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Navigating Nuclear Energy: A Roadmap to a Sustainable Future | A Noble Conversation with Ray Rothrock
What happens when the worlds of nuclear engineering, startups, and rock music collide? You get an insightful conversation with Ray Rothrock, our esteemed guest for this special episode. With a rich background that spans a Bachelor's in Nuclear Engineering from A&M, an MBA from Harvard, and a Master's in Nuclear Engineering from MIT, he brings a fresh perspective to our discussion.
We pull back the curtain on the current energy transition, unveiling the alarming rate of fossil fuel burning and its dire impacts on our environment. Ray Rothrock helps us connect the dots between quality of life and energy production, propelling us into a future where solar, wind, and nuclear energy take center stage. But it's not all sunshine and breezy days - we also tackle the limitations of hydroelectric power and the urgent need for alternative energy sources.
Then, we shift gears into the high-speed lane of nuclear energy, unearthing its complexities and the science that powers it. From the transformation of an element into energy to the global efforts in keeping nuclear technology in check, we break it all down. We also discuss safety concerns surrounding nuclear power and its potential role in the future. So, buckle up and ride along with us as we navigate the road to a sustainable, energy-efficient future.
Alright, get excited. Get excited, because today's episode is going to be amazing. I mean, I learned a lot while recording this and I'm sure you're going to learn a lot too, because our guest is just a wealth of knowledge. His name is Ray Rothrock. He needs no introduction, but Ray is a venture capitalist and has had multiple IPOs and exits in companies like Imperva, which is a data security company, cloudflare, an internet security company, and PGP Corporation, an enterprise encryption software company. Ray is also an author of the book Digital Resilience, which is a book primarily for leaders who are interested in protecting their organizations from cyber threats. Prior to that, ray was the CEO of Red Seal from 2014 to 2020, and Red Seal is a company that helps organizations and corporations reduce your cyber risk. Before that, ray was also a partner at Venrock, the venture capital arm of the Rockefeller family, for 25 years. I mean, that's a big deal During that, for 25 years at Venrock, you learn a lot about the venture capital industry and how it's changed over time, so he has a lot of experience there.
Speaker 1:Ray is multi-talented and can also be seen playing bass in the rock band Up and to the Right Now. Ray earned his bachelor's degree from Texas A&M in nuclear engineering, went on to earn a master's from MIT in nuclear engineering and eventually an MBA from Harvard Business School. And with all this experience, today we're going to be talking about nuclear energy and the role it plays in the energy transition. We're also talking a little bit about solar, wind and hydroelectric power as well, but without further ado, ladies and gentlemen. Ray Rothrock, yeah, so how have you been? How's everything been?
Speaker 2:Oh, it's been great. I've had a life's been good. Yeah, been busy, but you know, moving on, how about you? Lots of travel, not so much, oh me, day trips here and there, but how about you? How are you doing?
Speaker 1:Oh, I am good. So I started a new job in Houston that was last week and so it's a healthcare startup. They help hospitals and health systems transition to more of a value-based care model, and they've been around since what? 2018. And so I'm going in as a at least I'll be shadowing and doing like a rotation between different areas. Right now I'm in business development, and so it's been good, good. Lots of learning, lots of info to take in, but good experience so far.
Speaker 2:That's great. Well, you're a young man, you got a lot to learn and you'll learn it fast, so that's all good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's right. You said you were going to Israel, I believe, or at least you were traveling to Israel, yeah.
Speaker 2:Now, and I did, I'm on, I'm on.
Speaker 1:How was that?
Speaker 2:You know I'm on three boards over there. I've been I've been 64 times in the last 25 years. Okay, yeah, it's a long way to Do you ever go with family? Yeah, yeah, I've done a couple of times. We've done it, but in the first time, the first half, a dozen times a month over there, I always saved a few minutes for a few days for doing some touring. So I've I've, with that many trips I've explored pretty much the whole place. There's a few things I still haven't seen, but let me get a glass of water just in case I have a little Okay.
Speaker 2:Okay, this will help. I tend to get dry mouth when I talk too much.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, I got one as well.
Speaker 2:I brought my, just so you know. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:I think you're. Yeah, you are at the Hegla Institute, Gala.
Speaker 2:Right, I was there for that.
Speaker 1:Yes, congrats on the award. I saw, I saw you got the award. Yeah, thank you, sir, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That was. That was great. I think that was my second time attending and it's I mean, it's phenomenal, Just the people there and mission, just amazing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the scientists at the Hegla Institute of Tracks is quite remarkable. It's pretty exciting, pretty exciting, oh yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but yeah, thanks for coming on. You know, I just wanted to talk to you specifically about, you know, the energy transition and nuclear power and the role it plays in that transition. But before we go there, I'll just like our audience to know more about you. And so who is Rerothrock? When you think about yourself, what comes to mind?
Speaker 2:Gosh, what comes to mind? Well, you know, things like I'm a pretty solid citizen, pretty patriotic, pretty try to be a good person, but yet navigate the world as best I can. I, you know, I can be pretty nerdy and I can also be pretty creative, and I've got some eclectic hobbies, from playing music in a rock band to amateur radio here in the community to, you know, hanging with my family and my wife. So those two, that's who I am. I think it's Okay. So what do you play? What do you play?
Speaker 1:in the rock band.
Speaker 2:Bass guitar.
Speaker 1:Bass guitar okay.
Speaker 2:I grew up playing music and in fact I played all the way through graduating from A&M. I started out in the fourth grade of the clarinet and played the oboe and the saxophone at the A&M Symphonic Band back in the day.
Speaker 1:So I've always had a little hang. Is the Symphonic Band still around? Yes, the A&M Symphonic Band. It is Okay.
Speaker 2:It's brought into many other different bands, different genres. Okay, symphonic there's. I think there's a reggae band there's. All kinds of that have just branched off from that activity. Yeah, I think Okay, yeah, the album that you get here is who am I? I'm a doer, I like to get things done. Doer, I like results and you know I'm pretty straight shooter. That way, no results. Well, we're gonna find somebody who'll get results.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I mean you went to A&M, did your. I think your bachelor's was it in nuclear engineering, Correct, nuclear engineer. And then, yeah, yeah, and then you went to you did, got your MBA from Harvard. And did nuclear engineering at MIT as well.
Speaker 2:Exactly. I got a master's at MIT in nuclear engineering and then went to work yeah, and after nine years came back to Harvard.
Speaker 1:Yeah, ok, wow, that's. I mean, that's impressive. That's a picture of a doer right there.
Speaker 2:Well, there you go, I guess. So, yeah, you know, wayne Starr, who was the head of the MSC when I was at A&M, was a very keen mentor of mine and quite helpful and in guiding and you know he was sometimes very pushing, other times just very persuasive, so and he encouraged me to pursue all of that, especially the Harvard Business School thing.
Speaker 1:So what about the nuclear engineer and what got you into that?
Speaker 2:Oh, great, great question, great question. So I grew up in Fort Worth, texas, and I was 14 years old. I was working as in the Boy Scout. So I was working on badges, you know, merit badges to get to your Eagle. And the town children's museum, as it was, is a very educational oriented museum. So they actually had they brought in a white lab coat guy from Nashville at Oak Ridge, from Nashville, tennessee, oak Ridge Laboratory, to basically teach the atomic energy merit badge for any Boy Scout who's interested. And so there were a couple of hundred of us that signed up for the badge and I don't know how many finished, but I finished and that was a remarkable aha moment for me.
Speaker 2:It just I was this hook, line and sinker on this nuclear stuff. It was called the Atomic Energy Merit Badge, which was how it was described in those days. But it was just fascinating and I think the intriguing part about it was like trying to understand matter but you couldn't see the matter. You had to infer what the matter was about, right? So a lot of the merit badge was not only just basic alpha, beta, gamma and this radiation stuff, but the scientific method about how to you know how, the enlightenment, and I don't think that I'm adding that but how the scientific method was used to discover and understand the atom.
Speaker 2:I mean, it was only 20 years before 25 years before I got this merit badge that Enrico Fermi controlled fission in a reactor in Chicago. So it was a pre-existing phenomenon and this was new science, and so it was about teaching science, scientific method, but also nuclear energy. So that's enough of that. But that's how I got it. That's how I got very interested and even my science project. In senior year in high school I got an industrial accommodation from a local utility company, texas Electric, and I got a nice letter from the CEO of Texas Electric and I presented it to the nuclear engineering department at Texas A&M. And the rest is history.
Speaker 1:As I say, and so it all started with the atomic nuclear and merit badge.
Speaker 2:Yeah, boy Scout merit badge.
Speaker 1:Boy Scout merit badge, okay, okay. So since then, I mean you've gone on to do multiple things in the business world, but also the nuclear world, and I guess this kind of leads into the topic for the day. But in terms of nuclear energy, or at least energy in general, what is the energy transition?
Speaker 2:And just for people who don't know what that is, Well, I'll give you my definition of it and I'll try to be brief. So the world in which we live today was basically built on fossil energy. That is, scraping the earth and getting a chococole, or burning some wood, or, as we found out in this country, poking a hole in the ground and finding oil, all of which burn very easily. Net burning is a chemical process that releases CO2 in the beginning when it burns, and so the entire industrial modern age in which we have all the benefits come from that source. Along the way, we figured out how to harness rivers for hydropower, so the dam like the Hoover Dam down in Arizona, huge project. And then, of course, in 42, in Fermi, figured out how to control fishing, and then Abra Rickover built a ship powered by nuclear fishing. Nuclear energy was born, and in fact I was just coincidence, I didn't know it at the time, but my first job at Yankee Atomic Electric Company was an engineer, one of the many engineers working on a plant called Yankee Atomic Electric. And Yankee Atomic went critical in 1961, making energy for the grade it was in a fully commercial plant.
Speaker 2:Anyway, the energy transition. We've got all this fossil fuel. We're burning lots of it. I can give you some numbers that are staggering. That's one of the issues with the transition. These are staggering numbers that people can't understand and we woke up in the 90s and the UN with its IPCC report and people started studying this. We could see the impact of what CO2 was doing in the atmosphere. It basically creates a greenhouse. And so what's a greenhouse? A sunlight comes in, it goes through the atmosphere and it heats things up and the heat stays within the atmosphere. It doesn't leave the earth. A perfectly reflective planet would be. One unit of light comes in and one unit of light leaves, and that's not the case.
Speaker 2:So the CO2 basically has formed a shell. This happened on Venus, by the way. We think it's happened on other things. We're still in early days of figuring that out, but basically that CO2 has been building up. Now the earth naturally processes CO2. Plants consume CO2. The ocean absorbs CO2. Things natural processes consume that CO2. But when the production from human activities exceeds what the planet can normally consume, then there's a reservoir of it builds up and that's created the heat.
Speaker 2:So the energy transition is wow. We've got to stop producing all this CO2. It means we've got to stop burning fossil fuels that have carbon in them and some other means of generating power. Why do we have to do that? Well, the correlation between quality of life and the production of energy and energy consumption is a perfect correlation. If you have energy, if your country has energy, your community has energy you typically have a good life Meaning. You have lights on in the evening, you have heat, you have food preservation, refrigerator, you have transportation, you have all the beautiful things that we have that makes life comfortable. You have pharmaceuticals to keep you well, you have information, the internet. You have all this stuff. Unfortunately, not all the world has the same amount of energy, but a lot of the rest of the world wants to have that energy because they want to have a life like the West particularly. I'm speaking of the global South.
Speaker 2:So, here we are. We've got countries like the United States, china, somewhat Europe, a lot Russia even, who have pretty good lives based on their energy production and consumption. We've got a lot of countries that don't, and they want to have it. So what do they do it? They're drilling for oil and they're scraping for coal. And until we give to the West or until the modern world gives them an alternative, that is exactly what they're going to do. So in the meantime, in this country the US and China largely these days we have pursued other alternatives besides fossil fuels, primarily solar, which in the Obama administration went from like $12 a watt to $1 a watt. It was a remarkable or research project by that administration.
Speaker 2:We have wind, which has been around since the Dutch had their windmills back in the 1500s. So to modernize these windmills and to make them productive and effective it took a lot of modern technology, modern manufacturing technology, modern magnetic technology Again, things to the West and good science and engineering knew how to do. And then there was nuclear energy, which was growing very quickly in the 60s, the 60s, the 70s and the early 80s. But in 1979, there was a nuclear reactor accident in Pennsylvania called Tremont Island made a lot of people ask questions. So the transition is switching from fossil-based energy sources to non-fossil-based energy sources and we have only a handful of options and we're working on more. Right now we have solar, wind and nuclear and a little bit of that. We've pretty well exhausted the hydro potential for rivers.
Speaker 1:That was pretty long winded, I apologize, but it's not so could you tell us more about the? So you said we've exhausted the hydro potential. Yeah, okay, in what way?
Speaker 2:Well, for hydro. Well, let's see, it's a physics problem. So in order to Okay, in order to turn a turbine that turns a generator when it makes electricity, there's a resistance to the making of that electricity, so you have to have water coming into a turbine blade. That water has to be so many feet above that turbine blade in order to put pressure on that blade to turn it, because the generator is pushing back. And so it's about a river. A river gradually goes down right, gradually goes down.
Speaker 2:Maybe you've seen pictures of some rivers that are very high and they fall all and go down Well, though, like Victoria Falls or in Hawaii places. But most rivers they start high and flow low, and along the way we've dammed them up and we've let water build up behind that dam. Well, from that water level to the bottom of that dam is what's called the head. It's how many head a feet water pressure above the turbines. You can have Hoover Dam, for example, those turbines down on the Colorado River, and when Hoover Dam was built was about 250 feet of water pressure above those turbines. So you can only do that so many times and you stop water flowing.
Speaker 2:The Columbia River has massive, massive, the China. They built the Three Gorges Dam, which is the largest hydro plant in the world, and of course you had to do that. When you back up water it fills valleys for miles and miles and miles behind the dam, so you displace people. So it's a big undertaking. I'm sure y'all saw the scientists say that at this point we've probably consumed about 90% of the available hydro locations without major damage to various things. I mean anyway, okay, that's what it's all about. You got hydro Hydro. Yeah, hydro is wonderful, it's clean, but it's we've used it up.
Speaker 1:So we've used that up, and fossil fuels are not necessarily great for the environment due to CO2 emissions Primary. I knew something, so we're left with sorry.
Speaker 2:Primarily fossil fuel with the issues. That's what we worry about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so we're left with solar, wind and nuclear Right. What's ideal?
Speaker 2:Well.
Speaker 1:Like which one's the most ideal energy source.
Speaker 2:Well, the sun is the most ideal energy source. It's a long way away from us, it burns constantly and we figured out how to capture it. However, it doesn't shine on the dark side of the planet at night. So while it's a perfect energy source, it's only good half the time. Right, wind? Wind is a good source of energy, but there are people beginning to understand the impact of that on the environment. These windmills are huge, they're 300 meters tall. They're massive, they make a lot of noise and there's an impact on animals which we didn't appreciate in the beginning. But the wind doesn't blow all the time either, and the problem is you can't predict. We can predict when the sun's gonna shine, we cannot predict when the wind's gonna blow.
Speaker 2:So you have a modern society and you need electricity, for example, seven by 24, which you do and I do and everybody in the West, china and Russia and Europe and a lot. See anybody with a manufacturing industrial base, anyone with a city. You need power, seven by 24. That means there's only one source If you can guarantee you will always be available, and that's nuclear, because the other intermittent. They have a role to play, a big role to play, don't get me wrong, but until we perfect battery storage, it's extremely expensive. Right now we're still working on it. Until we perfect that, nuclear seems to be one of the only sources for seven by 24 electricity that we have.
Speaker 1:And we know how to do it. So how do we perfect battery storage?
Speaker 2:Well, it has issues too, in the sense that a lot of the materials that batteries use are not in friendly countries. Lithium is a core element, cobalt, neodymium and many other things. These are called rare earth elements and rare earth elements most of the world's rare earth reserves had been found in guess where? China. When I say been found noble, you've gotta appreciate it's always a matter of price. How much do you wanna pay? Those rare earth elements exist in seawater, but it lost a fortune to get them out, and that's okay if you wanna pay that price, but economically viable, easy to get.
Speaker 2:Rare earth elements are primarily from China. So our solar panels, which are made out of silicon, are generally manufactured in China. The windmills and the generators that the windmills have are mostly generated in China. So those two sources alone batteries, wind and solar are in the United States. We like to buy things as cheap as possible on the world market, so we get them from China.
Speaker 2:Well, that's a geopolitical, especially in today's age. So one of the things that the current administration has tried to do with its industrial policy is bring a lot of that home so that we can at least control our destiny with regard to wind, solar and batteries and we're working on it. It'll take. It'll take. It took several decades for it to get where we are. It'll take several decades to recover Newflare. On the other hand, we've got uranium, we've got engineers, we've got the supply chain, we can build these plants and there's a whole generation of new nuclear that's in the works right now. Actually, some of it is being experimented with. Up at Idaho National Laboratory there's 50 startup companies that are trying to come up with a new way to harness nuclear energy for different applications besides great big power plants. So there's a lot. There's a lot of innovation going on there because, at the end of the day, nuclear does not emit CO2. It's extremely reliable and it's the safest form of electricity generation we've ever created.
Speaker 1:And so when I know, when a lot of people hear nuclear, one of the things that they think about is bombs, right, yeah, and I mean the Pandora's promise. I watched the documentary Good good, yeah, I thought it was really, really interesting. But how so, when people think about bombs, right, is that the right way to view nuclear? Or, and if not, then why do most people view it that way and how could we move away from that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you put your thumb on a key, key issue and there's several vectors. I'll go down. What is this generational thing? I mean my dad, my wife's dad, when World War II and World War II ended with using the nuclear weapons. I guess the enemy and that's pretty fresh and current in people my age or older, guys like you, and that's not been part of the game but realizing the potential for nuclear weapons and the issue with nuclear weapons, the world agreed to limit the spread of nuclear material and nuclear knowledge through a non-proliferation treaty. Now, not every country has signed that treaty, though the world has worked very hard on containing the technology and the know-how to make bombs. So that's a big deal.
Speaker 2:I'm on the board of the Nuclear Threat Initiative and this is one of our. This is our key mission is to somehow rid the world of nuclear weapons, educate about what's different and so forth. The other vector, besides the memory of people, the other vector is that nuclear reactors the ones you see Glen Rose there in Texas or South Texas Project are the new one, vogel in Georgia. The material in those plants cannot make a bomb. The laws of physics tell you that they will not explode as a nuclear device and that's by design and that's by the fact that they're which is called the enrichment, and that's what most the 450 plants that are operating on the planet today making electricity they are of that design so that the material in the plants cannot be made into a bomb. So we have engineered and built systems that prevent us from becoming a bomb.
Speaker 2:Now how can I keep people from connecting the two? You really can't. There's a lot of propaganda. There's a lot of movies. There's a new movie, in fact the latest movie by Oliver Stone called Nuclear. He's got many minutes of nuclear bombs going off in the movie, yet the movie is all about we need to rethink nuclear for the United States as a power supply. So even Oliver Stone mixed it and it's very unfortunate. I mean very unfortunate, but over time we will learn enough. Just like I don't know, just like I hate those things, but gasoline can be made into a very powerful bomb. Tnt can be a bomb. Look at the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995. That was a truck full of fertilizer. Fertilizer blew the face off of that federal building and killed 29 people or something. So these are risks that society faces and if we approach it on good people, honest people, and with science and technology we can make things where they can be used for these destructive devices, and that's what we did quickly and early in nuclear energy.
Speaker 1:So there are other things that could equally be made into a bomb, but the reason why people associate nuclear with bombs is because of the world wars that we've had, right, yeah. And you know these are World war II specifically. Ok.
Speaker 2:World war II. I mean, those are dramatic images. Everyone knows what a mushroom cloud looks like. Right, right.
Speaker 1:Right and so OK, how does I mean because you've talked about how, at least why people view nuclear that way, but how does it work in terms of eventually generating energy right from the element to energy?
Speaker 2:How do we get there, oh boy, OK, all right, you're going to get a PhD real quick. I'm ready. It's really quite a simple process, and there are certain elements in the periodic table you know what that is and one of those elements called uranium. And all elements have different isotopes, meaning they have the same number of protons but different number of neutrons. So in uranium there's uranium 235 and 238 and 233. These are specific descriptors of the different isotopes of uranium.
Speaker 2:Well, the one that fizzes the easiest is 235. Now there's not much of it in the ground. There's not much of it in the ground. So we actually have to enhance it. We have to take out some of the U238 and leave more of the U235. So we get it to a level, a certain level, and then we make it into basically a pellet. Now you know what a neutron is. A neutron is a neutral from the nucleus. So you take a uranium 235 nucleus and you inject a neutron into it. It becomes uranium 236. Uranium 236 is very. It doesn't stink around very long, like within nanoseconds it breaks into two pieces, what are called fish of the nines. When it breaks into those pieces this is mother nature and physics at its best Part of the mass of that atom is converted to energy, just as in the relationship that Einstein showed us. E equals MC square.
Speaker 1:Now it turns out.
Speaker 2:C is a big number when you squared it to a huge number and mass is a very small number. But it'll times C. Squared that's a speed of light. Square E is a very big outcome.
Speaker 2:So with very few uranium atoms splitting, you get a lot of energy. So that's the essence and so that energy comes out in different forms. It comes out as light, it comes out as these fishing products when they literally physically blow apart. So they're like they have momentum and they're heavy and they slow down. They slow down, that's friction. That friction creates heat and we have water passing by these pellets and the water comes in cool and goes out hot.
Speaker 2:And that hot water you've circulated through this bed of uranium. That's fishing and it'll boil, or it'll get so hot it will boil. And then, just like we make electricity with coal and natural gas and everything else, we burn, that water is converted to steam and that steam is put into a turbine and that turbine spins and that turbine spins a generator. They're on the same axis, one thing spinning together and now the generator comes electricity. So it starts with uranium-235 absorbing a neutron, fissing into two pieces that heat of the fissile material plus the gamma-raising energy that's emitted when that is captured in the water, heating the water, and it flows through a system that creates steam and out the back, incomes electricity. Not unlike a coal, a natural gas plant burns CH4, heat.
Speaker 1:And that's methane. Is that methane? Methane, that's natural gas.
Speaker 2:And a coal plant burns long hydrocarbons, they break and when they break they release energy. It's not equals MC square, it's a chemical bond, not a nuclear bond. In fact, it's about two million times less energetic than a nuclear bomb. The nuclear bond is inside the nucleus. So it's basically I forget what it is 2000 units, 2000 units 2001,. That's the ratio of energy density of uranium to coal.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'm sorry, I didn't know. Okay, so let me see if I'm see if you got. No, let me see if I get it. Okay, so you have uranium-236, sorry, yeah, 236, but it's not 235. Oh, 235. It's yeah, okay. You extract it Okay, because it's not a lot of 236, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there is no 236.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It only lasts for-. Oh, there is no 236,. Okay, but you make it with a neutron going into the 235, because a neutron is one, 236, uranium-235, 235 plus one is 236.
Speaker 1:You see, okay, yeah, yeah, okay, okay, and that creates so that process of division, is what is called nuclear fission. Right, fission, correct, splitting, okay, and that's splitting okay, no, okay, and that's what generates heat and light which can be used as a source of energy.
Speaker 2:To boil water, to make steam, to turn a turbine. That's right, right.
Speaker 1:Okay, and so how? In terms of cost, how expensive is this as a source of energy?
Speaker 2:Well, that's not an easy answer because there's so many things involved In the middle of the night. Well, let me see, I don't know. I really don't know how to answer that. In the world of the electric grid there's this thing called the LCOE, and I think that means the cost of energy or something. And if you combine all the capital you spent to build a plant, the fuel, the humans that operate the plant, all in it can vary depending upon where you build it, how big it is.
Speaker 2:There's all kinds of things that affect it. It can vary from 15 cents a kilowatt hour of power to 30 cents a kilowatt hour of power and you compare that to solar and wind and gas and coal. They vary as well because sometimes you have to haul the coal a long way, so you have to dispose the coal. The gas that goes up the stack very is very expensive to deal with. There's all kinds of cost in there. But generally in the United States I think the national average for all electricity is about 15 cents per kilowatt hour. Here in sunny California a whopping 43 cents a kilowatt hour. Thank you very much.
Speaker 1:Whoa, that's more than double.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and guess what? We have a lot of solar and a lot of wind. 10% of my power my house right here is coming from a nuclear power plant. Only 10%, and I have the most expensive electricity in the nation. How about that? So explain that one to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I wish I could I wish I could too, but unfortunately the people who I don't want to say the idealist in the world, they don't consider the whole cost of something, and that's another topic I don't want to. There's a whole lot of things involved in putting turning that light bulb on in your room, a whole lot. And people don't. They're the world that way, but it's the truth. The engineers out there, the power companies, it's reality to them.
Speaker 1:And so how does? Because I mean, we've talked about nuclear and how it's clean, it's safe and there's a lot of energy that can be generated from nuclear fission, right, yes, so how does nuclear play a role in nuclear, in the energy transition? Yeah, and how does it get to, let's say, power my house or something like that?
Speaker 2:Well, where are you at Houston? Are you in Houston?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm in Houston currently.
Speaker 2:Well, part of your power is nuclear. From the South Texas project They've got a couple.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So you're already getting some nuclear power.
Speaker 1:Oh, I had no idea.
Speaker 2:I think there are four plants in Texas Glenrose there are two, and in South Texas there are two. I'm sure Houston Powerlight probably gets some of their electricity from. Oh, I'm sorry, so where are we going? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So how energy? Well, the road.
Speaker 2:Well, as we have now got a lot of solar and wind, we have learned a whole lot about how to manage when the sun shines or when the wind blows, or when the sun doesn't shine on the wind. Because imagine all these buildings, all these companies, all these industries, these refineries, they're all connected to the same electric grid. There's wires between all of us, right, and when one of those, if the demand for electricity changes dramatically, then the power companies have to turn down the production. Likewise, if one of the producing facilities goes offline, the wind stops blowing or it gets dark and you still have the same demand, then the power companies have to provide. They have to provide that power that they lost, or you'll have brownouts. You'll have. They'll say Noble, you got to turn off your power for four hours or whatever it is.
Speaker 2:Texas has got a particularly interesting electric grid, but anyway, it's about the grid, the mazure grid. One of the things I should have said right up front electricity. When you make electricity in a generator, you have to use it immediately. We're storing a battery and it turns out we make a lot of electricity in this nation we don't have batteries nearly capable of storing it. So, for all intents and purposes. When that generator spins and makes a certain amount of electricity, somebody is consuming that certain amount of electricity. So if the demand drops, the supplier has to cut back. If the demand increases suddenly, then the supplier has to find sources to match. It's an amazingly sophisticated system.
Speaker 2:My point is, we've learned a lot about solar and wind, but the truth of the matter is, when you get up in the morning and turn on your lights or whatever, power goes up, demand stays up all through the day, and then in the evening it goes down at night. So it goes through. What kind of a sine way. And so the power companies have to adjust all day long. Well, when it's going up, and that's the daytime, that's fine. So, wind and solar if the wind's blowing, great, sun's certainly shining, that's great. But at night it's not.
Speaker 2:So, if you think about the bottom of the lowest part of that wave. That's sort of what's called the base load. That's below which your city always needs that much power when everyone's asleep. And that's what nuclear is really good at. Is called base load, or some people call it firm power, meaning not variable, and so we learned how to manage all that. So in the transition, nuclear can play the role of base power, and when the wind's blowing, we can use the wind and turn down the nuclear plants, or if the wind isn't blowing, we can turn up the nuclear plants. Or if the sun is shining, we can turn down the nuclear plants, or if the sun goes away, we can turn up. So we you've got multiple sources and lots of users and you have to manage and control all that. So the role nuclear plays is base load power, firm power, so that when you get up in the middle of the night because you don't feel well and you flip that light switch on, you'll have power, because you may not wind and you may not have solar. And in our modern society you and I expect when we flip that light switch, that light switch, the power comes on.
Speaker 2:Or that's just you and me, but what about people who have medical devices and are holding the need power all the time to help them breathe, or dialysis machines or hospitals for that? That just a little sidebar. If you're moving somewhere and you're worried about the power or whatever, always move next to a hospital. Yeah, it'll be a little noisy, it'll be anilitis and stuff, but the electric power company is going to do when a city is in trouble and they have to start turning parts of the city off. The last thing they turn off is the hospitals. So if you're in the neighborhood of a hospital you'll probably always have electricity, to the extent the power company can keep it on. Isn't that interesting?
Speaker 1:That's smart, that's yeah.
Speaker 2:And so the next time you go by a hospital, go out back to the parking lot or something and see these giant steel cases. Those are generators. You know it's the power. Well, that hospital must have power and those generators will come on. They'll burn natural gas or diesel fuel as long as it takes so that those people that are in the hospital bed that need electricity to stay alive can stay alive.
Speaker 1:Okay, okay. So let's take, let's take but that's you know me, okay, okay, let's take. Let's say, my apartment complex, for example. We have this apartment complex and there are different sources of energy that allows me to have power, that's, you know, wind, solar, fossil and nuclear, but these are these are alternating based on what time of the day it is.
Speaker 2:Right, right.
Speaker 1:Okay, and so-.
Speaker 2:Right. You don't know where they are. They're all the way away from you, so they're brought. That power is brought to you by wire hooked into your building.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:And so would there, or would it be ideal if, let's say so, you have solar, wind, fossil, but it's just nuclear that's powering the whole thing. Is that, is that possible? Yeah?
Speaker 2:It's very possible to have nuclear power, the whole thing. I'll give you an example.
Speaker 1:What's stopping that from happening?
Speaker 2:Well, lots of things there had. So here we go again, some energy transition talk. So for the last 20, 23, four years in the United States the demand for electricity has been flat. So there's, even though we have all these cell phones and you and I have an internet with all these connections, we are we've not demanded more power. But now we've got electric cars, we've got a new industry, we're re-inmanufacturing back to the United States. Demand for electricity is going to go up dramatically.
Speaker 2:So in that time when there was no new demand and no people built power plants generally speaking, nobody built anything. Our whole mystery and our whole regulatory infrastructure that keeps us safe, kind of ossified it, kind of called you know, everything's fine, we'll just keep, we'll renew these plants, but we don't have to do anything new. So right now, all these new entrepreneurs that are bringing these new nuclear ideas to the regulatory body, the regulatory body's got to wake up and get with the program. So there's a lag. That's one lag. The other lag is money. It takes a lot of money to build anything, whether it's a coal plant, a nuclear plant, a gas turbine. These things cost money and until there's a new demand for electricity that people are convinced is going to happen.
Speaker 2:It'll be hard for people with the money, the Wall Street folks, to get behind and write investments to do these things. It's like, show me that you need the electricity, so it's a thing, because you need the demand to signal the people who provide electricity, to then make a decision about what technology to buy and then to finance it. So it's a very complicated capital equipment business and all of these things take many years. The best gas plant can be online in like 18 months and a nuclear plant can take five or 10 years because of the complexity and the scale.
Speaker 2:The entrepreneurs are working to shorten that and make them smaller, but today you can't just go out and buy one of these things. So it's a market demand, supplier issue. And look, the IRA that the president signed and the Congress passed just six months ago. People, analysts, are saying that that will increase If that all comes to pass, electric vehicles being the principal element, our nuclear, our electric power demand in the United States might go up as much as 25% in the next decade. That, noble, is a big, big number. 25%, a big number, that's a lot of.
Speaker 1:So the IRA, because I read a little bit about it. People who don't know, yeah. So what's the part of it that will drive demand up for electricity or energy?
Speaker 2:Well, first of all, the subsidies for electric cars, electric vehicles. Today it's 5% or 6%, I think, the penetration of new car, soul or electric. But with the incentives in place, people are going to buy more probably, and that's the hope, because when you're not driving a gasoline-powered car, it's not burning fossil fuel, there's no CO2. It's electric. So if everybody charges their car at night, the base load's going to go up. So that means the demand for firm power is going to increase, and so people are estimating what that is. That's part of it. The other is there's a clever tactic that Congress has used many times. It's called a production tax credit.
Speaker 2:So your income tax is if you produce something, and this is actually very big during the solar deployment in the 90s and the 00s. You make electricity and you make it a certain way. You get a tax credit for what you make, and so you don't pay taxes on a certain portion of what you make. Well, that's a big incentive. So instead of I'm just going to make up some numbers here. But let's say you charge a dollar for a unit of power. It costs you 50 cents to make it, so you have 50 cents a profit and you would pay 50 cents, you'd pay 25 cents of taxes and the investment tax credit says well.
Speaker 2:I'm producing electricity this certain way, I don't pay 25 cents of taxes. I pay 15 cents of taxes, so I have an incentive to make electricity that way. Well, that's the way solar was and that's the way wind was, and still is, by the way, for decades. And now in the IRA they put that in for nuclear first time ever. Huge wind for the industry, huge wind for the people who are thinking about building a nuclear power plant. It's a big deal, a very big deal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay. So even with the increase, or at least the projected increase, in energy consumption by 25%, that tax credit that was included for nuclear is going to help with some of that.
Speaker 2:Right, exactly.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And the other thing that was in there. It's a small number, but it's not insignificant. There are some modern nuclear power plants that are online today that literally were competed out of business by cheap natural gas, which is great. I love market dynamics, it's a wonderful thing. And so the administration not the administration, but the bill contains the law, contains some subsidies to help companies bridge the gap if they find themselves in an unprofitable or uncompetitive situation. I forget the number, but it'll be useful on the margin to save existing nuclear power plants that are under competitive pressure. Look, gas is real cheap. It's real cheap, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, I just learned so much about nuclear that I didn't I had no idea.
Speaker 2:Well, I hope Okay. So there, I've tried. This is You've picked a nerdy topic, favorite of mine, and I hope I'm clear for you, so yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, so I'm gonna find a way to put all of this together and just paint a picture that you just discussed. So you have these different sources of energy solar, wind, fossil hydro and nuclear. Hydro is pretty much exhausted. It's exhausted. But solar, on the other hand, I mean, you only get it half the time, yeah, as in wind, doesn't? It's not always there, like you can't tell, you can't predict that. But nuclear is what will allow us to have that base load. Let's say, you wake up in the middle of the night and you turn on the lights. That's like the base load. You still have it because of nuclear, right. But that base load is projected to increase because of the subsidies for electric cars, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's one of them. Basically, we're gonna demand electricity for our life, basically, yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay, and so that increase in demand is going to require some kind of nuclear energy source, or at least increase in production?
Speaker 2:The demand for new generation. And then what will those generators? They'll look at all the alternatives and if it's in firm power, they don't have much choice today. Natural gas, nuclear.
Speaker 1:Okay, and so, for those that are listening now, what would you say is the main takeaway that you want them to to take from this episode?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that there's a lot of information misinformation about nuclear power. Nuclear power for the production electricity is not a nuclear bomb. That's one thing to take away. You can't make the latter from the former Two. It's extremely safe. There's 450 planes in the world Only Chernobyl did someone die in an accident. No one's ever died of an accident. The US Navy, just as an example, has operated about 120 nuclear reactors without ever a problem. So it's an extremely safe technology.
Speaker 2:If we make enough plants and we make them with some new technologies, they have the potential to be very cheap, very low-cost electricity. That's to be proven, but that's an opportunity. And then, finally, I would say that, at least where nuclear power plants have existed in this country primarily, we have 93 of them out of the 450 in the world or so. The people that live around them love them. They provide jobs, it pays taxes, it provides for a good environment, it's a good neighbor and when I worked in the industry, the plant I worked in was in rural Massachusetts and it's just amazing. So a lot of people get scared about things they don't know and I would encourage anyone to learn more before just reacting to robbers or bad information the facts on the ground. The history of nuclear power in the United States since 1953 or 54 is a remarkable, and now in the world it's remarkable, so we need more of it. It'll make the air clean and the water clean and life will be good.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. I'm going to touch on just one thing you said there and ask a question there. So because I know some people might be wondering. So you said Chernobyl was the only time that someone died due to an accident. So what was the reason? Because I know some people are probably wondering what's the reason that happened.
Speaker 2:The Chernobyl accident.
Speaker 1:Yes. What happened that caused that death?
Speaker 2:It was a bad design. The reactor was designed poorly and they were conducting a standard drill, a test, and the reactor got out of control and it literally exploded. It was not an American design, it was a Russian design I forget the name anyway and the men in the control room were exposed to extraordinary amounts of radiation and then they had to send people in to extinguish a fire, a burning fire, as well as to cover up parts of the plant that had been blown clear of. It wasn't a nuclear explosion, it was just a regular physical explosion that blew it. The energy just blew the system apart. So what a nuclear explosion? The plant exploded from just an energetic burst of energy.
Speaker 2:Those people in the control room and those people who volunteered that's what the Russians say to go and clean up the mess something like 50 of them died because they got too much radiation. That area today is an exclusion zone and some people are already moving back. The animals have moved back. There are no three-headed things. All that science fiction stuff is just that science fiction. It was messy. It was the initial that couple of weeks of cleaning up those people. They got more than they could handle and they died.
Speaker 2:Fukushima none no deaths. Three-mile island no deaths, no injuries either, by the way, at any of them, and it's only three out of 450 sites in the world that have ever had a nuclear accident, and for very different reasons. The Russians was a poor design, three-mile island was a valve stuck open and it was misread, and Fukushima was a tsunami that swept over the plant and wiped out the emergency generators for emergency power. You can imagine ride a nuclear power that's making electricity, but if you turn it off, you don't make any more electricity with the nuclear, so you got to turn on some generators to have power, to run the lights, run the control.
Speaker 1:And so it wasn't nuclear. That was the issue. It was none of those, okay, none of those.
Speaker 2:Now the tsunami is unfortunate. There's a really good book if you want to read about our mankind's adventures in technologies called Failures, just by Dick Clark Richard Clarks, and he evaluates all the major catastrophes that we've had the Challenger accident, fukushima accident and Three-mile Island accident, many other things, many big things. That what is? There was a chemical plant in India that exploded and killed thousands of people. Anyway, he explores why these things failed and did we know? Were we smart enough? Could we have prevented it if we had just paid more attention or did more work? The answer yes in all of them.
Speaker 1:So we're humans. What's the name of the book? I think it's called Failures by it's called Cassandra Dick Richard Clark.
Speaker 2:Let me look it up real quick.
Speaker 1:I think it. Yeah, let me look it up.
Speaker 2:Sandra, oh, it's called Warnings, sorry, warnings Finding Cassandra's to stop catastrophes. You know who Cassandra was? Right, cassandra, no idea. Oh, cassandra, a mythological god that could see the future but couldn't do anything about it.
Speaker 1:Okay, okay, I'll check it out. I'll check it out. And so for you, where can our audience find you or your work?
Speaker 2:Okay, well, you can just type my name in Google, but I am at Ray Rothrock on Twitter and I have a really easy email it's rayatrothrockfamilycom, and I'm pretty responsive on email and text and Twitter and I'm happy to continue this passion of educating people about how safe and clean and viable nuclear energy is, because we're all in this together. This planet is one planet. We all breathe the same air, we all have the same CO2 problem and it'll take the world to solve this problem and we're in this energy transition. You know I'm optimistic, we'll get there. We've got the capital, we've got the know-how and we've got the sources of energy so that everyone can live the life that you and I've lived. We're living here in the United States. We're the luckiest people ever and I know it, you probably do too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean so. I grew up in Nigeria and I lived there for most of my life, and I think it's been good to be able to see how different living here is from living there, even from just a power perspective. You don't have 24-7 power and so, like you said, it's important that people understand at least nuclear as a source of energy, so that other people could also live comfortable lives.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Nigeria is in the global south and it is an up-and-coming country. If you look at the demographic projections by the United Nations. Nigeria is our house of people, intellectual capability capital. Nigeria is going to be one of the leaders. I will be around, but you will. When Nigeria is. Hopefully you are, Hopefully I am too. If we keep coming up with pharmaceuticals, I can live a long time Awesome.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much, ray, I appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Noble. I hope this is okay. I probably waxed on a few too many paragraphs and segues and just some of your questions, but this was fun and I enjoy talking to you always and thank you for this talk. Thank you. Thank you For sure For sure, for sure, thank you.