Energy in 2024 Geek Out

with yours truly and Richard Campbell. Mister Campbell, Hello, been working on this script for days and I am happy to be done.

So I mean he literally orchestrated killing an elephant with AC power to meet people a frame. Remember, Like, that's not a nice guy, No, that's not no. And I also hear he stole a lot of patents and was kind of a jerk.

head football coach Knute Rockney. There's a name for you. Canute. Wasn't Canute like one of the leaders of Sweden one of the Kings?

the world in a single engine plane. And the reason why you haven't heard their names more pronounced than history is because they make it that happens. You know the keyword there is attempt attempt. July sixteenth, the Emperor of Ethiopia called Emperor Hile Silassie signs the nineteen thirty one Constitution of Ethiopia called First Constitution of Ethiopia. July thirty first, New York City experimental television station w two XAB now

known as WCBSTV, begins broadcasts. August twenty fourth, France and the Soviet Union side a Neutrality no Attack treaty. August twenty eighth, France and the Soviet Union sign a treaty of non aggression. September eighteenth, the mukten incident gives Japan the pretext to invade and occupy Manchuria. October first, The George Washington Bridge, linking New Jersey in New York opens October seventeenth. Al Capone's convictive income tax evasion. October twenty fourth,

George Washington Bridge opens to public traffic. November seventh, Chinese Soviet Republic is proclaimed on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. December ninth, the Constituent Cortes approves a Spanish Constitution of

nineteen thirty one, which establishes the Second Spanish Republic. And finally, and I mean that, December eleventh, the Statue of Westminster Parliament of the United Kingdom British Parliament establishes legislative a quality between the UK and the dominions of the Commonwealth of the Nation's Commonwealth, Australia, Canada, Dominion of newfound Newfoundland. I think that's what that means.

I think they may have scaled it substantially into everybody can have a ballpoint pen. They were not rare.

what is a virtual power plant? It's where you get virtual power, man, I guess so it's kind of like so here's the issue. The power industry is used to having a handful of very large power plants that they keep in synchronization and gear up and down to supply power is needed, and of course they're struggling in the modern day with more and more power demands and more and more variability, and so the business of virtual power plants grew up around being able to provide power to

the utility based on resources that are small. So this is mostly a software problem, right. This is the ability to do things like run backup generator plants or little run of the river hydro electric like all these little power generations, small scale wind, that kind of thing that isn't necessarily directly controlled by the big utilities and may distribute power in a bunch of different ways, and has this ability to provide this sort of flexible load.

the car because the grid's in trouble. I've even seen versions of this with just being able to turn down thermostats for heat or turn them up for cooling, because if you're able to do that on mass you can actually make a dent in power consumption. So, like I said, it's mostly a software problem. It's these distributed energy resources and being able to coordinate them. Now some energy companies are getting more savvy to this and being able to

do it. So, you know, to Pascal's question like what do you think they're going to look like in the future, it says, I think this is an interim stage where the power companies are sort of catching up with essentially Internet technology distributed peer to peer mindsets and what their consumers are actually using them, what they're able to produce. So in theory this should all consolidate someday. But you know, the VPP appeared because it served serves a problem that

exists today. Okay, So, Pascal, thank you so much your commentating. A copy of music code by It is on its way to you, and iview'd like a copy of music code by. I write a comment on the website at don at Rocks dot com or on the Facebook. We publish every show there, and if you comment there and every reading on the show, we'll send you a copy of music Code.

which is really fun, you know. I get to read government documents about power generation all the different places, like I have a weird version of fun. But I also ended up writing this year or in by the first time I did it was in August, was strictly an hour on nuclear power alone, just because it was it was only getting a few minutes in the general energy conversation, right, and folks wanted to know more. And my timing was right because suddenly all the tech giants jumped on to

being interested in nuclear power too. Oh sure for cloud based AI stuff. Yeah, they want to build more data centers in the grid can support and so they're looking for more power availability, and so my knowledge jumped and

digging into that. But I work, you know, a lot of the work that I do on these end of year geek outs ends up showing throughout the year and other content, and so this is My deepest dive is really reading up on all the latest and going over the IA's documentation and a number of other sources and onclude the links to where my readings for all of this.

And there's a few things that are really important, and one of the most that impacts energy across the board is that the cost of money went up in the past year or so. The side effect of inflation was raising of interest rates to counter that, and so suddenly lending policies have shifted.

based on future returns. You spend a lot to build out infrastructure to generate electricity, and then you make it back over time. And these are expensive projects that can easily go into cost overruns, and so the cost of borrowing is a sensitive thing, which is interesting. The interesting part of this is also that you have the bank behavior. There's one of those things where it's like, if you owe the bank one thousand dollars, you have a problem, but if you own the bank a million dollars, the

bank has a problem. Yeah. So, where when cost of lending was low and you could had rapid turnover, building small power projects made a lot of sense. It was cheap to borrow of the money, the returns were quick, you could pay it down off you go right, and big projects struggled more. But now with the cost of lending being higher, big projects in some ways are protected because once you've borrowed a billion dollars for a project, you're kind of not willing to walk away from it.

The bank's days in there's more money lens. In some ways, big projects are because they have these huge budgets are harder to cancel.

to build the whole thing all at once. You can build just a portion of it, start generating money, and then add more to it over time, really benefited from low cost money, and the bigger projects didn't near as much. You know, you kind of have to build a whole nuclear power plant before it makes any power at all, and it's very difficult to build those. And the other part of this, it's become really interesting. And why these bigger plants are becoming more interesting when money costs more

is that bigger plants tend to be more efficient. Sure, so this idea in power generation called capacity factor, which essentially is like you're at one hundred percent capacity factor if you're running full power all over the time, right, and traditional power plants still need maintenance, So they talk about like what's the relative you know, utilization of it. A coal power plant back in the day when fifty to sixty percent of capacity factor that was considered good.

The funny thing is has to become less popular and antiquated, their efficiency goes down and so their utilization is getting lower. That top of the line combined cycle natural gas plant sort of you're sort of go to plant if you want to make electricity quickly today is just under sixty percent efficient. Even a hydro electric dam. You're sort of the largest class of non carbon producing electricity thirty to

fifty percent efficient. And this the want to I'm going to go back to this capacity factor issue as we talk about different methods, like I'm not going to talk a lot about hydro and coal and things. I'm going to talk about more of the newer stuff because these capacity factors come into play. So, I mean, let's start with solar, because solar had an unbelievably good year in twenty twenty four. It is staggering how much dolar soolar are installed, Almost six hundred gigawatts of new solar this

this past year. I was I was one of them. Yeah you're not alone, right, which was like a twenty percent increase. Again, it was four hundred and sixty and twenty three. It was two hundred and fifty and twenty two. More than half of what installed in twenty four was just in China. China was like an inexcessive half. And

then the next four that represent about a third. Again where the US, India, Germany and Brazil and the IA talks about there's more than seven million people working in photovoltaics now, so that's between the manufacturing, distribution, all the production elements, and then the installations. This is both commercial as well as residential. It's a huge, huge business and it attracts a lot of talent. Australia has the highest

amount of photovoltaic per capita. A. It's a low populated country. B, it has huge power demands and limited options, and it has a lot of sunlight, so they have one of the highest levels of residential solar anyway, you know, the number two is would be unexpended by kapita the Netherlands. Oh and again these like dense country windmills, right, and not a lot of area to cover and so forth. It was easy to put some solaring very quickly, and they did. But the capacity factors on solar are not

that great. You know. You know that a given panel can generate a certain number of watts, but it doesn't all of the time. You know, depending on where you live, you're going to only get a ten to twenty five percent capacity factors. Yes, why we tend to overbuild solar just when we have it, we have lots of it. It's what makes variability. I think I told you Richard last year.

all that kind of stuff. We went with a company that says, no, we're going to take those benefits and we're going to lease the panels to you at a flat rate, which is going to come in under your average electricity bill, way under it, right, and you basically you're the whole goal is that your bills will go down to practically nothing. But you will have this fixed you know, monthly fee for twenty five years, and.

they're going to get a return over decades. Literally decade, and the solar panel business actually got really interesting this year because we're starting to finally have some breakthroughs in improving panel efficiency. So we've been living on monocrystaline panels are the most popular kind by far. They're they're relatively expensive. There are thin film and pol crystalines that are cheaper,

but they're slightly more efficient. The best thin films coming at about twenty percent efficiency and the monocrystals are as high as twenty two. And then you get into some weird options, right, there's some focus and so forth, but

they all have questionable yields. But we've been talking about Proov's guide solar panels for years and years and year robs and the problem with perovskites, this is a particular kind of crystal growth is they are efficient, like they absorb more of the energy from the sunlight, but they don't last. They're fragile. The only way you make a deal for twenty five years in your solar panels is if you have a fairly good expectation at twenty five

years and now those panels will still work. That being said, Oxford PV has built a hybrid cell that is now actually for sale they're starting to install them into commercial solar sites that are running about twenty seven percent efficient, which that's not a good way to describe how much better these are. The better way you say, is twenty

percent more efficient than monocrystaline panels. They say they've perfected a manufacturing technique to protect them from wear and decay, so they don't wear any faster than the monocrystaline, which all of these things do wear. They lose about one or two percent per year. They think we'll only know twenty five years from now for sure if these proscuts

are really going to last that long. But they they're pretty confident enough that they're actually putting it on the market, and they say they can improve efficiency further, they can get over thirty percent and what did what did you say?

just to commercial Okay, Well, there's the red well. I mean, commercial states tend to be on the ground standard layout, like very conventional and good to selling into the grid as opposed to residential, which is get figured more for just replying power to your house right right. Solar panel

recycling has continued to expand. Last year I talked about a company called solar Cycle in Texas who was able to take existing solar and use solar panels, take the metals off of them, cut the glass away, grind down the substrates so forth, pretty much be able to reuse the whole thing. They've opened additional facilities. Now they've got

another facility in Georgia. They're also signing agreements with solar power companies both to take used panels and recycle them and to sell out materials those recycled materials back to the solar panel companies to make new panels with it. So we're heading towards this idea of a circular economy with solar panels. It's not a bad thing where a certain percentage of the material in a solar panel came from a previous generation solar.

need a lot of exotics here. We're not trying to make screens or CPUs or anything like that. Cool. I did put out the word when I was working on the street, which a minutedly. I put out the word a couple of weeks ago that I was working on the script and got some questions, and one of them came from Michael Zelenski, who asked, what are the options for excess residential solar power? Excess? You mean, what do you do with what you don't use? H yeah, okay, yeah,

So you're generating more power than your house needs. The typical mechanism is the grid tie or the buy back, so you have a deal with your utility that when you produce to at a certain level, you're going to get a certain amount back as a credit for that power and depending on the setup it but we already know that that power is of questionable utility because it's already stepped down to residential level. It doesn't necessarily flow

the other way. This isn't water and so the the utilities don't really want to do this, which is why they never set these deals up. It's always governments mandating it. Right. Sure, you know the utility, that's the thing they want, right, which is reduced to love.

it's doing is overheating transformers. Yeah, sure, And so there's a big discussion about is there a better way to use your excess residential solar power? Now at the simplest level, if you've at least got some kind of monitoring going on and your house says, hey, you know we're making more power than we need, you can shift the load. Now is the time to wash the dishes or fire up the washing machine? Sure, run the dry like, just burn you more power if you.

you get in. There are more expensive options, like there are smart hot water tanks and heating systems HVAC systems that we'll say, oh it's solar now, let's cool the house more or warm the house more, or yeah.

would use. Right, there's a difference between it being a power shifting tool where it's like my evening power consumption comes from my battery versus a backup tool where the mains are out and I need electricity. Right. Power shifting is really what those power walls were for, is to get you off the grid when the solar when it's nighttime and you're you know, cooking food and doing all the things in your house or a high consumption. I also have in our house a pellet stove which we

put in in the basement. There was one here when the house was originally built, but the owners when they left, took it with them, So we got a pellet stove and in the wintertime it's always on. It's either on low at night or when it's warm, or you know, when it's really cold. They crack it up and we leave the door to the basement open and we get radiant fl heating because it heats the floor right and also comes through the through the door, So that's it's

really nice. It's just good to have options. Yeah, that's the way I look. We burn wood for heat here by the ocean, not that we also have electric heat, but one of the reasons to do that is aar wood comes from our property, so that's effectively free. But the other one I've noticed is the heat from that cast iron stove is very dry and in especially in the wintertime here, it's damp, and as soon as you light the fire up, the house dries out, like you

feel better. Yeah, it makes a huge difference, especially in the winter, to have that heat, and there's something special about a fire. I love fire. I read on Reddit when I was looking on other options for excess as solo there is a guy who's set up home assistant to crank up the temperature in his hot tub during the day when there's excess solar too hot to get in, but he's just I'm not going to get in until night.

But normally I have to run the thing for an hour to make it warm enough to sit in, So if there's excess solar, I just overheat my hot tub and then by night time when we want to get in it, it's nice and warm. And it was for free.

growth is consistent, it's going up slightly. Wind is a bit more efficient, and solar you get about twenty five to forty percent capacity factor, so still well behind traditional power plants, but you know, we're getting better doing more offshore wind. Yeah, the onshore seems to be kind of built out in a lot of ways. I feel like the wind industry is matured now. We're not seeing bigger wind turbines. They got bigger and bigger every year for quite a while, and they've seem to have topped out

of somewhere around the fifteen megawatt range. It's a couple of fourteens and a couple of sixteens. But they're getting to a point now where they're so large that the weight of the equipment is a problem and they're not lasting. We're starting to see gearbox issues where a gearbox system that was supposed to last for twenty years broke down in seven and needed major repairs. So these really big wind turbines are problematic. Yeah. I've talked about this before too.

licensed in the US, which is very expensive. In fact, it is so expensive that the situations like shipping a liquefied natural gas from Louisiana up to New England, the US doesn't do it. It is cheaper for them to sell the gas from Louisiana to another country and then buy natural gas from another country to bring to New England. Okay, that's really strange. Because of the costs of licensing and operating ships in license in the US. Wow, so it's like a two hundred year old law. It probably needs

some updating. I would think, Yeah, weird little impediments. I've a little highlights on wind before we get into the nitty gritty details. This year, for a few hours, Ireland, a very windy place, operated entirely on wind power. What the whole country, the whole country for a while for a few hours during a particularly windy time that all of the electrical generation was win. That's impressive. Yeah, it just shows how much when they've got the UK Land,

they've gone big on wind. They've got lots of shallow water that they can put these wind turbines up on, and they build them big. The big business now for wind turbines. A lot of that easy area, those fifty meters or less waters largely are allocated and being built out. So wind growth is going to slow until we can really mature floating wind turbines. Right. They have their own problems in British Columbia. Here, our water's all too deep.

I get past fifty meters inside of my house. The water is very deep here, and so you need to have floating wind turbines, and generally these rigs are good up to but at least three hundred and fifty meters of water and theory more. This is all oil rig technology, but it is more expensive, is more complicated to install, and it tends to be further away from land, and you kind of need electricity on land, and so the wiring going back gets costly.

and forth. Surge is moving front to back, so the wind blows and it pushes it back. And then pitch and roll are both rotations and two different axises. So the anchoring process is important. And this is also a solved problem when you think about oil rigs. Right, So the bar just kind of the most primitive way to go. If you get into the oilry designs, you start talking about different spar and semi submersible designs. So one of the ones that's being tested thoroughly is is called a

semi submersible spar so. This is three to five spars that can be filled with water. They actually are ballasting. One of those spars has the wind turbine on it, and then the others are ballasted to stabilize it. And then you have cables running onto the bottom, either in catenary or tension, that keep it essentially stay. And what's

a spar so? Just imagine a cylinder, okay, right that, So take a bunch of cylinders, connect them with pipes, three to five of them, and so one of them has the wind turbines, so I has the most load on it, and the other ones at least two maybe more use water ballast to offset that mass and keep it alive. So there's a vertical yeah, verticaltical cylinder. Okay, there's single spar approaches where you literally you just put a floatation spar with the mast on it. They have

more tipping problems, but they're very easy to build. And then the most complex one, the one that again comes to the oilery industry, is the one called tension leg where you're actually putting anchors into the bottom under tension to hold the mouths in place, so they're quite rigid. The problem is that it's not good with tides because it's kind of set to its depth, so you think kind of a minimal range of tide. They'll limit cinemarias you can put it in and they don't fail well.

If one of those tension lines gives out for whatever reason, you're going to tip over. So part of this is start of figuring out what is the movement causes problems with generation. Right serge, especially when you lean into the wind, might actually speed up the turbine, but there there's dozens of test projects out there. They're not past the test phase, but they're real turbines generating real power, and they're learning

how these things work. They're still relatively expensive comparative, about four times the price of near shore or fixed bottom. Okay, but the price. You know, the only reason that nearshore is as cheap as it is today is because we've built so much of it and we know exactly what we're doing. While we're in the experimental phase, is going to stay expensive, but as it matures, it should cut the price substantially. No.

tie it in? You know, this is where the reservoir model came in, where the excess solar then was used to pump water back into the reservoir, presuming you have a setup that works out. Yeah. So it's sort of a site by side situation.

They need to do floating. They're also big on the oil platform stuff, right they know their way around it. They've done a lot of it. That's all that north sea work, and in fact one of their biggest projects right now is actually only providing power too deep sea oil rigs nearby as they develop and perfect the technology before they spend the money to send power all the way back home, because when you get that far off shore, transmitting the power back to the shore gets expensive and

they have to experiment. They're switching from using AC transmission back to shore to DC transmission factor shore, which is not really proven as well in deep water like this. The UK is also doing a lot, mostly because they've used They've filled up most of their places for fixed bottom development, they've allocated them out, so they're starting to do more in deeper water. You also see this happening

in France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Japan, China, Korea. The US does have a project called the Floating Offshore Wind Energy Shot, which is basically recognizing that that wind power is too expensive right now and they're trying to reduce the costs on it as part of the inflation production. Okay, all right. A section I hadn't talked about, you know, a couple of years, but sort of had a little resurgence, not big. Mostly experimental is wave power. Yeah, so wave power is

an immature technology. It's been experimented in many ways. The ocean is remarkedly good at destroying things. This is trying to utilize the motion from waves and tides. Sure, their capacity factors are terrible, well, single digits, like less than temper. That's mostly because they barely function. But there's a group off the coast of Oregon called the Pack Wave Energy Project that is repurposing some older wiring already in place, part of a deal with Oregon State University to create

sites to do experiments with wavepower. So part of the challenge if you want to build a wave power system is getting the onshore cabling in place and the instrumentation so forth. And so a couple of nautical miles off the coast of Newport, Oregon, they built out the site

with the university to allow for prototype experimentation. So multiple bays essentially areas a few one hundred yards across that have both power wiring and control wiring, so that different groups can come in and test one of their wave systems without having to do all that infrastructure. It's kind of brilliant. And these are typically turbines, right, They sometimes turbines sometimes just like a boy that pumps oil, right, or even compresses air. So you fationed this boy is

going up and down. Yeah, and it can build up pressure. Right. There's a couple of different techniques and the most common one in these days it is called a point observer absorber. So it's a sort of a linear process. The boy goes up, so it pull it creates some pressure and then as it comes down it pushes that pressure in and that you can turn into rotating motion to create power. Wow, there's been a you know, a zero was one of the ones I looked at that. They built a test

unit on Hawaii making about twenty kilowatts of energy. But you know the problem here is, yes, it could make power, but it costs more than what the power's worth. Very really hard to make these things cost effective, and they don't last. The Life Skill Project in Sweden they built out eleven of these point observers with the generations they got to put about two undred and sixty kilowats and then a huge storm came through and destroyed them all.

for twenty megawatts of power, which is true. They've got four five megawat conduits going to four bays, four tests berths. Nobody's making a mega wat of power with wave like that's just a ridiculously huge number. But I hope they get to that point five. But it's nice to see some experimentation going on here. It's just to recognize it. These are far away from commercial products. It's very difficult to operate in the ocean, and it's hard to get

efficient utilization, and it's not consistent. Right. Sure, the waves are bigger, they're smaller. You know, there's high tides, there's low tides, so you can learn how to do them, but it's hard to make advantages. When we talked about this before, I talked about most of the tidal power systems we know of are actually flood management tools right

that on the side also make electricity. I recently did a version of the Future of Energy talk in the Netherlands and we talk with who are flood management masters, and they're in the process of converting an existing flood management gait to install these little turbines one after the next. Be able to put forty of them in. But when they're done, it'll be ten megawats of power, like compared to a they're one, you know, the Netherlands one nuclear

power print that produces a thousand megawats of power. Right, It's just wave power is small and incremental, even harder than wind in that respect. Yeah.

Richard Campbell. And as a reminder, how about this as a reminder, if you don't want these messages, you can become a patron at Patreon dot dot nerocks dot com five bucks a month to get you an ad free feed, and that list of patrons is growing. So what's next? Mister Campbell got a question from Kyle Nunnery on the twitters. I believe it was when he's asking about solid state batteries,

and that just ties into power storage in general. Now we've heard about solid state batteries and then use for forever. It helps to try and to find what does it mean to be a solid state battery. This is the idea of having a solid electrolyte as opposed to a liquid or a gel or a lead acid battery uses lead as the cathode an anode, and the electrolyte is actually sulfuric acid. Right, don't get that stuff on your skin like it's bad.

talking about they got solid state batteries soon. Hyundai says they've got a pilot production for a solid state battery and a car for twenty twenty five. So that's supposed to be next year, but when you dig further, you go, oh, it's actually just a pilot. The mass p actually would be till twenty thirty. RUSSI finding companies that sort of manipulate the term solid state. There was recently you could buy on Amazon a little battery charger unit, you know,

the size of a toaster. It was supposedly a solid state battery, although it turned out yes, the electrolyte was solid, but there were other liquids that were in it. So, okay, how.

So on the storage side, residential power storage just ties back into the question of what to do with access solar is about the batteries. The good news is if you don't want to buy power wall, you don't want to buy Tesla, you don't have to. Lots of companies now are making very good whole house battery systems. I would look at Anchor and Ecoflow, but try Phase. There's a bunch like Get and Face pick one like. They've all got merit and they're compatible. They're comparable to what Tesla's doing.

grid scale batteries even possible. It's just that lithium I own batteries are exceptionally bad at that job. You know. Those Those batteries were designed to be light and power dense and quick acting, which is all features you want in a car, but isn't important for the grid. They also have a habit of exploding sometimes and they're costly. Right. So a spin off of some folks left Tesla to make grid scale batteries in a company called Form Energy.

Their battery uses an iron air to which is resually pioneered by NASA. Yes, you are storing energy in rust. They are about the tenth the price of lithium ion batteries. They are much heavier, they run hot, and they are large, all things that aren't a big deal if you're just building grid power. They also have a natural discharge cycle of one hundred hours, as opposed to lithium ions six hour discharge cycle. Wow, so you're talking running for days.

I've talked about them before off of Rust on Trust. Yeah, it's hilarious, isn't it. So I brought them up a couple of times this twenty twenty four They actually broke ground on a power storage facility in Minnesota for Great River Energy. This will be a one and a half megawat storage system and because it runs for one hundred hours, that means one hundred and fifty megawatt hours. That's real power, man, that's not trivial. And it is expected to be operational

in twenty twenty five. It was supposed to be done in twenty twenty three, but you know, everything takes longer. Sure, they are raising hundreds of millions, so they're not a little bit of money. They're making the kind of money that allows them to build bigger factory. So they've been built a larger factory in Virginia. They've got a new project going into Maine that is supposed to be eighty five megawatts, So from one point five in Minnesota to eighty five that is much one of the largest power

storage systems ever built. Very exciting.

So the idea is when you have excess energy right your solar or your wind or whatever power source you're using that's that you can't just shut off on demand is doing this thing. Then you heat up a substrate sand sand, graphite. I've also seen etwos thermal storage unit.

So these just you literally have a box full of sand with electrical heating elements in it and it'll get up to hundreds of degrees centigrade and then you have a set of pipes running through it that you either pump air or water through to heat that up, make steam to spin a turbine, or even just to provide heat.

The big one that's being built right now is in Finland Polar Night Energy, and it is a megawatt storing one hundred megawatt hour, so comparable to what we're talking about a Minnesota with form energy, Except this thing is just a silo right now. Admittedly it weighs a lot to store a mega wat they're actually using crushed soapstone,

which is a byproduct of a factory nearby. So they're taking waste, grinding it down into smaller pieces and piling it into a silo that's thirteen meters high and fifteen meters wide. Wow, that's the size of a house. But it stores a mega want of energy and can discharge you know, over days and days and days with about

a ninety percent efficiency. So you know, especially in some in Finland's place that far north, bright sunny winters, but they only you know, the days are short, so in those days you collect a lot of sort of power. You heat up this sand, and then you have power available to you in storage with you know, minimal moving parts, nothing being burned. It's just a big container of powdered soapstone.

You can take that agro waste and burn it to boil water and spend a turbine and make a little with electricity. They're small and they're localized. The technique you're talking about that has the minimum emissions is called pyrolysis.

Typically there's two weight approaches to it. You either use a digestion process where you use bacteria to change the material so it doesn't mean as much carbon dioxide, or you burn it a very high temperature so that the carbon is blown off the oxygen and you end up with graphic individuals they're not Pyrolysis is hot, and so it tends to use more energy than it emits. So it's it's one of the reasons these things haven't taken off.

They're just not that easy. The fuel matters and biomass tends to be irregular.

what are we talking about? Yeah, what does that imagine is cylinder about two meters across and six meters long, buried in the ground with a large metallic cylinder inside of it that you spin up with electricity and it has so much momentum that you can then tap that electricity back off of it again. Okay, just a spinning flywheel. This is one hundred and twenty of them. They're buried in the ground for a reason. When they come apart, they fly, so you keep them in the ground to

keep them safe. They don't start power for very long. They're good for stabilizing the grid, so if you're switching, you know solars coming down because it's night and you're powering up your other plants. As the power gets a little unstable, these flywheels really come into play. It's the largest in the world. The second largest, the one that it beat out was actually in Stevens Style in New York Beacon Power. It's a twenty megawat system. So these

are not that weird. They but they don't scale particularly well and they don't start power for long. They're great for the several minutes where you need to stabilize the grid. They're not designed to run for days. Got it. Power storage The largest in the world is pump tydro right, that's pumping water uphills so you can let it flow back downhill. Has about an eighty ninety percent efficiency ratio. Today there's about one hundred and twenty five gigawatts of

pumped hydro in the world. There was a great study I talked about last year from the Australian University about how how many pumped hydro sites exist in the world that could be built is the place different from a hydro electric site where you need to have flowing water at the top of a hill and you control it going down to the bottom of a hill, and that

makes power. This is I have flowing water at the bottom of a hill, right, so I put the reservoir at the top of the hill, pump the water up there, and bring it back down when I need it. There's lots more sites for that. There are about two hundred gigawatts of pump hydro indevelopment, so almost double what already exists. Wow. So we're catching on to different ways to store power. It's not just about batteries. There's thermal, there's gravity, lots

of choices for stormpower. Nice. All right, Let you wanted to talk about poweralysis, It is probably a good time to talk about hydrogen because hydrogen involves paralysis. Now, all right. You get a lot of noise about hydrogen these days, and there's a very good reason for it. It's good for the oil and gas industry. Why why does the oil

and gas industry like hydrogen. I see the writing on the wall that the pressure's on to burn less hydrocarbons, But they own all these pipelines and things, and hydrogen can be piped too, so instead of pumping natural gas through those pipes, you could be piping through hydrogen. Not that it's easy, hydrogen is remarkably good at escaping and it's not particularly efficient, but they still it's an option

for them to keep running the infrastructure. So when you hear about hydrogen economies, just remember that's because the oil and gas industry likes it the most, because it's got lots of problems. Now, it's not like we don't use hydrogen today. It's used in industrial processes. We don't use it for energy generation, we use it for industrial processes.

It's how you hydrogenate soybean oil. You need hydrogen, and so the mechanism that's used to make the majority of hydrogen today is called steam reformation, which is typically you take methane and you blast it to blow the carbon off the hydrogen. You store the hydrogen, you let the carbon go as carbon dioxides. So for every ton of hydrogen gas you make, it takes about six megawatt hours of electricity, and you produce a ton of hydrogen at about nine to twelve tons of carbon dioxide. It's a

messy process, but it works. And so again we will only make a certain amount of hydrogen today for industrial processes. But if we want to scale it up for the so called hydrogen economy, we need to get more efficient. That one is to get rid of the carbon dioxide. So if you up the power consumption four times to about twenty five megawatt hours, you can do methane pyrolysis. So now you're blowing the oxygen, the hydrogen and carbon apart, but you're not allowing oxygen to bind to it because

the energy levels are too high. So you get out a ton of hydrogen and about three tons of graphite, carbon powder and barry. If you want to secure the carbon that way, it's questioning or use the graphite like it's up to you. It just takes a lot of energy. Right. The one that everybody wants, the one everybody loves, the so called green hydrogen. The other steam reformation being gray and making it water. It's making from water electrolysis, electronity.

So this is you've seen these experiments in your in your science labs. Pretty easy. You can take a battery and put two leads in water and you'll get bubbles out. One of the bubbles will be hydrogen, the other one will be oxygen. Beautiful. To do electrolysis at scale to make a ton of hydrogen gas, you need about sixty megawatts megawatt hours of energy. Okay, so ten times what it costs to make an energy what it takes to make a ton of hydrogen with steam reformation. You'll also

make eight tons of auction. But nobody minds that, right, and so it's just too costly. Like here's the here's the other equation. So I have this hydrogen gas and I want to make electricity from it. So the most efficient way to make energy from hydrogen right now is in a fuel cell R right. We use these on the Space Shuttle. They're pretty expensive and finicky machines.

energy that it costs to get it from electrolysis. So this is a loser.

more efficient in every respect. Oh, there's another problem with hydrogen. It goes boom.

One of the areas where electrolysis kind of gets interesting here is when you get back to that excess solar thing or even excess wind, I mean, any of these power generation methods where they we can't control when they generate. They just generate. If you have access power, you could be doing electrollsy essentially for free, but you do have to store the hydrogen and move it and none of that is free. Mm so, but it's still understanding that

the electrolysis is the most expensive part. It just consumes a lot of energy. It's one of the possibilities.

Most geothermal power comes from geysers Iceland, for example. So you're looking for interface points in the earth where you have a wet system being heated by the rock underneath it. Yea. So places like Iceland, Indonesia, New Zealand, where they have quite a lot of volcanic activity, they've got these geyser basins think Yellowstone, Yeah right, so weird colored pools, occasional spouting guysers, that kind of thing. This stuff, by the way, all over New Zealand too. But they realize the energy

potential of it. Years ago, and so they drill into it, put pipes down to bring that hot water up, spin a turbine and then pump back down. It does destroy the guys are bed in the process. These systems are very fragile, and so as soon as you mess with them in any way, they go away. Like one would argue, they're more valuable as amazing tourist destinations than they are.

New Zealand destroyed a bunch of them. It's one of the reasons that Yellowstone is so heavily protected because the experience of any country trying to tap that power that way is it's an industrial site after that, and they do fail. Like you disrupt that water flow, sometimes that water goes away. I just go right into a volcano. You know, well, yeah, he's coming to Mount Saint Helens. So there's the traditional geothermal is what call a wet

rock model. So you already have voids in the rock that build up steam so that you can take that power and so forth. But we know there's lots of dry rock right that's very hot. It just doesn't have water in it right, right, And you can't really pump water into it because it's essentially in perma. So what's happened in the past few years, and again I've talked

about this before. The companies have gotten together using fracking techniques, so horizontal drilling combined with vertical drilling to make wet rock structures. So they use horizontal drilling and fracking to go into a dry rock bed. The fracking actually creates

the voids to give you a place to water. Then you have vertical pipes coming down on one side of that void to pump the water in, and vertical pipes on the other side to take that hot water back out and spinder and this we talked about this last year. Fervo in Nevada and Utah built test plants, megawatt sized power plants using this technique, and the big thing they pointed out was that they even had one of them

break right then. One of the things happens when you slam cold water down on hot rocks is those rocks move and the water stop flowing. But they were able to use the horizontal drilling method to re establish the bed. So it's got possibilities and they've raised a ton of money. In fact, Utah has now got this new project could call Operation gigawatt where they want to start scaling out geothermal and nuclear power to provide a farm or energy.

So they've licensed Fervo to build out a two gigawatt geothermal power plant in Utah that would be as much geothermal has has ever been built in the US. Wow. Like you're really talking about doubling it. Wow, And they are bringing the kind of money that's supposed to work. On a previous show, I mentioned microwave drilling. So traditional

drilling uses diamond headed tips and casements and mud. So you drill down in the ground and you're grinding up the rock and that rock gets in the ways you grind it up right, so you pump down a slurry mud that helps lift that rock out of the pipe so that you can keep drilling down. Eventually headwear is out. You got to back all the way out, use casements to stop the hole from classes. Like, drilling is a

complicated set of technologies. And don't even get me started on horizontal drilling where they actually turn corners and things with these casements. It's astonishing technology which the US leads the world. Well, we should talk about fracking before we wrap up here. I don't know if now it's the right time, but we should talk about it. Sure, I know that based on what I've learned in the last few years, mostly from talking to you, fracking kind of

reinvented the energy boom of the United States. The US is now export back one of the largest in the world.

The company is called Quay's Energy, where they had this high frequency microwave that would drill into the ground by melting the rock. Very cool, very science fiction, very demoable, not particularly practical. It's a tremendous amount of energy The idea here was that you vaporized the rock with microwaves and that rock would embed itself to become its own casement, which is a cool idea. It just doesn't work at depth. Then you need to pump more and more pressurized air

in as you're doing that, which takes more energy. It's problematic. So it's and then looking at their funding and what's been currently going on, I think everybody's figured out it's not going to go anywhere, So okay, it's not a thing. Matt Furder asked on one of the social media's about volcanic geo thermal, which hearkens back to the super Volcano show we did fifteen sixty four back in July twenty eighteen. Yeah, and I just said, why not just stick a pipe

into Mount Saint Helens to see what happened. This wouldn't be my first choice. It's kind of a messy place. Look all of the geo thermal it exists in the US, which is in California, Nevada, Utah is volcanic geothermal. Right, there's called errors is young immature volcano. Magma buds all over. That's what's heating up the water on the rock in the first place, relatively close to the surface. There was the reason I did that super volcano show is that I had read the paper from NASA about how to

defeat the Yellowstone supervolcano. Right that the Yellowstone super volcano has erupted every six hundred thousand years for the past two point four million years, and the last eruption was six hundred thousand years ago, which is yeah, twice the duration that humans have existed on the planet. What would we do if we knew it was going to happen. We're pretty good at understanding volcanic behavior now, So if they Yellowstone Caldera was to start rising, aka magma pressure

is building up, what could we do about that? Because that a volcano erupting a super volcano is hard to conceive of it's several kilometers across. Would literally drop ash in a swath going east all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, several hundred kilometers across, Like it would be bad. Yeah, And so the idea was put a series of pipes down around the cult ara, not in it, but near the hot rock, and pump the heat away by making electricity with it so that it never melts its way

through the crust. You just extract enough heat. Now would we win that battle? That's a good question, because the other side of this is you're going to make that plug stronger and stronger as you're stucking that heat away until it does blow even bigger. But you're also and you'd also destroy the park in the process. But if the choice is between destroying the country and destroying a park, I think the park's going to lose.

was more than sixty thousand years ago. Mount Taupo could easily create the equivalent of a nuclear winter, several years of darkness, plant death all over the world. But the ash fall even from a smaller version of that eruption would be several feet deep, a few hundred miles across, running from Wyoming to Boston right through Connecticut. That's a lot of economic destruction. And you know, who knows how wide that band would be. So there's a case for

could we do this now? A minutely, this was the Planetary Defense Group. The guys were also dealing with how did we stop asteroids the planet? So forth? So this was another project and very speculative, but not out of realms. You know, the old joke is the dinosaurs died out because they didn't have a space program, right, yes, right, right. If we knew that there was a possibility of that volcano, that super volcano erupting, would we want to try and

stop it? Is that feasible? I wouldn't say anybody other than Americans would even consider it and take it seriously, but it would be possible. Yeah, all right, what's next? I've talked about all that because it was the easy stuff. Because now we get to talk about the hard stuff. Okay, it's time to talk about nuclear. Nuclear. So again I've been doing talks on nuclear I've gotten a lot of

feedback from a lot of people. I've read deeper than ever I come to appreciate how complex the industry actually is, or at least understand more about it. You know, we talk about the nuclear industry being stagnant, but at the same time it kept improving in subtle ways like that

are not that obvious. Three Mile Island really stopped nuclear development in the US, and in Chernobyl that was seventy nine, and in Chernobyl, you know, arguably one of the large, one of a significant cause of the fall of the Soviet Union, and then Fukushima and twenty eleven, you know, that being said, this year a new nuclear power plant went online in Georgia and Waynesboro at the Vaugdeal site.

and twenty forty nine, respectively. So in two thousand and nine, the Volacteal group applied to add two more reactors, which is unusual in the US. It's always just been a pair of reactors in each site. Other parts of the world have more. They'll do four or eight. Chernobyl was four. It was a reactor for that blew up.

certified in two thousand and five. And the whole point here was that reactors had gotten really expensive to build, and so the eight one thousand design was to reduce costs. The big one was passive shutdown. The thing that caused all the problems in Fukushima when they lost the generators that the reactors needed water pumped through them all the time to stop from overheating. There were actually six reactors

in Fukushima. We never hear about five and six because they did have this passive shutdown capability, so it didn't matter y had no power to them. They cool down on their own. So the eight one thousands are about not only that they passively cool down so they're safe, but it means you don't need a lot of the

complexity in the reactor. They're talking about half as many safety valves and eighty percent less piping on the safety systems, a third fewer pumps, eighty five percent less control wiring and sensors, a smaller reactor building that reduces the amount of concrete used.

that I'm getting to here. They only paid for one. Oh no, they've paid for all four of them, and they've actually improved on design. They're mailing one point five and one point seven giga wat reck Wow Cool under license. So two thousand and nine, the estimate is fourteen billion

to build Unit three and four. By twenty twenty three, it was up to thirty four billion when the first Then when we unit three was done, we haven't got the budget yet for Unit four because it got it went up and it came online in April of this year, twenty twenty four. So bankrupted the construction company bankrupted Westinghouse geez right, like wow, they went into bankruptcy and recovered, right,

they got additional financing and so forth. But I want just to understand these this is quite a disaster, and the story of Ougdall is long. It has a lot to do with the fact that they're hadn't been any construction for twenty years, so a lot of the most knowledgeable people about how to build reactors and how to certify them. Those people didn't exist anymore, and so everything took longer, cost more. There were foolish mistakes and it just cost a fortune, and it doesn't have to be

that way. I would also now compare this to the Kashizaki Krawa reactors in Japan. These were advanced boiling water reactors, also generate three designs, where they started construction in nineteen ninety two and finished in ninety six, operational in four years, Like it is possible to build full size reactors in a reasonable length at time comparable to any other kind of large scale power plant. Wow, the Chinese didn't let in ten the first time they ever built AP one thousands,

and they still got it done. Now admitutedly the Chinese will cut corners, but that the Japanese can do it in four years, admittedly on a site that already had reactors on a design that they understood pretty well. Like, it's doable. It just has gotten little nuts out there. So that brings us to small modular reactors, which is the most common question. Andrew Clark, jen Artowski Peter Luiz piqued, all these folks are like, hey, tell us where we are at small reactors? So why why do we want

small reactors at all? And in fact, it's got to the point now where in some jurisdictions in Illinois they actually vetoed a pro nuclear bill because there's pro nuclear bills coming out these days. They vetoed the bill because it allowed for large reactors to be built, not just small, which is silly, like why do you care about the design? Like just you know, nuclear has got is having a

renaissance right now in a lot of ways. And I'll talk about more of the stuff that's going on, but yeah, it's California plast If you want to build a nuclear power plant in California has to be small, modular, even though none exists. Right, So why first question is the first reactors that we built back in the fifties and sixties were small. They were two hundred and three hundred megawatts. Why did we scale them up in the first place. Why didn't we just stay Well, the reason is that

it made them better. They were more thermally efficient, for you needed fewer people and machines per megawak produced. They were the same size as existing power plants generation. And so you get into the situation now where SMRs would become a nuclear engineering solution to a political and pr problem. Well, last time we talked about them.

increases costs. Actually, now, the idea of having a central place to build the reactors and move them around is a good one because it simply separate the operation of reactors from the refueling process. But that hasn't been built out yet, right, We're still doing testing on this. The point being the battle here is that small modular is going to cost more than per megawatt than conventional reactors of the other day, and insights where you need less power.

Not everybody needs a giga want of power. You couldn't put one of these plants anywhere in Africa, for example, because you can't use the power. Smaller reactors would make a lot of sense, but in a place where you need a lot of power, fewer, larger units do make sense if you manage them well and it takes fewer people to do so. So there's a case for if the main goal was to get as much nuclear online as quickly as possible, why wouldn't you go with the

known design. The modularity parts important, but couldn't we do more of that modularity with a conventional reactor design? Stop building them so Bespoke build more of them in components and factories, build and build them at scale. The fact that you you know, part of the problem with VAUG TELL three and four is there's only two of them, right, If you were building twenty, then there's then that you have a bigger team. Folks kind of know what they're doing.

They move from site to site like you can start to work at larger scale. Now that being said, I don't just want to poopoo on SMRs because they're definitely being built right China has has had the Linglong one, which is an ACP one hundred small reactor abou one hundred twenty five megawatts, started construction in twenty one. Their

pressure vessel went in in twenty three. They expect to be in operation in twenty six, so they're the furthest Along with this smaller design, the US has a demonstration reactor that technically qualifies as an SMR, but it's a little different than this is an oak Ridge. This is the Keros Hermes Low Power Demonstrator. It's not for making electricity. It's actually what they consider a generation for reactor as opposed to the EIGHTP one thousand, most the s martial

Generation three. This is next generation and this is fluorine salts. Ah. So I knew we were going to get to since the Oak Ridge experiments of the sixties, right, the thorium reactors in Staffe. Nobody in the US has built a thorium reactor or molten salt reactor of any kind. This is a molten salt reactor. So it's a small modular and molten salt and molten salt. Yeah, but again it's a demonstration reactor. It's just for testing. It's been licensed,

so it's under construction. It's going to become a thing that's exciting.

up and running in twenty twenty eight. They will probably miss that date because it is a first of a kind and so of course they're going to be problems. But yeah, SMRs are coming, but the problem here is they shouldn't be coming strictly the exclusion of everything else. Sure, you know there's a case for the Ape one thousand and that you could build those at scale and get

a lot more power. You know, as we're starting to have governments have these missions where it's like we need to bring thirty gigawatts of nuclear online in the US one of their mandates. Well, do you want to do that three hundred megawatts at a time or one point two gigawatts at a time? Right, right, depending on the location. So there's cases for both. Right, let's talk about thorium. Yeah,

Peter Lewis asked about those. Folks are always interested At Shanghai Institute had a test reactor put together in twenty twenty one. It's a two megawatt reactor, and last year they got the license a permit to build a ten megawatt tests reactor. That site got identified this year. Construction starts next year. So thorium reactors are on their way in China. Very cool, and again tell us what the

benefit of thorium is over lightwater. So we talked about this on the Thorium molt Salt Reactor Show because it's a combination of three things. It's using thorium instead of uranium, it's using molten salt instead of solid fuel, and it was supercritical carbon dioxide. I believe for the turbine technology because when you go molten salt your temperatures go way way out. They're much hotter, and so thorium is safer than uranium. Is that the idea or not really? What

thorium is five times more plentiful than uranium. Okay, but to use thorium in a reactor, you actually have to breed it into uranium. So you bombard it with a neutron, and that neutron sticks and then has a beta decay, so it becomes protectium. And then you which is AUM. Yes, it's a real thing. So thorium is atomic weight ninety so that means that has ninety protons and the number of protons tells you what element it is, right, So you hit it with a neutron. Neutron gets bored, turns

into a proton. I know, it's weird, but it's the thing baited again. So now it's protectinium atomic weight ninety one. Then it happens again, another pro neutron flips and it becomes ninety two, and that's your UM two thirty three. Okay, that's what you're running the reactor. Now you combine it with fluorine to make uranium and a fluoride and you've got you've got a liquid that is only it only becomes liquid at four degree centigrade, so it's hot, but

it doesn't boil until fifteen hundred degrecentigrade. So you have a huge working range, right, almost one thousand degrees. You work it as supposed to water, which is one hundred right, right, Sure, that big working range means you can deal with heat, and as it gets hotter, it expands, so it tends to slow down the reaction. It's moderated by graphite, so you don't there's no water involved any of this. Now. Admittedly,

urinium fluorides are dangerous, like this stuff is corrosive. It's toxic, but it turns to a solid as soon as it cools down. And it sounds like you can control it more, can you not? Well, it has some It definitely has some advantages. Okay, it's not. Nothing is simple, or we'd

all be doing it for sure. Right, while it's in the while it's in the graphite moderator, fission going on, right, So this is uranium atoms are being broken apart into different elements, and if it leaves the graphite, it cools down. So one of the passive safety systems is you have a salt plug at the bottom of the containment vessel, and if it gives two hot say have over a thousand degrees or so, that's all plug melts and the fluid runs out into containment vessels that aren't graphite, and

the reaction just stops. They had this system at Oakridge in the sixties when they're experimenting to do this, and they do that on the wheat so they didn't have to work on the weekends. They just melt the salt plug, let the fluid run out, the whole thing would cool down, and on Monday they would electrically heat the fluid back up till the material uptil was a fluid again and then pump it back in the reactor with a replaced salt plug and continue running. Yeah, that's pretty cool, pretty safe,

and it's got some strengths. It also you can run the reactor. You can keep the reactor running and add new fuel to it as opposed to having to shut a reactor down to change fuel rods. And it's there are chemical processes you can run in line to remove by products. So one of the issues you have with solid fuels is that gases are made from some of the transmutations like xenon and krypton, and they cracked the rods, and so eventually I have to stop using those rods.

You don't want to crumble. That would be bad, and so you take them out and you reprocess them, or in the case of the United States, you store them in polls them for decades because you stopped fuel reprocessing in the nineteen seventies. It's really kind to turn around. Well, that was the believe it or not, and it's relevant

the day we're recording this. That was the Carter versus Ford election, a Carter one on nuclear nonprofilation, and it was Ford that shut down fuel reprocessing in because it's how we got plutonium and they've never restarted it. Rest in peace Hunters yesterday, extraordinary man from this recording. So the gases on naturally bubble out of the fluorium the fluorine salts. Now that's a plus and a minus. One

is they're not in the way. The other is you've got to keep it contained, right, So your containment vessel is now accumulating these radioactive gases in the top of the vessel. But fluorine salts also don't need to be under pressure, so you're not running a high pressure vessel like you do are with water reactors, where they're pressurized

to have enough heat the heat exchanging. We're getting better at using these kinds of molten salts non radioactive versions because they store a lot of heat, so it's really a good way to move heat, make steam shpin turbines or even try other turbine technologies like supercritical cover docs afterly, so there's a lot we're getting some value out of

salts even without getting into the react radioactive versions. Relating to this is Copenhagen Atomics, which are out of Denmark, who are building a molten salt reactor that fits in a set of containers so it could be shipped by truck. Again, this sounds like science fiction, an unfundable and so forth, but they've actually raised enough money that they are now building a non They've built a pair of non fissionable reactor prototypes, so they've got no radioactive materials because Denmark

doesn't allow it. But they are using both nitrate in florian salts and they're heating up their reactor with electricity to show that their fluid systems work right to the point now where They expect the next year to scale up to a one megawatt thermal a non fisional prototype. Then they have to find a way to make it legal to start working with fissional materials, which is a problem in Denmark, or they'll get a license in another

country to do this. But they're basically proving out their models, so they are bending metal and building things around this. So again I'm combining two different technologies. Thorium is interesting in certain places because it's more plentiful in uranium, but there's lots of uranium were do not have any shortage uranium.

But India is very interested in thorium for the reactors that are developing their own because India has thorium in the ground there, they don't have uranium, so rather have to buy uranium from another country like Russia or Australia. If they can mature the thorium technology enough for themselves, that's their own indigenous power system. Yeah, the US has

that would be good for them. The US has lots of thorium, doesn't have an uranium, but Canada's got uranium and we're buddies, you know, at least for now for now, so that works out just fine. So, but the maturing the thorium fuel chain is not a trivial problem, and in the end you're only just the important thing to understand about armies. You make it into uranium. Making molten salt reactors is a different thing, and it's also valuable. You could run out any kind of uranium you want.

Two thirty three to thirty five, thirty eight is fine. You just got to mature all of the fuel processes. There's some material challenges for the toxicity of the fluorines, and you've got to do the extraction systems. But one of the things that Copenhagen Comics bushes on is this is a fuel wave burner. But the nature of molten salt reactors is that you can leave the actinides in the loop until they all break down and you run

a solid fuel and a light water reactor. Typically a given rod is going to be the reactor for six years, so it'll every two years you'll move it around, but after six years it's run as far as it can. But the vast majority of the uranium that went in that rod is still in there right, It's just contaminated with other things. And so if you're the French. You reprocess that fuel and take the uranium back out of

it and make new fuel runs. Right. This is also where you get the plutonium, and they've also learned to put the plcunium back in the fuel rod and burn that as well. In a molten salt reactor, you don't need to take them out and reprocess them. You reprocess them in line. This is the technology. It isn't mature, but this is one of the things you'd learned to

do with the molten salt reactor. So the whole time you're making electricity, you're also removing materials, and you're breaking down the actinides, the radioactives until there's virtually none left.

And so the promise is we don't have all this nuclear waste, that we have less nuclear waste, and we have short life a few hundred years versus tens of thousands of years, right, So I would see arguably we'd end up as soon as we get a molten salt reactor mature, we'll probably put it down beside our light water reactors and take it's their old fuel and use it up to make electricity and clean up they waste from the light water reactors.

with solid fuel. The water serves a few different purposes. One is that it is the moderator. It slows the neutrons down. Neutrons coming off of uranium are moving very giving a fraction of the speed of light, and when they're going that quick, they're hard to collide with, so having them run through water it slows them down to what they call thermal neutrons, so they have a higher impact rate. Although the upside about being fastest when you do hit things, you break them, and so more atoms

fission quicker. So the light rotter reactor fuel process. When uranium two thirty eight is hit with a thermal neutron, it keeps that neutron and it becomes a proton and that's how you make plutonium, right, Okay, But if you hit it with a fast neutron, you'll break it. You'll pull it apart of thecom variant and krypton or something. There's a bunch of different combinations it'll turn into. And so the using fast neutrons in a reactor has been

a key thing for a long time. And sodium is transparent to neutrons, so it's your ability to move heat around with liquid sodium, but it doesn't stole the neutrons around. So you have a very fast, running, very hot reactor using liquid sodium. Again, they have been around for a long time. The problem is it's liquid sodium. Yeah, And the problem with liquid sodium is that it volatile. It burns in the air and it explodes in water. Yeah okay, and it's not transparent, so when you want to look

in the reactor, you can't see anything. And so the process of actually cleaning out a reactor do maintenance on it, you have to get every bit of sodium up. It's not that easy to do. The fire problem is so prevalent that in Russia, where they still operate a couple of these sodium reactors, they just plan for the fires. It just happens. Yeah, it's a thing, regular sodium fires. Don't worry too much about that smoke. Don't breathe that

it's bad. Yeah, it's bad. Meantime, Natrium has gotten a license, so they've broke around in twenty twenty four. The reactor design is not approved, but the salt parts. So what they've done is they've separated the design into the radioactive parts the reactor parts, and they are going to use that molten sodium that's gotten hot from the reaction to heat up fluorine salts, which are then pumped to a tank that it then has the separate area with all

the power generation and so forth. So they have a license for that now. This is similar to what Copenhangan Atomics doing with their non fissioning reactor design. These guys are building all the non fission parts first. Because they're actually going to store a lot of that molten salt,

it allows them to have surge power. So the initial reactor design is only about three hundred and fifty megawatts, but they should be able to bump up to five hundred megawats for a few hours because they have enough hot molten salt stored that they can run that use that salt to flash steam more than the reactor can actually generate, so you can you now have a sort of power dynamic. This is an interesting thing to add to almost any power source.

because they heat up so much molten salt. The salt keeps the generators running through the night. So admittedly nuclear actors run twenty fours a day. That's their advantage. But this actually gives you some surge ability anyway. They've actually they've got enough money. Gates is kicked in over a billion. The Department Energy skicked in some more. The site's been selected. It's in Camera, which is in Wyoming, a place that has a uranium mines is actually an old coal mine

site that they're using. So it already has the power cables and stuff pulled in and it's already a space. Wow. The challenge with used making liquid sodium reactors is you need a different fuel. It's still uranium, but it's more highly enriched. It's what they call halo HALO fuel for high SA low enriched uranium, high enriched uranium, meaning stuff you use in bombs, normal solid fuel reactors and light

water reactors. They the fuel rods about three percent enriched, so it has three percent you two thirty five in it along with mostly you two thirty eight pitch blend. The raw uraniumy dig out of the ground is about zero point seven percent thirty five need more to thirty five because it's the fissionable product, right, It makes everything else work, and so you enrich it to get it up to three percent or up to five percent. Right,

And what's the percentage for a bomb, one hundred percent? Okay, So the halou can go up to about nineteen percent. And there's only so much enrichment capability in the world, right, It's part of the challenge. And we talk about enrichment. They talk about this thing called a separative work unit or how much it takes, how much uranium? How much? How many times can you take one hundred kilos uranium and make ten kilos of enriched uranium from it? Okay?

That a work unit is that basically measure take a hunred kilos making in ten kilos of five percent enrich the stuff you use in nuclear reactors. The largest sites would be from Russia. Rossotom makes about twenty seven million swus China's got about ten million. Irana, which is a conglomerate of the US, UK, Germany, France, Netherlands makes about

seven point five million. Rangco, which is also a conglomerate of the UK US Germany is eighteen million, so the West can make about twenty five million, SWU use Russia to a twenty seven million China ten million. In fact, when it comes to HALU, which is this highly enriched they want to use for natrium, only rostotom makes it right. So one of the challenges with them actually building the reactor side of this thing is you're supposed to buy

fuel from Russia. Yeah, so they're kind of going to need to mature HALU production in America if they're actually going to make a go of this. But you know, they've got the money, so they're going in with them. Sure. One more other kind of reactor design being built in the US is a company called x Energy in Texas and they are building a pebble bed reactor. Pebble bed. Yeah, we talked about these two case we did. So this depends on a fuel called Triso. So here's the interesting

idea behind a Triso fuel. Instead of building a rod coded in the zircanadum of enriched uranium. And when I build those rods, I have to put them into assemblies that then go inside of a pressurized tank with a big structure around it and so forth, they got to

manage the radiation. Right, But the trisop fuel, I make spheres that have granules uranium in them, but the moderator graphite is embedded in the fuel and then it's coated in silicon carbide, so it's essentially indestructible and on its own. You could hold one of these in your hand, right, you won't do anything. But if you get a bunch of them together, they neutron start to paying between them, and they heat up and they get really hot. And when they get too hot, they start to expand and

they slow themselves down. The reaction slows down because they get bigger, so they can't burn. They're structurally sound, they're self contained. It's pretty cool, right, it's interesting. They're safe. And so the idea would be you basically have a high temperature hopper that you put a bunch of these in. It gets really hot, You pump helium through that. It superheats the helium. You pump that helium out, flash steam, run a turbine, right, right, I remember this.

expensive to make and it's very hard to reprocess. Now the reason X Energy is doing this project is actually working closely with now Chemical because now has a big industrial plant in Texas right beside where they're going to build this reactor, and they want the heat for their industrial process, so not just electricity being generated, but it's a huge byproduct of a lot of heat. And right now the Dow plant they have to burn natural gas

to make that heat. So having a reactor that you can take both the heat and the energy off of is interesting. So they're helping to fund a bunch of that. But the Triso fuel needs to be matured. The fuel production is being built in Oakridge, Tennessee, so that's back the same location again.

look at those EIGHTP one thousands, they're certified for fifty years. Yeah, right, Like you could get them done and know you have power for quite some time. Right. The salt is worth maturing because it can deal with the waste and it's efficient. Yeah, So that's a research project separate from you dealing with the I need the power and I need it now, right, Okay, I meantime. Now you've got the Microsofts and the Amazons and the Googles all wanted to build these data centers.

So Microsoft now licensed three mile Island reactor one. Yep, hearn about that, right, And they're starting to fund more SMR development because the small reactor would actually make sense for data centers. Data centers don't want to giggle out of power. They want a few megawatts, so so Dominion smaller reactors would actually make sense for them.

you need to make it make sense. Yeah, but you're right. I've talked about a lot of different techniques. You know, the sodium reactor has the advantage of being a good fuel burner too, much like molten salt. It has more it's been built more times than molten salt reactors have, but also had had way more problems. But that's also you know, it's just they've never found a real nobody's run them for very long except the Russians who don't

care about the consequences. So, you know, fluorine salts. Because of the ability of reprocess fuel and you're actually talking about taking the waste products and using them, like turning them into using the product. That's a lot of straight to them, alt attractive to me. There's another tryso reactor in development for the US military. It's a product. It's called Project Pelee Pelea. I think it was a character from Hawaiian mythology. It was like the god of the volcano. Yeah, yeah,

volcano god or something. Yeah. Yeah. They got it's the military, So they got the funding. It's a half They got a half a billion dollars to build out a reactor that fits in four twenty foot containers, so shipable. One

of those containers would actually be the reactor. The rest is like pumps and generations and all that sort of stuff, using highly enriched fuel triso fuel, which the military is allowed to do so rich to nineteen percent I presume because it's the US military, they're going to figure how to make that fuel themselves and not buy it from the Russians. But it would be a high temperature gas reactor.

You think about we talked about this before, the amount of money that the US spent in Afghanistan shipping fuel from Pakistan and a continuous convoy of trucks to burn in generators to operate their bases. Small reactors like this would make a huge difference. I mean, so with space based power, but that would be more than half a billion dollops And so, I mean the upside to the US bringing PLA too into existence is it will make a market for triso fuel, which then opens the door

to more pebble by discussions as a reactor design. The fuel already exists, that makes it a little bit easier to deal with. That being said, you know, nineteen percent enriched geranium is got a proliferation risk. It's fine if the military control of it. I don't know if you allow commercial entities to control that fuel, right where five percent really doesn't have the same risks at all. Yeah, all right, a little bit on fusion. You know, I don't spend a lot of time on fusion these days

because I've really come to appreciate their research projects. They're a long way away from being real. That being said, my favorite fusion project of them all is Commonwealth Fusion. Okay, that's the one that's the one in Mit that they're trying to build a they're trying to build a Takamat reactor based on reb Co semiconductors. So these are the

high temperature cooled liquiditrogen superconductors. They've got enough funding, Like they went real quiet, and I said years ago when they went real quiet, its because they got enough money. They're just trying to build a thing. That's basically what's happened. They've scaled up their factory. They've had eight hundred people working on it. They react to their building. It's called Spark,

which is their test reactor. They're supposed to have first plasma in twenty twenty six, so they're well, they're reactor buildings in full assembly right now. There's been a little bit of an update. They're pretty quiet, they don't need to talk, but the destruction and I bring up because this year they also announced the site of their full scale reactor, the ARC Reactor, being in Virginia. Wow. So

I think it's a bit speculative. I don't like it when they say, hey, we know we're going to build a full scale reactor before you built the prototype, Like, you don't. You're so confident it's going to work, you're already picking sites. But I think that might be partially a funding thing.

as far as that's going to go. But it'll give us the education to build the next one.

I can think of many. Yeah, well that's that's at least two or three commercial light water reactors and several gigawatts of power that could be working in right now. Yeah, you know, there's a lot of things that can be done with that. So, I mean, I'm excited to see if Commonwealth Fusion gets there. They're getting closer, like the they are well funded, so they're not scrounging for money. That's why I don't hear from so.

these others are now really in stasis. They've got just enough money to keep limping along trying to find a bigger funder to go further. Okay, a few more questions. J Michaud asked about the aid of the art and residential lighting. Now, in some ways, I feel like LED lighting. Everybody's got it now, it's in home depot. It's not a big deal. It's normal put LED lights. And although they're AC based LED, and as you know, and we did a whole several shows on it, there's DC based LED,

which is much rarer and more efficient. It is more efficient, it's about it's about thirty, you know, sixty percent more efficient than AC based, but you have fewer products so I found two stacks. Lumin Cash is the one I used in Coquitlam back in the day and sold with the house. And they have a new generation of their product and I would use it again in a second. When we tear this place apart and do upgrades, I

will put lumin Cash in. It's been nice. And there's another company called clean Life with their ATX system spin on native led DC lighting is solar because solar naturally comes off at about forty eight bolts DC, and so all both lumin Cash and clean Life now makes systems where you can basically plug your solar directly into your lighting system. So that's interesting. No battery storage, no conversion, you're making DC power. You use it for your lights. That's really interesting.

They're just a really efficient way to make client cool. Martina gram our friend and fellow RD always asks me hard questions for the geek outs, and her question this year is how what our energy consumption trends like for

country to country, so are we getting better? And the answer, Martina, is that in the Western world, so US, Canada, EU, Australia and New Zealand, you're seeing that power consumption per capita going down, which is good because we have the highest power consumption per capita in the world, but our total consumption per person is decreasing. In the developing world, it is still increasing. That's the nanatary nature of industrialization. China has the most growth. They're still less than US

by half, but they are increasing. So when you say US, China as one country is less than the whole West. Their power consumption per capita is half the US is power presumption or the US which is the highest. But all you know, I don't think the spread between the US, Canada, Europe is that large. It's there, but it's not.

Land Man is a television show and the character involved was played by Billy Bob Thorne, and he went on this huge rant about there's nothing clean about alternative energy, right, you need all these trucks running diesel, and you need lubricants and so forth, like there's nothing clean about it. It's important to remember this is a television show. He was playing a character, and none of my set was

actually true. You know. His argument was that it you know, I'm sure you put up a wind turbine, but that you used made more carbon putting that up than it's ever going to save, which is patently untrue. The typical carbon payback, even for all the concrete castings and everything for a wind turbine is less than a year. The larger the turbine, the faster the payback, the big big ones three months so and then after that your net

negative on carbon production. And I'm not even accounting for the amount of say, concrete, you would pour to build a coal power plant. Right.

for the payback in carbon. In fact, when is the fastest payback almost always less than a year. A few months. Commercial solar is one to two years, from a carbon footprint perspective of payback, it does create a certain amount of CO two to make those panels and to put them up and to put them down on the ground is commercial solar, but it does pay back.

jet fuel. Well that's interesting. So if I take carbon that's already in the system, like take it out of the atmosphere is carbon dioxide, or take it from algae already in the system and make jet fuel from it, I'm not adding new carbon to the system as opposed to socking it from underground and refining into fuel adding new to the system. The problem is that today those zero carbon fuels are five times the price, right, and so we're going to have long range jet flight because

we are starting to see electric and commuter ranges. We're going to see long range jet flight. We're going to have to raise the price and reduce the cost of that fuel and meet it somewhere in the middle to get to carbon neutral in that it's a great question, and it's a it's a common one, but you know, you've got to understand the payload fraction of a large airliner in fuel, right, and airliners get more efficient as

to get the higher altube. But they're carrying so much fuel when they start, they can only fly so high. But today to increase efficiency, as they lose weight from burning net fuel, they actually raise their health to increase their efficiency. It's that significant, more than half of the mass of an aircraft when it takes off on all over reason I get that is fuel. Yeah. Is that a show? You know? I feel it. You'd be two hours. Yeah, feel better now that it's out of your brain. Yeah,

much better. Thank you, We all do as well. Thank you for sharing, Richard. It's always a pleasure. Awesome. All right, We'll see you next time on dot net Rocks.