take a real government effort to move forward on recycling. But, you know, when I was a doy, this was definitely something that we were continuing to do research on.

• 30:23Speaker 03

  And there was a great deal of interest from the commercial side in seeing recycling be back on the table in terms of options. Molten salt reactors also were mentioned earlier. I should note, in the SMR, MSR universe, molten salt reactors are also very amenable to recycling.

• 30:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like the ASMR universe.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  And?

• 30:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yes.

• 30:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How's your nuclear power doing? Yes. Tell me about it.

• 30:52Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 30:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So are we still mining uranium? There's still plenty of uranium left in Earth's crust for this?

• 30:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, we are still mining uranium. Some of the best uranium in the world comes from mines in Canada. But it exists in a lot of places, including the United States, Australia, Kazakhstan.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  How about Greenland?

• 31:10Speaker 03

  Oh, gosh, too soon. So, yeah, I think the reality is unless you do a great deal of recycling, you're going to continue to mine uranium. So, yeah, recycling would reduce our need for new, fresh uranium.

• 31:22Paul Mecurio?

  But isn't that part of the issue is the geopolitical concerns of this, right? The more we come up with this great technology and SMRs that feed these data centers. There is a lot of uranium out there, but they're not in every country. And some of these countries are borderline sort of friendly. Terrorists take over, like, so how do you factor that in? And should some other simultaneous technology be developed that's away from nuclear? So energy so that we're not so dependent on on uranium and the potential.

• 31:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, do you have a hotline to the State Department? You know.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it basically comes down to not going back to relying on one single.

• 31:58Paul Mecurio?

  Exactly.

• 31:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I think that's what it comes down to.

• 32:00Paul Mecurio?

  Right.

• 32:00Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 32:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If if there's a trouble in one sector, you just shift the economics, you'll be right. But if you have single point failure, everything is running on oil.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Into fossil fuel, there's a problem.

• 32:12Speaker 03

  The biggest bottleneck for that uranium fuel cycle is that, you know, the mining of uranium, there's lots of sources of it, but then the process and conversion and then enrichment of that fuel where you increase the number of isotopes of uranium 235 per kilogram of total uranium. That enrichment process and the fuel fabrication process all happen at a at much smaller number of facilities internationally. And so, yeah, you know, quite quite to your point, international collaboration has been necessary to ensure that, you know, if Russia, who dominated historically conversion and enrichment capabilities in the last 20 years or so, if they decided not to sell to the United States, we needed to have more capabilities in the US and among our allies, France, the UK, etc.

• 32:56Speaker 03

  And so that has been underway. In fact, right behind me is the law where we banned Russia and uranium from Russia, you know, imports in the near term so that we could protect some of our ability to invest in new enrichment capability.

• 33:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Catherine, if you have what's called spent uranium.

• 33:14Paul Mecurio?

  Mm hmm.

• 33:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that is basically waste product from fission, uranium fission, what does it mean to recycle it? You have to boost the isotope back or stick it in a in a particle accelerator again? What? Because you have the uranium. How would you accomplish this?

• 33:30Speaker 03

  So there's two different ways, but basically the spent fuel that you start with is a mixture of uranium atoms and split fission products. So the two parts that the uranium atom splits into, this might be iodine and technetium, practically, you know, half of the isotopes in periodic table or in the chart of the neglects, that mixture needs to be separated so that those fission products are removed from the total, the already split atoms.

• 33:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I think the public is generally not familiar with the chart of the nucleotides. We all know the periodic table of elements because that's that mysterious chart of boxes that sat in the front of your chemistry class. And the table of nucleotides, those were always in the more advanced chemistry classes.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  The one I didn't go to.

• 34:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or the physics classes. And so that lists not just the elements, but all the isotopes possible for each of the elements. That's a more complicated diagram, correct?

• 34:23Speaker 03

  It is. It's quite a bit more complicated and it's extremely useful for nuclear engineers because we end up producing a lot of those isotopes inside reactors during the fission process.

• 34:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you can track their whereabouts.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  But can you make little cocktails to find which ones work better with each other? To be able to take that forward?

• 34:41Speaker 03

  That's an interesting idea. You know, some of them fall into chemistry groups that can be useful for industrial applications and things like that. So one of the interesting possibilities for recycling, which I'll get to how you do it in a second, but one of the interesting possibilities for recycling is that some of those products that aren't useful in the reactor and are otherwise waste, some of those products are hard to generate otherwise, but can be useful for, you know, medical reasons, imaging, other kinds of radioactive.

• 35:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You listed technetium as one of the byproducts, and I've seen that used in medical imaging. So that's what you mean by possibly recycling some of this material?

• 35:18Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Technetium-99 metastable is routinely used for things like thyroid imaging and whatnot.

• 35:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. Cool. So it's picking through your dumpsters.

• 35:27Speaker 03

  Exactly. That's right. A very specialized, high-precision radioactive dumpster.

• 35:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but how do you, you can't boost the uranium back into the isotope it needs to be and then just run it?

• 35:39Speaker 03

  No. But generally speaking, what you end up doing is you take out those fission products and you still have a great deal of enriched material left. And during the fission process, you have been breeding a little bit of plutonium. Some of the uranium-238 atoms have absorbed a neutron and then another neutron, and they move their way up the chart of the nucleites into plutonium-239, which is also fissile. So you can put both the uranium and plutonium back into the reactor usefully, along with some of the other transuranic elements, and that's recycling. You can do it with egg waste chemistry or electrochemistry.

• 36:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's no different from recycling plastics or it's they gotta carry their weight with their waste products.

• 36:16Speaker 03

  That's right. That's right.

• 36:17Paul Mecurio?

  There'll be a time when I could take my nuclear waste to the dump on a Sunday. On your own, yeah. You make the dump run. But then you sort it out in there. You sort it out, or I have a man do that for me. You have the right little bins for the right sort of waste. I have a guy who sorts my radiation. You got a guy? I pay him 50 bucks. Not Louis again, is it? Yeah, he's easy to find. He's glowing. Can you explain to me why this is gonna sound like a neophyte question, but like why we haven't gotten better at reducing the amount of radioactive waste that gets generated in these processes? And is there an attempt, or again, are all you scientists just lazy?

• 36:54Speaker 03

  So first of all, the volume is pretty small to start with. But yeah, there's been a lot of work in fuel utilization so that the amount of fuel that you put in is used to the maximum extent practical. A lot of that has resulted in designs that will leverage a higher initial enrichment of uranium. You'll see this in a lot of small modular reactor designs because it allows the reactor to be smaller, and in a lot of cases, it'll allow for a higher fuel efficiency or fuel utilization.

• 37:21Paul Mecurio?

  What kind of radioactive waste do you get out of fast reactors?

• 37:24Speaker 03

  It's a metal uranium plutonium fission product object, right? And it's never sort of, when it's sort of comes out of a reactor, it's gonna be in the same form it is. You know, you get a lot of Simpsons kind of images where it looks like a glowing green goo. Spent nuclear fuel is actually a uranium oxide coming out of conventional reactors. So it's a type of ceramic. It's quite heavy, and it's in little pellets. But it's a solid and quite dull. In the case of a sodium cooled fast reactor, it would be a solid metal cylinder. In the case of a molten salt reactor where the uranium is dissolved into a liquid salt in the reactor, these don't really exist commercially yet, but they've been proposed. That would be a liquid, but that would be the only kind of reactor that has sort of a liquid waste.

• 38:08Paul Mecurio?

  So is spent fuel then sort of turned into a ceramic and then?

• 38:12Speaker 01

  Very deep underground, so it's because that's kind of the way it originates in Earth to begin with before we extract it. Do we then kind of send it back in a similar state?

• 38:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's a rock ore when it comes out and then when you put it back in, it's a solid uranium oxide typically, and it's contained in a canister that's steel and then concrete and layers upon layers of shielding.

• 38:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But Catherine, they're not equally as safe.

• 39:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's fairly straightforward to maintain a fission reaction at a stable, steady state at this point with our development of technology, but there are feedbacks that could drive that reaction into supercriticality and you have to spend a lot of time balancing the reaction in the reactor. Whereas a fusion reaction, its tendency is to end. This is why it's so hard to make a fusion reactor. It's a very hard reaction to maintain because it's hard to maintain and because there's not this sort of opportunity for easy supercriticality, then you don't end up in this situation where you might become overpowered, create a lot of extra heat you weren't ready for, melt things down, etc. And so fundamentally,

• 39:45Speaker 03

  since the stable state of a fusion reaction is to not be happening, it's a little bit easier to keep it safe.

• 39:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you don't have radioactive byproducts?

• 39:55Speaker 03

  So in fusion, there are activated byproducts, but not the kind of high-level fission products that are very radioactive for a very long time that we'll have to manage as a spent nuclear fuel in fission.

• 40:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gotcha. And you have to dispose of it in some careful way.

• 40:09Speaker 03

  That's right. And multiple nations are making real progress on that. Finland is just about to start operating their final repository. Canada has just selected a site for their final repository. Sweden has gotten permission to begin constructing their final repository.

• 40:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And one other quick point. I think the fear factor here is if there is an accident, it will kill many, many more people than if there is a coal mining accident. You can tout-

• 40:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The deaths per terawatt hours and nukes look very good until they don't look good. And if there's some disaster, if a terrorist takes over the plant, or it becomes the target of a weapon, and there's some kind of radioactive leakage, if it's in the fission, if in the fusion, maybe, as you said, it's not self-driven, so maybe it'll just snuff it out. But what do you tell someone who's concerned about how widespread the damage would be in an accident relative to any other sources of death from any other source of energy?

• 41:18Speaker 03

  If I have time to bring that person to a nuclear power plant, I would, and show them the containment structure, but if I don't, then I would show them a video of Sandia experimenting with the structures that protect us from nuclear power plant accidents.

• 41:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Sandia, is it FFRDC?

• 41:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, Sandia National Laboratory.

• 41:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In New Mexico, I think?

• 41:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's correct, in Albuquerque. Did some experiments to show that you could ram a jet engine right into the side of a containment building, a sort of standard steel and concrete structure, the dome over the reactor, and it survives just fine.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  Who thought of that as an actual experiment to conduct?

• 41:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was from Mission Impossible. They were filming, they should throw it in there.

• 42:04Paul Mecurio?

  Tom wanted a new challenge. If we're talking about not in my neighborhood, right? How you get people to come on board, which is great, education, give people knowledge about safety. If you want to get people on board and you have a nuclear power plant, small or large, in their neighborhood, just put a Chick-fil-A in it. If you've got a Chick-fil-A attached to a nuclear power plant, people are on board. You do a little drive-through, you enjoy the...

• 42:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how it works, I never knew.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Is this their new PR campaign? The Department of Nuclear Energy?

• 42:32Paul Mecurio?

  Exactly. Nuclear waste and Chick-fil-A, bring you...

• 42:36Speaker 03

  Power plants like that do produce a lot of jobs and tax revenues that communities love. Maybe they use them to build a Chick-fil-A.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  Okay, so data centers are connected, surprisingly enough, to the people behind AI, which are the tech bros. And as such, it's important for their model going forward that they have clean, reliable energy. So surely, the tech bros are going to be driving this whole thing along, so as nuclear energy does become the go-to source of energy for this in the future.

• 43:10Speaker 03

  We're seeing it already. We've seen requests for proposals and power purchase agreements signed to ensure that new reactors are coming online. Amazon has invested in Xenergy. Microsoft has invested in restarting the Three Mile Island unit. We have very clear demonstration that the money is already going towards those new deployments and restarts. And I think it's helpful to have those deep pockets working towards reducing the risk for entropy kind builds. But yeah, it's hopefully going to result in more power even than those tech companies are going to need, because that's what we need for our country.

• 43:49Paul Mecurio?

  Do we see, in our ever quest for capitalism and to market anything that we can, that these SMRs become so small, that literally they'll be marketed as you could have your own nuclear reactor in your house, right? Like, I could see a day-

• 44:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your own power generator. That's the whole fusion, Mr. Fusion.

• 44:07Paul Mecurio?

  But that's like, gives a whole new meaning to nuking leftovers, right?

• 44:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that the limit of this?

• 44:12Paul Mecurio?

  You're going to literally nuke leftovers.

• 44:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And here's an example. In 1968, the movie 2001 came out, imagining the world in 2001, which was 33 years after that. And what they could not figure was that the future of computing would be distributed rather than centralized. So to them, the modern computer was this one giant computer. How? Controlling the whole ship. The super brain. The super one brain. And they weren't thinking that it could be miniaturized. You don't need a whole room. It could fit on your hip. And I can watch movies. We can all watch different movies.

• 44:52Paul Mecurio?

  And this is exactly, and Gary referenced it, the comparison to smartphone development. It could get, these reactors could get so small-

• 44:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's a question back to our expert here. Is that a future possibility? And let me add that-

• 45:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm impressed at the level that private enterprises participating in trying to solve our energy future because I don't think it was always like that. There was like each city had its power plant or each county and that was it. And it was a utility and it did the thing and the government and that was it. But in an entrepreneurial atmosphere, it seems to me, yeah, I want to invent that. So you buy the product from me.

• 45:30Paul Mecurio?

  I want to go to a picnic and show off and go, anybody want a smoothie? Here we go. I'm going to power it with my nuclear mini miniaturized.

• 45:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That seems like overkill, but.

• 45:38Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, but it's a, it's a.

• 45:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can just shake.

• 45:42Paul Mecurio?

  No, it's a damn good smoothie. Not the way I make it with energy powder, strawberries, bananas.

• 45:48Speaker 03

  That probably will be overkill for especially the regulatory and nuclear nonproliferation community. You want to make sure that certain nuclear material is kept extremely well controlled and observed, counted, you know, tracked. Because there's a universe in which if you could put it in a suitcase, a briefcase, then there's a potential to make a dirty bomb out of some of the spent fuel.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  There's too many bad actors around for it to be unlicensed. I'm just, we are, we are throwing that way into the future.

• 46:20Speaker 03

  So far in the future.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, with Mr. Fusion, our little nuclear home friend.

• 46:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mr. Fusion.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  I mean, how far are we actually away? These things are obviously being tested, but how far are we away from commercially being able to bring them to a situation where they go online?

• 46:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, the first couple are in the very early stages of construction and we're expecting them to be completed. Some of them hope for a five-year construction timeline, but it'll probably be more like 10 years. And then if we don't have orders on the books for more and more of them in the next year or two, then you have to wait another 10 years for the next one. And so what we're seeing from data centers and other kinds of companies, utilities like Dominion, thinking about small modular reactors, then you see those orders, that's an opportunity to have those first deployments five, 10 years from now that are, you know, connected to the grid. Followed by the next many.

• 47:12Paul Mecurio?

  I just want one in my basement. I want to be able to go to a party and say, just got a nuclear reactor in my basement. You just.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  You think anyone's gonna stay at this party?

• 47:21Paul Mecurio?

  Exactly.

• 47:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just want to be the first one on the block.

• 47:24Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 47:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With a nuclear power reactor.

• 47:26Paul Mecurio?

  The guy's just looking at you like, what? And then walks out.

• 47:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so we gotta land this plane. So Catherine, what are you working on right now?

• 47:34Speaker 03

  So I run a research group that writes software for modeling and simulating advanced reactors and their fuel cycles. A lot of what we've been talking about today, I write multi-physics software with my graduate students.

• 47:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What does multi-physics mean? What does that mean?

• 47:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's when you combine different physics, especially when you're combining physics at different scales. In my case, it's neutronics on the very small sort of angstroms and 10 to the negative 14 seconds kind of time scales. With thermo-hydraulics, which is more like seconds and meters. If those two things affect each other, which they do when you're talking about reactor feedbacks and reactor accidents.

• 48:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The actual reaction is this tiny little nuclear thing that has to plug into this macroscopic facility out of which you draw energy. So I hadn't thought about it that way. Multi-physics, is that the word?

• 48:24Speaker 03

  That's right. Multi-scale multi-physics, if you want to sound highfalutin.

• 48:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's not only in size, but in time scale as well for phenomena.

• 48:33Speaker 03

  That's right. That's right. So I study advanced reactors, like molten salt reactors and high-temperature gas reactors, sodium-cooled vest reactors, and recycling strategies. This is something really important.

• 48:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but do you earn your keep at the university? Do you also teach?

• 48:46Speaker 03

  I do. I absolutely do. It's my favorite thing to do in the whole wide world. I'm sure you understand.

• 48:52Paul Mecurio?

  How about that?

• 48:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very cool. Just make sure she's an honest broker here.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  Sounds a lot like she is.

• 48:57Paul Mecurio?

  You seem like you'd be great. You're very relatable. You make it understandable for somebody that doesn't know the world.

• 49:04Speaker 03

  I could borrow a few jokes, though. I don't think they laugh enough.

• 49:08Paul Mecurio?

  50 bucks a joke. You're in. And I want to go in your bunker when the whole place melts down from nuclear. I know you got the best bunker. I know you do.

• 49:17Speaker 03

  Only if I get to go to the party with the reactor in the basement.

• 49:21Paul Mecurio?

  There you go. It all comes full circle.

• 49:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let me offer a cosmic perspective here.

• 49:27Paul Mecurio?

  All right.

• 49:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If I may.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  You may.

• 49:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Those of us old enough remember back in the 50s and 60s where people were imagining futures?

• 49:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we didn't have to wait longer than a month, maybe not even a week, before one of the major magazines, Life Magazine, Look Magazine, had a cover story, the city of tomorrow, the home of tomorrow, transportation of tomorrow, food of tomorrow. And you'd see these artist illustrations of what tomorrow would look like. And that tomorrow was not infinitely far away. It was like in your lifetime. What every single one of those projections got wrong was the assumption that we'd have unlimited access to energy. Because every one of those illustrations, they had flying cars,

• 50:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  motorized sidewalks, everything was in motion from a power source, an energy source. And what it got wrong was, no, we didn't walk into a future of unlimited energy. We walked into a future of cheap computing. So we became an information technology future, not an energy technology future. And what I wonder now, hearing these developments on the horizon and our needs that will require it, perhaps, though it's long overdue, we're on the doorstep of a future where we derive our energy from any one of a dozen ways

• 51:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  and we have as much of it as we need to do anything we want. And that is a cosmic perspective. Join me in thanking Katherine Huff for your brilliant expositions on the state of the industry. And dude. Always fun. Good to have you, man. Absolutely. And tell Frank Oz I said hi, because we became good friends when he was on the show. Yeah, he's not a fan.

• 51:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why are you laughing?

• 51:36Speaker 01

  Because he's funny.

• 51:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Gary, we'll catch up with you next time. For StarTalk, special edition, Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.