August 17, 2025 • 46 mins
Summary
The conversation explores the critical role of energy in society, emphasizing its impact on product pricing and the overall economy. It highlights how energy is a fundamental component in the production, transportation, and recycling of goods, affecting both individual products and broader societal functions.
speaker bio:
Thomas Jam Pedersen is the co‑founder and CEO of Copenhagen Atomics, a pioneering startup in thorium molten‑salt reactor technology. With an M.Sc. in electrical engineering and over 15 years in software and hardware, he transitioned from IT into nuclear energy, teaching himself reactor physics and engaging in global research networkscontact:
copenhagenatomics.com
www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-jam-pedersen-9595a4/
Takeaways
Energy is essential for a prosperous society.
A significant portion of product pricing is attributed to energy costs.
Energy is involved in the production and transportation of all products.
Household energy use includes cooking, lighting, and recycling.
Understanding energy costs can help consumers make informed choices.
Energy efficiency can lead to lower product prices.
The energy sector influences economic stability.
Sustainable energy sources are crucial for future prosperity.
Energy consumption patterns vary across different products.
Investing in energy efficiency can benefit both consumers and producers.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Energy Futures
01:25 The Journey from IT to Nuclear Energy
03:20 The Importance of Energy for Prosperity
06:07 The Potential of Thorium Energy
07:30 Challenging the Concept of Energy Transition
08:21 The Cost and Accessibility of Thorium Energy
09:29 Energy Needs for Future Technologies
12:02 Understanding the Scale of Thorium Reactors
13:46 The Role of Ammonia in Energy Production
16:45 The Future of Energy Consumption
18:12 The Misunderstanding of Energy Consumption
21:36 The Impact of AI on Climate Change Awareness
22:32 The Energy Demand of AI
28:52 Economic Volatility and Energy Prices
33:42 Safety Concerns in Nuclear Energy
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Energy is the the bedrock of a prosperous society.
All the products we use and all the building materials,
everything, transportation of products around the world, all
of that requires energy. And you can look up for
different types of products. You can look up how much of that
product's price is the energy price.
In some cases, you know, 80 or 90% of the product's price is
(00:23):
the energy behind it. In other cases, maybe it's only
10%. But almost all products have a
fairly only big share of energy in there.
You know, takes energy to make products and transport them and
so on. And of course you also use
energy for heating your house, cooking your food, light in your
house and we use a lot of energyfor recycling of products and so
(00:44):
on. Welcome to Sustainability
Transformations podcast, where we explore bold ideas to drive
positive change for people, the community, and business.
Today's guest is an inventor, energy futurist, reactor
pioneer, systems thinker and global problem solver.
(01:06):
Thomas Jam is a CEO and Co founder of Copenhagen Atomics,
pushing the boundaries of clear,scalable, affordable energy from
thorium molten salt reactor technology.
If you are ever wondered what the future of energy might
really look like, this conversation is on Miscible and
the goal of our conversation is exploring thorium waste and the
(01:28):
future of cheap clean energy. Thomas, thank you so much for
joining us. Can you introduce yourself to
the audience and how you went from it to nuclear energy?
Yes, thank you very much. Yes, it's true.
Originally I I got a degree in engineering, but not nuclear
engineering. This is of course many years
ago, back in the 90s, but I did,I studied both in Denmark,
(01:52):
engineering, both in Denmark, but also in the US, in, in
Texas, in the US. And anyways, then I went about
my career for many years doing mathematical modelling,
simulations, a lot of software development.
Back then you had to write all the code yourself.
Now today you can get the AI to write your code, but, and
because of this, I worked with the energy systems.
(02:12):
I, I got involved in simulating things around nuclear energy and
me and three other people, I decided to start a company
called Forum called Teco Mega Atomics.
The reason we started the companies because because we can
we saw that there was a possibility to make a new type
of nuclear reactors that could be much more efficient than the
traditional nuclear reactors we have today.
(02:35):
We have 400 nuclear reactors in the world that produce
electricity, but we realized that we could make probably
energy much lower cost, but a more importantly that these new
type of reactors could be installed much faster.
So yeah, what's not so like if you can get low cost energy and
and get to just install it really fast.
The idea with our type of reactors or our company is to
(03:00):
mass manufacture reactors. We want to make at least one
nuclear reactor every day. They come in sort of the form
factor of a 40 foot shipping container that's roughly the
size of a commercial reactor. And then and then we can stall
many of those at the same side. Right now it's not possible
because of the regulations around nuclear.
(03:21):
It's not possible to install onein your house or your on your
ship or something. You still have to install a
number of these at a site that is nuclear approved as a power
plant. Maybe later, you know, 20 years
from now, maybe it's possible toinstall one at each big factory
or something like that. But this was a sort of a big,
(03:42):
very quick introduction to myself and and the company.
Yeah. So you've said energy is the
most important factor for futureprosperity.
Why is that? Yeah.
So, so energy is sort of the thebedrock of a prosperous society.
All the products we use and all the building materials,
(04:02):
everything, transportation of products around the world, all
of that requires energy. And you can look up for
different types of products. You can look up how much of that
products price is the energy price.
In some cases, you know, 80 or 90% of the products price is the
energy behind it. In other cases maybe it's only
10%. But almost all products have a
(04:25):
fairly big share of energy in there, you know, takes energy to
make products and transport themand so on.
And of course you also use energy for heating your house,
cooking your food, light in yourhouse, and we use a lot of
energy for recycling of productsand so on.
So I mean, if you want to make, for example, wind turbines or
solar cells, you need a lot of materials for that.
(04:46):
And those materials takes a lot of energy.
For example, solar cells, you need silicon plates and you need
aluminum. And both of those are very high
intensity energy consuming materials.
So for a solar cell, the solar cell might live for 10 or 15
years. And in that whole lifetime of
the solar cell, it produces maybe two or three times more
(05:07):
energy that what was required tobuild those solar cells in the
1st place. And that's of course because we
all that aluminum and silicon needs a lot of energy.
And it's a similar thing with the wind turbines on that.
So energy is a big part of a prosperous society and having
access to products, you can think about any product you've
ever seen, it's probably produced in some sort of house
(05:29):
or factory. And those factories are made of
concrete and steel and other materials.
And especially concrete and steel uses huge amount of energy
to be manufactured from when we take it out of the ground and
refine it and get it to steel product.
And then today actually 60% of all steel in the whole world is
(05:50):
produced in China and 70% of allaluminum in the world is
produced in China. And that's because they have
access to low cost energy. When I was a kid, the European
Union was actually called the the Coal and Steel Union.
And we used to make a lot of steel in Europe, but now it's
Europe can no longer compete with the low prices from other
parts of the world. And that's because energy is
(06:11):
expensive in Europe. And the last five years it's
gotten very expensive compared to other other places in the
world. So that's that's part of what we
want to change. We want to give all people, not
only in Europe, but all over theworld access to low cost energy.
And we need lots of energy. In the last 100 years, the
energy consumption of the whole world has increased tenfold.
(06:32):
And we expect also in the next 100 years that the energy
consumption will again increase tenfold from where we are today.
So that's a lot of energy. It's a huge amount.
And it's difficult to, when you start looking at where can we
get all that energy from? Is there enough hydropower?
Is there enough wind or solar? Is there enough, you know, coal,
oil and gas or nuclear? It starts to become difficult
(06:55):
because some of those solars I mentioned, it's definitely not
going to scale very much further.
Maybe some of the other ones canscale and, and nuclear energy,
especially the one we work with,the thorn type of nuclear
reactors is the one that has thehighest potential of scaling.
And I believe I've said before that I believe by year 2100 that
(07:16):
half of all energy in the world would be made from form.
And so that's in 75 years from now.
And, and today we, we don't actually use the one for energy.
So it's going to be a big transition and we as a company
are part of that transition. Very curious question.
If the energy is going to increase tenfold from now, then
why is it called energy transition?
(07:38):
Because we are not actually transitioning.
Trying to hopefully challenge the premise of the word energy
transition because it is energy growing.
Because if it's transitioning, then it's like you are going
from say 100% fossil fuel and you are transitioning to
nuclear. But here's a case where it's
going to grow 10 times, then putthe understanding of the policy
(08:02):
leaders, business leaders ship from that transition.
Yes, yeah, There's also this whole political discussion going
on. And I'm, I don't want to be a
big part of that, but there's some part of the globalist
movement, movement that want us to be less people in the world
and we should use less energy. And less energy obviously means
(08:22):
less prosperity. So that, yeah, there's some
people who have a different agenda and, and they actually
have a lot of so supporters in Europe, but, but you can see
already that in in Asia, including India, but also in the
US now that that people are leaving that agenda more and
more and, and they want to live a prosperous life.
(08:44):
There's so there's also another movement saying that the, the
net zero story of energy and the, the climate change story is
a hoax. I mean, so they're different
political fractions that want that have a different of where
the world is going. I'm not too big of a participant
in that whole debate. But we are a company producing a
(09:05):
new type of energy solution thatcan generate energy at a very
low cost. And we get a lot of lots of
countries and and people contactus and I'm very interested in
being able to buy energy at low cost at our target price is $20
per MW hour, which is a roughly 4 times lower price than for
(09:27):
traditional nuclear energy. For example, you are located
right now in the UK, The nuclearenergy prices there are quite
high and especially now that theUK is building some new
reactors, the Hinkley Point C and the size we'll see and so
on. I think those are the energy
prices above €100 or $100 per per MW hour and we want to
(09:49):
target $20 per MW hour. And then I know that there's a
lot of countries who wants to get access to that and grow
their energy portfolio. And of course, our type of
energy, thorn energy is a green form of energy.
It doesn't release any CO2. So in that sense, many people
think it's better than fossil fuels.
But my belief is that even 100 years from now, we're still
(10:12):
going to use both fossil fuels and hydropower and nuclear and
wind and solar and I mean all the different types of energy
sources we have today. And thorium energy is just one
of the new energy sources on that stage or global states.
And of course, being from a company developing this
technology, I have really high hopes for thorium.
And I think it's going to take avery large market share of the
(10:34):
global energy market, and especially for things like
aluminum production, ammonia production, and data centers.
There's a lot of hype right now around data centers and AI that
they need a lot of energy. For example, Elon Musk came out
and said that he wanted to build1 terawatt of compute, which is
(10:55):
so. So what are you suggesting is
that his data centers will use twice as much electricity as all
of the USA uses today. So all other companies and
private homes and factories and businesses and the military in
the US today, he wants to use twice as much energy as that
just for AI computers. And I don't think it's
(11:16):
unrealistic. I think it's going to happen.
But of course it's going to takehim more than 10 years to build
that out. And we also see other stories
where where people want to, of course, we many people want more
electrical cars in the world. And electrical cars require a
lot of energy to build. They are typically they use
three or four times more energy to build an electrical car than
(11:38):
to build a traditional gasoline car.
And all that energy is going to come from somewhere.
And usually it comes from China because the batteries, the
lithium and the aluminum for thecars are made in China and China
makes all that aluminum to from coal.
They would like to change that. They would like to use a cheaper
form of energy, for example, Thorm.
And China actually has a lot of Thorm in stockpile.
(11:59):
China and India are the countries in the world that has
the largest amount of Thorm in stockpile.
So it's likely that those two countries will install a lot of
Thorm energy and I mean because of aluminum and lithium and
these other things use so much energy, they can easily double
at those countries can alone candouble the global amount of
energy we use today. If they want to transition away
(12:22):
from coal and want to make more aluminum for electrical cars and
more data centers. Actually also the when you look
at data centers that the computer chips themselves are
made from silicon that required quite a lot of energy to make
those. But the all the racks and
everything in the data center ismade from aluminum.
So you use a lot of aluminum in a data center.
And all the cables are made fromcopper.
(12:43):
Copper is also quite energy intensive when you want to make
that. So yeah, so if we want, you
know, electrical vehicles and data centers and AI, we're going
to use a lot of energy to manufacture all of that and
install it. And that's where we come into
the picture. Just to give an idea of size, I
know you've mentioned about the cost adjust of size, size of
(13:06):
household or business can use your thorium energy systems so
the viewers can picture what type of household sizes and
business sizes. Yes, I mentioned a little bit
earlier the the, the reactor itself that we built is roughly
the size of a 40 foot shipping container.
So you can transport it on a regular lorry.
(13:27):
That means it's it's roughly 12 meters long and three meters
wide and three meters high. But that's only the reactor
unit. It needs to sit inside a
building and because of the nuclear regulations in most
countries right now, you need you basically need to install
many of these at the same side. So if you have an aluminum
factory, for example, you might install 20 or 50 of these units
(13:50):
on the same side. And the building where you
install all these reactor units inside can easily be, you know,
500 meters long building and then it would be 50 or 70 meters
wide and 10 meters. So it, it looks a little bit
like a normal distribution center, you know, like an Amazon
distribution center or maybe a Walmart shopping center,
(14:12):
something like that. So it, it doesn't look like a
traditional nuclear power plant.It looks more like a yeah,
industrial building. And then, you know, if you have
a really big site where you makeammonia or something like that,
then you might install more than100.
So then you would have several buildings at that site to
generate the energy. Maybe I should mention for the
audience, because a lot of people don't the the role of
(14:35):
ammonia. So today the, the, the global
ammonia market is 200 million tons per year and it's made from
natural gas that I'm 99% of it is made from natural gas.
But we want to change away from natural gas and use something
that is not fossil fuels. In that case, you can use
thorium energy from, from our reactors.
And then you take seawater and you split that into hydrogen and
(14:56):
oxygen with electrolysis, just similar to what many people have
done in their physics class in the primary school.
And then once you have that hydrogen, you use that and mix
it with nitrogen from our from the air.
And then you get ammonia. Ammonia is a fertilizer for
most. It actually fertilizers.
When you have fertilizers, you have with all the food in the
(15:18):
world is produced from fertilizer.
Or put it in another way, if youdidn't have fertilizer, we could
only produce half as much food in the whole world in the same
amount of land that we use for producing food, food today.
So you could say when you go into your supermarket and look
at all the food on all the shelves, half of the energy and
all that food, food comes from ammonia as an ammonia is made in
(15:41):
factories and the energy in those factories come from
natural gas. But that's what we as a company
would like to change. We would like that energy to
come from Thorium instead. I mean, the food will taste the
same, of course, and that it will look the same, but instead
the half of the energy in the food would come from a green
sauce instead of a fossil fuel sauce.
(16:02):
And of course this is going to take 20 years to sort of
transition that industry again. Today the the big producers of
ammonia in the world are India and China and the USA and
Russia. We used to make ammonia in
Europe, but it has declined a lot because our energy is too
expensive. So we cannot afford to make
ammonia in Europe. We buy it from these other
(16:23):
countries because we still need the food and we still have
farmers in Europe that produce food.
Actually, you saw that there wasa lot of strikes or a lot of
demonstrations from farmers about 1/2 a year or one year
ago. And this was all about this, the
new rules and the new regulations around fertilizer
and ammonia. One, now that we talk about
ammonia, I want to mention one more thing.
(16:45):
Ammonia can also be used in the chemical industries for
generating hydrogen. In the chemical industries.
Today, a lot of times in the chemical industries, we use
again, natural gas. But as we want to move away from
that, or if we want to make morechemicals for more products,
more people in the world who wants to have great product, we
need to use additional energy togenerate that hydrogen.
(17:05):
And that can be done from thorn reactors and from ammonia and
electrolysis. Like I was talking about before.
A lot of times you make the ammonia in one factory and then
you transport that ammonia over to the chemical factory and then
the chemical factory use that ammonia for forgetting the
hydrogen. And ammonia can also be used as
a replacement fuel for diesel, diesel oil in trucks and ships
(17:28):
and trains and so on. So we expect that half of all
the ships in the world that sailon the oceans that transport all
our goods from either the raw materials from the mines
transport that around, or they transport the finished goods
like shoes and iPhones and so onfrom from China to Europe.
Those ships in the future can sail on ammonia as a fuel
(17:48):
instead of diesel oil. So that there's going to be a
lot of transition from one type of energy source over to new
types energy sources and, and combing atomics and our thorn
reactors is going to be a big part of that.
It's not something that normal people see in their everyday
lives because it's a, when people go to work and they, you
know, use the metro or the bus or the car, whatever, they
(18:12):
don't, they don't see that we are one of the companies behind
that powering everything from making the aluminum in their car
or, or generating the electricity for the metro or
the, again, the electrical vehicle or, or making the steel
or the concrete for all the buildings and the bridges and so
on. But, but that's, that's what we
(18:32):
all about. And it's a, it's a big part of
the world economy to make all this energy.
And like you said, it used to beor even today, today is still
80% of all energy in the world is made from fossil fuels.
And this is going to change. And I think in the past, there
was some people who thought thatwe were going to reduce the
amount of energy we use. But my opinion, I mean, my
opinion is that we will increasethe energy tenfold over the next
(18:56):
100 years. And all that new energy will be
a different type of energy. It will be wind and solar and
thorum energy and to some extenthydropower.
We already use hydropower today and there's not much more
hydropower we can get, but maybea little bit more in some
places. Yeah, that's good.
So one container of that energy,I'm simplifying here for the
(19:17):
audience. One container can power and
homes. 100 homes now would you say?
One container can power depending on what country, how
much energy they use, but between 20,000 to 50,000 homes.
That's because homes homes are you.
I mean, homes doesn't use that much energy for for cooking your
food or having light in your home that doesn't require that
(19:40):
much energy. But of course, if you are, if
you have air conditioned or if you have a heat pump that
requires more electricity or if you have an electrical car that
you charge at your home every day, that also requires more
electricity. So, so it depends a lot on where
you live in the world and what kind of appliances you you plug
into the to the grid. But of course.
If you think of yourself as a asa person, less than 10% of the
(20:04):
energy you use is in your home. 90% of the energy you consume as
a person is in from all the products you consume.
I mean the producing all those products, making all the
factories for all those products, transporting all those
products around in ships and making britches and all all that
good stuff and hospitals and stuff that uses a lot more
energy. So roughly 90% of your energy is
(20:25):
outside the home and and 10% of your energy consumption is
inside the home. Different possible world have
different energy intensity that the embodied energy.
If I could use that term in different products, why is that?
It's not a common knowledge where the energy understanding
tends to be more what we use physically in the air
(20:45):
conditioning or the lighting andso on.
Why is that less popular knowledge?
Yes. So my background is in
engineering and, and I actually,so I were, I went through
school, the school system in Denmark and part of the time I
also went through the school system in the USA And we, we
learned very little about energyin primary school, very little,
(21:08):
you know, high school, maybe a little bit, but not sort of not
a full understanding. And then I studied engineering
and we learned quite a lot aboutenergy.
But they didn't, they just taught, taught us about the
physics and the calculations of the formulas for energy.
They didn't, they didn't teach us about how everything is made.
And that's something I had to learn on my own.
And in our company, we actually spent quite a bit of time
(21:31):
teaching our employees about that because also they never
learned about about it anywhere.And our sort of our business
leaders, if you go to Business School or if you go, if you're
politicians or journalists, you never learn about this anywhere.
And it's, there's a lot of good new YouTube videos about it and,
and of course also this podcast.But so it's starting to become
(21:51):
more available. But, but in the past, there was
not a lot of focus on this. Of course, the oil industry, oil
and gas, they, they had executives who learned about it,
but it was not, it was not supercommon knowledge.
And in the past, and I think there's, there's maybe a whole
generation of people who was born in the East and East and in
after 2000s who never really learned about it.
(22:14):
And, and I would say that the, the traditional media, like
traditional TV shows have, have some of the blame because they
never really explain this in a way where people can understand
it. And so people have no idea how
things are made and where the energy is coming from and how
much energy is required for EVs and aluminum and chips and so
(22:34):
on. But but now with the AIS, with
the chat, TPT and SCROC and other things like that, you can
actually ask it questions about that.
They are fairly good at answering those questions
correctly and giving you sort ofthe right proportions of how
much energy goes to this and that.
But I would say that the the people in charge of the energy
politics in Europe are very misinformed about energy.
(22:58):
And maybe it's not their fault because they never learned about
it and they just wanted to be a politician.
And unfortunately, they didn't spend the time to read up on
this themselves. So yeah, they, they tend to say
things that are ridiculous sometimes.
But the world is not perfect. We we still have to make it
work. Absolutely, which explains why,
(23:18):
for example, there might be a lot of focus on a plastic straw
where those who are being drawn to the plastic straw do want to
eliminate fossil fuel from the. But they probably don't realize
that the cup may be made of paper, but the processing of
that paper has so much energy inthat, you know, perhaps the
(23:39):
plastic as an example, you know,just picking something which is
common, the energy position. I think the initial question I
asked, it sounded more like the political side.
But I think between 2020 and 2022, there was a pandemic.
It gave people enough time to actually realize that the
climate change impact could be asignificant challenge that
(24:02):
humanity have to focus on. And this is my observation.
But as soon as 2022 to 23 GPT and AI came, all of a sudden
that sense of urgency around climate change is.
And I say that because you have Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock
and other key CEOs and influential leaders.
(24:23):
We're talking about how essential we have to deal with
the climate change impacts and so on.
But I believe looking at just the next five years, you've used
the example from the Elon Musk, how much energy is going to be
consumed? There is some estimate that's
just in five years from now by 20/30/15 to 30, sorry, 15 to $20
(24:46):
trillion of investment in AI is going to come in.
I guess the question is, or the observation is the amount of
energy needed to meet this AI isso huge that the current fossil
fuel and solar isn't going to beenough to meet those demand.
And that's where I personally see the nuclear energy coming
(25:10):
in. And again, having this
discussion is to understand whattype of nuclei produce.
Is that a fair assessment at thevery end of how much demand this
AI needs? And that's where I believe there
is. It's not only an only AI, but if
I look at one aspect of the AI, the amount of energy hungry is.
The term I've had being used is very hungry for energy.
(25:33):
I know you've mentioned on that,but I thought I would tease out
a bit more around that area. Yes, yes.
So yeah, that there's a lot of economical pull and push in AI
right now. And, and the chip factories, it
takes many years to make the chip factories and, and they've
already gotten orders for sort of the chips that they are going
(25:54):
to make in the next 3-4, five years and they are now building
new factories for that. And the so we already know from
that how many chips are going tobe made before 20-30 because
they cannot suddenly make more of it.
It takes many years to build thefactories and those chips that
they will make until 2030 to power those chips in data
centers require roughly 100 gigawatts of electricity and 100
(26:19):
gigawatts of electricity is sortof 1/3 roughly of all the
electricity that we generate in Europe.
In America, they generate a little bit more electricity
because it's it's not as expensive and they use air
condition more and so on. But so in the US that
(26:42):
electricity alone for the data centers is going to increase the
the total amount of electricity in the US by 30%, something like
that. And so you can see that is a
significant increase and it's definitely a bigger growth in
electricity than what we've seenin the past decades.
(27:02):
So the total amount of electricity production in the US
will grow. But this is just until 2030.
People are also looking at what's going to happen from 2030
to 2040 and and even further on.And then it will be much more
energy. I mean, when we get to something
like it's somewhere between 2040and 2050, I alone will use more
(27:26):
energy in the US than everythingelse uses today.
And that's back to the, the story I said about Elon Musk
wanted to install 1 terawatt of compute, which is twice as much
as what the total U.S. market consumes today.
Yeah, so the, the AI is, is driving the growth in
electricity. But I also mentioned that
(27:47):
aluminum and ammonia and other products is also going to drive
that growth, maybe not so much in Europe because our energy is
too expensive, but in places like India and China.
And I would really like to see Africa also take off because
there's a lot of people in Africa content contacting us as
a company all the time and asking, can we, you know, you
tell us that this is cheap energy, can we buy that?
(28:09):
And they will be able to buy that, maybe not from day one,
but we definitely want to sell our form of enemy and install
that in Africa. And, and in this, our type of
entity of these reactors are actually very well suited for,
for the type of electricity gridthat is in many African
countries. So it's, it's maybe better than
(28:30):
a lost traditional nuclear powerplant or, or a hydropower plant
or a coal, big coal-fired power plant.
But let's see where everything goes.
But, but I hope that we can install sort of 25% of all the
energy we create in Africa because it is, it is a big
continent and it's, it's a fast growing continent.
I forget the numbers right now, but I think there's roughly 1
(28:52):
billion people now, but they expect that there will be 4
billion people in Africa by 20. Maybe that was by 2070.
I can't remember the exact year there's.
Is it possible for me to share aslide on this?
Yeah, sure. Yeah, you can share a slide.
Because you you mentioned the the pandemic and I just want to
(29:14):
show this slide here. Yeah, sure.
So this, this slide here tells us how much entity the whole
world has consumed in the last 200 years.
And you can see here, there was a small dip here in the 1970s,
and that was because of the energy crisis in the 1970s.
(29:35):
Oh, I think it was called the oil crisis.
And then here in 2009 when we had the economic crisis, there's
another little dip. And then again, when we had the
pandemic, you, you spoke about the pandemic.
We have another little dip. So this tells you how the whole
world, how much energy the wholeworld uses and also tells you
when that whenever there is a crisis in the media, when the
(29:56):
media talks about a crisis, thisonly creates a tiny dip in the
in the chart. And of course, people like me
and other other people believe that this this chart will just
keep on going up and going up even steeper than it.
What is this right now? I also want to tell the audience
about a lot of times in, in European politics and European
(30:18):
media, we talk about these energy sources up here.
So renewable and wind and solar and hydropower, those are the
ones we talk about. But we forget about all this
down here. Let the 80% of the energy in the
world and that's of course because in Europe today most of
our products are made outside ofEurope.
And if the product is not made outside of Europe, the, the raw
(30:41):
materials, the aluminum, the steel, the concrete and so on
are made outside of Europe. And so we don't, when we look at
European energy production, we, we only see the tip of the
iceberg with which is these energy forms up here.
But we don't see all of this down here, which is what makes
the world move around or makes the world run.
(31:04):
And, and one of the reasons that, you know, some countries
have access to more fossil fuelsthan others, for example, the
oil states in the Middle East has access to lots of oil and
coal and so on. And, and China and India has
access to lot lots of coal. And that's why those countries
(31:25):
make the type of products they make.
It's because of what type of energy they have access to.
So yeah, I just thought I wantedto to share that with the
audience. I also have other slides if we
if we need to to look at that. The energy, if it's going to
increase 10 times, then clearly we can see that increase.
(31:49):
Is it going to come from nuclearas our discussion?
So yeah, it really helps for theaudience to picture it.
So thanks for sharing that. There are two segments I want us
to explore, perhaps the how the energy price plays into the
global inequality and economic volatility.
So for example in the UK or other parts of the world where
(32:12):
the more they were pushing towards the renewable energy,
which is good, the energy price just went up, which was counter
intuitive. And if the energy prices goes
up, it hits into the pockets of people.
So even though there may be people wanting renewable energy,
but then then that plays into the political football all or
political game of all, the more you have renewable energy, it
(32:35):
makes your energy price goes up.But that's more due to policy.
So having shared those context, what you think about the energy
price and the economic volatility more from the
individual pocket perspective? Yes.
And honestly, that's also part of the reason why we started our
company. I mean, we, we saw this
happening since I was a boy. When I was a boy, a lot of the
(32:58):
products that we consumed in Denmark was actually made either
in Denmark or in Europe. And I've seen over the three or
four decades that more and more products were produced elsewhere
outside of Europe and, and, and a lot of factories were closed
down. But Denmark have been in a in a
(33:18):
unique situation that we have been able to still create a lot
of jobs in the Pharmaceutical industry and medical industry.
The economic didn't sort of crash while we transitioned away
from those sectors where that use a lot of energy.
Like I, I talked about steel, steel and aluminum factories.
(33:41):
We used to have those when I wasa kid, but we don't have those
anymore because the electricity is way too expensive to make
those products here. And part of the reason why the
electricity is expensive is because we have a lot of wind
and soda. But there's also another fun
part is that Denmark is Denmark shipped out all these production
(34:05):
companies or production of all the products to other places.
And this means that we today we use less electricity than some
other countries. And we say that our politicians
say we are, we are very efficient.
We were able to cut down, but ofcourse we still use the
products. It's just the energy for those
products are consumed in India and China and we don't talk
(34:26):
about that. And then and then we install a
lot of wind power in Denmark and, and you know in wind is
intermittent. So some days the window blowing
and other days is not. But we were very lucky that we
could we could hook up to the Norwegian and Swedish grid.
And the Swedish and Norwegian grids are very unique because
they have a lot of hydropower that you can easily turn on and
(34:49):
off. So whenever the wind is not
blowing, Sweden and Norway just turn up a little bit there
hydropower. And Sweden has nuclear power as
well. So they can also turn that up a
little bit. So Denmark was in a unique
situation where we could just ask our neighbors to give us
more electricity when the wind is not blowing.
And there's not many countries in the world that are in a
(35:09):
situation like that. So that's quite unique.
And I think that's why we have managed to install quite a lot
of wind power without hurting our economy.
And you cannot expect most othercountries in the world will not
be able to do that. And we saw that.
I saw that growing up when I wasa young man and so on.
(35:30):
And, and I think this was a bad solution for at least for the
rest of the world. And then then we stumble on this
thorium energy that it's really a game changer because you can
make energy of at much lower cost than from fossil fuels or
window solar, even fusion. A lot of times we talk about
fusion in the future, but I actually wanted to start a
(35:53):
fusion company or or get involved in one of the fusion
companies 20 years ago. But after studying it, I
realized it was not this was notbest idea, at least not for me.
I mean, I love that let other people are trying to make it
work. But now I know that this storm
energy that we're making can make energy at much lower cost
(36:13):
than fusion ever will. And so that gives me a lot of
hope. And that's also part of the
reason why I believe that we will supply half of all the
world's energy in, in 75 years from now.
When I say we, it's not our company, it's there will be more
companies of course making this type of energy.
So there will be a whole host ofcompanies and I think big
(36:37):
countries like India and China and maybe Russia and so on, they
will probably make a state sponsored or state owned
enterprises who make forum energy.
And those are big countries. You know, India is the country
in the world with the most people and Africa is the
continent with the most people. So yeah, let's see how it all
plays out. But but I imagine that those big
(36:58):
countries and and also Africa will install huge amount of
energy in the next 3-4 decades. So the area is a lot of talk
about the safety aspect of nuclear.
So I think it'll be good to address that.
I know the theorem, there are other types of the nuclear.
(37:20):
I'm happy for you to show the differences, but how do you
address all the safety concerns that has been talked about
through the theorem system? Yeah.
So yes, so there's a lot of talkabout molten soul reactors is
the type of reactor we use for generating Thor amenity.
There's a lot of talk on the Internet about molten soul
(37:42):
reactors being more safe than traditional reactors.
And that is somewhat correct. I mean it has some safety
aspects that are better than oldreactors.
But I think the the important message here is not that it's a
little bit safer. The important message is that we
have been misinformed for decades by the public media
(38:04):
about how dangerous different types of energy sources are.
It's absolutely true that the media has been telling us and
the politicians have been telling us that nuclear energy
is dangerous. And that is a fact.
And they've been talking about this for 40 years now.
But it's not true. I mean, it's, it's not true that
(38:25):
nuclear energy is dangerous. So, but every, you know, 99% of
all people in society, they agree that this is true because
that's what they've been told for four decades, but it's not
true. So if you look at there was an
accident in Japan like 15 years ago, Fukushima, and nobody died
(38:48):
during the accident itself. Yeah.
There was one guy who volunteered to go into a room
where it was high, quite high levels of radiation.
He was working at the plant, andhe volunteered to go in there
and turn on a valve. And he knew that there was high
radiation, but he still volunteered.
He was quite old. And then some years later, 10
years later, he died from cancer.
(39:09):
And people have agreed that there was a high likelihood that
the reason he died from of cancer was because he went into
that room. So the world has agreed that the
one person died from that accident incident.
But then the authorities and theJapanese authorities that they
got afraid when that accident happened and they, they decided
to evacuate 150,000 people. And unfortunately more than 2000
(39:33):
people had died from this evacuation.
So they didn't die from radiation, they died from the
evacuation. And that's very unfortunate.
And, and I think all nuclear experts agree that that, you
know, in the heat of the moment,but maybe it was the correct
thing to evacuate those people because they didn't know how
much radiation there was and so on.
(39:54):
But then a week later when they had the measurements and they
knew that it was not dangerous, those people should have been
allowed to return. I mean, maybe, let's say maybe a
10 people would have died from radiation when they were allowed
to return. But now instead, because they
were evacuated and they were notallowed to return, then 2000
people died from. All kinds of things like having
(40:18):
their whole life upended some, some took suicide, other people
started drinking and died from alcoholism.
I mean, even some people died intraffic accidents when they were
evacuated because they got afraid and they drove their car
too fast and died. And that, so it's a, it's a very
unfortunate example of how the, the politicians and the media
(40:42):
scared people so much that people died from that scare.
You know, if you, if you say, you know, one person died from
radiation and 2000 people died from, from the media and the
politicians. So I think there's something we
need to talk about. And of course the media and
politicians don't want to talk about it because it's, it's not
a good story for them. But it is quite painful as an
(41:06):
industry to look at that how everything was done in the wrong
way and therefore people died. And that I have another small
anecdote that to go with that there was this Chernobyl reactor
that also had an accident in 1986.
And because of that Chernobyl accident, a lot of other
reactors were not built. And there's actually still eight
(41:27):
of those types of reactors, the same type of reactor as
Chernobyl reactor running now 40years later.
And those reactors are still producing entity every day and
they haven't killed anyone at all.
I agree that those reactors are not the safest nuclear reactor
sign. It's actually I think all people
in the nuclear industry agree that those are the most unsafe
(41:49):
reactors. But we also have to recognize
that those 8 reactors ran for for 40 years and they haven't
killed anyone. But at the same time, for most
countries, the alternative is toinstall coal-fired power plants.
And every coal-fired power plantin the whole world, including in
Europe and the US kills people every year because of coal
pollution and, and, and mining and so on.
(42:12):
So even the worst nuclear power plant designs have not killed
anyone in 40 years. But all the coal-fired power
plants in the whole world kills millions of people.
It's, it's more than a million people that die every year from
coal-fired power plants. So, so I think as an
alternative, I mean, I would, I would definitely choose any type
(42:33):
of nuclear reactor over any typeof coal-fired power plant.
If it, if we're talking about safety and and yes, our type of
reactors, these modes are reactors we talked about, they
are safer than the Chernobyl reactor.
But but the really big step is, is not so much making reactors
safer. It is making sure that the
(42:53):
politicians and media and authorities doesn't make bad
decisions when there's an accident.
It's also to make sure most people in the nuclear flu
industry that die, they actuallydie in the mining part of the
industry. So it's not the radiation from
the reactors, it's in the miningwhen you, when you have to mine
for uranium. And I think we can make that
part of the industry safer. And that will help all the
(43:15):
reactors, not only our reactor, but all the reactors will, you
know, that whole industry will have less casualties if we, if
we focus on making the mining more safe.
And of course, if we if we try to make mining of uranium more
safe, this will also have an impact on mining all kinds of
other materials that mean iron ore or coal or other things.
(43:35):
And unfortunately, also quite a lot of people die in the in the
mining of of coal and iron ore and aluminum and copper and all
these things. Yeah.
So I think I think this is wherewe should spend our focus on
trying to understand how is it actually that people die in
those industries in wind and solar.
There's a lot of people who die from falling down from roofs or
(43:58):
falling down from wind turbines and maybe we can do something
about that. It's not so much something that
I have to work on, but but that industry should should take a
hard look at that and see if they can make it safer.
Yeah, that's, again, it's good to have the insight explanation
and to address it. And I believe the addressing is
(44:20):
a very good part of the education because we've seen
that the media and the competitors, if I may use that
term, is not in the interest to explain it.
And so, yeah, perhaps we need more of these discussions.
So if our listeners, maybe thereis an energy investor or a
policy maker or simply someone who's passionate about
sustainable transformation, what's your final thought for
(44:41):
them? So first of all, I mean, they
can learn more about our companyif they go to our website,
itscalledcopingatomics.com. We also have a YouTube channel
where there's a lot of our podcasts or, or videos that
we've done in the past that are explaining how this technology
works and, and some of these other acts, aspects around
energy that we talked about in, in this podcast.
(45:04):
And I also encourage people to just ask, you know, chat DPT or
whatever their favorite AI is, because now with those AIS, it's
actually much more easy for normal people without special
education to, to teach themselves about how everything
works. And they can ask, they can ask
questions like, you know, do electrical vehicle use more
(45:27):
energy than a gasoline vehicle? Or they can ask how much energy
does my Nike shoes use? And do they use that energy in
in China or in, in India or in Europe?
And does it use the energy from the mining or for the
transportation on, on the ships that bring the shoes to the
(45:49):
store? So you can ask all kinds of
questions and get sort of reasonably good answers.
And I think this is this is brilliant because in the past,
if you were a student, like a high school student, and you
asked your teacher about it, they didn't have a clue about
it. They didn't know.
So what was you to do? I mean, it was difficult for a
high school student in the past to get that information.
Maybe they had an uncle who was an engineer that they could ask,
(46:11):
but now they can ask their TPT on their phone when they're
sitting in at a bus stop. I think that's brilliant.
Huge thank you to Thomas for these incredible insights and I
encourage the listeners to follow the their journey at the
Copenhagen Atomics and be part of a future where clean, safe
and affordable energy is not a dream, but it's been engineered.
(46:33):
Thank you so much, Thomas. Thank you.
Have a great day.
Energy is the the bedrock of a prosperous society.
All the products we use and all the building materials,
everything, transportation of products around the world, all
of that requires energy. And you can look up for
different types of products. You can look up how much of that
product's price is the energy price.
In some cases, you know, 80 or 90% of the product's price is
(00:23):
the energy behind it. In other cases, maybe it's only
10%. But almost all products have a
fairly only big share of energy in there.
You know, takes energy to make products and transport them and
so on. And of course you also use
energy for heating your house, cooking your food, light in your
house and we use a lot of energyfor recycling of products and so
(00:44):
on. Welcome to Sustainability
Transformations podcast, where we explore bold ideas to drive
positive change for people, the community, and business.
Today's guest is an inventor, energy futurist, reactor
pioneer, systems thinker and global problem solver.
(01:06):
Thomas Jam is a CEO and Co founder of Copenhagen Atomics,
pushing the boundaries of clear,scalable, affordable energy from
thorium molten salt reactor technology.
If you are ever wondered what the future of energy might
really look like, this conversation is on Miscible and
the goal of our conversation is exploring thorium waste and the
(01:28):
future of cheap clean energy. Thomas, thank you so much for
joining us. Can you introduce yourself to
the audience and how you went from it to nuclear energy?
Yes, thank you very much. Yes, it's true.
Originally I I got a degree in engineering, but not nuclear
engineering. This is of course many years
ago, back in the 90s, but I did,I studied both in Denmark,
(01:52):
engineering, both in Denmark, but also in the US, in, in
Texas, in the US. And anyways, then I went about
my career for many years doing mathematical modelling,
simulations, a lot of software development.
Back then you had to write all the code yourself.
Now today you can get the AI to write your code, but, and
because of this, I worked with the energy systems.
(02:12):
I, I got involved in simulating things around nuclear energy and
me and three other people, I decided to start a company
called Forum called Teco Mega Atomics.
The reason we started the companies because because we can
we saw that there was a possibility to make a new type
of nuclear reactors that could be much more efficient than the
traditional nuclear reactors we have today.
(02:35):
We have 400 nuclear reactors in the world that produce
electricity, but we realized that we could make probably
energy much lower cost, but a more importantly that these new
type of reactors could be installed much faster.
So yeah, what's not so like if you can get low cost energy and
and get to just install it really fast.
The idea with our type of reactors or our company is to
(03:00):
mass manufacture reactors. We want to make at least one
nuclear reactor every day. They come in sort of the form
factor of a 40 foot shipping container that's roughly the
size of a commercial reactor. And then and then we can stall
many of those at the same side. Right now it's not possible
because of the regulations around nuclear.
(03:21):
It's not possible to install onein your house or your on your
ship or something. You still have to install a
number of these at a site that is nuclear approved as a power
plant. Maybe later, you know, 20 years
from now, maybe it's possible toinstall one at each big factory
or something like that. But this was a sort of a big,
(03:42):
very quick introduction to myself and and the company.
Yeah. So you've said energy is the
most important factor for futureprosperity.
Why is that? Yeah.
So, so energy is sort of the thebedrock of a prosperous society.
All the products we use and all the building materials,
(04:02):
everything, transportation of products around the world, all
of that requires energy. And you can look up for
different types of products. You can look up how much of that
products price is the energy price.
In some cases, you know, 80 or 90% of the products price is the
energy behind it. In other cases maybe it's only
10%. But almost all products have a
(04:25):
fairly big share of energy in there, you know, takes energy to
make products and transport themand so on.
And of course you also use energy for heating your house,
cooking your food, light in yourhouse, and we use a lot of
energy for recycling of productsand so on.
So I mean, if you want to make, for example, wind turbines or
solar cells, you need a lot of materials for that.
(04:46):
And those materials takes a lot of energy.
For example, solar cells, you need silicon plates and you need
aluminum. And both of those are very high
intensity energy consuming materials.
So for a solar cell, the solar cell might live for 10 or 15
years. And in that whole lifetime of
the solar cell, it produces maybe two or three times more
(05:07):
energy that what was required tobuild those solar cells in the
1st place. And that's of course because we
all that aluminum and silicon needs a lot of energy.
And it's a similar thing with the wind turbines on that.
So energy is a big part of a prosperous society and having
access to products, you can think about any product you've
ever seen, it's probably produced in some sort of house
(05:29):
or factory. And those factories are made of
concrete and steel and other materials.
And especially concrete and steel uses huge amount of energy
to be manufactured from when we take it out of the ground and
refine it and get it to steel product.
And then today actually 60% of all steel in the whole world is
(05:50):
produced in China and 70% of allaluminum in the world is
produced in China. And that's because they have
access to low cost energy. When I was a kid, the European
Union was actually called the the Coal and Steel Union.
And we used to make a lot of steel in Europe, but now it's
Europe can no longer compete with the low prices from other
parts of the world. And that's because energy is
(06:11):
expensive in Europe. And the last five years it's
gotten very expensive compared to other other places in the
world. So that's that's part of what we
want to change. We want to give all people, not
only in Europe, but all over theworld access to low cost energy.
And we need lots of energy. In the last 100 years, the
energy consumption of the whole world has increased tenfold.
(06:32):
And we expect also in the next 100 years that the energy
consumption will again increase tenfold from where we are today.
So that's a lot of energy. It's a huge amount.
And it's difficult to, when you start looking at where can we
get all that energy from? Is there enough hydropower?
Is there enough wind or solar? Is there enough, you know, coal,
oil and gas or nuclear? It starts to become difficult
(06:55):
because some of those solars I mentioned, it's definitely not
going to scale very much further.
Maybe some of the other ones canscale and, and nuclear energy,
especially the one we work with,the thorn type of nuclear
reactors is the one that has thehighest potential of scaling.
And I believe I've said before that I believe by year 2100 that
(07:16):
half of all energy in the world would be made from form.
And so that's in 75 years from now.
And, and today we, we don't actually use the one for energy.
So it's going to be a big transition and we as a company
are part of that transition. Very curious question.
If the energy is going to increase tenfold from now, then
why is it called energy transition?
(07:38):
Because we are not actually transitioning.
Trying to hopefully challenge the premise of the word energy
transition because it is energy growing.
Because if it's transitioning, then it's like you are going
from say 100% fossil fuel and you are transitioning to
nuclear. But here's a case where it's
going to grow 10 times, then putthe understanding of the policy
(08:02):
leaders, business leaders ship from that transition.
Yes, yeah, There's also this whole political discussion going
on. And I'm, I don't want to be a
big part of that, but there's some part of the globalist
movement, movement that want us to be less people in the world
and we should use less energy. And less energy obviously means
(08:22):
less prosperity. So that, yeah, there's some
people who have a different agenda and, and they actually
have a lot of so supporters in Europe, but, but you can see
already that in in Asia, including India, but also in the
US now that that people are leaving that agenda more and
more and, and they want to live a prosperous life.
(08:44):
There's so there's also another movement saying that the, the
net zero story of energy and the, the climate change story is
a hoax. I mean, so they're different
political fractions that want that have a different of where
the world is going. I'm not too big of a participant
in that whole debate. But we are a company producing a
(09:05):
new type of energy solution thatcan generate energy at a very
low cost. And we get a lot of lots of
countries and and people contactus and I'm very interested in
being able to buy energy at low cost at our target price is $20
per MW hour, which is a roughly 4 times lower price than for
(09:27):
traditional nuclear energy. For example, you are located
right now in the UK, The nuclearenergy prices there are quite
high and especially now that theUK is building some new
reactors, the Hinkley Point C and the size we'll see and so
on. I think those are the energy
prices above €100 or $100 per per MW hour and we want to
(09:49):
target $20 per MW hour. And then I know that there's a
lot of countries who wants to get access to that and grow
their energy portfolio. And of course, our type of
energy, thorn energy is a green form of energy.
It doesn't release any CO2. So in that sense, many people
think it's better than fossil fuels.
But my belief is that even 100 years from now, we're still
(10:12):
going to use both fossil fuels and hydropower and nuclear and
wind and solar and I mean all the different types of energy
sources we have today. And thorium energy is just one
of the new energy sources on that stage or global states.
And of course, being from a company developing this
technology, I have really high hopes for thorium.
And I think it's going to take avery large market share of the
(10:34):
global energy market, and especially for things like
aluminum production, ammonia production, and data centers.
There's a lot of hype right now around data centers and AI that
they need a lot of energy. For example, Elon Musk came out
and said that he wanted to build1 terawatt of compute, which is
(10:55):
so. So what are you suggesting is
that his data centers will use twice as much electricity as all
of the USA uses today. So all other companies and
private homes and factories and businesses and the military in
the US today, he wants to use twice as much energy as that
just for AI computers. And I don't think it's
(11:16):
unrealistic. I think it's going to happen.
But of course it's going to takehim more than 10 years to build
that out. And we also see other stories
where where people want to, of course, we many people want more
electrical cars in the world. And electrical cars require a
lot of energy to build. They are typically they use
three or four times more energy to build an electrical car than
(11:38):
to build a traditional gasoline car.
And all that energy is going to come from somewhere.
And usually it comes from China because the batteries, the
lithium and the aluminum for thecars are made in China and China
makes all that aluminum to from coal.
They would like to change that. They would like to use a cheaper
form of energy, for example, Thorm.
And China actually has a lot of Thorm in stockpile.
(11:59):
China and India are the countries in the world that has
the largest amount of Thorm in stockpile.
So it's likely that those two countries will install a lot of
Thorm energy and I mean because of aluminum and lithium and
these other things use so much energy, they can easily double
at those countries can alone candouble the global amount of
energy we use today. If they want to transition away
(12:22):
from coal and want to make more aluminum for electrical cars and
more data centers. Actually also the when you look
at data centers that the computer chips themselves are
made from silicon that required quite a lot of energy to make
those. But the all the racks and
everything in the data center ismade from aluminum.
So you use a lot of aluminum in a data center.
And all the cables are made fromcopper.
(12:43):
Copper is also quite energy intensive when you want to make
that. So yeah, so if we want, you
know, electrical vehicles and data centers and AI, we're going
to use a lot of energy to manufacture all of that and
install it. And that's where we come into
the picture. Just to give an idea of size, I
know you've mentioned about the cost adjust of size, size of
(13:06):
household or business can use your thorium energy systems so
the viewers can picture what type of household sizes and
business sizes. Yes, I mentioned a little bit
earlier the the, the reactor itself that we built is roughly
the size of a 40 foot shipping container.
So you can transport it on a regular lorry.
(13:27):
That means it's it's roughly 12 meters long and three meters
wide and three meters high. But that's only the reactor
unit. It needs to sit inside a
building and because of the nuclear regulations in most
countries right now, you need you basically need to install
many of these at the same side. So if you have an aluminum
factory, for example, you might install 20 or 50 of these units
(13:50):
on the same side. And the building where you
install all these reactor units inside can easily be, you know,
500 meters long building and then it would be 50 or 70 meters
wide and 10 meters. So it, it looks a little bit
like a normal distribution center, you know, like an Amazon
distribution center or maybe a Walmart shopping center,
(14:12):
something like that. So it, it doesn't look like a
traditional nuclear power plant.It looks more like a yeah,
industrial building. And then, you know, if you have
a really big site where you makeammonia or something like that,
then you might install more than100.
So then you would have several buildings at that site to
generate the energy. Maybe I should mention for the
audience, because a lot of people don't the the role of
(14:35):
ammonia. So today the, the, the global
ammonia market is 200 million tons per year and it's made from
natural gas that I'm 99% of it is made from natural gas.
But we want to change away from natural gas and use something
that is not fossil fuels. In that case, you can use
thorium energy from, from our reactors.
And then you take seawater and you split that into hydrogen and
(14:56):
oxygen with electrolysis, just similar to what many people have
done in their physics class in the primary school.
And then once you have that hydrogen, you use that and mix
it with nitrogen from our from the air.
And then you get ammonia. Ammonia is a fertilizer for
most. It actually fertilizers.
When you have fertilizers, you have with all the food in the
(15:18):
world is produced from fertilizer.
Or put it in another way, if youdidn't have fertilizer, we could
only produce half as much food in the whole world in the same
amount of land that we use for producing food, food today.
So you could say when you go into your supermarket and look
at all the food on all the shelves, half of the energy and
all that food, food comes from ammonia as an ammonia is made in
(15:41):
factories and the energy in those factories come from
natural gas. But that's what we as a company
would like to change. We would like that energy to
come from Thorium instead. I mean, the food will taste the
same, of course, and that it will look the same, but instead
the half of the energy in the food would come from a green
sauce instead of a fossil fuel sauce.
(16:02):
And of course this is going to take 20 years to sort of
transition that industry again. Today the the big producers of
ammonia in the world are India and China and the USA and
Russia. We used to make ammonia in
Europe, but it has declined a lot because our energy is too
expensive. So we cannot afford to make
ammonia in Europe. We buy it from these other
(16:23):
countries because we still need the food and we still have
farmers in Europe that produce food.
Actually, you saw that there wasa lot of strikes or a lot of
demonstrations from farmers about 1/2 a year or one year
ago. And this was all about this, the
new rules and the new regulations around fertilizer
and ammonia. One, now that we talk about
ammonia, I want to mention one more thing.
(16:45):
Ammonia can also be used in the chemical industries for
generating hydrogen. In the chemical industries.
Today, a lot of times in the chemical industries, we use
again, natural gas. But as we want to move away from
that, or if we want to make morechemicals for more products,
more people in the world who wants to have great product, we
need to use additional energy togenerate that hydrogen.
(17:05):
And that can be done from thorn reactors and from ammonia and
electrolysis. Like I was talking about before.
A lot of times you make the ammonia in one factory and then
you transport that ammonia over to the chemical factory and then
the chemical factory use that ammonia for forgetting the
hydrogen. And ammonia can also be used as
a replacement fuel for diesel, diesel oil in trucks and ships
(17:28):
and trains and so on. So we expect that half of all
the ships in the world that sailon the oceans that transport all
our goods from either the raw materials from the mines
transport that around, or they transport the finished goods
like shoes and iPhones and so onfrom from China to Europe.
Those ships in the future can sail on ammonia as a fuel
(17:48):
instead of diesel oil. So that there's going to be a
lot of transition from one type of energy source over to new
types energy sources and, and combing atomics and our thorn
reactors is going to be a big part of that.
It's not something that normal people see in their everyday
lives because it's a, when people go to work and they, you
know, use the metro or the bus or the car, whatever, they
(18:12):
don't, they don't see that we are one of the companies behind
that powering everything from making the aluminum in their car
or, or generating the electricity for the metro or
the, again, the electrical vehicle or, or making the steel
or the concrete for all the buildings and the bridges and so
on. But, but that's, that's what we
(18:32):
all about. And it's a, it's a big part of
the world economy to make all this energy.
And like you said, it used to beor even today, today is still
80% of all energy in the world is made from fossil fuels.
And this is going to change. And I think in the past, there
was some people who thought thatwe were going to reduce the
amount of energy we use. But my opinion, I mean, my
opinion is that we will increasethe energy tenfold over the next
(18:56):
100 years. And all that new energy will be
a different type of energy. It will be wind and solar and
thorum energy and to some extenthydropower.
We already use hydropower today and there's not much more
hydropower we can get, but maybea little bit more in some
places. Yeah, that's good.
So one container of that energy,I'm simplifying here for the
(19:17):
audience. One container can power and
homes. 100 homes now would you say?
One container can power depending on what country, how
much energy they use, but between 20,000 to 50,000 homes.
That's because homes homes are you.
I mean, homes doesn't use that much energy for for cooking your
food or having light in your home that doesn't require that
(19:40):
much energy. But of course, if you are, if
you have air conditioned or if you have a heat pump that
requires more electricity or if you have an electrical car that
you charge at your home every day, that also requires more
electricity. So, so it depends a lot on where
you live in the world and what kind of appliances you you plug
into the to the grid. But of course.
If you think of yourself as a asa person, less than 10% of the
(20:04):
energy you use is in your home. 90% of the energy you consume as
a person is in from all the products you consume.
I mean the producing all those products, making all the
factories for all those products, transporting all those
products around in ships and making britches and all all that
good stuff and hospitals and stuff that uses a lot more
energy. So roughly 90% of your energy is
(20:25):
outside the home and and 10% of your energy consumption is
inside the home. Different possible world have
different energy intensity that the embodied energy.
If I could use that term in different products, why is that?
It's not a common knowledge where the energy understanding
tends to be more what we use physically in the air
(20:45):
conditioning or the lighting andso on.
Why is that less popular knowledge?
Yes. So my background is in
engineering and, and I actually,so I were, I went through
school, the school system in Denmark and part of the time I
also went through the school system in the USA And we, we
learned very little about energyin primary school, very little,
(21:08):
you know, high school, maybe a little bit, but not sort of not
a full understanding. And then I studied engineering
and we learned quite a lot aboutenergy.
But they didn't, they just taught, taught us about the
physics and the calculations of the formulas for energy.
They didn't, they didn't teach us about how everything is made.
And that's something I had to learn on my own.
And in our company, we actually spent quite a bit of time
(21:31):
teaching our employees about that because also they never
learned about about it anywhere.And our sort of our business
leaders, if you go to Business School or if you go, if you're
politicians or journalists, you never learn about this anywhere.
And it's, there's a lot of good new YouTube videos about it and,
and of course also this podcast.But so it's starting to become
(21:51):
more available. But, but in the past, there was
not a lot of focus on this. Of course, the oil industry, oil
and gas, they, they had executives who learned about it,
but it was not, it was not supercommon knowledge.
And in the past, and I think there's, there's maybe a whole
generation of people who was born in the East and East and in
after 2000s who never really learned about it.
(22:14):
And, and I would say that the, the traditional media, like
traditional TV shows have, have some of the blame because they
never really explain this in a way where people can understand
it. And so people have no idea how
things are made and where the energy is coming from and how
much energy is required for EVs and aluminum and chips and so
(22:34):
on. But but now with the AIS, with
the chat, TPT and SCROC and other things like that, you can
actually ask it questions about that.
They are fairly good at answering those questions
correctly and giving you sort ofthe right proportions of how
much energy goes to this and that.
But I would say that the the people in charge of the energy
politics in Europe are very misinformed about energy.
(22:58):
And maybe it's not their fault because they never learned about
it and they just wanted to be a politician.
And unfortunately, they didn't spend the time to read up on
this themselves. So yeah, they, they tend to say
things that are ridiculous sometimes.
But the world is not perfect. We we still have to make it
work. Absolutely, which explains why,
(23:18):
for example, there might be a lot of focus on a plastic straw
where those who are being drawn to the plastic straw do want to
eliminate fossil fuel from the. But they probably don't realize
that the cup may be made of paper, but the processing of
that paper has so much energy inthat, you know, perhaps the
(23:39):
plastic as an example, you know,just picking something which is
common, the energy position. I think the initial question I
asked, it sounded more like the political side.
But I think between 2020 and 2022, there was a pandemic.
It gave people enough time to actually realize that the
climate change impact could be asignificant challenge that
(24:02):
humanity have to focus on. And this is my observation.
But as soon as 2022 to 23 GPT and AI came, all of a sudden
that sense of urgency around climate change is.
And I say that because you have Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock
and other key CEOs and influential leaders.
(24:23):
We're talking about how essential we have to deal with
the climate change impacts and so on.
But I believe looking at just the next five years, you've used
the example from the Elon Musk, how much energy is going to be
consumed? There is some estimate that's
just in five years from now by 20/30/15 to 30, sorry, 15 to $20
(24:46):
trillion of investment in AI is going to come in.
I guess the question is, or the observation is the amount of
energy needed to meet this AI isso huge that the current fossil
fuel and solar isn't going to beenough to meet those demand.
And that's where I personally see the nuclear energy coming
(25:10):
in. And again, having this
discussion is to understand whattype of nuclei produce.
Is that a fair assessment at thevery end of how much demand this
AI needs? And that's where I believe there
is. It's not only an only AI, but if
I look at one aspect of the AI, the amount of energy hungry is.
The term I've had being used is very hungry for energy.
(25:33):
I know you've mentioned on that,but I thought I would tease out
a bit more around that area. Yes, yes.
So yeah, that there's a lot of economical pull and push in AI
right now. And, and the chip factories, it
takes many years to make the chip factories and, and they've
already gotten orders for sort of the chips that they are going
(25:54):
to make in the next 3-4, five years and they are now building
new factories for that. And the so we already know from
that how many chips are going tobe made before 20-30 because
they cannot suddenly make more of it.
It takes many years to build thefactories and those chips that
they will make until 2030 to power those chips in data
centers require roughly 100 gigawatts of electricity and 100
(26:19):
gigawatts of electricity is sortof 1/3 roughly of all the
electricity that we generate in Europe.
In America, they generate a little bit more electricity
because it's it's not as expensive and they use air
condition more and so on. But so in the US that
(26:42):
electricity alone for the data centers is going to increase the
the total amount of electricity in the US by 30%, something like
that. And so you can see that is a
significant increase and it's definitely a bigger growth in
electricity than what we've seenin the past decades.
(27:02):
So the total amount of electricity production in the US
will grow. But this is just until 2030.
People are also looking at what's going to happen from 2030
to 2040 and and even further on.And then it will be much more
energy. I mean, when we get to something
like it's somewhere between 2040and 2050, I alone will use more
(27:26):
energy in the US than everythingelse uses today.
And that's back to the, the story I said about Elon Musk
wanted to install 1 terawatt of compute, which is twice as much
as what the total U.S. market consumes today.
Yeah, so the, the AI is, is driving the growth in
electricity. But I also mentioned that
(27:47):
aluminum and ammonia and other products is also going to drive
that growth, maybe not so much in Europe because our energy is
too expensive, but in places like India and China.
And I would really like to see Africa also take off because
there's a lot of people in Africa content contacting us as
a company all the time and asking, can we, you know, you
tell us that this is cheap energy, can we buy that?
(28:09):
And they will be able to buy that, maybe not from day one,
but we definitely want to sell our form of enemy and install
that in Africa. And, and in this, our type of
entity of these reactors are actually very well suited for,
for the type of electricity gridthat is in many African
countries. So it's, it's maybe better than
(28:30):
a lost traditional nuclear powerplant or, or a hydropower plant
or a coal, big coal-fired power plant.
But let's see where everything goes.
But, but I hope that we can install sort of 25% of all the
energy we create in Africa because it is, it is a big
continent and it's, it's a fast growing continent.
I forget the numbers right now, but I think there's roughly 1
(28:52):
billion people now, but they expect that there will be 4
billion people in Africa by 20. Maybe that was by 2070.
I can't remember the exact year there's.
Is it possible for me to share aslide on this?
Yeah, sure. Yeah, you can share a slide.
Because you you mentioned the the pandemic and I just want to
(29:14):
show this slide here. Yeah, sure.
So this, this slide here tells us how much entity the whole
world has consumed in the last 200 years.
And you can see here, there was a small dip here in the 1970s,
and that was because of the energy crisis in the 1970s.
(29:35):
Oh, I think it was called the oil crisis.
And then here in 2009 when we had the economic crisis, there's
another little dip. And then again, when we had the
pandemic, you, you spoke about the pandemic.
We have another little dip. So this tells you how the whole
world, how much energy the wholeworld uses and also tells you
when that whenever there is a crisis in the media, when the
(29:56):
media talks about a crisis, thisonly creates a tiny dip in the
in the chart. And of course, people like me
and other other people believe that this this chart will just
keep on going up and going up even steeper than it.
What is this right now? I also want to tell the audience
about a lot of times in, in European politics and European
(30:18):
media, we talk about these energy sources up here.
So renewable and wind and solar and hydropower, those are the
ones we talk about. But we forget about all this
down here. Let the 80% of the energy in the
world and that's of course because in Europe today most of
our products are made outside ofEurope.
And if the product is not made outside of Europe, the, the raw
(30:41):
materials, the aluminum, the steel, the concrete and so on
are made outside of Europe. And so we don't, when we look at
European energy production, we, we only see the tip of the
iceberg with which is these energy forms up here.
But we don't see all of this down here, which is what makes
the world move around or makes the world run.
(31:04):
And, and one of the reasons that, you know, some countries
have access to more fossil fuelsthan others, for example, the
oil states in the Middle East has access to lots of oil and
coal and so on. And, and China and India has
access to lot lots of coal. And that's why those countries
(31:25):
make the type of products they make.
It's because of what type of energy they have access to.
So yeah, I just thought I wantedto to share that with the
audience. I also have other slides if we
if we need to to look at that. The energy, if it's going to
increase 10 times, then clearly we can see that increase.
(31:49):
Is it going to come from nuclearas our discussion?
So yeah, it really helps for theaudience to picture it.
So thanks for sharing that. There are two segments I want us
to explore, perhaps the how the energy price plays into the
global inequality and economic volatility.
So for example in the UK or other parts of the world where
(32:12):
the more they were pushing towards the renewable energy,
which is good, the energy price just went up, which was counter
intuitive. And if the energy prices goes
up, it hits into the pockets of people.
So even though there may be people wanting renewable energy,
but then then that plays into the political football all or
political game of all, the more you have renewable energy, it
(32:35):
makes your energy price goes up.But that's more due to policy.
So having shared those context, what you think about the energy
price and the economic volatility more from the
individual pocket perspective? Yes.
And honestly, that's also part of the reason why we started our
company. I mean, we, we saw this
happening since I was a boy. When I was a boy, a lot of the
(32:58):
products that we consumed in Denmark was actually made either
in Denmark or in Europe. And I've seen over the three or
four decades that more and more products were produced elsewhere
outside of Europe and, and, and a lot of factories were closed
down. But Denmark have been in a in a
(33:18):
unique situation that we have been able to still create a lot
of jobs in the Pharmaceutical industry and medical industry.
The economic didn't sort of crash while we transitioned away
from those sectors where that use a lot of energy.
Like I, I talked about steel, steel and aluminum factories.
(33:41):
We used to have those when I wasa kid, but we don't have those
anymore because the electricity is way too expensive to make
those products here. And part of the reason why the
electricity is expensive is because we have a lot of wind
and soda. But there's also another fun
part is that Denmark is Denmark shipped out all these production
(34:05):
companies or production of all the products to other places.
And this means that we today we use less electricity than some
other countries. And we say that our politicians
say we are, we are very efficient.
We were able to cut down, but ofcourse we still use the
products. It's just the energy for those
products are consumed in India and China and we don't talk
(34:26):
about that. And then and then we install a
lot of wind power in Denmark and, and you know in wind is
intermittent. So some days the window blowing
and other days is not. But we were very lucky that we
could we could hook up to the Norwegian and Swedish grid.
And the Swedish and Norwegian grids are very unique because
they have a lot of hydropower that you can easily turn on and
(34:49):
off. So whenever the wind is not
blowing, Sweden and Norway just turn up a little bit there
hydropower. And Sweden has nuclear power as
well. So they can also turn that up a
little bit. So Denmark was in a unique
situation where we could just ask our neighbors to give us
more electricity when the wind is not blowing.
And there's not many countries in the world that are in a
(35:09):
situation like that. So that's quite unique.
And I think that's why we have managed to install quite a lot
of wind power without hurting our economy.
And you cannot expect most othercountries in the world will not
be able to do that. And we saw that.
I saw that growing up when I wasa young man and so on.
(35:30):
And, and I think this was a bad solution for at least for the
rest of the world. And then then we stumble on this
thorium energy that it's really a game changer because you can
make energy of at much lower cost than from fossil fuels or
window solar, even fusion. A lot of times we talk about
fusion in the future, but I actually wanted to start a
(35:53):
fusion company or or get involved in one of the fusion
companies 20 years ago. But after studying it, I
realized it was not this was notbest idea, at least not for me.
I mean, I love that let other people are trying to make it
work. But now I know that this storm
energy that we're making can make energy at much lower cost
(36:13):
than fusion ever will. And so that gives me a lot of
hope. And that's also part of the
reason why I believe that we will supply half of all the
world's energy in, in 75 years from now.
When I say we, it's not our company, it's there will be more
companies of course making this type of energy.
So there will be a whole host ofcompanies and I think big
(36:37):
countries like India and China and maybe Russia and so on, they
will probably make a state sponsored or state owned
enterprises who make forum energy.
And those are big countries. You know, India is the country
in the world with the most people and Africa is the
continent with the most people. So yeah, let's see how it all
plays out. But but I imagine that those big
(36:58):
countries and and also Africa will install huge amount of
energy in the next 3-4 decades. So the area is a lot of talk
about the safety aspect of nuclear.
So I think it'll be good to address that.
I know the theorem, there are other types of the nuclear.
(37:20):
I'm happy for you to show the differences, but how do you
address all the safety concerns that has been talked about
through the theorem system? Yeah.
So yes, so there's a lot of talkabout molten soul reactors is
the type of reactor we use for generating Thor amenity.
There's a lot of talk on the Internet about molten soul
(37:42):
reactors being more safe than traditional reactors.
And that is somewhat correct. I mean it has some safety
aspects that are better than oldreactors.
But I think the the important message here is not that it's a
little bit safer. The important message is that we
have been misinformed for decades by the public media
(38:04):
about how dangerous different types of energy sources are.
It's absolutely true that the media has been telling us and
the politicians have been telling us that nuclear energy
is dangerous. And that is a fact.
And they've been talking about this for 40 years now.
But it's not true. I mean, it's, it's not true that
(38:25):
nuclear energy is dangerous. So, but every, you know, 99% of
all people in society, they agree that this is true because
that's what they've been told for four decades, but it's not
true. So if you look at there was an
accident in Japan like 15 years ago, Fukushima, and nobody died
(38:48):
during the accident itself. Yeah.
There was one guy who volunteered to go into a room
where it was high, quite high levels of radiation.
He was working at the plant, andhe volunteered to go in there
and turn on a valve. And he knew that there was high
radiation, but he still volunteered.
He was quite old. And then some years later, 10
years later, he died from cancer.
(39:09):
And people have agreed that there was a high likelihood that
the reason he died from of cancer was because he went into
that room. So the world has agreed that the
one person died from that accident incident.
But then the authorities and theJapanese authorities that they
got afraid when that accident happened and they, they decided
to evacuate 150,000 people. And unfortunately more than 2000
(39:33):
people had died from this evacuation.
So they didn't die from radiation, they died from the
evacuation. And that's very unfortunate.
And, and I think all nuclear experts agree that that, you
know, in the heat of the moment,but maybe it was the correct
thing to evacuate those people because they didn't know how
much radiation there was and so on.
(39:54):
But then a week later when they had the measurements and they
knew that it was not dangerous, those people should have been
allowed to return. I mean, maybe, let's say maybe a
10 people would have died from radiation when they were allowed
to return. But now instead, because they
were evacuated and they were notallowed to return, then 2000
people died from. All kinds of things like having
(40:18):
their whole life upended some, some took suicide, other people
started drinking and died from alcoholism.
I mean, even some people died intraffic accidents when they were
evacuated because they got afraid and they drove their car
too fast and died. And that, so it's a, it's a very
unfortunate example of how the, the politicians and the media
(40:42):
scared people so much that people died from that scare.
You know, if you, if you say, you know, one person died from
radiation and 2000 people died from, from the media and the
politicians. So I think there's something we
need to talk about. And of course the media and
politicians don't want to talk about it because it's, it's not
a good story for them. But it is quite painful as an
(41:06):
industry to look at that how everything was done in the wrong
way and therefore people died. And that I have another small
anecdote that to go with that there was this Chernobyl reactor
that also had an accident in 1986.
And because of that Chernobyl accident, a lot of other
reactors were not built. And there's actually still eight
(41:27):
of those types of reactors, the same type of reactor as
Chernobyl reactor running now 40years later.
And those reactors are still producing entity every day and
they haven't killed anyone at all.
I agree that those reactors are not the safest nuclear reactor
sign. It's actually I think all people
in the nuclear industry agree that those are the most unsafe
(41:49):
reactors. But we also have to recognize
that those 8 reactors ran for for 40 years and they haven't
killed anyone. But at the same time, for most
countries, the alternative is toinstall coal-fired power plants.
And every coal-fired power plantin the whole world, including in
Europe and the US kills people every year because of coal
pollution and, and, and mining and so on.
(42:12):
So even the worst nuclear power plant designs have not killed
anyone in 40 years. But all the coal-fired power
plants in the whole world kills millions of people.
It's, it's more than a million people that die every year from
coal-fired power plants. So, so I think as an
alternative, I mean, I would, I would definitely choose any type
(42:33):
of nuclear reactor over any typeof coal-fired power plant.
If it, if we're talking about safety and and yes, our type of
reactors, these modes are reactors we talked about, they
are safer than the Chernobyl reactor.
But but the really big step is, is not so much making reactors
safer. It is making sure that the
(42:53):
politicians and media and authorities doesn't make bad
decisions when there's an accident.
It's also to make sure most people in the nuclear flu
industry that die, they actuallydie in the mining part of the
industry. So it's not the radiation from
the reactors, it's in the miningwhen you, when you have to mine
for uranium. And I think we can make that
part of the industry safer. And that will help all the
(43:15):
reactors, not only our reactor, but all the reactors will, you
know, that whole industry will have less casualties if we, if
we focus on making the mining more safe.
And of course, if we if we try to make mining of uranium more
safe, this will also have an impact on mining all kinds of
other materials that mean iron ore or coal or other things.
(43:35):
And unfortunately, also quite a lot of people die in the in the
mining of of coal and iron ore and aluminum and copper and all
these things. Yeah.
So I think I think this is wherewe should spend our focus on
trying to understand how is it actually that people die in
those industries in wind and solar.
There's a lot of people who die from falling down from roofs or
(43:58):
falling down from wind turbines and maybe we can do something
about that. It's not so much something that
I have to work on, but but that industry should should take a
hard look at that and see if they can make it safer.
Yeah, that's, again, it's good to have the insight explanation
and to address it. And I believe the addressing is
(44:20):
a very good part of the education because we've seen
that the media and the competitors, if I may use that
term, is not in the interest to explain it.
And so, yeah, perhaps we need more of these discussions.
So if our listeners, maybe thereis an energy investor or a
policy maker or simply someone who's passionate about
sustainable transformation, what's your final thought for
(44:41):
them? So first of all, I mean, they
can learn more about our companyif they go to our website,
itscalledcopingatomics.com. We also have a YouTube channel
where there's a lot of our podcasts or, or videos that
we've done in the past that are explaining how this technology
works and, and some of these other acts, aspects around
energy that we talked about in, in this podcast.
(45:04):
And I also encourage people to just ask, you know, chat DPT or
whatever their favorite AI is, because now with those AIS, it's
actually much more easy for normal people without special
education to, to teach themselves about how everything
works. And they can ask, they can ask
questions like, you know, do electrical vehicle use more
(45:27):
energy than a gasoline vehicle? Or they can ask how much energy
does my Nike shoes use? And do they use that energy in
in China or in, in India or in Europe?
And does it use the energy from the mining or for the
transportation on, on the ships that bring the shoes to the
(45:49):
store? So you can ask all kinds of
questions and get sort of reasonably good answers.
And I think this is this is brilliant because in the past,
if you were a student, like a high school student, and you
asked your teacher about it, they didn't have a clue about
it. They didn't know.
So what was you to do? I mean, it was difficult for a
high school student in the past to get that information.
Maybe they had an uncle who was an engineer that they could ask,
(46:11):
but now they can ask their TPT on their phone when they're
sitting in at a bus stop. I think that's brilliant.
Huge thank you to Thomas for these incredible insights and I
encourage the listeners to follow the their journey at the
Copenhagen Atomics and be part of a future where clean, safe
and affordable energy is not a dream, but it's been engineered.
(46:33):
Thank you so much, Thomas. Thank you.
Have a great day.
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