Unlocking Energy & Business Opportunities through Nuclear with James Walker, CEO at Nano Nuclear Energy

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to James Walker, CEO at Nano Nuclear Energy, about the challenges and unprecedented opportunity in harnessing nuclear energy. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:18) Now what I was hoping to get out of this episode is a better understanding of the microreactor technology. So I've been on this mission, and I'm going to tell you what my assumption is and you tell me I'm wrong or I'm right or whatever it may be, because I'm just new and learning. It looks like there are some of these nuclear reactors that are being studied in college campuses, so they're just for research purposes. But it doesn't seem like we have any actual small nuclear reactors out in the wild. Is that true?

(James Walker at 00:00:49) It is effectively true. So the reactors you get at universities, and there's a couple dozen, I think, in the States, colleges, universities that have these reactors. They're usually called test reactors, and the universities have them for things like training students, that kind of thing, also irradiating materials, studying isotopes, that kind of thing. But this was only ever done really for non-commercial purposes. The difference now really is that for the first time, I think, in the U.S.'s history, we're looking at deploying very small reactor systems commercially.

(James Walker at 00:01:32) And that's the big difference here. And, you know, but it's something we know can be done. It's been done before. In fact, we were recently chatting with MIT, and they have a test reactor there that's more powerful than the reactor that we plan to produce. So it's really not a matter of can it be done. We know it can, but we're just going to do it at a larger scale here. And we'll also sell to industry mining projects, things like that this time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:58) What's the holdup? Why don't we have them today?

(James Walker at 00:02:01) So I think there's several reasons. So in the past, for something like a test reactor, it wouldn't need to undergo the same sort of licensing process as a big nuclear reactor. And that's because it was essentially a test reactor. It had come under a different NRC regulatory framework. And so you could just sort of push it through this process and get it out to industry.

(James Walker at 00:02:23) So there was a licensing difference, whereas when we're going to commercialize a microreactor now for industry, it would undergo a different licensing process to those test reactors at university. So that's one thing. The other thing too is that the smaller you make a reactor, the less economies of scale you get. So what we're targeting will be remote things like island communities, military bases, remote industry, remote habitation, these kind of areas where there's diesel generator, and diesel generators have no competition from other energy sources. So if you do that and you shrink your reactor right down, you can compete with the cost of remote diesel because it's extremely expensive.

(James Walker at 00:03:12) But microreactors probably cannot compete with big nuclear, small modular reactors, which are still a much larger system, or gas, coal, things like that. And so for that reason, no one's really targeted these new devices for these remote locations before. But once you start looking at how big that market is, it becomes very commercially appealing. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of these remote locations that use these diesel generators that we could effectively, with mass production of these microreactors, beat the cost of that diesel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:47) And so where are we at on the curve of you guys actually having one you could sell me today? Let's say I own an island. Say I'm Richard Branson's nephew. I am not. I am not. Let's say I want Necker Island to be nuclear powered. Right? When can I buy it? And then what are the steps from where we are today to when I can? Can't I just buy the reactor from MIT? You said they built one that's already good.

(James Walker at 00:04:12) The licensing agency, the regulator wouldn't allow you to do that unless you said it's a university reactor on my island.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:20) Yeah. University of Branson.

(James Walker at 00:04:22) Yes. It's the University of Branson. Yeah. Maybe if you engineered it that way, you could maybe get away with it. But for a commercial, you obviously, you would have to show that you're going to do experimental work or that kind of thing to trick them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:38) But why do we care about the regulator? Why can't I just make it in my backyard?

(James Walker at 00:04:41) Well, the reason why is that it's just a very heavily regulated industry. And actually, a lot of the reason why nuclear power in America was more expensive than everywhere else, because traditionally, the licensing time was so long that it would accrue a huge amount of capital costs. And what ended up happening is because the upfront capital cost was so great, partly because of development, but also very much so because of very expensive long licensing times. The financing cost around the capital cost was so large, it could be 70% of the whole project. So companies started actually, industry really started looking at smaller modular reactors so they would be able to produce more of these things, produce them faster, require less infrastructure, have more passive cooling systems built into them so you could deploy more, deploy them more quickly, and get them through the licensing process faster.

(James Walker at 00:05:34) And that way you could make cheaper nuclear energy. But you can't get around the regulator. The only, and this is not something I advise you do, but if you wanted to build your own reactor and not fall foul of any regulator, you could put the reactor in international waters and run the power cable back to your island, and you could maybe get away with it. And I think there's some people who have been thinking about little solutions like that to get around the licensing process. Maybe we'll do the same. Maybe we'll build a microreactor before it's licensed. We'll just anchor it in a semi-submersible vessel under the water where there's no waves, but can get to it, and then we'll just run the power cable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:19) Yeah. What we need is Elon Musk to come through and cut a bunch of useless regulation.

(James Walker at 00:06:22) Look. You know, if he needs my number, he should reach out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:28) Well, he probably heard you on Peterson. That was an awesome interview you got to do. How did that come about?

(James Walker at 00:06:32) Well, that's a very interesting one because Jordan Peterson has a sort of humanitarian angle to a lot of the things he does. And one of his big concerns is that at a time when there's a lot of focus on going after big energy sources for humanity in the name of sort of cutting carbon emissions and things like that. The knock-on effect of that is that less power means a decrease in quality of life for people because quality of life is very much dictated by energy supply. And so his angle really was that he was looking at companies that were trying to address the shortfall of energy that we're going to expect, especially because the higher the quality of life gets, the more the energy requirement is. And there's a, as the world is industrializing, the energy that's going to be required is huge.

(James Walker at 00:07:27) So he had a humanitarian angle. And because of that, when we connected with him first, he was predominantly interested in this from how can this benefit mankind. How can you get power systems out to remote locations and then, you know, you have desalination. You can have vertical farming. You can have medical facilities in areas where that wasn't possible before. And nuclear power in general, he's just very in favor of because it can be put anywhere. It's a high base load energy. We know it works. So he has a sort of an academic interest as well as sort of this humanitarian interest too. So that was honestly the biggest podcast ever done as well. So it was very surprising. And I, obviously, I knew of him before that. So it was quite a surreal thing just chatting with him as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:14) Yeah. I got to meet him when he came through Nashville to give one of his talks on his most recent tour back in March. And he said I had the best beard in Nashville.

(James Walker at 00:08:25) It is a fine beard.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:27) Thank you. Thank you. So all right. Let's look at this market. So there's the big giant factory, you know, the Springfield, Simpsons, Atomic, Energy Plants, and those exist. I think there's north of 450 of them around the world.

(James Walker at 00:08:44) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:45) And then what seems to be really taking off right now is the small modular reactors. The one where if I'm a military and I need to go boot up a base overnight or if I'm a data center and I found some good land that's completely has no infrastructure, I can just pull in and start my data center. I can pull in and start my special operations. So that is super interesting. I've been tracking you. I've been tracking Oklo Atomics. I have been tracking Radiant and Kairos. Are you familiar with any of those players?

(James Walker at 00:09:21) Kairos a little bit more. I think Radiant are also doing a microreactor like us. I don't know a lot of the detail of what their sort of design is, but certainly Kairos is a, they're producing a small modular reactor. So whereas just very quickly, the industry is sort of split between microreactors and small modular reactors. So a microreactor is really anything sort of under 20 megawatts of power output, whereas a small reactor could be from 20 megawatts to, like, Rolls-Royce's 480 megawatts.

(James Walker at 00:09:54) So it's a big range of power. So Kairos are doing a much larger reactor to us. So they're not a competitor. And actually, some of their scientists are actually working with, we have the same sort of scientists but working on a different project. So I might be a bit more familiar with what they're doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:11) And so Kairos, you said, is in the 20 to 480 range?

(James Walker at 00:10:14) Yeah. I think, I'd be guessing from memory. I think they're in the sort of 300 megawatt range. And if Kairos are listening to this, I'm sorry, Kairos, if that's wrong.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:23) Unacceptable. We're going to have them on the show. I'm doing interviews with everybody because I really am trying to understand the space. And so you're in the microreactor space, which is under 20 megawatts.

(James Walker at 00:10:34) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:34) For people who are just not used to converting megawatts to what a normal house is, how many houses would that be?

(James Walker at 00:10:41) So I would say, say a microreactor is producing one and a half megawatt electric or five megawatt thermal. Say something like that. If a reactor, let's say it runs for 20 years. You could power a couple thousand homes. You could power a couple thousand homes for 20 years. So in terms of remote communities or island communities, military bases, these kind of systems are perfect for those kind of deployments. Now Kairos, if they are producing 300 megawatts, which I think they are, they're targeting powering bigger places like towns, cities, big tech centers, data centers. They could do smelters, big foundries, chemical plants, things that need a huge amount of energy. So there's actually not as much competition between SMR and microreactors as you think. They're sort of targeting very different markets.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:34) Is there a difference between microreactor and nanoreactor?

(James Walker at 00:11:37) No. No. If we put out nanoreactor, we're just trying to tie up the name. But effectively, in the industry, a microreactor is really the sort of the name that the industry understands. But they're just, they're so small. You could call them a nanoreactor, and people would know what you meant.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:57) So as the armchair quarterback of me trying to get this knowledge and looking at the different companies. One of the thing that struck me as interesting that I saw from your strategy was well, first of all, you're public. You went public and all these other companies are private. And so that was one interesting thing. The second interesting thing was and I think I like it. Like, of all of everything I've seen, I think I like it. But you took a strategy of the different parts of your, let's say, post supply chain, your delivery of the system, as far as the shipping, the refueling, and the actual manufacturing. You actually separated those entities. They're subsidiaries. They're not just one company where the other companies, from what I've seen on their websites and read publicly, it looks like they're just bundling everything into just one brand.

(James Walker at 00:12:45) Yeah. So first of all, the public company, that was an executive decision. But the reason why we went that route, and look. There was a lot of financial incentives to stay private, and you also wouldn't have to deal with the public markets and everything that comes along with that. So we had to look at, it's going to be a very capital intensive business.

(James Walker at 00:13:08) How have companies managed in the past? Actually, it's been very difficult for a lot of them unless they've got a billionaire backing them, like Bill Gates backing TerraPower or something like that. So a lot of these companies can become very reliant on government grants to make work, especially for significant capital investment, or they're continuously going around, trying to get capital on a private level. If you do that, you can lose a lot of control of your company. So it was a tactical decision.

(James Walker at 00:13:36) We had to turn down a lot of private money. We came out public very early, and the intention was to try and grow with the public so that when we needed to raise incremental amounts more cash, we had access to the capital markets. So back in July, the stock was doing very well. We raised just a small amount, just $20 million. And in nuclear, that's kind of a small amount.

(James Walker at 00:13:59) And the idea here is that as we build and we have increased credibility and the stock does appreciate and we have a tight structure and a small float, we will go out and raise capital, and we'll just keep doing that along the way so we can meet our capital needs. And that's a big advantage over being private where maybe you're locked up. Maybe you've gone through a venture capital fund at the beginning. They've got first right of refusal. You don't know what the, and you don't know how easy it's going to be to raise privately.

(James Walker at 00:14:28) It could be very competitive. But if the stock is doing well, there'll always be interest in raising capital from equity investment groups, banks, all those kind of things. So it was strategic, but that's the reason why we did it and why we're a bit different as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:44) Where does that expertise come from? You haven't taken a bunch of companies public. How did you get that?

(James Walker at 00:14:49) So the founder of the company, Jay, he actually had a background as a capital markets guy. He was a banker. Yeah. And when he was, actually this was before the resurgent interest in nuclear energy. But when he was an, and I was number two in the company after him.

(James Walker at 00:15:08) But when he was analyzing the market, he realized that energy was going to become an increasingly difficult thing to source, and there's going to be a lot of money in the future. But when he analyzed everything, wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, he came to the conclusion very quickly that it had to be nuclear because it was a high base load energy. It was consistent, and it was still zero carbon, so it met those requirements. And it could be put anywhere. And this was an advantage. It gave nuclear over everything else. And he called it correctly. And so, I did actually meet him through some of my capital markets connections. I had been involved in a couple of IPOs in the past, and I'd run a public company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:52) Oh, you have?

(James Walker at 00:15:53) Yes. So I had a bit of experience in that realm, not as much as Jay, obviously.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:58) Yeah. I looked at his background. I messaged him and stuff before the interview.

(James Walker at 00:16:03) So, yeah, he's got a big background there. And even I'm in New York at the moment and even walking down the street here, you get accosted by bankers who know him. So I think he's semi-famous in that world. And so he's obviously very good at that. So, yeah, so through that network, I met him.

(James Walker at 00:16:23) When he reached out to me, he said, I want to build a nuclear company. I said, that's crazy. Like, you know how capital intensive that is. It's a very high bar to entry. There's big players in that space.

(James Walker at 00:16:33) But when we examined where we could fit in the market, there was a big spot for us. And in the micro reactor realm, not SMRs, it was much more uncontested. It was much less developed. And we saw that, actually, with the right technical teams and the right financing structure, it was an area we could pull out into the lead very quickly. So we went that route.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:54) Where does the breakdown happen between the micro and the SMRs?

(James Walker at 00:16:59) So it's interesting because, I hope they don't mind me mentioning them. But when we first started working, Oklo, we're designing microreactors, and they were systems about one megawatt as well. But when they got interest from Sam Altman from ChatGPT, they—I don't know how it happened, but they changed a lot of their design work to manufacture reactors that were a lot larger. So they're now looking at 50 megawatt systems. And, you know, we're on good terms with them.

(James Walker at 00:17:29) So I'm sure they won't mind me saying this. But they were targeting more data centers, tech centers by upscaling their power. So they shifted the market essentially from what they were originally looking at and what we're still looking at to a different area because that's where the money was leading them to. They're backed by Sam Altman and—

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:48) Well, somebody knocks on your door and they're just like, hey, I'll buy 50 of these if you had them. And you're like, you know how to get from where you are today to just upscaling it. You would sign a contract and make that change.

(James Walker at 00:17:59) Yeah. Hi, I'm billionaire tech entrepreneur. You know, I'll back you if you just build this.

(James Walker at 00:18:05) Absolutely, sir. Like, I'll build you whatever you want.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:08) I'll build you a time machine. You just gotta write that check. We'll start R&D immediately.

(James Walker at 00:18:13) Yeah. And when you—yeah. Yeah. Don't you remember me giving you that time machine? I gave it to you in the past. Remember?

(James Walker at 00:18:18) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:20) So let's talk about the actual concrete. So I'm very excited as a consumer, as an individual watching this marketplace play out, because I believe that I kind of missed the boat on Elon's stuff just because he's older than me. I'm 36. But now I'm watching and I'm like, I think that these companies, the humanoid robot companies and the nuclear companies could be like the next SpaceX and Teslas. I think that's the next big thing for humanity is humanoid robots and nuclear power.

(James Walker at 00:18:51) I know it's not my area of expertise, but I really hope the humanoid robot thing works because, like, now that I've started having small kids, they trash the house, and everything's a mess. And if I can come home from work and the robot has cleaned the house and put the kids to bed, great. I'll buy three. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:10) Right? That's—I actually last night, my wife was putting away laundry, and I came downstairs. And I was like, babe, I promise this is only gonna happen for another year or two. We're gonna get you the humanoid robot.

(James Walker at 00:19:24) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:25) It's gonna be 20K. We're gonna buy one from Figure or from Elon or someone. All it needs to do is honestly, I would buy it if all it did was laundry. Like, if it folded the laundry and put it away and washed it, I would—that's worth $20K to me.

(James Walker at 00:19:41) Oh, look. Easily. Like, just to be able to relax more on the weekend maybe or just—yeah. In the evening, I can come home and not have to worry about chores. If I want to cook and not clean up the pots and pans, great. Like yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:54) Well, that gives you more time to chase the kids. Right? Chase boys or girls or both?

(James Walker at 00:19:59) I've got two boys, but there's actually a third boy that's due in November. So the house is always trashed. Yeah. Because they destroy everything. You clean everything up, and ten minutes later, they just think, well, that's my license to wreck everything again.

(James Walker at 00:20:11) So humanoid robots, I really hope that works out. Yeah. And look, if it's nuclear power that powers them, I think it's a very unique time in nuclear, and this is what you're talking about with this might be the right time because it's kind of an unprecedented era where the government is panicking a little bit because it needs to build back a lot of infrastructure to make sure that the US can actually produce all these reactors. And there was a reliance on Russian material to meet some of the domestic nuclear needs. And, obviously, the relationship with Russia is not great at the moment, and that supply chain is obviously gone. So even the DOD needs nuclear material for submarines, aircraft carriers. So the Department of Energy is throwing money at the nuclear industry at the moment to build back infrastructure. But at the same time, you know, the tech industry has also decided that their energy requirements are huge, and the amount of downtime that these data centers, AI centers can have is so minimal that they decided nuclear is the solution. So Microsoft, Google, they've recruited nuclear experts.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:18) Is that hurting you guys?

(James Walker at 00:21:21) No. Actually, it's good. Like, I—to be honest, the more that people like Google and Microsoft and the tech industry are involved in nuclear, the better because it's money that's coming into the industry. And a rising tide raises all boats, right? Something like that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:39) Yeah. Yeah. Rising tide.

(James Walker at 00:21:40) Rising tide. That's it. Yeah. That's the expression. But it works for us too. Like, it means that there's more money in, which means you don't have attrition of personnel. There's more money to be made from even small things like—say any of these small modular reactors are successful and we can help them transport their fuel or supply them a pump or give them a high temperature sensor or consultancy services. All of these things mean more money for us. So it's not we need to win the race. It's if any of these big, small modular reactor companies produce these products, we benefit too. So it is kind of that unprecedented time in nuclear where for the first time industry and government have just gone all in. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:24) So where are we at right now in—you guys have two reactors. I think one was called ODIN. I don't have it in front of me directly. When will—has either of them been built ever, or are they all hypothetical?

(James Walker at 00:22:37) So they've gone through the design phase and all the detailed design. What we're gonna do now is we've moved into a phase which is typically in the industry called the demonstration phase, where you do physical test work. And it's really test work for the purpose of verifying the modeling that gets done. Because you can model a reactor perfectly, but for licensing purposes, you still need to be able to build a prototype. But in the lead up to building that prototype that you're gonna get licensed, you do all the test work, like thermal conductivity tests on materials, destructive testing, nondestructive testing, irradiation testing, so that when you've assembled the reactor and you license it, you are suitably confident that it can meet all the safety requirements to be approved for commercialization. So we're now in that phase. So we have picked out a site where we're gonna build our test reactor.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:26) Oak Ridge. Right? Come on. Is that right?

(James Walker at 00:23:29) I don't think we've publicly announced it. This is the problem with being public too is that—

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:33) You have announced it. Yeah.

(James Walker at 00:23:34) Oh, we have? Okay. Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:36) Well, yeah. We'll edit this in post if we need to, but I saw a thing because I'm two hours from Oak Ridge.

(James Walker at 00:23:43) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:43) And that's actually how I found you guys, by the way.

(James Walker at 00:23:45) Oh, it is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:46) The way I found you was I looked up—I saw you guys come through some feed somewhere.

(James Walker at 00:23:54) Uh-huh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:54) I Googled you, and the top news story was that Nano purchases land in Oak Ridge next to Orano or whatever they're called. How do you say their name, by the way? Orano?

(James Walker at 00:24:04) Orano. Yeah. So, actually, we technically beat them to it because we bought that building a few months ago. We obviously publicly announced it. We're gonna obviously site a lot of technical personnel there. We have a partner company that we're gonna move into the basement of that building so they can do technical experiments there. Nice. And I'll probably be moving to Tennessee sometime around early next year to oversee some of this work being done. So, yes, it's very likely to be our technical headquarters in Oak Ridge.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:36) Yeah. Yeah. Alright. So let's—I want to recap the process so I understand it. So we've got design, test work, prototype, approved for commercialization. You guys have made it past design. You bought your building. You're about to start test work. When will—do you have a date? All of these other companies have put out dates, like 2026, '27. Have you guys put out a date of when you're gonna have that working prototype?

(James Walker at 00:25:00) So the working prototype, and this is assuming it's not been licensed. The plan actually is to have that prototype ready by about 2027, but that doesn't mean it'll be ready for commercialization. We'll still need to undergo a licensing process. So say we start the pre-licensing application imminently and we start formal licensing sometime around the same sort of time, maybe 2026, 2027. Historically, you're looking about a 40-month process. Now that 40-month process might be reduced because of this ADVANCE Act to 25 months, but that still takes us out to the end of the decade, so 2030. And if it's not reduced to 25 months, then you're looking at kind of 2031 sometime around then. The small modular reactors, they started that formal licensing process, some of the big ones. So they can expect to have a commercial product sometime around 2026, 2027. But I think any company that has stated that they want to produce a reactor by 2026, 2027, and they've not started that licensing process, is probably overambitious, and there's a tendency, I think, in deep tech to underestimate how long things will take, especially when you're dealing with a regulator. And so just to be conservative, I'm gonna stick with 2030, 2031 for a commercial product ready to mass manufacture and send to the world to power all these different locations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:26) Yeah. That's interesting. Here's a different angle. Why is this so difficult? We have nuclear powered submarines. We have nuclear powered aircraft carriers. They're not new. They're old technology. Why can't I just rip the design out of the nuclear aircraft carrier or submarine and just say, okay, we're just gonna—tech transfer happens all the time. NASA gave us power tools. Like, this is a very common thing. Why has this not happened with our known tested operational—we put our soldiers around it. We use it to do our operations. Why is that not just transferred over? Why are we all trying to develop something from scratch?

(James Walker at 00:27:06) So there's a couple reasons. I don't mean to keep harping on the regulator because I'd probably give them enough problems. But they would—the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, they would not have overseen the deployment of those reactors into aircraft carriers and submarines, all those kind of things. So it's something they wouldn't be as familiar with, especially not—and commercializing them would undergo a different regulatory process than the military ones would. But the other big difference as well is that the military reactors can use whatever type of enrichment they want, whereas civil reactors are capped. So a lot of these advanced reactors use HALEU fuel, and that's the maximum allowable enrichment level that is legally permitted. And that's about 20% or I think that everyone's gonna sort of cap about 19.75% for a little bit of margin.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:59) Break that down for monkeys. Are you telling me that's the stuff that goes boom? Like, it's capped?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:06) Why is it—what do you mean it's capped at an enrichment?

(James Walker at 00:28:08) So a military—say, a nuclear submarine, the military ones, they can enrich up to 90% plus U-235. So the isotope that you actually—that is the most active ingredient in a reactor system is the isotope uranium-235. And it's from that that you get the fission product, the chain effect from the fission that creates the power that moves the turbine that moves the submarine. But you are not allowed to use that level of enrichment in a civil power plant. So whereas the nuclear submarines might use 90 plus percent enrichment, the civil power plants, the big ones you're used to, they're less than 5%. Now HALEU, which is what a lot of these advanced reactors use, it can go up to 20%. But we can't take the exact technology from an aircraft carrier or submarine because they use different enrichments. So if you use a lower enrichment, you have to make a slightly bigger system, put a bit more fuel in there, and so you have to modify the design slightly. Now that doesn't mean you have to modify completely.

(James Walker at 00:29:16) And a lot of these designs actually use a lot of this historic technology. Like, if you look at NuScale as an example, they actually have a licensed reactor out, and they've gone for very conventional technology. So water-cooled as a coolant, conventional fuel rods, uranium dioxide, I think, almost exactly the same as the way a submarine reactor would be set up. Water, uranium dioxide, fuel rods, whatever, but just a larger scale. But when you make a microreactor and you're using—you have to use a fuel that's obviously much less enriched, and but you can put it into the reactor system. But then there's a bit of tech around—say you shrunk it right down, you're gonna generate a lot of heat because you've compacted a lot of that power into one place. So you can't use water anymore. So you might need to use something like a molten salt or a solar salt or lead as a coolant as opposed to water. So the design becomes different again. And a lot of these advanced reactors you'll see will use a different coolant to the big power plants, the aircraft carriers, which all use water. You can obviously with a small modular reactor, you might make a very high power profile, like 400 degrees, 500 degrees. Obviously, that boils water several times over. So you can pressurize boiled water to prevent it from boiling over to keep the reactor steady. But it becomes technically more and more difficult to do that. So it's better to shift to alternative coolants that have a higher boiling temperature. So I hope that's not too boring for the audience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:57) No, no. But I did want to make sure I had a note from my producer that you had a hard stop at the top of the hour. Yep. So I just want to make sure I don't want you to be late to your next meeting.

(James Walker at 00:31:04) Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:07) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.