071 Nick Touran, What is Nuclear

Nick Touran (00:00)
they just have untold multitudes of

old reactor detailed documents, like full designs of pumps, tens of thousands of pages on like hundreds of old reactors. And so the more I kind of like peered into that abyss, the more I was amazed with what was in there and how relevant it was for the problems I was trying to solve in my professional life. And also just how interesting and amazing it was. And it got to a point where I would challenge myself. Like someone said, I have an idea about a reactor like this is a new type of reactor. And I go into HathiTrust and try to find it with

you know, quotes around search terms and stuff. And almost every time I could find some, at least a paper and sometimes like, they built a reactor that was like that. So it, I was totally blown away with what has been done in the past and I really enjoy digging into it. And I think there is value for the modern effort. It's not just of historical interest. I think there's a lot that can be sort of relearned and applied or dug up and used for some of the current development efforts.

Mark Hinaman (02:03)
Welcome back to another episode of the Fire Division podcast where we talk about energy dense fuels and how they can better human lives. I'm joined today by a rock star guest, Nick Duran. Nick is an energy consultant slash founder at What Is Nuclear LLC. If you don't know what What Is Nuclear, if you don't know what that is or what is nuclear, just type in whatisnuclear.com and it's awesome.

stoked to talk to you today. is great. Great. Yeah. Cool. So yeah, like I said, What is Nuclear? You've got this website that is has been around for a long time. You've talked about it bunch for other folks, but give yourself a plug, Like, what's the quick background on this for the ignorant few that may not be aware of?

Nick Touran (02:29)
Thanks, Mark. Yeah, really happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

It's yeah, it started out as a just public education. Like I learned about nuclear power, you know, late into my educational career as an undergrad. was like, nuclear power is really awesome. I didn't know that. And we need to tell the world. And at the time it was like 2006. And so the thing to do is, well, let's just make a website. So we checked my friends and I checked domains and like what is nuclear was available. And so we just grabbed it we started throwing up like, what's nuclear waste? What's a nuclear reactor? Just.

you know, basic stuff, trying to get it out there, hoping, you know, to shift public acceptance and knowledge about nuclear. so anyway, it was just in the background. This is a fun thing I did mostly on nights and weekends, you know, between like regular school and then like an actual job that I got at TerrorPower for 16 years. So I worked on it.

And it sort of moved on beyond just like the basics as I got interested in like reactor history or reactor economics. I would like learn stuff and just write it down almost as an exercise. Like for me, you can learn stuff better if you're like writing notes on it. And so it would be like, Oh, I should make a what is nuclear page on radiation on flights or on nuclear economics. And then that would like be an excuse to go kind of dive deep, get some good references and then throw it up there. So anyway, it just became kind of a

Mark Hinaman (03:51)
Bye,

Nick Touran (04:04)
Now it's like a big hodgepodge. It probably needs better navigation. Like there's dozens and dozens of pages and they're kind of all over the place, but it's still fun. like people, I get messages from like middle schoolers and from like policy people, like who are in charge of stuff. So I get all sorts of, it brings in lots of people who want to talk about this stuff that's on there. So it's been, it's been really fun.

Mark Hinaman (04:26)
That's awesome. It is a tremendous resource in my opinion, the industry. I mean, I know you've been complimenting other podcasts and shows and stuff, but man, it's been really helpful for me. I think I share the post most often, you're showing the waste and the picture of stacked canisters on a football field and then actually how tall the actual fission products are. ⁓

Nick Touran (04:42)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, and that's that

was like another one. I like that one is I'm glad that one's helpful. But I was like, we see, you know, different people say different things. They can fill a football field or can fill a stadium this high or that high. And I was like, well, what's the real answer? So and I couldn't find like the math anywhere. So was like, well, I'm just going to write down, you know, my simple math and put the assumptions on there and then just throw it up there so that I mean, it's not that it's anyway. that's like a great example of how those pages come about. It's like, what's the real answer?

Mark Hinaman (04:59)
You

Yeah.

Nick Touran (05:14)
I figure it out, I make a page about it.

Mark Hinaman (05:17)
I love

it. I totally agree that writing, I mean, I love consuming information and taking in podcasts, ⁓ but you get to a point and you're like, well, I've been getting a lot of inputs and no outputs and I feel like I'm not learning as much as I could if I were putting things out. And so yeah, as a learning tool, can be really, really helpful too.

Nick Touran (05:35)
Yeah, totally.

It's almost like a selfish thing for me.

Mark Hinaman (05:38)
⁓

Cool. We might circle back to what is nuclear, but regular people don't check that. time at TeraPower, you spent a long time there and you just left this year, like what, four months ago in March? So we'll timestamp this podcast, August 2025 recording it now. Right. yeah, talk about your time there and kind of what you learned and yeah.

Nick Touran (05:50)
Yeah, in March, yep, yep.

Yeah, there we go. Yeah.

Sure.

Yeah, my time at TerraPyro was awesome. I it was like such a cool, I mean, I went there originally as a consultant. I was a grad student. I went as a consultant in 2008 because they needed someone who could simulate fast reactors with the several software tools that existed to simulate fast neutron reactors at the time. And when they like, I guess they Googled like who's publishing fast reactor results.

There just weren't that many. So they called up my research group at University of Michigan and ⁓ said, hey, come teach us how to run these old argon codes, which I just happened to know. so sort of by luck of knowing something extremely esoteric, they like reached out to me. So I came out and then I did an internship and then I just never went home. That internship became full time. They sponsored the finishing of my PhD. The work they needed done there was very similar to what I was working on for my PhD. So they

Mark Hinaman (06:49)
Yeah.

Nick Touran (06:59)
We're like, hey, you could work full time and work on your PhD, which is a great deal, and be in the Seattle area, which was sort of a dream of mine anyway. So it was really a sort of unexpected and awesome thing to get involved in. And it was very small back then. was like I was probably the ninth full-time employee. There were a bunch of consultants, but it's very exciting. It's like, OK.

Mark Hinaman (07:17)
That's fantastic.

⁓

Nick Touran (07:20)
Yeah, we're going to build this reactor.

It's revolutionary. We have basically unlimited funding and we're going to build it in like several years. And so like that was it's like the most exciting thing. And so to like work on that every day was was so fun. And then, I mean, I think there was like everyone sort of grew together, like as the institution and all and the engineers.

sort of learned more and dug into the details and started doing the detailed analysis, we got into situations where we were like, wait a minute, this thing that some physicists said a couple of years ago, like is actually impossible when you try to actually engineer it. And so there was a lot of, a huge amount of just learning and getting smarter and charting a course that would lead to a reasonable reactor product in a reasonable amount of time.

And that was like a relief sort of formative experience, like going from like, we're going to do it in a year to like, okay, now we have like a more, much more sort of incremental change over the status quo. it's still really cool. but it actually, there's a lot of systems, there's a lot of interactions, there's a lot of engineering, a lot of material science that needs to be done and takes time and takes money. And so like, yeah, building that team and learning all that stuff was like extremely was, was great.

Mark Hinaman (08:30)
So.

Nick Touran (08:36)
I love that team and they're now building this first reactor in Wyoming, which is pretty exciting.

Mark Hinaman (08:42)
Yeah. Do you have or can you give a specific example of like, wow, this, made a mistake on this one and we have to

Nick Touran (08:49)
I mean, I

mean, they like if you just look at the publications, like you can pull up public publications from like 2009 and it was like deep underground. It was helium cooled and thorium fueled and it had no moving parts and was totally autonomous. And then, you know, a couple of years later, it's like, OK, there's fuel management. It's you can access it. There's maintenance. There's people who go in and move fuel every once in a while. And so you can kind of read between the lines in terms of like, well, that may be.

physically possible, the ability to do it right now, have a deep underground fully autonomous reactor is just not the first thing that you're going to do. It's not, it's not so much that we don't have to say it's a mistake. It's like the timing is off. Like you first have to walk before you can run. And so like getting a reactor that gets most of your technology and systems tested out is a prerequisite to getting one that is like, you know, does something that no one's ever done before, which is run.

reactor like autonomously for years and years.

Mark Hinaman (09:49)
I like that, like path dependency, right? This is like true innovation and small step changes, not enormous leaps.

Nick Touran (09:52)
Yeah.

Yeah,

I mean, I'm sure there are enormous leaps possible as well, but I think it is really hard in nuclear. It's just so much of the space has been so broadly covered by like the smartest people on the planet for so long. It doesn't mean there's nothing out there that's new. People do come up with new things, but it is extremely challenging and it shouldn't be your default. Like if you go into nuclear thinking you're going to revolutionize it with your one cool idea.

you should be skeptical, be skeptical of someone who says that. It'd be cool if they would, I wish them luck, but like it's a lot harder than I originally thought and it's a lot harder than many people thought. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, but there's so many different ways to do things. So it's not like my experience fully covers all possible experiences, but like it definitely like shaped my view of things.

Mark Hinaman (10:29)
We tried. It's hard. We spent a lot of money doing it.

⁓

It's interesting having real life experiences like that. We're like, wow, our assumptions might have been wrong and we've learned more and we have to figure out more. It kind of forces you to go back and look at history and examine technology that's already been built before. That's been my experience at least. Did you have a similar epiphany? You've got this whole hobby of digitizing old videos from labs, right?

Nick Touran (11:04)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that definitely happened to me. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, I I became

yeah, I'm like I'm unhealthily obsessed with like old reactors at this point. And I think that did probably come from this kind of this pathway. It was like, OK, we're going to solve all these problems. You know, no problem. then, you know, for work related reasons, I might be reading an old document about some fuel handling machine that was built in Nebraska on the Hallam reactor, you know, in the early 60s. And like they have solutions and, you know,

challenges and solutions that are still perfectly relevant to fuel handling in a reactor that you might be trying to build today using the same fluid. like that's when I was like, wait a minute, there's a whole world of stuff in these archives. And I found some pretty interesting resources. Everyone knows about this one called OST, which is like the DOE document repository. But I found another one called HathiTrust, which is like it's kind of the academic side of Google Books. And they just have untold multitudes of

old reactor detailed documents, like full designs of pumps, tens of thousands of pages on like hundreds of old reactors. And so the more I kind of like peered into that abyss, the more I was amazed with what was in there and how relevant it was for the problems I was trying to solve in my professional life. And also just how interesting and amazing it was. And it got to a point where I would challenge myself. Like someone said, I have an idea about a reactor like this is a new type of reactor. And I go into HathiTrust and try to find it with

you know, quotes around search terms and stuff. And almost every time I could find some, at least a paper and sometimes like, they built a reactor that was like that. So I was totally blown away with what has been done in the past and I really enjoy digging into it. And I think there is value for the modern effort. It's not just of historical interest. I think there's a lot that can be sort of relearned and applied or dug up and used for some of the current development efforts. And so.

Mark Hinaman (13:06)
I completely

agree.

Nick Touran (13:08)
Yeah, yeah. And

yeah, not to say again, it's not that like just because something happened in the past doesn't totally, you know, history rhymes. doesn't repeat or something like that. Another another credit I should give is to Michael Schellenberger, who wrote an article ⁓ pointing to this is I can't remember. It must have been 10 years ago by now. But he did an article in Forbes that was about.

the challenges of operating advanced reactors. And he pointed, he was referencing a book, a free book that's on the Department of Energy website called Adams for Peace and War. It's like a 900 page book, extremely well referenced, written by professional historians working for Department of Energy. And I was like, man, where's he getting all this stuff? So I went and I pulled that book up and reading through that book also.

was sort of a revelation in terms of just like the depth and breadth of what's been done. then it pointed to a bunch of things. And lastly, sorry, last history tidbit, for some reason read Alvin Weinberg's autobiography, which is called The First Nuclear Era. ⁓

Mark Hinaman (14:12)
For some reason,

because he's awesome.

Nick Touran (14:14)
I mean, yeah, I can't remember like how I heard about it and I just read it

it's a very short but like very dense and really excellent book that I recommend to everyone who's sort of even a little bit interested in nuclear enterprise or history. It's a really great book. I have a, I think I put like the first Amazon review on it and now they did a reprinting of it or something. So it's available like only in hardcover or something like that, but very good book and also.

really just spoke to me and had so many interesting and useful tidbits that really shaped my view. So that's how I got in.

Mark Hinaman (14:46)
Yeah, awesome. Man, we could take this in so many different directions. I'll have to link to the book on Amazon for the audience if folks want to go and check it out. yeah, like this idea of learning from the past to build the future. And I like that, that history rhymes, it doesn't repeat. But like, there's...

Nick Touran (14:50)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mark Hinaman (15:08)
ton of work that has been done. Like how does that information get synthesized and how does it get captured? like, I mean, you're, I'd say like a savant and from a historian perspective, but also like this combination of being a nuclear nerd and like super intelligent, like capable and like, so how do you put all of these things together? And like, it's easy for you, but then if someone else is trying to do it, like...

Nick Touran (15:20)
you

Yeah.

Yeah,

Mark Hinaman (15:32)
Man, is that part of the effort

Nick Touran (15:32)
well, thanks.

Mark Hinaman (15:34)
for trying to proliferate the information and capture it on text?

Nick Touran (15:37)
Yeah, yeah, I mean,

yeah, thanks for saying that. And I really have leaned into the word amateur for my history stuff like amateur. The root of amateur is like a more like love. You're only doing it because you love it. So like if you're a true amateur, if you really love something, you can like really spend a lot of time enjoying going through it. So I guess I'm kind of on the line of professional now that I am doing more consulting. A lot of people are asking me.

professionally for like, can you help me find some historical information on this? but anyway. ⁓

Mark Hinaman (16:09)
Yeah. Well, it's

easy. You just go look at it and read it and like, just read it. they're like, Nick, it's not easy for me. I can't do it. So let me pay you.

Nick Touran (16:13)
Yeah, yeah, just go to Happy Trust.

Yeah, exactly. Well,

I think there's a couple of things that are happening. I do think so right now, the AI chat bots are extremely capable and can do all sorts of amazing things. The large language models. However, when I go into the cutting edge models and ask them about nuclear history or the basis of nuclear things that have happened, they are amazingly wrong, like almost every time. Like they can get some basic stuff, but if you ask them anything, even a little bit sophisticated, they just don't have enough material.

to go on and so they just aren't that good. And so there's this like moment right now where someone like me who kind of knows this stuff is still better than the large language models. But I do think that will change rapidly. And I think as more of this stuff gets digitized and consumed by the large language models, I do kind of think that we will be able to rely much more on them as they get more of that material to sort of say like, hey, I'm building a.

whatever, Beryllium moderated reactor, give me some ideas and tell me some problems and challenges and show me what experiments were done in the past. I think the large language models will make it so much easier then like, here I am spending my nights and weekends reading through thousands of pages or at least browsing through them. Having a large language model will make that so much better and so much easier and so much more accessible. So that's one major thing. It's not ready yet, but it's like right on the cusp of being ready.

And that's another, like as I'm digitizing these films, which we were talking about earlier, like I've gotten 45 historical films digitized from the National Archives. And I've been trying, in the more recent ones, I've been running AI on the audio to make a transcript. And then I try to sort of edit the transcript a little bit. Some of them are pretty long, but I try to make sure the transcript, you know, sense. And so part of me feels like that's a fun way for normal people, or at least, you know, more normal people to...

consume nuclear historical information, like a well-produced documentary from the 60s with this, you know, that same narrator is kind of, some people enjoy. A lot of people on YouTube are like, dude, I just put these on to sleep. Like I just sleep to this. Thanks, man. But yeah, that's just another way. Some people prefer consuming it through video and then also just digging them out of the archives and get them digitized will feed into the large language models and other AI of the future. So I'm hoping, you know,

Mark Hinaman (18:16)
It's the same time. White guy wearing

Nick Touran (18:36)
when AI takes over, maybe they'll have like a credit system where they're like, that guy digitized a bunch of stuff for us. And so we'll be nice to him as the overlords or something like that. That's the real driver.

Mark Hinaman (18:46)
you

I mean, yeah, in the present era, there's certainly still value in the human, right? And being able to synthesize and trust and double check. the technology continues to march forward, but it's certainly not perfect.

Nick Touran (18:56)
yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And just to, I mean, I just want to like further emphasize how bad the large language models are. I mean, I get people who are like, Hey, I asked chat GPT and it said this, this and this. I'm like, well, that's a hundred percent wrong. Like that's totally wrong. And I mean, I use it all the time. I try to ask it for help digging into things. And it's done recently. It like made up three different quotes out of IAEA tech docs. And the quote was like, perfect. Like if the document actually said what it said, it said it would have been like exactly what I was looking for. But when I

went to look for the original reference, the original reference didn't even exist. Like there were three completely made up tech doc numbers that, and the quotes were completely fabricated. And I was like, like, okay, well, I guess I still have to check my original references, but there are people out there who just use chat GPT and come to a conclusion about a nuclear thing and then talk about it on X. it's like,

Mark Hinaman (19:47)
Yeah. ⁓

Nick Touran (19:59)
Now, and they're just so extra confident because Chad GPT said something and it is like a problem. I've been fighting against like BS in nuclear, know, even pro nuclear BS for many years. And like, I feel like it's just getting worse because now the large models are like backing up the BS that's already that they've been trained on. So it's a problem.

Mark Hinaman (20:17)
Yeah, that is a problem. Actually,

my distrust in AI stems from a question about helium turbines. I was like, find me a helium turbine design that I've been using in the past. Look up patents and look up different design diagrams. It's like, oh yeah, here's all the helium turbines and here's the patent numbers. And I was like, really? I'll go look up a patent number. And it's like a toaster or something. This is not correct at all.

Nick Touran (20:30)
Mmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, there's there's three right there's like

Lefler, Oberhausen two and there's one other one I can't remember. But yeah, I recently looked into the same thing and like those are hard to find.

Mark Hinaman (20:56)
Yeah, yeah. So why'd you leave TerraPower?

Nick Touran (21:02)
I mean, 16 years is a pretty long time. I was. Yeah, it's like weird. Yeah, and again, nothing but good things to say about TerraPower. like they did like when I wasn't finishing my PhD because I was too focused on my full time work, they were like, no, like you better finish it like the CEO, like talk to my immediate boss, like, don't give him any more work until he's done with his PhD. They like really push me through that. So I owe TerraPower a ton.

Mark Hinaman (21:07)
Kind of weird in the modern era.

Nick Touran (21:31)
But yeah, mean, you can only spend so many years working on the same. It's almost my joke is that it's like a continuation of my senior design project. Like when I was an undergrad, I did a sodium cooled fast reactor with metal fuel, very similar to the Atrium core. I've just been, I kind of felt like I've, know a lot about that type of technology. I wasn't learning as much. I mean, it is exciting to be transitioning into the construction phase. That's something that, you know, is like my biggest.

concern leaving is like I'm not going to be able to participate as much in like actually doing the construction. But I don't know, I just figured I had just moved across the country for sort of unrelated reasons, for family reasons, and was working remote and just thought like it was a good time to just, yeah, just see what else is going on in the world and leave on good terms. Like I assume if I wanted I could go back, although, you know, never can be guaranteed. But

Mark Hinaman (22:13)
Try something.

Yeah.

Nick Touran (22:24)
I just wanted

to try something different, see what else was going on, learn something a little bit new.

Mark Hinaman (22:29)
Yeah, that's awesome. I've made similar jumps in the past when I get to the point where I feel like I'm not learning as much as I can anymore. Then that's been an indicator for me of it's time to go.

Nick Touran (22:38)
Yeah.

Yeah,

Mark Hinaman (22:44)
How have you seen, and this might be a super obvious question, but nuclear change over time? Like people are reaching out to you now, or is it more than they were before? It's popular in the news and the press and the investment community now. Like we did it, Nick. It's happening. Nuclear school.

Nick Touran (22:58)
Yeah. Yeah, it's done. Yes.

What is nuclear.com? We'll take the wind now. yeah, it's changed. mean, it's gone through many sort of ups and downs. People reaching out now are more on the like, yeah, it's like more investors and institutional people. It's fewer middle schoolers. I used to get tons of middle schoolers who would like write in with like homework questions, and that almost never happens. I don't know if it's because my site, you know, fell down.

Or are they're using AI or whatever? I mean, there was a time when what is nuclear was like the number one search result on Google for like nuclear reactor, nuclear waste. And now it's like number 30 or something, because I don't know, it's not social media enough. So that may be the only reason there. But and now my audience is more seeing me on whatever LinkedIn and X. so they reach out and say like, hey, I you said this. Can we have a call and talk more about it? But it's very positive. Like I see very little ⁓ even 10 years ago.

Mark Hinaman (23:39)
Yeah.

Nick Touran (23:57)
there was tons of anti-nuclear sentiment all over the social media. And if I went to a talk when I lived in Seattle and gave a talk on nuclear, people would be like, who's paying you? They would like scream out of the audience. And that just like never happens anymore. People are like, okay, so what do we do next to make this happen? Like it's so much more positive and optimistic. There's very little opposition. That's like one major change. And then the other change is that like,

the focus of technology has obviously changed. Like in 2006, it was all about large light water reactors in the first Renaissance. And now it's all about, you know, the smaller, the better micro reactors being pumped out on a chip fabrication line or something like that. So that's been another interesting technological shift. And in the middle, there was thorium, but even that's kind of gone down now. So those are numerous changes I've seen.

Mark Hinaman (24:50)
Nice. I'm optimistic Thorin will have a resurgence, but we can talk about that next. You posted about the Dunning-Kruger curve. I might have pronounced incorrectly, but what is that? And I mean, this was a question that our producer came up with. I don't know what it says. Teach me about it.

Nick Touran (25:00)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, so I mean the Dunning-Kruger curve is this like kind of famous curve where it's a curve of confidence on the y-axis and or sorry, yeah, confidence on the y-axis and competence on the x-axis. And so it kind of, it's this idea that like when you first learn about something, you're very confident in it and you'll say things very confidently and you'll, and then as you become more competent and you get more experienced then,

your confidence starts dropping way down and then slowly as you get really good at it, it starts slowly coming back up. So big peak and

Some people call this the peak of Mount Stupid. then anyway, and then this is like the curve of delivery or something like that. And I put little labels on it to make it nuclear specific. And the labels are from this old 1953 Rickover memo, which we all call the Rickover paper reactor memo, where he says, look, there's two types of reactors. There's paper reactors, which are...

small and ⁓ use off the shelf parts and have multipurpose and simple and very safe. And then there's like practical reactors, which are heavy and behind schedule and over budget and so on. And so I kind of put those at little points around the just sort of as a commentary. I mean, as part of the resurgence of nuclear, there's a lot of people in nuclear and a lot of people are very excited about it. And a lot of people are saying things that are almost

too excited and in my opinion, like too optimistic, sort of reminding me of what I was hearing back in the 2009 days. And part of me should just, maybe I should just like let it ride and be like, yeah, go, let's do it. Like all the best. But like part of me also is thinking of like, I don't want people to be disappointed. Like I've kind of gone through that curve myself. And it's a little bit hard to sort of realize that, well, like when I...

Mark Hinaman (26:47)
Yeah.

Nick Touran (27:00)
This is embarrassing, but I think when I met my wife, like she kind of jokes about this. She was like, so what do do for a living? I'm like, I'm saving the world like effectively. And then she's like, what do do now? And I'm like, I sit in teams meetings and do spreadsheets. like, it's the same thing, but like it's just a little bit slower and less, like, I don't know. And maybe that maybe that's just a screw up on my part. Like maybe I should have stayed more focused on directly saving the world, but.

Mark Hinaman (27:13)
Hahaha!

Nick Touran (27:28)
Anyway, the point is, you, when you first come into nuclear, you think everybody does this. They come in, they're like, well, why is nuclear expensive? Well, that's dumb. Let's just do a factory. Let's just make it small. They have like an easy idea and they're like, boom, let's go. And you can raise a hundred million dollars, like no problem right now in this, in this market. You show up and you're like, hey, I've got a reactor idea and it's going to be cheap. Like you will get a hundred million dollars almost guaranteed.

And then you have to deliver. when that delivery pipeline starts happening, it gets a lot harder. And so there are engineers who have to sit down and actually make those promises real. And I claim it's going to be a lot harder than a lot of people think right now. And so that curve was just commentary kind of warning people like, yes, this is going to be awesome, but there's a huge amount of work. There's technology development work.

That is just really hard and takes time and can be done, should be done is worth doing, but it's not easy and it's not fast and it's not cheap in general.

Mark Hinaman (28:29)
So can

you think of maybe, I don't know, some examples, like some low-hanging fruit of different technologies that exist that like people are like, this is going to be easy to do. And it's like, well, there's, there's, I don't know. Well, let's pick, let's pick on Triso. That'll be...

Nick Touran (28:38)
Sure.

Yeah. OK. Yeah. mean,

sure. Yeah. I was going to say thorium first. Let's do Triso first. like Triso is lots of companies are totally dependent on this Triso fuel, which is, should I explain like that? Most people know what Triso is at this point, but I can briefly talk about it. ⁓ Yeah. So it's a it's a right. It's a very special fuel that instead of just having

Mark Hinaman (29:01)
Trisperal isotropic spheres, uranium, ceramic coating.

Nick Touran (29:10)
like a fuel with uranium in it and then a cladding around it that has uranium and little tiny particles with like many layers of carbon around it. And then those particles are embedded in like a bigger matrix of graphite as well. And so it's a super robust fuel form. It's also like when you look at it's uranium oxide or uranium oxycarbide in there in those little tiny pebbles. And if you look at the actual density of how much uranium is in a pellet of this stuff, it's literally 5%.

So there's 20 times less uranium per volume in tri-so fuel. But it has this big advantage where it's really robust and it's difficult to release those fission products. graphite doesn't even melt. Like it sublimes at high temperature. It cracks, but it like doesn't melt like a metal cladding might melt. You still can release fission products. Like if you go to high temperature, the fission products all

kind of migrate out even though it doesn't melt. But it is pretty robust and it's hard to come up with an accident where you have like a very large amount of radionuclides released. So people are basically saying, well, if we use this fuel, then our reactor doesn't really need safety systems. It doesn't need a nuclear grade quality assurance program. And so all the capital costs, all the systems and equipment can be

from Home Depot, from a commercial type quality assurance ⁓ pipeline. you just don't need the level of redundancy or backup systems and diesel generators or any of that stuff because the fuel itself is just so robust. And so that's kind of a, that's a design philosophy. And people are willing to pay more for the fuel. They're like, yeah, yeah, we'll pay more for that fuel. It's much more expensive to fabricate and it requires, yeah, it's absurdly expensive.

Mark Hinaman (30:56)
It's super expensive. It's like 10

times more expensive.

Nick Touran (31:01)
⁓ more like

200 times per kilogram to fabricate the fuel right now. Now, it's not fabricated in bulk. And so there's an argument that maybe even though it's a very intricate and sort of high waste process where you're making these little particles and they have to be within a certain specification. So what ends up happening is you get a lot of rejects and so you have to like recycle them back through. But if you've already coated them with carbon, it's like pretty hard to.

Mark Hinaman (31:18)
car.

Nick Touran (31:28)
You have to kind of burn the carbon off or crack it off and put it back through the system. So it's low throughput, small batch process. It's very difficult to scale. Lots of people are trying to scale it. There's like four or five different triso fabrication facilities going up right now. A few companies are making it in small batches, which are going to fuel the first triso reactors like Pele already has fuel fabricated. So.

Yeah, but it's and besides being extremely expensive to fabricate because of that very low uranium density, five percent of uranium oxide, you have to put in a much higher enrichment. So instead of four or five percent enriched, you've got to put in 15 or 20 percent. And so now you're spending a big premium.

at the enrichment plant and you're mining a lot, you do get more energy out than you would. So you go to high enrichment and then you burn a higher fraction of that fuel. So from an overall sustainability point of view, it's like not that different. But from a cost point of view, because of the premium of higher enriched uranium, it's like absurd. like the fuel cost is, yeah, it can be up to $60,000 a kilogram.

including enrichment and fab or even more for some of the early

like when

look at what

Mark Hinaman (32:42)
for the economics.

Nick Touran (32:44)
yeah I mean it's yeah when you do the math on it which I've done in a few tweets like if you just take the ⁓ just the fuel assume the reactor is free let's say the factory process works and like you just pay nothing at all for all those pumps and sensors and vessels and containment and shield and hundreds of tons of shielding all that's free

Well, the fuel alone at a certain reactor size is already three times what like natural gas electricity is a full system. So it doesn't mean it's not a terrible idea. It is like an intriguing fuel like that safety benefit is real and it is cool and it can go to really high temperature as well. So you can get you can use high temperature gas or high temperature molten salt and do some high temperature thermal processes or whatever. And that's all legitimately cool. But like

The fuel is very expensive, the systems are low TRL, and it's definitely worth trying, but it may not work at all, or it may be way too expensive.

Mark Hinaman (33:39)
Well,

it sounds like the innovation necessary in this circumstance is like fuel needs to be cheaper, right, and like with comparable quality control.

Nick Touran (33:48)
Yeah, yes, there's plenty of room for innovation in fuel fabrication of that type of fuel, but you still can't really get rid of the fuel enrichment is expensive issue. Like you still need HALU, which is also like even if you made the fabrication better, it would still be relatively expensive. So but if you really can just build a dirt cheap, non safety related reactor, like maybe the cost could be done. But I mean, even then.

Like there is still stuff that has to be in a reactor that has no safety systems. Lots of stuff. You still need the bulk shielding material, which, you know, isn't super expensive, but it's massive. You still need a control instrumentation and control system. You still need to a coolant purification system that's pulling any impurities out of the coolant during operation. You need a leak detection system. You need all these. You need HVAC. You need a bunch of stuff that costs money. And that's where

you know, the bigger reactors have the economy of scale advantage. So I do. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So like, yeah, I think certainly like large high temperature gas reactors are like totally reasonable for the thing that might work great. But I think that like micro ACG, ours, I really don't see the case like I get in trouble for saying this too much, but like I don't see a case outside of

Mark Hinaman (34:47)
You might only have to have those systems and dependencies.

Nick Touran (35:11)
high electricity, high power cost fringe type uses. So they're perfect for military bases like Pele or remote, know, anything remote where they want to pay a premium for that type of awesome capability. It's perfect. Like it's an awesome technology and it'll be great for that. But when you're talking about powering a home in Chicago competing with the bigger reactors and natural gas, like that's where I think the story gets a little bit lost. But again, I shouldn't worry about that too much. If someone made

A sweet micro-HTGR that made power in a remote area, that would be like the coolest thing ever and I would be all over it. And just because they thought maybe they could get cost down, but didn't, that's not so bad. Like that got them funded to do the development and they made a useful product for a small group of people. It doesn't save the world, but it's still a really awesome use of nuclear. So that's kind of where I am.

Mark Hinaman (35:58)
Yeah, absolutely.

I guess I'm optimistic on like where their...

is technological innovation and like step change opportunities. Like people can step in and start businesses to solve those problems. like we're calling out, hey, the fabrication cost for Triso is expensive. yeah, like BWST manufacturers in has been, they like to doubt that they've been manufacturing for decades, but like it's still expensive. there's surely, I struggle when people say like, well, we're the incumbents and we're the experts. there's, I think often opportunities for people to come in and be like, well,

let's look at how to actually do this a little cheaper and maybe rebuild our... I saw similar, honestly, similar technology, with Frac sand and Frac ceramics and the upstream oil and gas industry. We got better and better at finding cheaper and cheaper solutions. And it was a little step change. We started using just dirt out of the ground instead of high-quality ceramics. So, not a perfect analogy, but there were companies that had innovative...

Nick Touran (36:37)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, nice.

Mark Hinaman (37:01)
ceramics and technologies and they came in and made them cheaper and cheaper.

Nick Touran (37:05)
Yeah, no, I there is a great opportunity to try to make cheap triso fuel and that would be an enabling tech for a lot of reactors. And there are so like standard nuclear just got the IP from Ultra Safe Nuclear who had a pretty cool modular scalable triso fabrication technology going and they are going to start, you know, trying to build that out. X energy has one. ⁓ couple other people have triso fab. So, yeah, it's a great opportunity and there's nothing.

Mark Hinaman (37:18)
Right.

Nick Touran (37:32)
There's no law of physics that says triso fuel fabrication will always be expensive. So I think it is an opportunity and it's a cool thing to work on. And then like, as with any advanced technology, like we have run triso fueled high temperature gas cooled helium cooled reactors before, right? Like Fort St. Brain in Colorado. Yeah. Yeah. Which is famous for being.

Mark Hinaman (37:51)
One in Colorado. For the same, you know, life to it.

Nick Touran (37:57)
⁓ you know, extremely touchy and never running. And there's a great headline in the New York times. No, I've never been in. Have you been in sweet.

Mark Hinaman (38:01)
Dude you you've been inside the old building? Dude, you gotta go check it out. Like we got a tour

of it and it is

But like a horrendous design for operations. Like you can imagine like a nuclear reactor, giant concrete slab, like the shielding that was in place. And then like all of the helium pumps that they put around the whole system, they're just like spread out all over the place and they leaked. And like, we talked to one of the operators that was there and like, it was hot to work on and the NRC was looking over his shoulder all the time. And he's like, yeah, no, I worked here for like five, 10 years and eventually I just got

Nick Touran (38:15)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mark Hinaman (38:39)
fed up and like went down to Pueblo and worked at the coal plant. And I was like, why? Because the NRC wasn't over my shoulder and I could just do stuff.

Nick Touran (38:43)
Yeah, well, yeah, they had tons of...

I mean, there was a major design flaw, which was that they had like a water-cooled bearings and seals on the helium circulator, and the water kept shooting into the reactor, which is bad. If you get water in a hot graphite reactor, the graphite oxidizes, and you have all this... you have like big issues. Oxidizing graphite, no good. ⁓ And so, yeah, the headline was...

world's safest reactor shutting down because it never runs. That was the 1980s headline when it shut down. And so the fuel alone, Triso, doesn't solve the nuclear challenges. And that reactor was well conceived. had a few problems. You can just not put water-cooled seals, and that would get rid of the major issue for that reactor. But it just kind of goes to show that, well, we just have to have a

have to rebuild a rich exploratory environment that's hands on with different types of reactors. And so that is something I am very happy right now to see. And it's best to do that with very small prototype scale reactors. And so like now there's 10 different companies that are going to try to go critical in a year and like, okay, they aren't, they don't have any. yeah. I thought two were the aren't two like both Oaklow. Yeah. But anyway, but like that's, mean,

Mark Hinaman (39:53)
It was was 11 yesterday.

yeah, maybe.

Nick Touran (40:04)
a year is if you're going to take engineering shortcuts and just slap something, some crap together. Like it's better than nothing. Going critical is going to be cool no matter what. But certainly having

Mark Hinaman (40:14)
I guess for folks

that are unfamiliar, what are we referencing? You and I are Indian.

Nick Touran (40:18)
Sorry, yeah, the Department of Energy

related to one of the executive orders. There's a goal to get three new nuclear reactors, Gen 4 type reactors, critical outside of Department of Energy sites by 4th July, 2026, which is in like, you know, 10 months. And so they just, everyone who wanted to sort of get that fast track applied.

And it was just announced yesterday that like these 10 or 11 companies are all like approved for fast tracking. So off you go. And ⁓ so everyone's going to be scrambling to try to get something, anything critical by that time. And, you know, conceptually it should be doable. We have enriched uranium now, like assembling a stack of graphite and uranium will go critical. Like, is it going to be a good, you know, high performance reactor? Almost certainly not, but.

Mark Hinaman (41:07)
But this is like a massive, I think it's a massive step change for the industry. Because to get to this point without this authorization, was at least a three and half year licensing period from the NRC? What was?

Nick Touran (41:07)
Is it a step?

Yeah, it this this

Yeah, I mean,

I will say, I mean, yes, it's the urgency is super exciting is really needed and I'm happy to see it. So like, for sure, it's a good thing. I will say that like a lot of the stuff that goes on during licensing process is legitimate engineering design. Like a lot of times the license asks questions that you really should know the answer to to perform an appropriate engineering analysis. So it's not the license. mean,

So doing like three years to go critical for like a new type of reactor that you're just starting conceptual design on is pretty aggressive. Even back in the sixties when people started, um, or working on, uh, very fancy gas cooled, beryllium moderated reactors, like the EBO are, it was a, it was a three year design period where they, and they had dozens and dozens of people performing elaborate analysis of.

the stresses and strains and thermal strains in the vessel, what happens when it turns on and turns off and making sure they had systems in place to do that. And so if you say like, okay, go critical in a year, you don't have time to do all the transient analysis. So you cannot assess what's going to happen to your reactor under all conditions. And like, even if there were no regulations at all, you still want to know what your reactor does when you turn it on or turn it off. And so there are some things that

for a typical power plant should take a little bit longer than that. But like we've been sitting around doing studies for so long and not going critical for so long that I totally agree that like, let's just go critical. It doesn't have to be the world's best reactor. Like it will lead to the world's best reactor like the next time. And so just getting that, that sense of urgency.

Mark Hinaman (42:58)
Yeah, I think those

models are all dependent, any models depend on the inputs and assumptions that you have building it. And so the bounding conditions that you use, and just from turning it on, you're to have so much more data available to update your models and make it. I think the design, build, iterate, do loop.

Nick Touran (43:04)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so let's get back.

for sure.

Mark Hinaman (43:19)
it should be used more often nuclear. like that's been really, in my opinion, prohibited for the industry to like build anything new. It's like you can't actually go build something and test it. You can make all the models you want. But so I think it's...

Nick Touran (43:31)
Right. And no, no, it's really true.

it like further emphasizes why this is important. And there's this there's a whole class of skills that are completely lost. It's like the hands on sort of the plumbing, high temperature plumbing. One of my friends, Ryan Kelleher, did a great article in nuclear news a couple of months ago about high temperature plumbing and like just getting a flange that can carry molten salt or liquid metal at high temperature and doesn't leak and can be maintained is like a hard skill. And you can

run all the simulations you want or read all the old books you want, unless you're sitting there hands-on with the hardware doing that, like you will not really learn that. And we've lost generations of people who have those skills. And so this kind of project or getting, you know, getting the hands-on experience with the high temperature fluids, with the actual nutrients, with the actual fission products is the easiest, the probably the fastest and best way to really relearn the stuff that you really need to know. And then that'll feed into the design process for the.

more commercial product side of things. So it's really great in that it's going to like build this whole new generation of people who are like playing with reactors, literally like hands on. And so that's, it's extremely exciting and I'm really glad they're all on there.

Mark Hinaman (44:40)
I totally, man. It's like

the, I mean, the foreseen brain is a good example of where, mean, they built a smaller system, like I think as a prototype and then like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Small, small prototype, right. But, but like this operating experience with real systems that there's no, no supplement for it in my opinion.

Nick Touran (44:51)
Yeah, Peach Bottom. was a big prototype.

Right.

Mark Hinaman (45:04)
And like

your example of molten salt flange is a good one, but like even in well understood industrial technology, like stuff still breaks and there's maintenance. Like operating matters, so.

Nick Touran (45:15)
Right.

And yeah, like, hey, my control rod drive just broke. Like, can you go look at it and fix it? Like, that's I mean, that's a hard skill. And so having people who can go like, sure, let me go fix that control rod drive mechanism. And like, I know what I'm doing and I've seen this before. Like, that's a essential type of person who we just don't have too many of right now. And so having 10 or 11 companies all having people physically building control rod drives is going to be it'll be great. There's nothing.

Negative about it.

Mark Hinaman (45:45)
Yeah, yeah. I guess like we might share the caution for the world that like these things, not all of them are gonna work and there's gonna be learnings and it's gonna be expensive, but like this is a positive step forward for the industry. Of the 10 or 11, do you have a, do want to bet on how many we're gonna see that actually go critical between now and?

Nick Touran (45:54)
Yeah.

Yes, this.

⁓

I think like, I'm going to say like four are going to actually go critical. I believe that four can do it. The only way that I think they can do it is to basically just build the core. Maybe like a vessel with a core in it. It'll be hard and then basically do what we'd call a critical test or a low power or zero power critical test where you've got the core.

Mark Hinaman (46:10)
Yep.

Nick Touran (46:28)
Maybe it's in a vessel and it has some control rod drives and you're going to pull those drives out and that thing's going to go critical at basically zero power. So it's not going to make a lot of heat, but you'll start learning about the characteristics of the core, see how it changes if it heats up and cools down. It's a typical step in the commissioning of reactors to do these critical tests. I think as that's happening, other people will be slapping on coolant to, you know, coolant pipes and putting in circulators and pumps and building the rest of the system that's necessary. Like I think.

Otherwise, there's just no way you can meet that timeline. But if you just focus on slapping together a core with control rods and going critical and sort of get a conditional license that's like, you can't come to power until you do more transient analysis, but you can go critical. ⁓ think like, yeah, I'd say there's enough excitement and funding and capability and fuel to do like at least four. So I'm into it. Nice.

Mark Hinaman (47:22)
I'm going to bet six. What do you

think? A hundred bucks? Four or fewer and you win, six or more and I win and five we tie.

Nick Touran (47:26)
Alright.

I don't know, like four

or six is kind of like, it's all I feel like it's plausible. Going critical shouldn't be hard. Like it should be embarrassing to like worry about going critical. But there is like fuel supply challenges. There's only so much of this trisome that you can get. But like some of these guys are just using uranium oxide, which you can go down the street and buy and like putting that in a core and going critical. Yeah, we'll see what the fast track is. Like how much are you? Do you have to make sure that your reactor doesn't explode when you turn it on?

Mark Hinaman (47:36)
Thank

Nick Touran (47:57)
Like that, like how much transient analysis is going to be required? I don't know. Like there are plenty of reactors that you can design a reactor that's totally unstable. It usually doesn't, it doesn't just go critical and then immediately blow up. Like we've done this before. The Canadians built two reactors, the maple reactors that were inherently unstable, totally against what they expected. But you see it when you do the low power ascent to power and they're like, Whoa. And you put the rods back in and you're like, yikes. And they canceled those, those got torn down. They lost hundreds of millions of dollars. But, ⁓

Like, so are we going to just not worry about it and say like, sure, it's your money. if you build a reactor that's unstable, your problem, but like you, you just can't come up above percent power. Yeah. I mean, there's this fast track. The COE, I, yeah, if it's off site, who's licensing them? Like that's the thing. I'm not totally sure. Like who's authority. Okay. Yes.

Mark Hinaman (48:38)
I don't think that DOE is not funding any of It's the private... You have permission to build.

I think it's the DOE. I don't know. They found a mechanism

to do it.

Nick Touran (48:56)
So it's DOE but not

on DOE sites. anyway, yeah, there are like, it's just, it's the SL1 reactor. And this isn't, I don't mean to be like too whatever cautionary, but like SL1 was a tiny micro reactor, right? It was like 250 kilowatts. And it didn't, when they pulled the rods out of that, some guy pulled a rod out and it killed three people who were working on the plant. These are dangerous machines.

Mark Hinaman (48:59)
Yes, I think there is.

potential,

potentially only, murder-suicide.

Nick Touran (49:25)
Yes, it could have been hypothesized

to be a murder-suicide from a love triangle, but not confirmed. But like, these are, they're somewhat dangerous or they're hazardous machines. Like a little tiny reactor isn't going to cause a wide scale radiological incident. It just doesn't have enough fission products in it, but it still can be, you know, dangerous to the people working on it. So I think, and as far as I can tell, people are still respecting nuclear safety culture and all that stuff. So I assume it'll go fine.

Mark Hinaman (49:30)
Hahaha.

Absolutely.

Yeah, I'm excited for it. I'm going to, yeah, I'll take the bet if you take the bet, Nick, but it for me for. All right. All right. That's fine. Yeah. High confidence. So.

Nick Touran (49:58)
Well, let's do 10 bucks. I'll do 10 bucks over and under.

You can see how my consulting business is going.

Mark Hinaman (50:13)
Let's pivot to fuel. mentioned we talked about tri so we talked about enrichment. I you know something that I think is underappreciating. I'm curious about your opinion on this is conversion. I don't think I did have you looked much into the conversion supply chain?

Nick Touran (50:27)
I

not too much. Like I'm not a conversion savant like some other people on the rotation. like, yeah, it's a serious constraint and we have basically wiped out our ability to do any uranium conversion. I mean, and there's a bunch of like similar supply or fuel cycle capabilities that we've sort of abandoned, which I'm pretty upset about and it's not good for a, well, like.

Mark Hinaman (50:50)
Like what?

Nick Touran (50:52)
fabricating mox fuel, which is mixed oxide, has uranium and plutonium. There's this story where we have a couple tens of tons of separated plutonium from the weapons program that we would like to down blend, mix with uranium, and then put in our power plants. It's sort of a swords to plowshares type of program, where instead of

Fabricating into bombs, you put it into power plants and you power cities and power people's lives and it's a beautiful thing. Well, to do that, you have to be able to fabricate fuel that has both plutonium and uranium in it. And so we thought we said, okay, let's do it. And we started building a Mocks fabrication plant ⁓ in South Carolina and

Mark Hinaman (51:31)
Where was that? ⁓

Nick Touran (51:34)
For some reason, I don't know exactly why, but it boondoggled out of control. We spent $8 billion on it. wasn't even half designed or anything like that. This lesson of like, finish the design before you start construction. They hadn't learned that lesson even on that plant. And so we ended up just canceling it. There was a bunch of corruption and all sorts of stuff. And so it's like, we can't even build.

a simple fuel fabrication plant that has, mean, plutonium is more radioactive than uranium. Natural enriched uranium is like barely radioactive. You can hold it with a glove, whereas plutonium has some more alpha particles coming out. So it's like a little bit radioactive. So you have some more extra precautions, but like we can't even build that facility. And so what kind of a nuclear country are we? That's like, people talk about reprocessing the waste and refabricating stuff with like really hot fuel. This is like.

pretty clean plutonium, making every processing plant is way harder than that, but we can't even do a mox plant. And so I was very disappointed in that. And I sort of somehow wished, I don't know if we had saved it or like done the project management better and actually built the now, so then the plutonium was going to be just disposed of like buried ⁓ in these executive orders. said like,

wait, don't bury that plutonium. Let's hang on and see if we can do something else with it. So I was very happy to see that. So the plutonium is still around, but like we can't even ⁓ make fuel with it. and then the.

Mark Hinaman (52:57)
So

what steps would we have to take to go and do that?

Nick Touran (53:01)
I mean,

it's basically restart that project or like, you know, do an analysis or like send in a guy for give them a one week, you know, review the project and find out why it failed. People have tried this and I'm sure there's some lessons learned, but then I don't know, like put better people on it, better project managers, find someone who can actually deliver on an industrial facility. Like, I don't really know exactly what that entails, but like just commit to it and do it and, ⁓ you know, put.

make the project better aligned with success or something like that. mean, there's a bunch of studies about how do we fix nuclear construction of power plants. And I assume the lessons would be similar. It's like, make sure the contractors get more money if they deliver. Like if you make it a situation where like you can just keep on doing changes and they just keep paying you, then you are motivated to just keep being slow. Like you're just collecting money. So make it so.

Mark Hinaman (53:53)
area.

Nick Touran (53:56)
align it so that if you don't finish it on time, like you start losing money and find out if that's a contract structure that can actually be possible. And then just, yeah, somehow facilitate its completion. And similar things for, I mean, there is a lot of movement in enrichment space. I mean, we see this new company, General Matter, which is cool. And yeah, yeah, this is.

Mark Hinaman (54:17)
centrist off the charts. The financial

performance of that stock is just unbelievable. My buddies bought in and I did not. I was like, my god.

Nick Touran (54:23)
Yeah, it's awesome. That's yeah, that's a good sign. Sorry. Yeah, I try to I

always try to like invest outside of nuclear because I feel like I'm personally already so invested. No, I'm just too like I'm already.

Mark Hinaman (54:35)
Do know too much? Do you know when I sold

my new scale stock? When the carbon free power project was ended. And that was the exact time to buy.

Nick Touran (54:42)
yeah. Yeah,

that was definitely the time to buy. That's a bummer. Anyway, but yeah, so conversion is another thing that, we kind of shut it all down. We had all sorts of enrichment conversion. had reprocessing. I mean, the Atomic Energy Commission would reprocess fuel from every reactor. Like you'd burn your your fuel for a while, send it back to the Atomic Energy Commission. They'd reprocess it, refabricate it, send you new fuel. They charge you for.

How many atoms you split? It was like a leasing type of deal. Like you never actually owned the fuel in the really early days. But now we don't reprocess at all. We don't do conversion. We don't do that much enrichment. I am glad to see movement in the space. There's a lot more people in excitement. But a big part of this, you probably know the story, was the START Treaty where we started buying down-blooded, highly enriched uranium from ⁓ Russia in the early 90s after the collapse.

Mark Hinaman (55:34)
Mega turns to megawatts.

Nick Touran (55:35)
Yes, exactly.

that and that provided half of our enriched uranium need for our whole fleet. So was powering 10 percent of the United States' electricity came from dismantled Soviet nuclear weapons, which is really cool. But if you're in the conversion industry or the enrichment industry, it does kind of throw that off a little bit. Sorry about the

Mark Hinaman (55:56)
So, I mean, we talked about opportunities. I call them opportunities in the fuel space, right? Like every problem can be viewed as a challenge or as a predicament or an opportunity. I mean, I think there's huge upside for a lot of people trying to get into the industry now. I mean, another benefit of kind of these 11 reactors coming to market and like...

the advanced reactors and you know the nuclear company saying we're gonna build a fleet model and like that's putting stress on the fuel supply chain right which is both good and bad it's bad because there could be bottlenecks and long lead times but it's good because like there hasn't been a financial case to be able to underwrite a lot of these new facilities like if any additional capacity

is desired in the market and wants to be built, to be underwritten somehow. Are there other areas that you see in the industry that could fill that niche or that could become available as additional reactors come into play and are built?

Nick Touran (56:55)
Yeah, right.

Well,

you mentioned helium turbines. Yeah, yeah, there's a whole world of like high. Yeah, yeah, let's do this again. Or and there's another.

Mark Hinaman (57:11)
Helium turbines, right? Dear Siemens, please build helium turbine.

we didn't have

NGAM, I'd say more about that, but I can't comment on it.

Nick Touran (57:25)
Okay, okay. Yeah, I mean,

if we do start making high temperature reactors that are easy to maintain and operate well, there will be pressure to transition the power cycle from the traditional steam ranking steam turbines over to Brayton cycle gas turbine type stuff. So you can do helium turbines, you can do nitrogen gas turbines like we did at ML1, or you can even do supercritical CO2, which is another

that's been like perennially in development and we've been it's going to revolutionize everything soon but like it's been kind of slower than people expected but it has major advantages if it works and where you have better thermal efficiency more compact turbo machinery and stuff like that so there's a whole world of supply chain where like nobody's making stuff like that and if we get lots of micro reactors coming along like maybe they'll a lot of them want to vertically integrate maybe they'll make a super critical co2 turbo machinery as well

But also maybe that's another place where like the supply chain could really ramp up. That's kind of an easy to separate type of thing.

Mark Hinaman (58:26)
Yeah. Or they, you

know, they have one division that makes a and then that, division spins off and gets sold and like just makes turbines for all, all the other.

Nick Touran (58:30)
Yeah.

Yeah, yep, yep.

And there's, all the reactor components for all the advanced reactors. Like if any of these advanced reactors take off, there's a whole class of components that need to be fabricated in mass in order for that fleet to take off. So you can imagine molten salt pumps that work in high radiation and don't leak. Heat exchangers, compact heat exchangers, printed circuit heat exchangers would be very beneficial to

all advanced reactors like the sodium liquid metal cool could really benefit from that and all sorts of auxiliary systems. There's a whole, there's a whole industry that could like ramp back up that we kind of used to have where people make a sodium liquid metal ⁓ purification system. Like you can see ads for this in old nucleonics magazines from the 60s and like we have to get back to that where you can like open up the magazine and it's like here's your flow sensor or here's your electromagnetic pump for a liquid metal. Like those are all things that

Mark Hinaman (59:31)
can be getting Instagram

ads, right? That's EBT will be referring you to the companies that will be selling it.

Nick Touran (59:33)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. It should be Instagram ads now. Yeah, it'll be like voiceover

on viral TikToks. Come on down and get your printed circuit heat exchanger.

Mark Hinaman (59:43)
molten salt circulating pumps.

Nick Touran (59:46)
Yeah, I mean,

that's those are all there's a whole world of supply chain like none of those things are being fabricated even for you know, for other purposes. Well, the compact heat exchangers are but for these particular fluids and temperature regimes, those are like specialized with special code cases. So I think there's just a there's a whole world that would take off if we can get any of these advanced reactors with different fluids up and running in a in a case that that actually looks good and someone

actually starts making orders of them because they look that good.

Mark Hinaman (1:00:17)
Yeah.

Awesome. Nick, you've spent a lot of time thinking backwards about the industry, and not backwards, but looking back on the industry and looking at the history, and you've worked on developing new systems yourself. You've done a lot of the math, and we just talked a little bit about what's next in the future, which is awesome. But ⁓ leave us on an optimistic note. ⁓ What does it look like in the next five, 10 years, and what are you going to do to help? What's your role going to

Nick Touran (1:00:47)
Yeah.

Well, yeah. So part of my like leaving terrifying, I intended to spend like six months to a year surveying things and figuring things out and then like making a decision about what to like really dedicate myself to. And I haven't I'm only a few months out. So I have yet to determine exactly what I will personally do. But I do think that, there's there is more momentum now than we've seen, at least since the first nuclear renaissance in.

Mark Hinaman (1:00:48)
in it.

Nick Touran (1:01:14)
in nuclear. And I really think this time it feels a little bit better. It feels like there's more priority, more support and a lot more private investment and a much richer variety of different technologies that are being developed. And I do believe that, you know, if you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything. There's nothing that prevents these advanced reactors from being, you know, someone can put in the elbow grease and get that thing running in a way that is actually

maintainable and operable and reliable, and that could be a great product. And so I do think we'll see at least a few of these advanced reactors take off. Meanwhile, I think there's also more and more interest in just accepting that like the light water reactor is a highly optimized, very well designed system with decades of experience baked into it, American ingenuity encoded on its blueprints and ⁓ taking the experience we had at Vogel and learning from it and building.

10 and then 30 more big light water reactors is like another thing that I truly believe has to happen and will happen. So I want to see like 30 big reactors and 300 small reactors in this country in the next 25 years or something like that. I think it's possible. I think there's like the momentum and I think if we at least sit down and focus on it, don't kid ourselves, then that kind of thing should be possible. And I want to be a part of that.

Mark Hinaman (1:02:37)
⁓ for a hire, right? Smart brain for hire, so nice. Well, Nick Turan, thanks so much for the time. It's been a joy ⁓ chatting with you.

Nick Touran (1:02:41)
Yeah.

Yeah, of course

it was great fun, Mark. Thanks for having me on.

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