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The Nuclear Investing Podcast features thoughtful, in-depth conversations about one of the most important pieces of the global energy mix: nuclear power.
Through interviews with leading industry leaders, investors, and policymakers, the show explores how nuclear energy is becoming central to the clean energy transition — and how investors are gearing up to support it.
Each episode gets to the root of how companies plan to build, finance, and deploy next-generation nuclear projects — and how they aim to create lasting value for investors and society.
The goal: to advance awareness and informed participation in the future of clean, reliable energy.
## The Nuclear Investing Podcast: Idaho National Lab Series
the obviously it's not a good look when you have an accident like that.
we talk about nuclear fuel.
Nuclear fuel really is the intersection between reactor technology and the fuel cycle that supports it.
yeah. So U.S. utility can currently by Russian Russian uranium.
But it's there's a clock ticking on that.
if you can generate energy, you can generate value. And when you constrain energy supply, you see economic
recession
Welcome back to
the Nuclear Investing Podcast. I'm Brennan Moore, your host in this episode is part of a special multi-part series we recorded on location at Idaho National Lab, the country's leading nuclear energy research lab, and the place where a lot of the most important work in advanced reactors and nuclear fuels is actually happening. Over the next few episodes, we'll be sitting down with leaders across INL on both the reactor side and the fuel side, getting into what they're building, why it matters, and where the industry is headed now.
Be sure to watch these on YouTube or Spotify. We filmed throughout the trip, including outside the famous dome and inside its old control room so you can see the work for yourself. Really excited to share this one. Hope you enjoy it!
welcome to another episode, the nuclear investing podcast. I'm your host, Brennan. More excited to be sitting here with Dan Walks to talk all things fuel. Dan, welcome to the show. Yeah. Glad to be here. Looking forward to the conversation. Where in the world do we start, man?
Yeah, it's a big field. We just talked for ten minutes sitting here before and realized we should probably be recording this. True. Let's start. Well, first of all, let's talk about what's happening this week briefly. Well, let me rewind. I'm sorry. Let me rewind. Give us a little bit about your background because it does help establish the credibility how much time you've been at the lab and also all your experience.
So let's start there. Yeah, I came to the lab here in the mid 1990s and the darkest days of nuclear energy and, you know, stuck around, got involved in nuclear fuels. And I really believe there was a future. And at this point, I'm currently the national technical director for the Advanced Fuels campaign. And so we manage the whole R&D portfolio for the Department of Energy in that area.
Why were the 90s, the Dark Age? Yeah, so we were you know, we talked a lot here about EB two and the Integral Fast Reactor program in 19 right there. Right. Yeah, it's right there. 19 the early 1990s, when President Clinton came into office and in his speech was to close the close that facility. Interesting. And so, you know, at that time, I came here as a summer student, and we were really focused on shutting down the facilities here and decommissioning everything and cleaning up the wastes and, and those things.
And so we thought there was some real seeds of opportunity that continued to grow. And they hired some interns like myself. And we were here when the Renaissance arrived. So, yeah, it's pretty exciting to see that start to come close to full circle. So yeah, we were talking earlier how it really feels like a new era of nuclear, but what has it been like?
So you've been 30 years. That's almost 30 years. Origin of your time here? I mean, how has that evolved from, I guess, first of all, how did you stick it out, like in the Dark Age? Were you did you come to Idaho and fall in love with Idaho? Did you fall in love with your work at the lab?
Was it all the above? It's a mixture of both, right? Idaho. One is a wonderful place to live. It is beautiful. It's incredible. I got to fish on the snake River side sidebar. But I got to fish on the snake River, which was amazing. Yeah, it's a really a pretty place. And there's just, you know, everything interesting is within a couple of hours away.
It's pretty, pretty great if you're into the outdoors. But it's also true of the work. The work is really interesting. You know, there's only so many places where an engineer gets to be creative on the scale that you can do here. You know, nuclear is a relatively young science. And so every time you do something, you're discovering something new.
And had some really amazing mentors here, some people that really did some terrific things when they when in the heydays of nuclear in the 70s and 80s and early 90s that, you know, you get to sit at the feet of and really learn some wonderful things from. So it's been a great arc. It's been really, really fun to get where we are and see the growth and and play play a role in that.
Yeah. Have you felt excitement like you feel right now in the energy, in the industry, in nuclear in the last 30 years? Is this the peak or nothing like what we're seeing today? I think it's it's really a unique situation. We felt like we were pulling on the, on the rope for a long time, trying to get people interested, and now just keeping up as a tremendous challenge.
It's really yeah. You know, we've been, you know, praying for this moment for a long time. And here it is. Right. So you know the big anxiety is how do we deliver on it. What's the what's the that opportunity look like. Let's talk I want to I have a background. I spent over ten years in Öland gas. So I always find myself I always find myself relating things to what I understand.
Okay. But my understanding is there was this tease of a new nuclear era in the early 2000, before hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling really changed our domestic wool and gas supply, and natural gas prices really made a run up. You know, at one point we were looking at importing natural gas, right, because natural gas domestically wasn't so abundant and it was expensive.
And then when the fracking era unleashed all this new natural gas, we reversed those terminals and decided we're going to export this stuff because suddenly we have a lot. But nuclear was making a comeback at that time. And then you had two things happen. My understanding was you had the unlocking of all this domestic natural gas supply. So natural gas prices plummeted, which meant that the alternative of net gas was cheaper.
But she also had Fukushima happen in 2011. Right. So living through that like curious to get your your thoughts and takeaway. You know, I think
impacts, right, when you don't know what you've got until it's gone.
And you see people around the world that scaled back on nuclear, and it takes a few years to really see the consequences of that decision. You look at where Japan was at and is at and the, you know, shortages of energy supply and the constraints it has on economic growth. We're seeing that in Europe, in Germany, Germany particular.
Right. I mean, even Belgium has decided to just recently decided they're going to keep their reactors online and nationalize them and make sure they protect them, because, you know, energy is economy, right? If you
if you can generate energy, you can generate value.
And when you constrain energy supply, you see economic
recession and and closed down.
So we're seeing some of those impacts. So I think you know Fukushima we learned a lot from that. I think it's not something you ever want to see again, but it tells you what role nuclear plays in your overall system. And then pairing that with the relative inexpensive ness of of gas and oversupply. Yeah. So you get this big constraint that's that, you know, swung things for a while.
But energy demand has continued to grow. And meeting that demand has been the challenge that's driving what we're seeing in nuclear space right now, because the plants that have been operating in the US continue to operate. They continue to generate a lot of electricity. We're looking at ways to increase that by, you know, five, ten, 20, 30% out of the existing fleet, but just saturate that relatively quickly.
And we're going to need to build new facilities that we're looking at gigawatt scale generation capacity. And there's really only one effective way to do that. And that's going to be nuclear. So you I'm I'm a proponent of all the above. I think there's a role for all these different tools to play to to play in our energy economy.
But nuclear is going to be the foundation, I think, in the future. People are seeing that. Yeah, there aren't many options for baseload. I mean, the quality of power. Most people, you know, you turn the lights on in your house. Yep. You don't care where it comes from. Yeah. You don't, you don't make no difference. You don't know.
And if it like flickers or something it not such a big deal. Yep. Whereas the data center guys I mean they need the highest quality, purest form of electricity. That's how I frame it. And nat gas is. I mean, you really have three options outside of hydro. You all are fortunate in Idaho to have a bunch of hydro, but you can't scale it, right?
It's pretty much scaled out. Yeah, exactly. Tapped. And the geothermal guys like I think a lot of good works being done there as well. But again, like everywhere you go it's a little bit different geologically and it's hard to scale as well. So you really have three options. It's coal, which I mean in the Western world. Are we going to start building new coal plants?
I think that's highly unlikely. Probably not. People talk about political support. Yeah, yeah probably not. Not gas, which is great. Like we're fortunate to have this abundant supply but also not the most agreeable bipartisan topic. Right. And it's got other value. I think there's other things you can use it for that maybe are more useful than than electricity generation.
Yeah, a lot of use cases. Also it's a gas and it's you can't just you can't just put a gas in a, a barge or in a truck and move it around the country without bringing it down to a really low temperature and moving it. So we're fortunate to have this robust pipeline network. But and then lastly there's nuclear, which there's there's a lot of there's a lot of uranium in the world.
There is not the not the most. We need a lot more capacity to convert it in enrichment, which I guess this is a good bridge to what we came here to talk about in the first place. On the fuel side. Yeah, I think right. It's people think of you see this probably in the oil and gas space. Do they think you pump oil out and then you put it in your car?
Yeah. There's a lot of things that go on between taking it out of the ground and turning it into a useful product. And uranium is like that, too, right? So you're going to mine the uranium, you've got to mill it, you got to convert it to gas, and you've got to enrich it, and then you've got to convert it back to, you know, uranium oxide form that you can then turn into fuel and then fuel itself as a technology all of its own.
It's just a component in that technology. And so there's a lot of pieces in that supply chain that are, you know, under under stress in order to meet the demand. Yeah. And, you know, we mix in just the basic processes of acquiring the material and doing the work, but then you blend it in with geopolitics. Right. So uranium comes from a lot of places.
It's all of these processes that we're talking about were developed by nuclear nations. And so there are friendly nuclear nations and unfriendly nuclear nations. And you know, how do you how do you handle that supply chain to make it as resilient as possible and understanding the the security issues that come with, you know, having control over that, that, that, that supply chain.
So it's really an interesting space that I think there's been, you know, as people imagined a sun setting of nuclear. They didn't worry about it too much. But I think people are pretty aware of it now. We're starting to see that come back to the the forefront of our thinking. And when we talk about nuclear and energy in general.
Yeah, the bottlenecks on the fuel cycle side are really interesting because it's generally agreeable. There's no shortage of uranium like uranium is in the ocean. Uranium is in the ground like we can find it. The expertise is there. You need a lot of capital and you need to you need to plan that capital over a lot of time.
But there's a lot of uranium. But then we we have this big bottleneck around conversion enrichment. And a lot of it dates back. I want to talk about it a little bit. Your view of the of the rationale behind that, I'm sure it's political and I'm sure it's also economic at the same time. A lot of it dates back to the Cold War, right?
Yeah, absolutely. There's all this spillover supply, and then we more or less got addicted to this cheap fuel. Right? Correct. Like, tell us a little bit about the history of that. Yeah. I think that, you know, obviously the beginning of nuclear there was we were enriching to support the, you know, the weapons complex. And you know, what you need to do for a commercial irradiation is a long ways from what you do for, for weapons.
But that infrastructure was translated into the commercial industry to, to make products for civilian use. And it's primarily happening in the big nuclear countries in US, France, Russia, Japan, some of these places that, you know, had functioning commercial nuclear industries. So that was moving along and supporting what the domestic needs were. But the collapse of the Soviet Union, you know, one of the things we wanted to do is make sure we got rid of the uranium that was sitting in storage there, and that became available to to us in the West.
And it was a cheap source of useful material. And so, you see degradation of the domestic supply chain because we didn't need it. It wasn't being used to its full capacity. And that's a natural process. But we're seeing that shift now where we need actual domestic capability or capabilities that are attached to our most reliable partners. And you see a scramble across the world to set those those up right now in front of us, happening in real time.
It's interesting, though, because if you break down the fuel cycle, the countries that are producing the uranium, let's just call it raw uranium, it's it's not there's some overlap, but all those same countries aren't necessarily the leaders in converting their uranium, because there's only my understanding, like five countries in the world really with with material infrastructure to convert uranium.
And those aren't necessarily the same countries that are that are increasing the uranium and they're using it. So it's like, why is that? It's I mean, are we are we purchasing? You get through all three steps of those and we're purchasing the enriched uranium or the uranium that's been converted back to be used in fuel fabrication. Is that what we're purchasing from Russia or are we in purchasing.
Are we purchasing conversion? Are we purchasing the conversion piece from Russia like it's a combination? I think, you know, we're you know, we're are the big mines right there in and Kazakhstan, Australia and Canada. Right. And so that materials mind and it goes to somebody to do the conversion to clean it up, turn it into radium hexafluoride, which then gets fed into the to the enrichment change to the that are happening in those same places.
And so yeah. So you'll mine it in Kazakhstan, send it to Russia. And then we'll buy enriched uranium in this uranium hexafluoride gas from them. How do you buy though. Sorry but can you is it at at room temperature. Is it a liquid or something. Because I think of a gas I think it's hard to transfer. It's the same.
It's a liquefied gas. Just like okay. Just like you would see with just like an a propane tank. Yep. Okay. Exactly. Yeah. That's about the that's about the size of these things. Maybe they're okay. You know, 50 gallon propane tank. Gotcha. So if you go to a fuel fabrication facility, like recently up in Richland, Washington, at the plant, they've got a bay out front to covert Bay where they've got a couple hundred of these canisters.
Gotcha. But they, you know, bring out and feed in and convert into reactor fuel. Gotcha. It's kind of how that gets transferred around. So you convert it. You can ship it in these big propane tanks and then you got enrich it. No, it's already enriched. It's already enriched. Yeah. The first step is to convert it to the gas.
Yeah. Then they put the gas into the into the enriching machines, the the centrifuges, the centrifuges. And then as it's enriched, appeals back out into that gas again, and then you liquefied into the transportation containers. Gotcha. And then that's what gets gets shipped around. And that's what we're we've been addicted to a really low cost from Russia, really cheap.
It's really cheap and easy to get from them. And you think it will continue to be. No, I do not I think I think it'll be cheap as long as it's convenient for people to sell it to us. Cheap, and as long as it's not bad for them to sell it. Yeah, exactly. So there's a
yeah. So U.S. utility can currently by Russian Russian uranium.
But it's there's a clock ticking on that. So the you know the government has decided that that's not a sustainable path. And we need to create the signals to, you know,
retrofit back in our domestic capabilities. And there's a bunch of companies that are working aggressively to do that. Is it 2028? I think it's 2020. You have to get to the chief uranium.
Exactly. And I you know, and so when you look at the cost of nuclear energy generation, fuel cost is actually not a huge chunk of that. Right. So if we see increases in uranium cost, just raw uranium cost, it's not going to you're not going to see that on the meter. Yeah. You know you'll see it in some of the bottom lines that these these generators.
But it's not a massive cost like 5% or something. Yeah. So it's so you'll maybe if you, if you domesticated if it's double the price, you're still only talking 5% or 10%. Right. So it's it is something that we can do and stability stabilize our, our supply chains and the security without a massive cost. But that cost is going to come back down as you as you get set up for over time.
Where do you think the biggest bottleneck is right now? Because you have you have new companies being started and you have companies that are few years in, and then you have companies that have been doing it for a long time, and you really need all of them, right? There's reprocessing companies and there's conversion in Richmond companies, new mining companies, all the things.
But what do you think there's the biggest bottleneck. So that's the biggest challenge is time right. So it takes time to construct these facilities. It takes time to license the facilities. And you know when you sign a uranium contract, it's not, you know, hey, I'm not buying more uranium every six months. You're buying a multiyear commitment. So so there's time for those contracts to expire and then go out and re you know, reshape around to see who's got material, who's in a position to supply it.
And so those timelines getting all that stuff to fit together I think is the biggest challenge. And so to make that there's always inefficiencies in that at the beginning. And that's really why you're seeing federal money being injected into the ecosystem to kind of bridge those start up at times. And that activation energy to make sure that there's, you know, ways to offset the inefficiencies and costs for, for setup of something new like that.
Well, the chicken or the egg issues with everything that's new, especially because it's, hey, I'm going to go build this thing and to build this thing, I need to raise money and to raise money, I need a contract or a partner or a story. And so, you know, a lot of companies have said, hey, we have partnership with the Doe.
We have a site at the Doe. Now, maybe the deal is not giving us funding. Maybe they are. You know, you've seen significant funding for the enrichment guys, but it's you really need a contract partner. But then the big utilities, pretty risk averse guys are about as risk averse as you can get. Mean, they're not going to say, yeah, I'll buy this thing from you, that there's very little capacity to do in the country today, but you are going to do it in a record time.
You know, it's challenging. Yeah. And I'm going to let go of the contracts I have in a very competitive market. Right. So, you know, a lot of people want that uranium. And so you want to you want to make sure that you have stable supply. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's a big deal. That's a really big deal. The Field of Dreams build it and they will come comes up a lot.
Because if you have the financial backing, if you have the financial wherewithal, which most people don't just have extra money. Yeah, you you probably just build it and the demand will be there. Yeah. I think that's true. I think in the end that's that's like the likely outcome. Yeah. And you know, and you look back to some of the early days of nuclear and this is true for lots of industries when, you know, Admiral Rickover was launching the nuclear navy, he needed a specific zirconium alloy that's really unique to to nuclear applications.
So he didn't buy how much he needed, he bought it ten times as much as he needed, because he knew he needed to stimulate the industry to be be there when he needed it to scale up and start building not just a demonstration reactor, but, you know, a dozen actual submarines to put out into the fleet. And so that that really is the role, I think, a government in a lot of these cases and, and is one of the things that really shocked me is we've come into this phase, venture capital and folks that are really getting involved in, in seeing the future of this interesting position themselves to inject resources and see it move
fast. Yeah. So we've I think that's one of the unique things that we're seeing right now is the combination of these two things and, and how it's going to play out. It's going to be interesting how how those things all fit together. Well. The VC guys like to talk about Thames, the total addressable market okay. And that the Tam for nuclear, whether it's fuel or the reactor guys or just nuclear has ballooned in the last really three years.
It seems like I mean you had the AAP. So the advanced reactors have been on the deals radar for a while, right. You had the DP Awards that went out in 2020, but no one most people don't even know what that means. Yeah. That's true. There's been a lot of PR and hype around the the pilot program, which is great, but several of these companies have been working on this for a while.
Yeah. Yeah. They don't I mean, you see things come up overnight, company, new companies popping up. But some of those companies, they've been working on this for a long time. Before it was cool. They were doing some of these things. And you know terror power is a great example, right. They they've been around here for at least ten, 15 years.
Wow. Yeah. Investing in their technology and working with us on things and and yeah that, you know, that really shows in some of the maturity of some of the things that they're doing. And there's a number of companies that are kind of in that family. Yeah. And so, so yeah, it's I think, I think it's it's for real.
There's real things out there that are going to work. Yeah. Well, we're going on about a year anniversary of the executive orders. Yeah. Which really just like blew a whole new life into the space. Right. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's been a real interesting stimulus. Right. It's it's done so many things with the, I guess the bureaucratic pieces of, of, of what it takes to actually deploy and demonstrate something.
You know, we've seen some meaningful changes in the way the regulatory community sees themselves. You know, they still recognize that there are requirements to be met, that they, you know, we have to do certain things X, y, z have to be met. But the pathways to meeting those have been evolving, and a willingness to think about the opportunity that they that they need to help create space for.
So I think that's been a huge opening up of what's possible. But also, I think in the way we're thinking at the national laboratories, I think we've been stewards of the technology and scientists for a long time. But this transition back into an engineering role to to helping people actually deploy these, these ideas, it's been quite refreshing and quite different.
Yeah. So well, the EOS hit on fuel as well, having our own domestic fuel supply. So let's talk about fuel now. I think we were going to talk about fuel. Yeah we digress. But it was super helpful and interesting background. Well I'd say, you know, the big thing on the EOS, right, is,
is we talk about nuclear fuel.
Nuclear fuel really is the intersection between reactor technology and the fuel cycle that supports it.
Right. And so not only do we have to fit into with fit into both of those things, right. So when you look at the design of a reactor, almost all of the reactor requirements come from the limitations of the fuel technology. And so if you want to do something different than what we do today, you know, light water reactors with U2, uranium or uranium oxide fuel pellets in a zirconium tube, you're going to need a new fuel system, right?
Because it's so well optimized to that application that if you start with that fuel system, you're almost invariably going to end up back at where we are today because. So we needed to have a new fuel systems that kind of break the paradigm. And we've seen that with over the last 20 years, we've really been investing in the foundational fuel technology that makes the advanced reactors possible.
And that's people talk a lot about the tricep fuel. So the coated particle fuels that are used in the gas reactors, and now they've blossomed into many different applications. We started work on that 20 years ago. The qualification program for that, the reactor we were targeting went away. But the fuel system we recognized was the most important foundational piece.
And that's borne out in what we're seeing in the in the industry today, and also with metallic fuels for fast reactors. And so this has been the foundation for reactors like Oak low and terror power that they're building. And there are more of them emerging. That's based on a uranium zirconium metallic fuel alloy in a steel cladding sheath.
And so we've been working on those technologies, trying to get them to the point where they're deployable. And after 20 years, what it usually takes to to qualify a fuel system, we're like in the last year or two of those programs. And that's really been the seed that's blossomed all these advanced reactors out. And so having that technology available has been the real game changer, I think, in terms of what's possible.
So we've done demonstrations. We've conceptualized these types of reactors for 70 years. But it's the confluence of all these things at the same point in time that makes it unique. Let's talk about dry. So okay, tricep is an interesting topic because you already mentioned it. I mean my analogy for is it's a really energy dense, robust ping pong ball.
Right? It's not much bigger than a ping pong ball. Right. But isn't the biggest driver for try. So it's not cost which we'll talk about. Certainly not cost. But it's safety isn't it. The like the most robust safest fuel on earth as of now. Well you know all fuels really are talked a little bit about the the safety envelope.
Right. The limitations of a nuclear fuel deliver the limitations for the reactor. And so you look at the motivation for generating the tri. So fuel it was for high temperature gas reactors. And so you needed a fuel system that was going to be able to tolerate really high temperatures. Like in this case, we're talking, you know, 1500 1600 degrees Celsius.
And, you know, under their limiting accident conditions, right? Molten lava is 900°C. I mean, so it's really, really hot. And so you needed a fuel system that could survive that. And so they set out to, to develop these coated particle fuels where you have this little tiny kernel of, of, of fuel, uranium, carbon, oxygen ceramic. They coated it with all these layers until silicon carbide.
And these are tiny little things, little 300 micron I mean like the diameter of a hair particles. And then you blend them all together with graphite and you make compacts and either in little cylinders or billiard ball size, size balls just full of those things. And then they're, you know, properties are such that they can tolerate collecting all the fission gases and radioactive materials that are born when you fission fuel and they stay inside that little tiny kernel.
And so even at these very high temperatures. So that allows you to do some really unique things with the reactor, particularly things that are related to high temperature chemical processes. So you talk with the energy folks, they're looking working with the chemical. And those high temperatures that can tolerate really are useful in, in that, that kind of space when you're looking at the applications.
And so yeah, it's it's a really robust fuel. And when you combine it with the reactor, it used to be usually a big slow moving reactor that doesn't it gets hot, but it gets hot really slowly. It tolerates those kinds of things really well. So it changes the changes the posture a lot in the way that you do do safety and use those fuels.
Gotcha. That's interesting. I didn't know that it was born out of the high temp gas reactor. And now it's made its way to Kairos, for example, has a molten salt design but with solid fuel, which I think simplifies the chemistry a little bit. It does. It's a lot simpler. And yeah, so it was originally for gas reactor. So I temperature gas reactors with helium or helium coolants typically maybe argon.
But yeah then it spun off into unique applications like what Kairos is doing but also into micro reactors. It's been real popular with some of those folks that are looking at small reactors, but they want to be high temperature because they're because they're gas cooled also. And so, yeah, lots of spin offs that are happening from those things.
And we're, we're scrambling to, to keep up to help, you know, show that as you change the operating environment that the fuel still performs as you would expect it to. Yeah. Does halo always equal try. So because in my my interactions I see every time I see try. So it's associate with Haley. So try so is a type of halo fuel right.
Yeah. So I mean the motivation. So the challenge with try is the particle is so tiny and it's mixed in with all this other stuff. So the uranium density is quite low. Right. So you need a it's best if it's in a bigger reactor because you need a certain amount of uranium density in order to go critical to do the job.
And the way they compensate for that is increasing the enrichment. And so you could build a you could operate a reactor on 5% enriched. Try. So but it has to be really big. You need a lot of and you need a billiard balls. Yeah. You need a lot of them. And so so they try to compensate by going to Halo.
Yeah. Doesn't try. So help with online refueling as well. Yeah. So when you're working on the the you know there are multiple kinds of reactors. So the ones that use the little cylinder compacts are more traditional and that you'll shut down or move and replace them. But the the folks that are using the billiard ball scale fuel like Kairos and some of the, the advanced gas reactor folks.
Yeah, you just bleed out a couple of balls and you throw a couple new and top and, you know, they examine them and decide if they're, you know, good enough to throw back in, and they'll just cycle them through that way. So it helps with online refueling. So we call it. And that saves a lot of time and money if you can actually implement that.
Do you think online refueling though ultimately leads to capacity factors that are closer to 100. Yeah. Because like the light water guys had to shut down for a month or refuel. Right. Which is prohibitive to data center. Like you can't co-locate a light water reactor that's going to have to shut down for a month. Yeah, we typically see, you know, we've been working with actually, we've been working with the industry to push the reactors that are on 18 month cycles to 24, and they're expressing interest in 30 to 36, meaning meaning they only have to shut down a month every 18 to 24.
Okay. But they still have to shut down a month. They do. And so they go and they have to refuel and they have to do maintenance on the plant and all those kinds of things. And so, so yeah, so you lose a certain fraction of your capacity factor to reloading. And yeah, a live real time fuel loading helps you with that.
You still have to shut down occasionally to, to do maintenance on the reactor systems and things like that. But you can yeah, you can get a lot higher capacity factor. And and we see that in some applications where you have to buy backup power from someplace else to make sure that you can fill those bridges. Yeah. But you need to have that's why you need to have a surplus of energy available on the marketplace in order to, to satisfy all those needs.
Yeah, that makes sense. I just thought of an interesting hypothetical that I'd like to walk through with. Okay. So we have the pressurized water reactor, light water reactors licensed. Understood. Safe. At this point, we have the flagship Westinghouse AP 1000, which is really the only thing you could go get started building and have a lot of confidence because more or less.
Right. We've done it a couple of times. So let's let's use the AP 1000 and let's throw Hailu on it in this hypothetical, like what does the upon thousand turn into same design, same size. And I'm sure like that's oversimplification. But does it does the power output go up or does it just need less fuel? Or like what happens if you use Hailu in the AP 1000, you talked about the executive orders, and one of the executive orders is to increase the generating capacity of the current fleet by five gigawatts by 2030.
That's like building five new reactors by 2030 uprights or extension. It's a combination of both. Right. And so we talk about capacity increase. And that means either reducing the number of outages. So stretch the operating cycle to to longer and and or updates. So how could I squeeze more energy out of this this particular plant. And both of them kind of go together.
And so when you extract more energy from a fuel assembly by running it longer, you need to you're going to have to burn up. You're going to use up more uranium. So you have to compensate. You have to increase the enrichment going into the into the fuel assembly. Yeah. So we're seeing that already where the, the, the US fuel fabricators for LWR fuel have raised their limits to 10% enrichment.
We call that Lou. Right. So if you needed another acronym between Lou Lula's ALU who which is 5 to 10, right. Yeah. It's between 5 and 10. And so we're already seeing the first users loading what we call lead test assemblies of 6.5% enriched material. So we're seeing that push already. So and that was a massive breakthrough. There used to be regulatory limits that said thou shalt not cross 5% and there was no real technical basis for it.
It was just easy number to start with. And you could do all of your, you know, plant design and your criticality analysis to make sure that you'd be okay at 5% and there was no desire to cross that. We're crossing that. So that's a big piece that's happened here recently with the regulatory community and the the practical users to say, yeah, there's demand to go higher.
There's technical basis to go higher, let's go do it. And that's going to be a critical element to pushing these capacity increases over the next couple of years. But generally you can the higher the enrichment the smaller you can make the reactor. Is that a fair statement or is that. Yeah, I think, you know, you typically use uranium density as correlates to or fuel density correlates with the power density.
And you can make them smaller. Yeah. But you could do that. You could make the reactor smaller and higher power density. Or you can make it bigger and last longer. And right now, because it's a retrofit to the existing plants, you know, pushing it longer is really the driver. It's interesting. Yeah, there's a lot of knobs to turn.
Right. So, you know, the nuclear physics guys get really nerdy about all this stuff and figure out all these details. Well, Halo is just such a hot topic and it's yeah, I wonder this. I'm curious to get your perspective on it. I wonder, because you look just the Doe pilot program. Like, to me, if you combine the AAP recipient and the Doe pilot program, you more or less have the universe, right?
Like there's there's some companies that are in there. There's some non-U.S. companies. But like you have a good sample set of the space, okay. And you have all these different fuel choices. And some guys tout that we're using Lu, which is an advantage because it's here and it's now a checkbox. We don't have to worry about it. We can contract with GE or Westinghouse like done.
Next problem we using Li plus not Hailu. We're using Halo Tri because it's the most robust fuel on Earth. All these designs that I wonder if guys are really making suboptimal decisions about reactor designs, that internally they're saying, hey, like, eventually we'll switch to Halo. Yeah, or otherwise, or plutonium whenever we can. But for now, this is this gets it done.
It's like, are we you know, it's five plus year lead time to build these conversion and enrichment facilities, which takes capital. It takes time. And like we're working on that. But you think people are making suboptimal decisions on designs as a function of just not having line of sight to availability? I mean, perfect is the enemy of good enough, right?
So I think there's a there's a need in this moment to get stuff built for sure. And to start the across that threshold. Yeah. We saw this with the the light water reactor industry. Right. It started with, you know, I don't know, 3% enriched fuel. And they ran it to much, much less, you know, much lower burn ups than we are today.
And so over the last 30 years, we've seen a doubling, and we're headed towards a tripling of how much energy you extract from a fuel assembly in a, in the existing fleet. I think the same thing is going to happen with whatever reactors emerge from the, you know, from this primordial moment. Right? So there's going to be a lot of them.
There's gonna be some winners, there's going to be something that works, and then you're going to really ramp up the optimization of that. And as you get better and better at operating those plants and understanding the real limitations, the, the, the use cases get tighter and tighter and the technology gets better and better. You start pushing it further and further.
Yeah. And that always translates into higher uranium loadings or higher fissile loadings, which you accomplish either through a higher density fuel or through putting more, more, higher, higher enriched uranium or other fissile material in. So I expect that's absolutely going to happen. And I think a lot of the folks that are making these choices are making them consciously to try to be first to market.
And there's a real advantage to being early to market. You know, I'm curious if we again, a hypothetical, okay, allow me to allow me to be inquisitive. Right now, we're focused on small reactors, right. Like make it smaller, make it modular. Repeat these things. Learn make it cheaper. Great. I bet at some point we get to 5 or 10 gigawatt sized plants.
Right. So because the economies of scale in the light water side are probably going to apply on the small Richter side too. That's true. So like let's let's construct a five gigawatt plant hypothetically. Like if we were if we were saying that we're going to go design at INL was going to spearhead this thing. And, you know, like we don't have to commit to a certain company, but like just from a technology standpoint, how do we feel in this thing?
Yeah. Are we using Halo in this five gigawatt plant or are we using low enriched uranium or are we using some other fuel source or. Yeah, there's so much that there's so many engineering decisions to make when you think about that. Right. And I you know, you think about scale. You need to get to an end of a kind.
Right. So if we're China and we're building 20, 30, 40 reactors, all, all at one time, you can build big reactors at scale, right? It's not a one of a kind. And I think that's going to be what really dictates the end point for for the sizes here, you need to do something that you're going to do more than three or 4 or 5 times.
Right. So if we're going to put on 300GW of of new generating capacity in the next 25 years, that's a lot of reactors of any kind. Right. They're going to be there's going to be room for a lot of those. And I think big is going to win, because you're going to be able to put up 20, 30, 40, 50, 300 of these 300 gigawatt plants, right.
That's a lot. That's a lot of reactors. So it does get that economy of scale. So I think that's what's going to drive us. And then I think there's a there's a limit on the top end. And how big do you really want to be. So when you shut off do you want to take five gigawatts offline or do you want to take, you know, 300MW offline?
And I think those, those kind of things and how they balance the the users will make a difference because I, you know, we talk about the plants and how they're used today. It's primarily electricity feeding residential and and you know, traditional manufacturing and things like that. Right. And what does the user model look like in the future? Is it supporting.
You know, we'll continue to support residential, right? I mean, people people want heating and cooling all over the country now and more and more than they ever did. So you'll see more residential demand. You're going to see the economic pieces change. Data centers need like you mentioned, it needs a power that looks a certain way, nice and clean.
But maybe if you're supporting a chemical processing plant, you're okay shutting down periodically in sync with what the reactors are doing. And so so I think a lot of it, the user market is going to decide a lot of these things. But I guess your question was about do you if you're building a gigantic reactor, do you want it to be Halo or.
I think if you're building a really big reactor, lower enrichment works great. Okay. So, you know, small reactors tend to want higher density, smaller, more and more uranium packed into it than a big reactor does. Gotcha. Just because the neutron you know, the neutron geeks talk about how far neutrons travel and all these kind of things. And so do you think we'll see gigawatt size, high temp gas and sodium cooled fast and molten salt reactors.
And once once we get the internet of a kind? Or do you think it's large? We'll keep doing light water reactors. It's going to be interesting. I think the you know, the motivation for going smaller if you go all the way back to the 90s when there, you know, we're postulating this, this wave of small modular reactors and kind of conceptualizing it.
It was driven by what we call passive safety. And so if you want passive safety built into it, where the reactor and the natural physics or the things that manage your severe accidents and areas small is better, it works easier, and they're a little bit more coupled into those times. It's it's yet to be proven that we can apply those to big reactors, just because they just have so much more inertia that it's a little bit harder to overcome.
Gotcha. But, you know, if we can use active protective systems and all those kinds of things which we've successfully done for 50 years. Yeah, that allows you to go bigger. And so there's there's some trade spaces in here that I think we're going to have to figure out through the demonstration plants. I think that's the big wave of demos that are coming out here now that we're working on trying to answer a lot of those questions, the passive safety and walk away safe is we briefly talked about Fukushima earlier, and my understanding you'll know a lot more about this and I will.
My understanding was Fukushima was a combination of two things that usually don't happen in tandem, but they happen in tandem. There was an earthquake followed by a massive tsunami that had like 40, 40ft swells or something massive, and it broke over the wall and it essentially flooded the backup power, like the system shut down as it was supposed to.
But they had these backup generators that were supposed to. You needed power. You needed continuous power to the system. Right. And they the system shut down. And also the backup power got flooded. And so there was that's what caused the meltdown, right? Yeah. And I had a third is the you know, it was unique to the Fukushima space is the debris that prevented the emergency responders from getting there.
Right. So interesting. The tsunami blue all this stuff up and destroyed the roads, block the roads so that, you know, you could if you could have got a fire truck to the plant, you could have powered the the emergency cooling system, but they couldn't get there. So there's yeah, it's is a pretty significant multi fault multi-event kind of thing.
And yeah. And so so yeah so that's that's a big part of it. Right. It's hard to it's hard to explain because I compare it to Waymo. You familiar with Waymo the driverless cars I live in Austin. They're driving on everywhere. Okay. It's a it's a Google company. And you get an Uber okay. And there's no driver okay okay.
Great. And if one of those runs over a pedestrian yeah it's a big problem. It's a big problem. It's a big problem for all driverless cars. And it's almost like the Fukushima in the Chernobyl and the Three Mile Island problems. Like you have these very isolated events. You look at the statistics on nuclear and how many people have directly or indirectly died from nuclear.
It's pretty middle as low as solar. And when I mean, it's it's very minimal. But also these big headline. So I think one was Waymo moments you know. Yeah I mean it's tricky to write when you really you know everybody nobody likes to talk in these terms. But how many driver how many Uber drivers have run over people?
I mean you start looking at the statistics and we we feel really emotionally reactive to certain types of risks. Right. And so, yeah, I think, you know, you go out to, you know, some of these places if you go visit. I was in Japan recently. We were chatting about with some of the local experts there and, and I said, oh, how about how do you guys feel about the Fukushima things?
Like, I don't care. Tell me about the tens of thousands of people that were killed by the tsunami. Yeah, that's what we really care about. That's where the real damage was. And so, you know, it's really a it's a catchy thing and it really captures people's imaginations. But it's not in the terms of the disaster that occurred there.
Yeah, it's really not. You know, it's kind of the headline, but it's really not the most important thing to happen. It's hard because it basically made that on top of existing regulations. It just made it prohibitively expensive in the West because we overregulated. I mean, imagine if an airplane had to have a 0.0001% chance of crash or like zero across the board?
Yeah. I mean, I don't know, we'd be flying airplanes around with some, like, rod attached to the earth where they couldn't. It's difficult. I mean, and I, and I, you know, I don't want to give the impression we're not super committed to safety. We really are. I think it's a but I think it's really an impressive record of the nuclear industry has, has experienced and and.
Yeah. And so I think it's you know, we need to be conscious of it and think about it, but not you know, you got to think of it in context of all the other risks that we face. And what are you willing to to accept?
Okay, so let's pivot.
Okay, back to the fuel side. Let's talk about high enriched uranium okay. Because my understanding the Navy nukes use it. There's use cases for it. And presumably you could go even smaller if you use it for sure. Is there a path to us using that in commercial Reactor? I think it's highly, highly unlikely. Highly highly enriched and highly, highly unlikely.
Yes. I mean, when you think about the nonproliferation posture. Right. So what do we what do we really worried about? Your high enriched uranium is the easiest thing to generate a nuclear device with. And that that's why it's so off limits. Yeah. And we used it for a long time in the particularly in the research reactor space, right, where you want really high density reactors that generate a lot of high intensity neutrons for science purposes.
But, you know, for commercial applications, it's one it's really expensive. Even if you could use it, it's you need a real strong use case for it. Yeah. The Navy doesn't care about cost, right. They want the best machine that humanly can be made. And so they're going to use that that material to do that. But yeah I think it's it's not only difficult but it's probably smart to not to not use that because it's the most easy.
It's the easiest thing to divert and to use for, for non civilian applications prohibitively expensive I imagine it gets. Yeah. So you look at the enrichment process, the more enriched you get the harder and harder it is. It takes longer and longer. And so yeah it's tough to you don't want you don't want. Isn't there curve like isn't there a curve.
Where do you get from 5 to 10. Takes a lot 10 to 20 in the centrifuge. And then from like I don't know the numbers but from like 20 to 70 or 80 is not so much. But then from 70 to 72 is a lot. It's you get a diminishing return, right? It's harder and harder to do. But you know, so that's
Yeah. So that's what it's undeniable. We want to avoid, avoid using that to make sense. And I don't think it's really necessary for most civilian applications. Maybe if you're trying to get to Mars and you're in your the mass of your of your reactor, you're going to drive the plant with, maybe there's an argument to made you made for a very specific applications.
But civilian energy generation, I don't think it's necessary. But you can't. Like let's debunk the myth a little bit. Let's say you have a nuclear power plant that's selling electricity into the grid, and it's using hi, hi, hi. Enriched uranium. Okay. You can't just go drop a bomb on that. Like, from a terrorism standpoint, right? Like you can't because people think you can, by the way.
Okay? They think you can. Generally, I think more people than not think that you can, that you could target nuclear and you could bomb it, bomb the facility and it ignites a nuclear explosion, a secondary. Yeah. No, there's just the physics require extremely clean, pure materials in a very, very tight space. And so yeah, this the material that's in a nuclear reactor is very diffuse and spread out over and mixed with lots of other materials.
And. No, it's it's it's completely impossible. But what's the proliferation risk then. Okay. So like we have this facility, it's using highly enriched uranium. We're bringing that highly enriched uranium in. And there's some bad actor that's working in that process. And they're like sticking some somewhere else and then feeding it to another mechanism where they're then concentrating and and building.
Right. Okay. So it's not the facility itself. Yeah. it's almost all about diversion of the material. Right. So if you've got a you got to really know what you're doing, a highly enriched uranium economy, right where you're shipping material all over the world. People are using it. You can, you know, theoretically peel off material, use it for another application before it gets turned into nuclear fuel.
So if you just went out and grabbed nuclear fuel, it's it's a complicated chemistry process to separate out and do things with. But it's not going to be something that could be inadvertently. It's something you have to do intentionally that makes sense. With modern technology and Google Maps, you could see it's yeah, to your point, the global supply chain is not built around highly enriched uranium.
So if someone's doing it somewhere, we're going to know about it. Yes, I think that's true. Versus if we said we're doing it and therefore China is doing it and therefore Europe's doing it and everyone's doing it, then there's a lot that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, the defense folks know exactly who's doing it and when they're doing exactly that okay.
That's super helpful framing and the this the whole purpose of the IAEA. Right. So the International Atomic Energy Agency provides oversight to confirm that people are doing with the materials what they said they were doing. Yeah. And so there's usually a long lead identification that somebody is a little bit out of bounds. That makes sense. I remember and I want to go back to this because it's interesting and it's important.
And it ties into conversations that I've had with companies on the investment side. It just economically okay. I've heard the quote once or twice that try so in some form is 100 times more expensive than other fuel. But when I, we talked earlier about how fuel is traditionally I think it's 5 to 7% or something of the reactor cost.
And a lot of the bulk of the cost comes from construction and financing. But when I hear that try so is 500 times more or not. It's not 500, 100 times more. It can't be that the end fuel is 500 times more than the alternative, because then instead of being 5% of the reactor build, it would be like 100% of the cost or something.
So what part is it, a try. So that's a it's got to be some input cost it try. So not the entire fabricated fuel right. Yeah I mean you've got a mixture right. So going to Halo is more expensive than 5% right. That's a that's an initial cost. And then the manufacturing technology is wildly different. And and frankly it's still quite immature.
Right. So we've done we've made stuff at the Graham scale at the laboratories, maybe a kilogram or two. We've done tens of kilograms kilogram scale or maybe a core load type quantities in commercial plants. That's a long ways from if you go to, you know, a Westinghouse plant and you look at them making fuel for a commercial reactor where they're fueling 30, 40 reactors every year, there's a lot of material.
It's very much automated. It's got all those kind of things built into it. We haven't made that transition yet on the advanced fuels. So tricep doesn't have a full scale factory in operations today. There's a bunch of people building them. One down the just down the road here that they're working on here in Idaho. And there's another one in Tennessee and there's one in Lynchburg, Virginia.
So there's they're building that infrastructure. So we expect the cost of manufacturing to come down dramatically just due to full commercialization and those kinds of things, but it is going to be inherently a more expensive product. It is, you know, there's it's relatively straightforward to to compress uranium dioxide into little pellets. They just they basically use the same kind of tools that the pharmaceutical companies make to make bills.
Yeah, they just compress them and they heat them up and center them, and then they slide them into a tube. Cheap. It's very easy. You know, the processes we use for try so are going to be more expensive. So the question is going to be how do you get more value out of that product to justify spending more money on it.
Yeah. And that that comes out in the, in the way the reactors operating and the, you know, can you, you know, are you going to burn 1% of that 20% enrichment before you discharge the fuel? Or can you get up to 17, 18, 19% burn up in them. And that's going to play a big role in the overall integrated economics.
Gotcha. Sometimes it's worth spending more money up front to get more value out of the back end. And I think that's the piece that the advanced reactor community has to really figure out and show off. Exactly. Like, do I design this for a fuel that likely will have infrastructure built around fabricating it, or do I designed for what I have today and people have taken different approaches.
They have. Exactly. So the the current tri. So guys bw xt tri so x which is part of X energy standard nuclear. Anyone else that a top of mind is really focused on specifically on try. So those are the big three okay I got some of the facilities you rattled off probably relate to those. Those three. Yep. And BW historically has helped build the they've helped facilitate the build out for the submarines.
Right. So the tri so BW try. So business has that been unrelated to the submarines. Oh yeah. Completely okay. Gotcha. But has it been for their own reactor use case or selling it to the industry. So it was initially they were. So when it was when this program was set up, this advanced gas reactor program was called the Next Generation Nuclear Plant.
In the late 1990s, General Atomics was building the big gas cooled reactor, and BW was going to be the fuel supplier for that. And so there was a lot of research being done at the laboratories to feed those programs. And so we spent the last 20 years working on qualifying the fuel design. You know, as I mentioned, it started by we built some small amounts, and we did the irradiation and the test reactor out here in Idaho and then do the examinations, and then we would go to BW and say, okay, I want you to make this part of the fuel and we'll make the rest and we'll test that again and make sure everything
is working great. And then the last stage was say, okay, do you make the whole thing using your, your pilot production line. And we'll do the validation experiments to prove that it meets all the specifications so that that process is just completing. We're in the last bits of the, of the examinations also across the street here in the hot fuel examination facility to, to prove it meets those, those requirements.
And from that you'll see the specifications that were developed and the processes that were developed are spinning off to these other companies. Since it was generated with federal research dollars, it's available to any US company that wants to use that product. And so all those guys are standing up to do that. Gotcha. In fact, all of them are doing a radiations in the ATR right now to validate that their product actually meets those same requirements.
Okay, okay. I feel like we could probably talk for two more hours. Yeah. It's really it's just in general this is great. This has been great. I want to I do want to hit on. Before we wrap up, I want to talk about reprocessing okay. Because it's a hot topic. There's and there's different views on it. I would I would love to sit down with someone.
This isn't a this conversation thing. And just look at the math like talk to think to the math. Because I think of it similarly to desal, events like you have these technologies that the technology exists. It's just not it's technologically feasible, just not economic. And there's there's arguments that we are going to be able to reprocess fuel in an economic way.
So curious to get your thoughts on state of that piece of the industry. Viability of it. Is something you're excited about where that's heading? Yeah, I am a I'm a big believer that that recycle is the right thing to do it really to it's the best use of resources. And I think we'd be doing it today if the economics bore out very clearly.
And and to get to that point, you have to start with thinking about spend fuel. So right now, after you irradiate a fuel assembly in a commercial reactor, it goes on to the storage pad. And because there's not a permanent repository in the United States, the government pays the utility to hold on to that material for them. So an existing utility actually gets a revenue stream from storing spent fuel.
That's crazy. Right? So there's not an incentive to send it off someplace to get to to get it reprocessed. And so so that, you know, when we think about the overall economics, you have to think about in reality, and not with a government subsidy that props you up to make the decisions you're making today. Yeah. So that's one of the reasons I think the the executive orders are so important is it starts to to challenge that assumption, like, well, maybe there is a better way for the, you know, the country as a whole to manage the nuclear fuel cycle.
It's okay. So if you open the door to the economics on that a little bit, you have to look at what's the value of the material that's in the current commercial fleet, which is be different than the value that would be the material of some of the advanced reactors. And come back to that, you know, so the net enrichment is maybe 1% left over that's left in, in the uranium.
Right. So then you have to ask yourself, is it cheaper for me to reprocess the material that's sitting on the pad right here in the United States, than it is to go dig up new uranium, convert it, enrich it, ship it in. Right. So there's some easy math to do in terms of equivalent mining. Could you mine the existing spent fuel storage.
So that's that's one piece. And the second piece is what's the value of the other materials that are in there. You see a lot of companies now they're saying well there's in these, you know, radionuclides. So the things that are born when you fission uranium, there's actually a lot of value in those isotopes, whether it be for industrial applications like it's you use radioisotopes in the oil and gas industry for for seeking that material comes from a lot of these applications.
There's a lot of applications in medicine and medical medical space for unique isotopes and to do imaging and cancer treatments. And so there's a lot of value in those materials related to those industries. Then there's also the the remaining fissile materials that are not uranium. Sometimes when a neutron hits uranium 238 so the non fissile one, it absorbs it and it becomes plutonium or the plutonium absorbs another one, it becomes a higher actinide neptunium curium americium.
All of those higher actinides are also. So you can burn those. So could you pull out the plutonium. This is what the French and Japanese are doing today and the Russians are doing today. They'll pull the plutonium out and they'll put it back into the reactors and reuse it along with that uranium. And then the last piece is these higher actinides, we call them the trans that are in the storage facility.
They're the things that last one of years. It's not the other fission products. Those last hundreds of years. You can actually pull those out and put them back into a fast spectrum reactor. So some of the sodium cooled fast reactors and burn them like fuel, and then they're gone. Right? So there's so you look at all these different pieces and how you might use them that drive the economic cases.
And they affect it in different ways. And so we do a lot of work looking at the different scenarios. So we have you know, there's programs within Doe that are doing scenario analysis to see what cases actually pay out and what are the environmental what are the economic sides of it that that drive those decisions to one or another.
So we've been sitting in a space where it's kind of break even in light water reactors for a long time, and it's just not enough impetus to change to to flip over. But when we start looking at advanced reactors, you start talking about Hailu. The residual value of that material goes way up because you're not going to burn it to 1% left.
The reactor just can't keep running if you burn all the uranium. So now the reprocessing of of some of those reactor fuels will be very, very interesting and especially for the fast reactors. So terror power at Oak low those two when you know are very very, very friendly to a recycle based system. Gotcha. So Terrifier said they're not going to do that.
Okolo is very much leaning into it. So it'll be interesting to see how the marketplace plays out for those. But from a technology perspective, you know, I don't know. We're doing reprocessing over here. Also, right on the other side of the dome, there's a there's a hot cell that is reprocessing fuel right now. And doing that to recover uranium to use for halo.
That's where the halo for, for some of these companies is coming from is it's recycling that material from, from what used to be spent fuel here. So it's very much available. It's being done in other countries, United States. We've kind of pump the brakes in the 70s and, and yeah, that was the moment maybe to bring that technology back.
I guess regulation helps the right. Economic incentives help. I thought this an oversimplification. This is this is super helpful because I've latched on to some analogy I heard of. Basically the uranium 235 is it's like a match. You light the match, the match burns, and there's not really much you can do with with the little stick that's left, you know.
So you just but we we can't just throw it in the trash either. So we have to store it on the surface. But it sounds like there's some more juice in the match. Yeah for sure. It's like absolutely. You maybe it's a two sided match or like a four sided match, and you light like three of the sides that there's still one left that we couldn't get to.
And so there's yeah, a lot of people don't realize that if you look at, at boiling water reactors. Right. The light water reactors, we have a pressurized water reactor and a boiling water reactor, which is what. Geez. Yeah. So RTGS are the are the boilers at the, you know, at the end of their fuel cycle, the fuel, the reactors primarily running on plutonium that was bred in during operation.
Okay. So the beginning you're burning that you 235 match and is it burns out, you're accumulating more plutonium and it runs for for a lot longer on that, just on that fissile source. And so yeah. So we're kind of, you know, we're not doing reprocessing, but we're doing, you know, we're burning plutonium currently in the United States. And there's room to get more value out of these, out of these reactors if we talk about enrichment.
So, you know, 5% enriched is 5% U2 35. And the rest is this U-238, which we call fertile material, which you can turn into fissile material if you if you subject it to the right, right neutron environment. We didn't even get to throw. Yeah. We didn't get to thorium. Right. So that's a yeah. Yeah. We talked a little bit about earlier.
The big takeaway there is that again it's it's technologically feasible. There's no there's no shortage of thorium in the world. But we would also have to reconfigure a lot of the domestic and global supply chain to accommodate it. Right. Yeah. Certainly in the United States, the US supply chain and most of the Western world supply chain in Europe and in Japan.
But, you know, some places Canada, maybe with the can do reactors would actually run really well on thorium. India, same. They got lots of lots and lots and lots of thorium there. So they're they're interested in in that economy. Some of these are kind of emerging. So they haven't built out the same infrastructure that we have. And so they build up their new infrastructure.
Maybe they'll tilt towards the Aureum. It's it's still yet to be seen. That'll be interesting man. It will be very interesting I agree. Well there's been a lot of fun. I would love to talk for longer. I know we've got to wrap up here, but I will ask you, I love to ask unrelated to nuclear. Okay. One thing, especially people in such a high pace industry as nuclear right now, things are rapidly evolving and changing, and you really need to show up to your job and be sharp.
What's one thing that you do consistently to keep your mind and body sharp? Okay. Yeah. You know, I think the foundation for everything is good sleep. You got to get good sleep. I think, you know, prioritizing that and I and I think but for me, the biggest thing is, you know, exposing yourself to nature. Get out in the quiet spaces, actually be, you know, present in those spaces.
And I guess it's one of the things that really tracks me about Idaho is there's a lot of that and all kinds of different flavors. And so, yeah, I think that's the the calming and clearing of the mind. And we have some wonderful places that get no cell service. So yeah, that helps a lot. That's. Yeah. We did some fishing yesterday on the river and I actually left my phone on purpose.
Yeah. In the truck. Yeah. Be present in the moment. Who who really needs a picture of your fish? No. Well, and I asked my friend, I said, Will you be the camera guy for the day? Because I don't want my phone. I don't want it, man. Sleep is huge and it's so hard. I think as Americans, we are just so wired all the time.
My wife and I wear these aura rings. It's actually my wedding ring. Is an aura ring okay? And it's one of the first things we ask in the morning. How did you sleep? What's your sleep story? Yeah, yeah, we do that. The Fitbits too. It's like always optimizing. How much would you sleep? Sleep? When am I getting it?
It stars. I mean, food and sleep. Yeah. Really? So much build off of food and sleep and then minimizing stress, which is hard to do. It is because we're all trying to build and accomplish and. Yep. Yeah, you trying to do something important. It's hard to not experience stress. The stress is real, which is why you have to sleep well and you know, you got to recover.
So I'm with you. It's been a lot of fun and really appreciate you taking the time, and it'll be cool to see how things continue to evolve in the industry, My pleasure. Thanks for coming out. Awesome.
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