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, Gary O’Reilly & Paul Mecurio discuss the physics, safety, and future of nuclear reactors in a world of increasing power demands with nuclear engineer Kathryn Huff. Originally Aired February 21, 2025.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hey, StarTalkians, Neil here. You're about to listen to an episode specially drawn from our archives to serve your cosmic curiosities. The archives run deep. If you enjoy this, take a peek at the full catalog on your favorite podcast platform. There's a lot there to tickle your geek underbelly. Check it out.

• 0:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:37Neil 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.

• 0:48Gary O'Reilly?

  Hi, Neil.

• 0:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hey, former soccer pro.

• 0:50Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 0:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Soccer announcer.

• 0:52Gary O'Reilly?

  Mm-hmm.

• 0:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we're borrowing you from your soccer people.

• 0:54Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 0:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. And it's special edition, we think all about the human condition.

• 1:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Hmm.

• 1:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 1:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know about the human condition.

• 1:11Gary O'Reilly?

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

• 1:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:26Paul Mecurio?

  Nice to see you guys.

• 1:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's back.

• 1:27Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah.

• 1:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 1:28Paul Mecurio?

  Always fun.

• 1:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. You were a former stockbroker or attorney?

• 1:33Paul Mecurio?

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

• 1:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:39Paul Mecurio?

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

• 1:43Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh.

• 1:44Paul Mecurio?

  When I did say it, she said to me, I'm going to leave, I said, I'm going to 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.

• 1:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, good one. Clever mom.

• 1:54Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah.

• 1:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like that.

• 1:55Paul Mecurio?

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

• 1:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 2:04Paul Mecurio?

  That's highfalutin.

• 2:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A highfalutin.

• 2:05Paul Mecurio?

  It's that little chairman.

• 2:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't know you had highfalutin here.

• 2:08Paul Mecurio?

  From the cartoon character.

• 2:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you also work The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

• 2:12Paul Mecurio?

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

• 2:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stephen, he's a first name.

• 2:16Paul Mecurio?

  Stephen, oh, yes, sorry.

• 2:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stephen Colbert and the rest of it.

• 2:18Gary O'Reilly?

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

• 2:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 2:30Paul Mecurio?

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

• 2:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 2:37Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, we were doing a...

• 2:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A state show.

• 2:38Paul 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...

• 2:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why, like that?

• 2:48Paul Mecurio?

  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.

• 2:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'd love me some Frank Oz.

• 2:57Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, I know.

• 2:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's been a guest on our show.

• 2:59Paul Mecurio?

  I know.

• 2:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 3:00Paul Mecurio?

  He's constantly backwards talking now 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 going to be, paulmccarrio.com. But it's been really cool and a sort of a breakout from my stand-up.

• 3:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, cool.

• 3:13Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 3:18Gary O'Reilly?

  We did.

• 3:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I love me, it's nukes.

• 3:20Gary O'Reilly?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love me some nukes.

• 3:21Gary O'Reilly?

  Not the missile kind.

• 3:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nukes predate missiles.

• 3:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, good.

• 3:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just so you know.

• 3:26Gary O'Reilly?

  As long as you're not.

• 3:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 3:30Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 3:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the energy contained therein.

• 3:33Gary O'Reilly?

  That's where we go.

• 3:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 3:36Gary O'Reilly?

  That is, okay, so...

• 3:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Set up this show. What do you have?

• 3:40Gary O'Reilly?

  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?

• 4:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would be delighted.

• 4:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Good.

• 4:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 4:18Gary O'Reilly?

  And we have one.

• 4:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 4:25Speaker 03

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

• 4:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 4:32Speaker 03

  Excellent.

• 4:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's for the first time, you gotta get one of those. You are associate professor in the department, now, this is a mouth, this is like a business card's worth of, in the Department of Nuclear Plasma and Radiological Engineering.

• 4:48Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 4:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which means she glows at night.

• 4:50Gary O'Reilly?

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At University of Illinois, at Champaign-Urbana.

• 4:54Paul Mecurio?

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

• 4:57Neil 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've seen it all. So Katherine, could you just remind everybody the difference between fusion and fission?

• 5:24Speaker 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 curve by splitting a big

• 6:06Speaker 03

  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.

• 6:14Neil 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 try, let me just open this up, because

• 6:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  after Chernobyl, and after Three 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 rebranding 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?

• 7:38Speaker 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.

• 7:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 7:52Paul 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.

• 7:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's just weird to count deaths by how much electricity has been produced.

• 8:04Paul Mecurio?

  Nuclear energy, you'll only die once in a while.

• 8:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but, but does that exist for coal?

• 8:12Speaker 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 informed 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. And

• 8:56Speaker 03

  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.

• 9:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 9:16Speaker 03

  There's more power generated.

• 9:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Per, per whatever, per anything?

• 9:20Speaker 03

  So the terawatt hours are higher.

• 9:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 9:23Speaker 03

  By a long shot.

• 9:24Neil 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?

• 9:34Paul Mecurio?

  Pulled a right turn on you.

• 9:37Neil 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.

• 10:06Paul Mecurio?

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

• 10:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a relative correct.

• 10:09Paul 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?

• 10:20Gary O'Reilly?

  That sounds like a bad experience on your behalf.

• 10:23Paul Mecurio?

  We call him my uncle.

• 10:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Way too precise an example.

• 10:27Paul Mecurio?

  My Uncle Archie, just sending anything, but 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?

• 10:38Speaker 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.

• 11:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How many people ever have died mining coal?

• 11:20Speaker 03

  It's a great question, right? The WHO has estimated all kinds of things for full, total cost and death 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.

• 11:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 11:36Speaker 03

  It's pretty high.

• 11:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 11:42Speaker 03

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

• 11:47Gary O'Reilly?

  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.

• 12:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not in my backyard, don't put it there.

• 12:02Gary O'Reilly?

  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.

• 12:10Paul 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?

• 12:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 12:26Speaker 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.

• 12:57Paul 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.

• 13:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right.

• 13:05Paul Mecurio?

  Put it in the blue bag.

• 13:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And put it on Staten Island.

• 13:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Remind me not to live in your neighborhood, ever.

• 13:11Paul Mecurio?

  Exactly. There's the glowing Paul house.

• 13:13Gary O'Reilly?

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

• 13:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 13:19Gary O'Reilly?

  In the middle of nowhere.

• 13:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 13:27Gary O'Reilly?

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

• 13:30Speaker 03

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

• 13:32Neil 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, at Livermore Labs?

• 13:46Speaker 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 Eder device in France, that is a magnetic confinement fusion. It's a slightly different approach, and seeing real breakthroughs in the Eder 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.

• 14:31Neil 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.

• 14:39Gary O'Reilly?

  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.

• 14:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not yet.

• 14:48Paul 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?

• 15:01Speaker 03

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

• 15:07Paul Mecurio?

  Maybe if you guys tried harder, there would be.

• 15:09Speaker 03

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

• 15:14Paul Mecurio?

  Here we go. Here we go. You 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.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 15:24Paul Mecurio?

  Okay, good.

• 15:25Speaker 03

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

• 15:28Gary O'Reilly?

  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?

• 15:56Speaker 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.

• 16:40Speaker 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.

• 17:02Paul Mecurio?

  And the issue there is, in sort of these data centers, which are going to, are in, 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.

• 17:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Paul, could you tell the rest of us what SMR means?

• 17:18Paul Mecurio?

  Uh, small modular reactors.

• 17:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did he get it right, Catherine?

• 17:22Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  He did.

• 17:24Paul Mecurio?

  Catherine, 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.

• 17:47Speaker 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

• 18:30Speaker 03

  can build a few more of them, get some lessons learned, 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.

• 18:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 18:58Speaker 04

  I'm Ali Khan Hemraj and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 19:13Gary O'Reilly?

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

• 19:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the United States?

• 19:19Gary O'Reilly?

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

• 19:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  SMRs.

• 19:27Gary O'Reilly?

  SMRs to some. Advanced reactors. So you've, you've got these micro reactors. 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, "My merry hell." We know that. So how are we going to sort this out and with what technology?

• 19:53Speaker 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 3 and 4. Those are AP1000s 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 Holtech and GE Hitachi. Westinghouse has a shrunken version of the AP1000 called the AP300. Yeah, you've got NuScale is one of those small modular light water reactor designs.

• 20:35Speaker 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.

• 20:52Paul Mecurio?

  Is that the moan salt?

• 20:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:54Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, MSRs, yeah.

• 20:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What does sodium do for you?

• 20:57Speaker 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.

• 21:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it absorbs neutrons?

• 21:19Speaker 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.

• 21:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Regulated.

• 21:45Paul Mecurio?

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

• 21:50Speaker 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.

• 22:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Good.

• 22:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's good to know. Just if it gets wet.

• 22:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 22:42Gary O'Reilly?

  That's half of it's old school.

• 22:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that correct? Half is old school.

• 22:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 22:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that correct?

• 22:45Speaker 03

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

• 22:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In a different way.

• 22:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Using a steam.

• 22:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Different source of heat.

• 22:52Gary O'Reilly?

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

• 22:58Speaker 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.

• 23:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 23:26Speaker 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.

• 23:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rather than making electricity out of it through a turbine.

• 23:38Speaker 03

  Right. And rather than burning natural gas or coal to make direct heat.

• 23:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 23:43Speaker 03

  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.

• 23:57Paul 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?

• 24:06Speaker 03

  Not exactly the way we convert heat into electricity, but it is certainly the case. It is the case that high temperature. Heat is higher quality because it is easier to convert. You have a little bit less loss.

• 24:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, very good. Very important point.

• 24:21Gary O'Reilly?

  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 eighties.

• 24:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The shoulder mounted one that they used in.

• 24:34Paul Mecurio?

  The one that Magnum PI would have.

• 24:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or Gecko in.

• 24:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Right, right. So now.

• 24:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Shoulder mounted cell phone. I remember.

• 24:42Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 24:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 24:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 24:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I had a phone like that.

• 24:49Gary O'Reilly?

  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 do they cost and who's paying for it?

• 25:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 25:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 25:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 25:14Gary O'Reilly?

  Where were you putting it?

• 25:16Paul Mecurio?

  Exactly. And why was it on your thighs?

• 25:19Neil 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?

• 25:29Speaker 03

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

• 25:43Gary O'Reilly?

  So these small modular reactors, as I said.

• 25:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  SMRs.

• 25:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Thank you for reminding me.

• 25:51Gary O'Reilly?

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

• 25:56Speaker 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 DOE put out, but it estimates that new nuclear power, you know, is going to be in the order between $120 per megawatt hour for the first of a kind, all the way down to nth of a kind, maybe in the $60 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 that involves renewables, right? Alternatives would be new natural gas with carbon capture, cheaper certainly, maybe

• 26:40Speaker 03

  between a hundred at the high end and $60 per megawatt hour at the low end. Geothermal has a very, very big range, but very similar to nuclear, you know, 130 at the high end, 57 at the low end. Hydro power is always cheap.

• 26:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was recently in Iceland, they're nearly 100% geothermal. I mean, they're sitting on top of multiple volcanic.

• 27:01Paul Mecurio?

  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?

• 27:19Speaker 03

  I hope so.

• 27:20Paul 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?

• 27:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 27:50Paul Mecurio?

  Okay.

• 27:51Neil 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.

• 27:59Paul Mecurio?

  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.

• 28:12Gary O'Reilly?

  Or are you talking about your own life?

• 28:13Paul Mecurio?

  Exactly.

• 28:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Which one is it?

• 28:14Paul Mecurio?

  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?

• 28:24Speaker 03

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

• 28:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Net zero what?

• 28:32Speaker 03

  Net zero carbon.

• 28:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Carbon, thank you, okay.

• 28:34Speaker 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 have committed to tripling nuclear energy in their countries.

• 28:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 29:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Had to get that in, didn't I?

• 29:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I had to get that.

• 29:09Speaker 03

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

• 29:14Gary O'Reilly?

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

• 29:20Speaker 03

  Correct, yes.

• 29:21Gary O'Reilly?

  How are these, are these new advanced modular, small modular reactors, our good friends, the SMRs?

• 29:30Gary O'Reilly?

  Are any of them going to be able to recycle that spent fuel?

• 29:33Speaker 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.

• 30:16Speaker 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.

• 30:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like the ASMR universe.

• 30:37Gary O'Reilly?

  And?

• 30:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yes.

• 30:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 30:45Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 30:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 30:52Speaker 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.

• 31:02Gary O'Reilly?

  How about Greenland?

• 31:03Speaker 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.

• 31:16Paul 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 away from nuclear so energy so that we're not so dependent on uranium and the potential?

• 31:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 31:47Gary O'Reilly?

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

• 31:51Paul Mecurio?

  Exactly.

• 31:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 31:53Paul Mecurio?

  Right.

• 31:54Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 31:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 32:03Gary O'Reilly?

  If you're trapped into fossil fuel, there's a problem.

• 32:05Speaker 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 processing, 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 much smaller number of facilities internationally. And so, yeah, you know, 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, et cetera.

• 32:49Speaker 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.

• 33:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Catherine, if you have what's called spent uranium, 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 particle accelerator again? What, because you have the uranium, how would you accomplish this?

• 33:23Speaker 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 the periodic table or in the chart of the nucleids. The mixture needs to be separated so that those fission products are removed from the total, the already split atoms.

• 33:49Neil 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's sat in the front of your chemistry class. And the table of nucleotides, those were always in the more advanced chemistry classes.

• 34:05Gary O'Reilly?

  The one I didn't go to.

• 34:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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?

• 34:17Speaker 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.

• 34:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you can track their whereabouts.

• 34:29Gary O'Reilly?

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

• 34:35Speaker 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.

• 35:02Neil 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?

• 35:11Speaker 03

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

• 35:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 35:20Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 35:23Speaker 03

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

• 35:27Neil 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?

• 35:32Speaker 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 nucleids 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.

• 36:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 36:09Speaker 03

  That's right, that's right.

• 36:11Paul Mecurio?

  So be a time when I could take my nuclear waste to the dump on a Sunday.

• 36:14Gary O'Reilly?

  On your own?

• 36:15Paul Mecurio?

  You like to make a dump run?

• 36:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But then you sort it out in the?

• 36:18Paul Mecurio?

  You sort it out or I have a man do that for me.

• 36:20Gary O'Reilly?

  You have the right little bins for the right sort of waste.

• 36:22Paul Mecurio?

  I have a guy who sorts my radiation.

• 36:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got a guy?

• 36:26Paul Mecurio?

  I pay him 50 bucks.

• 36:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Not Louis again, is it?

• 36:28Paul Mecurio?

  He's easy to find, he's glowing. Can you explain to me why, this is going to 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?

• 36:47Speaker 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.

• 37:14Paul Mecurio?

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

• 37:18Speaker 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 going to 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.

• 38:01Gary O'Reilly?

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

• 38:14Speaker 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.

• 38:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But Catherine, they're not equally as safe.

• 38:55Speaker 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, et cetera.

• 39:37Speaker 03

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

• 39:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you don't have radioactive byproducts.

• 39:49Speaker 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.

• 39:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 40:02Speaker 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.

• 40:18Neil 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 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 you'll just snuff it out.

• 40:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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?

• 41:11Speaker 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. And those-

• 41:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Sandia, is it FFRDC?

• 41:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, Sandia National Laboratory.

• 41:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In New Mexico? I think New Mexico, I think.

• 41:35Speaker 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.

• 41:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Who thought of that as an actual experiment to conduct?

• 41:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 41:57Paul Mecurio?

  Tom wanted a new challenge. If we're talking about not in my neighborhood, right?

• 42:03Paul Mecurio?

  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 to 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 your nuclear power plant, people are on board. You do a little drive-through, you enjoy the-

• 42:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how that works, I never knew.

• 42:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Is this their new PR campaign?

• 42:23Paul Mecurio?

  This is the new-

• 42:24Gary O'Reilly?

  The Department of Nuclear Energy.

• 42:26Paul Mecurio?

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

• 42:29Speaker 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.

• 42:37Gary O'Reilly?

  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.

• 43:03Speaker 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.

• 43:42Paul Mecurio?

  Do we see in our ever quest for capitalism and to market anything that we can, that this, 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-

• 43:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your own power generator.

• 43:58Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the whole fusion, Mr. Fusion.

• 44:00Paul Mecurio?

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

• 44:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that the limit of this?

• 44:05Paul Mecurio?

  You're going to literally nuke leftovers.

• 44:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And here's, 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.

• 44:35Gary O'Reilly?

  The super brain.

• 44:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The super one brain. And they weren't thinking that it could be miniaturized. You don't need a whole room, it can fit on your hip. And I can watch movies, we can all watch different movies.

• 44:45Paul Mecurio?

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

• 44:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's my, that's a question back to our expert here. Is that a future possibility? And let me add that I'm impressed at the level that private enterprise is 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 for me.

• 45:23Paul 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 miniaturized-

• 45:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That seems like overkill, but-

• 45:33Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, but it's a-

• 45:34Gary O'Reilly?

  That's how you impress people.

• 45:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can just shake-

• 45:35Paul Mecurio?

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

• 45:41Speaker 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.

• 46:06Gary O'Reilly?

  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.

• 46:13Speaker 03

  So far in the future.

• 46:15Gary O'Reilly?

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

• 46:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mr. Fusion.

• 46:18Gary O'Reilly?

  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?

• 46:30Speaker 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.

• 47:05Paul Mecurio?

  I just want one in my basement. I want to be with a global party and say, just got a nuclear reactor in my basement.

• 47:12Gary O'Reilly?

  You just- You think anyone's going to stay at this party?

• 47:15Paul Mecurio?

  Exactly.

• 47:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just want to be the first one on the block with a nuclear power reactor.

• 47:19Paul Mecurio?

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

• 47:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 47:27Speaker 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.

• 47:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 47:41Speaker 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-

• 47:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, okay.

• 47:54Speaker 03

  With thermohydraulics, 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.

• 48:04Neil 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?

• 48:17Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 48:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cool.

• 48:18Speaker 03

  Multi-scale, multi-physics, if you want to sound highfalutin.

• 48:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 48:26Speaker 03

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

• 48:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 48:40Speaker 03

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

• 48:45Paul Mecurio?

  How about that?

• 48:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 48:50Gary O'Reilly?

  Sounds a lot like she is.

• 48:51Paul Mecurio?

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

• 48:58Speaker 03

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

• 49:01Paul 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.

• 49:10Speaker 03

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

• 49:14Paul Mecurio?

  There you go. It all comes full circle.

• 49:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let me offer a cosmic perspective here.

• 49:20Gary O'Reilly?

  All right.

• 49:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If I may.

• 49:22Gary O'Reilly?

  You may.

• 49:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 50:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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, motorized sidewalks, everything was in motion from a power source, an energy source.

• 50:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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, and we have as much of it as we need to do anything we want. And that is a cosmic perspective.

• 51:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Join me in thanking Catherine Huff for your brilliant expositions on the state of the industry. And dude-

• 51:17Paul Mecurio?

  Always fun.

• 51:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good to have you, man.

• 51:18Paul Mecurio?

  Absolutely.

• 51:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And tell Frank Oz I said hi, because we became good friends when he was on the show.

• 51:23Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, he's not a fan.

• 51:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why are you laughing?

• 51:29Gary O'Reilly?

  Because he's funny.

• 51:32Neil 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.