Is Nuclear the Key to Net Zero Emissions? with Jonathan Cobb of the World Nuclear Association

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today Joel is talking to Jonathan, senior communications manager at the World Nuclear Association. And they discuss different uses for nuclear science, including energy, medicine, and heat generation, the challenges of getting nuclear energy to compete economically with fossil fuels and renewables, and how we can get the world to net zero emissions in the next twenty-five years. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Jonathan at 00:00:39) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:40) This is the Modern CTO Podcast. About a year or so ago, I was interviewing a technologist, and they had gotten their start in the Navy, and they were working on nuclear submarines. And the nuclear submarines—he was explaining to me how infrequently they need to refuel because of the nuclear technology. And I was like, wow. If they were doing that in the eighties and the nineties, you know, why isn't nuclear so prevalent today? Like, why don't I have a nuclear generator at my house or something like that? And then in my—so I'm not very experienced here. This is not my field of study. But in my little research, the thing I got from my armchair research was that nuclear hasn't advanced as fast as I'd hoped it would have advanced because, like, society's kind of scared of it a little bit. Do you think that's right, or is that a wrong interpretation?

(Jonathan at 00:01:44) I think it's one of the things that has been behind the fact that nuclear hasn't been growing for the last twenty years or so overall. Generation's been staying roughly the same since 2000. It grew over the last five or six years, but that's really been getting it back to its peak. So, yeah, I think public perception is one of the issues. It is something that has to be dealt with when people are looking at putting in a large nuclear reactor. And that's one of the things. We do use large nuclear reactors at the moment. They're big power stations. And the upside of that is that you don't need to have one in everybody's house as a central heating system. You can have relatively few of them supplying a lot of electricity. So a country like France gets about 75% of its electricity from 50 reactors that are on sites around the country. So relatively few, and so that's not such an issue for people. But it certainly is one that would need to be addressed. And it's one that if we wanted to go down the line of having smaller reactors that might be used in cities or reactors that are used on industrial sites or factories needing heat instead of using coal or gas would use nuclear process heat, then obviously the perception would be something that people would need to deal with. And that's one of the interesting things when we look at polling. Some of the places where you have the best public opinion about nuclear power plants is actually around nuclear power plants, where they are in places around the country. So you have people—I think because they work there or they know people who work there—they get a chance to talk to somebody and have a better understanding of what this mysterious concrete box is all about. So once there's a better knowledge of what nuclear is about, then you do tend to get a better public opinion, more support. But I do think perhaps it's overplayed as an issue. So, for example, in the United Kingdom at the moment, there's just been some polling that's gone alongside a government announcement of looking to do new nuclear build over the next ten to twenty years. And that came up with figures where 35, 40% of people would say they're favorable about nuclear energy. Maybe 20% would say they're not favorable. And then there's a big group of people who either say don't know or say, well, neither one or the other. But still, that's 80% of people not opposing nuclear energy. And I think for some people, that would come as quite a surprise. But that's what comes out when you actually ask people what they think rather than assuming what people think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:27) Is that curve then going more positive towards nuclear over time, or have you not researched that curve of how people view nuclear from the eighties to today?

(Jonathan at 00:04:37) It's been holding pretty steady. I'm trying to think if there has been a trend. It's pretty much stayed where it is. Those figures, for the UK at least, which is the ones I'm most familiar with, they've been at that level for some time. There are variations up and down, but not a huge amount. It's been generally in that kind of range.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:01) I would imagine that, like, as you get farther away from the big nuclear incidents that have occurred, people would be more interested in pursuing the technology because, you know, you just look at energy density alone. And even me being a layman and not in this industry at all, I look at all the energy densities. I'm like, why aren't we nuclear? That seems like it makes the most sense. It's really powerful energy. It seems to not have as many issues with the waste as, you know, the CO2 going into the air. And correct me if I'm wrong, but so it seems pretty logical that that would be a good source of fuel for us.

(Jonathan at 00:05:36) Well, yeah. I think it's surprising the way in which public opinion did react to something like Fukushima. What we did see was a dip. Again, and this is my familiarity with the UK, but also with the US—I know this was the case—there was a dip, but it was fairly short term, and it then came back quite quickly to the level it was. So they have less impact than we might imagine. They become notorious. I mean, one of the things is there have been very few accidents involving a nuclear power plant compared to, you know, accidents you have in other energy industries or indeed the impacts, as you say, of things like the greenhouse gas emissions, particulates, and so on that you get from fossil fuel power plants. So because they've been so few, there's an easier way for them to be notorious, if you like, for Fukushima and for Chernobyl to have a lot of recognition and a lot of people realizing that they were nuclear accidents, and that does influence the way they feel about nuclear energy. But there's been some really interesting analysis done by a group called Carbon Brief looking at how the press responded to nuclear energy in the UK over the last ten, twelve years. And around the time of Fukushima, of course, they covered the Fukushima Daiichi accident then. But over the whole year, overall commentary in the press was tending to be positive. The time when it moved to be negative was when we had the big investment decision to go forward with a new nuclear power plant, Hinkley Point C, in around 2016. And so at that time when that decision was made and people were considering the large investment that is needed for a new reactor, that's when it started to generate some negative press. And once that decision was made and the plant is underway and being constructed, we've seen that swing around again. So again now, press in the UK for nuclear tends to be positive, you know, recognizing its role in climate change and more and more energy security coming out as an issue that people are concerned about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:48) Yeah. The only time I've ever seen nuclear stuff in the press in relation to my everyday life is, I think, five or six years ago in Florida, in the United States, they were talking about building another nuclear plant. And that's when I said we already have nuclear plants. I looked up a map and there's a number of nuclear plants in the United States. And I go, oh, well, I guess nuclear energy is more prevalent than I imagined. But the solar companies ran tons of marketing to not build the nuclear power plant—instead buy solar. And so it was this energy battle happening in the media. So that was the one experience that I have had seeing a nuclear power plant try to come about.

(Jonathan at 00:08:31) Yeah. I mean, there is a lot in the US. There are more than 90 reactors in the US, and they generate just under a fifth of the electricity. So, and they've been there for a long while. They've been operational for, you know, sixty years. There's been nuclear in the US. Yeah. It really frustrates me, this competition there is between nuclear energy and renewables, or even once you get down to renewables, between wind and solar, and all these different energy types because it's destructive for us all. If you look at what's happened with climate change, it's been an issue that has been out there. You know, we've had the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which in 1992 said we're going to stop concentrations of CO2 rising to a level where we're going to have harm to the environment. And over those thirty years, the share of electricity provided by fossil fuels has stayed the same. So it stayed around 65% of the generation of electricity, and the amount coming from non-fossil sources—so from nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, those other low-carbon sources—has stayed around 35%. And it's worse than standing still. We have had a very big increase globally in the amount of electricity being consumed. It's gone up by more than 50%.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:01) So the ratio stayed the same, but—

(Jonathan at 00:10:03) And we're generating more and more fossil fuels. Yeah. So global emissions of fossil fuels have continued to rise over all this time when we've had these annual meetings of governments, these COP meetings aiming to reduce emissions, but failing to do so. It's only now that we're beginning to plateau out, and we've really used up our carbon budget. So instead of being able to spend the first half of the twenty-first century coasting down to a low-carbon economy, we now have to really make an absolute nosedive to get to net zero by 2050. And what frustrates that is when you have this competition between all the different possible solutions there are, whether it's nuclear, solar, wind, and the things that go beyond electricity. When they start competing with each other, it just slows everything down. And clearly, the fact that we've stood still in terms of the share of generation and, you know, the amount of fossil fuels burned has gone up means we're just not doing enough. There shouldn't be a brake on the amount that any one particular technology, clean technology, should be able to contribute over the next twenty-five years as we head towards net zero and beyond. But there's still this infighting, and it's so frustrating.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:26) So for the World Nuclear Organization, how do you fit into these conversations? Are you hosting—is the World Nuclear Organization hosting these conversations with countries to get their carbon down, or are you participating in it? How does that work?

(Jonathan at 00:11:42) We'd like to. But one of the things about the World Nuclear Association, it is a global trade organization—trade association. So it represents a global industry. And although there is a United Nations, there is the international agreement that is the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Agreement, and all these other climate agreements, they are agreed by nation states. And so decisions are still taken on a national basis. And so if there is any interaction between, you know, industry or industry associations and government, it's done by national trade associations or regional trade associations in the case of Europe. Whereas we try to engage. We make comments on the latest IPCC report to take one example. We did go—some four of us went to the climate conference in Glasgow last November. But in terms of sort of access to governments, that doesn't really happen. What is needed, I think, from governments to actually implement the things that will help them achieve the goals that they're signing up for is the national energy policies, amongst all the other climate change mitigation things they need to do. And that's something that they agree amongst themselves. The individual nations determine their energy policy. And they have to pick their own national energy policy to meet the obligations that they're making. And so, yeah, how we fix the climate isn't really something that is negotiated at these global meetings of the United Nations, at these COP meetings. They bring together groups. They try to get a global consensus, but the solution comes out of national action.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:38) And so you're at the World Nuclear Organization, and that's a professional trade—

(Jonathan at 00:13:42) That's right. So World Nuclear Association. So we represent the global nuclear industry. We've got about 180 different member companies. We've been around since the mid-1970s in various guises. So, yeah, that's our role. Where there is a role for global representation, like the United Nations, you know, we will be there. But also, it's a place for those individual industries. Some of them are national. Some of them are multinational. It's a place for them to come together and discuss, prepare policy papers and so forth amongst themselves.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:19) So you're this professional association. Is it just focused on people who are doing new energy things in nuclear? Or is there medical nuclear? Is there other types of nuclear technologies that are a part of this?

(Jonathan at 00:14:32) It's mostly about the energy side. But, yeah, there are many other applications of nuclear technologies. And when we are—mostly about information, provision. Probably one of the biggest roles we have is in providing information. And, you know, as I said, it has been a characteristic that because we're a global association, there isn't a global government. So we don't have that advocacy role in terms of political advocacy that national associations of all different industries have. But we have this thing, the World Wide Web. And so we have that role, that responsibility to provide information. So that is one of our major activities to put out articles which are almost like nuclear Wikipedia pages. So as clear as we can, as straight and information-based as we can. But we also do things like produce reports that look at the global industry, where it is now, where it's going to be over the next twenty-five years, and things like that. So that's our global function.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:40) Yeah. I think it's cool that you bring that up because I got to do an interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee about a year ago, and he was talking about how he created the World Wide Web at CERN. And that's—and he's over in the UK as well, I believe.

(Jonathan at 00:15:55) That's right. Yeah. Yeah. He was one of the stars of the show of the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony. One of the people who took part, him and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, or somebody playing Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Yeah. But getting back to that point, you talked about other uses. There are other uses. So there are hundreds of thousands of medical procedures every year that use nuclear medicine, both in diagnosis but also in treatment. And another thing I think is going to come to be more important is going to be where nuclear is used for energy uses other than electricity. And it has been electricity that's been the focus. But one of the ways that people see us dealing with the climate crisis is to do more with electricity compared to other energy sources. Because we have proven ways, a variety of proven ways of producing electricity with virtually no greenhouse gas emissions. And that's something that other sectors that need to be decarbonized don't have, or they're still trying to develop the ways of doing that. So you have got France, which has got 75% nuclear, I think about 10% hydro, and some renewables as well. So it uses a very small amount of fossil fuel for its electricity provision, but it still uses quite a bit for heating. But we could move into providing more heating from electricity than from central heating systems. With transport, you can move into electric vehicles.

(Jonathan at 00:17:32) I mean, that's now becoming legislation in many countries. So I think that's going to move at an amazing pace. But, of course, then it's fine having an electric vehicle that doesn't use petrol or diesel, but you have to produce the electricity cleanly to make it a low carbon transport option. So you're going to need more generation capacity, not less. So you're going to need to build even more clean generation.

(Jonathan at 00:17:57) And there are things like the steel-making industry, cement industry—these industries that use a lot of heat at the moment, high temperature process heat. They could get that from reactors that are designed to supply heat rather than electricity.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:14) Yeah. When my neighbor got one of the Teslas, he was very excited about the electric cars, and he was very excited about how he's not using any fossil fuels. And I was like, "I don't know if you know this, but the power plant that powers our neighborhood runs off fossil fuel."

(Jonathan at 00:18:32) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's still—in most places, it still means there's a benefit to having that electric car rather than using diesel. But it needs to be completely low carbon. So, yeah, it's just going to increase the demand for clean electricity that we have. And that's going to drive the way we build new capacity of whatever clean energy we have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:00) Oh, yeah. I was—I'm 100% for electric cars. Honestly, they're the coolest cars. I'm a nerd. So the way that their motors work—it's insane how much you can do. I mean, I like to tell people when you go to the dentist, they're not using a diesel drill on your mouth. They're using an electric motor because it's incredibly precise control.

(Jonathan at 00:19:23) I think it's great. And the one thing I do wonder is that Tesla are a premium brand. They build cars that you'd buy instead of a BMW, instead of a Mercedes in general. That's where they've pitched. They're very high-tech inside. They have a huge flat-screen TV, basically, far bigger than you really need, but it's there because it feels good. And so that's great. But most people don't drive BMWs. You know, they drive a—well, depending on which country you're in—various sizes of Ford or Nissan or Renault, whatever. And I know those companies are now coming forward with their electric vehicles, but how are we going to build an affordable electric car rather than a luxury electric car? That's going to be one of the big challenges over the next five, ten years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:16) I'm optimistic too. I think we're going to get there. And I've even gotten to talk with people that are helping solve the problem of finding the materials, like using artificial intelligence and imaging and data to help figure out—I think the company was called Cobalt Metals. And they were designing all these brilliant people they brought together to figure out how to use predictive analysis to determine where these materials might be and pursue them like that. So they cut down on the discovery time of new harvesting locations. And so it's so cool to see, like, okay, well, you know, you start using batteries at a scale you've never needed batteries before. Now you have these material problems, but new companies come out. And it really kind of feels like we're all working together as a species to sort of do something pretty cool. So, yeah, I'm a big fan of how this is progressing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:10) I even saw that—what's really popular over here is like General Motors, right? And they, I think, have a version within like the next two or three years. Like, every model that they have, all their core models will have an electric version. They have, you know, the electric pickup truck coming out for Ford. They have—they did this weird thing with the Mustang where they, like, made it different and then made it electric. I'm not sure I would do that with the Mustang brand, but it looks fine. Like, it looks like a cool car. I just wouldn't have replaced the Mustang with it. Yeah. I'm off topic, but the electric cars, I am very excited about. I've already got—I don't have the electric car yet, but I've got the 50 amp plug in my garage. So I'm looking forward to when I will get the electric car. Yeah.

(Jonathan at 00:21:55) Oh, yeah. We're not going to have a choice soon. I mean, I don't know the legislation position in the US. But in the UK, basically, from 2030, you will not be able to buy a gas or diesel car. It'll have to be low emission, most likely electric. So, yeah, there's another eight years of petrol cars and then that's it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:13) So they're going to keep the old ones on the road for a while, and, you know, people will probably want all those old diesel and petrol cars partly because they will be old cars and they will be affordable for the 17-year-old who wants to get his first car and who wants to spend £500 on something that might last another year. They'll probably still want to get hold of petrol cars. But, yeah, from 2030, new cars will have to be low emission.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:44) So low emission—is that like hybrid or is it no petrol, no diesel?

(Jonathan at 00:22:53) I think it's not hybrid. I think hybrid was potentially on the cards, but certainly there was a lot of pressure to say, well, if you do that, then people are going to have notional hybrids. They're going to have hybrids where they stick in a little rechargeable nine-volt battery just enough to power the lights and say, "Oh, this qualifies. This will do." And then stick a two-liter engine in it to give it some performance. But, yeah, I think it's still fluid. And as we get to that 2030 deadline, I think there may be—you know, either things will have progressed so far that people will want that anyway, or it may be that, you know, the technology hasn't brought down the costs. We haven't quite had the cost reductions that we would have wanted. So there will be complaints about—and rightly so—complaints that, you know, it's making transport something for the rich. And there are places where you can't rely on public transport. You do need to have your own car. So what exactly is enforced in 2030, I think we shall see. But it's definitely set a strong signal to the automotive industry to say, "You need to move away from the internal combustion engine."

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:07) Yeah. It's a step in the right direction. Like, nothing's ever perfect. But okay. So the main reason why people join the World Nuclear Association is what?

(Jonathan at 00:24:20) Well, it's companies that join. So—and I think companies join because first of all, there is the role we have as an advocate for nuclear energy. And they, being from the industry, want to support that role. So, you know, we have this global reach that we have through our website and through some of our reports, and they're supporting that function that we have. But, yeah, it is also the fact that our industry used to be very national. So individual countries would develop their own reactor designs. They'd have their own fuel cycle facilities, their own regulation, and they would do it all themselves. And so you could function just within your own country. But the way in which the industry has evolved over the last twenty years is to become much more global. So you're having, you know, reactors of different kinds exported around the world. The fuel cycle itself now is something that is very international. You know, uranium is mined in many countries around the world, and then it gets processed, it gets enriched, it gets fabricated into fuel, and you can use different sources for all these different services from all around the world. And so it has just become a much more global industry, and so there's a need for all these companies to have a way in which they can come together. So, you know, we have conferences like other trade associations do, and that's an opportunity for all these different companies to come together and, you know, exhibit, to make business contacts, to retain business contacts, and just get together and be part of that global industry. And that's an activity that we've been really trying to keep going over the last two years when, of course, international travel—you know, conferences of that kind—have just not happened. And so we've made a big push to have the Zoom conferences, to have other ways in which our members can come together. And that may end up being something that actually makes our role more significant because it's always been the people who can have the time and the money to fly into London or wherever our conferences are taking place. They're the ones who come to the meetings. But for some of the smaller companies that are involved in the industry, that's too much of an investment to make. And so the fact that any of them now can sign up and, you know, participate in one of our virtual meetings, I think it's something that we're going to keep going forward. And there's a big environmental benefit in that as well in cutting down travel and so forth. So, yeah, that is one of the things I hope that we're going to keep on doing going forward. Because that's a way in which we can keep our global perspective that we give to these companies applicable and accessible to all of them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:27) Yeah. And it allows another benefit—it helps spread ideas faster because there's people who wouldn't be able to attend or might be at different levels of business who can participate now. I've got several friends that own, like, conference-type businesses, and I've always talked with them and found it interesting how they each view the online mixing. Some have been very into it since the beginning. Some are like, "No, you have to be here. That's the value. You have to be in the room. We won't record them. We won't stream them." But it's been interesting to see how everybody sort of adapted and gotten on board with the live streaming. But I was curious—before I forget, I wanted to ask you about, like, how long have you been studying nuclear? How long have you been in this field and why did you get into it?

(Jonathan at 00:28:24) I got into it really straight out of university. So I did a degree and a PhD at a university in Liverpool. It wasn't a nuclear energy PhD. It was called Studies of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, but that's more a spectroscopic technique just for examining a fairly basic chemical process that was going on in this setup that we did. And from that, I wanted to go and continue doing research. And when I looked at the job offers that were available to somebody who was doing a PhD, a lot of the companies wanted people of that type to go into management. They wanted them to manage a lab or manage a team to do research, not to actually continue the research itself. And one of the few opportunities there was with the company called British Nuclear Fuels, which was the main nuclear company in the UK at that time. And they had a big site up at Sellafield where they were reprocessing nuclear fuel, and that's where you basically take fuel that's been in a reactor, dissolve it, separate out the uranium and the plutonium from the other components—the fission products that build up in the fuel as it's being used. And then that uranium plutonium can be reused. Or it's just another better way of processing used fuel for eventual disposal. Either way, it's the thing that was happening at that site up in Cumbria, which is in the Northwest of England. And they had positions available. They were making actually quite a big investment in developing their research and development capabilities at that time. And so there was still the opportunity with them to do research rather than to manage research, and that was very attractive to me. What I found out was, because it's a nuclear site, the regulation and the safety requirements ramp up 10 times what it was in my little lab at the university. And in fact, you can't wander into the lab one day and go, "Oh, I think I'm going to do that and see what happens," which should be a characteristic of university research. Well, it was back in those days. I expect it's changed. No. You have to fill out a proposal, get it approved, reviewed, checked. Maybe a month later, you'd be able to do the thing you planned to do. So I didn't get a lot of actual wet chemistry research done there. But I found myself drifting more and more into looking at nuclear energy and its role. Actually, this tied in with the beginnings of the interest in climate change. So it's around about 1990, early 1990s. And I just drifted more and more within the company into looking at that. So I moved away from research and development into our corporate strategy department and into our what was then our commercial department. And these were the areas where these kinds of policy developments that were taking place were sited. And also I got more involved in some of the dialogue that was taking place amongst industry and between industry and government about what measures could be introduced to tackle climate change. So things like emission trading, things like what should the formulation of a carbon tax be. And I just got more and more involved in that. And then that broadened into looking at nuclear energy and climate change as a broader topic—sustainable development, you know, going beyond just the greenhouse gas side of things, but into the broader issues of sustainable development. And I really enjoyed that because although it's going beyond being a lab coat, white coat-wearing scientist in that way, it's still clearly a very scientific part of the business and part of what we do. And so I enjoyed that. And also because climate change is not about nuclear energy. Nuclear energy is one cog in a potential solution to the challenge of climate change and what we need to do. So you do deal with a lot more than just, you know, your particular silo of being somebody in the nuclear industry. You know, the reach of different issues that I get to explore, to communicate on, to learn more about, is much broader, I think, from going down the direction I have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:22) So proliferation is like—explain that to me better. What does that word mean?

(Jonathan at 00:33:31) Well, it is—I suppose proliferation is—a way of putting it would be diversion. So making sure there isn't diversion of materials that are being used for the civil nuclear industry for other purposes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:47) How do they do it?

(Jonathan at 00:33:49) It's—so there's just very good monitoring. So there'll be online monitoring. One of the organizations that's involved in this is the IAEA. And what they have is they have feeds of information coming from nuclear sites that allows them to monitor what's taking place on those sites. They're just very strong controls on this. And, yeah, it's one of those ones where if I told you, I'd—well, I wouldn't kill you, but I probably shouldn't tell you. Nice. Yeah. The threat goes the other way. If I told you, I'd be killed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:29) Yeah. There you go. We don't want to say that. We have a megaphone around. We don't want to say that. Yeah. But exactly. Like, for example, a while back, I was interested in what it would take to get like an ordinance license or like an explosive license. And the chain of paperwork and the amount of stuff you have to go through in order to purchase or transport or anything explosive materials is just—it's an enormous undertaking to get that type of license. And, naturally, if you guys had—so the same material, by its lowest level of properties, the same material that they're using for research could be used like in a nuclear bomb, and they put these controls in place to make sure that that's not happening. Is that what we're talking about?

(Jonathan at 00:35:23) That is, and this is something that has been an issue with the agreement that there was with Iran and the breakdown of that agreement. Because one of the differences is in how much you enrich natural uranium in one isotope, the fissile isotope, uranium-235. For most civil reactors, you only need to increase the enrichment from roundabout 1% up to 5%, something in that region. At that enrichment, it's just not a viable material for any kind of military purpose that you're thinking of.

(Jonathan at 00:36:04) Yeah, you need to go to much higher levels of enrichment, up towards 70%. And so you can monitor an enrichment plant and know what's happening with that plant, know where the materials in that plant are, trace the materials coming in, the materials going out, and ensure that they are being used in the right way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:28) Can you monitor them from satellites to see what type of materials they have or how rich their materials are?

(Jonathan at 00:36:36) Yeah, I don't—it's more that you have monitors on-site, rather than being able to stare down from space. Centrifuge—you know, most of enrichment now is done through things called centrifuges, which are ultra-centrifuges. Very large installations of multiple hundreds, if not thousands, of these centrifuges that have to spin uranium fluoride at high speed to try to separate out uranium-235 from uranium-238. Because you have to enrich it in this isotope, but you can't use chemical processes to separate out an isotope of an element. You have to use its physical properties, and the fact it's slightly different atomic weights between those two isotopes is done through these enrichment facilities. And there are relatively few of them. They're big installations, and yeah, the monitoring takes place on-site.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:35) So is it—I'm just, I'm gonna go a little bit deeper because I'm kind of interested in this. I'm gonna try—what I'm gonna try to get to, maybe I'll speed it up. How, like, how do they make it so that, like, if I'm a country and I wanna lie, that I can't lie about what I'm doing with it? Like, is it because the people that are in the plants are part of a world organization or some sort of other thing, and their scientists' morals say that they're gonna report it? Or is it they can do whatever they want as long as they fake the paperwork?

(Jonathan at 00:38:12) I don't think you'll fake the paperwork. The way in which it is imposed is through very close monitoring of the materials and making available data about what's happening at the plant available to others. Now, of course, there have been military programs. Actually, usually it goes the other way to what people might think. So in general, it tends to be that you'll have a secret military program, and maybe later there will be a spin-off and a civil program will come after it. That's what happened in the early days in the 1950s and the 1960s. It was military comes first, and then civil comes afterwards. Because these are things that are scrutinized very closely, those that are covered by the Non-Proliferation Treaty. And therefore, it's a really dumb thing to do to try to do what you're suggesting.

(Jonathan at 00:39:06) You know, the idea—if you set something up which is monitored, where there's the interest of the entire industry and the interest of the entire international community to ensure it's being done right, you're exposing yourself to an enormous amount of scrutiny by doing something in the civil nuclear realm. If you're gonna do it in a clandestine way, you don't bother getting into the civil industry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:30) You just do it as a military practice. Like, I didn't—my brain didn't pick up on that until you mentioned it. Like, all this context of this conversation is about how they make sure that the proliferation doesn't happen in the civil world because they can just buy it militarily. Are there—and then they can just do what they wanna do militarily over there, not having to fake paperwork or anything like that. Are there countries that we won't trade uranium with or some sort of radioactive or nuclear material with?

(Jonathan at 00:40:03) This is going a bit beyond sort of my change part.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:09) That's my job. I find the edges.

(Jonathan at 00:40:11) I know, right? The answer is yes. Trade has to be covered by these agreements, or there has to be particular agreements in place to allow trade to happen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:26) All right. One of my producers had a sciencey question for me. They said that they wanted me to ask this to you. Fission and fusion. I believe it was that fission is more popular. It's more used for energy production, and fusion is less used. I think fusion is where you do—like, you put really lightweight things and hit them together. And he wanted to know why one is so popular and the other is not as popular.

(Jonathan at 00:40:55) Because the only fusion energy we can use at the moment is solar. Okay. So there's a lot of work being done, research into fusion. The joke about fusion is that it's always thirty to fifty years in the future, whichever date you start from. I think that's coming down, but to give one idea, there is a demonstration reactor that's currently starting construction, early days of construction, called ITER. And that might be moving towards getting to running as a demonstration plant coming up towards the 2040s, something like that. There'll be some stages along the way of them trying to prove that this can happen, and that will just be a demonstration plant. And after that, you might get the first generation of commercial fusion plants sometime in the 2050s and beyond, certainly in the second half of the century. Now there are other groups that are trying to do things in a smaller way. Sometimes this is national research. Sometimes this is private research. And so ITER, which is this huge international collaboration, isn't the only thing that's underway in terms of fusion research, but it's the big multinational project. But even so, you know, these smaller scale ones—hopefully some of them will come through because we could do with some more ways of producing energy, having more options on the table. But as yet, it is still at the demonstration stage.

(Jonathan at 00:42:28) And what they're demonstrating is the ability to produce plasmas, to maintain plasmas. Because with a fusion reactor, you are trying to replicate what happens in the sun, basically. So converting isotopes of hydrogen into helium. Not exactly the same as what happens in the sun, but the same fusion process. But because we haven't got the huge gravitational pull that the sun has to force these hydrogen atoms together to make them fuse, we're actually gonna have to have even more extreme conditions to make fusion happen. And so there's no material that can resist or stand up to the huge heat that would be produced by a fusion reaction. So they have to be constrained by magnetic forces. So use magnets to constrain this fusioning material. And so at the moment, one of the main things that is being tried to be proven is that there is this ability to maintain a fusion reaction for a little while within one of these huge magnetic fields, or to maintain the plasma for some time. So it's still early stages. There's some good promising progress being made. But yeah, that's the situation with fusion. So it's got potentially a significant role, second half of this century, let's say, in terms of big commercial deployment. So everything that's being done in terms of nuclear generation since 1953 has been done with fission. And fission is where you take a larger nucleus, a uranium nucleus, uranium-235. That gets hit with a neutron, and it forces the nucleus to basically split apart and split into two smaller elements. It's transmutation. But that process of splitting from one big uranium atom to two smaller elements releases energy because the mass of the two elements isn't quite the same as the mass of the uranium atom. And it's E = mc². A little bit of mass is lost, generates a lot of electricity.

(Jonathan at 00:44:48) So everything is done so far in terms of nuclear electricity through the fission process.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:55) That's pretty cool. So they know how to make this fusion thing happen. The material would just—we don't have a material that could withstand the temperatures that it would produce if you made it happen?

(Jonathan at 00:45:08) It's that you can't—what you can't do is say, "Okay, I'll build a container and I'll somehow find a way of making those hydrogen atoms, hydrogen isotopes, fuse together to make helium and let them just be in this vessel, this reactor." You know, whatever. It needs a lot of—what it needs in the sun is a lot of heat and a lot of gravitational attraction to force these atoms together to make them fuse, to overcome the repulsion there is between two positive nuclei. So that this fusion takes place and that then, for exactly the same reasons about conservation of mass, that then releases energy when that happens because the helium atom that is produced, or the helium nucleus that is produced, has a little less mass than the original mass of the two hydrogen isotopes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:05) Has anyone just ever, like, asked the particles nicely to merge?

(Jonathan at 00:46:10) It would be great if we could do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:12) Right?

(Jonathan at 00:46:13) Yeah. But they've proven to be stubborn even to communications.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:21) What are you—as we start to wrap up, what is the most exciting thing that you see happening personally? Like, subjectively, what is the most exciting thing to you happening right now in nuclear?

(Jonathan at 00:46:33) Number one would be the excitement of solving this climate change issue. And I know that might not be the big tech thing, and I've got a couple of tech things that are really interesting. But if you're saying just by doing more of what we're currently doing with the technology we've got now, the large reactors contributing more along with a whole bunch of other options, it should be exciting to save the planet. And that's fundamentally what, you know, the goal of the whole climate process, the climate change mitigation process, is aiming at doing. It's that serious. But then again, achieving that should be that exciting. So just because we may be able, in the large part, to rely on proven technologies, and we're gonna have to rely on proven technologies because we need to get to net zero over the next twenty, twenty-five years, that's still gonna be exciting if we can do it. And it will make the world very different. In some ways, it'll be the same. If we've got different ways of supplying electricity and for, you know, the average person to think, "Well, I'm still plugging in the same devices into the same socket in the wall. I don't care that it's come from a different power source in terms of, you know, what I do with the electricity," then, you know, it will seem hopefully very mundane. But, you know, it will have benefits in climate change. It will have benefits in terms of air pollution. It will clear our skies. I can still remember from when we did have lockdowns here in the UK a couple of years ago, suddenly seeing how blue the skies got because we weren't having the traffic pollution and we weren't having, you know, the pollution that does come from burning fossil fuels. You know, that was one of the few upsides of the whole situation. But potentially, if we move to a cleaner energy system, that is gonna happen and that is gonna be hugely exciting. If we're looking from a technology side, then it is the things that are going beyond the conventional electricity production that are really the things that are exciting. So moving into reactors that will just operate at a much higher temperature, and they will provide that heat directly. They'll use new processes. So instead of using water as a moderator or even water as a coolant, they'll be producing—their potentially gas-cooled reactors, and that gas is gonna be the delivery system for the heat. You know, that is something which I think can revolutionize the way in which industry works. And it's something that you can do with nuclear technologies that you can't do with some of the other low-carbon electricity generation technologies. A wind turbine isn't gonna provide that high-temperature heat that you can produce with a nuclear reactor. And then I think the move into small modular reactors, these smaller reactors that may be a tenth or even less the size of a conventional reactor, they have the potential to have a lot more applications and to be able to take electricity production, heat supply, and desalination into areas which, you know, won't be somewhere where you could put a 1,500-megawatt power plant of any kind because it would just be too much energy in one place.

(Jonathan at 00:49:55) So it's just going to broaden the number of applications that nuclear technologies are going to be able to provide. And as well as tackling the climate issue, that's going to help with development. And, you know, it is amazing that we still have, you know, on our planet, maybe 800 million people who don't have access to electricity. That's just crazy in 2022 that that's the case. Many, many more, you know, billions more don't have access to reliable electricity. So just providing a clean way of producing electricity—because we get so much from electricity. I mean, nuclear is gonna be the source for a good proportion of that. But we do so much with electricity, and electricity really brings so many benefits that if we can democratize that, if we can spread that and get that accessible to people globally, it's gonna enrich so many lives and make people's standards of living worldwide so much better. That, yeah, that has to be exciting.

(Jonathan at 00:51:00) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:01) It's definitely happening too. I've been talking with people over in Africa. Africa is exploding right now in their growth, and getting them internet and power and things like that have been very important. And one of the advantages that I think they do have is that as they enter this global market, they're learning from the best material possible. So, like, you know, we went in engineering or software engineering, you know, there was a lot up for debate over the past fifteen years about the best ways to do things. And those have all sort of shaken out. And now you have, like, your best practices. And so they can sort of, you know, all cohesively learn the best practices from the get-go and be able to push things faster, farther. So I'm super excited to see countries develop, and I love seeing the different technologies help those people, you know, go farther. For one example, I live an hour outside of Nashville, Tennessee. It's a big music city, and it's like—we would call it the sticks here in America. It's like out in farmland. Well, I have gigabit internet. I have gigabit fiber, and they just got it last year. It's like I just bought the house a few months ago, but that was like a big selling point. They're like, "Oh, there's gigabit fiber at the road. You know, you have to pay to have them bring it into the house and get service," but they waited ten or twelve years for it. But they got the most advanced. And now my connection's more advanced than somebody living in downtown Chicago or something, because the equipment and everything that I have is just the newest, most advanced stuff out there because they just installed it.

(Jonathan at 00:52:40) Yeah. I think that's absolutely it. And it's this technology leapfrogging is something that's brought up a lot for the way in which the countries that are still developing, that are still, you know, aspiring to improve standards of living, improve their competitiveness, their economic activity. They're not gonna repeat the last seventy years based on where was the UK or where was the US when it started having electricity or grid supply? Okay.

(Jonathan at 00:53:11) We'll repeat that. We'll all plug our phones into a landline and use landline phones because that's the way you do it. That's not the way we do it now. We are more global and hopefully, you're right, we'll be able to pick the best technologies.

(Jonathan at 00:53:26) Or those countries will be able to pick the best technologies that are available to them now to bring in things like, you know, communication, the Internet, and that's a huge democratizing thing that can help in terms of education and so much more. So yeah, exactly. It's not gonna be everybody copying what's happened before. It's gonna be bringing in what's available now to meet the challenges that people have now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:56) Absolutely. Well said. I have a fun question for you. You might not know the answer, but if I were to take my entire lifetime of energy consumption needs and were to visualize it in the form of uranium, are we talking a cup, a bucket, a swimming pool? Like, how much energy would a human use?

(Jonathan at 00:54:22) In terms of the amount, the one comparison I do know is the amount of waste that would be produced in terms of the amount of fuel. Okay. And so spent fuel that, and maybe that's the way you need to, you know, that's the number one concern. What do you do with what you produce? We're talking something like a Coca Cola can or soft pop beverage of your choice. So something like a fizzy drink can's worth of material would be sufficient. Because a nuclear reactor, if we can go from first principles, nuclear reactors are something like 70 meters high, something in that range, the buildings. But the actual fuel assembly is about four meters high. And there's a couple of hundred of those fuel assemblies in a reactor, and you put in new fuel roughly once every eighteen months. So for a reactor that might be big enough to supply a couple of million people with electricity over its sixty year lifetime, the spent fuel, the used fuel that it would produce would then go into that swimming pool you mentioned.

(Jonathan at 00:55:29) So the entire fuel use for that reactor would go into water because water is a great way of absorbing the radiation, and it's a great way of cooling used fuel. So, yeah, the spent fuel pools look like a big swimming pool, and that's enough to store all the fuel that that reactor would have used over the sixty years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:52) That's crazy.

(Jonathan at 00:55:53) Yeah. Whatever your share of that, whatever your share of it, if that's supplying a million or 2,000,000 people with electricity, then your millionth or two millionth of that swimming pool is what's left.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:05) That's crazy. That is so cool. Wow. A soda can of byproduct from a lifetime of energy use. That makes me excited to see what will happen over the next twenty years with nuclear. So I'm on team nuclear. I'm excited for it. I've got family who are physicians and they talk about the different things nuclear can do medically. And they've been talking about that for a little bit now. So I'm a big fan. Now do you have a book or do you have anything we can promote for you?

(Jonathan at 00:56:38) The best thing for me to mention would be the website. Particularly if people watching this have, you know, there's questions that have been posed. If I haven't explained things well enough or if people wanna know more, then come to our website, which is world-nuclear.org, or just Google for the World Nuclear Association, and you'll come to that website. And, yeah, considering the amount of effort that I and a lot of my colleagues put into writing that, it'd be great to have some more readers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:10) 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.