August 14, 2025 • 31 mins
Electricity demand is soaring, and some think the answer isn’t building bigger, but smaller. That’s the idea behind small modular reactors (SMRs): take a large-scale nuclear plant that’s hard to build, and shrink it down to something that’s more manageable, cheaper and easier to replicate. Instead of one huge nuclear plant, you build 10 small ones.
Right now these kinds of small modular reactors are in the startup phase, with only two in commercial operation in Russia and China. So how viable is the business for these small modular reactors? And will SMRs ever become a scaled up solution for our energy needs? Rachel Slaybaugh joins Akshat Rathi on Zero to discuss.
Explore further:
- What Are Small Nuclear Reactors and How Do SMRs Help Solve Climate Change?
- Canada to Build $15 Billion Modular Nuclear Plant, First in G-7
- UK Selects Rolls-Royce to Build First Small Modular Reactors
- China is Home to World's First Small Modular Nuclear Reactor
Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Oscar Boyd. Special thanks to Eleanor Harrison Dengate, Siobhan Wagner, Sommer Saadi and Mohsis Andam. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit https://www.bloomberg.com/green.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Zero. I am Akshatrati. This week, how big
things become small. Among all forms of energy, the fastest
growth is for electricity, and that's making people look to
(00:24):
every possible technology, including nuclear. Last week we talked about
how the West has been struggling to build big nuclear
power plants in recent decades. Today we'll talk about small
modular reactors what some say could be the solution to
the problem. Don't build large, build small. The idea is
(00:45):
enticing take something that's big and hard to build and expensive,
shrink it down to something that's more manageable, easier to replicate,
perhaps even cheaper. Instead of one huge nuclear power plant,
you build ten small ones. But right now these kinds
of small modular reactors are very much in the startup phase,
(01:06):
with only two in commercial operation in Russia and in China.
There are hundreds of different designs wuying to be the
next success story, all with their own pros and cons,
and there are of course concerns about safety. So how
viable is the business for these small modular reactors. Will
SMRs ever become a scaled of solution for our energy
(01:29):
needs and climate goals? This week on Zero, I'm joined
again by Rachel's slabaw. She's a partner focused on climate,
sustainability and energy at the venture capital firm TCVC, where
she has made investments in startups that are shrinking nuclear reactors.
Before that, she was a tenured professor of nuclear engineering
at the University of California in Berkeley. Rachel talks us
(01:52):
through where we are in the development stage for SMRs,
why she's not worried about having SMRs in her garden,
and why wind, solar and nuclear developers should team up
to take on the fossil fuel lobby. This is the
second of two episodes looking at the development of nuclear
fission technologies. If you didn't listen to the first one,
(02:13):
we've put a link in the show notes. Rachel, Welcome
back to Zero.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
So last week on the show we covered large scale nuclear.
This week, I want to talk about SMRs small modular reactors.
Now there are already two of these reactors, one in
Russia and in China, but you know, Western governments don't
want those technologies, So these Western countries are making their
own bets. Canada has approved building two reactors, the UK
(02:44):
is approved one. The Tennessee Valley Authority in the US
wants to build one, and then there are hundreds of
companies with their own designs. So let's just start with
the basics. What has already been approved in construction for SMRs,
and which Western governments are willing to pay for them.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Yeah, I mean this is changing all the time. I'm
probably not going to get the current list right, but
one of I will point out. One of the reactors
that's likely to be built first, especially in Canada, is
called the BWRX three hundred and that's from General Electric,
and that is one of these sort of crossovers where
it's a light water reactor. It's a boiling water reactor design,
(03:22):
but it's small and modular. It's three hundred megawatts, and
so that is one of the bridge faster paths forward
because the design is not that different from the designs before.
The supply chain is really similar, and so maybe you
don't get some of the benefits of the advanced reactors,
but you can move more quickly and you don't have
(03:43):
to wait for supply chain build out, and so it's
kind of a good bridge technology. And like all of
these things, if actually we build a bunch of them
on that bridge. Maybe that becomes the technology that is
one of the winners in the long run.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
And yet it is true there are one hundred plus
small molo de reactor designs available. And sure we could
play the free market game of letting the market decide
which of these reactor designs we should pick, and that
might take one hundred years to decide. We don't have
that time. At what point do you go? This is
where governments need to come in decide we need to
(04:19):
narrow field down drastically and perhaps pick a few winners
and let that competition create the ecosystem to have nuclear I.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Mean, I think because nuclear is such a specific technology
where there are things that are inherently more sensitive than
some other technologies, government is always going to be involved,
and that's important. It also requires real expertise to understand
what is more likely to work and what is more
likely to hit their cost targets, and I think it's
(04:50):
not reasonable to expect all customers to be able to
figure that out. And so again it makes sense because
there's so much expertise required to have some government participation here,
and you can see that in some of these research programs,
and like in the US there's the Advanced Reactor Demonstration
program where there are a range of technology supported, but
(05:12):
two large demos selected, and one of them is a
sodium cold fast reactor and one of them is a
triso fueled gas reactor. And those are really sensible choices
because those are the two reactor technologies where we have
the most experience and the most data, and so those
ones sensibly would be the first ones you would support
(05:34):
to demonstrate, because that's you know, we've had gas reactors
in the UK, we've had sodium fast reactors in France.
We've had both of them also in the US. So
those technologies aren't ones where we don't have any experience.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Okay, well this is the time to get nerdy about
advanced reactors. So talk us through the main categories of
these reactor designs. As you said, some of them have
been tested, but some of them are yet to be tested.
Has been tested, and why did we even try those
things in the first place.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
So we have sodium fast reactors and that's where sodium
is the heat transfer media, and we have metal fuel.
Those are the reactors where you can use a recycling
process and they have really strong safety features because metal
or sodium is a really powerful heat transfer mechanism, so
if anything happens in the reactor, you can get the
(06:25):
heat out really quickly and keep the fuel safe. There
are let's say three other major bins, so there's high
temperature gas reactors, and so they use typically helium as
the heat transfer medium, and the fuel is in very durable,
robust kernels called trizoparticles. They're teeny little kernels that have
(06:47):
like layers of ceramic around them, so they're incredibly durable,
and so the particles themselves can't really melt. So helium
it's a gas, it's not as good of a heat
transfer mechanism. So in gas reactors the safety comes from
the fuel form. The fuel just can't melt down. It's
super rugged. And then if you have a loss of
coolant accident where the helium is lost, the heat transfer
(07:09):
properties of air are not so wildly different, so it's
not as big of a deal, and those tend to
operate at higher temperatures. We've built the most of those reactors.
And then the third category that has two subcategories is
molten salt reactors, and so we have built an experimental
molten salt reactor at Oakridge National Lab. And this is
(07:32):
where there are several different approaches. But you can instead
of fabricating the fuel into some kind of solid material,
you dissolve the fuel into the salt, so the fuel
is actually a liquid. It's a utectic technically, and so
the fission happens in the molten salt utectic and some
of the benefits of those molten salt very good heat
(07:54):
transfer properties, also high temperature, so you can get heat.
And because you're not fabricating a fuel form, you have
a lot of flexibility, so you can do recycling or
materials management. And then there's one reactor company that's taking
a molten salt coolant and trizoparticles that we typically use
in gas reactors and combining them to get the heat
(08:14):
transfer of the salt and the durability of the fuel.
So it's a wild world out there. You can combine
these things in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
That's how you get to one hundred and thirty designs
or whatever there are. Yeah, exactly. You talked about how
many of these designs can then be made in different sizes.
We talked about a gigawot is the sort of standard
size large nuclear power plant, the three hundred megawort that
is now being built as a small modular reactor. There
are some ideas for two hundred, and for one hundred,
(08:43):
and nowadays the thing that just blows my mind is
people are talking about tiny nuclear reactors five megawort and
one megawote, And just so that we can put this
in scale, one megawatt is about five hundred houses worth
of power if you're a UK consumer, and probably two
(09:06):
hundred houses if you're an American consumer. And so if
we're talking something that could sit in the backyard of
a tiny neighborhood and just power the neighborhood. But I'm
worried about those because with the large power plants, the
one gigawater three hundred megaworter, you have trained people who
operate a power plant, who know what they're doing, will
(09:27):
keep this thing safe. What happens when you turn these
designs into this small thing that will not have the
economics to have a safety officer sitting next to the
power plant running.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
They're a totally different type of technology. So how much
energy is in a gigawatt reactor is a thousand times
more than in a one megawatt reactor, right, and so
the volume of material, the intensity of the material is
just a totally different scale. So what you need to
(10:01):
keep that safe. You can design them so that they
can't melt down and that they're tamper proof because it's
just so much less heat to manage, so many fewer
things can happen.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
And so as DCVC, you have invested in this company
called Radiant, and it is supposed to be making these small,
very small reactors. So maybe we could take that example
to try and explain to people, why do you think
that it is okay to have one of these nuclear
reactors in your backyard.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Yeah, and maybe it's because we talked about that. I
used to be a reactor operator. It was at a
research reactor. It was one megawat thermal, so about three
times smaller than one of these. But like I've operated
one of them, it couldn't melt down, nothing could really
happen to it. I guess partly it's familiarity with what
the safety really looks like and how safe they actually are.
(10:54):
You know, at that reactor at Penn State, people would
call and ask what the evacuation plan was and we're like,
there's no evacuation, like, there's nothing can happen. I guess
I'm just comfortable and knowledgeable about the safety features that
that's not my concern.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
What do they look like, how quickly can we have one?
And where would they typically be used?
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Great questions. They're a high temperature gas reactor, so they're
using that super durable triso fuel with a helium coolant.
The reactor plus the power conversion system, all of it
fits into a shipping container. As you were talking about that.
As a scale, it's pretty small. Radiant is using a
super critical co too Brayton cycle to convert the power,
(11:38):
so it's a bit more efficient, and that means they
don't need water as a heat sink, so they can
cite very flexibly. They can be in aert environments. You
just don't have water impact concerns.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Because the turbine that is being turned with the heat
is not being turned by steam. It's being turned by
hot CO two.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Yep, that's right. What are their applications? So micro reactors,
we do not expect that you're going to take one
hundred microreactors to get one hundred megawatts and have that
be on the grid and compete with utility scale. They're
in remote locations, they're in emergency situations, they're in high
reliability backup. So anywhere that you would have a diesel
(12:20):
generator is where you could put a micro reactor. So
military bases, industrial facilities, remote communities, and for a lot
of these places diesel generators one, they're expensive, or they're smelly,
they make a lot of local air pollution, they're loud.
But also the logistics of getting diesel fuel is pretty complicated,
(12:42):
and the more remote your location. I mean there are
places in Alaska where now the roads are melting more frequently,
it's actually quite difficult to get fuel there. Right, there's
a real reliability and resilience issue around diesel fuel delivery.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
Oh yeah, I mean, especially for Defense department, it would
be a godsend because one estimate of getting fuel to
a battlefront is four hundred dollars a gallon, Yeah, fifty
to eighty times the cost of fuel that you can
buy at the pump. And so if you have something
like a microreactor, the Defense department would be the first
(13:17):
ones to buy a bunch of these.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
And even diesel fuel it's six or eight dollars a gallon,
which happens in a lot of places. You know, fuel
doesn't have to be four hundred dollars a gallon for
a microreactor. It makes sense. We also are forward looking
at things like, okay, we want to build ev charging
stations in the middle of the country. This is maybe
less relevant in the UK you're not as spread out,
(13:40):
but trying to build transmission to have that charging station
might be slower and more expensive than just building a microreactor.
So there's a lot of like flexible applications.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
If there is something like a microreactor doing a charging
station in a remote area, how do you make this
reactor stop? Because the whole point of a nuclear reactor
is you start this chain reaction that is controlled. But
if you're going to start and stop, how does a
reactor deal with start and stop?
Speaker 2 (14:11):
So we have control mechanisms and you can ramp reactors,
and then how rampable they are depends on the design.
For large reactors, fuel is not that much of the
cost of the reactor compared to the overall capital, so
ramping the reactor to like save fuel doesn't make that
(14:31):
much economic sense for very small reactors, fuel is actually
a much larger fraction of the cost of the system,
and so it does make much more economic sense to
ramp your reactor because it's just again it's so much smaller.
Some of the general rules that you would use for
large reactors don't apply. So for small reactors, turning it down,
(14:53):
turning it off, saving the fuel actually makes sense.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
And so how exactly would you do it in a
radiant reactor.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
Yeah, so we have what are called control drums. So
what control mechanisms do is they absorb neutrons, and so
you can imagine the more neutron absorber you put in there,
the reaction slows down, slows down, stops, and then when
you remove that absorber, the reaction increases again. And so
basically you just, in a controlled and thoughtful manner, you
(15:22):
just add more neutron absorber until the reaction gets to
the place where you want it to be, and then
to turn it back up, you remove that neutron absorber.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
And could that be instantaneous like the way we do
batteries for example, you know, you click a button, turns
on and provides your power, So.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Shut down can be instantaneous. Start up slower than instantaneous.
You need a little bit of time. But again, on
one megawatt a reactor, a very small reactor, that time
is like minutes. For a very large reactor, it's longer, right,
so you have a longer time evolution. But microreactors are
pretty responsive. But for all of them, if you put
(16:02):
the control mechanisms in quickly, that reaction shuts down in seconds.
The last thing is timeline. So Radiant, the company I
work with, is on pace to demonstrate their reactor next year.
So they will turn on their first full scale demonstration
reactor in twenty twenty six. That's actually pretty fast. So
(16:23):
the company started in twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen, twenty twenty,
you know, when they were just a few employees. To
turning on a reactor in twenty twenty six, it will
have cost them less than two hundred million dollars to
do that. You know, it's pretty good. They expect first
commercial deployment in twenty twenty eight. They're going to turn
on that reactor at Idaho National Lab. There were recent
(16:44):
announcements that they have the slot to go do that.
They've got the fuel. You know, they're racking and rolling
and it's pretty exciting.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Join us after the break when I ask rachelously how
the economics of advanced nuclear reactors stack up. And while
I have you. If you're finding this episode insightful, please
give Zero a review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It's
great to hear your feedback and it helps new listeners
find the show. Recently, a listener who goes by Maui
Gardner said Zero is an excellent place to find what's
(17:20):
happening in climate tech. I'm not a techno geek, but
I find the show fascinating and understandable. Thank you, Maui Gardner.
And so, microreactors mean they'll have specific applications and they'll
(17:43):
have specific economics. But the stuff that is going to
make a difference on the energy transition at large or
small modular reactors. And so let's talk about the economics
of those. Because you started by saying they could be cheaper.
The nuclear industry has promised cheaper power for a long time,
but in the West it's not quite delivering on the promise.
(18:05):
So why do you think SMRs could do it?
Speaker 2 (18:07):
I will say I'm not under the hood at any
of the other SMR companies knowing the blow by blow
of how the economics are really looking. So this is
more from the outside philosophical. So, as I mentioned, because
we're not very good at megaprojects, we do tend to
be good at factory manufacturing. And so if you replace
the economy of scale with economy of numbers, right, so
(18:30):
you're making a lot of the same thing over and
over again. It's repeatable, it's modular, it's shippable, and you're
limiting how much on site work you're doing so that
it's more rinstant repeat and less redesign for every location.
We tend to do better and more predictably economically.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
There.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
The other is because these reactors do have such high
inherent safety, it is likely that we will need fewer
systems and less complication to keep them safe. So it's
not that we want have safety systems, it's just that
it's easier to do the safety systems. A lot of them,
for example, don't operate at pressure. So large light water
(19:15):
reactors even the there's pressurized and there's boiling, but all
of them operated a pretty high pressure. So you need
like thick steel vessels if you don't need such a
stick theal vessel that can only be made one or
two places in the world. Now that saves cost. So
there's a lot of things that are simpler. And then
by making them smaller, they can be fabricated more places,
(19:35):
they can be three D printed. You know, you just
have so much more flexibility and resilience in the supply chain.
You don't need that size of a crane, you don't
need to dig up as much dirt, you don't need
to pour as much nuclear grade concrete. Like, just everything
gets simpler.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
So China has one small modular reactor that is actually
connected to the grid today. Russia has built a small
modular reactor that is on a floating ship that it
can move around and provide power. And for all the
talk in the West about small modular reactors, what the
West has done and to its credit, has innovated and
(20:14):
developed lots and lots of interesting designs, but hasn't really
built any. So why is it that if advanced reactors
have these other properties that you're talking about, which it
would be smaller, cheaper to make, and something that the
West could use, especially AI data companies could use. Why
is it that Russia and China are investing and actually
building these things first political will.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Mostly they are structured differently. Right in China and Russia
it's very state owned in top down. Also to some extent,
the reason France has been so successful in nuclear is similar.
And the United States and most of the West has
more of a hybrid system where there's government involvement but
it's mostly free market but also like quasi free market
(21:01):
and so you end up with convoluted incentives sometimes. And
so if the United States had decided this is for
sure what we're going to do, we could do it.
But the market drivers of real load growth to pull
these things forward has only just happened, right, and so
one could argue, yes, these are interesting designs and there
(21:22):
was reason to care about them, but without the load
growth to drive the demand, it's hard to move really
anything forward. And now we're in that point in time
and then everyone's like, oh, but these aren't ready yet,
and it's like, well, you got to, like you have
to have that combination of planning ahead syncd up with
market signals, and so it's a it's a little messy,
(21:45):
but we're getting there.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
In the future, we're going to bet on a bunch
of technologies that are going to help us with the
energy transition, with trying to meet this growing power. The
competition for nuclear is going to be all of those.
So the first competition is gas, The second competition is
solar and when combined with batteries of some sort, maybe
(22:08):
long duration batteries. The third competition growing now is geothermal,
in advanced geothermal, which can also provide power all the time.
Why do you think then nuclear is a good bet
to make because all these other things have plenty of
promise too.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
It is good to have a resilient system where you
have a variety of technology sources, so that, for example,
if everything was natural gas, electricity prices would be so
subject to the price of natural gas it would not
be a very stable environment for businesses or consumers. Geothermal
has a likelihood to be more stable. Geothermal is going
(22:45):
to become viable in more and more locations, but it's
not viable in every location. It makes sense to have
a variety of technologies just in principle, and also, the
amount of electricity growth we are taught talking about is
so high we don't have time to only build one
(23:05):
thing like that just isn't gonna work. You're going to
have to build some of everything because you're going to
need to exercise multiple supply chains and multiple skill sets
and multiple people. There's such a fighting over the pime
mentality like the pie is getting bigger.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
There's plenty of pie, and what about the public perception
of it? So we talked a little bit about safety,
but there is real safety risk, and then there's perceived
safety risk. And there is a lot of perceived safety
risk around nuclear that holds back people's support for the technology.
(23:44):
And it is not to say perceived safety risk is
one that you should swipe away, because you have to
convince people that this is something that is worth the
money and something worth investing in four or their interest
for their benefit. Are there places in the world where
(24:05):
you think that has been done well and what lessons
can we draw from it.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
It's a huge mix, and it actually is changing really actively.
So we've seen among millennials and now gen Z a
much stronger openness to nuclear because climate change is the
bigger concern and your right perception of risk. Humans are
very poor at risk perception for most types of risks.
(24:34):
So nuclear is actually the safest form of energy that
we have. But if there's an accident, it feels scary,
and it's just we can't have systems that can have accidents.
So one of the things that I think is helpful
about advanced reactors is that it is easier to make
them safe. And so if you just get out of
(24:54):
the category of it's even possible to have an accident
or a meaningful accident, it's just simpler because there's no
world in which humans aren't going to think reactor meltdowns
aren't scary. Just like driving is way more dangerous than flying.
People are afraid of flying, they're not afraid of driving.
It doesn't matter if it's dangerous or not. It's it's
risk perception. The UK has actually overall done a good job.
(25:20):
South Korea has done a medium job. Sweden has done
a pretty good job. France has done a medium job.
So it's a big mix. I think Switzerland has done
a pretty good job. They're fifty percent nuclear, even though
they're very small, and in the US it's it's been changing.
Part of it is how active is the opposition to
(25:40):
nuclear energy. We didn't talk about this, but one of
the things about nuclear that is so compelling is the
fuel is incredibly efficient, so The reason it doesn't matter
to save cost on fuel in those big reactors is
you just need almost none of it. So a fuel
pellet the size of the last knunkle of my pinky
will make the same amount of energy as one ton
(26:01):
of coal or three barrels of oil. And so you
just don't have the same size of industry compared to
some of these other industries, so you don't have as
powerful of lobbying groups, so you don't have the same
resources to go make sure people understand what the technology is,
and you have competitor technologies that have quite a lot
(26:22):
of resources. That most anti nuclear campaigns are funded by
oil and gas.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Wow has that been proven?
Speaker 2 (26:29):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Wow? Expand on that, like, I didn't know that.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
Oh yeah, I mean who's the I think it used
to be different, But like, who is the biggest loser
of nuclear succeeds.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
It's oil and gas. Yeah, but that's also true of
wind and solar and so like then there has to
be some lobby that renewables and nuclear come together. Is
that happening? Oh you wish it.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Would maybe someday. Both communities have too much of a
small pie mentality, I would say, And don't recognize that
they're actually fighting for the same thing.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
So yes, it's an efficient fuel, and the amount of
waste it produces relative to save fossil fuels or even
some of the renewable technologies which are much less waste
producing but still do have some waste. Nuclear waste in
volume is small, but there are two big problems with it.
One is that the length of time that the waste
(27:25):
could be radioactive and could be harmful is immensely long.
We're talking thousands of years, which is again a timeline
that human perception doesn't allow you to really understand. And
then second, it's that so far we've not really done
a very good job of dealing with the nuclear waste
(27:45):
we do have. So here in the UK, waste from
nuclear weapons and from nuclear power plants is in one
site and cell a field, and yes it's there and
it's being managed, but it's also one which people are
aware of and feel fear from. So what should we
do with the waste problem?
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Yeah? No, I would love to see us actually solve it.
And there are a few countries that are again mostly
smaller European countries where decision making is simpler, that are
making good progress on what to do with their waste.
The biggest challenge with nuclear waste is that it's a
problem with no urgency because there isn't that much of it,
(28:26):
and it's safe how it is for like, it's safe today,
it's safe next year, it's safe in ten years, it's
safe in fifty years. So who's going to expend the
political capital and energy on solving the problem. So some
of the issue is that it just it's fine how
(28:47):
it is for now, and so it's really hard to
get people to move on the topic. And because these
solutions are long term solutions in politicized environments, it's easy
for them to be reversed. That's what happened in the US.
So it may be that we'll pitdle around to not
solving it for long enough that we actually will just
get recycling stood up and then it's a simpler problem
(29:09):
to solve.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
What are the solutions that you think are working though,
which you consider as good solutions and an operation today?
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Yeah, so you can do deep geologic storage, where basically
you dig a hole deep in the ground that's a
very well studied and thoughtful hole, and you store it
in casks underground. That's what most people are thinking about
is geologic storage. You also for smaller volumes you can do.
There's a startup actually doing borehole storage, where you instead
(29:38):
of making one big hole, you make some smaller holes
and store it in a more dispersed fashion. There are
some more exotic ideas that have never really gotten much purchase,
like oh, what if you put it in a deep
sea subduction zone and let it get stucked back into
the crust. I actually think it's a pretty good idea,
but we don't know enough about the deep ocean maybe
(30:00):
to satisfy what we would need to satisfy to say
that was okay. And then there's recycling, and that's where
because nuclear fuel just isn't that expensive, it hasn't been
economically viable to recycle. So so far it's only been
a country like France where there's a strategic national interest
of you know, they don't have that much fuel resource themselves,
(30:22):
or they don't have any fuel resource themselves. They've gone
all in on nuclear and so recycling makes sense for
them so that they can really extend their fuel supply.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
That was a lot of fun. Thank you Rachel, Thank
you Exhan.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
It was great to be here.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
And thank you for listening to Zero. And now for
the sound of the week. That is the sound of
a Formula car racing in London, going at speeds of
(31:02):
up to three hundred and twenty kilometers per hour indoors.
Formula E is vying with Formula one to become the
world's most popular racing sport, something we'll be covering in
a future episode of Zero. If you liked this episode,
please take a moment to rate and review the show
on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Share this episode with a
friend or with someone who is not a techno geek.
(31:24):
This episode was produced by Oscar boyd Our. Theme music
is composed by Wonderly Special Thanks to Eleanor Harrison, Dungate, Samersadi,
Moses Andim and Shawan Wagner. I'm Akshatrati back soon.
Welcome to Zero. I am Akshatrati. This week, how big
things become small. Among all forms of energy, the fastest
growth is for electricity, and that's making people look to
(00:24):
every possible technology, including nuclear. Last week we talked about
how the West has been struggling to build big nuclear
power plants in recent decades. Today we'll talk about small
modular reactors what some say could be the solution to
the problem. Don't build large, build small. The idea is
(00:45):
enticing take something that's big and hard to build and expensive,
shrink it down to something that's more manageable, easier to replicate,
perhaps even cheaper. Instead of one huge nuclear power plant,
you build ten small ones. But right now these kinds
of small modular reactors are very much in the startup phase,
(01:06):
with only two in commercial operation in Russia and in China.
There are hundreds of different designs wuying to be the
next success story, all with their own pros and cons,
and there are of course concerns about safety. So how
viable is the business for these small modular reactors. Will
SMRs ever become a scaled of solution for our energy
(01:29):
needs and climate goals? This week on Zero, I'm joined
again by Rachel's slabaw. She's a partner focused on climate,
sustainability and energy at the venture capital firm TCVC, where
she has made investments in startups that are shrinking nuclear reactors.
Before that, she was a tenured professor of nuclear engineering
at the University of California in Berkeley. Rachel talks us
(01:52):
through where we are in the development stage for SMRs,
why she's not worried about having SMRs in her garden,
and why wind, solar and nuclear developers should team up
to take on the fossil fuel lobby. This is the
second of two episodes looking at the development of nuclear
fission technologies. If you didn't listen to the first one,
(02:13):
we've put a link in the show notes. Rachel, Welcome
back to Zero.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
So last week on the show we covered large scale nuclear.
This week, I want to talk about SMRs small modular reactors.
Now there are already two of these reactors, one in
Russia and in China, but you know, Western governments don't
want those technologies, So these Western countries are making their
own bets. Canada has approved building two reactors, the UK
(02:44):
is approved one. The Tennessee Valley Authority in the US
wants to build one, and then there are hundreds of
companies with their own designs. So let's just start with
the basics. What has already been approved in construction for SMRs,
and which Western governments are willing to pay for them.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Yeah, I mean this is changing all the time. I'm
probably not going to get the current list right, but
one of I will point out. One of the reactors
that's likely to be built first, especially in Canada, is
called the BWRX three hundred and that's from General Electric,
and that is one of these sort of crossovers where
it's a light water reactor. It's a boiling water reactor design,
(03:22):
but it's small and modular. It's three hundred megawatts, and
so that is one of the bridge faster paths forward
because the design is not that different from the designs before.
The supply chain is really similar, and so maybe you
don't get some of the benefits of the advanced reactors,
but you can move more quickly and you don't have
(03:43):
to wait for supply chain build out, and so it's
kind of a good bridge technology. And like all of
these things, if actually we build a bunch of them
on that bridge. Maybe that becomes the technology that is
one of the winners in the long run.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
And yet it is true there are one hundred plus
small molo de reactor designs available. And sure we could
play the free market game of letting the market decide
which of these reactor designs we should pick, and that
might take one hundred years to decide. We don't have
that time. At what point do you go? This is
where governments need to come in decide we need to
(04:19):
narrow field down drastically and perhaps pick a few winners
and let that competition create the ecosystem to have nuclear I.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Mean, I think because nuclear is such a specific technology
where there are things that are inherently more sensitive than
some other technologies, government is always going to be involved,
and that's important. It also requires real expertise to understand
what is more likely to work and what is more
likely to hit their cost targets, and I think it's
(04:50):
not reasonable to expect all customers to be able to
figure that out. And so again it makes sense because
there's so much expertise required to have some government participation here,
and you can see that in some of these research programs,
and like in the US there's the Advanced Reactor Demonstration
program where there are a range of technology supported, but
(05:12):
two large demos selected, and one of them is a
sodium cold fast reactor and one of them is a
triso fueled gas reactor. And those are really sensible choices
because those are the two reactor technologies where we have
the most experience and the most data, and so those
ones sensibly would be the first ones you would support
(05:34):
to demonstrate, because that's you know, we've had gas reactors
in the UK, we've had sodium fast reactors in France.
We've had both of them also in the US. So
those technologies aren't ones where we don't have any experience.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Okay, well this is the time to get nerdy about
advanced reactors. So talk us through the main categories of
these reactor designs. As you said, some of them have
been tested, but some of them are yet to be tested.
Has been tested, and why did we even try those
things in the first place.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
So we have sodium fast reactors and that's where sodium
is the heat transfer media, and we have metal fuel.
Those are the reactors where you can use a recycling
process and they have really strong safety features because metal
or sodium is a really powerful heat transfer mechanism, so
if anything happens in the reactor, you can get the
(06:25):
heat out really quickly and keep the fuel safe. There
are let's say three other major bins, so there's high
temperature gas reactors, and so they use typically helium as
the heat transfer medium, and the fuel is in very durable,
robust kernels called trizoparticles. They're teeny little kernels that have
(06:47):
like layers of ceramic around them, so they're incredibly durable,
and so the particles themselves can't really melt. So helium
it's a gas, it's not as good of a heat
transfer mechanism. So in gas reactors the safety comes from
the fuel form. The fuel just can't melt down. It's
super rugged. And then if you have a loss of
coolant accident where the helium is lost, the heat transfer
(07:09):
properties of air are not so wildly different, so it's
not as big of a deal, and those tend to
operate at higher temperatures. We've built the most of those reactors.
And then the third category that has two subcategories is
molten salt reactors, and so we have built an experimental
molten salt reactor at Oakridge National Lab. And this is
(07:32):
where there are several different approaches. But you can instead
of fabricating the fuel into some kind of solid material,
you dissolve the fuel into the salt, so the fuel
is actually a liquid. It's a utectic technically, and so
the fission happens in the molten salt utectic and some
of the benefits of those molten salt very good heat
(07:54):
transfer properties, also high temperature, so you can get heat.
And because you're not fabricating a fuel form, you have
a lot of flexibility, so you can do recycling or
materials management. And then there's one reactor company that's taking
a molten salt coolant and trizoparticles that we typically use
in gas reactors and combining them to get the heat
(08:14):
transfer of the salt and the durability of the fuel.
So it's a wild world out there. You can combine
these things in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
That's how you get to one hundred and thirty designs
or whatever there are. Yeah, exactly. You talked about how
many of these designs can then be made in different sizes.
We talked about a gigawot is the sort of standard
size large nuclear power plant, the three hundred megawort that
is now being built as a small modular reactor. There
are some ideas for two hundred, and for one hundred,
(08:43):
and nowadays the thing that just blows my mind is
people are talking about tiny nuclear reactors five megawort and
one megawote, And just so that we can put this
in scale, one megawatt is about five hundred houses worth
of power if you're a UK consumer, and probably two
(09:06):
hundred houses if you're an American consumer. And so if
we're talking something that could sit in the backyard of
a tiny neighborhood and just power the neighborhood. But I'm
worried about those because with the large power plants, the
one gigawater three hundred megaworter, you have trained people who
operate a power plant, who know what they're doing, will
(09:27):
keep this thing safe. What happens when you turn these
designs into this small thing that will not have the
economics to have a safety officer sitting next to the
power plant running.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
They're a totally different type of technology. So how much
energy is in a gigawatt reactor is a thousand times
more than in a one megawatt reactor, right, and so
the volume of material, the intensity of the material is
just a totally different scale. So what you need to
(10:01):
keep that safe. You can design them so that they
can't melt down and that they're tamper proof because it's
just so much less heat to manage, so many fewer
things can happen.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
And so as DCVC, you have invested in this company
called Radiant, and it is supposed to be making these small,
very small reactors. So maybe we could take that example
to try and explain to people, why do you think
that it is okay to have one of these nuclear
reactors in your backyard.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Yeah, and maybe it's because we talked about that. I
used to be a reactor operator. It was at a
research reactor. It was one megawat thermal, so about three
times smaller than one of these. But like I've operated
one of them, it couldn't melt down, nothing could really
happen to it. I guess partly it's familiarity with what
the safety really looks like and how safe they actually are.
(10:54):
You know, at that reactor at Penn State, people would
call and ask what the evacuation plan was and we're like,
there's no evacuation, like, there's nothing can happen. I guess
I'm just comfortable and knowledgeable about the safety features that
that's not my concern.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
What do they look like, how quickly can we have one?
And where would they typically be used?
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Great questions. They're a high temperature gas reactor, so they're
using that super durable triso fuel with a helium coolant.
The reactor plus the power conversion system, all of it
fits into a shipping container. As you were talking about that.
As a scale, it's pretty small. Radiant is using a
super critical co too Brayton cycle to convert the power,
(11:38):
so it's a bit more efficient, and that means they
don't need water as a heat sink, so they can
cite very flexibly. They can be in aert environments. You
just don't have water impact concerns.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Because the turbine that is being turned with the heat
is not being turned by steam. It's being turned by
hot CO two.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Yep, that's right. What are their applications? So micro reactors,
we do not expect that you're going to take one
hundred microreactors to get one hundred megawatts and have that
be on the grid and compete with utility scale. They're
in remote locations, they're in emergency situations, they're in high
reliability backup. So anywhere that you would have a diesel
(12:20):
generator is where you could put a micro reactor. So
military bases, industrial facilities, remote communities, and for a lot
of these places diesel generators one, they're expensive, or they're smelly,
they make a lot of local air pollution, they're loud.
But also the logistics of getting diesel fuel is pretty complicated,
(12:42):
and the more remote your location. I mean there are
places in Alaska where now the roads are melting more frequently,
it's actually quite difficult to get fuel there. Right, there's
a real reliability and resilience issue around diesel fuel delivery.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
Oh yeah, I mean, especially for Defense department, it would
be a godsend because one estimate of getting fuel to
a battlefront is four hundred dollars a gallon, Yeah, fifty
to eighty times the cost of fuel that you can
buy at the pump. And so if you have something
like a microreactor, the Defense department would be the first
(13:17):
ones to buy a bunch of these.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
And even diesel fuel it's six or eight dollars a gallon,
which happens in a lot of places. You know, fuel
doesn't have to be four hundred dollars a gallon for
a microreactor. It makes sense. We also are forward looking
at things like, okay, we want to build ev charging
stations in the middle of the country. This is maybe
less relevant in the UK you're not as spread out,
(13:40):
but trying to build transmission to have that charging station
might be slower and more expensive than just building a microreactor.
So there's a lot of like flexible applications.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
If there is something like a microreactor doing a charging
station in a remote area, how do you make this
reactor stop? Because the whole point of a nuclear reactor
is you start this chain reaction that is controlled. But
if you're going to start and stop, how does a
reactor deal with start and stop?
Speaker 2 (14:11):
So we have control mechanisms and you can ramp reactors,
and then how rampable they are depends on the design.
For large reactors, fuel is not that much of the
cost of the reactor compared to the overall capital, so
ramping the reactor to like save fuel doesn't make that
(14:31):
much economic sense for very small reactors, fuel is actually
a much larger fraction of the cost of the system,
and so it does make much more economic sense to
ramp your reactor because it's just again it's so much smaller.
Some of the general rules that you would use for
large reactors don't apply. So for small reactors, turning it down,
(14:53):
turning it off, saving the fuel actually makes sense.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
And so how exactly would you do it in a
radiant reactor.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
Yeah, so we have what are called control drums. So
what control mechanisms do is they absorb neutrons, and so
you can imagine the more neutron absorber you put in there,
the reaction slows down, slows down, stops, and then when
you remove that absorber, the reaction increases again. And so
basically you just, in a controlled and thoughtful manner, you
(15:22):
just add more neutron absorber until the reaction gets to
the place where you want it to be, and then
to turn it back up, you remove that neutron absorber.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
And could that be instantaneous like the way we do
batteries for example, you know, you click a button, turns
on and provides your power, So.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Shut down can be instantaneous. Start up slower than instantaneous.
You need a little bit of time. But again, on
one megawatt a reactor, a very small reactor, that time
is like minutes. For a very large reactor, it's longer, right,
so you have a longer time evolution. But microreactors are
pretty responsive. But for all of them, if you put
(16:02):
the control mechanisms in quickly, that reaction shuts down in seconds.
The last thing is timeline. So Radiant, the company I
work with, is on pace to demonstrate their reactor next year.
So they will turn on their first full scale demonstration
reactor in twenty twenty six. That's actually pretty fast. So
(16:23):
the company started in twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen, twenty twenty,
you know, when they were just a few employees. To
turning on a reactor in twenty twenty six, it will
have cost them less than two hundred million dollars to
do that. You know, it's pretty good. They expect first
commercial deployment in twenty twenty eight. They're going to turn
on that reactor at Idaho National Lab. There were recent
(16:44):
announcements that they have the slot to go do that.
They've got the fuel. You know, they're racking and rolling
and it's pretty exciting.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Join us after the break when I ask rachelously how
the economics of advanced nuclear reactors stack up. And while
I have you. If you're finding this episode insightful, please
give Zero a review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It's
great to hear your feedback and it helps new listeners
find the show. Recently, a listener who goes by Maui
Gardner said Zero is an excellent place to find what's
(17:20):
happening in climate tech. I'm not a techno geek, but
I find the show fascinating and understandable. Thank you, Maui Gardner.
And so, microreactors mean they'll have specific applications and they'll
(17:43):
have specific economics. But the stuff that is going to
make a difference on the energy transition at large or
small modular reactors. And so let's talk about the economics
of those. Because you started by saying they could be cheaper.
The nuclear industry has promised cheaper power for a long time,
but in the West it's not quite delivering on the promise.
(18:05):
So why do you think SMRs could do it?
Speaker 2 (18:07):
I will say I'm not under the hood at any
of the other SMR companies knowing the blow by blow
of how the economics are really looking. So this is
more from the outside philosophical. So, as I mentioned, because
we're not very good at megaprojects, we do tend to
be good at factory manufacturing. And so if you replace
the economy of scale with economy of numbers, right, so
(18:30):
you're making a lot of the same thing over and
over again. It's repeatable, it's modular, it's shippable, and you're
limiting how much on site work you're doing so that
it's more rinstant repeat and less redesign for every location.
We tend to do better and more predictably economically.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
There.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
The other is because these reactors do have such high
inherent safety, it is likely that we will need fewer
systems and less complication to keep them safe. So it's
not that we want have safety systems, it's just that
it's easier to do the safety systems. A lot of them,
for example, don't operate at pressure. So large light water
(19:15):
reactors even the there's pressurized and there's boiling, but all
of them operated a pretty high pressure. So you need
like thick steel vessels if you don't need such a
stick theal vessel that can only be made one or
two places in the world. Now that saves cost. So
there's a lot of things that are simpler. And then
by making them smaller, they can be fabricated more places,
(19:35):
they can be three D printed. You know, you just
have so much more flexibility and resilience in the supply chain.
You don't need that size of a crane, you don't
need to dig up as much dirt, you don't need
to pour as much nuclear grade concrete. Like, just everything
gets simpler.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
So China has one small modular reactor that is actually
connected to the grid today. Russia has built a small
modular reactor that is on a floating ship that it
can move around and provide power. And for all the
talk in the West about small modular reactors, what the
West has done and to its credit, has innovated and
(20:14):
developed lots and lots of interesting designs, but hasn't really
built any. So why is it that if advanced reactors
have these other properties that you're talking about, which it
would be smaller, cheaper to make, and something that the
West could use, especially AI data companies could use. Why
is it that Russia and China are investing and actually
building these things first political will.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Mostly they are structured differently. Right in China and Russia
it's very state owned in top down. Also to some extent,
the reason France has been so successful in nuclear is similar.
And the United States and most of the West has
more of a hybrid system where there's government involvement but
it's mostly free market but also like quasi free market
(21:01):
and so you end up with convoluted incentives sometimes. And
so if the United States had decided this is for
sure what we're going to do, we could do it.
But the market drivers of real load growth to pull
these things forward has only just happened, right, and so
one could argue, yes, these are interesting designs and there
(21:22):
was reason to care about them, but without the load
growth to drive the demand, it's hard to move really
anything forward. And now we're in that point in time
and then everyone's like, oh, but these aren't ready yet,
and it's like, well, you got to, like you have
to have that combination of planning ahead syncd up with
market signals, and so it's a it's a little messy,
(21:45):
but we're getting there.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
In the future, we're going to bet on a bunch
of technologies that are going to help us with the
energy transition, with trying to meet this growing power. The
competition for nuclear is going to be all of those.
So the first competition is gas, The second competition is
solar and when combined with batteries of some sort, maybe
(22:08):
long duration batteries. The third competition growing now is geothermal,
in advanced geothermal, which can also provide power all the time.
Why do you think then nuclear is a good bet
to make because all these other things have plenty of
promise too.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
It is good to have a resilient system where you
have a variety of technology sources, so that, for example,
if everything was natural gas, electricity prices would be so
subject to the price of natural gas it would not
be a very stable environment for businesses or consumers. Geothermal
has a likelihood to be more stable. Geothermal is going
(22:45):
to become viable in more and more locations, but it's
not viable in every location. It makes sense to have
a variety of technologies just in principle, and also, the
amount of electricity growth we are taught talking about is
so high we don't have time to only build one
(23:05):
thing like that just isn't gonna work. You're going to
have to build some of everything because you're going to
need to exercise multiple supply chains and multiple skill sets
and multiple people. There's such a fighting over the pime
mentality like the pie is getting bigger.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
There's plenty of pie, and what about the public perception
of it? So we talked a little bit about safety,
but there is real safety risk, and then there's perceived
safety risk. And there is a lot of perceived safety
risk around nuclear that holds back people's support for the technology.
(23:44):
And it is not to say perceived safety risk is
one that you should swipe away, because you have to
convince people that this is something that is worth the
money and something worth investing in four or their interest
for their benefit. Are there places in the world where
(24:05):
you think that has been done well and what lessons
can we draw from it.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
It's a huge mix, and it actually is changing really actively.
So we've seen among millennials and now gen Z a
much stronger openness to nuclear because climate change is the
bigger concern and your right perception of risk. Humans are
very poor at risk perception for most types of risks.
(24:34):
So nuclear is actually the safest form of energy that
we have. But if there's an accident, it feels scary,
and it's just we can't have systems that can have accidents.
So one of the things that I think is helpful
about advanced reactors is that it is easier to make
them safe. And so if you just get out of
(24:54):
the category of it's even possible to have an accident
or a meaningful accident, it's just simpler because there's no
world in which humans aren't going to think reactor meltdowns
aren't scary. Just like driving is way more dangerous than flying.
People are afraid of flying, they're not afraid of driving.
It doesn't matter if it's dangerous or not. It's it's
risk perception. The UK has actually overall done a good job.
(25:20):
South Korea has done a medium job. Sweden has done
a pretty good job. France has done a medium job.
So it's a big mix. I think Switzerland has done
a pretty good job. They're fifty percent nuclear, even though
they're very small, and in the US it's it's been changing.
Part of it is how active is the opposition to
(25:40):
nuclear energy. We didn't talk about this, but one of
the things about nuclear that is so compelling is the
fuel is incredibly efficient, so The reason it doesn't matter
to save cost on fuel in those big reactors is
you just need almost none of it. So a fuel
pellet the size of the last knunkle of my pinky
will make the same amount of energy as one ton
(26:01):
of coal or three barrels of oil. And so you
just don't have the same size of industry compared to
some of these other industries, so you don't have as
powerful of lobbying groups, so you don't have the same
resources to go make sure people understand what the technology is,
and you have competitor technologies that have quite a lot
(26:22):
of resources. That most anti nuclear campaigns are funded by
oil and gas.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Wow has that been proven?
Speaker 2 (26:29):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Wow? Expand on that, like, I didn't know that.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
Oh yeah, I mean who's the I think it used
to be different, But like, who is the biggest loser
of nuclear succeeds.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
It's oil and gas. Yeah, but that's also true of
wind and solar and so like then there has to
be some lobby that renewables and nuclear come together. Is
that happening? Oh you wish it.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Would maybe someday. Both communities have too much of a
small pie mentality, I would say, And don't recognize that
they're actually fighting for the same thing.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
So yes, it's an efficient fuel, and the amount of
waste it produces relative to save fossil fuels or even
some of the renewable technologies which are much less waste
producing but still do have some waste. Nuclear waste in
volume is small, but there are two big problems with it.
One is that the length of time that the waste
(27:25):
could be radioactive and could be harmful is immensely long.
We're talking thousands of years, which is again a timeline
that human perception doesn't allow you to really understand. And
then second, it's that so far we've not really done
a very good job of dealing with the nuclear waste
(27:45):
we do have. So here in the UK, waste from
nuclear weapons and from nuclear power plants is in one
site and cell a field, and yes it's there and
it's being managed, but it's also one which people are
aware of and feel fear from. So what should we
do with the waste problem?
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Yeah? No, I would love to see us actually solve it.
And there are a few countries that are again mostly
smaller European countries where decision making is simpler, that are
making good progress on what to do with their waste.
The biggest challenge with nuclear waste is that it's a
problem with no urgency because there isn't that much of it,
(28:26):
and it's safe how it is for like, it's safe today,
it's safe next year, it's safe in ten years, it's
safe in fifty years. So who's going to expend the
political capital and energy on solving the problem. So some
of the issue is that it just it's fine how
(28:47):
it is for now, and so it's really hard to
get people to move on the topic. And because these
solutions are long term solutions in politicized environments, it's easy
for them to be reversed. That's what happened in the US.
So it may be that we'll pitdle around to not
solving it for long enough that we actually will just
get recycling stood up and then it's a simpler problem
(29:09):
to solve.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
What are the solutions that you think are working though,
which you consider as good solutions and an operation today?
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Yeah, so you can do deep geologic storage, where basically
you dig a hole deep in the ground that's a
very well studied and thoughtful hole, and you store it
in casks underground. That's what most people are thinking about
is geologic storage. You also for smaller volumes you can do.
There's a startup actually doing borehole storage, where you instead
(29:38):
of making one big hole, you make some smaller holes
and store it in a more dispersed fashion. There are
some more exotic ideas that have never really gotten much purchase,
like oh, what if you put it in a deep
sea subduction zone and let it get stucked back into
the crust. I actually think it's a pretty good idea,
but we don't know enough about the deep ocean maybe
(30:00):
to satisfy what we would need to satisfy to say
that was okay. And then there's recycling, and that's where
because nuclear fuel just isn't that expensive, it hasn't been
economically viable to recycle. So so far it's only been
a country like France where there's a strategic national interest
of you know, they don't have that much fuel resource themselves,
(30:22):
or they don't have any fuel resource themselves. They've gone
all in on nuclear and so recycling makes sense for
them so that they can really extend their fuel supply.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
That was a lot of fun. Thank you Rachel, Thank
you Exhan.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
It was great to be here.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
And thank you for listening to Zero. And now for
the sound of the week. That is the sound of
a Formula car racing in London, going at speeds of
(31:02):
up to three hundred and twenty kilometers per hour indoors.
Formula E is vying with Formula one to become the
world's most popular racing sport, something we'll be covering in
a future episode of Zero. If you liked this episode,
please take a moment to rate and review the show
on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Share this episode with a
friend or with someone who is not a techno geek.
(31:24):
This episode was produced by Oscar boyd Our. Theme music
is composed by Wonderly Special Thanks to Eleanor Harrison, Dungate, Samersadi,
Moses Andim and Shawan Wagner. I'm Akshatrati back soon.
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