Rethink Energy Talks Ep. 18: Nuclear Power with Ed Ho, Part 2

Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Rethink Energy podcast. This is a very belated episode, so I hope you like it because it's the last one ever. It's following on from a previous discussion about nuclear power. Today I'm joined by Ed Ho. Hello. We spoke before for a rather lengthy podcast about the current and past situation of the nuclear industry. So today, since Ed Ho is an independent energy analyst from Canada with uh, a focus on nuclear, this time we're going to be looking at what is the near future prospect for nuclear power in the US and in the world as well. But perhaps the US is the most uh, unpredictable market. I wanted to start out by just asking about the terminology. So SMR stands for small modular reactor, but apparently there's some controversy around the, the name.

Speaker B: Now from the very beginning of the industry SMR was not particularly well defined. It was defined at one point something from 10 megawatts to 300 megawatts depending on how people wanted to structure their product. There have been products that are in, you know, the 400 plus megawatt and there are smaller products that can be modularized and put together in groupings that could serve different purposes. So the term doesn't really mean much other than it's not a large grid scale reactor. But some of them are small grid scale reactors, whereas other ones are, you know, industrial application reactors that could be say 100 megawatts, which is not particularly small, but not large. So it's a really in nomenclature. It's a tough thing to talk about though. SMR is sort of what people have gotten used to talking about in lieu of talking about grid scale reactors.

Speaker A: In a big traditional nuclear plant, a single reactor is 1 gigawatt and that costs anywhere from a few billion dollars to $15 billion if you have the worst cost overruns.

Speaker B: Correct. Or if the UK $25 billion. But a gigawatt is a large reactor. Generally speaking though, there are smaller ones. The one we're building in Ontario is 300 megawatts, but which is hardly small. And I tend to think of small as smaller, uh, than that. You know, the hundred ten to one hundred is, is different from the grid scaled ones because you can use it for different applications for industrial.

Speaker A: So maybe people don't like the SMR term so much because of course we started out building nuclear plants that were that small. So it's supposed to be a, ah, new category but we've had lots of small ones, even really small ones on um, you know, nuclear submarines or aircraft carriers for sure. Anyway, we'll we'll jump into the next question, which is why do SMRs really even exist? There's a bit of a broad question, but I think we should jump into just the finance issue and the issue of who pays for it and who shoulders the equity risk. Because it seems to me we try to do a lot of things through the private sector and a traditional nuclear plant is just too big and too slow with perhaps a 10 year construction period to fit inside any private corporation, even the biggest ones. And so that's why we're doing the small, smaller ones. And then they can just pay for it if they're a really big company. Is that correct?

Speaker B: That's fair. And not to be backwards looking, but from a historical perspective, the entire build of the nuclear industry happened with the command and control sort of model of government building it and having the, the social license to do that for the, for the good of the, of the country, to support it. And that all stopped. That happened through the late 60s, 70s, 80s and at the end of the 80s, basically that entire large build stopped because of a number of reasons. You know, Chernobyl didn't help and then Fukushima was certainly not, not good news for the industry at time in the early teens. But it really became down to, there wasn't any real load growth and any of the load growth that was there was covered by natural gas because the cost of natural gas was incredibly cheap. Um, so there was really no need for nuclear and it couldn't compete on a finance financial basis with some of those really cheap power sources. So there was no real incentive to build any new reactors. And all of a sudden now we are at a point where we're starting to have load growth again, but we don't have the, I guess the experience because we haven't built reactors in the western world so much at all for the last couple of decades at the very least. There are people who have been building things and there are exceptions, but basically there hasn't been, there hasn't been a history of building reactors over the last two decades. And the history that's there hasn't been very good. So people are reluctant. People being utilities, public utilities don't want to take the risk to blow themselves up, which happened in, you know, in the Vogel case, to take that risk on because of the financial commitment which could be, you know, in the tens of billions of dollars if you're building, you know, two plants like Volga was. So it's been a bit ugly and as you said, the financial commitment for a smaller reactor Is, is smaller just by the nature of the reactor size. So if you're looking to build 300 megawatt reactor, it's going to be cheaper than a gigawatt reactor in theory.

Speaker A: And perhaps another issue is that with the risk and the cost of finance, if it's just smaller, uh, it should be built quicker. And so maybe you're spending less time paying interest on the loans. Right.

Speaker B: For example, in Ontario in theory, the BWRX 300 that was proposed back, you know, in 2019 on the cut sheet I have the beautiful uh, the cut sheet from, from GE Itachi. Construction time is 30 months which is great relative to the average cost to build a larger plant. Not in China it was sort of like eight or nine years in general to build a large plant. So that's definitely much shorter. And because the, the cost should be on that same cut sheet was $1 billion to start with, you know, that's less of a uh, financial risk than building a $10 billion reactor, say or 8 or 8 or 9 billion dollar reactor. So the designs are supposed to get simpler, more modularized and safer. So it gets easier and easier to build it because components can be shipped to site and there's not so much sort of bespoke big earth earthworks and pouring of concrete and rebar and that type of work to be done because it's a little more, it's smaller and more modular. You can just basically, you know, set it and forget it.

Speaker A: So we've kind of explained the basic appeal of SMRs. There's maybe a few other little details like um, you might want to build it where the grid is too small for an entire gigawatt of nuclear power. But then again that probably is because you don't have a state led energy sector which is why you don't have massive transmission lines being overbuilt like in China. It kind of comes back to the

Speaker B: same thing depending what your needs are. It is certainly easier in a case like Poland where they have a number of smaller coal plants that need to be replaced that are sort of 300, 500, 600 megawatt reactors to drop a uh, gigawatt in an area that doesn't have the transmission. There's a lot of balance of the system that needs to be upgraded to be able to put that in there. So it is easier to fit in the smaller, the smaller size reactors. And we are, it seems, sticking to the traditional model of electricity being sort of hub and spoke in a big centralized generation and then lots of transmission to get the power out to one, wherever it needs to go, versus you know, taking these smaller reactors and putting them where the load is or where they should be relative to the load. Um, so there'd be more useful and there'll be less transmission, uh, to be built though. Um, you know, people, and I say people, utilities and people who design systems are getting their heads around the fact that, you know, distributed resources make a lot of sense and why don't we do more of it that way. Uh, though it's, it's, it's hard to change because the inertia is so great because that's the way it's always been done.

Speaker A: So you mentioned Poland. Um, does that mean that's uh, their Bechtel Westinghouse deal.

Speaker B: Poland is my favorite new jurisdiction to talk about because, you know, they're sort of going the UAE route to the, to an order of magnitude more because they have large scale, um, AP1000 projects and they want to build 6 to 9 gigawatts of new power. So they want to put in 6 to 6 to 9 new AP1000, which is very large endeavor to do. And on top of it they want to put in some small modular reactors, the same ones that we're putting in Ontario. We're going to build four in Darlington. They've, they want to build, and I don't mean to laugh, but they Want to build 24 now based on the biggest cost estimates of what it's going to cost more or less. Now that could be upwards of $100 billion of, of financing to, to build those. And, and it's quite a, uh, it's quite a large project for any jurisdiction, let alone a non nuclear jurisdiction that's just getting into the nuclear business right now. So it's really, I got to give them credit for their gumption to, to want to build that much though. You know, if it were me trying to make policy decisions, I think everyone will come to that sort of same conclusion that we need to build more faster and if we don't plan for it and set bold goals to build huge amounts of new power, we're actually going to be behind the eight ball. And in the worst case scenario they could at least export the excess to the people that haven't had such foresight. Um, so I think Poland's doing a really smart, smart job trying to be ahead of the curve as far as their needs go. And they really do want to decarbonize their coal infrastructure though. That, that's another discussion in and of itself that you Know, decarbonization still matters, but energy security matters more because what's just happened over the last few years with the, you know, the Russian invasion has really caused countries to change the focus from necessarily decarbonization to energy security. Though it's the same goal, just calling it something different.

Speaker A: So are we putting Poland, uh, in the SMR camp?

Speaker B: They're in both. They're going to build both large and small and they also have a micro reactor project going on with last Energy. So they want to do everything. And when you, you know, when you aim, when you aim for the moon, aim for the stars, you may get to the moon. So I know they will get some of that done. And they have the right partnerships. They're, you know, the Canadian regulators working with them, uh, OPG is working with them. They have an agreement to do like pre deployment operations services with Orland Synthos, which is their partner in Poland for the, for the smaller reactors. They're doing everything right and they're bringing in the right partners and they're doing it exactly the same way that I would say the UAE and uh, Korea Hydro and nuclear did it. And they put together joint ventures and put together joint ventures where they can do transfer of uh, everything you need to do to become a nuclear jurisdiction. And they're doing it well. And I think I have nothing to criticize as far as the way they're going about.

Speaker A: Um, yeah, I guess Poland would naturally tend towards pursuing multiple angles because it's, last uh, I checked, a very rapidly growing economy. So you naturally want multiple different types. They've got countries that are uh, liabilities. Germany is going to be importing electricity. Ukraine's had most of its power stations blown up, up and just Europe in general.

Speaker B: I thought we agreed we wouldn't poo poo on Germany this time because I

Speaker A: might lose my control again.

Speaker B: But that said, Germany, Germany has come out. There's so m. There's so many changes that have happened and so many things that are changing so quickly. Germany has come out and changed its position on nuclear as well. So there is hope that they may restart their nuclear reactors at some point. They've certainly are open to have a discussion about it. So that's major. And there have been so many, you know, major announcements that have happened even in the last month. It's it as I, as I joke with people like I've had to start writing things down because there's so much information coming out. I'm drinking from such a fire hose on new news and really important News within the nuclear sector that I'm having trouble keeping track in my brain and I have to start writing it down.

Speaker A: There is one, actually one big overarching question that I guess we should uh, lay out which is that uh, I think we probably in the first nuclear podcast explained why nuclear is making the comeback which is that ah, renewables plus fossil fuels been the paradigm for a while of new development but now we're kind of killing off so much fossil fuels and bringing in so many renewables. Now we need the storage to fund the renewables and when you double the capex of renewables by bringing, adding batteries, suddenly the nuclear kind of makes sense again. When you look at things like seasonal variation, I won't. So we kind of explained why nuclear exists again.

Speaker B: But um, yeah, I think when you talk about the, the notion of total system costs to get the same functionality and you know, no carbon. The um, DOE loans program office in their liftoff reports for nuclear do a comparison of like, for like dispatchable power. You have nuclear or you can do renewables with lots of storage or you can do natural gas or other fossil fuels with carbon capture. And when you factor in those additionalities of having to add the storage or having to add the carbon capture, the costs are pretty close in line but depends on, on what you're doing. Um, so, so it's, it's certainly viable as a part of the discussion. I think depending on the, on the purpose and I don't, I don't want to, I don't want to be completely, you know, with blinders on and just focus on nuclear because I do focus on the entire whole, you know, ecosystem of energy generation. And I think renewables certainly have their time and place depending where and how things need to get done. Based on the newer demand of things like data centers, hyperscalers and wanting 24, 7 always on power. Nuclear is making a lot more sense than other solutions right now.

Speaker A: I like to think of it as, oh, it costs $1 billion to make a gigawatt of solar and $15 billion, worst case for one gigawatt of nuclear. But the nuclear's capacity factor is 90 instead of 15 so it's already six times as much power per nominal gigawatt. And then you just add in some other considerations like the duck curve, uh, time of day or um, seasonal variation and then suddenly they do line up even with just a back of an envelope calculation. But an overarching question I want to ask if Poland is sort of a 50, 50 between SMRs and LMRs LMRs being just a normal or large modular reactor. Would the US be more. The majority of new builds will be SMRs.

Speaker B: Sorry, uh, the short answer is not necessarily based on recent announcements. The government has committed to building, you know, 10 new AP1000s and upgrading the current fleet by another sort of 5 gigawatts. So they're, they're looking to get stuff done really quickly with large because the technology exists and it's ready to go though the supply chain and the construction ability. As I said that that capacity doesn't necessarily exist in an ability to build it at the pace that they want to do it at. So that'll be a really interesting, It'd be really interesting to see how they mobilize their proficiencies to be able to get that done. And I wish them um, luck to do it because they have the social license to do it. And I think they should do everything they can to try to build everything they can now because you know, it's

Speaker A: game is on and the targets are like, was it 300 gigawatts up from 100 gigawatts today?

Speaker B: Yeah, they went up. The uh, COP pledge in 28 went was they want to 3x the nuclear fleet in the world. And then uh, the current president one upped them by saying we're going to 4x what uh, we're doing in America. So we're going to go from 100 to 400 instead of 100 to 300.

Speaker A: Oh wow. I thought it was double to triple,

Speaker B: but it's triple to quadruple.

Speaker A: It's even more stereotypically Trumpian.

Speaker B: Then it's one more and that's where people are getting a little bit caught in the weeds and it's. I try to focus on the positive things of what's going on and there's a lot of change happening and it's a little bit hard to predict what is going to be the policy tomorrow based on the, you know, sort of um, erratic, let's call it, um, changes that are not persistent in policy. As you wake up in the morning and read your newsfeed though, that said, one thing that has clearly not changed, but only gotten better is that there is a further commitment to nuclear. Clearly a bipartisan. There uh, was legislation, there were agreements in, you know, the ira, there was legislation that was passed in the advance act to make nuclear uh, more viable to update the NRC to get out of the uh, get the regulatory process going faster. So everyone, everyone agrees. And now it's been supercharged with executive orders and you know, further, further um, enhancements with the uh, big beautiful bill as well. So that's the one thing I'm very excited about is wow. Like anyone who's in nuclear is clear in their vision and focus to be able to say that seems like that's not going to change. So let's, let's go ahead. If you're in solar and wind and you know, in maybe, you know, in the EV business or other things that might be uh, at risk or hydrogen, there are questions and people are questioning, you know, investments in America to be able to do that kind of energy business. But on the nuclear side of things, it's unequivocal. There is, you know, 100% support for, for nuclear. So from where I sit it's a, uh, it's a really positive environment. Let's just leave it at that.

Speaker A: And so the US has been a place that struggles a bit with large scale infrastructure. But in this case we should actually take a positive view. And when we look at that, uh, don't they have a 35 gigawatts by 2035 target?

Speaker B: It's aggressive because if you want to get to that number you will have had to start already and uh, we're not quite there. Um, and I say we, but I'm Canadian, but I follow the American market because it's such a technology forward and finance forward and really exciting market to be involved in. Those plants are going to take somewhere, call it seven or eight years to build each. For the large scale AP1000s, a tender went out to see if there was any interest on the VC summer site that was mothballed and there was a large amount of interest. I think there are 18 parties that bid to get that project and they'll make a decision at some point in the next to turn that back on. They're building AP1000. So it's almost by default that the AP1000 supply chain will have to go to supporting that project for sure. But for the fact that there's a lot of remediation that has to happen to get it in a state where it can be, I guess, constructed again because it's been mothballed and sitting rusting for eight years or something like that. Um, that was a, you know, really unfortunate um, delay let's call it. It may be easier to do it in a brand new site that doesn't have to be cleaned up before you get moving forward and sorry, I'm going back to the question you asked me about five minutes ago about Small versus large. The US is also in a really exciting place with small reactors and micro reactors. There are many proficient, very smart, progressed projects that are going on in America for a moment from a, a micro reactor and a small reactor, um, technology that are going to be built and going to be um, coming online probably before 2030. More exciting part of that is that many of them are really modular. They are building things that can be built in factory, that can be delivered to sites in the order of, you know, from five to 15 megawatt electrical reactors. And depending on the vendor you're talking about, they're proposing that they could potentially be building hundreds of these smaller reactors in a year, or at least dozens of them. And the metaphor is getting, analogy is getting old. But the airplanes versus airports, Airplanes, uh, can be rolled off, uh, assembly line and doing it in an assembly line way, uh, makes a lot more sense. Like you're building an ev, but it just happens to be a nuclear reactor that is smaller but really truly modular being built in factory. And people are being a little bit quiet about the progress that they're making yet I'm really excited by a number of the companies that are working down that way. And um, it's going to come sooner than I think people are giving them credit for.

Speaker A: So in the past when I covered this SMR topic, my attitude was, well, we know what works in nuclear. It's just the big traditional state led stuff and they're trying to find a type of nuclear power plant that doesn't fit inside that mold. They want to do private sector. And so I was sort of annoyed at SMRs and I thought, well, this is just inherently worse, inherently more expensive because it has, it's missing out on economies of scale fundamentally and it's being pursued for all the wrong reasons. But it sounds like our uh, attitude has changed and now it's a bit more positive towards the isomrs.

Speaker B: There's certainly enough research to, to say that there is economies of scale to be had in building big nuclear plants. And I don't, I don't deny that either though. I, where I think it's that the industry is underestimating is the economies of multiples that are possible from some of these very smart vendors who will be able to roll things off an assembly line very quickly.

Speaker A: So instead of judging the economy of scale by, oh, here's this one small project, you judge the economy of scale by Here's 10 smiles that were built sort of in the same way, right, by the same people when you make

Speaker B: them At a sufficiently micro size that is small enough to be able to be made on a uh, assembly uh line with parts that are not necessarily hard to source materials and hard to source parts that a lot of the, a lot of the smaller components can be off the shelf components that are used for other types of balance of plant generating stuff that doesn't have to be necessarily nuclear rated in any way that there is definitely um, an underestimation of how well that modularization will go and how well that the assembly line will actually end up working out. So I don't, I don't underestimate um, the smaller reactor designers and there are you know there are lots of lots, lots of good ones. You know OKLO is a good example, ALO is a good example. Nano is a good example of they're building you know, small M reactors with technology that is definitely advanced. I'm not worried about the technology risk of things. It's more about the execution on having the build things and what the cost will initially be and what the learning curve will be as things move forward and progress. And I think we'll get to a point where people are going to be surprised at how less expensive it is. I don't want to say inexpensive but less expensive than they thought it was going to be based on estimates.

Speaker A: And so across both LMRs and SMRs. I mean I would have loved to have a big sort of argument about which is better in the contrasts but it sounds almost as if they have the same issues which is they work if there's just a commitment to building them across the finance side, the private side, all the corporations that are relevant, the planning permission, the state, the policy environment and we just need everyone to line up and say yes, it's being done and if that happens well they're both good and if it doesn't happen then they're both bad.

Speaker B: The hang up has been and I'm m happy to see that we're breaking through this. There are so many designs. I think the, the NEA just came up with their latest uh updates date on the number of designs for, for small reactors was up to 127 from where it was up like it's 72 the year before, the year before that. So the little boy in me is a very excited about the science and I love to see, I love to see research and development happening and I'm an all the above kind of person in the sense that oh isn't that cool. I love to see other people trying new things and Differently. Like you had even brought up the point for this one about, you know, thorium or thorium reactors. There are some legitimate developers of thorium reactors. The Chinese have a thorium reactor that is critical and they're working on it, though. The entire nuclear industry is built around uranium and not, not thorium. But it's certainly viable. And there are so many different designs, generally speaking, that there will be, there will be successes, though. We're at a point because we're in such a rush to get new capacity online and get it built, that we need to start focusing on a few technologies that are viable, are, uh, financeable, are able to get through the regulatory environment that will get to their first of a kind and then into commercial development. And that, you know, that path in America in and of itself is really interesting because I don't say they're short circuiting the NRC process, but there are, you know, there's a DOE process or a Department of Energy and a Department of Defense process that can get a reactor built faster without having to go through NRC approvals. And that doesn't mean they're dangerous. The Department of Defense, as you said at, uh, the outset, we've been running pressurized water reactors in nuclear submarines and in aircraft carriers for 70 years now. Like, it's not a new, it's not a new technology. And to be able to do it for a project, to perhaps put it on a Department of Defense base up in Alaska, to put your first reactor there, to test it and to get proof of concept and to get first of a kind deployment, you can do that because you have the added security of the military and you have the added might of the, of the military and the added financing of the military, because economics don't really matter. They want to just see if it works. And if it really works, then you can get one built. You'll have all of the data you need to be able to then go to the NRC and say, hey, look, we have a reactor, it's been operating for a year and a half on this base. Everything's good. Uh, you know, we should be able to get NRC approvals, which is a really viable path. And the same thing with the doe. There are national labs where there are projects being advanced that are going through those Idaho national labs or, you know, the national lab in Tennessee to again, do proof of concept and to be able to build first of a kind and do work on all types of things like fuel, for example, which is a very interesting part of the supply chain.

Speaker A: Challenge. And so there's an irony here, which is that, uh, it's a nuclear. We're discussing nuclear power which, um, and if we really wanted to, we probably could go and dig into some of the technological side. But it sort of feels a bit pointless because it comes down to boring things like pouring enormous amounts of concrete, having planning permission, not paying too much on the cost of finance, just sort of practical things. And then when you look at the sort of fancy technological side, maybe thorium could be considered that it has promises like we're going to get rid of the nuclear waste issue, but really the nuclear waste isn't actually in terms of the final cost, the nuclear fuel and the nuclear waste isn't really the problem that nuclear faces.

Speaker B: I would go even a little bit of a step further. I wouldn't even say that thorium is an example of, I guess the innovation. The difference is we're going from sort of pressurized water reactors in the big reactors to completely new technologies or never been approved technologies before, like high temperature gas reactors, like, you know, molten salt reactors. And those concepts need to be sort of proven out in their own right. And you know, high temperature gas reactors have been working in Japan for decades. There are sodium fast reactors that are, they're operating in Russia right now, have been operating for decades. So the technology, again, I'm not concerned about the technology because I know the technology works. It's now just getting it to a modular smaller size that can make a business plan out of it economically, not just make the science work.

Speaker A: So since you're Canadian, I want to ask, how's CANDU doing?

Speaker B: Can do is great. As Canadian, I, you know, I am a big supporter of candu. I grew up drinking heavy water, so to say. And in grade seven I went to the Chalk river plant and got to visit a visit, uh, you know, the reactor, the national lab, the ACL national lab there. And it was, it was fantastic. And we've done really well historically. The reactors are always up in the highest of capacity ratings of any nuclear anywhere we've gone through now in Canada we were really fortunate or we've maybe had really good foresight to maintain our supply chain to do refurbishments for all of the reactors that needed to be refurbished. And we've done, you know, we're in the process of doing. Darlington and Bruce Power are both getting reactors redone. Uh, we just agreed to do Pickering. So all of the reactors basically in Ontario are going to be, except for the, you know, a couple that were shut down will be refurbished then be able to life extend for another 30 or 40 years, which is great. And that's definitely a more efficient way of, of maintaining the assets than having to build from scratch. And at the same time, because we have this supply chain existing to do these refurbishments, we have the ability to build more can do in Canada already. So the, I mean, the big battle royale in Canada is, well, for the next reactors we've already proposed from, uh, the Ontario government, with the utility proposed to build 10 gigawatts in a new site, uh, in Wesleyville and another 5 gigawatts in the Bruce Power site in Bruce C to build, basically call it 15 new big reactors. But there's a real technology decision going on right now. But if you had told me like three years ago, I didn't think we'd ever build another Candu. And all of a sudden, about a year and a half or two years ago, I thought, oh, my goodness, we're going to build more Candus in Canada, which is great. But the challenge, the challenge on either sides of the coin are that they want to design a new, bigger Candu that will be, uh, you know, slightly more cost efficient. That's sort of a more gigawatt size versus the, uh, Candu 6, which is sort of 700 megawatts. And I get that. But at the same time, you know, Westinghouse is saying on the other side, well, we have a design that's already built and already approved. Let's just go ahead and build the Westinghouse, which at the same time, Westinghouse is actually owned 100% by Canadians, even though it's a US company out of Pennsylvania. Cameco, which is the big uranium producer in Saskatchewan, owns 49%. And Brookfield, Brookfield, uh, renewables, uh, ironically, is the name. They own 51% of Westinghouse as well, but neither the can do. They didn't spend time over the last 10 years to update the design to what they should have been doing already, because so now they're a little behind the eight ball and getting the engineering done for the new reactor, and Westinghouse is a little behind the eight ball in getting the supply chain set up to build in Canada. And at the same time, I'm not sure they can build, you know, six in Poland, 10 in the US and then call it four or five more in Canada all at the same time. So we're going to have to get to a point where I think people are going to have to start to make decisions based on how can we get it Done based on the supply chain more so than um, you know, what technology is viable. And then coming from right field, the Koreans, they've done a really good job in building, you know, building out the UAE and creating a really good data point in coming in on time, on budget, building Baraka four large reactors, 5,600 megawatts that are all online now running really well. They are now outside of taking over the world in the sense that um, they've got a, I guess they have a whole bunch of agreements with a whole bunch of parties around the world, including in the US they're working on the Palisades refurbishment with Holtec. They're um, if I had to put a bet on a horse and who's going to be the, one of the bigger winners in the global large nuclear deployment game. There's, there was a very quiet announcement. Enec, which is the UAE utility and Korea, sorry, Hyundai Engineering have an agreement to build and deploy nuclear projects with the finance backing of the Emirates. They can now compete with the bigger people that are doing it, which include you know, basically China and Russia are heroistically doing that to, to, to expand their, their nuclear deployment into you know, new countries. But Korea and, and the Emirates are now fully um, in that same game. And you know, to add one more nuance to the entire conversation, the World bank has now, the World bank has now agreed to consider nuclear again in SMRs and building sort of nuclear refurbishments and uh, nuclear transmission which they have not done since 1959 when they supported the, you know, the last Italian uh, reactor to be built. So game on. Like I don't know if the US will allow non US participants to come and build reactors, but when it comes to building reactors in other, you know, new nuclear jurisdictions, I think um, Korea is definitely uh, right, right up there. And to add one more, one more news thing size. Well sea, which is the, the sister plant to the Hinkley C in the UK was given final investment decision and the economics don't look fantastic from a cost per megawatt, but they have it fully financed with partners from, you know, pension funds and other utilities to, to finance it under a, you know, a RAB basis. So which I uh, didn't think was going to happen this quickly and the fact that they could make this announcement already was quite um, let's call it

Speaker A: exciting because Britain is certainly not the most ah, dynamic place these days. So it's nice that we have one

Speaker B: thing going based on the financial, the economic challenges that, that, that Hinckley Point C Had, they basically came back and said well, we're going to do size well. C. But we think we can do 20% better. Our partners can get some sort of infrastructure type returns of 10 to 12% on a nominal basis and it'll be paid for by the, by the ratepayers. It seems remarkable that that was able to move forward even though the rate little bit resistant to the model at the outset. It's gone through and they, they, they've, they've approved it. So I'm a little bit um, surprised and, and, and excited at the same time that that's moving forward. And I was at, I was at um, Hinkley Point in, in April and I got to see what was being built there. And it's an incredible, it's an incredible sight to see. And, and Carl, the crane, which was sort uh, of the biggest crane I've ever seen in my life, was uh, it was. I love big things as a, you know, the little boy me again, uh, to see how that goes. And they will basically replicate that same site but on, you know, on the other side of the country.

Speaker A: So speaking of large, uh, beautiful machinery, we've kind of spoken in very broad general terms, but if we did try and dig into um, the supply chain constraints, these sort of production capacity constraints of how many nuclear plants can a single company actually develop all at one time. And you look at that 35 gigawatt target that's supposed to be built in 10 years and you say well you can build any one of those projects if you start building it now, but you can't m. Start building 35 gigawatts all at the same time. Do we know actually what the um, the specific bottlenecks are? Would it be on things like the manufacturing of reactor pressure vessels or would it just be lots and lots of different things? And also skilled, you know, skilled employees.

Speaker B: It's skilled workforce is definitely a big one. And to be able to have the workforce that can go from project to project to project, project to build um, you know, serially. Sorry in sequence. It would be, it would be faster to be able to build it serially, uh, clearly, but there aren't enough bodies to do that. But certainly the reactor pressure vessels are a challenge. The, the interesting part of, I guess with, with the cranes. Hyundai Steel made um, a pronouncement a few months ago that they're going to make a $20 billion investment into the US of which 5 or 6 billion would be to do a, you know, a new steel, uh, foundry in in Louisiana. So it's, we're, we're knocking off these obstacles one by one. And one of the, you know, one of the bigger obstacles that people were saying is, well, we can't, we can't produce these parts in, in America because it's going to cost us billions of dollars of investment to do it. And here we have, you know, Hyundai coming in and doing the, uh, the heavy lifting for the Americans. So, you know, at some point we may have even more understanding that capacity building in the US can happen with international partners and not necessarily have to be, uh, a, uh, completely fresh start. Yeah. Or necessarily, you know, when we have to shut out our trading partners, which, you know, being Canadian, it's hard to have this conversation and, and, and not be somewhat cynical. Although I, you know, I, I'm, I

Speaker A: still tariff partners instead of trade partners.

Speaker B: We have, we, we have, we have, you know, a free trade agreement with the US yet there has been some real, um, resistance to sticking to the agreement that was made with the current president in his prior term. Um, but I'm not going to get into the politics of it because at the end of the day, when you get below the, you know, the top levels of government and you talk to the people who are working on the projects and the regulators and everybody who just wants to get a project built, everyone is cooperating. The US and the Canadians are cooperating. We're still, you know, shipping uranium south of the border to. There's no real slowing of the agreements. At the, at the real level where it's happening, though, there are certain things that are being affected that are outside of nuclear, and a lot of the natural resources that we, we ship to the US including steel of all things, are getting affected by the tariff talk.

Speaker A: What you said about skilled, uh, workers reminds me of that little incident, I think it was ten years ago now in Belarus where they were putting in the reactor pressure vessel and they dropped it a few meters and, and the Belarusians eventually found out and said, hey, we don't want to use that one anymore because you probably cracked it. Well, you might have. A might have is already not acceptable. So they swapped it out. But it's just like, you know, so the skilled labor can just be operating a really, really huge crane. And of course these are the largest. You might think of it as kind of a high technology, but then these are the largest concrete structures on the planet. Who loves concrete the most would be the Chinese. So I think we've discussed it a lot from the Western and American perspective. How do you address the financing? How do you put it into the private sector? How do you deal with planning permission? Is everyone on the same page? So how's it looking in a country where perhaps all of those issues are just solved by central government, uh, Fiat. Will China just be building large reactors because it doesn't need to do SMRs?

Speaker B: Short answer is, you're right though, they are building small reactors as well. But just to put into context, I open up the World Nuclear association page. Reactors under construction right now. China has, you know, 34 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity under construction right now. So they are, they are by far the largest builder of, of new nuclear. Not only are they not going smaller, they're actually, you know, they have their wallong one which they're building lots of, but they're also bringing on newer designs as well. Well there's A uh, the CAP 1400 which is a bigger model of, you know, 1500 megawatt reactor. And I think they want to compete globally by having these more economically viable reactors with, with even, you know, an even cheaper than, call it, you know, 3M meg, $3 a watt kind of cost. It's remarkable what they're doing and you see it on every, on every level whether it's, it's, it's nuclear, whether they're, they're, they're going to build more hydro. As it, as it stands right now, they're building clearly tons of solar and wind and there's no um, condemning them for, for having taken the lead because they really had the foresight to do it. And I really have a, you know, respect for their ability to see what needed to be done, plan for it and get it done. And they've done that, you know, not even just on the renewables, but on all the other, you uh, know, supply chain for strategic minerals, rare earths and batteries. Every strategic mineral as well.

Speaker A: I came into this podcast thinking maybe let's have a dialectical argument about which is better between SMRs and LMRs. And I very swiftly realized, well actually no, that's not the discussion we're having at all. It's much more about the good nuclear is just the nuclear that gets built perhaps because in the west we're in this context of building so many data centers and cutting off a lot of the traditional conventional power that's dispatchable. So it's a bit of an all hands on deck scenario.

Speaker B: And we didn't even really get into the other industrial applications. And the last bit of decarbonization, if that's your concern when you're looking at something like X Energy and they're doing their 100 megawatt reactor with Dow Chemical to provide industrial heat to refine chemical. They are.

Speaker A: Okay, so that must be at least a few hundred degrees Celsius or they're

Speaker B: hard, they're sort of in the 5, 5 to 550. It's uh.

Speaker A: Oh, very good. So that's, that is very interesting because again, that would be a kind of crucial Western characteristic which is that we're energy intensive and the Chinese are just eating up all of those energy intensive industries. And I think the higher the temperature, the more energy intensive it is. Things like polysilicon or carbon fiber, all of these products that are now getting, you know, polysilicon has been in China for a while, but carbon fiber is something I think they doubled the global production capacity of recently. Yeah.

Speaker B: And um, even cement.

Speaker A: Yeah, cement as well. Yeah. Isn't that like 1500 degrees Celsius?

Speaker B: It's up there.

Speaker A: And doing that with just like drawing electricity off the grid into a heating element is painful, Painfully expensive. So doing it a bit more directly where you just directly generate the heat at the nuclear plant because, you know, the whole thing runs off a steam turbine still, doesn't it? Despite all this talk of innovation. I mean it still uses steam turbines.

Speaker B: And that was it, or that was the other sort of nuance about, you know, what, what is the great, the greatest thing about nuclear? Well, there's actually the industrial applications as well and then there's the off grid stuff that you can do, like I said with, with army bases or also, you know, in Canada we have a, uh, particularly challenge with remote communities. Most of them are indigenous and mining sites that are not able to get electricity any other way. But flying in or barging in diesel and running diesel gensets to, to create electricity, which is horribly expensive. And I think I said this in the last podcast like there is actually an economic benefit once it comes to us, it gets to a certain economy to be able to drop in a reactor, a nuclear reactor that is actually cheaper per kilowatt hour than, than running diesel. And that's not much of a stretch. We're talking sort of, you know, $400 to $500amegawatt hour to run some diesel gensets, whereas, um, we can get, certainly get power cheaper out of a small reactor or micro reactor than that.

Speaker A: But my, my sort of prediction or characterization of SMRs versus LMRs that I still wanted to make is so if you look at China, where they don't have the planning permission issue. They have very consistently expanding supply chains so they can build lots of nuclear. And also they don't necessarily have to because they're doing ridiculous things like, uh, what was it, $200 billion in the Yalung Sampo, uh, hydropower project in Tibet, that kind of thing. They have every kind of power. I mean, they import a lot of fuel, so they do need it. But, you know, they've got the Inner Mongolian Plateau for wind, they've got solar deserts for solar power. They've got kind of everything going on. So they don't have to build lots of nuclear. They're kind of doing it by choice. And so maybe in the Chinese case it will be big. Uh, do we have like a prediction that maybe 90% of the Chinese stuff will be large?

Speaker B: I would say that's fair, though. I'm just looking at the. When the new reactors are expected to come online and what they are, the Wolong one is sort of their main reactor, but there's also.

Speaker A: That's 1.2 gigawatt per reactor, isn't it?

Speaker B: 1.2, yeah. And then the CAP 1400 is a 1500 megawatt. But there's also, uh, you know, coming out in the next, you know, this is just going in the next two years. There's 125 megawatt ACP. 100 they're building as SMR. Um, that's interesting. There's uh. And they're building a VVR, which is the, you know, Russian designed, uh, reactor as well. So I think they have the ability to do, to do whatever they want. They have the expertise to do whatever they want. And the, and like you said, the planning to build whatever they want, whenever they want, wherever they want. For the most part though, it's, um, you know, I think that they could go even faster than they are doing.

Speaker A: Well, my pet theory is that they built so much renewables in the past couple of years because of, uh. Yeah, the whole panic around Russian fuel supplies and Nord Stream 2 getting blown up. And suddenly it seems like a strategic weakness to be importing, uh, power, you know, fuel.

Speaker B: I think, I think, I think they realize that though they're, you know, they're still importing a lot of Russian power as well.

Speaker A: No, Well, I mean, like, uh, I was thinking more of importing it over the sea where it can be intercepted, um, if you catch my drift. Yeah, I think that panic is perhaps, uh. Well, panic, I mean, sort of rush has subsided that, you know, They've built a lot of solar and wind and the pace of those new installations might stagnate now. It's stagnating at a high level. So.

Speaker B: But ultimately, like, you know, my, uh, if I had to, you know, leave you with a final kind of, you know, message m in. In my, my, you know, uncertainties in the world and what if I haven't been enthusiastic enough about building new, new generation, like the time is now. I think we should be trying to build as much as we can as fast as we do. Need more electrons. And regardless of the modeling and regardless of who's, you know, the efficiencies that can be gained, uh, we have load growth. It would be better to have more power than we know what to do with than not have enough because, you know, we can't turn the lights off. And I think people are not understanding that, you know, these hyperscalers and the big technology companies are accumulating all of the free electrons that they can get, the available electrons they can get so that if there's ever more load growth, which there's going to be as a society and, you know, countries are going to have to start building more and we need, we need to get going. So I think there's no, um, there's no amount of new generation that we shouldn't be building. Sorry. And just my point about the hyperscalers and where the whole industry is very excited in that, you know, the hyperscalers are gone from just purchasing, you know, giving power purchase agreements to actually becoming partners, uh, investing in actual reactors and reactor development. There's a sort of newer model of a developer that is not a utility that's going to be potentially, you know, a high tech company. Because when you think about what those hyperscalers are doing with those electrons, they're converting electrons to bits and the energy input into that process is a small portion. Depending what they're doing, it could be, they could be magnifying their profits anywhere from, you know, 10 to 100 times based on the cost of that power. It's worth it. And they want the electrons. I don't want to say at any

Speaker A: cost, but, but they have a high profit margin and they need a lot of consistency.

Speaker B: Yeah, ah, they have really good profit margins and you know, at worst, in the dumbest of data centers, you're, you know, maybe cost of power of 20 to 30% in converting something, you know, power to bits. Whereas some of the other, you know, large language model learning stuff, you can, you can sort of magnify that by an order of magnitude.

Speaker A: So um, intuitively I mean these, these GPUs are just um, they're just very cost intensive. They're working through this Nvidia monopoly and supply chain bottleneck. So you would certainly expect the server infrastructure to be far more expensive than the power. And so there's room to ramp up the power cost. Actually that's, that's one last question that maybe we can, we can finish on how much of this in the US case this uh, nuclear resurgence is just due uh, to the hyperscalers and the data centers.

Speaker B: Depending on who's on whose numbers and whose projections you look at, it could be anywhere. Call it 10% of the actual consumption of electricity could be data centers by 2030. And I think the number right now is some number sort of half that. But, but that said, it's not just the low growth. The low growth is somewhat startling, but it's more that there is a new consumer for power that is going to sort of break the logjam as far as the investment decision on creating new generation. And they are at the table with a very large balance sheet and a very large need for power. And that is sort of the bigger part of the dynamic than just the, the low growth itself. It's just their insistence that they actually need power to do it and they need to be on 24 7. So that's, it's a new, it's basically a newer customer that is insisting on that type of energy resource. So I think that's the, that's the real, real excitement in the industry.

Speaker A: Um, because my thought would be the scale of, of new demand that's coming from data centers is so high. I wonder if this nuclear resurgence would have happened in the US at all without the data centers and the AI.

Speaker B: It's hard to know, but it definitely, you're a generalist in, I mean you focus on solar, but you're, you understand energy as in a system. A certain amount of baseline has to be there. Um, I think the reliance on natural gas and other fossil fuels is going to come to uh, start to reduce at the very least. And something's got to fill that gap and it's not going to necessarily be uh, renewables and batteries and there has to be some persistent baseload that I think we would have gotten to the same conclusion that nuclear is necessary and when you're building a system properly.

Speaker A: So, so really this whole, um, this hyperscaler sort of synergy with nuclear has just accelerated things by. It's just exciting or 10 years.

Speaker B: Yeah, seeing the, the, what the hyperscalers have been doing and things like, you know, taking all the capacity of Three Mile island and having it restarted. That's again, it's a pretty shocking yet exciting type of news that comes out because, uh, well, if no one else wants this asset, I'm going to take it. Because these companies are very smart and they see the need for power that um, they have the balance sheet and the risk tolerance based on their business plan to be able to have a fraction of a decimal point of uh, their balance sheet to go to, uh, locking in power needs for the next 10 years or 20 years. Um, and that, that's very smart and uh, I'm excited for their support of the newer, you know, sort of micro reactors and the more modular reactors that are going to come out. And you know, Bill Gates is a really big supporter of nuclear as well. And Terrapower is, uh, you know, is, is under construction right now. They're, they're good, they're going to have not, uh, so small a reactor, 345megawatt. But um, you know, he's, he's got, he's got skin in the game as well, so. And ultimately, you know, I don't like to make predictions. Uh, though the directionality is good, the social license is good. Everybody is coming to the same conclusions even that are not necessarily the really heavy hardcore.

Speaker A: You say everyone, but not the Germans.

Speaker B: Well, the Germans, even the Germans are starting to change their minds. And then, you know, the leadership is.

Speaker A: I can't believe that. Yeah, I can't believe it. The better nuclear gets, the more they'll reject it. They have a death wish again.

Speaker B: I don't like to poo poo anybody.

Speaker A: Another one that might be interesting is Vietnam. They cancelled their nuclear plan that they were going to do with Rosatom a, uh, while back and maybe they'll bring it back, but there's quite a lot of these countries like Egypt and Bangladesh and I think it was Kazakhstan, wasn't it?

Speaker B: There are 30 new countries or so that are planning new power programs and they're all over the point the place. And you know, Egypt is actually in the process of building new nuclear right now and they're building with, with the Russians. Same thing with Turkey.

Speaker A: Turkey. What else is there, uh, in Eastern Europe? Is it Slovakia or is it Hungary? It's probably Hungary, isn't it?

Speaker B: There are many, many, many jurisdictions in Europe. I just came from the Balkans on a trip. It's been dire because of the political challenges there, but Albania, Serbia, Croatia are looking though the only Balkan nation with nuclear right now is Slovenia. Um, so they're all, they're all considering it because it's been a really challenging, it's been really challenging to continue to exist just on coal and, or some, some hydro and it's all over the world. In Southern Asia, in Southeast Asia there are lots of exciting, the Philippines is a really exciting jurisdiction. Singapore is talking about it and they have, you uh, know, lots of money to do things and a lot of it is having the money and having the will are, you know, get you very far, um, in wanting to create a new industry.

Speaker A: Singapore is an interesting one because they, they will have to, when they have to build a new island for it,

Speaker B: maybe they'll, maybe they'll barge it in, who knows.

Speaker A: Oh yeah, yeah, they, they'd use that sort of floating concept and that, that's

Speaker B: very exciting as well. And that's getting um, the, the, the regulations in place where you can actually not just you know, barge it within, you know, have it barged within your country, but to actually travel. The regulation doesn't exist to navigate commercially, non militarily with, with nuclear right now. And you know, people are working on it and there are lots of, lots of smart people working on lots of uh, really good solutions for everything we need to do. Because it's again, it's sort of a no brainer to use, you know, nuclear propulsion the way the military has been using it for all of these decades. But for you know, for shipping, shipping containers and oil tankers, why not? And that's, you know, that's ironic to be using potentially, you know, small modular reactors to ship oil around the world. But um, it makes a lot of sense.

Speaker A: I wonder if there's decommissioned uh, aircraft carrier assets, would they actually be big enough for Singapore? We're probably getting off topic now.

Speaker B: There are lots of things that can happen. You know, Singapore as a city the size of the reactor you need could easily fit on the size of barge depending on the configuration.

Speaker A: So I, I mean uh, apparently these aircraft carriers have 100 megawatts. If they had been decommissioned, maybe you could hoist those out and put it as an auxiliary role in Singapore. But uh, yeah, that's a bit niche

Speaker B: but um, everything, everything is on the table and people are, if you thought about uh, an application, somebody's probably working on it.

Speaker A: And Japan's bringing their fleet back. And France, it's been very recent actually, isn't there? Because right across the East Asian periphery you had this wave of uh, Opposition to nuclear. I think Taiwan is getting rid of its nuclear. South Korea though, considered it and is now changed its mind and will keep its nuclear.

Speaker B: Yeah. And even, even France up until just recently they were keen to phase out a large portion of their nuclear which they've reversed. Thank goodness for them because I guess they, they look at their next door neighbor and realize that you know, deindustrialization because of lack of power is probably not a good thing for the, for the government. You know, EDF is going through their own pains right now and they have new leadership and their new leadership is going through um, a reckoning with respect to the development because they've spent a lot of money and a lot of effort, um, in their, I would say imperialist, but they're in their um, reactor proliferation through Finland, Finland and the UK and even in China. Um, and it hasn't always been economically, um, sound, uh, some of the, some of the results. And the new leadership is really um, cracking down on their ability to um, continue to follow the same path. So I think uh, there will be a bit of a uh, internal uh, reorganization and EDF is probably going to be stronger for it um, though you know, you know, God bless them for having the wherewithal to want to go do it because I, they, they saw the need for more energy around the world and reactor development around the world and they, they took the bull by the horns and did it. Even though, you know, the financial results were not necessarily sound.

Speaker A: Yeah, well this, the whole French, uh, the whole French grid though in a very broad sense looking back for 50 or 60 years, is in a very strong position though because of the original nuclear strategy. And I guess now instead of letting it age out, they're going to be refurbishing it.

Speaker B: Yeah, but you know there were, there were bankruptcies and you know, government takeovers in the interim. It wasn't all, it wasn't all pretty.

Speaker A: Okay. So on the surface it's been very pretty.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I would say it's been successful in the sense that you know they've got a very strong, you know, strong reactor base and grid based on nuclear though, even though they've been suffering somewhat for the lack of water in rivers to be able to cool some of those reactors sometimes. So it's not, again it's not perfect. And they've had some, some maintenance issues with the number of their reactors though. I would rather be France than Germany as far as um, my energy grid goes. Think about the resilience of nuclear in Japan considering what they've gone through historically with World War II and with Fukushima, yet they are in the process of turning all of their reactors back on. Politically. A really challenging decision to make, though. Uh, you know, practically speaking, the right decision to make because there, uh, is really no other solution. You got to hand it to the, you know, the government for having the wherewithal to do that, because governments don't like to make really tough decisions all the time. Rarely m do.

Speaker A: My impression is that maybe it's been so gradual for sort of political reasons, acclimating people to the idea that, yeah, the nuclear fleet's coming back online while never having a big argument about it politically.

Speaker B: The one thing I didn't say, and one thing you hate to say, because if you say it then, then it might happen, is that the one risk to the whole nuclear renaissance, for lack of a better word, is that if something were to happen, some kind of incident or accident, it would not be. It would not be positive, though I think we, uh, have a lot of momentum nonetheless and could probably survive minor things, but who knows? I never take anything for granted. And as we encourage people to develop faster and more, you know, safety is always the number one, uh, number, number one concern, uh, and the number one factor in everything that's being done. So I don't think, I don't think we ever really talked about how, you know, how secure these technologies are and how safe they are. And part of the reason why they're so expensive in their current iterations and their newest, in their newest iterations is the fact that they are incredibly safe and they are safer than they've ever been.

Speaker A: I heard that Hinkley has a digital control center and an analog control center.

Speaker B: Uh, the control room wasn't built yet, but, uh, uh, there was some, you know, intimation of that, though. There's a real, especially in North America, there's a real resistance to digitizing and there's a, A lot of. It has to do with regulation and, um, fear of cybersecurity. Um, but ultimately, you know, ultimately in looking at the small modular reactors and sort of the way the model of operating them is going to be and the way reactors are operated right now, it is fairly remote. Like, you're not, you're not sitting beside the reactor and, you know, putting your finger in the, in the pool to make sure they're still running. It's, it's all done by, you know, sensors and dials from, from, from a distance and you're, you know, whether you're 400 meters away or 400 kilometers away. It, you know, it should be able to be done and operated, um, uh, from, from remotely though there need to be more people, still have people on site to do things if, if something were to happen or need to be done. Um, that. But you know, the whole operating model for the small reactors is, is exciting in that we don't need to have, you know, hundreds of people on a, on a exclusion zone that is mostly security and you know, other couple hundred operators on top of it to be able to, to run your plant, but you know, maybe have some, some AI and some digital tools to be able to, you know, have a data center where you're running, you know, 10 different reactor sites from you know, one, one team. Um, there's no reason why that shouldn't be able to scale like that, but for the fact that there are, and there is an incredible amount of security that has to happen in the model, but it's going to change and it has to change to, to make sense for a lot of the small reactors.

Speaker A: So as we, as we close out this podcast, um, I guess my final question is, um, what's the big thing that you're looking for, uh, next in nuclear? For me it's maybe policy decisions by the Germans and the Vietnamese. What.

Speaker B: I like people to do things and not, uh, tell me about things. So I'm waiting for, I tell people, you know, just wait. By 2035 things are going to look a lot different because there are a lot of non believers about, uh, the progress of the industry. You know, there will be setbacks and there will be successes. But I know at some point, BY, Certainly by 2030, there will be new reactors, you know, online, critical and running. That um, will, you know, potentially be the first of hundreds or first of dozens anyways, um, of new models of reactors to go forward. So I'm just looking for somebody to turn the lights on one by one by one. And uh, that's, that's what excites me the most.

Speaker A: So when the projects are actually built, then we have the, some new statistics for uh, hey, Lazard's levelized cost of electricity tracker can decline a little bit from their single data point of Vogel.

Speaker B: As you said last time, I love them for owning that report though. I wish they had a little more bigger data set to work with a lot of the numbers that they come with, but they do make it nice and beautiful and, and easy to read though. Uh, you know, you question what the assumptions are in the, in the model sometimes

Speaker A: anyway, so I guess that was. I, uh, guess we'll wrap it up there.

Speaker B: That's amazing. I appreciate the conversation again.

Speaker A: Yeah, that was. That was Ed Ho, uh, Canadian energy analyst with a bit of a specialty in nuclear. And that was, uh, our. That was our second, uh, podcast with him. So, um, we previously discussed the sort of past situation in nuclear. Yeah. So have a nice day.

Speaker B: Cheers.