Micro Nuclear Reactors: Powering Off-Grid Water Access and Climate Resilience

[00:00] - Ravi Kurani
This episode of Liquid Assets is sponsored by HASA. The leader in water treatment solutions. HASA delivers eco friendly, reliable and cost effective water care and has been keeping communities safe one drop at a time. They've been at it for more than 60 years. And you can learn more about HASA by visiting hasa.com.

[00:25] - James Walker
Hi everyone, I'm James Walker. I'm the CEO of Nanonuclear Energy. I'm a nuclear physicist and nuclear engineer and I'm here with Ravi to talk a bit about our industry, what the company's involved in, how nuclear fits into the energy space. And I believe it's a very interesting conversation and I thank you all for joining us to be part of it.

[00:44] - Ravi Kurani
Welcome to Liquid Assets. Liquid Assets is a podcast about the intersection of business, technology and management, all as it looks at the world of water. I'm your host, Ravi Kurani and today we have an awesome guest for you. A little bit different than the water world, but coming from the energy side at Nano Nuclear we have James Walker. James, how you doing today?

[01:05] - James Walker
I'm not doing too bad, Ravi, thanks for having me on.

[01:08] - Ravi Kurani
Yeah, you're calling in from Africa right now, right? From Namibia.

[01:12] - James Walker
I'm calling in from Namibia. Yep, that's right. So awesome.

[01:16] - Ravi Kurani
Really cool. I do want to jump into the conversation were having before on kind of what you're doing in Africa, but I think a great setup for that is why don't you just tell us kind of what is nano nuclear, what are you working on and what, like what is nuclear energy coming from the top line and how do you guys play in that world?

[01:35] - James Walker
Sure. Look, I'm very happy to discuss. So the nano nuclear energy started as a micro reactor company and a micro reactor specifically is. It's like a small modular reactor, but very on the small end. So anything below 20 megawatts is classified as a microreactor. And these are power systems that are really targeting remote locations. So mining projects, oil and gas, military bases, disaster relief areas, island communities, remote habitation, remote industry, those kind of things. The types of locations where you would be deploying to where you don't have access to anything else, whether it's coal, gas, wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, any of those sort of options. So your only real competition for a microactor is diesel generators.

[02:22] - James Walker
And so we began down that path of building this microactor and we also principally went the microactor route because the small modular reactors are actually a much larger power system. And they're used to power cities and towns. They're not actually a competitive product with us. But as were actually developing the microaractor, it became very clear that in the United States, the infrastructure that was necessary to produce the amount of fuel for the anticipated nuclear renaissance and all the reactors that are being produced wasn't there. And so the company had diversified very quickly to de. Risk its own advancement into the fuel supply chain.

[03:03] - James Walker
So very quickly we worked with partners to build up expertise in enrichment and in deconversion and fuel fabrication and identify land packages where we could put these things and then start bringing in scientists and engineers to design these sort of facilities. And while were doing that too, were also buying technologies that could yield revenue for us more near term. So patented basket designs to move commercial quantities of Hailu electromagnetic pumps to move molten salt within reactor systems without the need of big pumps that make a reactor very unwieldy. And so we've, we've diversified very quickly. And so it's, there's a lot going on within the company at the moment. And it was the second part of the question, Ravi, was about nuclear energy and where it fits within the, the, the monage of all the energy systems. Yeah.

[04:01] - Ravi Kurani
And I think we can maybe. You've actually said a lot. Let's just go ahead and like unpack some of what you said in the beginning. You said you guys are a micro reactor and there are small modular reactors, and then I assume there's like the large nuclear that, you know, we would otherwise see when we drive around California or we would like, imagine like a nuclear plant looking like. Can you just kind of break apart the three sections? I don't even know if those three sections are the entirety of it. But that's what I just assume. What, what does that world look like?

[04:31] - James Walker
I think that's a good assumption, actually. So if you think of the big standard power nuclear reactors of the past, so they might be a gigawatt, one and a half gigawatt, two gigawatt power systems. And so those are the ones everyone's probably very familiar with that have all that, those big towers with water vapor coming out that everyone thinks is smoke, but it's just steam, those ones.

[04:53] - James Walker
The small modular reactor industry has really grown out of the desire to try and reduce the upfront capital costs, because with nuclear, taking a reactor system through licensing could take many years and cost a lot of money, and that adds to the capital cost, and then you can end up With a situation because all your costs for a nuclear power station are upfront, including all the fuel for the 30 years, whatever it's going to be operating, then you might need a lot of financing related to that cost. So when you build a nuclear power plant, 70% of the costs could just be financing costs, nothing to do with the power plant itself. And so the intention with small modular reactors is to create a much more scalable industry where you can mass manufacture these.

[05:43] - James Walker
And so if you get one license as an example, you can roll out many more much more quickly and you can avoid a lot more of those capital costs, upfront capital costs that result from the licensing period and then you reduce those financing related costs as well. So small modular reactors grew out of an industry solution to the high costs of conventional plants. And then a micro reactor arose because these things have been done in the past sort of at submarine level. And also, interestingly enough, within the states there's been a couple dozen micro reactors shipped across to two dozen universities in the states where they've been operating since the 60s, 70s, 80s. So we've done it before, but never in a commercial way.

[06:32] - James Walker
And the good part about my correctors is that part of the fire industry, so the third block of the three is targeting a very different area to the large nuclear and the small than the small modular reactor sectors. Because in a lot of areas, say, whether it's maritime vessels that run on bunker fuel or military bases on diesel or island communities is a big one too. You've got hundreds of millions of people across the world that live on islands that basically subsist on diesel fuel. And with all these decarbonizing mandates and concerns around consistent energy, being able to supply these communities with fuel microactors is actually a really wonderful solution to provide especially remote communities with consistent power for many like a couple decades without needing refueling.

[07:22] - James Walker
And that way you can eliminate a very complicated fuel supply chain where you might having to be bringing in diesel on a daily basis, which is very expensive and quite polluting.

[07:31] - Ravi Kurani
Yeah, it's terrible. And I want to dig into what you said in the kind of beginning. It almost seems like the necessity for small modular reactors and microreactors came out of the pain point of there just being too much like regulation, which is. I've heard this narrative a lot and I think I was listening to one of your podcasts with Paki McCormick, which was awesome on nuclear. And it seemed like we used to do this before, right? We like in the 40s and 50s, were like printing These things and were popping up everywhere. What exactly happened? And now with this junction of small modular coming out of copy pasting this regulation so you can kind of do it over and over again. Can we just go back to what were doing before and what's like the problem there? Why is there this pain here?

[08:20] - James Walker
It's, it's an interesting question because it's, it the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the NRC is that it's not exactly a government body. It's private. It's a private body, but it's, but for that reason it also needs to be fairly protective of itself. And, and what sort of happened over time is that we had a very streamlined process that was appropriate at the beginning for reactor systems. So you know, I think the scientists were having a lot of fun with it. They were just producing reactors in whatever way they wanted to and getting them out there and cheap energy that could power things for 30, 40 years. Wonderful. Like it was kind of a very fun time to be involved with the industry. But as time went on, things kept getting added to it that made it more and more onerous.

[09:05] - James Walker
And so it's sort of reached a point now where nuclear engine went from being pretty cheap to being quite expensive. Because this licensing period can cause delays, cost overruns, time overruns, failures to deliver things on time. And it's something that the NRC is not unaware of either. There's been pressure on them from the government. This is something they've been trying to address because this sort of accumulated history of increased regulation. And so now you've got measures like the advance act coming out with the intention of trying to streamline the regulation so they're a bit more appropriate again, because if you look at the cost of nuclear energy in the States, it's enormously more expensive than pretty much everywhere else in the world for this reason.

[09:54] - James Walker
And I think China is now, as an example is now settled on nuclear is going to be its solution for its energy need. And so it's got more, it's building more nuclear reactors than the rest of the world combined now. But consequently actually the energy they're going to generate from those reactors is pretty cheap. And actually the states could do the same thing with small modular reactors that could be mass manufactured. With regulation rollback, you can create a lot more cheap energy. And the good thing about cheap energy is it makes everything cheaper. If, if energy is cheap, then the products industry creates can be cheaper, which means food can be cheaper because transportation gets cheaper. And it will have a real knock on effect. So we can really benefit from like addressing that licensing problem that's sort of built up over the years.

[10:45] - Ravi Kurani
I want to hold your thought on the knock on effect of energy being kind of this platform that we can build a bunch of stuff on, because I have a distinct question around water. So for the audience out there and for you, just hold that thought. There was a second question that I had on nuclear reactors, like you said, requiring a huge capital upfront cost, which it seems like obviously regulation is driving a big portion of that.

[11:09] - Ravi Kurani
But given the cost comparison of running, you know, like a natural gas plant, a coal plant, even having a solar farm or like a wind farm, to me it just seems like you would have 100% of the costs on deploying your solar panels, getting them out there and then you're starting to reap this benefit of where you have, you know, it seems like generally a 6 to 10 year ROI. How does nuclear compare to that from an ROI perspective? And also like an initial cost is, it just seems like it would be cheaper to do solar. But like is there a difference? What do we, what do we look at from a cost perspective?

[11:41] - James Walker
So there actually there's been many attempts to replace nuclear with other renewables because of this, the same sort of assessment. So just as an example, if you take Germany, they had a very powerful green lobby. They shut down the nuclear power stations because it wasn't popular with the greens. But what ended up happening is when they shut them down, they actually actively tried to replace that power with wind and solar. And that meant, you know, huge construction projects to produce that. But those systems could never produce anywhere near the amount of power that the nuclear plants regenerating because the sun is not the sun and the wind are both not consistent outputs. These, these plants can't be placed anywhere they want, anywhere you want. And the capacity factors of these things are very low.

[12:33] - James Walker
So you need to say you want to generate a gigawatt and you need, I don't know, a thousand acres. You'd actually have to build 5,000 acres to compensate for the fact that they're not consistent. And then on top of that you might over generate power, which means you need very expensive storage systems. And the problem there as well is once you take energy and you store it, you have a big loss to store it. And then when you take it out of storage, you have a big loss again. And so these sort of things weren't being considered. And so Germany ended up in a position where it couldn't beat its own domestic energy requirements. So it had to buy power from Poland that was manufactured by coal and buy power from France that was ironically manufactured by nuclear.

[13:19] - James Walker
So their emissions actually went up because of the coal. And the cost of their energy went up massively, too. And wind and solar never plugged the gap. And that's pretty much every single example of where they tried to shut down nuclear and replace it with other things. And look, actually you're in New York. That happened in New York. They shut down Indian Point with the intention of trying to replace Indian Point's power output with wind and solar. And they never got it above 2 to 3% of that output of that plot. It was, I don't want to say a failure, but it never got there. You needed something far more consistent. So I think reality can really intervene when on paper it might sound like a good idea, but the practicalities of it have shown that it's been a failure after failure. So from.

[14:10] - Ravi Kurani
If I'm just kind of drawing a comparison chart and summarizing what you just said, it almost seems like, you know, like you said a 1 to 5x in terms of land requirement, right? If you had like a thousand acres, what would be a nuclear plant, you'd require anywhere between 4 to 5,000 acres of a similar on a solar plant.

[14:30] - James Walker
Oh, well, yeah, so I, I should probably explain that better. I, I meant in terms of, say you have your solar panels at, say a thousand acres of solar panels were able to produce a gigawatt when they were fully operating. The problem is because the capacity factor, which is really a measure of consistency of output is 15% or 20% or whatever. You actually need to build 5,000 acres of solar panels to effectively do what 1,000 acres should be doing because of that inconsistent power output. So obviously you might need a big. And that's one of the drawbacks. So you could say, well, this area should yield this, but in practicality, because of the inconsistencies, you actually need a much larger piece of land than you would have thought. And plus storage systems and all those kind of things.

[15:22] - Ravi Kurani
And so then let's get into the, the kind of fuel systems as it compares to power output, right? Which kind of seems like we're at it down. If you, if you had a, and maybe you can help me break down the kind of units here, right? Because I know one solar panel is not really the equivalent of like uranium or like enriched uranium to make nuclear power. But if you were to kind of just make like a simple, super simple chart between the current energy systems that we have today with cold natural gas, you can pick whichever ones you want and then kind of move into like the renewables territory of maybe solar, wind, hydro. Again, pick which ones you want and then compare that to nuclear.

[16:02] - Ravi Kurani
How does that compare against like an energy density standpoint, like for the same unit of, oh, fuel or output? Like, I know I'm asking this question really weirdly, but is there a way?

[16:14] - James Walker
I see what you mean. So there's no other real way to say it. So there's. The nuclear is incomparable in terms of energy density. And just to give an example, say for instance, when we build a microactor, say it's a 1 megawatt system or 1.5 megawatt system, after 20 years of outputting power without any refueling, you'll burn up less than 1% of that fuel, powering a thousand homes consistently for 20 years. Though the power density of uranium is so great that it is tens of millions of times more energy dense than coal or gas or anything else. You cannot. There's no other system I think we've actually discovered where you have a power source that's even remotely close to the energy density of uranium.

[17:09] - James Walker
Which is why I think when it was discovered there was so much elation around it because it really did look like the solution for all of our problems and energy needs forever. And where that, where the other sort of. I mean, coal and gas has actually served us incredibly well as a species. I think they've lifted us out of poverty a lot and they've been the backbone upon which we've industrialized and created modern societies. I don't think it's really feasible to dispense with them unless there's something commensurate that can readily supply that much energy. But I'm not saying that wind and solar and geothermal and hydro don't have a place. They all do. I think the more complex and larger country is like the United States. You need a diversified energy solution. So where there's good sun, why not have a solar farm?

[18:03] - James Walker
Where there's good wind, have wind, hydrogen, you know, people have generated enormous amounts of power from dams and gas and coal have a proven track record of success. Nuclear has many advantages in that you can put these power stations anywhere you want. It's not location dependent on things like when the wind blows or the sun shines. And so like, for that Reason it's actually more deployable and more versatile than wind and solar. So if you wanted to, I don't know, power Greenland with something, a nuclear power station, be way better than a solar farm. Yeah, yeah.

[18:38] - Ravi Kurani
And I like this example of the one megawatt system. You got, you know, powering a thousand homes 20 years, you have less than, you know, 1 to 2% of degradation on the fuel. I'm sure, you know, the audience can envision a thousand homes, right, Sitting kind of in a small suburban American complex. You know, you have your 3.5 to 4 kilowatt systems where you have your rooftop solar. If you were to just kind of envision that, what is the size and space required on a 1 megawatt nuclear system? Is this like, does this fit in like a truck, shipping container? Is it just parked outside my home? Like, what does this thing actually look like?

[19:18] - James Walker
Well, you made a fantastic guess there, because it's exactly the shipping container. So one of the reasons why we ended up on sort of one and a half megawatt electric is because we wanted the product that we're producing to be, you know, as commercial as possible. And a product that's very attractive. And that means we need to be able to move this thing anywhere in the world very easily. And that whether it's the middle of Alaska or Siberia or Greenland or, you know, island communities or military bases, if you have it in an ISO container dimension, including the turbine system, then you can move it by road, you can move it by rail, you can move it by shipping container, and you can take these things wherever you want in the world.

[20:01] - James Walker
And the intention here is to have a full system built within that ISO container dimensions that can be put down and plugged into a local microgrid. And I think this could be enormously beneficial all over the world. And I know your podcast focuses on water a lot, and if I segue into that a little bit as I'm in Africa currently, one thing that has been brought up while I've been here is that the utilization of micro reactors in remote locations to desalinate water for communities. And this would be a real game changer for people who sometimes, when water is scarce, you could end up walking five miles to go get water and back again. And, you know, if that, if you're doing that for the day, that's, you know, that's your day, you don't really accomplish anything else.

[20:48] - James Walker
But, you know, vertical farming paired with micro reactors, desalination power for hospitals, it could actually make a lot of communities right across the world much more secure because there's in these locations, there's actually no alternative to a diesel generator, but it's not feasible to bring in diesel on a daily basis to power those generators. So it could be really transformative as a technology across the world.

[21:17] - Ravi Kurani
Yeah. And we've interviewed a few folks on the podcast before and it decel seems like an amazing technology. Right. But it always breaks down into two major problems. The first being the brine that's generated. I think we still need to figure out how do you actually deal with the brine. But the second problem is always just the energy required to run a decel process is just ridiculous. It's just crazy. And so if you had something like nuclear that, you know, could basically power a thousand homes, in quotes, sitting in the size of a shipping container that was powering a diesel plant, you could then provide clean water to places that are even having these day zero issues. Right. We're having issues like Mexico City that's facing a day zero issue.

[22:01] - Ravi Kurani
I know South Africa, a few of the cities in South Africa had day zero issues where you would turn the tap on and you don't have water that's going to flow through there. And so that actually brings you back to that point that I told all of us to hold in our head around these knockoff effects. Right. If we think about energy as a platform, if we think that if we can have abundant energy where we don't have to worry about it anymore, you end up not needing to worry about, you know, AI and like all these problems that we're talking about, it's sucking up a bunch of energy or bitcoin mining or, you know, any of these kind of other things. But then also you can build more sustainable water technology. You can provide water to clean people in rural areas.

[22:38] - Ravi Kurani
You might be able to even retrofit our coastal communities so we can have a different water source because a lot of our Earth is surrounded by 70% of the oceans, notwithstanding the brine problem. But I wanted to pick your brain on you being in the energy world. Where do you see those knockoff effects going in terms of having a cleaner, more abundant energy source?

[23:02] - James Walker
So the interesting time here is that we're in a very transitionary period. I think the war in Ukraine has meant that energy sovereignty has become an increasingly important thing. And you saw how a lot of European countries that were dependent on Russian gas, their foreign policy was Essentially limited. And so now they're obviously trying to move into being very self sufficient. So there's been a big drive from all governments to obviously invest very heavily in nuclear. And I think there was sort of a international agreement to cop 28 to triple nuclear by 2050. And it was essentially to provide a greater sovereign energy sovereignty to all these different countries. So you've got one side the government pushing into nuclear very hard now.

[23:49] - James Walker
But to speak to what you were talking about too, tech centers, AI centers, things like that, those are incredibly energy hungry industries. And not just linearly increasing energy hunger, but sort of almost exponential increase of power requirements. And so if you look at some of the estimates of the power that's going to be required for these increasingly sophisticated AI technologies, they're going to very quickly use more power than acidic, like very fast. And so the technology is either going to be very, is going to be limited almost straight away by not being able to secure the energy because you can't just steal the power from the main lines because that has to power a city. So the Microsofts of the world, the Googles, they sort of settled on nuclear as having to be their solution.

[24:40] - James Walker
It's a clean form of energy that is very consistent, that can be put anywhere and power these things. So for the first time ever, we've got government pushing very heavy into nuclear and industry pushing very heavily into nuclear. And you're seeing that as well at big mining companies like the Rio Tintos of the world who have these big decarbonizing mandates for processing, for mining, for moving their trucks around the site. They want to electrify, but they can't electrify in the middle of nowhere. And with a small modular reactor you can do all these things. So you know, as far as the future looks, I think you're going to see a lot of nuclear start being deployed for industry. And that might be the most interesting change I would say, like chemical plants powered on it, mining sites, big tech centers, AI centers, bitcoin mining.

[25:30] - James Walker
And then on the microactor front, you'll see these things replacing diesel generators in remote locations like island communities, sort of. If you think of the Canadian north, we've got hundreds of rural locations that all power on diesel. They would suddenly have their consistent form of power, military bases, disaster relief areas, all of these sort of areas that diesel has monopolized before and never had a challenge from. A lot of these microactors will be deployed there, the same as in the States at the moment with the two dozen microactors around the universities, you won't know they're there, they're just providing power. And they do that for decades without incident.

[26:09] - Ravi Kurani
So let's kind of double click into how nanonuclear actually works, right? So let's start from this very tactical. We talked about this shipping container that's parked up somewhere next to a chemical factory. Let's just say right now there is a, I guess a wire that goes out to some sort of an inverter that starts powering this chemical plant. I think we can all understand that energy is consumed, right? Like the chemical plant uses it for, however they use it. If you walk back to that container again and you kind of open it up to as much as you could talk about how much, like what's inside that container and how much uranium is inside there. Is it a little Coke bottle? Is it, you know, a big gallon jug of it? Like what does that look like? What's actually happening inside there?

[26:54] - James Walker
So I'll do my best. So if you were to do a cross section of the container and you were to open it up, say you would see sort of less than a 1 meter cylinder. And within that cylinder you've got your core, and within that core you've got your fuel rods. And so this isn't a very large sort of cylinder that you put in there because, you know, this isn't a big power station. But within, say the Zeus reactor that I'm specifically speaking about, now you've got two of these things and between them you've got a turbine system that converts the heat that's generated in each of those cores into electricity. And so it's, the system is actually incredibly small, which is why you can actually compartmentalize it into an ISO container. In terms of the amount of fuel, it's less than a ton.

[27:51] - James Walker
But you might think a ton is quite big until you realize that the density of uranium is so great that it's actually not a very big space it occupies. So say it's 900 kilos. That small one meter diameter core or two of them would contain all that 900 kilos or something, whatever it is of uranium. So incredibly compact energy system. But the good part here is that obviously you would never need to refuel this system either. At the end of the 20 years, whatever it is, that's the end of reactor life done. You just, you just ship the reactor off and take it for reprocessing.

[28:35] - Ravi Kurani
Wow, that's awesome. So just to the, to re. Explain that for also the American audience, we have, you have 1 meter which is the same as obviously 1 yard, 3ft. You have this 3 by 3 cube that contains about a ton of uranium which fits inside there plus the turbine as well. That I understand correctly. Or is that there is that in the remaining part of the container?

[28:58] - James Walker
That's it. That's in the remaining part of the container. So that whole system, that very small core, plus the turbine that obviously converts thermal to electric, that's all contained within that one system. So that one container.

[29:12] - Ravi Kurani
So let's kind of dig deeper into this uranium core which I know people always have questions around safety of that like if is there any. We've all seen this Chernobyl on hbo, right? Is that going to be a problem in this container or not? Can you just kind of talk to the safety around the actual container?

[29:37] - James Walker
Yeah. So I always find with these sort of safety questions, the difference between the reality and the difference between conception or misconception of nuclear is wider than most things I've ever seen. So as an example, if I was to say to you, if you look at deaths per gigawatt hour, nuclear is safer than everything. And that actually includes wind and solar, absolutely everything. It's the safest form of energy we've ever developed, ever. And so it's important just to get that out immediately, just to appreciate, if you look at real statistics, how safe it really is. And when you actually look at disasters. So say for instance, take Fukushima, nobody actually realizes that nobody died in that accident.

[30:22] - James Walker
What happened was you had a very old reactor that was first of all hit by an earthquake and then a tidal wave and only then did the core break and it just melted. And essentially you just had a bit of a cleanup operation and that was really the end of it. But nobody was hurt, nobody was killed. But it's still considered a disaster because the reactor broke. And that's the same with, in the States, the biggest accident was Three Mile Island. Again there, nobody died. The core just melted. The Fukushima, sorry, the Chernobyl is a strange one because it wasn't actually operating normally.

[30:57] - James Walker
All the safety systems were turned off for an exercise and they could have actually stopped the reactor runaway problems anytime they wanted, but they had to basically phone to Moscow to get permission and they, you know, that fact that they couldn't just have an engineer to put the control rods in or turn the safety systems back on that led to the core melting. And this time they had to send people in to go and clean it up. And the people who were sent in to go and clean it up, they got radiation sickness. But again it was only, it was 60 people. I don't want to say only, but that's the only people that have ever died in the whole history of nuclear under a very strange circumstance that just would never happen. It couldn't happen again.

[31:42] - James Walker
So the worst, you could probably extrapolate from that the worst thing that could ever happen with a reactor is core melt. Because once the core is melted, it just needs to be cleaned up and the reactor is useless. But on a micro reactor you can't get core melt because it doesn't generate enough power to melt itself. You have a passive cooling system in there. So say every mechanical component was to break in a microreactor. It, Well, I wouldn't say it doesn't matter because you just need to fix it up and get it going again. But the heat is not going to, it's just going to passively radiate out. So you're not going to get that sort of core melt which is, which could be, you know, pretty annoying to clean up. So that's probably important just to emphasize too.

[32:25] - James Walker
And you know, this is, you know, we haven't, I don't think the states has ever had know an accident where they've actually, anybody's died.

[32:34] - Ravi Kurani
That's, that's really interesting. And so I just want touch on something you said. Around the core just kind of passively radiating heat. You know, the thing breaks and it's just warmer than it would be. Is this, is the container going to heat up? I mean, just kind of asking a dumb question here. Like do you not go close to it? What's, what's the process to clean this up? Like, let's just assume it's broken to its kind of 10th degree.

[32:58] - James Walker
I mean you can, it's not a dumb question. Like obviously the container would just get hotter, but not even enough to melt the container. And even if it melted the container, like doesn't matter, like, you know, just get a new container. The reactor can just be turned back on and go back to normal working. So if we're talking about a worst case scenario where you do have a melt, I mean that couldn't happen with this system. So let's take a theoretical small modular reactor that's much larger and for some reason every mechanical component was to break in that reactor system. And it got hit by a missile. So the core was breached or it got hit by an earthquake, a tectonic shift or something like that, and it split it. So it would need something pretty outlandish to happen to actually cause that.

[33:45] - James Walker
What would usually happen is you would need to expend a lot of water over the reactor core just to keep it cool while you just start separating the uranium. Because the thing with uranium is that it only has a chain reaction with itself to generate heat when it reaches a critical mass. And a critical mass means when you have enough uranium packed together to excite itself. So if you actually just separate that uranium, it actually gets, it no longer is critical mass, so you can't get a runaway chain effect, so it just gets cooler. So effectively in an accident scenario, a really bad one, you would keep it cool, you would separate that uranium and then that's actually the issue mostly solved because now it's going to stop generating.

[34:36] - Ravi Kurani
The only real issue at that point in time. So you've kind of dissolved this heating issue because the uranium is actually separated from. It's, it's not in a combined area. The biggest issue you would just have is radiation issues. And I guess you'd be suited up so you wouldn't be dealing with this thing with your bare hands basically.

[34:55] - James Walker
Well, the radiation, as soon as it's separated, I mean, the chain reaction actually happens because as a uranium atom is split, it releases neutrons that split other uranium atoms. But when you're talking about radiation, that's what you're talking about that process. So if you separate out that material, it's actually not, it's because it's not reacting with itself anymore, that radiation has been dissipating. It's not really an issue. It's an issue while it's all compact together. And obviously that's what killed the Chernobyl people who went in just to clean up the melted core.

[35:37] - Ravi Kurani
Got it.

[35:37] - James Walker
Makes.

[35:37] - Ravi Kurani
Makes a ton of sense. Let's, let's kind of go back to the container again. You gave us that cross section of the nuclear core and the turbine inside there. How do you, how do you like make, assemble the, like the turbine I assume is kind off the shelf turbine and you guys make that, or is that custom designed? Walk me through kind of your supply chain because I think you alluded to this earlier of the US doesn't have that high of a supply of uranium or enriched uranium and so that's kind of while you're in Africa. But like, how do we walk me through like the supply chain? How do you actually make this thing to get a container deployed at this chemical factory?

[36:15] - James Walker
Sure. So just touching on the turbine as you brought that up first, the good part here is that, you know, the turbine technology is pretty advanced. Like if you think about a turbine that might feature in a helicopter, it'll be that kind of scale that would go into the ISO container. And that's whether we manufacture it ourselves or somebody else manufactures it. That's, that's going to be the, that's going to be one of the easy parts of doing this with regard to supply chain. I think one of the issues that the resurgent nuclear industry has is that there's this renaissance on the horizon where a lot of money is going into nuclear energy now and there's a lot of small modular actors being designed and microactors being designed.

[36:58] - James Walker
But within the United States, a lot of infrastructure needs to be built to allow for those products to be built. And what I mean by that is there's not enough uranium being produced, converted, enriched, deconverted and fabricated to provide enough fuel for all these different systems. And so that's caused some concern in the Department of Energy. And so I think even this year I've seen funding opportunities for enrichment, for deconversion. I'veseen one that's I think, coming out shortly for transportation. And so they're throwing money at private industry to build back this infrastructure. And one of the big reasons why this infrastructure might not be in place is that for a long time the US was very, it was very easy for the US to source weapons grade material from Russia.

[37:52] - James Walker
And it was just taking that product and it was down blending it to meet its domestic needs. Now, as you can imagine, the, currently the relationship between Russia and the US is not great. So that supply chain, and I think they made announcement sometime in May, they're going to cut off that purchase from Russia. But that also leaves them in a situation where they need to build back their infrastructure to manufacture the fuel that they're going to lose from that supply from Russia. So that dependence, or at least that reliance has sort of enabled this sort of situation where the US has to build back the supply chain to enable this. I believe they can do it and I believe nano will actually be part of that process and be involved in the building of some of that infrastructure.

[38:38] - James Walker
But the sooner it can be done, the better because some of these big SMRs, they're already going through the licensing process and could be ready for deployment before the end of this decade. And the biggest limitation to all of them is going to be do you have enough fuel to manufacture enough of these things? And currently the answer is no, you don't, but hopefully you will.

[39:02] - Ravi Kurani
And we kind of see an issue with lithium in particular on the battery industry side of things. When we look at the supply of uranium, is there enough of a global supply? Is it something that's abundantly there, we just haven't really focused on finding it or where do we stand from the supply standpoint given all the other things.

[39:23] - James Walker
The good thing is that we will never run out of uranium. There's more than we'll ever need right here to take us up until the end of humanity. So I'm not too worried on that front. But what ends up happening is that the development of uranium is very dependent on the spot price of uranium or at least the market price of uranium. And recently after Fukushima, for instance, the price of uranium dropped substantially to the point where the junior mining companies were not going out and exploring uranium deposits and developing them. And because they weren't doing that, the majors weren't buying them off the juniors and then developing them into fully fledged uranium projects. So suddenly now the uranium prices improve because demand is increasing on uranium, as you can imagine, with this sort of resurgent interest in nuclear.

[40:10] - James Walker
But the mines have not been developed during that whole period. So now that the price is good, suddenly the mine is economic. But to take a mine from greenfield all the way through to production could take 10 years, especially with things like getting it licensed, all the infrastructure that's going to be needed and all the exploration work. Yeah, it could take you 10 years, but then suddenly you want to wait for 10 years. And so this is the issue is that the amount of uranium available is very dependent on the what people on what the prize the global price is. And something like Fukushima can happen where the reaction was very disproportionate because again, no one was hurt, then that can create downward pressure on the price.

[40:57] - James Walker
Uranium mining stops re interest in nuclear obviously resurges again after a time when it realizes that we need to rebuild these things and then the uranium is not there. And that's currently why we're. The company is actually looking for offtake agreements with international partners to secure a supply for the United States, because the United States has some good uranium deposits, but those will not be producing anytime soon.

[41:26] - Ravi Kurani
Really interesting. I Do want to spotlight a really interesting point that you mentioned of the USed to buy weapons grade uranium from Russia, like, which was really interesting for us to all think about that. We were in the Cold War, obviously, and even with strained relations now, the fact that Russia was our leading supplier of product. Kind of interesting.

[41:48] - James Walker
Yeah, it's kind of funny because even when the Ukraine war started back in 2022, for two whole years, even though there was a sort of a proxy war taking place between the United States and Russia, there was still purchasing of that material going on because it was so necessary to what we wanted for the country. So it was kind of sort of overlooked until this year where I think it got to a point where it just wasn't tenable anymore to keep on buying this stuff. Sure.

[42:21] - Ravi Kurani
I want to kind of go into your story a little bit. I feel like our guests on the podcast really have interesting backgrounds. What, what got you into nuclear? I know you had mentioned you're from Canada. Can you kind of like trace us through the journey of. The journey of James?

[42:38] - James Walker
Sure. So I actually began at university as a mechanical engineer. And I didn't really know what to do after mechanical engineering, so I actually did a master's in mining engineering. And when it came to the end of that mining engineering degree, I joined the Army Reservist. And so I couldn't go abroad. And unfortunately because I was living in England at the time, there are no mines there. So I had to take a job with the Ministry of Defense so I could be army Reservist and work for the Ministry of Defense as an engineer. And while I was working as a mechanical engineer for the Ministry of Defense, they put me into submarine department where I was doing things like designing secondary systems for submarines.

[43:21] - James Walker
And I did that for a time until it was suggested that I actually go away and be sent on a master's in nuclear physics and nuclear engineering because they need they need those qualifications desperately and there's not many nuclear physicists out there. So I got sent away from by my employer to another master's in nuclear physics and nuclear engineering. And I, I, when I qualified upon that and I completed it, I was seconded to Rolls Royce for a year where I worked as a physicist and a thermal hydrolysist in the design op, the next generation of nuclear reactors for the next generation of nuclear submarines. And I worked there until I was sent back to the Ministry of Defense where I took a more senior position. I was the lead engineer on rebuilding the UK's nuclear fuel reclamation plant.

[44:13] - James Walker
I was also one of the engineers involved in the core manufacturing facilities as well. And I did that for three or four years, I think, as well, before the Fukushima incident happened. And nuclear industry looked like it was very much on the decline. So I thought it would be interesting to change countries. So I thought, well, I, you know, it is either going to be Australia or Canada because, you know, those sort of countries are easy for me to get into. I opted for Canada because the mountains look quite pretty. And that was pretty much the reason. And I ended up. So I moved out to Canada where I got involved in project management jobs for the design of processing facilities for silver projects, gold, some for lithium. And through that network I actually met one of the founders of Nano because I was.

[45:02] - James Walker
He'd been working on a gold project and he'd been looking for an engineer who had experience, who had some experience of capital markets which I had picked up from being involved in some companies in North America, and a knowledge of nuclear physics. So he thought I was the only person who had that. So I began the company with him and when he first suggested getting into nuclear, I said, I can't believe you. After I moved continents and industries, I big dragged back into this, but I semi reluctantly went back in and then very quickly I realized the potential that was here because this was a time, this was a very unusual time when there was this massive drive back into nuclear and this huge interest in it. And I saw with microactors that there was a.

[45:52] - James Walker
There was a sort of, it was, I say niche, but it's actually a massive industry that's completely open. I saw that it was the less developed within the nuclear industry. So I pushed in the direction of microactors and from there we diversified into all sorts of other businesses and I think were, we took the company public this year and were the first micro company in the world to list. So.

[46:16] - Ravi Kurani
Wow. Congratulations.

[46:17] - James Walker
Thank you.

[46:19] - Ravi Kurani
That's an awesome journey from mechanical engineering to getting stuck in the UK to nuclear and then coming all back around full circle.

[46:28] - James Walker
Yeah.

[46:30] - Ravi Kurani
Public. That's awesome.

[46:34] - James Walker
Cool.

[46:34] - Ravi Kurani
James. Or to the end of the time here, I like to ask all of my podcast guests if there is a, a book, a TV or a show that has just generally had a profound impact on your life or on your career, is there anything that comes to mind?

[46:55] - James Walker
Well, I wasn't ready for that one. I've been told that Oliver Stone's directory about nuclear is very transformative. I would encourage people to go and look at that because he made that movie because he really believes it could improve a lot of our lives and the world in general. So Oliver Stone's nuclear documentary, I think that's probably not a bad recommendation, especially because it's relevant. If I just said my favorite movie, everyone like, well, that's not relevant at all. So what is your.

[47:25] - Ravi Kurani
What is your favorite movie, by the way?

[47:27] - James Walker
Oh, it's probably split between. I thought Once Upon a Time in America was fantastic with Robert De Niro Leon with Natalie Portman. Was. Was pretty excellent. Maybe one of those two, I think would be my favorite. Okay. Awesome.

[47:42] - Ravi Kurani
Yeah. Cool. James, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. And we're excited to publish this episode because I feel like energy has been such a big conversation here.

[47:52] - James Walker
Yeah, no, thank you very much. Thank you very much, Ravi. This is good fun.