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Matt had the chance to chat with Thomas Jam Pedersen from Copenhagen Atomics about their small modular thorium reactor that they’re bringing to the market. It’s an interesting conversation that covers everything from nuclear safety to why thorium may be a positive addition to the future of nuclear power.
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, Why Thorium is About to Change the World https://youtu.be/bz4aTO6M4Ho?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ
Matt had the chance to chat with Thomas Jam Pedersen from Copenhagen Atomics about their small modular thorium reactor that they’re bringing to the market. It’s an interesting conversation that covers everything from nuclear safety to why thorium may be a positive addition to the future of nuclear power.
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, Why Thorium is About to Change the World https://youtu.be/bz4aTO6M4Ho?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ
Follow us on X: @stilltbdfm @byseanferrell @mattferrell or @undecidedmf
Undecided with Matt Ferrell: https://www.youtube.com/undecidedmf
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What is Still To Be Determined?
Join Matt Ferrell from the YouTube Channel, Undecided, and his brother Sean Ferrell as they discuss electric vehicles, renewable energy, smart technologies, and how they impact our lives. Still TBD continues the conversation from the Undecided YouTube channel.
On today's episode of Still To Be Determined, we're talking about thorium reactors. Hi everybody. I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci-fi. I write some stuff for kids and I'm just generally curious about technology. Luckily for me, my brother is that Matt of Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives.
And the purpose of this podcast is usually to have a chat between Matt and me looking into the comments on his most recent videos and on our most recent podcast episodes, and seeing what you all had to say about those things. But today is a bit different, isn't it? Matt? Say yes. Yes it is. Sean, thank you.
Recently, Matt had a chance to sit down and chat with Thomas Jam Pederson from Copenhagen. He's part of Copenhagen Atomics, and he spoke to them about their small modular thorium reactors that they're bringing to the market. It's an interesting conversation that covers everything from nuclear safety to why thorium may be a positive addition to the future of nuclear power.
So on now to Matt's conversation with Mr. Pederson.
Hi, Thomas. Thank you so much for, uh, joining me today to talk about Copenhagen Atomics and what you guys are doing with thorium reactors. There's been a lot of movement here, and so I'm really excited to talk to you about it. Yeah. Thank you for having me.
Yeah. Could you, could we start just by like having you introduce yourself and who you are and how you ended up doing what you're doing right now?
Yes, correct. So, so I've spent my, my whole career in different types of cutting edge technology. I'm educated as an engineer, most of my education from Denmark, but I did check my master degree in the US in Texas actually.
Uh, and then I worked some years in Silicon Valley. A lot of my career was in mathematical modeling and, and software things related to that. Uh, and now we started this, uh, company 10 years ago, but I started already studying for amenity and nuclear engineering and so on for 15 years ago. So it's, it's been quite a long time.
Uh, and I've learned a lot in all these years. Uh, especially, for example, in chemistry. I, I was never, never really a good chem chemical engineer. I'm still not, but I'm now, I dont sort of understand it, but, uh, yeah, deep engineering background, but also a lot of other fields within in engineering and technology.
And now I'm the CEO of the company. We are four people who started Copenhagen Atomics 10 years ago. All with the technical background, engineering background and on, um, and, uh, we're trying to build these reactors that are hopefully going to make energy a lot, uh, lower cost than what we see today, uh, sometime in the future.
And it's not that far away, but we can talk about that.
What, what inspired the founding of Copenhagen Atomics?
I have a little bit of a history also in, in, uh, other energy, uh, things. I invested in wind, uh, companies. There's, there's some famous wind turbine companies in Denmark, so I invest in that. And then I also.
I thought about starting a, a energy storage company with a friend. We, we took some patents and looked at that. That never, uh, really took off, but, and, and I worked for the national, uh, grid operator and here in Denmark. So I was a little bit involved in energy. Uh, and then, uh, it was around 2009. We had the COP 15, COP 15 in Copenhagen.
And, and that led me to look into, you know, what kind of solution are there for the future, not for the next five or 10 years, but sort of for the next 100 years, you know, my, my kids and my grandkids and so on. Uh, and, uh, and I, I started looking at fusion and fission more than I had done before. Uh, and then I heard about this Thorium.
To be honest, I didn't believe in it in the beginning. I thought it was a hoax or something like, but, but then I started to look more into it and I went to a few conferences and, and started to educate myself in that topic. And I realized, uh. That there's something really exciting here. And, and one thing led to the other, I met the other founders, uh, and we started just by meeting up in bars and discussing, you know, what does this work?
You know, how does it work? Uh, you know, where could this take us in the future and how far is that future away? And so on. And then one thing led to another and we decided to start a company. And honestly, in the, the first year of the company. We were really nerdy. We were working in a garage and we're just trying to figure out, uh, you know, how does this even work?
Uh, and uh, and I was very lucky in, in meeting those, uh, three other founders because they had some of the skills that I didn't have at all, for example, in chemistry. So, yeah, so that's how we got started um.
That's, that's fantastic. So, so let's touch on that a little bit more. Like why, like of all the technologies, usually when you hear like.
There's so many companies that are doing small modular reactors, but you guys are different 'cause you're doing thorium or almost nobody else is. Why thorium? I think that would be the question that most people would be asking. Like, why, why thorium over something else?
Yeah. So I, I just wanna small modular reactors term that is used a lot right now in the media.
Yeah. And, uh, it, it's a very, uh. People use it in many different ways. There are certainly some of the reactors that call themselves small and modular that are, it's difficult. It's difficult to see how that is small or modular, but hey, that's what they like to use the word and, and to say, our reactor is definitely built from modules, but the, the main purpose of that word, or that phrase, small modular reactors, is that the classical large reactors has been really expensive and really slow to build.
And, and people are thinking maybe if we start building those reactors a little bit smaller again, maybe we can cut down the cost and the time it takes to build them. So that's the, it's basically the same technology as just going down the ladder again and making it smaller for most of the companies.
There are some advanced reactor companies that have other concepts that are also calling themselves small modular reactors. We tend to not use that term because it's, it's difficult to know what it means, but we can get back to that later. Then you, you say, what is the difference between thorium and sort of classical uranium reactors?
And it's, it's actually more complicated than that, than that, but I'll, I'll try to make the explanation simple. So all the reactors we have built until today, everywhere in the world, even the ones that have been suggested, all of those are solid fuel reactors. This means that the fuel is in fuel rods.
It's usually from enriched uranium. Most of them are enriched uranium. There are some, like in Canada, that runs on natural uranium sometimes, but the majority, like 90% of all the reactors in the world are solar fuel reactors with enriched uranium. And the other ones, like Candu I mentioned are natural uranium.
So not enriched, but, but still solid fuel, uh, bundles. And, uh, the problem with that is the, you can only, you can only burn a small amount of the fuel. So a few percent of the fuel, depending a little bit on the reactor design and so on. Then the rest of it becomes what they call waste in Yeah in sort of classical media.
Uh, yeah, but it's not really well waste. It's actually, there's still a lot of energy in that spent fuel, but, um, and our reactors can use that, but we can get back to that. But thorium, thorium is a little bit different than uranium because thorium by itself cannot generate a chain reaction. You first need to put it into a reactor where thorium undergoes the change, where it slowly converts over to something called Uranium233.
Which is not found in nature. So it's different from the other uranium fuel we are using today. And Uranium233 is a much better nuclear fuel than the other types of uranium. And, and therefore thorium reactors have some benefits. But I should also say that in the past, sort of in the, all the way back in the fifties and sixties and so on, uh, we, we have tried to put thorium in classical solid fuel reactors.
It doesn't really have any benefit there. I mean, there's some small benefits, but in economic terms, it's, it doesn't make it better. So it has been tried more than 10 times in different reactors around the world, and every time they concluded that it's not really worth the, uh, the effort, uh, and it doesn't, you know, it doesn't create cheaper energy or anything.
But, so in order to create cheap energy from thorium you must have what is called a molten salt reactor. And the reason why that is important is because that allows you to have a blanket, blanket is sort of a shell, an outer layer of thorium. And then in the center you have where the chain reaction is happening, where you're splitting either normal uranium or plutonium, or this new Uranium233 that you can, you can fission in the middle and the neutrons from that will then fly out in all directions and hit the blanket or the, or the, um, the outer shelf.
And then the thorium will get upgraded to uranium out there. And then chemically, you separate that out and you put it into the center of the reactor, the, the, the fuel salt in the middle. And then in this way, you can convert thorium to Uranium233 and generate energy. And when you do it like that in a molten salt reactor, you can get much higher, uh, efficiency.
So essentially the, the cost, uh, of energy in terms of fuel is a thousand times less expensive. So that means the, the fuel for thorium reactors made in this way becomes almost zero. I mean, a, a very, very low cost. Yeah. And, but of course the reactor is still expensive, so it's not like it becomes a thousand times, uh, lower cost for the energy in the end.
But we think we can make the energy free or four times, uh, low cost than traditional nuclear reactors. Or even small modular react is kind of the same.
Yeah, I, I've, I've read, I don't know if this is a hundred percent accurate, but I've read that the thorium that gets it's theoretically possible to convert, get more Uranium233 out of the thorium that you put in.
Yes. Is that Yes, correct. Okay.
So that, that is called a, a breeder reactor. And, um, yeah, it's essentially because, uh, every time you have a fission event, you, you have a, a heavy atom that splits. Depending on what it is, and specifically for this Uranium233, you get 2.35 neutrons if you create your reactor correctly.
Uh, and, and those 2.35 neutrons gives you a little bit more because you need one of those neutrons to split the next, uh, uranium atom in the chain reaction. And you need another, uh, atom or another u uh, neutron to upgrade your thorium to uranium. But then you have this point 35 extra. So you can generate a little bit more fuel than you, than you consume all the time.
So it's actually a, a reactor that creates more fuel than it consumes. So we talk about doubling time. How many years that it does it take for that reactor to create twice as much fissile fuel as when you started on day one. So then after that amount of time, you can start two reactors. And so for our reactors, this is.
I mean, in the very best case is 10 years, but I don't think we, we will reach that anytime soon. I think we should be really happy if we can make it 20 years. So that means every 20 years we can start twice as many reactors. So it's like, uh, yeah, it's like an exponential function, but of course it's not super fast when it's 20 years between the double.
Yeah.
You, you brought up the, the perception of nuclear waste. It's kinda like the big boogeyman. Yeah. Uh, how does the waste product coming out of a thorium reactor differ from what's coming out of a, a traditional reactor.
So the waste from reactors consist of a number of different things. Actually, I sent you some slides.
There was one slide in there, but I'll try to explain it. So, so in a classical light water reactor or a solid fuel reactor, you typically only burn a few percent of the fuel. And let's say 95% of the fuel, or maybe even more, is exactly the same uranium as what we dug out of the ground. So it hasn't changed at all since we mined it out of the ground.
Uh, but it's still called nuclear waste because, you know, now it's lumped together with some other stuff that is radioactive, but it's actually not very radioactive. And you can, you could even eat that without dying from it. You should not eat large quantities because it's a metal. But, but there's, there's actually a, a guy on, on YouTube who eats small, uh, small amount of it. And of course he didn't die from that. So that's the uranium that comes out of the ground. That is no problem at all. It's slightly radioactive, but no problem. But then the rest of it is basically two things. It's called fission products, which is all the uranium atom that has been split into two new atoms.
Those are quite radioactive, especially in the beginning, but it also, it's, it has a, a, a short half-life, so it dies away fairly quickly. Even after a hundred years, it's not very radioactive anymore. And already after 300 years, it's less radioactive than this, uh, uranium from nature that we talked about before.
So you could actually put it back in nature without any problems. So that was the fissile products. And then the, the last little bit is called transuranic. That means all the atoms above uranium in the periodic table. And of course, they don't exist in nature. Uh, those are manmade in reactors. And one of the ones that are a large percentage of that is plutonium. Uh, there are three different isotopes of plutonium and some other ones, neptunium and californium and and so on. And all of those things are, uh, much more radioactive and some of them have half lives of 10,000 years. And, and that means that we need to store it for a long time.
Uh, and that's sort of the, the main problem of the nuclear waste is this transuranic. But that's also what can be used to start other reactors. Currently, France is the only country in the world that does that. They, they extract some of this transuranic plutonium and use it for a type of fuel called MOX fuel in, in solid fuel reactors in France.
And this way they, they reuse part of this, but it could also be done in other countries. And there have been other countries who did this, what is called recycling or reuse of the fuel, but that has been stopped. The, the UK, the. Uh, let's say USA and Japan was doing that. I think also, um, Russia has been doing it a little bit, but, but I think in the future we will, we will use all the fuel in the world, all, all the spent fuel, uh, because we can reuse both the, the uranium, I talked about, the uranium as the same as in the ground, but that part of the uranium can be reused in Candu reactors like the ones they have in Canada, for example.
The other part, this transuranic, uh, can be re reused in our type of reactors and we can completely burn it away. Uh, but it takes many years, so more than 50 years, then it's slowly been converted into energy. Um, yeah, that's one of the things I hope that explains it. Otherwise it it's asked more.
It, it does.
It's like, that's one of the things I found fascinating about thorium reactors is that it can use the quote, nuclear waste from regular reactors and basically get rid of it to a certain extent. Yeah. Which is just fascinating.
And we can also take the whatever nuclear bombs that are not supposed to be used and, and use the material in there and burn that to efficient products.
Since you bring up nuclear weapons, there is something that's less another boogeyman. When talking about nuclear reactors, especially small modular reactors, there's a concern about those materials being stolen or reused for nuclear weapons. And I believe in thorium reactors, that's less of a concern because of how it's making the Uranium233.
And it's not like a good material for a weapon. Is is that the case? Yes, that's the case.
So thorium by itself, the, the material thorium cannot create a weapon. So thorium is no problem at all. If you're, if the worst terrorists steal a lot of it, they can't do anything with it. And by anyways, thorium is part of beach sand in many countries, so it's already there.
So, um, so that's a good thing that it's, it doesn't create any problems at all. But of course once you have a reactor, then you have all these neutrons and you can convert different atoms into other atoms. And different types of reactors are better or worse at creating plutonium, and it's usually plutonium.
That is the the main material they want to use for bombs. And depending on how you make your reactor, that you can make that more likely or less likely. And you also mentioned Uranium233, Uranium233 that I said was, didn't exist in nature, which is, uh, it's a very good material for running reactors, but because of the, it's mixed with something called Uranium232.
It's not good for bombs. It's not that it cannot be used at all for bombs. It's just a shitty bomb material. If you. If you, if you wanna make a bomb, you definitely want to go for the plutonium route. And that's also what all countries have done so far. Yeah. Those who couldn't get the plutonium, they try to make highly enriched Uranium235, because that's sort of the second best option, which is kind of shitty.
But if you can't get plutonium, that's your, your second choice. Right. So, so in this way, uh, thorium reactors help because it doesn't create any of those things. But I would say we do create a lot of neutrons. Uh, so. And that's the same with fusion reactors. I mean, fusion reactors also create a lot of neutrons, and as soon as you have neutrons, there's a risk that somebody can use those neutrons to make something else, uh, because that neutrons allow you to convert one material into another.
So it, it still, we still need proliferation safety around these type of reactors.
Well, let's get into the details about what Copenhagen Atomics is doing with your design. So you are going that small modular route. Could you kind of, what is it, shipping container sized? Yes. Correct. Yeah. Okay. So what are the advantages that you see for going this approach?
So the, the size we can come back to that, that's actually not the, the most important thing. Yeah. The most important thing is that with a thorium reactor, you can, you can create a system where you don't need to refuel with fertile, sorry, with fissile material at all. So all the reactors we've ever built, they need constant refueling with new fissile material, and that is very expensive. But once you get to some sort of reactor that can run without that, of course we still need to add thorium. And thorium is the fertile part of it. So, but we don't re refuel very often. We, we could only refuel like every 50 years if we wanted to.
Uh, but I think we are going to refuel maybe every 10 years or something. Just top it off a little bit every 10 years. That's sort of a big game changer when you can run reactors on fertile fuel because there's so much fertile fuel in the world. I mean, we will never run out of it. And, and this is the big game changer.
And of course it's, it's the dream for, from all nuclear engineers all the way back from the 1940s. If you could make a reactor that run on fertile, you know, that would be great. And there's been lots of people dreaming about it and thinking about it. And it, it's just, it's not only for thorium reactors, but now it seems that we will be able to do that within the next five years. So that's the big news here. But there has been lots of people dreaming about making what is called fast reactors also that could run on fertile fuel. And the fertile fuel in that case would be what is called depleted uranium, or Uranium238.
And there has been spend a lot of money trying to do that, but it just never worked out. Uh, and I don't think I will see any of those reactors closing the fuel cycle within, within my lifetime, especially not at a reasonable cost. And then, and then we have the fusion reactors. Fusion is the same. I know that some people say, oh, fusion run in water.
That's not true. Uh, most fusion reactors run on deuterium and tritium, uh, which is two different types of hydrogen. And, uh, deuterium you can find in seawater, but it's quite expensive to extract it so. Typically one kilogram of deuterium cost you like $400. Something in that, in that range. But the tritium, you also need, there's very little tritium on this planet.
Uh, there's barely enough for just one, uh, fusion reactor. We are already building several fusion reactors, so. They have to discuss between themselves, so who, who gets access to that tritium? But anyways, the, the, the tritium right now costs, so something like $30 million per kilogram. So it's quite expensive.
And of course in the long term, that doesn't work. So what, what fusion reactors need to do, they also need to have a blanket where they can breed tritium. And the way they do that is they put lithium six. Which is not very expensive. Lithium, well, so li natural lithium is like, uh, I don't know if you want a pure, maybe $200 per kilogram, but then once you convert natural lithium into your lithium six, maybe cost, uh, $5,000.
Who knows? It's not readily available right now, but probably something around that price. And, and then when you have lithium six in your blanket of your fusion reactor. Then you can convert that into tritium and hopefully someday in the distant future, we can get that breeding ratio above one, meaning that we create more tritium than the fusion reactor consumes.
But that is, uh, that's difficult. But no, let's hope, uh, and so, so therefore, um, therefore the, the Fast Reactor and the Thorium Molten Salt Reactor and sort of the, the future Fusion Reactor have this in common that they can run on what is called fertile fuel. Basically fuel that can be converted into real fuel.
That's really what we bring to the table in Copenhagen Atomics. We are probably gonna be the first reactor in human history that can do that trick efficiently and get the price down. But yeah, let's talk a little bit more about it because there's also a, a test reactor in China and there's some other people working with thorium.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I wanted to bring up the, the, the China thing. 'cause like they've been making some really interesting advances. They just did, they refueled a working reactor, like without stopping it. And, and there was a quote that I thought was really kind of funny from the head of the project that said, the US left its research publicly available, waiting for the right successor.
We are that successor. They're kind of coming out and like planting their flag saying they're gonna be the leader in thorium. What, what's your reaction to that kind of stuff?
Well, first of all, I, um, you know, I, I've been bitten by this thorium bug. I, I realized many years ago that, that thorium could actually.
Uh, okay. The way I look at it, in the last 100 years, we have made roughly a hundred times more energy production and that benefits a lot of people on this planet. Not all people, but almost like many billions of people. And I'm wondering like, what about the next 100 years? Are we going to make a hundred times more energy again or are we just gonna make two times more energy or five or 10 times more?
Of course, I hope that we can make 20 times more or 50 times more energy than what we are consuming today. I think that would benefit a lot of people around the world, and I think it's completely impossible to do that with fossil fuels, hydropower, wind, solar, it's gotta be some sort of nuclear and classical nuclear with light water reactors or soild fuel.
It's not gonna happen. You know, just do the math. It's completely out of the question. You know, maybe classical nuclear can help you double or triple, uh, global energy. I don't know. But, but if you, if you really want to have 10 or 20 or a hundred times more energy on this planet, then we need, uh, what is called breeder reactors or reactors, that one run on fertile refueling.
And this is exactly what we are developing. And, you know, it, it would be great if we are not the only ones. And I think the Chinese, I, I haven't spoken to them, but I think that's what they want to do. They also want to get to the states where you can run your reactor on a thorium fuel cycle. They're not quite there yet, but at least they have a molten salt reactor operating at least that what it seems.
I haven't seen the, the sort of the, the evidence, but, but I believe that they have a molten salt reactor operating and I do believe that they have added a little bit of thorium to the salt so that it's a mix of uranium salt and thorium salt circulating. And, and then of course eventually they will create a little bit of that energy from thorium.
As far as I know, they don't have the reactor with a blanket like we have. So they, they couldn't do this thing where you can run entirely on fertile fuel, but one step at a time. I mean, we don't even have the approval to start our reactor yet, so at least in that respect, they're further ahead than us.
So for, for, let's go to the, the, the breeding blanket design.
Like how close are you to actually having. Well, since you don't have permission to actually have a working reactor quite yet, like when do you expect to be able to kind of test that out to, to kind of prove out your concept of this breeding blanket design?
Yes. So, so we made a strategic choice, uh, five, six years ago that we wanted to have this thorium blanket on the very first test reactor and we made an agreement with Switzerland and a Swiss national lab called PSI or Paul Scheer Institut, uh, that we, we will run our first test reactor in Switzerland by 2027. And we are currently going through all the approval processes and trying to get the licenses needed to, to start our reactor in, uh, in Switzerland in 2027.
Uh, we currently have full scale reactors here at our facility in Copenhagen. But we are not allowed to start a chain reaction, but we can still heat them up with electricity and pump the salts around in the, in the fuel salt channel and the, the blanket channel and so on. So, so we are doing a lot of the testing that is needed before we are allowed to, to, uh, start the chain reaction.
Uh, and of course, once we start that reactor in 2027, we will generate a little bit of Uranium233 in the blanket, but we actually don't, in the very first version, we're not going to take that new uranium from the blanket and put it into the core. So it, it will not really create energy from thorium right away, but later on it will.
But some from the way, very first day, we do create Uranium233, but we just don't fission it. And, um, it's a little bit similar to what they're doing in, in China now.
So that kinda leads to the question I, one of the questions my team and I had, which was, how are you gonna get the uranium out of the reactor?
Like what's the process of doing that?
Yeah, so in, in all the attempts that have been made in the past, in history, people were doing sort of batch processing or off life, offline chemistry. Basically meaning that they would take the fuel out of the reactor and then take it to some other building and then do the reprocessing there and splitting the things.
Uh, but we will actually do it inside the reactor, so it it in our system. It happens every hour, every, you know, yeah. Once every hour we take a little bit, a few grams of, uh, this newly created Uranium233 from the blanket and transfer it into the fuel cell. And you can do that because it's a molten salt reactor, because now everything is liquids.
And when you have liquids, you can actually separate these things out, and it, it's a mix of chemistry and electrochemistry to, to do that. It's a completely autonomous system that runs inside the reactor while the reactor is operating.
This is an oversimplification of what your reactor is, but I've thought about it kinda like a battery.
It seems like when you get it, you put it on the facility where wherever it's gonna be, it runs for what, three, five years and then it might need to be changed out like, like that one gets taken away and a new one gets put in its place. Is is that the basic concept?
Yeah, we, we didn't follow up on that question in the beginning, but you're correct.
It's a, yeah, the, our reactors sort of roughly the same size as a 40 foot shipping container. It, it's not a standup container, it's a special nuclear version, but it has roughly that size. And, uh, and you're right that the, the, the reactor core and the pump and the heat exchanger, we cannot get that approved to run for 20, 50 years in the beginning.
We can only get a license to run for, I don't know, five years, something like that. Therefore every five years, we need to replace that whole box of metal. It's a lot of pipes and pumps and heat exchangers that needs to be, be replaced with a new one. And then the, the fuel salt and the heavy water that can be reused.
So, so the, the fuel salt and the heavy water is just the same being used over and over and over again. And that's also the expensive part, that, that's like two thirds of the cost is the fuel. Uh, and therefore. Uh, you keep on using that, but the reactor container is only licensed to run for five years and then you need to put in a new one.
But the great thing about that is that every five years you are able to upgrade your technology, whereas now with the classical nuclear reactors, they run for 50 or 60 years and it's still the old technology from back in whenever they were built. But in our case, we will keep on, you know, even after 50 years, it's still 5-year-old technology.
So that's sort of a plus in terms of keeping, keep on improving the efficiency of the system.
Is one of the reasons that you can't get it kinda like licensed longer than that time period because of how molten salt reactors are very corrosive. And so it's, it's difficult on parts. Is that part of the reason why you have to change those things out every five years or so?
Yeah, it's actually more the neutron damage, but, but in all honesty, it is a combination of neutrons and, and chemistry. If you look at light water reactors, we also take the fuel, fuel bundles out of those reactors every two or three years. And the cladding, meaning the, um, there's a metal rod and the uranium sits inside that metal rod.
And those metal rods also gets damaged after those two or three years. So actually already in classical reactors, the part of the reason why we change out the fuel every two or three years is because the cladding, uh, is at its limit of its lifetime. And of course if you're, you can change how much burn or how much neutron density you have, and then it can last maybe a little bit longer or a little bit shorter.
And in our case, the way we have constructed our reactor and the, and the neutron flux and so on, that gives us roughly five years of lifetime of those, uh, metal surfaces. And of course, because we have this, uh, fuel salt that is being pumped around, it also goes into the pump and it goes into the heat exchanger.
So those, uh, components also get irradiated with neutrons and that's why they also get damaged. So, you know, we would love to have a reactor that could run for 20 years. Yeah. And maybe eventually we will get there. I don't know. But right now let's focus on getting something up and running that has super low, uh, price of electricity, and then hopefully over the years we can keep on improving it.
But I, I doubt that we will ever be able to run it for 50 years because it's, it's really tough for the materials, uh, when they're hit by all those neutrons.
Can we transitioning to like kind of safety, 'cause like the public's gonna be very concerned about the safety issues. Uh, could you walk through it like how your passive safety system works in the reactor in case something does go wrong?
Of course, these molten reactors are quite different from, from light water reactors or solid fuel reactors in that the, the fuel is actually part of the liquid, it's part of the fuel salt. So in our case, we have pumps that pump the fuel from the, the dump tanks up through the reactor core and through the heat exchanger.
Uh, and then as soon as those pumps stop, so if you cut the electricity, all the liquids will drain down into the dump tanks by itself, simply by gravity. Uh, and then when it's in the dump tanks, there's passive decay heat removal. That means that the decay heat, which is there in all types of reactors, will be, uh, will go through the bottom of the tank and out into a, a passive decay system, a system that removes that heat.
And that's, that's one of the problems we see in light water reactors, is that possibility of meltdown. And we don't have that same possibility, but of course we still have to remove the decay heat, uh, and, but in our case, it's passive. Most of the reactors in the world today have an active system. Of course then people are afraid.
What happens if, if a pump breaks down or if the electricity goes missing? Or like what we saw in Japan with Fukushima, that the diesel generators doesn't start and so on. But, but we don't need that, and that's called walkaway safety. That means that if all the electricity is gone, if all the people run away, it's still safe.
It's safe, safe by itself because it has hazard decay heat, uh, heat removal. And the next very important thing is that it's not under pressure. Our, the whole system runs at atmospheric pressure, whereas the most of the solid fuel reactors has high pressure. So if somehow you breach that, that reactor containment, then it'll, all that steam will leak out and fly away.
Another concern that I know a lot of people would have is like the, the gamma radiation. There's concerns about that for like worker safety. Uh, how do, how would you address that for, uh, worker concern and the, the public concern about that kind of thing?
All nuclear reactors, including fusion, have lots of gamma rays and a little bit depending on your reactor construction and the number of layers of shielding and so on.
Uh, it has a different profile. In our case, even in order to get the reactor approved, we need a lot of shielding so that the, the radiation le levels on the outside of the building get, gets to a very low limit. Uh, and it's the same regulations as for traditional light water reactors. I mean, we, we have to follow the same, uh, levels of radiation and uh, and we just need very thick walls with steel and concrete and water and so on to, uh, to attenuate those gamma rays.
So it's, it's not very different from all the other reactors, including, yeah fusion.
I may be wrong about this, but didn't you, aren't you working on some kind of remote controlled like robot systems to help with maintenance? Um, so workers don't even have to do anything 'cause that's. It's too, it might be too dangerous.
Yeah, so what happens in most of the classical reactors is that they shut down, let's say every 18 months, and then a whole crew of workers go in there and they take off the lid and then replace the solid fuel with the cranes and stuff. And then their whole reactor is down for maybe a month or more when they do the refueling.
Uh, we don't want to do that in, you know, every five years when we have to replace that reactor box. We want, we want to be able to run all the react, all the other reactors in the same building. So typically we would put 25 reactor units in one building, uh, and then we want to be able to run all the other 24 while we are replacing one of them.
And it is possible to send people in there while the others are are running. But the amount of, uh, sort of health and safety that you have to, uh, work with, like the amount of documentation and the amount of people you have to hire to keep that process under control is just so expensive that when we look at that, we said, okay, by the time we have these reactors up and running, you can definitely get robots who can do that.
Either remote control with, uh, you know, with VR control or even autonomously. That can easily take out. So it's not, it's not really so much robots. It's more like remote control cranes and remote control forklifts. And I mean that, we already have that today in some factories. We even have, uh, autonomous forklifts that drive around in warehouses.
Uh, but in, in this case, because it's reactors, we are probably not gonna be allowed to make them completely autonomous, but we can run them with remote control. Some, some guys sitting in a control room. And, and this means that we don't have to send people into the building. And this means that we can save a lot of money on, on all this health and safety and, and yeah, it's just.
It's just to make things, uh, quicker and easier.
A couple of things I wanna talk about. It's like going back to the kind of like the development status that you're at. Um, there was a quote I read from you where you had said that you've completed kind of 95, the 95% of milestone one for, that's focused on like technology innovation.
That means there's 5% left to go. What, what is left in that 5% that you have to kind of go for your development?
When you wanna develop a reactor like this, first you have to sort of make the engineering and, and drawings and calculations and make everything work. So we've, we've done that part. The next big part is to get everything approved and licensed and, and get all the regulators to scrutinize every little detail and make sure that everything follow all the standards and so on.
And that's where we are right now. But the, the 5% that are missing from the first part, the, the, the reactor design and construction is that we need to run all of these both test systems, but also reactors for many, many hours in order to, to find all the errors. You know, when you develop hardware, software, it takes a long time to find all the bugs.
Yeah. And when you, if you te, if you test 10 systems, then you find some bugs. But then when you start to test a hundred systems, then you find some other bugs that didn't show up in the first smaller tests and that's where we are right now. We're testing hundreds of systems and we still find some issues that needs to be fixed.
And that's the last 5%. And as you know, what we say in engineering, the, the first 90% is easy, last 10%. And that's where we are with the sort of making everything more reliable and, and finding all the small issues that that needs to be fixed before we go to mass manufacturing. And that's quite expensive to find all of that and fix it.
Um, it's, it's all those edge cases that you just, you don't know they're there until you actually start kicking the tires and really putting it through its paces. Yes. We already kind of touched on this a little bit, but like, what's a realistic timeline for deploying commercial thorium reactors?
Like I said, we, we really focus on getting that first test reactor running in 2027.
We are also talking to some countries about deploying the first commercial reactors. There's a discussion of whether the, all the, the approvals and the licenses and all the, the findings from the first reactor in Switzerland can be reused in another country. Uh, and that is, it's, it's not easy to move, uh, a reactor approval and a reactor design from one country to another.
The next country always wants to scrutinize it again, and, and we are trying to talk to countries to see is there a country where this process is not going to take five or 10 years or whatever for, because it would be really unfortunate if it, it would take 10 years then to get the license for the commercial reactor.
Uh, and we haven't selected a country yet who's going to be the first one to run the commercial reactor. And there are definitely some countries who are forthcoming and, and want to find solution of how we can get this up and running fairly quickly. But I, I also have to admit that there are some countries who say, Nope, you have to start all over and, you know, and everything has to be written in our language or whatever.
Uh, so there's some countries that are more likely to be first candidates for commercial reactors than others, and that's our job to sort of find out where we can launch it. I think the, the best cases that we can free years after the test, so 2030 that we can start the first commercial reactor, maybe that's not going to be like full power right away.
So we will, we will start at maybe 30 megawatts and then slowly increase the, the, the power up. Because if, if you, if you want to start at a high power rating, then they also need more time to do all this approval. So, so a way to sort of, um, get it going early is to reduce the power a little bit and also reduce some of the, the, the timelines.
Like I said, we would like to run the reactor for five years, but maybe we only get it approved for two years and then after two years they look at it again and say, okay, that worked well. You get another two years. So that's, that's a way to, to get the approval going a little bit faster. And some countries are more accommodating for that than others.
Once you do get to that stage where you're, you're starting to roll these out, you're past that pilot phase, who do you think your first customers are gonna be? 'cause from all the research I've done, it looks like everybody's targeting, like in the small modular reactor space, are targeting data centers, things like that, as their first customers. Are are you gonna be doing the same thing?
That's a good question. You're correct that in the last, uh, two or three years, there's been a lot of frenzy around data centers. And it is true that it's a very fast growing sector right now. I mean, if you look at all the other sectors, uh, that needs electricity, households or whatever, those sectors are not growing very much in the western world.
Uh, but data centers is one of the new types of customers that are growing really quickly. And of course, uh. You know, yeah. It's easier to go for, for new types of customers than to try to outcompete somebody who's already selling coal fired power electricity to, to households. And also right now, these data centers, they, it's, it's difficult for them even to get other types of energy like gas, uh, gas turbines.
I heard that there are two or three years sort of a waiting list to get a gas turbine in the US so of course they're looking at, okay, you know, can I, can I get something else? That is more green or lower, lower price or um, or more reliable or, and we've definitely also looked at data centers and I, I do see that market growing a lot over the years, but I think a combination is the best thing for us.
We would want to have a customer that wants to buy part of the electricity le let's say 20% of the electricity at a high price. That could be a data center. We could also use 20% of the electricity for the grid. When the grid doesn't have enough electricity because the wind is not blowing or it's in the night or whatever.
And then in the, in the grid you have this intermittency and, and when there's a, sometimes the price for providing backup or Yeah, backup power for the grid can be very high, so Right. In some cases, you can easily get $200 per megawatt hour for being sort of the last, last resort for delivering power to the grid when there's not enough power.
And that would be really good because if we can sell 20% of our energy at a high price to the grid, for example, or data center, and then we sell 80% of the electricity to some consumer that just need very cheap and a lot of it, and they can allow you to turn it up and down, you know, whenever you're not selling to the other guys, I think that's the best combination for us.
And I think in that way we can get the price really far down for, for that customer who wants the low price? That could be customers who wants to make aluminum or ammonia or hydrogen or steel or something like that.
Well, speaking of cost, like when your technology hits its full potential, like how much do you think it could reduce energy costs compared to other options?
Our target, and we've said that even on our webpage, uh, that we want to get to $20 per megawatt hour for electricity. And that is a really tough, uh, challenge. And of course we'll not hit that right away, but I actually do think we can get that price sometimes in the 2030s, so yeah, before 2040. And of course, like I said in the beginning, it will be this combination where part of the, the prices for, I don't know, hydrogen and another more expensive part of it will be for data centers.
Uh, but eventually we will be able to sell all the electricity at $20 per megawatt. But I think that's gonna be after 2040. Um, but it, it is definitely a technology that can reduce the price, uh, because our fuel cost is, is, uh, hundreds of times lower than all the other reactors we have today. Um, and they're not very, they're not very big, so we don't need a lot of construction materials.
I mean, one of the most expensive things are these licenses and approvals, but I assume that once we have built more than a hundred of these reactors, then the price of all this licensing and approval will also come down. And then the. So the, the part of each unit that goes towards licensing will become smaller and smaller.
And therefore, I think this is definitely a technology that can bring the cost very far down. And I, I've also said that I think, you know, for the rest of my life, my life, we will be able to beat Fusion on price. In my mind, there's no way that Fusion can ever beat us in price, even if they reach some of these very hopeful goals that they have.
But I mean, I, I'm a, I like physics and I, I really like all this plasma physics, so I hope they keep on working on it. And I think we as humans can learn a lot from experimenting with plasma physics. But, uh, but I think there's. It's far away from being, being a low cost energy source for the whole world.
Is there anything we haven't touched on that you'd wanna touch on?
Uh, maybe one thing, because a lot of people who, who hear about Copenhagen Atomics and they see this, that we can deliver this, uh, box, like almost like a 40 foot shipping container with a reactor inside. And it does have all the reactor components inside.
So all the, all the radioactive components are inside that reactor. You don't need any extra systems for, for handing radioactive fuel or whatever. So that is a pretty smart thing. And, and then a lot of people contacted us and they say, oh, can I buy one from my, uh, factory or my, uh, my little city somewhere?
And yeah. And I, I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. Right now there's 31 countries in the whole world that has commercial nuclear power, and I do think before 2050, that number will grow to maybe 45 countries that has commercial nuclear power, even if we are very successful and build a lot of our units.
I still think the majority of the nuclear power will come from traditional big, uh, uranium gobbling reactors and, and those, all of those reactors are super expensive. They take a long time to build, they need armed guards. Uh, and, and I don't think the rules will change very fast. Even in some of those countries who are now want, want to build nuclear it, they seems that they're adapting the same type of rules as the existing 31 countries.
So I think it'll take a long time before it will be affordable to put one or two reactor units at each new site. I mean to today, uh, if you look at the countries who already have nuclear, most of them say that it takes three to five years to get a site license. That, that, that's a lot of work just to be allowed to put a nuclear reactor on that site.
And it, you know, the, the, the cost of that, it's so expensive that it would be much more than the price of the building and the reactor and the fuel. And therefore, I, I think really we need to put, we need to have large sites with many units in order to help pay for that licensing cost. Right. But of course, in the long term, when the rules change, and I do believe they will change before I die.
So I don't know, sometimes in the 2040s or later, I think the, the rules will start changing. And then I think we'll start to see smaller and smaller deployments with a couple of a hundred megawatts. But that's still quite a lot. So it's, it's not like a small factory, it's, that's a big factory, but Right.
Let's see.
I, I, I kind of hope you're wrong in that because it's like, it seems, it seems like a no brainer to me. Like as you start rolling these out and people start seeing how they work, how effective they are, how easy they are to deploy, I would expect that that barrier starts to get smaller fast, because.
We have a lot of needs, we have a lot of energy needs, and so it's like, I think people will start to reduce those barriers quickly. Okay. Um, I hope it's not, I hope it's not 2050. I hope you're right. I hope you're right. That would be great. Uh, yeah. One of the last questions I have for you, it's one I love asking all people like that are innovating and kind of pushing things forward like you are.
Do you have any words of advice for other people, young people that are looking to get into sustainable technologies or energy research like this? Like do you have any words of advice?
Yeah, yeah, I have, because I've been a, what do you call a maker or a tinkerer my whole life. And, uh, I think it's a wrong notion that you go to university, even if you go to the best universities, they don't teach you how to build stuff.
You have to learn that in a basement somewhere. And with some nerds in like these maker spaces, you have to go there. And if you don't have access to a makerspace, just start, you know, taking things apart and try to assemble them again. Watch a lot of YouTube videos about how things are made and how people figured out how to modify something.
That's how you learn about how things are built. You, you don't really learn that in a university, and, and unfortunately, many people think that, you know, that's how you learn about things. Of course, you learn something like you, you, you learn some tools in university and you learn how to do simulations and stuff, but it's not really until you start doing stuff yourself, with your own hands and with your friends.
In some basement you do 3D printing or welding or whatever it is you need to do. That's when you start learning about how things are made. And that's also when you start to understand, you know, how difficult it was for people to invent the television or the airplane or the transistor or these other things.
And unfortunate that, that there's only a small percentage of the population who like to do that. I usually say that it's less than 1% of of the population in any given country that have the skills to create a new product. It's actually quite difficult to create a new product and make it good enough so that you can actually sell it on the market and, you know, find customers and, uh, and we don't teach those skills.
It's something that you learn from, from other people in makerspaces and stuff. And, uh, I, I wish there were more of that. And if I had a lot of money, I would, I would give a lot of money to maker spaces and, and people in basements that are tinkering with stuff because that's actually how innovation happens.
So basically go out there and do something. Go out and build. Just go out and play. That's, I love that. Well, thanks again for taking the time to talk to me. I really appreciate it. Um, love what you guys are doing and I'm gonna be keeping a close eye on what you're doing and how the progress goes. 'cause this is very exciting stuff.
Cool.
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