September 23, 2025 • 36 mins
Thomas Jam Pedersen is my latest Scaling Clean podcast guest. Thomas Jam Pedersen, the CEO of Danish startup Copenhagen Atomics, is developing compact molten salt reactors fueled by recycled nuclear waste and thorium for greater efficiency and scalability. What’s interesting about this tech is its potential to address long-term radioactive waste, reducing storage time requirements from 100,000 years to ~300 years.
Here are the big three points:
🔹 Energy drives prosperity:
Every product we buy uses energy. 200 years ago, humans consumed significantly less energy. Today, it's about a hundred times more per person in the Western world. We are hungry for more energy because it's fundamental to prosperity. In the next decade, Thomas believes people globally will use 10x as much energy as today, which will strain global energy production. The only solution is generating a huge amount of energy. Countries like China and India are already realizing they need to produce everything: coal, oil, gas, wind, solar, and fusion. They want to build as much as they can, as fast as possible.
🔹 The challenge of starting in Europe: A decade of economic stagnation and resistance to new tech made Europe a tough launchpad. In Europe, the focus is still on cutting energy consumption. However, I Thomas believes this position will change in the next five years.
🔹 Fundraising for the long haul: Unlike software startups, nuclear ventures have timelines more like pharmaceuticals, spanning decades. To address the gap, Copenhagen Atomics built a revenue model from day one by selling test systems, reactor salts and lithium-6 and -7. They have a demo reactor planned for 2027 with projected revenues of $50M by 2028.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
China now has 70% of all aluminum production in the
world. That means that they will be
making most of the EVs of the future and and basically car
manufacturing in Europe and US might die if we don't figure out
how to make aluminum for those EVs in the future.
And it's not only EVs, I mean lots of our building materials
(00:24):
and airplanes. And when you put up solar cells
and sorry out in the fields, they also use a lot of aluminum
for that. And this is Scaling Clean, the
podcast for clean Economy CE OS investors and the people who
advise them. I'm your host, Melissa Baldwin.
(00:45):
Each show we bring you usable insights from tested leaders
that you can apply to the business of running your
business. Welcome back, cleantekers.
My guest today is a bit of an outlier.
Thomas Jim Peterson is the CEO of Copenhagen Atomics, a Danish
startup developing compact molten salt reactors powered by
(01:07):
recycled nuclear waste. Copenhagen has invented a new
type of reactor that uses thorium differently, which makes
it more efficient. Since 2020, the company has
grown from 4 founders to a team of nearly 70.
They've already started generating revenue by supplying
highly purified salt for reactortest loops.
(01:28):
We're excited to have Thomas bring his expertise to scale and
clean. Welcome to the show, Thomas.
Thank you very. Much.
All right, so we're going to getstarted here.
I'm going to ask you a couple questions about your career
journey, but first, I just want to have you tell our listeners
about Copenhagen Atomics. What makes your company
different? Yes.
(01:48):
So we are four people who started the company more than 10
years ago now. And then we had this idea in the
beginning, which was a little bit of a sort of a hinge or gut
feeling that it would be possible to make a new type of
nuclear reactor that is much more efficient than all the
current nuclear reactors, including what is called
advanced reactors and small module reactors, and also able
(02:12):
to produce energy at a lower cost than fusion ever will.
So that was exciting. But of course, in the beginning,
we didn't quite know if it was would be possible to make this
work. So we did a lot of simulations
and calculations, a lot of engineering to figure that out.
And by the spring of 2022, we knew that OK, this is actually,
(02:32):
this actually works, this new idea actually works.
And so now we've changed into a,a mode of basically building the
first demonstration reactor and then later on building the first
commercial reactors. We've already finished the
design phase as such. And what tell me again, like
I've hear a lot in the news about small modular reactors,
(02:55):
these SMRS, what makes your technology different from an
SMR? Yeah, as as you're correct, it
says it's small and modular, butthe term has been used by so
many people in weird ways that it doesn't really, it's not
really accurate anymore. I mean, there's also very large
(03:16):
reactors that uses this term, and there's also reactors that
are not modular that uses this term.
And there's also what used to becalled micro reactors, which is
very, very small reactors with avery high price that are using
the term. So it's, it's a little bit, it
just means a nuclear reactor. It doesn't really mean any
particular type of nuclear reactors.
(03:38):
Just almost any nuclear reactorsnow call themselves small
modular reactor. And it's because I, I think it's
because the, the term picked up in the broader news media and,
and nobody really understood what it meant.
And then it just been used againand again.
But I think it'll go away again really soon, like in 3-4 years
we will not be using that term anymore because it doesn't
(03:58):
really make sense. There are other terms like for
example, I mentioned micro reactors, which used to mean
reactors less than 10 MW electrical power.
And then there's also a term called advanced reactors which
are different than light water reactors.
I think that term will also be used more in the future.
(04:18):
But hey, I mean the, the nuclearindustry is full of crazy terms
and, and for outsiders it's, it's very confusing.
Also the type of reactor we are building is called a mould and
Sol reactor. So that's MSR and you know, MSR
and SMR, you know, it confuses people.
So I'm, I'm, I'm sorry about that.
(04:39):
I mean, count me among one of them.
So I wanted to, I'm glad I wanted to work that out.
The difference between an MSR and an SMR.
So but I but I want to hear morefrom you on this because I
imagine, you know, this isn't scaling clean where clean tech
come clean tech show lots of renewables, traditional solar
(05:01):
and wind. Among our audience are probably
people who are skeptics of nuclear energy.
So what would you say to them about your technology and why
it's better or different? Yeah, there's many things to
unpack and I'm not sure we can do all of them, but I'll, I'll
just list a few things. So the majority of people in the
(05:21):
world think that nuclear energy is dangerous.
And that's unfortunate in, I mean, fortunate or whatever,
it's not correct. I mean, if you look at nuclear
energy and, and you look at how many people it has killed in the
past, it's absolutely one of thesafest technologies we have.
And even when it goes completelywrong, like Chernobyl or
(05:42):
whatever, you know, it doesn't kill very many people compared
to other energy sources we use. And the majority of people who
are killed in the nuclear industry is not killed by
reactors or radioactivity. They are killed by mining, for
example, and construction work. So the exact same type of death
as occurred when you build any other power plant.
(06:02):
So but of course, the public hasthis completely wrong.
And unfortunately, many of the classical media has been playing
this string that nuclear is dangerous, but it it's not true.
Only one person died in Fukushima from that accident,
but then the authorities decidedto evacuate 150,000 people and
(06:23):
out of those, 2000 died from theevacuation or from having their
life uprooted and their employment ended and so on.
So, so that was not radioactivity or, or nuclear
power and that was a wrongdoing by the authorities.
And that's just very unfortunate.
But I mean, we, we have very little regulations on, for
(06:44):
example, evacuation or, or mining where people die or
building buildings. But we have very, very, very
super extreme tight regulations around how we built and upgrade
nuclear power plants. And, and that's the reason why
it's super expensive. That's another thing people
complain about and that's another reason why they don't
like nuclear energy, because they say it's slow and
(07:04):
expensive, but that's because wehave basically stupid regulation
that are not necessary. But I think all of this will
start to change in the next decade or two.
I do see a lot of sort of willingness from many people
around the world to, to wake up and take a new look at this and
see, OK, how could we do this ina better way where it provides
(07:27):
safe and clean energy to societyand the public and, and where it
doesn't hurt anyone. And could you give me one of the
things I noticed when I was researching your company is that
you talk about how you were ableto reduce the timeline on waste.
Could you quickly explain that for our listeners?
(07:49):
Yes, that's true. So that has been, that's an old
dream in the nuclear industry tofigure out how to use spend
nuclear fuel from classical light water reactors.
The the most we have 440 nuclearreactors in the world today
producing electricity. And most of those are the type
called light water reactors. And unfortunately the way they
(08:11):
use the fuel is not very efficient.
They they can only burn 1 or 2% of the energy content of the
fuel. And then we call it spend
nuclear fuel or some people evencall it dangerous nuclear waste,
which it's not. But but, and then there's been
this, the anti nuclear movement has said that we we have to put
it deep on the ground and geological stores and that's
(08:32):
very expensive. And that's why nuclear is
stupid. But that's not true.
I mean, if you, for example, if you put gasoline in your car and
your car is only able to burn 2%of that, then of course you
don't want to throw the 98% away.
You want to use it somewhere else.
And there has been and a lot of people in the nuclear industry
who wanted to build reactors that could reuse the fuel for
(08:53):
many decades. And that's also the reason why
very few countries have actuallyput it on the ground, because
everybody knows that we can use it again.
But the question was, can we do that efficiently?
And it can we make, can we use that spent fuel in a way where
the new energy we make from it becomes less expensive?
And that's also what we have solved with our type of reactor,
because the only country in the world right now that that
(09:15):
recycles nuclear fuel is France.And unfortunately, it's not very
economic. So I mean it, it's almost not
worth it for them, but they do it for more for political
reasons. But with our reactive, we can
actually get 10 times more energy out of the fuel than came
out of it the first time it was used.
So that there's a significant both saving and money.
(09:38):
But also, you know, we we need more energy in the world.
And in this way we can, we don'tneed to do more mining.
We can just take the spent fuel we already have, you know,
hundreds of tons of it or thousands of tons and we can use
that again and then get 10/10 times more energy.
So I think that's, that's a goodthing.
But it's also the regulations around reusing that fuel is, is
(09:59):
difficult. So it, it will take probably
take a number of decades before we really get up and running
with using that spent fuel. But because we need a lot more
energy for AI and other other things, power 2X and so on,
recycling and aluminum for EVs and so on, I think it's likely
(10:20):
that we could have used up all the spent fuel we have in the
world today by the year 2050. So even though people think we
have a lot, it can be gone fairly quickly.
And when I say, when I say it's gone, it's of course inside
reactors that makes energy. So we will continue to make
energy from it for for many decades.
So. It would be reused.
(10:40):
Yeah. OK.
I want to move now to talk aboutyour journey, how you became the
CEO. So let's let's start with your
background. How did you get where you are
today? Like what was your path that led
you to the role of CEO? I was always really good at
tinkering with things and I was very interested in how
technology work, even when I was10 years old.
(11:02):
And eventually I, I started an engineering career, got an
engineering degree in electricalengineering.
This is, I'm quite old. So this is back when software
engineering was not really engineering discipline, but
during my studies that was in the 90s, I actually tried to
take as many courses as I could in software engineering.
So I would say I ended up as more or less a software
(11:25):
engineer, even though on my diplomats as electrical
engineer, but it's sort of they are connected and and then I
work with software and mathematical modeling and
simulations for many decades. And, and this is also how I got
involved in this project. And I was very interested in how
we humans on this planet can have a prosperous society and a
(11:46):
prosperous life. And of course, in order to have
prosperity, we need energy. And you know, I, I realized that
we need to change. I mean, we get 80% of our energy
from fossil fuels and we need tochange that, whether we want
that for clean energy reasons orwe're afraid of doomsday CO2 or,
or just because we think we willrun out of coal and oil and gas.
(12:09):
And we don't want to make wars with each other over coal and
oil and gas. Whatever reason you have, we, we
need to find some other energy sources.
And it was very clear to me thatnuclear energy would be
important in the future. I mean, when I say that I think
100 years into the future. And I also looked at fusion for
quite a while. This is so at that time, I'd
(12:31):
already been an engineer for 20 years and, and I've, I've also
worked in the startup industry. I mean, I've been part of a
number of startup companies and software.
I also lived in Silicon Valley for a while.
So I was very used to sort of innovation and new ideas and
startup companies and funding and so on.
And then I got involved in this project with the other 3
(12:52):
founders and, and used my skillsin simulations and, and sort of
engineering and understanding ofhow energy works.
And, and I'm very proud that we came up with this new idea of
this new reactor core that is much, much more efficient than
traditional nuclear reactors that we've been building for 80
years almost now. So you essentially you took a
(13:16):
background in engineering and tinkering and startups, and
you're able to evolve into the role that you're in today.
Let's talk about who's influenced you in your life.
Who are the two or three most important mentors, and what do
you remember about them? At a very, very young age, like
when I was a teenager, I was sailing and and I had some
(13:39):
mentors there and I would say a lot of things that has formed
me, the willingness to try things.
When you were young, sailor likeI was you, you just go out in
the sea and you know that the sea can kill you and you have to
learn how to handle that and figure out how to, you know,
handle the weather. And another thing I want to
(13:59):
mention is the there was a guy who helped start the mass
manufacturing of both the Ford Motor Company, but also.
GM. Ford, yeah, like in auto motors.
Chevy Yeah. He's, he helped really built the
assembly lines of those. And then when the Second World
War started, he helped build themass manufacturing of airplanes
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and weapons and bombs and so on.His name is William Knudsen.
He's originally from Denmark, but he, he moved to the US in
18/18/90 or something. And, and then when he was very
young, like 19 years old, and then, and then he lived in the
US his whole life and he died shortly after the Second World
(14:46):
War. Well, I can see the influence on
him and your tech today. What I noticed when I was
looking at videos of your company is that you, you guys
are essentially, you know, building these things to be
modular and repeatable. And, and that's a part of how
you're bringing down costs, right?
That makes sense. So one more question, just
(15:07):
looking back at your past and thinking about advice.
If you could go back to when youstarted the company in 2020,
what advice would you give to your younger self?
Yeah. I, I think the number one advice
I would give is those don't start a nuclear company in
Europe. I think unfortunately what has
happened in the last 10 years, why we started this company,
(15:30):
Europe has gone into a basicallynew, new set of targets moving
backward. I mean, most, the most of the
countries in Europe are in recession.
Of course, Norway is not in recession.
They sell lots of oil and gas. So they, they are one of the
companies with growth, but also Poland has growth.
But the rest of the Europe is inrecession and have an evil
(15:55):
thinking around new technology. But we we figure out a way to
manage it and I think eventuallywe will build, I mean our
company and our idea is in of course going to be an
international idea and an international company.
And these reactors going to be sold in you know, many, many
countries all over the world, hopefully also eventually in
(16:16):
Europe. But I don't think we will we
will sell very many in Europe inthe beginning.
So I think we will still have a foothold in in Europe and in
Denmark likely the R&D department.
But the production and the most of the reactors will be outside
of Europe, in my opinion. I'm curious and maybe I'm
opening Pandora's box here, but I guess my advice, you've seen
(16:38):
what's happening in the United States recently and you referred
to this kind of recession in Europe.
Why do you think that is? Or how do you think it could be
made better? Or what you know?
What types of energy policy or energy approaches do you think
could help countries avoid recession?
Energy is part of every product we use.
(17:01):
And if we look back on how much energy every human consumed 200
years ago and how much humans inthe Western world consume today,
it's a big difference. It's not like just twice or four
times as much. It's like 100 times more energy
per person than we used to use. And then if you ask really rich
people, even they want to use more.
(17:23):
I mean, so we are super hungry for more energy and, and of
course, it's because energy is the fundamental thing that
creates prosperity. And of course, if we want to
continue in the future and have a prosperous life.
And now especially with AI, we see how AI requires a lot of
energy. Smart people in the world, not
(17:43):
only in the Western world, but all over the world, they will
try to use 10 times as much energy as they do today.
And of course, that puts a huge strain on production of energy
in the world. And that's basically what we as
a company wants to solve. And that's why I think Europe is
a little bit backwards. There's a lot of people in
Europe who says we should use less energy and basically that
(18:06):
computes to less prosperity and less growth and less everything.
And I don't think they will be successful in that.
I think it'll end up in some sort of revolt or revolution or,
or change the political situation in Europe.
But it's it's not happening right now.
Maybe it's five years away, but it's already happening in China,
(18:27):
India, US and other places that the energy market is growing
like crazy. And part of the reason is AI,
but it's also people have also looked at China and seen that
because China has access to low cost energy in the last 20
years, China now has 70% of all aluminum production in the
world. That means that they will be
(18:48):
making most of the EVs of the future.
And and basically car manufacturing in Europe and US
might die if we don't figure outhow to make aluminum for those
EVs in the future. And it's not only EVs, I mean
lots of our building materials and airplanes and when you put
(19:09):
up solar cells on sorry on out in the fields, they also use a
lot of aluminum for that and. In the frames.
Today, yes, today 70% of all aluminum in the world come from
China, 60% of all steel in the world come from China.
But and that's you see in Europehow the farmers are complaining
(19:30):
that they cannot compete and of course in order.
To the chemical industry is struggling as well, that's what
I understand because the high cost of.
Energy, chemical industry and ammonia needs low cost energy
and and that's what we want to provide from Code Mega Atomics.
It's a great point too about India and China.
I'm going to move on to another topic now.
(19:52):
I want to talk about startups and fundraising.
So, you know, you've been operating for about 10 years.
Can you just tell us what your experience has been?
It looks like you recently had a, you had a Series B.
What was that like for you? And what advice would you give
to other startups who are looking to get attention from
investors? First of all, raising money for
(20:15):
a nuclear startup is quite different than raising money for
software company or something like that.
I, I've, I've been, I've been part of a number of startup
companies in the past and some other technologies have a much
shorter life cycle. So you basically have to build
up the company and you get to customers and, and sell the
(20:38):
company within 10 years. So basically from, from, you
start from scratch until the company is very valuable, say
more than a billion dollars and you want to sell it, you, you
have to do that within 10 years.But obviously that's not
possible with fishing or nuclearcompanies or fusion companies
like that. So in that sense, we are more
like pharmaceutical companies that needs FDA approval or
(21:01):
something like that. They usually also take more than
10 years. In many cases they take 20 years
and it's a problem for them thattheir patents is almost expired
by the time that they have grownthe business through exit
status. But for nuclear companies,
fusion efficient, it likely takes more than that.
I mean, to, to grow the company.I think we will continue to grow
(21:24):
our company beyond 2050 and we will continue to raise funding
in all those decades. So it's, it's very different.
And, and this is also something where we, we struggled in the
beginning to figure out what does that journey look like to
raise, to keep on raising money for decades.
And and we decided like you saidin the beginning, we decided
(21:45):
that because we come from Denmark and because of Danish
government, it's very unlikely to sponsor us or fund us in any
way. We had to figure out a way to
make revenue from an early start, early days, even before
we had commercial reactors online.
And that's why we are selling test systems and salts for the
(22:06):
other, the other people in the industry.
And that gives us a lot of collaboration with with other
companies and universities and national labs around the world,
which is very beneficial to us. So this is part of the story of
how we can continue to raise funding is because many of our
(22:27):
competitors they continuously run out of.
So they get funding, let's say they get AB round and then they
they have money for two years and then they run out of money
and then they're in trouble if they are not able to raise the
next round. And maybe you can get lucky and
do that three or four times in arow, but you cannot do that 10
times in a row without screwing up.
And therefore that model doesn'twork in sort of when you have to
(22:50):
do it for many decades. So you have to have some revenue
and and we have shown our investors that we can continue
to grow our revenue. Right now our predictions say
that we will have a revenue of $50 million in 2028.
So this is before we even have any any reactors or any
commercial reactors. Online just from selling the
(23:11):
test systems and the salt. Yeah, because we also selling
what is called Lithium 6 and Lithium 7.
We're just starting to do that now.
We've gotten our first few contracts, but we haven't
delivered any, any of that yet. But when we start to deliver
that our revenue will go up. And we also have other, other
products in our portfolio that we can sell.
So we have sort of a a road map that shows investors that we can
(23:34):
continue to grow our revenue. And this is a a very important
part of being able to raise funding many rounds into the
future. And of course eventually we we
need to get to a working reaction.
We expect to have our first, first demonstration reactor in
2027. This one will not be able to
create entity for the grid or anything, but at least it, it
(23:54):
shows investors that our technology work and we can get
it approved and so on and that. And then we actually believe
that our valuation will, will increase by a factor of 10 once
we have that demonstration reactor, but also once we reach
proven track record and have $50million of revenue per year.
(24:14):
So that, that's pretty good for the current investors.
They, they can look at, OK, 3-4 years into the future, you know,
my shares will be worth 10 timesmore than they are today.
So that, that keeps our current investors happy.
And, and I think that also showsto new investors that, OK, this
company actually knows how to grow my investments or, you
(24:35):
know, make my money grow. Yeah, they see a near term
opportunity to yeah to grow their investment with those
that's smart to to build in thatrevenue stream, you know
temporary revenue streams as youwork to build the bigger final
product. I'm going to ask you another
(24:55):
question now. This is something we ask every
guest. So have you found that success
relies more on what the company chooses not to do or what you
choose to do? Good question.
I would say it is really, reallyimportant as a CEO or even a
founder or keep key personnel ina company, it's really important
(25:16):
to learn to say no and and deselect things.
And even we start some projects sometimes and then, and then
after a couple of months or halfa year, we review that project.
And if if we don't think it can create a lot of value, then we
kill it again. Good.
Now we're going to move on to hiring and team management.
(25:38):
Broadly speaking, hiring and interviewing has been one of the
more challenging parts of leading a company.
You've, you've taken your company from four people to 70
people and maybe you're not as involved in the hiring process
anymore, but can you tell us when you did do interviews, was
there a go to interview questionthat you would like to ask to
(26:01):
give you a sense of, of a candidate?
Yeah, I'm very involved in the, in the hiring process and
interviews as well. And what I'm trying to figure
out is, is this a person who want to extract value from the
company or is this a person who want to create value in the
company? And there's not one question
that I asked. I, I, I try to be smart about
(26:23):
and figure out what type of person is this?
And I mean, especially if they have, again, also we are very
technical company. So we want people who have
skills, technical skills. So is it somebody who can really
provide value to the company? And it's not because I want to
get rich, it's because all the existing employees we have, they
(26:45):
want to work with people who canbuild this company and build the
team. They don't want to drag somebody
up the hill. They want somebody who helps
them push the stone up the hill.I love that.
That's a great analogy too. Now we're going to move on to
another topic, marketing and AI.So you've got about 70 people
(27:05):
working in the company. At what point did you invest in
communications PR? What point did you bring in
someone full time to be thinkingabout marketing for your
company? I would say we are in our
company. We are world class at developing
nuclear reactors and some of thetechnologies related to that.
(27:26):
We have many employees that if they went to the World Cup in
that discipline, they will absolutely win the gold medal
because they are super good. But I think our marketing team
is maybe not, it's not one of our strongholds.
We've been struggling in the past and we're we're kind of
doing OK this year. This this year we created more
views and more attention and more bandwidth than we did all
(27:49):
the previous ten years. So we're starting to find the
right direction. But I will still say we're not
world class in that we we still have a lot to learn.
And I will say, I'll give creditwhere credit's due.
You guys have recently appeared on Undecided with Matt Farrell,
which is a really widely respected YouTube influencer.
(28:11):
Looks like you guys were coveredthere about a month ago.
Is there any podcast that you like and you recommend or any
interesting content that you're following right now that you
would recommend to peers? Yeah, So I would say I'm, I'm
not like the general public. I have always, like I, I said in
the beginning of the interview, I've always been working in high
(28:32):
tech and in, in, you know, in, in a sort of environment where
we invent things. And I've always been sort of
ahead of the curve looking at what is going to happen in 10 or
20 years from now. I've also been following AI very
closely and, but so, so I have had to consciously think about
(28:52):
using more present day media lately as to be more in line
with investors and, and yeah, everybody that I talked to in my
job. And you brought up another topic
that I want to ask you about andthat is AI.
So what is your company's approach to AI?
And that's a 2 fold question. 1 is are you using it internally
(29:15):
for your own business practices And the second part is, are you,
is AI are a part of your serviceoffering or your product
offering? We will soon release like a chat
bot on our website that is AI driven where you can ask
questions about first of all, coping atomics and our
technology, but also a little bit further down the line, you
(29:35):
can ask questions where you compare us to our competitors
and on. So that's, that's a small use
case for AI. That's something we offer to the
Internet. But I would say I've actually
started saying in the last year or so that I think, you know, 20
years from now, our biggest customers will not be humans, it
will be AI. And this sounds a little bit
(29:58):
weird to many people, but I think honestly that AI is not
something we can roll back. It's already here and it's going
to grow very strong and it's, it's going to have a lot of
influence on the, on the world. And yeah, I, I recently, I, I
put out an article about a monthago where I predict sort of by
(30:20):
2050 how much energy different sectors will use.
And, and of course, I predicted that AI is going to be the, the,
the largest growth in of all thedifferent sectors using energy
and it will consume sort of a, if I remember correctly,
something like 20% of all electricity by 2050 in the
(30:41):
world. But of course, that's just my
prediction. I could be wrong.
That's great. No.
And we'll, we'll have your team send us that article.
We can put it in our show notes.Now I want to talk to you more
about just on a personal level, your performance and well-being
as ACEO. So what do you do at work or in
your personal life to help maintain your performance as
(31:04):
ACEO? There's a ton of demands on ACEO
for your time, for your energy. You know, What do you do to help
yourself stay on task? I won't say that I'm good at it,
but I'm very aware that I have to say no.
I mean, I, there's so many people who want my time and also
my opinion on things and there'sno way that I can live up to all
(31:27):
of that. So it's really important to
decide what to say yes to and what to say no to.
And then I, I also, I'm aware that I have to spend time on
exercise. And actually lately I've decided
to spend more time on exercise because I, I believe that
there's also been some studies actually that I found on the
(31:48):
Internet that if you exercise and use your muscles, that helps
you brain and your mood in general.
So you are you are able to cope with more problems if you have
if you do exercise. Good.
And what about your team? How do you keep your How do you
keep your team motivated, especially if you have a tough
(32:10):
cycle or there's adversary adversity?
Yeah. I mean, when you do a startup
company, of course, the great thing is that I've had a number
of years of experience startup companies.
The problem with startup companies is always like a
roller coaster. And then then you get funding
and then it's all happy times and you hire more people and you
set very exciting goals. And then some of those goals
(32:31):
fail or there's some problem, either people problem or
technology problem. And then there's a lot of mood
swing in the both in the management and investors, but
also in the employees. Of course, I won't say that I'm
I'm really good at this, but butI also think I'm not the worst.
So I'm sort of in, in the middlemaybe.
And I definitely try to look at employees and see if somebody
(32:56):
has personal problems. Then I, I try to make sure that,
that we don't put like impossible difficult task on
them in that period. And I also try to see if we can
get some of the other employees to help them.
I mean, help them might just be,you know, let's go out for a
beer or let's make some, some social event that brings a
(33:18):
little bit of relief or fun intotheir life.
So it's not only about sort of just pushing people on technical
achievements. It's also about how can we make
some social events? One of the things I, I really
push in the companies that everytime somebody has achieved a
goal, like made something work, then we, we invite the entire
(33:42):
company for what we call a demo.It's an internal demo.
And then we have cake or ice cream or sometimes we have
champagne. It depends on what it is.
But so we tend, it's really important that we celebrate
every small win internally. And that also keeps the team
together. And it tells all the other
(34:03):
departments that this departmentover here finally succeeded with
this thing that they have been pitching about for two years or
whatever. And so these demos are really
important. Nice.
I like it. I love that with cake and ice
cream or champagne. I think it that's great to
celebrate the small wins. Well, good.
(34:24):
So my final question for you, would you consider yourself a
climate optimist or a climate pessimist and why?
Then I would say I'm a, I'm a climate optimist.
I actually don't think it's verymuch about climate at all.
And, and I think the, the planethas been here for what, 4 1/2
billion years? I'm sure it's, it'll still be
(34:45):
here. It's 2 billion years from now
and there will still be lots of life on this planet in 2 billion
years. It might not be human life.
I that's but, but there will still be life and animals and
plants and everything. All right.
Is there any other closing wordsthat you would like to leave our
our listeners with? We should think more about where
we get our energy from and what the energy means for everyday
(35:08):
life. Not take it for granted, but
actually try to understand what it means for the price of all
the products you would like to consume, whether it's coffee or
holiday or whatever. And try to understand who made
that product and that energy andthat factory.
Because for every product there's some factory somewhere
that was made from steel and concrete and who made that steel
(35:29):
and concrete? And why is that not made in my
community and my, my municipality?
It almost all the products that I consume is made halfway around
the world. And I don't think that's a great
situation, but there's nothing Ican do about it right now.
But I think I would like more people to be aware of that
(35:49):
situation and how it all fits together with the economy and
and the products and what's going to happen in the future
with AI and all that. Every single thing we touch is
there's a whole story behind it and how it was made and where it
was made and all the different pieces and components.
I think it's something it's a lot of people probably take for
granted or don't think about. Well, Thomas, it's been really
(36:10):
great talking to you. Thank you so much for taking
time to come on the show and thank you for being here on
Scaling Clean. Yeah.
Thank you for the opportunity. Thanks for joining us for
another episode of Scaling Clean, the podcast for clean
economies, CEO's, investors and the people who advise them.
I'm your host, Melissa Baldwin. Our producer is Claire Quirin.
(36:33):
If you like what you hear on scale and clean episodes, we'd
appreciate it if you'd give us afive star rating and leave a
comment where you get your podcast.
And until next time, we wish youall the best in the clean
economy transition.
China now has 70% of all aluminum production in the
world. That means that they will be
making most of the EVs of the future and and basically car
manufacturing in Europe and US might die if we don't figure out
how to make aluminum for those EVs in the future.
And it's not only EVs, I mean lots of our building materials
(00:24):
and airplanes. And when you put up solar cells
and sorry out in the fields, they also use a lot of aluminum
for that. And this is Scaling Clean, the
podcast for clean Economy CE OS investors and the people who
advise them. I'm your host, Melissa Baldwin.
(00:45):
Each show we bring you usable insights from tested leaders
that you can apply to the business of running your
business. Welcome back, cleantekers.
My guest today is a bit of an outlier.
Thomas Jim Peterson is the CEO of Copenhagen Atomics, a Danish
startup developing compact molten salt reactors powered by
(01:07):
recycled nuclear waste. Copenhagen has invented a new
type of reactor that uses thorium differently, which makes
it more efficient. Since 2020, the company has
grown from 4 founders to a team of nearly 70.
They've already started generating revenue by supplying
highly purified salt for reactortest loops.
(01:28):
We're excited to have Thomas bring his expertise to scale and
clean. Welcome to the show, Thomas.
Thank you very. Much.
All right, so we're going to getstarted here.
I'm going to ask you a couple questions about your career
journey, but first, I just want to have you tell our listeners
about Copenhagen Atomics. What makes your company
different? Yes.
(01:48):
So we are four people who started the company more than 10
years ago now. And then we had this idea in the
beginning, which was a little bit of a sort of a hinge or gut
feeling that it would be possible to make a new type of
nuclear reactor that is much more efficient than all the
current nuclear reactors, including what is called
advanced reactors and small module reactors, and also able
(02:12):
to produce energy at a lower cost than fusion ever will.
So that was exciting. But of course, in the beginning,
we didn't quite know if it was would be possible to make this
work. So we did a lot of simulations
and calculations, a lot of engineering to figure that out.
And by the spring of 2022, we knew that OK, this is actually,
(02:32):
this actually works, this new idea actually works.
And so now we've changed into a,a mode of basically building the
first demonstration reactor and then later on building the first
commercial reactors. We've already finished the
design phase as such. And what tell me again, like
I've hear a lot in the news about small modular reactors,
(02:55):
these SMRS, what makes your technology different from an
SMR? Yeah, as as you're correct, it
says it's small and modular, butthe term has been used by so
many people in weird ways that it doesn't really, it's not
really accurate anymore. I mean, there's also very large
(03:16):
reactors that uses this term, and there's also reactors that
are not modular that uses this term.
And there's also what used to becalled micro reactors, which is
very, very small reactors with avery high price that are using
the term. So it's, it's a little bit, it
just means a nuclear reactor. It doesn't really mean any
particular type of nuclear reactors.
(03:38):
Just almost any nuclear reactorsnow call themselves small
modular reactor. And it's because I, I think it's
because the, the term picked up in the broader news media and,
and nobody really understood what it meant.
And then it just been used againand again.
But I think it'll go away again really soon, like in 3-4 years
we will not be using that term anymore because it doesn't
(03:58):
really make sense. There are other terms like for
example, I mentioned micro reactors, which used to mean
reactors less than 10 MW electrical power.
And then there's also a term called advanced reactors which
are different than light water reactors.
I think that term will also be used more in the future.
(04:18):
But hey, I mean the, the nuclearindustry is full of crazy terms
and, and for outsiders it's, it's very confusing.
Also the type of reactor we are building is called a mould and
Sol reactor. So that's MSR and you know, MSR
and SMR, you know, it confuses people.
So I'm, I'm, I'm sorry about that.
(04:39):
I mean, count me among one of them.
So I wanted to, I'm glad I wanted to work that out.
The difference between an MSR and an SMR.
So but I but I want to hear morefrom you on this because I
imagine, you know, this isn't scaling clean where clean tech
come clean tech show lots of renewables, traditional solar
(05:01):
and wind. Among our audience are probably
people who are skeptics of nuclear energy.
So what would you say to them about your technology and why
it's better or different? Yeah, there's many things to
unpack and I'm not sure we can do all of them, but I'll, I'll
just list a few things. So the majority of people in the
(05:21):
world think that nuclear energy is dangerous.
And that's unfortunate in, I mean, fortunate or whatever,
it's not correct. I mean, if you look at nuclear
energy and, and you look at how many people it has killed in the
past, it's absolutely one of thesafest technologies we have.
And even when it goes completelywrong, like Chernobyl or
(05:42):
whatever, you know, it doesn't kill very many people compared
to other energy sources we use. And the majority of people who
are killed in the nuclear industry is not killed by
reactors or radioactivity. They are killed by mining, for
example, and construction work. So the exact same type of death
as occurred when you build any other power plant.
(06:02):
So but of course, the public hasthis completely wrong.
And unfortunately, many of the classical media has been playing
this string that nuclear is dangerous, but it it's not true.
Only one person died in Fukushima from that accident,
but then the authorities decidedto evacuate 150,000 people and
(06:23):
out of those, 2000 died from theevacuation or from having their
life uprooted and their employment ended and so on.
So, so that was not radioactivity or, or nuclear
power and that was a wrongdoing by the authorities.
And that's just very unfortunate.
But I mean, we, we have very little regulations on, for
(06:44):
example, evacuation or, or mining where people die or
building buildings. But we have very, very, very
super extreme tight regulations around how we built and upgrade
nuclear power plants. And, and that's the reason why
it's super expensive. That's another thing people
complain about and that's another reason why they don't
like nuclear energy, because they say it's slow and
(07:04):
expensive, but that's because wehave basically stupid regulation
that are not necessary. But I think all of this will
start to change in the next decade or two.
I do see a lot of sort of willingness from many people
around the world to, to wake up and take a new look at this and
see, OK, how could we do this ina better way where it provides
(07:27):
safe and clean energy to societyand the public and, and where it
doesn't hurt anyone. And could you give me one of the
things I noticed when I was researching your company is that
you talk about how you were ableto reduce the timeline on waste.
Could you quickly explain that for our listeners?
(07:49):
Yes, that's true. So that has been, that's an old
dream in the nuclear industry tofigure out how to use spend
nuclear fuel from classical light water reactors.
The the most we have 440 nuclearreactors in the world today
producing electricity. And most of those are the type
called light water reactors. And unfortunately the way they
(08:11):
use the fuel is not very efficient.
They they can only burn 1 or 2% of the energy content of the
fuel. And then we call it spend
nuclear fuel or some people evencall it dangerous nuclear waste,
which it's not. But but, and then there's been
this, the anti nuclear movement has said that we we have to put
it deep on the ground and geological stores and that's
(08:32):
very expensive. And that's why nuclear is
stupid. But that's not true.
I mean, if you, for example, if you put gasoline in your car and
your car is only able to burn 2%of that, then of course you
don't want to throw the 98% away.
You want to use it somewhere else.
And there has been and a lot of people in the nuclear industry
who wanted to build reactors that could reuse the fuel for
(08:53):
many decades. And that's also the reason why
very few countries have actuallyput it on the ground, because
everybody knows that we can use it again.
But the question was, can we do that efficiently?
And it can we make, can we use that spent fuel in a way where
the new energy we make from it becomes less expensive?
And that's also what we have solved with our type of reactor,
because the only country in the world right now that that
(09:15):
recycles nuclear fuel is France.And unfortunately, it's not very
economic. So I mean it, it's almost not
worth it for them, but they do it for more for political
reasons. But with our reactive, we can
actually get 10 times more energy out of the fuel than came
out of it the first time it was used.
So that there's a significant both saving and money.
(09:38):
But also, you know, we we need more energy in the world.
And in this way we can, we don'tneed to do more mining.
We can just take the spent fuel we already have, you know,
hundreds of tons of it or thousands of tons and we can use
that again and then get 10/10 times more energy.
So I think that's, that's a goodthing.
But it's also the regulations around reusing that fuel is, is
(09:59):
difficult. So it, it will take probably
take a number of decades before we really get up and running
with using that spent fuel. But because we need a lot more
energy for AI and other other things, power 2X and so on,
recycling and aluminum for EVs and so on, I think it's likely
(10:20):
that we could have used up all the spent fuel we have in the
world today by the year 2050. So even though people think we
have a lot, it can be gone fairly quickly.
And when I say, when I say it's gone, it's of course inside
reactors that makes energy. So we will continue to make
energy from it for for many decades.
So. It would be reused.
(10:40):
Yeah. OK.
I want to move now to talk aboutyour journey, how you became the
CEO. So let's let's start with your
background. How did you get where you are
today? Like what was your path that led
you to the role of CEO? I was always really good at
tinkering with things and I was very interested in how
technology work, even when I was10 years old.
(11:02):
And eventually I, I started an engineering career, got an
engineering degree in electricalengineering.
This is, I'm quite old. So this is back when software
engineering was not really engineering discipline, but
during my studies that was in the 90s, I actually tried to
take as many courses as I could in software engineering.
So I would say I ended up as more or less a software
(11:25):
engineer, even though on my diplomats as electrical
engineer, but it's sort of they are connected and and then I
work with software and mathematical modeling and
simulations for many decades. And, and this is also how I got
involved in this project. And I was very interested in how
we humans on this planet can have a prosperous society and a
(11:46):
prosperous life. And of course, in order to have
prosperity, we need energy. And you know, I, I realized that
we need to change. I mean, we get 80% of our energy
from fossil fuels and we need tochange that, whether we want
that for clean energy reasons orwe're afraid of doomsday CO2 or,
or just because we think we willrun out of coal and oil and gas.
(12:09):
And we don't want to make wars with each other over coal and
oil and gas. Whatever reason you have, we, we
need to find some other energy sources.
And it was very clear to me thatnuclear energy would be
important in the future. I mean, when I say that I think
100 years into the future. And I also looked at fusion for
quite a while. This is so at that time, I'd
(12:31):
already been an engineer for 20 years and, and I've, I've also
worked in the startup industry. I mean, I've been part of a
number of startup companies and software.
I also lived in Silicon Valley for a while.
So I was very used to sort of innovation and new ideas and
startup companies and funding and so on.
And then I got involved in this project with the other 3
(12:52):
founders and, and used my skillsin simulations and, and sort of
engineering and understanding ofhow energy works.
And, and I'm very proud that we came up with this new idea of
this new reactor core that is much, much more efficient than
traditional nuclear reactors that we've been building for 80
years almost now. So you essentially you took a
(13:16):
background in engineering and tinkering and startups, and
you're able to evolve into the role that you're in today.
Let's talk about who's influenced you in your life.
Who are the two or three most important mentors, and what do
you remember about them? At a very, very young age, like
when I was a teenager, I was sailing and and I had some
(13:39):
mentors there and I would say a lot of things that has formed
me, the willingness to try things.
When you were young, sailor likeI was you, you just go out in
the sea and you know that the sea can kill you and you have to
learn how to handle that and figure out how to, you know,
handle the weather. And another thing I want to
(13:59):
mention is the there was a guy who helped start the mass
manufacturing of both the Ford Motor Company, but also.
GM. Ford, yeah, like in auto motors.
Chevy Yeah. He's, he helped really built the
assembly lines of those. And then when the Second World
War started, he helped build themass manufacturing of airplanes
(14:23):
and weapons and bombs and so on.His name is William Knudsen.
He's originally from Denmark, but he, he moved to the US in
18/18/90 or something. And, and then when he was very
young, like 19 years old, and then, and then he lived in the
US his whole life and he died shortly after the Second World
(14:46):
War. Well, I can see the influence on
him and your tech today. What I noticed when I was
looking at videos of your company is that you, you guys
are essentially, you know, building these things to be
modular and repeatable. And, and that's a part of how
you're bringing down costs, right?
That makes sense. So one more question, just
(15:07):
looking back at your past and thinking about advice.
If you could go back to when youstarted the company in 2020,
what advice would you give to your younger self?
Yeah. I, I think the number one advice
I would give is those don't start a nuclear company in
Europe. I think unfortunately what has
happened in the last 10 years, why we started this company,
(15:30):
Europe has gone into a basicallynew, new set of targets moving
backward. I mean, most, the most of the
countries in Europe are in recession.
Of course, Norway is not in recession.
They sell lots of oil and gas. So they, they are one of the
companies with growth, but also Poland has growth.
But the rest of the Europe is inrecession and have an evil
(15:55):
thinking around new technology. But we we figure out a way to
manage it and I think eventuallywe will build, I mean our
company and our idea is in of course going to be an
international idea and an international company.
And these reactors going to be sold in you know, many, many
countries all over the world, hopefully also eventually in
(16:16):
Europe. But I don't think we will we
will sell very many in Europe inthe beginning.
So I think we will still have a foothold in in Europe and in
Denmark likely the R&D department.
But the production and the most of the reactors will be outside
of Europe, in my opinion. I'm curious and maybe I'm
opening Pandora's box here, but I guess my advice, you've seen
(16:38):
what's happening in the United States recently and you referred
to this kind of recession in Europe.
Why do you think that is? Or how do you think it could be
made better? Or what you know?
What types of energy policy or energy approaches do you think
could help countries avoid recession?
Energy is part of every product we use.
(17:01):
And if we look back on how much energy every human consumed 200
years ago and how much humans inthe Western world consume today,
it's a big difference. It's not like just twice or four
times as much. It's like 100 times more energy
per person than we used to use. And then if you ask really rich
people, even they want to use more.
(17:23):
I mean, so we are super hungry for more energy and, and of
course, it's because energy is the fundamental thing that
creates prosperity. And of course, if we want to
continue in the future and have a prosperous life.
And now especially with AI, we see how AI requires a lot of
energy. Smart people in the world, not
(17:43):
only in the Western world, but all over the world, they will
try to use 10 times as much energy as they do today.
And of course, that puts a huge strain on production of energy
in the world. And that's basically what we as
a company wants to solve. And that's why I think Europe is
a little bit backwards. There's a lot of people in
Europe who says we should use less energy and basically that
(18:06):
computes to less prosperity and less growth and less everything.
And I don't think they will be successful in that.
I think it'll end up in some sort of revolt or revolution or,
or change the political situation in Europe.
But it's it's not happening right now.
Maybe it's five years away, but it's already happening in China,
(18:27):
India, US and other places that the energy market is growing
like crazy. And part of the reason is AI,
but it's also people have also looked at China and seen that
because China has access to low cost energy in the last 20
years, China now has 70% of all aluminum production in the
world. That means that they will be
(18:48):
making most of the EVs of the future.
And and basically car manufacturing in Europe and US
might die if we don't figure outhow to make aluminum for those
EVs in the future. And it's not only EVs, I mean
lots of our building materials and airplanes and when you put
(19:09):
up solar cells on sorry on out in the fields, they also use a
lot of aluminum for that and. In the frames.
Today, yes, today 70% of all aluminum in the world come from
China, 60% of all steel in the world come from China.
But and that's you see in Europehow the farmers are complaining
(19:30):
that they cannot compete and of course in order.
To the chemical industry is struggling as well, that's what
I understand because the high cost of.
Energy, chemical industry and ammonia needs low cost energy
and and that's what we want to provide from Code Mega Atomics.
It's a great point too about India and China.
I'm going to move on to another topic now.
(19:52):
I want to talk about startups and fundraising.
So, you know, you've been operating for about 10 years.
Can you just tell us what your experience has been?
It looks like you recently had a, you had a Series B.
What was that like for you? And what advice would you give
to other startups who are looking to get attention from
investors? First of all, raising money for
(20:15):
a nuclear startup is quite different than raising money for
software company or something like that.
I, I've, I've been, I've been part of a number of startup
companies in the past and some other technologies have a much
shorter life cycle. So you basically have to build
up the company and you get to customers and, and sell the
(20:38):
company within 10 years. So basically from, from, you
start from scratch until the company is very valuable, say
more than a billion dollars and you want to sell it, you, you
have to do that within 10 years.But obviously that's not
possible with fishing or nuclearcompanies or fusion companies
like that. So in that sense, we are more
like pharmaceutical companies that needs FDA approval or
(21:01):
something like that. They usually also take more than
10 years. In many cases they take 20 years
and it's a problem for them thattheir patents is almost expired
by the time that they have grownthe business through exit
status. But for nuclear companies,
fusion efficient, it likely takes more than that.
I mean, to, to grow the company.I think we will continue to grow
(21:24):
our company beyond 2050 and we will continue to raise funding
in all those decades. So it's, it's very different.
And, and this is also something where we, we struggled in the
beginning to figure out what does that journey look like to
raise, to keep on raising money for decades.
And and we decided like you saidin the beginning, we decided
(21:45):
that because we come from Denmark and because of Danish
government, it's very unlikely to sponsor us or fund us in any
way. We had to figure out a way to
make revenue from an early start, early days, even before
we had commercial reactors online.
And that's why we are selling test systems and salts for the
(22:06):
other, the other people in the industry.
And that gives us a lot of collaboration with with other
companies and universities and national labs around the world,
which is very beneficial to us. So this is part of the story of
how we can continue to raise funding is because many of our
(22:27):
competitors they continuously run out of.
So they get funding, let's say they get AB round and then they
they have money for two years and then they run out of money
and then they're in trouble if they are not able to raise the
next round. And maybe you can get lucky and
do that three or four times in arow, but you cannot do that 10
times in a row without screwing up.
And therefore that model doesn'twork in sort of when you have to
(22:50):
do it for many decades. So you have to have some revenue
and and we have shown our investors that we can continue
to grow our revenue. Right now our predictions say
that we will have a revenue of $50 million in 2028.
So this is before we even have any any reactors or any
commercial reactors. Online just from selling the
(23:11):
test systems and the salt. Yeah, because we also selling
what is called Lithium 6 and Lithium 7.
We're just starting to do that now.
We've gotten our first few contracts, but we haven't
delivered any, any of that yet. But when we start to deliver
that our revenue will go up. And we also have other, other
products in our portfolio that we can sell.
So we have sort of a a road map that shows investors that we can
(23:34):
continue to grow our revenue. And this is a a very important
part of being able to raise funding many rounds into the
future. And of course eventually we we
need to get to a working reaction.
We expect to have our first, first demonstration reactor in
2027. This one will not be able to
create entity for the grid or anything, but at least it, it
(23:54):
shows investors that our technology work and we can get
it approved and so on and that. And then we actually believe
that our valuation will, will increase by a factor of 10 once
we have that demonstration reactor, but also once we reach
proven track record and have $50million of revenue per year.
(24:14):
So that, that's pretty good for the current investors.
They, they can look at, OK, 3-4 years into the future, you know,
my shares will be worth 10 timesmore than they are today.
So that, that keeps our current investors happy.
And, and I think that also showsto new investors that, OK, this
company actually knows how to grow my investments or, you
(24:35):
know, make my money grow. Yeah, they see a near term
opportunity to yeah to grow their investment with those
that's smart to to build in thatrevenue stream, you know
temporary revenue streams as youwork to build the bigger final
product. I'm going to ask you another
(24:55):
question now. This is something we ask every
guest. So have you found that success
relies more on what the company chooses not to do or what you
choose to do? Good question.
I would say it is really, reallyimportant as a CEO or even a
founder or keep key personnel ina company, it's really important
(25:16):
to learn to say no and and deselect things.
And even we start some projects sometimes and then, and then
after a couple of months or halfa year, we review that project.
And if if we don't think it can create a lot of value, then we
kill it again. Good.
Now we're going to move on to hiring and team management.
(25:38):
Broadly speaking, hiring and interviewing has been one of the
more challenging parts of leading a company.
You've, you've taken your company from four people to 70
people and maybe you're not as involved in the hiring process
anymore, but can you tell us when you did do interviews, was
there a go to interview questionthat you would like to ask to
(26:01):
give you a sense of, of a candidate?
Yeah, I'm very involved in the, in the hiring process and
interviews as well. And what I'm trying to figure
out is, is this a person who want to extract value from the
company or is this a person who want to create value in the
company? And there's not one question
that I asked. I, I, I try to be smart about
(26:23):
and figure out what type of person is this?
And I mean, especially if they have, again, also we are very
technical company. So we want people who have
skills, technical skills. So is it somebody who can really
provide value to the company? And it's not because I want to
get rich, it's because all the existing employees we have, they
(26:45):
want to work with people who canbuild this company and build the
team. They don't want to drag somebody
up the hill. They want somebody who helps
them push the stone up the hill.I love that.
That's a great analogy too. Now we're going to move on to
another topic, marketing and AI.So you've got about 70 people
(27:05):
working in the company. At what point did you invest in
communications PR? What point did you bring in
someone full time to be thinkingabout marketing for your
company? I would say we are in our
company. We are world class at developing
nuclear reactors and some of thetechnologies related to that.
(27:26):
We have many employees that if they went to the World Cup in
that discipline, they will absolutely win the gold medal
because they are super good. But I think our marketing team
is maybe not, it's not one of our strongholds.
We've been struggling in the past and we're we're kind of
doing OK this year. This this year we created more
views and more attention and more bandwidth than we did all
(27:49):
the previous ten years. So we're starting to find the
right direction. But I will still say we're not
world class in that we we still have a lot to learn.
And I will say, I'll give creditwhere credit's due.
You guys have recently appeared on Undecided with Matt Farrell,
which is a really widely respected YouTube influencer.
(28:11):
Looks like you guys were coveredthere about a month ago.
Is there any podcast that you like and you recommend or any
interesting content that you're following right now that you
would recommend to peers? Yeah, So I would say I'm, I'm
not like the general public. I have always, like I, I said in
the beginning of the interview, I've always been working in high
(28:32):
tech and in, in, you know, in, in a sort of environment where
we invent things. And I've always been sort of
ahead of the curve looking at what is going to happen in 10 or
20 years from now. I've also been following AI very
closely and, but so, so I have had to consciously think about
(28:52):
using more present day media lately as to be more in line
with investors and, and yeah, everybody that I talked to in my
job. And you brought up another topic
that I want to ask you about andthat is AI.
So what is your company's approach to AI?
And that's a 2 fold question. 1 is are you using it internally
(29:15):
for your own business practices And the second part is, are you,
is AI are a part of your serviceoffering or your product
offering? We will soon release like a chat
bot on our website that is AI driven where you can ask
questions about first of all, coping atomics and our
technology, but also a little bit further down the line, you
(29:35):
can ask questions where you compare us to our competitors
and on. So that's, that's a small use
case for AI. That's something we offer to the
Internet. But I would say I've actually
started saying in the last year or so that I think, you know, 20
years from now, our biggest customers will not be humans, it
will be AI. And this sounds a little bit
(29:58):
weird to many people, but I think honestly that AI is not
something we can roll back. It's already here and it's going
to grow very strong and it's, it's going to have a lot of
influence on the, on the world. And yeah, I, I recently, I, I
put out an article about a monthago where I predict sort of by
(30:20):
2050 how much energy different sectors will use.
And, and of course, I predicted that AI is going to be the, the,
the largest growth in of all thedifferent sectors using energy
and it will consume sort of a, if I remember correctly,
something like 20% of all electricity by 2050 in the
(30:41):
world. But of course, that's just my
prediction. I could be wrong.
That's great. No.
And we'll, we'll have your team send us that article.
We can put it in our show notes.Now I want to talk to you more
about just on a personal level, your performance and well-being
as ACEO. So what do you do at work or in
your personal life to help maintain your performance as
(31:04):
ACEO? There's a ton of demands on ACEO
for your time, for your energy. You know, What do you do to help
yourself stay on task? I won't say that I'm good at it,
but I'm very aware that I have to say no.
I mean, I, there's so many people who want my time and also
my opinion on things and there'sno way that I can live up to all
(31:27):
of that. So it's really important to
decide what to say yes to and what to say no to.
And then I, I also, I'm aware that I have to spend time on
exercise. And actually lately I've decided
to spend more time on exercise because I, I believe that
there's also been some studies actually that I found on the
(31:48):
Internet that if you exercise and use your muscles, that helps
you brain and your mood in general.
So you are you are able to cope with more problems if you have
if you do exercise. Good.
And what about your team? How do you keep your How do you
keep your team motivated, especially if you have a tough
(32:10):
cycle or there's adversary adversity?
Yeah. I mean, when you do a startup
company, of course, the great thing is that I've had a number
of years of experience startup companies.
The problem with startup companies is always like a
roller coaster. And then then you get funding
and then it's all happy times and you hire more people and you
set very exciting goals. And then some of those goals
(32:31):
fail or there's some problem, either people problem or
technology problem. And then there's a lot of mood
swing in the both in the management and investors, but
also in the employees. Of course, I won't say that I'm
I'm really good at this, but butI also think I'm not the worst.
So I'm sort of in, in the middlemaybe.
And I definitely try to look at employees and see if somebody
(32:56):
has personal problems. Then I, I try to make sure that,
that we don't put like impossible difficult task on
them in that period. And I also try to see if we can
get some of the other employees to help them.
I mean, help them might just be,you know, let's go out for a
beer or let's make some, some social event that brings a
(33:18):
little bit of relief or fun intotheir life.
So it's not only about sort of just pushing people on technical
achievements. It's also about how can we make
some social events? One of the things I, I really
push in the companies that everytime somebody has achieved a
goal, like made something work, then we, we invite the entire
(33:42):
company for what we call a demo.It's an internal demo.
And then we have cake or ice cream or sometimes we have
champagne. It depends on what it is.
But so we tend, it's really important that we celebrate
every small win internally. And that also keeps the team
together. And it tells all the other
(34:03):
departments that this departmentover here finally succeeded with
this thing that they have been pitching about for two years or
whatever. And so these demos are really
important. Nice.
I like it. I love that with cake and ice
cream or champagne. I think it that's great to
celebrate the small wins. Well, good.
(34:24):
So my final question for you, would you consider yourself a
climate optimist or a climate pessimist and why?
Then I would say I'm a, I'm a climate optimist.
I actually don't think it's verymuch about climate at all.
And, and I think the, the planethas been here for what, 4 1/2
billion years? I'm sure it's, it'll still be
(34:45):
here. It's 2 billion years from now
and there will still be lots of life on this planet in 2 billion
years. It might not be human life.
I that's but, but there will still be life and animals and
plants and everything. All right.
Is there any other closing wordsthat you would like to leave our
our listeners with? We should think more about where
we get our energy from and what the energy means for everyday
(35:08):
life. Not take it for granted, but
actually try to understand what it means for the price of all
the products you would like to consume, whether it's coffee or
holiday or whatever. And try to understand who made
that product and that energy andthat factory.
Because for every product there's some factory somewhere
that was made from steel and concrete and who made that steel
(35:29):
and concrete? And why is that not made in my
community and my, my municipality?
It almost all the products that I consume is made halfway around
the world. And I don't think that's a great
situation, but there's nothing Ican do about it right now.
But I think I would like more people to be aware of that
(35:49):
situation and how it all fits together with the economy and
and the products and what's going to happen in the future
with AI and all that. Every single thing we touch is
there's a whole story behind it and how it was made and where it
was made and all the different pieces and components.
I think it's something it's a lot of people probably take for
granted or don't think about. Well, Thomas, it's been really
(36:10):
great talking to you. Thank you so much for taking
time to come on the show and thank you for being here on
Scaling Clean. Yeah.
Thank you for the opportunity. Thanks for joining us for
another episode of Scaling Clean, the podcast for clean
economies, CEO's, investors and the people who advise them.
I'm your host, Melissa Baldwin. Our producer is Claire Quirin.
(36:33):
If you like what you hear on scale and clean episodes, we'd
appreciate it if you'd give us afive star rating and leave a
comment where you get your podcast.
And until next time, we wish youall the best in the clean
economy transition.
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