TITANS OF NUCLEAR

Jadwiga Najder
This is the show Titans of Nuclear, and today we have a great guest with us: Cesare Frepoli, who's the President and CEO of FPoliSolutions, as well as the PhD from Penn State University. The company of yours, FPoliSolutions, specializes in the management and execution of projects for industries like nuclear. But not only, it's also aerospace, for example, and other industries.

Cesare Frepoli
Thank you. Thank you. Glad to be here.

Jadwiga Najder
That's amazing. So right now you're the CEO, you're the principal consultant of your company. But what we like to start with is actually the background. Where do you come from? How is it possible that a person like you made such a long, very successful career? We want to know everything. Let's start from the fact that you're a Master of Milano, of the famous Politecnico di Milano.

Cesare Frepoli
That's right. That's right.

Jadwiga Najder
If I'm not wrong, it was in 1990, right? And so-

Cesare Frepoli
Yes.

Jadwiga Najder
I'm really- the atmosphere. Like how was Italy at that time, regarding nuclear?

Cesare Frepoli
Right, yeah, right. Now, actually, those were very interesting times. As a matter of fact, I started my Master program in Italy in nuclear engineering. I was always passionate about nuclear engineering since I was a young kid, so there was no matter of where to go, what to do. And 90 early- 1980s, the 80s were very good in Italy, because Italy was following, actually, the French model. They had what was called at that time, … which means that they were planning to build many, many nuclear power plants, and basically get to where France is actually today with 60, 70% of the energy coming from nuclear. And that was the intent. So I started my schooling in '85, '84 and I was really determined to go into nuclear engineering. And then what happened in 1986, we had the Chernobyl accident, as you know, in Europe and of course there was a lot that was probably heavily politicized and many things happened in Europe around that time as a consequence of the accident. And the sentiment or nuclear kind of deteriorated in Italy, they decided to hold a popular referendum in '87. As a result of the popular referendum, the whole program was cancelled. What happened is even a professor at the Politecnico di Milano said, Well, if you guys want to continue in this path, maybe you should reconsider. Instead, I was determined, I'm going to stay here. I really love- I really believed in that technology as far as the energy solution for the future, so I stick on it and then I graduated in '90. Then the question is where you're going to go work, because in Italy there was not much going on. There were maybe some basic research and things like that, so I started exploring opportunities. I started actually in France. France was probably the most promising country to go to, especially close, just across the border from Italy. That even was kind of difficult to get there. I eventually ended up to go make a decision, really a bold decision. I went to the US Consulate in Milano where I asked how I can get-

Jadwiga Najder
The last thing that I heard from you was that you you went to France and you started looking for a job.

Cesare Frepoli
Yeah, I tried to get a job in France, but as an Italian, it was kind of challenging at that time. So I was then trying to- went to the US Consulate and said- well, the other country was- well, United States, obviously Canada was lots of activity going on in the nuclear at that time and how I can get there. This was kind of around '90, there was lots of discussion of passive, more safe plants like the AP600, AP1000 in those days. They suggested, If you find a job in a company in Italy that works and collaborate with companies in the United States, like Westinghouse or GE General Electric, or even Framatome at the time, that could be maybe a way to go. And that's what I did. I kind of turned down a whole lot of offers and I ended up being my first employment at Ansaldo Nuclear, which is kind of a nuclear vendor in Italy, and then I kind of worked my way through in the first year or so to get an assignment in United States. I ended up being sent to United States as a guest engineer at Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, where I am today actually, back around '92, '93. I was there for six months, it turned out that I ended up staying there for three years, up to the '96 timeframe. And then, at the end of my assignment - obviously, I was very happy about my experience there - and I went back to Italy. I thought I was kind of done with my US experience at the time, but I'm still kind of missing going back, the kind of environment- that there was here as far as the nuclear energy. There was lots of development going on in those times. And what happened is - that was, sometimes it's some luck or what it is - but my former advisor of Westinghouse became a professor at Penn State University. One night, he called me and said, Hey, I'm setting up a thermal-hydraulic group - which was my background, in my experience here at Penn State University - if you want, you can come here and be my research assistant and then you can pursue your PhD studies. Obviously, I had a job, I had a young family at the time. But I still, I was so determined. I didn't spend much time to think about it. I think it was just within a week, I called him back and I said, I'm coming. I kind of quit my job from Italy and I kind of jumped into adventures. We flew in the United States - and this was '97, January '97 - and then that's where I started my PhD doing some research with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It was funded by the Nuclear Regulator Commissioning, my thesis, and then managed to graduate in 2000. And then again, it was kind of a big circle going around. Then, as I was looking for my first job as a PhD, I ended up working at Westinghouse again, and now I was as an employee. That's kind of how I got here, was kind of a long story. But that was kind of, I felt was always interesting to share. And that was kind of a little bit of a dream for me to start working in the nuclear- really, in a place where that was kind of rewarded and there was progress going on.

Jadwiga Najder
I'm actually interested, first, with something that is non-technical. What came to my mind from listening to you was that there is a little bit of stereotype among young people, like students, that either you finish your university and you go straight to PhD, or you go to industry and you stay there forever. What are your feelings about this? Was it an asset of yours, an advantage that you had already some experience in the industry and then started a PhD?

Cesare Frepoli
Oh, it's a very good question. And actually, there was something, when I was facing that decision was something that I was a little bit of a dilemma is the fact that, by the time I decided to do my PhD, I was already in my early 30s, so I had the basically seven year working experience between completing my Master in Italy and starting my PhD. So I was kind of an old student, if you want to call. But it turned out to be an asset. And the reason is that working in the industry for those years, it gave you like a structure in executions and planning. I was a very actually typical PhD in the States to be in excess of four years and maybe five years. But because of that, I was able really to work with the professor, have a good program, execute the program, and basically graduate in three year and a half with a PhD completed. I think at the end it was an asset. It was also interesting to go back into school in a different school environment. I graduated from Italy, going to the United States, much more research. And it was actually a refresher, somehow, to go back to classes and learn more advanced classes. So no, I think it was a positive. It was not actually a problem there was that gap. It was a good thing.

Jadwiga Najder
Right, great. Okay, thank you for this answer. So one of the things that I really caught in your bio was - in your early bio, especially - your contribution to the integral test facilities. And so I would like to ask you, first, to maybe explain to everybody what is an integral test facility? How does it work or what is its utility for the research, but also for the industry?

Cesare Frepoli
Right. So one thing that there's always been in the background on my career has been pursuing Safety Analysis. Safety Analysis is kind of a very, to say, complex work around the licensing and the design and basically proving the safety case of a nuclear power plant. Obviously, you cannot have an accident on a power plant. You want to avoid that, right? But you want to have the system designed that you can mitigate, even if you have an accident, what the consequences of the accidents are, just for the public's safety. The integral effect tests are really a very important and key component, because those are really kind of the proof and the only data that you have. Basically what they do with this integral effect test is a sub-scale simulator of the reactor where, obviously they don't have a nuclear reaction to provide the energy, but they simulate the nuclear reaction like electrical heaters. And then it's a sub-scale, so similar- maybe a parallel in the aerospace industry, where they may have wind tunnel tests of a Boeing 747 to make sure that they fly in all kinds of conditions, are safe. That's kind of the similar in the nuclear industry, They build this test facility, which has sub-scales - could be different types of scales, typically, you do at multiple scale, because the scaling is also an important issue - and you simulate the accident. You simulate the events, you see how this system performs, how the emergency system comes in, and how you're able to maintain the core cool, and what the consequences are. And then you use all that data. This is data that's been accumulated since back to the 1960s up to today. They're still generating new test data with the new reactors. And then what you do, you use computer codes to benchmark against that data. That's a way we'll call qualify the analytical tools so that you know that the simulators, they are actually predicting reality and they were the realities, in this case, the test data. Because obviously, there is no accident on the field, you're trying to avoid this, right? So that's a way to replicate conditions, adverse conditions in a safe way using those sorts of facilities.

Jadwiga Najder
That's really interesting. What are the challenges of construction of such a facility? Is that already the scaling, different scales, also? Please tell us more about that.

Cesare Frepoli
That's right. You tend to- only there are this kind of technology that evolve over time. There are some criteria of similarity criteria that you try to- it's a mathematical apparatus, where you say, like, for example, you want to preserve the pressure, but maybe you cannot, because of the cost, you cannot really preserve the scale in terms of floor area. So you do what is sometimes called pressure over volume scaling rationales. But there are other many more sophisticated, but really it's a mathematical algorithm that proves that what you are testing in the apparatus has a similarity with what would happen in the full-scale plant. And as again, the parallel in the aerospace industry when they will use a sub-scale model - even for marine constructions, for the shipyard and things like that - there are criteria to say, could be like maybe the time is accelerating the test facility or the timescale is different to preserve certain quantities. It's a whole discipline, actually, this scaling, which is something actually we do still do in my company. For instance, even NuScale, we may do some work associated with the scaling working with those areas, who's also an expert in scaling techniques. And yeah, it's a very important part of the scaling and applicability of the building the safety case of a power plant.

Jadwiga Najder
Each kind of scale will preserve one or several parameters, but we all know that the accidents are very multi-parametrical, so how do we go from the test facility to actually understanding what happens inside of the core or inside of the nuclear installation in general?

Cesare Frepoli
You typically combine several integral effects test. The different scale would be like a scale, or like a semi-scale is one of the holder. This facility is a scale of one over seven hundred, so it's a very kind of spaghetti representation of a nuclear power plant.

Jadwiga Najder
It's a good Italian parallel, righ?

Cesare Frepoli
That's right. Because really that's how we look, you have despite that really spaghetti shape. And then you have larger scale. Larger scale in the nuclear industry, it could be like one over 50 like, .. for example, is another one in my area. It's well known. That's a facility from Idaho National Laboratory. It could actually be a full-scale prototype. There was a program developed in the 80s - this is called the UPTF, Upper Plenum Test Facility - was a consortium between Germany, United States, and Japan. It was a very expensive test facility. The test was conducted both in Germany and Japan and then the US was responsible for instrumentation and control. And that was a full-scale. Why they had to go to full-scale is because there were phenomena that could not be represented in sub-scale, like multi-dimensional phenomenon, so they created this very large test facility that was representing what at the time was a large PWR design, German design. Then you use different points in scale to see how- also understand how the phenomena evolved with this scale, what the similarities are, so that then you have different points and you can extrapolate. When you do a simulation at sub-scale, you now have basis to extrapolate to the full-scale behavior, right? So you can predict the full-scale behavior, because you have two that have been validated in multiple scale. Now, the learning- the two kind of learn what the behavior is at different scales so we can predict, with fidelity, the behavior at full-scale.

Jadwiga Najder
Very interesting. Another topic that I could really catch in your bio is the licensing and certification, which is, I guess, partly related to the integrated test facilities and the knowledge that we get from them. Maybe, first, let's start from also defining what is the licensing, what are the certifications, what are its objectives.

Cesare Frepoli
This, also, actually even recent, it's been a continuous evolution also from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the industry as a whole. Traditionally, in the past, like in the 80s, they have like a two-stage approach where they have like a preliminary safety report. There was the applicant who would be the design of the reactor - Westinghouse or the utility applying or what have you - basically constructing all those bodies of evidence, kind of constructing the safety case for the power plants. That was submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and then they were going to do the review process and you get a final safety approval of the design. That was the final Safety Analysis for you at the start. And then after that, though, there were multiple stages where now you're approved for the design, but then you have to apply for the site permit. And then you have to apply for the construction. So it was a multi-stage process. Back in the early 80s, 90s, they kind of update- there was a modernization, a first wave of modernization by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to kind of streamline this process. You can imagine it's very costly, very expensive, takes a lot of resources. And so the idea was how we can simplify this process for new clients coming. And I'm talking around the 90s where designs like the AP600 or AP1000 from Westinghouse with passive safety features. So they developed what was the 10 CFR Part 52 and that was what introduced the concept of design certification. Basically, the process was kind of similar as before, but you get to certify a design and then you only have specific items that you have to address when you actually go and build it and construct a specific site, so there may be site specific. But it is a whole design that is certified. Essentially you have your safety case, that is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has kind of blessed and said, Yes, this is safe for the public and can be constructed. More recently as you know, there are lots of startups and lots of movements, particularly in the United States for advanced reactors, which are now exploring a wide range of technology. There are probably on the order of 10 startups. These are like Kairos Power, X-energy, Terrapower funded by Bill Gates, and many others. And those are introducing a variety of technologies that are not covered in the methods of regulating that have before. And so, actually quite recently, starting from 2018, it has been what they call a licensing modernization plan, so they are naturally moving in this Part 53. And the layer that introducing on top compared to the old way of regulating is what they call a … . It's where you fold probabilistic risk assessment, those type of analyses, into the design cycle. And that's actually what we do in my company. We develop tools and technology to kind of help the applicant to do those complicated licensing process, but hopefully to also reduce dramatically the cost which remain quite high for the power plants to apply and get the design certification.

Jadwiga Najder
Do you think that the fact that we have a new wave of reactors coming that are kind of - I don't want to say revolutionising, because we already know this technologies, they existed before - but add a new dimension to what nuclear is. It doesn't need to be always the same. It doesn't need to be only one technology that is prevailing, but several different technologies who then will be copy pasted into a modular installation. Do you think that this fact that they are so different, like starting from kind of scratch with the licensing, may it help in actually developing the regulations to make it more streamlined, not so slow and not so complicated to achieve, and not so costly most of all?

Cesare Frepoli
That's right. And that's I think- it's my opinion it's still a problem and has to be solved. Obviously, the only near experience, even before what I was referring to before is the 10 CFR Part 53, which is just the recent rulemaking, which is like an evolution from the design certification process. But the only point in history, recent history, that we have, for example, is NuScale. NuScale got the design certification, I believe it was 2019 - don't quote me there, but around those years - so it's probably the most recent example. But the other one, are still kind of, some are submitted. And I think the push from the industry standpoint is that there is so much margin in this design that they should be able to kind of defend the safety case in a much more streamlined way or whatever. You still have to face the regulator and go through all the scrutiny and build all those evidence that kind of make your safety case. I think the challenge still remains on how you can close that gap in a very efficient way, but then you can make these reactors economical, because they need to be economical to license. That is a short route to get there, to the deployment, but also to maintain that as components age. And also, I think a challenge maybe for the new players who goes to gain enough data on like a new piece of equipment that you have the history of, like water reactor technology, for example. But they do indeed have a large margin compared to the more traditional. They also tend to be quite simple, especially like micro reactors that can be transportable. The scenarios are very, very simple compared to the much complex machines are operating right now. I think the promise is there. Now, I think that in the next few years, we'll probably know more, but I feel the challenge is there. But I think the other thing we're trying to use, especially in my company, is to use digital technology, machine learning, AI, and all these infrastructure and kind of coming out from the digitalization of the world to help and facilitate and accelerate the design and also manage the data, track the information, make it easy for regulators to review, because one of the key goals for them is to be transparent, to be scrutable, so if you build a safety case, you understand why, what the rationale is. It's a very logical pattern and with a very voluminous amount of data. That's what we generate.

Jadwiga Najder
Listening to you about before the integrated facilities, it makes me think actually that's how it is with research that the different countries can collaborate and share the facilities. People from Germany can come to the US and use the installation and take some universal conclusions and take them home. However, with the licensing certification, it's not really so easy. Do you think that it is any close future of our hard work and our focus on the licensing development that we'll be able to harmonize the regulations in this respect, maybe globally, but at least regionally, let's say only in Europe or only in North America and so on.

Cesare Frepoli
Yeah, that's- I mean, now, many of the test facilities we discussed where, for the most part, many important were international programs. I've mentioned before even the one critical that is used by the entire industry was a collaboration between United States, Germany, and Japan. That was very important. There are many others like OECD and other organizations that tried to make that data more public. And I think over the years they've become now, like for a small company like us to be able to have access to a very large amount of data, which meant a lot of this data now becomes public consumption. And maybe the challenge is more like organizing that data, particularly because you have to deal with data generated today with instrumentation of today in 2020. At the same time you may go back to some of these reactors, go back to technology that was explored in the 1960s. Or you have experiments that go back in the 1970s, in the 1980s. So there is a whole set of legacy data and warehousing and processing, organizing that data. It's probably in the area where coordinated development or international effort can help, because at the end of the day, otherwise you have every applicant to kind of go through the same amount of work. It's very inefficient. And that's actually one area this is called. We call it data ontology, classify this data. We've created some tools, you can see this on our website, but that's what's also how we can make this all information more accessible to the public now that there are more startups and that can drive further innovation. Then we need to facilitate that process, kind of remove barriers and be able to share that incredible amount of knowledge that was created by nuclear industry in particular for the safety case of plants.

Jadwiga Najder
So is it possible to remove these barriers in terms of licensing and design certification?

Cesare Frepoli
I don't know, I think the NRC - as far as I know - the NRC still kind of taken, obviously there is the IAEA with the state guides and things like that. The NRC tends to be sometimes the example for many countries, but there are differences. And yes, it's what you're saying, it's a challenge if you have to take a new design and just because it's been approved in the States, it's maybe a good step ahead, but is not the job completed say if you have to deploy the same plant in the UK or in other countries. I think that remains a little bit of a challenge. There's been always a talk about harmonization, but the way a regulator approaches the licensing is not homogeneous, I would say. It's still kind of there are different facets that you need to face every time from different countries and different nations.

Jadwiga Najder
Okay, so it's not that easy as, Let's work together we will work it out. Let's-

Cesare Frepoli
Yeah, it's not straightforward.

Jadwiga Najder
All the regulators, I don't know, of Europe and let's just find some compromise, please.

Cesare Frepoli
That's right. That's right. That's right. Now, there had been an attempt in the past also. There was like a consortium of utilities for - especially based on my experience when I was working on AP1000 - to define a uniform, there was like uniform aggregation of utility from Europe to define common ground for the requirements for the design, so that when you comply to those requirements, then the design can be applied in Italy, as in France, as in UK, and I think there have been always attempts in that direction. And those are very useful for sure.

Jadwiga Najder
Can you tell me a little bit about the EU-COMAS project?

Cesare Frepoli
This was an-

Jadwiga Najder
It's very, very interesting. Like, please tell me, what were the initial conditions? What were the developments of the program?

Cesare Frepoli
So this one was actually- I was referred before when I was in the United States, the guest engineer, and then I went back in the mid 90s, back to Europe. And then I worked on some European program. And one of the projects that I was involved in at time was this EU-COMAS project, which I think I've even forgotten what the acronym stands for. But the test was conducted in Germany, was associated to actually a French plant, the Framatome EPR design, where they wanted to have the ability that even in the case where you have a very severe accident - which is almost the one that you don't want to have, right - but in any case, where even the emergency system cannot cool the core. And then at that point, the core melts, and then it kind of penetrates through the vessel. The vessel, essentially, that's containing the reactor, core fails, and then you have this molten material. And so they were planning to design, at that point, this core catcher, which is essentially kind of a basement inside the containment so that there was no radiation of the public, but then be able to collect this corium - and that's where COMAS, I think that probably is a German acronym, that's why I don't remember what they stand for - but the idea was to simulate a prototypical core you and then how that spread - and the idea was that your spread, think about a lava flow where you spread over a large surface and you develop a crust. And then by that you can stabilize the material, and even in that severe condition, you're still in a safe situation, because all the radiation has been contained within the containment. So the test was actually simulating real material like UO2, which is dioxide of uranium, which is used for the typical light water reactor technology, and actually heated up and melting that together with the zirconium cladding - which is the material they use to put the cladding to the pellet of the fuel - and then have all them melt and then open the gate and see how the behavior of the spreading was. It was actually- I attended some of those experiments. They were kind of impressive. You are behind that glass and see all these very high temperature materials spreading on the basement and then using different material that could be concrete, metal - although they were using more exotic substrate - to see which one was performing better for spreading the material. And this was what was called the core catcher concept design that is actually embedded in one of the French Framatome reactors like the EPR.

Jadwiga Najder
So was the result found, or was it just a set of data that was known that they don't work?

Cesare Frepoli
No, I think it generated some data that was used internationally to validate some of those design, I believe. Obviously, there were some set of tests that were proprietary that I was not involved in and the portion I was involved was a set of experiments that they decided to open up to the European that was actually funded by the European Commission. And that's a few tests that then internationally could be used to benchmark tools, again, at scale and see how that spreading behavior of the melt could be handled and modeled.

Jadwiga Najder
So these are the non-proprietary?

Cesare Frepoli
They were some non-proprietary sets. And then there were probably, I'm assuming the test facility was also used and dedicated for the designer. Areva was, as you know, Framatome and Siemens together, they created this joint company and I think that they were the most interested in design, because they actually implemented that device into the reactor.

Jadwiga Najder
Yeah, we are talking a little bit about the concepts that are technical, but not very much related to numbers and to what you're doing on everyday basis, because you're actually an engineer who is very, very much related to the computational fields. And so the integrated facilities that we are talking about, your COMAS project - all of these phenomena that you're studying, you are actually calculating based on the experiments that are conducted. What are your main fields of the computation? Is it thermal hydraulics? Is it rather the heat transfer?

Cesare Frepoli
It's kind of a combination of different disciplines. I mean, it's my background and also the background of the team is thermal hydraulics, but some of them are also, as a background, they are core engineers, meaning they understand all the thermo mechanical aspect of the core, what happened to the core when it is radiated during the operation, the degradation of the materials inside and things like that. I would say, and then the core physics, like the neutronics and how the power gets generated, and so forth. Yeah, it's a multidisciplinary and multi-physics approach when you do this type of analysis, and you have to look at different types of tools, different types of codes, if you have to simulate different all these different sets of experiments to benchmark those tools. But yeah, I think that the team overall, I kind of started as more as a thermal hydraulics and kind of evolved more like in core engineering, and my team is kind of diverse in that segment, in the whole cycle, for the Safety Analysis.

Jadwiga Najder
Can you give us a little bit of a feeling of how much one person is able to do right now in the nuclear computation? You said already, the multi-physics analysis. It doesn't mean that one engineer is able to start from the core finish on, I don't know, see if the analysis- just how much, how compressed is the calculation power right now in terms of what we are able to do as an individual?

Cesare Frepoli
Yeah, I think that actually was a motivation why I started the company in 2012 was because what was happening, really, in the computational capability in the world. Before, like when you go back 20 or 30 years ago, yes, this type of computation required very expensive infrastructure to run those calculations in terms of manpower, but also really servers, hardware that you need, and expenses that you need. And then, as you know, there's been a kind of revolution with cloud computing, where- and it turned out to be an opportunity that I identified when I started the company and said, I don't even need to be in a corporate to be able to do this type of complex analysis. There are a lot of things in the open source community that you can leverage. There are lots of things created by National Laboratory which are available to you and basically at no cost. And sometimes it's really the ability to integrate all those parts. And then when it comes down to the infrastructure, when you look at the cloud computing, like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft and all that, you kind of create, very easily kind of scale up your infrastructure to be elastic and kind of grow with the business, right? And so you really- you're not like in the past, maybe you need like a group of 30 people and very expensive computers at $100,000 to be able to do those analyses. I think these days, you can probably set up the system, apply for a subscription with AWS or Azure, what have you, create an instance, create your infrastructure for running those calculations, and then be able to also work remote,. Especially these days it's kind of important. And also you need a lot of- I think the technical tact that you need to have is still there. In a way, it's also broader, because it's not only understanding the physics and engineering, but also you need to be able to master like the advances in the digitalization, like software techniques come out and enterprise solutions, web services, what have you. And so it may make you a little bit broader, more holistic view of the problem. Not only in engineering, but also the software, the tools. I think it's an opportunity, especially for new engineers, why they like and all the startups that come out these days and kind of make it fun to work, because you don't always focus on one aspect, but you can explore a wide variety of things. And it's much easier to me than the past, for sure, with the technology we have today.

Jadwiga Najder
Can you imagine that finding such an engineer for your company who is able to do everything from the beginning to the end, from IT to understanding the phenomena, to having actually soft skills to be able to explain your results, because in the end, you want to be also selling your services. It's not an easy recruitment task. How does it work right now with finding young engineers? Are they easy to find are they looking for jobs? Is the market expanding? Is it shrinking?

Cesare Frepoli
Actually, you're bringing a very important point. Since I started the company, I would say that the most challenging part, but also the most rewarding has been the people factor. I started with this seed idea to, I really wanted to create this dream team where we can collaborate and really kind of change the industry and create some revolution in a way, how things are done, that we can do it better than in a corporate, much more jive and things like that. But then you face the issue while you need to set up the team, right? And it takes a lot of effort to make sure that there is the right chemistry, the right skill sets, but also there are a lot of dynamics in how you make people that own what they do and they are satisfying on a daily basis on what they do and develop that ownership. And I think one advantage I found in the small team, especially people that joined my team coming from corporate, is the ability that you're not only like a number where you're kind of very specialized in your sector, but you kind of are exposed, talk to the customer. You may, one year after you are in the job, you may be talking to a CEO of another company. They love that. They love that customer facing and that experience to kind of understand what the needs are and then challenging also, too. What I'm doing is really useful in the market where I really have a business case. So you're not really only executing a task, but make you more like an intrapreneur, kind of a group of intrapreneurs in a way in a very collaborative environment. And I think when you reach that goal, it's hard to get there. It's a lot of personal dynamics happening but took probably, even for my team, where we're at eight years since the company was founded, I think we're in a good spot there. And it's very rewarding when you see this dynamic, kind of everybody being kind of in the flow of things of creating, and then kind of enjoying what you're doing. But it takes effort to go there. As far as recruiting, I think when you create the right atmosphere and they feel when you interview somebody to actually feel your culture - what your corporate culture is, what your mission is, what your vision is - it's easy to attract people. I never had a problem to- a gap in that sense. When there are needs, always at a small business, you need to calibrate your resources to the businesses to grow organically, but it's not ever been a challenge to find people. Probably the most difficult is to create that atmosphere of creations. I think we're in a good spot now, but it took a lot of effort.

Jadwiga Najder
I guess other nuclear companies should take this quote home and take the conclusions. I'm wondering, as I'm a person who was facing the challenge not so long ago finding a job and deciding what my career will be, I can also solidify somehow with my peers and ask you maybe on their behalf, what the person that wants to become a person like you in the future should do, should think, should focus on, what to do to be Cesare Frepoli one day.

Cesare Frepoli
That's kind of a difficult question. You know, every story is a little bit kind of individual, right? But I'll say that, for me - maybe I don't know, maybe because I'm coming from another country and I was always curious about traveling and meeting people - I think, as I was working to my opportunity with different company, my career and kind of growing there and trying to learn as much as I could within those organizations, but also the ability to try to find any opportunities to network to exchange and to know people. I think at the end of when I was in that big decision time in my life where it was like, should I pull the plug and start a company and leave a very safe- I was a fellow engineer at Westinghouse. It was a very satisfying job there. I don’t' have a particular complaint, but I had that thing, I'd like to create something of my own. I could not have done that if it wasn't for really the network of the reputation in names, the network of colleagues, friends and then be able- Then that's where all the opportunity came about. It was really through that network. And I think creating that credibility in industry, these external exposure - even when you work in a corporate sometimes a little bit difficult - but if you try to find opportunity to expose yourself outside and then create that, I think that was probably the recipe for me to be able to start something on my own and kind of was mitigating any risk you know, because obviously you can always fail, but that was probably one critical aspect.

Jadwiga Najder
Thank you on their behalf. So we talked about attracting people. I would still be interested in actually attracting contracts in terms of the nuclear industry services that you can provide. You said already that you are not only focused on nuclear, but also on other industries. How are the moods in the nuclear industry in your opinion? And does it help you or is it an obstacle for the development of your company?

Cesare Frepoli
I think it's a- well, maybe- the nuclear is definitely an asset as fast as kind of forced to be very, say the technical depth and breadth that you have to cover in a nuclear discipline is pretty vast. And so that gives you kind of an extended capability, not only myself, but the leader of the team and always talking about the team and how we can do different things. We had an opportunity that came out, kind of a spin- off of the nuclear in the renewables, like in the energy storage, which was a completely new field for us. But that was because we developed certain technology in the software world to manage data. And then, as engineers, okay, it was a new problem, just a different problem. I need to understand a little bit more how batteries work, how batteries degrade, and how they're organized and they're completely different. Still in the energy sector, not completely different, but you can still cross-pollinate and explore that industry. Aerospace is also a similar thing. It also thinks about safety, the aerospace industry, and materials, so fluid dynamics, that we apply in nuclear that we can also apply in this other sector. And yeah, I would say that, as far as the work opportunity, that's the good part, your credibility and being able to- they know that you can solve complex problems. Maybe sometimes, because there is a lot of overhead in the nuclear industry when it comes to safety and the rigor that we do things, we tend to be maybe on the expensive side, when it comes to cost and things like that. That's a little bit of a challenge always we have to balance, because you have to develop certain skills, you have to attract certain engineers, and they demand a certain cost. And then you kind of have to kind of make a decision if you want to stay in that complex frame of things and stay with high caliber, which that's what we decided to say. But it may kind of make you not competitive when it comes to more simple jobs, in a way, which could be another industry where maybe the same level of rigor or the same level of knowledge is not as required.

Jadwiga Najder
So many different industries to explore. What makes you stay in the nuclear field, actually and push-

Cesare Frepoli
As I said, since I was a kid, maybe because I was reading the books of… in my time and there was all this nuclear energy there, and I wanted to be a nuclear engineer. I truly believe that the nuclear solution is still what can solve all the environment problems today, because we can do as much as we can with renewables - and that's a very good thing, the evolution of the renewables like wind and solar - but when it comes down to reliability and really energy at scale, and to maintain the whole system cost effective, I don't think we can achieve the goals that we're expecting to as far as making the economy carbon neutral without nuclear. Nuclear has to be there. You can see, there are people like even Bill Gates investing in Terrapower or things like that because people recognize that. And then all these startups that there are in the States right now on the advanced reactors and many, actually, privately funded, so they're not really supported by government. I mean, there must be a reason and I totally agree, nuclear is the solution, obviously integrated with all the other sectors. Now, we also talk about hybrid energy systems where you look at hydrogen generation and then you consider hydrogen, the way others in hydrogen right way now, you cannot construct a hydrogen economy, because they use basically steam in a form they're making. For every ton of hydrogen, you have to put four tons of CO2 in the atmosphere. And nuclear has no emissions. You can use electrolysis and use the nuclear energy to create what they call the blue hydrogen. I don't know why they call it blue, but it's what's supposed to, there are no emissions there. I think nuclear is gonna be an important part in the energy and for mankind. I think it's going to stay and that's why I want to keep working on it to make things easier and try to identify where the barriers are, like the licensing challenges, the licensing safety case, how we will improve that, make sure the public understands these plants are safe - because they're truly much safer than any other source - and I'm working in that direction now, creating a toolkit that we are able to communicate that to the public.

Jadwiga Najder
What would you like to see in the coming years happening in the nuclear field and what would you like to contribute to?

Cesare Frepoli
I guess we would continue in our mission to support the nuclear industry, more from the software side. We primarily work on the safety analyses and basically providing the toolkit to develop our new design and also be able to maintain the current fleet operating, because that's the other challenge, particularly in the States. You can see the last few years there are several plants closing - nuclear plants - because they cannot compete in the current energy economy for many reasons. And so, anything we can do to keep those plants alive and then to build the new plants, the new generation of plants, I think is something I would like to continue doing. I'd like to see these new plants, like NuScale or these advanced reactors, to be eventually operating, but even more important is that the current fleet stay functioning and operating. I mean, many were able to demonstrate licensing up to 80 years and it's really a bit disappointing when you see this plant closing for no really authentic reason. I think we need to find a way to keep them up in the energy landscape, otherwise it will be very hard to meet those environmental as a global society we want to reach.

Jadwiga Najder
Yeah, let's wish for the best and thank you very much for the topic.

Cesare Frepoli
Thank you so much, it was a pleasure.

Jadwiga Najder
All the best with the success of your company.

Cesare Frepoli
Thank you so much.

Bret Kugelmass
We are here today on Titans of Nuclear with Ian Hore-Lacy, who's the Senior Adviser to the World Nuclear Association. Ian, welcome to Titans.

Ian Hore-Lacy
Thanks, Bret. Good to be here.

Bret Kugelmass
Listen, you're a bit of a legend. I feel like whenever somebody goes to answer something about nuclear on the internet, they inevitably end up at a page that you've written. So you are like the internet's knowledge of nuclear. Is that right?

Ian Hore-Lacy
Oh, well, I have taken great pleasure in just collating information. Having a brain that doesn't retain a lot if you will, but collating and organizing it, so that's resulted in the information papers, the big range of them on the World Nuclear Association website.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, it's just so funny, because whenever I'm talking to a lay person and they want to ask me something about nuclear, sure enough, they reference- that page is like their bait- when they Google like, how much uranium is there - or whatever it is - it's like they always end up on one of those pages. But maybe we can just kind of take a step back. I'd love to just learn a little bit about you. Where did you grow up?

Ian Hore-Lacy
In Australia, near Melbourne, mainly. And then went to university at the University of New England - which has nothing to do with the United States, but this is in the northern part of New South Wales - and did a science degree and got hooked on environmental stuff. And then I spent two to three years doing various youth ministry type of things, then a Master's. I was a senior biology master at school for three years and then I saw this magnificent- and got very much involved in environmental education at that point. I saw this fantastic ad in the newspaper for a company I'd never heard of, but turned out to be one of the two biggest mining companies in Australia wanting an environmental scientist. The job description was about twice as good as anything I could dream up myself, so I applied for it and somehow got it.

Bret Kugelmass
And what mining company was that?

Ian Hore-Lacy
It was called CRA, Conzinc Riotinto, but these days it's just known as Rio Tinto.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, world famous.

Ian Hore-Lacy
It was the Australian arm of Rio Tinto and I was the first environmental scientist head office role. Let's just say processing information rather than out on the ground making things grow. And so I got involved with a whole lot of stuff about, well biological area, which of course is my own, for revegetation, but also pollution control. And I was so excited by all this, so I wrote a book called "Mining in the Environment" which was a huge success. Many copies printed and sent around to shareholders, in particular. About an 80- or 90- page book. And then the chairman, the chief executive of the company called me and said, Look, this book's been a great success. But look, the nuclear debate in Australia - and this was 1978 - nuclear debate in Australia is going nowhere. People are talking past one another for me to decide. I want you to write a book on nuclear power. And chapter one will be about energy. Chapter two will be about electricity. Chapter three will be about this. And he sort of laid it out and I said, that's a great idea, Rod. But he wanted to sort of be comprehensive, so that anybody looking at arguments for one side or the other can relate them to some facts. And I said, That's a great idea, Rod, but I don't know the first thing about nuclear power. And he said, Well, that's alright, Ron Hubery over here - who had been with the company for some years - knows all about it - he had been at the uranium mines and also with the Atomic Energy Commission - he'll help you. So we teamed up and became firm friends and the first edition of a book called “Nuclear Electricity” was published in 1978. And the 11th edition of the same book, but with a new title was published in 2008, 40 years later. That's nuclear power in the world today,

Bret Kugelmass
And how much of what went into these papers and this book, how much of it was just kind of pulling out of your colleagues head, versus you having to kind of pressure test what you heard, and fact check? And how did you fact check? What was your research methodology?

Ian Hore-Lacy
Well, the first edition of the book mainly came out of Ron Hubery's head, with a bit of research. But subsequent editions- he was a co-author for about the first three editions. After that, he then retired and I was in on my own, so I just learned to survey the literature and work out what was going on. You soon develop a sense of what's reliable and what isn't. And you follow up smoke down to the fire and other stuff you completely ignore. So you get a sense of how to research. And that's, of course, then flowed on into later on. I stayed with the company in other roles on the environmental role for some years. But then, in 1993, I think it was - or '94 - I took over the running of the Uranium Information Center in Melbourne. That was an Australian entity which was set up and funded by the uranium mining companies, but its focus was on nuclear power. In other words, it was just to sort of show what the stuff that was being mined in Australia was actually used for and sort of part of their social license, I guess, to have this information publicly. And I then sort of focused on that strongly and increased my personal research abilities. Then in 2001, I sort of had more and more to do with the Uranium Institute in London, which is now known as the World Nuclear Association with John Rich.

Bret Kugelmass
That was the history of WNA, interesting.

Ian Hore-Lacy
Oh, yeah. It changed its name in 2001. John Rich took over in 2001. It had been staggering a bit up till the last few years, up till then. And John conscripted me and said, Look, how quickly can you move to London, basically? And so my role with the UIC in Australia sort of progressively merged with a role based in London for the World Nuclear Association. And to some extent I continue in that, except that I've sort of really retired about three or four years ago and handed over to a successor, but I'm still part time.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, that's the thing I was gonna ask you. How much of like, if you were to think back to your environmental scientist days as you start to pick up the nuclear information aspect of your career, how much of it was your day job over the course of your career? Did it start off as like 10% and then became 100? Was it ever your full-time thing just looking into nuclear information?

Ian Hore-Lacy
The last 25 years has been, yes.

Bret Kugelmass
Just nuclear, not environmental.

Ian Hore-Lacy
Yeah, it's been full time. But before that it wouldn't have even been 10% on average.

Bret Kugelmass
And how many things- after you became full time, how much of this stuff did you have to go back and re-address? How much stuff that you originally had written about it or originally thought about it when you were only part time on it, as you became a world expert and had decades to acquire more information, how many things had to be changed? And what were they?

Ian Hore-Lacy
Nothing had to be changed radically at all. But everything was sort of updated and upgraded as my understanding progressed. For instance, I started out with no knowledge of nuclear physics and had to get my mind around that as a biologist.

Bret Kugelmass
What about radiation? I'm very curious about radiation, because this seems to be an issue of huge contention within the nuclear space, how people feel about either the linear no-threshold, ALARA, and its role on the industry. What about that topic?

Ian Hore-Lacy
Well, right at the outset that was an issue. One of the three or four sort of issues, I guess, that people were concerned about with nuclear power. So yes, I've got my mind around that pretty much. Again, my understanding hasn't changed- since that first edition of the book worked 45 years ago.

Bret Kugelmass
What is it? Maybe just you can kind of weigh in on the whole debate for me about linear no-threshold versus a threshold? Are the radiation standards appropriate or inappropriate?

Ian Hore-Lacy
I think they're over the top in many cases. I mean, we're all subject to radiation in small amounts naturally. And in some parts of the world, people are naturally subject to vastly more. If you live in Colorado, I guess, in the States, also in certain parts of India and Iran and South America, you're subject to almost 50 or 100 times more. And there's no adverse effects from that visible in epidemiologically. I think that the figures sort of suggested by people who studied this carefully, up to about 100 millisieverts per year is not going to hurt anybody, whereas we're mostly subject to 1/50th of that.

Bret Kugelmass
And as a world expert, I mean, have you ever been called in to meet with the regulators or international radiation standards bodies to explain this to them?

Ian Hore-Lacy
No, because I'm not an expert. I'm a scientific generalist and I'm a person that writes about these things, so I don't profess any personal expertise in relation to any of the things I write about.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, but as being one of the most well read and well researched, first, I have to call you an expert. I mean, maybe you didn't conduct scientific studies yourself, but I certainly put you in the category of people who are most knowledgeable on the sector.

Ian Hore-Lacy
Well, the most knowledgeable is one thing. May be. But that's because I'm drawing on experts and collating and assessing what they say and writing, which is a different thing.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah. Okay. Let's shift gears to Australia a little bit. What's going on in Australia? Why is nuclear a debate, especially if there's a healthy uranium mining industry? How come they haven't been able to lobby for better public opinion?

Ian Hore-Lacy
Well, a good question. Australia has no nuclear organizations that are capable of lobbying for nuclear power. It is the only country of its size and kind, I suppose, without a nuclear advocacy organization. Now, that is partly filled by the Minerals Council. And the Minerals Council just today, for instance, is releasing a small book on small modular reactors, which is quite expertly written by a fella named Ben Heard, whom I'm sure you've heard of-

Bret Kugelmass
Of course, Ben Heard. A former Titan on our show.

Ian Hore-Lacy
Yep. He's a very capable guy. Again, he's not an expert in the sense that we've just been discussing. But he is a very, very knowledgeable guy who's done a fairly expert job in writing this book and researching all the economic as well as other aspects of it. So the Minerals Council is the only body and, of course, there is the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization, which is a government body, but it is forbidden to be a lobby group. But just going back beyond that, the reason that nuclear power hasn't come to the fore in Australia is mainly that we are very well endowed with high quality coal, which is very conveniently situated around where it's needed in terms of the capital cities. I guess I'd say in Victoria it's low quality brown coal, but the point is, there's plenty of it. And it's cheap and there are no sulfur emissions hardly from it. And therefore, this has underwritten our prosperity to a very large extent. There has been no reason until concerns about global warming to go nuclear.

Bret Kugelmass
How are your energy costs? But I thought I heard sometimes that there are blackouts, or is this just a recent thing? What's the energy infrastructure like today in Australia?

Ian Hore-Lacy
Well, about two-thirds of our electricity comes from coal, nationally. South Australia is has not got a lot of coal - in fact it's not got any and stopped mining the rubbishy stuff that they were using - and it's tried to sort of go very renewables and it's had a statewide blackout a couple of years ago. But otherwise, we've done better than most people with regard to blackouts. But of course, we can't rely on that, because national policies are subsidized renewables, intermittent renewables. We've got very little hydro. And to close down coal progressively is going to put us in a horrible dilemma, unless somebody bites the bullet on developing nuclear power here. And that is getting close, I think.

Bret Kugelmass
Okay. I want to get to that and your take on where things are headed. But before that, I just want to come back to why no nuclear to begin with. I understand you have coal and that it was easy and cheap and reliable. Okay. But that's still not a reason to forbid nuclear in the law, right? But there is a law against it isn't there?

Ian Hore-Lacy
There are two laws that bear upon it. And that just comes down to political laws trading in Canberra. You hear that, Yes, we'll - with Greens pressure, of course - yes, we'll put this in because it doesn't matter in the short term, in order to get something else through on some other industrial relations, I think was the trade off.

Bret Kugelmass
But why were the Greens even- like why was that even an issue for them? If the country has never had it, there aren't even that many countries- I don't think there any countries around it that have really had it. I guess Japan is close-ish maybe? Why was it even a card for political horse trading at all?

Ian Hore-Lacy
Good question. It's an ideological question. It's partly related to anti-weapon, nuclear weapons. But not as closely related as say it is in the UK. And it just got- I mean, the Australian Conservation Foundation is the largest green group in Australia, and actually, I've briefly worked for them. But early on in the 1960s, they published a booklet advocating nuclear power. But by the 1970s, that had changed and they became strongly anti-nuclear, but it's an ideological question, basically.

Bret Kugelmass
I guess I'm afraid that's true. It's just that simple. It's ideological. There's no real rhyme or reason for it. Okay, so let's talk about the future. Okay, so Ben Heard's out there fighting the good fight. There are a couple other entrepreneurs I've even heard in Australia that want to make something happen. What's created this shift? I mean, I guess climate change. Obviously, you look at the solutions. Then you say, Well, we need stable baseload dispatchable power that's carbon free. Oh, I guess there's really only one option. That's one thing that puts on the plate. But what has to happen now like, literally, logistically to get the country on board? Does a law need to be passed? How do you even pass a law?

Ian Hore-Lacy
Well, two federal laws need currently changing, very minor change, just deleting about one line of text in each. That's the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Act, and also one on environmental protection. Those are the two federal laws which forbid any government body seriously looking at nuclear power, basically. That's in one sense of detail. And there is starting to be public opinion in Australia which would definitely support that legal amendment. But I think that the general feeling on the sort of conservative side of politics is that this has to be a bipartisan exercise. And the current leader of the opposition is the strong left side of that party, and he is trenchantly opposed. Although he did concede the other day, when this new pact, Australia, UK, USA, Aukus defense pact, which involves nuclear submarines, nuclear-powered submarines. He was brought in on that and he said, Yes, look, that's okay, just on a couple of conditions. And one of the conditions was that it didn't mean that the country would embrace nuclear power. We still got to come down from that. And so until he moves on or changes his mind, I don't see the government finding an easy path forward. On the other hand, may decide to move regardless - in the light of emerging or evolving public opinion - may decide to move in a way that sort of wedges the opposition, because there are plenty of people in the Labour Party who are pro-nuclear.

Bret Kugelmass
And what is causing a shift in public opinion? Is this global public opinion that's shifting more positively towards nuclear? Or is it Australian public opinion, for some reason, it's shifting more positively towards nuclear?

Ian Hore-Lacy
Well, I can't speak about global. I'm not tuned in enough. But it is Australian public opinion. I think it's mainly driven by the strong popularity in Australia of doing something about global warming, about reducing CO2 emissions. A lot of discussion about this sort of net-zero by 2050 type of idea. And while you in the US and the UK can talk about perhaps net-zero by 2050 with a good deal of optimism, but you're both starting with 20% nuclear. Australia's starting with 0% nuclear, so we have absolutely zero chance of getting anywhere near net-zero by 2050 without a large slab of nuclear such as you've got.

Bret Kugelmass
And so is that really it? Is it really that the climate-oriented policymakers are looking at the energy landscape and actually just coming to the logical conclusion, hey, we need nuclear. Because sometimes in the US I feel like some people, at least in my community, say, Yes, we need nuclear, it's a no-brainer, obviously. But a lot of people just say, Well, we'll just do wind and solar and we'll just make it work. We'll just add as much storage as necessary. Well just make it work. We'll imagine that storage will become cheaper. We'll imagine it'll be easier all around. We're just gonna imagine by 2050 it'll work. How come your policy leaders just don't imagine?

Ian Hore-Lacy
They do. The policy leaders are exactly on that wavelength. It is pure fantasy, it's pure fantasy and that's why-

Bret Kugelmass
But you're saying that the average person is actually coming to the conclusion that nuclear is necessary looking at the climate situation?

Ian Hore-Lacy
Yeah, well, I think people are seeing that there have been some big batteries built in Australia and they've been very successful, but mainly in frequency control ancillary servers. Not in storing energy. They're hoping to make the intermittent renewables work. But they're very expensive and to think of storing a week's worth of electricity for the country in those is just pure fantasy. So I think the penny is dropping them, but officially, the expert bodies in terms of running the energy policy have not articulated the nuclear word yet. But I think it'll come.

Bret Kugelmass
Okay, so talk me through the progression. First, the politicians have to be convinced. Then they have to vote and change those- delete those two lines in the laws. And then what needs to happen? Does the government need to get involved in procuring nuclear infrastructure? Do private companies just jump in and deploy small modular reactors or something else? Or what? How do you see it playing out?

Ian Hore-Lacy
Well, I think that the government is not going to invest in energy plants, in electricity generating plants, because, virtually, the whole of the electricity provision in Australia is privatized. So it's a question of the government's making available whatever incentives it may to encourage private investment. And that may be- that thing gets complicated, because it's really the same situation. In the States, you've got sort of half your states that have merchant plants, sort of selling into a liberalized market, deregulated market. And the other half, of course, are cost plus arrangements. We're in the first category. So you've then got to look at some way of having some long-term assurance through electricity prices. And this is exactly the same problem that the UK Government is wrestling with. They've tried to do it one way with the Hinkley Point plant on contracts for difference. That's produced a rather high and forbidding figure. And they are right now looking at regulated asset base, so that you actually share the risk around everybody. That's the other thing, there's got to be some modification of the electricity marketing in Australia to allow for investment in fairly high capital cost plant.

Bret Kugelmass
And then what about selling straight to industry? Is it possible to skip over the electricity market reform and just have, the same long-term price guarantee, just with a private company, perhaps even a uranium mine site?

Ian Hore-Lacy
Oh, yes. Well, that's definitely possible, but probably not so much uranium mine site, but the bigger iron ore mines which use a lot of energy. But yes, look, there are those possibilities there. There's a lot of talk at the moment about hydrogen production - and of course, that's green hydrogen - but once you start looking at that green electricity anyway, which is intermittent and then applying that to expensive electrolyzers producing hydrogen, using nuclear power for that makes a lot more sense. Yeah, but there is a lot of sort of visionary discussion or rhetoric about exporting, Australia becoming a hydrogen exporter.

Bret Kugelmass
Very interesting. And then tell me more about how you've seen kind of the various technologies playing out. If you were to be on an advisory panel of some sort as to who should be coming into the into the Australian market with what nuclear technologies, what would you advise?

Ian Hore-Lacy
I'd say it's very confusing. I mean, there are just so many designs for small reactors out there. But look, all the discussion in Australia at the moment is around small modular reactors. All of it.

Bret Kugelmass
Small modular reactors... is this of the standard light water reactor variant or could this be an advanced new moderator, new coolant technology as well?

Ian Hore-Lacy
Yes. It doesn't get that specific, but I wouldn't rule out some large plants. It's just a question of siting them. And the "not in my backyard" syndrome loud and clear. But there's certainly scope for some larger plans. The main thinking is under 300 megawatts.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah. Where are your coal plants located right now? Are they close to the cities? Are they kind of a little further inland?

Ian Hore-Lacy
Oh no, they're mostly within 100 kilometers of the cities. And they're on coalfields.

Bret Kugelmass
They're on coalfields, yeah. But are they- I guess, how close are they to the city? Could one make the argument that you could just kind of replace coal infrastructure with even large scale nuclear and it's just not in the middle of the city, so that gives people a little out from the "not in my backyard" perspective?

Ian Hore-Lacy
Yes, you could do that and that's certainly been talked about. And it would do that. But the logic- Australia has got a lot of coastline, as you would have observed, and most people live near the coast. So it would make more sense into my way of thinking to put any large plants - or even small ones for that matter - on the coast and using water cooling through the condenser circuit. At the moment, nearly all the coal-fired plants - all but about two, I think - use potable water for cooling. They're evaporating a vast amount of water for cooling. And the reason that they do that is because they're not on the coast, they're on the coalfields. But the point is, if you replace those with plants that use seawater cooling, you'd save about two-thirds of Melbourne's water supply in effect. And Melbourne's a city of about four or five million.

Bret Kugelmass
How come they use potable water and they don't use like wastewater? You know what I'm saying, like the planets in Arizona do where it's just, instead of the sewage kind of going into the ocean or wherever people dump sewage, why don't they feed it over to the wastewater treatment plant right next to the power plant and use that water to evaporate?

Ian Hore-Lacy
Well, I think it's just that there is potable water available for each of these and putting the city's sewage in that direction would be quite a major exercise. And nobody's, I think, really thought about it. And they're certainly not thinking about it now, because all the thinking and discussion is about closing these plants, coal-fired plants, down anyway.

Bret Kugelmass
It's funny, because I'm a big fan of small modular reactors. I think that's probably how the industry is gonna have to rebuild itself. But I'm a little conflicted also, because I look at the history of how we used to build the large plants. And they were so cost effective and they built them so quickly, on time, under budget. When you go back far enough, when you go back to the 60s - not to the 70s, 80s, we're going back to the 60s in the US, at least, maybe 70s in France and Sweden - how do I reconcile this, the fact that- why can't we just do what we did then? Build 100 gigawatt-scale reactors, or half a gigawatt scale, like 500=megawatts, let's say. Why can't we just do exactly what we did then? I still don't know how to answer that question. What are your thoughts?

Ian Hore-Lacy
There's an MIT study, which is interesting, and it shows over 25, 30, 40 years the relative costs or the relative labor productivity between factories and large plants being built on-site, like those big plants. And the graphs have diverged. The labor productivity in factories has gone up over that period and the labor productivity on-site has gone down. And that's why those plants are less commercially, economically viable to build today, according to this study.

Bret Kugelmass
And how is that possible? I know now we're getting out of nuclear world, but how is it possible that labor productivity in the field goes down when I see really sophisticated modern equipment on construction sites today? Like I bet that the computer controls and the extra instrumentation and the tablets that the construction guys have that they're communicating with each other, I bet that stuff should make them more productive than it made them in the 1960s, not less. So what's going on there?

Ian Hore-Lacy
I don't really know.

Bret Kugelmass
Everything should be cheaper too, right? The cost of a like a Bobcat or a crane, all of those things should have gone down over time, not up. The equipment usage should be cheaper, too.

Ian Hore-Lacy
Yeah, I think it's probably related to unions. It's partly related to OHS. It's partly related to-

Bret Kugelmass
What's OHS? Occupational health and safety?

Ian Hore-Lacy
Occupational health and safety, and also the amount of regulation, particularly in the States. I mean, the contrast between now and 40 years ago in the States, I gather the proportion of people on the staff of a nuclear plant - and this presumably goes back to also building it - who are purely sort of filling in paper in terms of regulatory sense, rather than producing electricity, it's changed remarkably. I get it. But just come back to the small modulars. If you've got a factory, there's often more flexibility with regard to the labor that you can employ. And all those sort of technological gizmos you've just mentioned apply even more so in a factory. And this just comes back to the earlier question about where we might go in Australia. This little book produced by Ben Heard - or produced by the Minerals Council and written by Ben Heard - looks at three possible reactors. You asked about what type. One is the NuScale, which is a PWR. The other is the BWRX-300 from the GE Hitachi, which is a boiling water reactor.

Bret Kugelmass
They've got to get better at naming stuff.

Ian Hore-Lacy
Yeah. Then they got the IMSR, which is a molten salt reactor.

Bret Kugelmass
From who? Who makes the IMSR.

Ian Hore-Lacy
Sorry, I can't I can't remember off the top of my head. Terrestrial I think, might be Terrestrial. Anyway, it's much more innovative, whereas the NuScale and the BWRX are very well proven technology.

Bret Kugelmass
But I feel like none of those are very small. This is the other thing that really kind of bugs me about the nuclear industry is, I feel like they understand the advantages of making something small and modular. They articulate it perfectly. They get the theory, but the products that they're delivering oftentimes are neither small nor modular in reality. Do you feel the same way?

Ian Hore-Lacy
Yes, there is a there is a question there. I mean, the NuScale units are 77 megawatts and the idea would be-

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, but even so it's like- okay, so they say, Here we are, we have a modular reactor. And what they mean is, the reactor comes in a module and it's like an integral reactor. It's got the steam generator, everything built in. But the building isn't modular. The building is like the largest pool ever known to mankind. That has to be a custom on-site construction. Okay, you got the point on the nuclear side, but you seem to miss the point where most of the construction costs are.

Ian Hore-Lacy
Oh, no, I don't think it is most of the construction costs. I mean, pouring the concrete to build a big pool is no big deal out in the bush, or anywhere you'd like to put it.

Bret Kugelmass
But then why does Hinkley Point C cost so much? Because it's like-

Ian Hore-Lacy
Well, because it's a huge reactor. It's the most complicated, over-engineered reactor design being built anywhere in the world. And that's why even the French are peering it down and simplifying it for the EPR 2 or whatever they're calling it.

Bret Kugelmass
Okay, so this is good pushback. What you're telling me is, hey, Bret, pouring that concrete pad and the giant pool for NuScale is actually not a big deal. And they really did address the modularity issues by making the reactor module, more modular itself. That's where you're coming from?

Ian Hore-Lacy
Yeah, well, that's the 77-megawatt units and they're probably transportable on a train or truck or barge. Your BWRX is a much larger unit, it's 300 megawatts. And your IMSR units, those two together, you put together and they're about 195 megawatts each. They're also quite big. So you do raise the question of what modular means there, and we'll leave somebody else to work that out and expand it.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, it's like, I see people build fossil plants that are, let's say 50 megawatts. And these are small buildings, small operations, not much going on, pretty simple. And their capital cost is very low. And I find myself asking, I'm like, well if you can do that, why not just shove a small reactor in a building next to it and that should be cheap and easy, too. What's so hard about it?

Ian Hore-Lacy
Sorry, I lost you there, Bret. You were off for about 30 seconds.

Bret Kugelmass
I've seen some of these fossil plants come together that are let's say 50 megawatts or 100 megawatts. And they come together fast and cheap and it's mostly the same stuff at the end of the day as a nuclear plant, except for your boiler. So I'm wondering why nobody just does kind of like the old school construction, the old school style plant. Don't get fancy with the integral stuff at all. Just build your 50- or 100-megawatt power plant for a fossil plant and then put a nuclear building next to it that's going to be comparably small as well.

Ian Hore-Lacy
Yeah, well, I mean, the conventional island - that is the steam turbine generator for these plants - I think is fairly conventional. And all you're looking at with each of these plants is the nuclear end, the steam producing end. And just going back, the other thing about small modular reactors- I've mentioned those three are the ones that feature in this book, which will presumably now be a focus of attention in Australia, but you've got two other rather important innovations overseas. One is the Russian RITM-200 reactor, which is a 50-megawatt unit, basically, and that does come integral and that does come as a unit from the factory. You can look at a photo of it on railcar.

Bret Kugelmass
I think it's genius. I think they're pioneering one of the best paths forward. Why aren't other countries doing that too? I guess China maybe is, also.

Ian Hore-Lacy
Well, China- the ACP100 is possibly similar. I don't know enough about. It is relatively similar. But the other thing interesting one in China is the one that started up about two weeks ago the HTR-PM. That's a high temperature gas-cooled pebble bed reactor that sort of comes in two parts from the factory. The reactor unit which is- it's actually two 200-megawatt reactors driving a 200-megawatt turbine. I think- again, the photographs I've got of the actual hardware suggests that it would fit on a railway wagon quite happily, all the separate pieces, and just have to be connected on-site. So I think that's going to be a modular thing in the same sort of way as we're talking about. And then the ACP100 which is a pressurized water reactor.

Bret Kugelmass
I love the Russian design, the kinda barge design, I guess because they had the icebreaker thing already which was kind of similar, too, just kind of like a small pressurized water reactor Why don't the French just copy that? Like shouldn't EDF just look at it, copy it? They invest so much in these giant projects. They need an export economy anyway. They can't sell you guys submarines, because you know, we won. Why don't they just build a bunch of floatable little nuclear stations copying the Russian design?

Ian Hore-Lacy
Well, there is a French design that is comparable. I've forgotten what they call it at the moment, but there is one, yes.

Bret Kugelmass
Okay, so they do have something?

Ian Hore-Lacy
No, it's related to their naval reactors, but not the same. It has a particular name, but I just can't think of it at the moment.

Bret Kugelmass
Interesting. Okay. So we've covered a few different technologies. We've got your perspective now. You think that SMRs are kind of dominating the Australian talking points and stuff, but you're not against the big ones either. Wait, so you're pretty optimistic about things changing in the next couple years?

Ian Hore-Lacy
Yes, I think I am, now, much more optimistic than I was six months ago. And mainly because of this deal with nuclear powered submarines. That's suddenly I think broken people's- taken people out of the rut they've got into in thinking their way. And look, if we're going to have nuclear powered submarines, why on earth are we rabbiting on about net-zero by 2050 and not having the appropriate technology to get there in terms of power generation?

Bret Kugelmass
That makes sense. Okay, so you think that's what's gonna switch the narrative. That's pretty interesting. What else would you like to see people do? People who are listening to this, other your fellow countrymen, what do you want the average person to be doing on a day to day basis to help bring nuclear to Australia?

Ian Hore-Lacy
Look, I think just looking at the other applications for industrial heat. And the whole question of hydrogen I think has a big question mark over it in terms of its viability, and cost, not to mention the difficulties of transporting it. But that's all a very, very interesting question and that's something I've given a bit of time, because this is the sort of way in which I'm backing up my successor in London -who you probably should also interview - Alec Mitchell, but where there's a need to pull together a whole lot of information into a fresh information paper, and with hydrogen there's a lot of stuff to pull together. That's the sort of task I've been able to devote myself to and distracted by the routine updating that Alec does. I mean, of those 160 information papers, probably five or 10 are updated every week, to some degree. Now, I don't mean wholly rewritten. I mean, just up to date information dropped into them. And that's a big job for him. So when there's something extraneous like the new hydrogen paper, that's the sort of thing that he will chuck to me, which was a very interesting challenge. Because particularly, it's not just a matter of how you generate your hydrogen, how you produce your hydrogen, and also the many, many ways in which you can use hydrogen in a sort of a zero carbon environment, and also the different ways of transporting it, making it into ammonia for it, particularly. And you will then burn the ammonia as a fuel or you sort of crack the ammonia or after it's been transported halfway around the world, back into hydrogen, feed into your guest network, or whatever you want to do with it.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, I think hydrogen is also very interesting. I'm wondering, has he done your research- have you found- okay, so let's say that you're creating it through electrolysis. You've already got the advantage of doing it from nuclear instead of intermittent sources, because you get to run your equipment full power, same rate all the time, so there are huge cost advantages there. But then, what about the heat? Because nuclear energy starts off as heat before you even create the electricity, can you use that heat at a higher efficiency to get the water molecules to a better state to break them apart? Is that part of this? I've heard of high temperature electrolysis, but I don't know, has anyone actually done it? Does it work? Does it make sense?

Ian Hore-Lacy
Oh, yes, it does, it does work. But it's only really laboratory scale so far. And you've got the solid oxide sort of catalytic thing, so you're actually electrolyzing steam in effect. So yes, that's imminent, I would say, an imminent commercial technology. But you then of course go from there and you've got direct thermochemical production of hydrogen using… process or a couple of alternatives, but the … is the front runner at the moment. And that that means you need heat at about 950 degrees Celsius. And you directly produce hydrogen from water, mechanically, without that electrolysis. The intermediate stage is high temperature electrolysis.

Bret Kugelmass
Got it. Okay, very interesting stuff. As we wrap up here, are there any kind of final thoughts you want to leave our audience with?

Ian Hore-Lacy
No, just that I think, to be just very optimistic about having nuclear technology is there. It has so many applications and to just work away at calming people's fears and misapprehensions down and working against what is really a campaign of misinformation about it that is really insidious and really damaging. And you get that turning up in all sorts of places, just making sure it's really good people's rationality in terms of listening to it or publishing it.

Bret Kugelmass
Well, I'm with you. I think nuclear's got a very bright future. Ian Hore-Lacy, thank you so much for joining us today on Titans of Nuclear.

Ian Hore-Lacy
My pleasure. Thanks so much for your time.

Bret Kugelmass
We are here today on Titans of Nuclear with Lonnie Stevenson, who's the President of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Lonnie, welcome to Titans of Nuclear.

Lonnie Stephenson
Thank you, thank you for the invitation. Appreciate it.

Bret Kugelmass
Well, I'd love to hear about what you do on a day to day basis., but before we get there, tell us a little bit about yourself. Where did you grow up?

Lonnie Stephenson
I grew up, I'm originally from Rock Island, Illinois, which is northwest side of the state along the Mississippi River and started my apprenticeship as an electrician back in 1975.

Bret Kugelmass
Wow. And what made you want to become an electrician?

Lonnie Stephenson
Well, actually, I was trying to decide what I wanted to do. I worked in a grocery store and a produce department and a gentleman come through there, electrician was doing a service call for the store. And so I got talking to him, I asked him how do you go about becoming an electrician? Where do you go to sign up? He gave me the information, told me where to go. I went and signed up and a little over a year later I got in the program.

Bret Kugelmass
Amazing. Oftentimes, whenever I hear about the statistics about how dangerous different jobs are - firefighter policeman - every now and then, someone's like, actually, it's electricians that's the most dangerous job in the country. Am I hearing that right? Is that true?

Lonnie Stephenson
Well, it certainly can be. As long as everybody's following the safety protocols and things, it can be safe. But it's dangerous every day and you can't take it for granted. You always got to remember what you're dealing with. I remember a journeyman telling me unless you can see both ends of a piece of wire laying on the ground, assume that that wire is hot.

Bret Kugelmass
Like a gun, assume the safety is off always.

Lonnie Stephenson
Exactly. Always assume that it's energized. It can be. In the line industry, on top of it, they're out there in the elements, climbing poles, steel structures every day, so it's always the same thing. It's a very dangerous environment. But again, I think if everybody follows the proper protocols, it can be a safe and rewarding career as well.

Bret Kugelmass
Yep, yep. Tell me about earlier in your career. What types of jobs were you on?

Lonnie Stephenson
Well, I was what we call an inside wireman. I worked on buildings, building construction. Yeah, I had just- actually, my first job, I was working on a steel mill out in the middle of Iowa. It was a scrap production plant and very cold that winter out in the middle of the of the fields. There's no heat, because heat is generated by the furnaces once it's done, so they really don't have much heat in those buildings. It was a pretty cold winter I spent that first year, but it really made me decide it's what I wanted to do, though, for my career. And then I had other opportunities - and really while I was on that job - to learn a lot of different aspects of pipe bending, control wiring, wire pulling, you name it. I really did get a lot of experience in just that first project and then moved on from there and a few other projects, but very rewarding.

Bret Kugelmass
And what's the lifestyle like? Do you have to move from state to state for different jobs or how does that work?

Lonnie Stephenson
Well, no, it depends. I mean, we had geographical jurisdiction, non-local covered, and anywhere within that area, which in my local could probably be about three hours from the southern part of the district of our jurisdiction to the northern. So depending on where you lived in there, you could travel a couple hours, three hours, to get to your worksite. Typically, it's probably most people within about an hour, hour and a half, maybe two hours at the max, because the way that jobs are distributed. But the way construction goes, especially in the union construction, if you happen to have a downside- like once I went through my apprenticeship and I was recognized as a journeyman, that's recognized all across the United States and Canada, for that matter. And so if you are slow, the construction is slow in the area where you come from and there's other work, there's a demand and looking for help in other areas, you can go there, go to work and you're recognized as that journeyman and get paid their journeyman wages and benefits.

Bret Kugelmass
And the journeyman certification. What is that based off of? Is it a certain years experience? Do you have to pass a test? You gotta wire something up in front of somebody? How do you get your journeyman?

Lonnie Stephenson
Well, our apprenticeship program now, it's a five year program that our apprentices start. During the course of their study, every year kind of builds on the year previous. It's kind of a refresher, when they're doing their book work and they're always tested. When they continue to test, it's based on current things that they've learned, but also what they had been exposed to in the past. And so when you complete your five year apprenticeship program, that is considered the same as taking a journeyman exam. Now, some areas, some locals actually do have a journeyman exam in addition to finishing the apprenticeship, and also depends on the state. Some states have licensing requirements, where you still have to go get that license in the state and take an exam probably to get recognized for that license as well.

Bret Kugelmass
What are some of the things that you just can't learn from a book, that you got to be out on the site to really master the skills?

Lonnie Stephenson
Well, a lot of the work, it is physical. When it comes to conduit bending, for example, you can read a book, but until you've got the tools in your hand and you're working with that conduit, you really have to learn that on the job, and wire pulling. A lot of the physical aspects of the job have to be learned on the job. My first day on the job - and I always relate this, whenever I talked to apprentices today - very first day, a journeyman, he told me, he says one thing about this trade, kid, is you'll never quit learning. Your entire career, you're going to work with somebody else that's got a better way or that's going to teach you how to rig for a wire pull or things like that. You'll continue to learn, because really every day is unique. It's not like you're going to the job the same day and you're pushing the same button doing the same task. Every day is a whole new task in itself.

Bret Kugelmass
What are you learning? Are you learning how to use new tools? Or are you learning the physical technique of how you- or are you learning strategy, what order you do things? What are the different types of learnings that occur?

Lonnie Stephenson
Well, really all the above, everything you said. There are the different tools and tools and materials have changed tremendously over when I started my apprenticeship. So you're constantly changing, keeping up with the newest technologies. And of course, the book work of it and the learning. I know when I was there, we were still learning about tubes, test tubes and things like that from the old televisions. For control, you had tubes. Now, today, of course everything's all solid state and computerized, so it's a whole different learning pattern today. This generation is learning what they're capable of doing. And we have to continue to change with the industry, or we will be left behind. And that's why our training is not only for apprentices. We have continued journeymen and apprentices, too, and all of our training facilities. We've got about 340 training facilities all across the United States. There's constantly journeyman training and upgrading as well.

Bret Kugelmass
From when you began to today, if you were to do the same job, wire up the same facility, how much faster would it go today, because of the new tools, techniques, technology?

Lonnie Stephenson
Um, yeah, it has made a difference. It takes less people on a job, I think, the man hours to complete a task, because of the tools and the technologies. It'd be hard to really equate how much less it'd be. You still have your conduit bending, however. It's not like before, they'd be required to have rigid conduit, which is a whole different aspect and a little longer, because it's more industrial. Now, there's still conduit bending and it's still an artwork to be honest with you. You get people that are good at running conduit and they'll take pictures of it and show people, because they're proud of it. When you look at it, it does. It looks like artwork in the way they lay out these large conduit runs or there might be 100 different conduits running in that control room and they're all looking nice and parallel and in line. It really is artwork for those that love doing conduit. There are some people, that's what they love to do. They want to run conduit and they're masters at it.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, it really is artwork. I subscribe to a channel on Instagram or follow a feed, an electrical feed on Instagram. And every now and then you see this picture, it's like, I don't know if it's a circuit breaker or something, or just some sort of routing box. But you see the perfect angle. Like it's a perfect right angle, then a perfect right angle above it, and perfect angle above it, and the colors are perfect. It is artwork. It looks almost like a tapestry.

Lonnie Stephenson
It is. And that's one of the things we take pride in, is not only doing the job right, but doing it professional, so when you look at it it's not just wires crisscrossed all across the place. You're training it in there, if you will, and really, like I said, it is something to be proud of. And that's why you're seeing pictures like that, because our members out there doing that work, they want people to see the skill that they've got and how they can also make it look well. Even though that electricity is gonna run through that wire however it's done, but the bottom line is it doesn't take any longer to really train it in there and make it look professional. So you really know what you've done and how proud you are of what you've done.

Bret Kugelmass
And saves people money down the line when you come back 10 years later.

Lonnie Stephenson
Absolutely. You know the one thing about the trade, too, both our linemen and our wireman journeyman: you always remember that job you worked on. Whenever I get back to my hometown - get back there a couple times a year - I'll go by a building and, this is 40 years later, I'll be thinking, I wired that building. I worked on that building when they built it. It's probably been remodeled a couple times since then. But there's that pride that you have in the trade of always knowing that what you worked on is there and you can drive by it and know I spent six months on that job. It was really a good job.

Bret Kugelmass
Hey listen, you probably have a better appreciation than most people just for modern conveniences. I don't think, you know most people will flip on the light switch since the day they're born and never think about what's going on behind the wall, but you probably have almost x-ray vision when you look at any building, any house, any anything, you can probably see where the wires are through the walls.

Lonnie Stephenson
You know, whenever I'm at, it could even be a restaurant or something, I'm always looking up the ceiling and looking to see if I see conduit run or wires running and see what kind of a- I'll say, Oh, yeah, that was installed by an IBEW person that did that job, because you can usually tell by the craftsmanship and they really want to make sure it's done right. And the same thing when I go into a building, when I go into a home. I always look to see where the panel is. In fact, when I built the house that I live in now in Maryland, was going through the model home and I was - and traditionally where I come from, your panel and your service is in your basement -I'm looking around and finally I asked the guy, the sales rep for this building that was building the homes. I said, Where's your panel on this house? And he goes, Well, it's out in the garage. I had never owned a house where you had the panel in the garage. But I still don't, by the way. They were able to- I talked to the power company and they put ours in the basement, because I always like to have access to it in case you ever want to add, move, or changes, you've got access to it if you've got it in the basement. They let me locate it in the basement.

Bret Kugelmass
I'd say you get special privileges. Tell me about the union. How does the union work? What does it do? How many people are in it? What's it all about?

Lonnie Stephenson
Well, we were established in 1891. And at that time it was a lot of linemen, linemen that were working on really telegraph lines back then. Going along the railroad and putting in telegraph lines. And then, as electricity started become more prevalent, working on those power poles. It was about 50% of the linemen who were dying on the job, either through falls, or getting electrocuted. But there was about 50% of them that were dying. So that's when Henry Miller who was our lineman, and he was our first president of the IBEW. When they formed and got together with 10 delegates, the first time they got together in St. Louis, there was 10 representatives from 10 different unions and got together and decided, Hey, we need to form a national union at that time. Canada wasn't part of it, so we were the National Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. And then a few years after that, Canada, one of our first Canadian locals joined and so then we became the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. All through that process of this started because of safety and making sure people had the proper tools and training so they can do their jobs. We always have a saying. You want to go home the same way when you left home. Go to work, you want to come back home and be in a physical position, and to build- take care of your family and still get the job done. We've got about 775,000 active and retired members all across the United States and Canada. We now have our largest construction group, what we call A membership, that we've ever had in the history of the IBEW. We have over 400,000 members that work on the construction side of the house. And then we have our utility members, well over 200,000 members that work for the utilities themselves. We have people working in broadcast, telecommunications, manufacturing, railroad, government. I mean we really have probably a little over 50% construction now, but everybody else, all the other branches that we represent. And every branch is unique and very important and really essential to the movement of the economy, keeping everything going, all the people we represent. We're pretty proud of them.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, that's pretty amazing. So I'd love to just hear about your personal experience, though. I mean, how did you rise through the ranks?

Lonnie Stephenson
I always ask myself that same question, quite often. Like I said, once I happened to get in the apprenticeship program- and back then actually, and I remember that journeyman electrician that came through that I talked about previously. He told me, he asked me, Do you know anybody that's in the trade? Do you have any family or friends, know anybody in the trade? I said, No, I don't know anybody. And he says, Well, I'll tell you where to go sign up, but it really helps if you know somebody that will really kind of speak up for you, I guess, and to help get you in the trade. So I went and applied. I was going to high school. I thought I wanted to be an electrical engineer at one time. I was really preparing myself and taking all the math courses you could, the science classes you could, really thinking I was going to go down that. And I wasn't a straight A student by any means, but I was a good- I was a B student. I think it must have been my grades and maybe some of the classes I had taken must have helped me get in, because I truly knew nothing about it and didn't know anybody in the trade. Then, once I got in my apprenticeship, you're on probation for a year and then you get into the union. At least we were then. A lot of them, your membership from day one now depends on where you're at. But we were on a year probation, then after that you get in the union. And I happened to be working on a job where some officers, Executive Board members of our Local were on and so they encouraged me to get involved. Go to the union meetings, get involved in volunteer and on committees. And so I did. I started doing a lot of things. We had a picnic committee. You get there early in the morning, help set things up. We always had a summer picnic for all of our members to come. But it really got to be fun. Once it gets in your blood and you're just voluntarily, Yes, I'll go help on this, I can help on that. We had a lot of community projects, community service projects we do in the area, go help out on that. I was actually sitting at a union meeting, it was the night of our nominations - I can tell you it was 1984. And I wasn't planning on running for any kind of position within the local union. It was the furthest thing from my mind. And one of my good friends I was sitting next to, they were nominating someone to be the vice president. There was one person that was nominated and said, are there any other nominations or any other nominations? And my buddy jumped up says, I nominate Lonnie Stephenson. And I looked to him, I said, What the heck is that about? Well, he had worked with the guy that was nominated and apparently they didn't get along too well, so I can't let him run unopposed. You got to run against him. And so on, I ended up, I got elected. And three years later, I ended up running for the president of my local and got elected, '87, 1987 was President. I did that for two terms. Then I was an assistant, our business manager asked me to go into the Local full-time in 1991. I went in to work with him as an assistant, worked with him for five years. And then when he was retiring, he came to me and said, Lonnie, I want you to run for business manager. And he had a couple other reps that had been with him a lot longer. And I said, Well, what about Gary? What about Carl? He says, We've already talked it Lonnie, you're the next generation of leadership for this Local. We're all three behind you. We want you to run. And so I ultimately became business manager, along the way, and then-

Bret Kugelmass
And how many people are in the local division?

Lonnie Stephenson
My Local, well, when I started, we had about probably 400. When I became the business manager, we had about 700. And then we had about 1,100. There's still a little over 1,100 members in my local today back in the Quad Cities. So we continued to grow as well.

Bret Kugelmass
And then what's the next level up from local?

Lonnie Stephenson
Well, then I was asked to go to work for the International Union as an international rep. They have field reps all across the United States and Canada that go in to assist and train and support our local unions. I was asked to take on a position as international rep and I started that in January 1, 2002. And then I ended up, probably about a year later or two years later, I went to work in the district office as an assistant, a desk rep we always call them, with the Vice President at that time to assist him in the office. And then he retired in 2010 and at that time I was asked by our International President Hill to fulfill that position as the Vice President. So then I did that for five years, and then President Hill announced his retirement in 2015 and he asked me to come out here to DC to take on the position as International President.

Bret Kugelmass
Amazing. Help me understand. What is the functional difference between what the local union achieves and what the international body achieves? What things are you negotiating, or who are you dealing with?

Lonnie Stephenson
Really - and I always tell people this and I mean, it - the toughest job I think I've ever had was being a business manager at the local level. Because they're working directly for and negotiating those contracts and handling grievances if there are grievances of their members. And it can be very time consuming and stressful. So what we try to do as the International then, we try to assist that business manager by having the reps as I mentioned before. They come in and help give them some guidance. We do a lot of training and education, too, for our business managers, negotiating contracts or handling grievances and things of that nature. But really, they're the ones that's working directly day in and day out with our members. And so, I always say if it wasn't for our members that's out there working hard every day, doesn't matter which branch they work out of, as I said, and those local union leadership that's doing it, that's where the strength of the IBEW is. It's not with me. It's about our members that are out there each and every day. They're the ones that built this union, continue to build this union, and we continue to grow by the way. We're very excited about that. We've grown I think like seven, eight years in a row, now, we've gained membership. We had a little bit of a hiccup with the COVID last year, but we still kind of maintained and now we're back. Even though we still haven't recovered fully from COVID, we are starting to see our numbers rise. We're starting to get back into organizing and growing.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, pretty amazing. How many local chapters are there? How many different-

Lonnie Stephenson
I'm trying to think off the top of my head, I think we got about 300 and some local unions.

Bret Kugelmass
And each of them 500 to 1,000 mark of people or something?

Lonnie Stephenson
Yeah.

Bret Kugelmass
That's phenomenal. Yeah, that's a lot to manage. So then how does, tell me, how does the International Union, how do they interact with politics, like with national politics? What's the connection there?

Lonnie Stephenson
Well, of course, like I said before, our local unions, they get along legislatively on the state level, pretty much. And then we out in DC, then we get intertwined, of course, in national politics and national legislation. We're very engaged in that. We have to be. People sometimes say, Why, you're a labor union, why are you involved in politics? Well, politics really drives everything we do, so we have to be engaged. And we want to make sure that we educate these politicians on who we are and what we do, because some people just don't know. They just don't understand what we provide to our countries, both the United States and Canada, and what the skill level of our members are, our dedication to their countries and their communities. We're labor unions and we represent the union, but we're also proud to have good relationships with our employers. And through our Code of Excellence, we have our Code of Excellence Program, but we know, and I've always told people jokingly, I'd rather sit down at the bargaining table trying to negotiate a contract with an employer that's got money coming out of their pockets, instead of having their pockets inside out, because they have no money. We want our employers to be successful, and all of our branches, we want them to be successful, because that also helps us then be successful, to have our members that's working for them and have good wages and benefits for them and their families.

Bret Kugelmass
Okay, so that's negotiating on the local level. What are the issues on the federal level? What are you fighting for?

Lonnie Stephenson
Well, right now, of course, hopefully this infrastructure legislation is out there, bipartisan infrastructure. That would be huge for- a lot of that is for the construction end of the industry, but also affects non-construction as well. But that's big for us right now. The Build Back Better Plan, anything that's going to help build the communities that we live in and raise the standard of living for everyone, we support that. And we also, of course, we want to have- people have the right to organize. And if they choose to join a union, they should have that opportunity without being harassed or threatened by their employers or being fired by their employers. That's what the National Labor Relations Act was actually designed for, originally, was to protect people's right to organize. And so we've got the PRO Act is what we're working on right now with the National AFL CIO and all the labor unions. PRO Act would help protect those people that are really seeking to have a union and without retaliation from their employers. We really push hard on that. Obviously, with the energy and the transformation and where we're going, the energy of the future, we're engaged in that heavily, in those conversations and how that's going to, how we evolve from producing energy today and where we're going for the energy of tomorrow. We're really engaged real heavy on that as well.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, I mean, listen, the clean energy transition is going to up end world infrastructure and you guys are the absolute critical linchpin piece of the whole thing. It's like, how are we going to install any electric infrastructure without your community being the backbone of it?

Lonnie Stephenson
Yeah, that's true, it really is, and just transforming how energy is generated. The more wind, the more solar. You've still got to get transmission, you've got it because that's usually out in the rural areas. You don't see a bunch of wind towers inside a metropolitan area, or even solar. It's usually outside. But you've got to get that power from the source it's being produced to where the demand is, and that's in urban areas. And so that means a lot of transmission.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah. What about nuclear? What's your take on nuclear?

Lonnie Stephenson
Well, nuclear has absolutely got to be part of the equation on where we're going for the energy, the future. Nuclear right now, I believe, represents over 50% of power generated in United States that is carbon free, is produced with nuclear energy. And we have to have, I always say we have to have reliable baseload energy. When you turn that switch on, you're going to have power. And that's where nuclear has got to come into play, because there are times the sun's not shining and the winds not blowing and battery- they're starting to have battery backup and supplies, but the technology is not there yet. You can't go days on end without having generation coming from solar, for example, and keep the lights on. You've got to have a baseload energy and nuclear is carbon free. I mean, it just makes sense. And the next generation of nuclear, as well, the small modular units. That's where I think you're going to see the nuclear in the future, that way we can, like I said, as long as everything we're moving towards, to just have that reliable baseload that you know you can count on as well.

Bret Kugelmass
And how did you come across nuclear personally? What was the first point in your career that that you got exposure to it?

Lonnie Stephenson
Well, probably I was a third year apprentice. We've got the Quad Cities Nuclear Power Station is in my local union. And I was working in there as an apprentice. If I remember right, Quad Cities went online to start producing power, I think around 1972. And, like I said, I started my apprenticeship in 1975. But in 1978, I was there as an apprentice with the contractor and we were doing updating and doing some adds and moves for the security system, around the exterior security system around the nuclear power plant. And so our members were, about every year, there are outages. They're having outages and refuel outages and going in and making changes, adds and changes. We get a number of our members of my local that worked those outages and I did too, when I was a journeyman. I used to go back there and work those outages, because that's usually in the fall or the early spring. And when those outages occur and it was always a good place to go for a couple months, and they'll go in there and get everything taken care of and keep them running. So I got exposed really early.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah. And then, I saw that you put together this op-ed, with Steven Nesbitt, on the future of nuclear. Just from your perspective, you get to see people around the country and some people just kind of exposed to their own perspective, being in a city or wherever they are. What's your perspective? What's the average person's take on nuclear? Is it positive? Is it they don't know? Is it negative? What do you think?

Lonnie Stephenson
I think people that aren't really educated don't really understand it. You think about nuclear and you might think something like a bomb. You're thinking about things, people that don't understand, they really don't and I think maybe they get some negative thoughts. But once you educate them and they understand how the system works and how safe it is. It really is. It's extremely safe and people, there's a fear. Because there's been, you think about Three Mile Island. How many years ago was that? But even though that was seen like a crisis at the time, the design maintained everything. It wasn't there was a whole bunch of nuclear that got exposed out in the atmosphere and people got- the system worked. Even though it was, there was a malfunction, the system worked.

Bret Kugelmass
It should have been a great story. Yeah, it should have been a great story about how good the engineering is, not this like scare failure- I gotta blame the nuclear industry on that kind of. Like how did they miss the opportunity to turn that around into a success story? Look at how amazing this device is, that even when it fails, nobody gets hurt. That's an amazing story. It's like, how did the narrative get spun around?

Lonnie Stephenson
Yeah, really is. That made them, after that event, it slowed down a lot of nuclear being built in country. And there were still several projects that were going online. But there were some changes that they made from some of the things that they learned and made some changes in the interior, the construction and how things were done. And just again, to ensure that everything was safe and continue to move forward in the industry. I think it's, you're right. It really was something that should have been said, Yeah, there were some problems there, but it contained itself. And then you hear things, of course, like Chernobyl and in Russia, but that's a different country and they-

Bret Kugelmass
Different country, different type of plant, different technology, everything different.

Lonnie Stephenson
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so I feel very confident in our nuclear plants, the updates. So I said, they have the outages all the time. They're constantly updating and making repairs, replacing cable, for electrical. They'll be replacing cables that were installed 30 years ago. When they're doing an outage, they're always updating and making sure that everything's running smoothly and efficiently.

Bret Kugelmass
Yep. You were also - just back to the federal politics side - you were on the transition team. How was that?

Lonnie Stephenson
Well, yeah, that was interesting. I don't know if there have been labor leaders involved the transition team before. There was me and the Farmworkers, the President of the Farmworkers was on it as well. But yeah, it was very interesting. Well, it gave me an opportunity to have some discussion and what positions were being filled where and who they were? It was really an honor to be asked to do that.

Bret Kugelmass
What is your input like? Is it, do you talk about people? Are you suggesting names? Are you talking about topics and questions to ask them? What's your input?

Lonnie Stephenson
Really, helping suggest names, or they'd run names by me if there's somebody, do you know this person? Do you have any concerns one way or the other? And then, because internally and administration, they really had the people that did the real vetting on the end and decided where they were going, but we certainly, during the process, were able to offer suggestions and moving forward. I think there are like 4,000 or 5,000 positions, I think, that get filled by the President of the United States. And our goal is initially that, by Inauguration Day, to have a couple thousand of those positions filled. There are still some of them that are still in the process of being filled today, I think. But administratively and getting their main core going, we were directly involved in all of that early on.

Bret Kugelmass
And do you still help out in some ways? Is there still some advice function that you participate in?

Lonnie Stephenson
Yes, particularly when it comes to the energy and climate policy. Our team works directly with the White House and communicates with the White House, probably almost weekly as they're continuing to evolve what they're gonna do. We've got some input, some suggestions, or tell them some of our concerns that we have. And so we can continue to work really closely with the administration on, particularly on energy, but really many other issues as well. Yeah, it's good.

Bret Kugelmass
As we wrap up here, I'd just love to hear your kind of take on the future. Where do you see things going over the next five or 10 years?

Lonnie Stephenson
I think we're at a point that we're evolving in a lot of ways, I think, in this country. I hope we get to a position that things like infrastructure or something that both parties can agree on and should agree on. You think about the core infrastructure of this country was built back in the 40s, 50s. Eisenhower, President Eisenhower started to, when we started building the road systems. It was crucial. And during his administration said, We've got to have the roads and the bridges. Because I think his experience of during the war seeing how important it was to have an interstate system, be able to move people. We've got to get to the point, I think high speed rail needs to be continued to be looked at. We're behind. There are a lot of countries that are, when it comes to high speed rail, even mass transit within the metropolitan areas. We've got a lot of room for opportunity and improvement I think in those regards, and building the transmission system. Like we said, if we continue to move- they're saying the demand for electricity is continuing to grow. It's not going away, it's growing. And especially if we evolve into electric vehicles and all those, there's going to be more and more demand on electricity. That's going to mean, I think, some great opportunities for our country. I think great opportunities for the IBEW, because all the people that we represent, what we do along those lines. I'm pretty excited about. I'm pretty excited about it. And I think if we can get the- if we can ever get the political system to really look out for what's good for our country and not get so tied up on the politics - and it's always going to be that, always has been - but really, there's a time you got to sit down and say, let's get this thing moving, it's good for our country. And I think that, personally, I think President Biden, I think he has made that one of his objectives early on, is I can work with people. I know we have to work the other side of the aisle to get things done. I think he's trying and I think we're going to get there and I think it's going to be good for our country moving forward. We have lots of opportunities, lots of opportunities for everyone to grow all across the United States.

Bret Kugelmass
Lonnie Stevenson, everybody, thank you so much.

Lonnie Stephenson
Thank you.

This transcript is pending

Jadwiga Najder
Hello Titans of Nuclear. Today with me, we have Laura Leay. Hello, Laura.

Laura Leay
Hi.

Jadwiga Najder
Tell me a little bit about your self, a little bit about your background. Where did you go to school? Where did you study? How did you start your career?

Laura Leay
All of my education has been in the UK. I'm from the northeast of England originally. High school I guess we can kind of skip over. I was pretty good at quite a lot of things and science was what really interested me. I thought it's sort of the thing that I can see has benefit to the world and it helps us understand things, so that understanding can really contribute to society. So I got my undergraduate degree from Durham University. As you know, I wanted to study, so I ended up studying natural sciences, which is pretty much whatever you want it to be. The degree I came out with was earth science with astronomy, which a friend of mine refers to as doing geology in space, two very different things. After that, I still didn't know what I wanted to do. I kind of stumbled across a Master's in what's essentially process engineering and process control, still didn't know what I wanted to do. A friend just happened to mention to me, there's this big site in West Cumbria that does a lot of science, you might want to take a look. That at the time was sort of just transforming from BNFL into the different organizations, Sellafield Limited and what was then called Nexia Solutions, which is now the National Nuclear Laboratory, and got an interview, got the job, and that was it. That's how I got into nuclear.

Jadwiga Najder
Okay, and what did you- what were you doing at the Nuclear National Laboratory?

Laura Leay
I was working on the vitrification test rig, which is a full-scale, inactive version of the active lines that process the high-level waste. Because it was doing experiments into how to improve the process and looking at different scenarios, you wouldn't really want to do that on something that is radioactive. Because in an experiment, although you can predict what the outcome is, you never know for sure, right? That's why you're doing the experiment. It was an inactive facility using inactive, non-radioactive stimulants of the high-level waste to look at different factors that affect the process. I was a technical support officer. I was trained to work on shifts. Turns out I wasn't very good at that, because a 12-hour shift and sometimes they're overnight. And I'm not good with different sleep patterns. I was also analyzing a lot of plant data and writing reports talking about how the plant performed under different conditions. The purpose of the plant is to turn the high-level waste from a liquid into a solid glassy waste form, so some reports about what that glass was like as well as a product, how durable was it? Whether it was a glass or not, that sort of thing?

Jadwiga Najder
Okay, and you said you were working with inactive substances, also. As I understand it well, it was supposed to be a mock-up of the real waste so that you can develop a technology that is the most optimal for the actual wastes.

Laura Leay
Yeah, that's right. It was chemically similar and all the elements that would only be radioactive were sort of taken out of that simulant in the non-radioactive elements of pro rata dope.

Jadwiga Najder
And even though the substances were not radioactive, what was the regime in the in the laboratory? Was it following the standard nuclear industry practices? Or was it a bit more relaxed? These were not dangerous elements.

Laura Leay
Because it was on a nuclear license site, even though we weren't dealing with radioactivity, we still had to follow the same procedures. It was still very stringent. And everything you did was quality checked. Everything you did you have to be trained for. Yeah, it was exactly the same as if you were working with radioactive material. The only difference was you could actually physically handle this stuff. You weren't behind shielding.

Jadwiga Najder
Alright. So this was your first job and then later how did it develop in your career? Did you use it later? Or you decided to try something new?

Laura Leay
I moved away from it for a bit. I did two years working for National Nuclear Laboratory. And then I was a safety consultant for a little bit. My reason for doing that was I thought I'd learn a lot more about the industry and I could sort of, again, use my knowledge to help people do things and facilitate doing things safely. But it turns out safety consultancy is really, really slow. I ended up being stuck in a loop of going through the same quality checks and never actually producing a document for anyone. That was sort of, in the eight months I was doing it anyway and I thought, I'm a scientist, I really like doing science. Maybe I should go back to doing that and stop doing all this paperwork. I started looking for something else and I found a PhD that wasn't even in the nuclear industry. I spent four years sitting in front of a computer simulating molecules. They were these polymers that are porous and they interact with carbon, CO2. It was looking at how they could capture CO2 from different processes. That was all sort of atomistic level modeling type work. Then from that, I was looking around for a job at the end of my PhD, like all students do, and came across a new lab that had been set up in Cumbria, working with the nuclear industry, but part of the university that I was doing my PhD at. They just happened to have a job opportunity going that apparently I was the ideal candidate for.

Jadwiga Najder
All right. So what is this job right now? Can you give us a little bit of detail to your current position?

Laura Leay
Well, so the job that I was doing - it was initially for two years - it was a knowledge exchange fellowship. Because the lab was fairly new and it was still being established, it was about doing short-term packages of work for different people in the industry, so doing experiments into radiation science to prove the benefit of the facility, so then more people would come and use it. It set up longer term projects. I did that for a couple of years and then that got turned into a fellowship that was for five years. My fellowship ended a few months ago, so now I've gone freelance, having had a career, having worked for other people for a bit, and having been in academia and seeing both sides. Neither one's quite for me, but working for myself probably is, so maybe I'll go my own way and see how that works out.

Jadwiga Najder
All right. Actually, this knowledge exchange position that you mentioned, it sounds super interesting. It's like an internal, like, inside of the industry, inside of the science and kind of a mean of promotion of your own lab, of your own facility. Is it really needed still in this time, the 21st century? I could imagine everything you can find on the internet and this kind of information should be very much available. Why is there still an interest to conduct such experiments?

Laura Leay
I think there are a lot of details that aren't quite understood all that well, so it's really digging down. My PhD was about atoms, was about digging into what those atoms are doing and how radiation interacts with them. Radiation has lots of interesting things that other processes don't do. You could heat something up and that will cause a chemical reaction, right? But radiation might cause a different chemical reaction. It's looking into all those very fine details and going beyond what we already know.

Jadwiga Najder
Hmm. All right. It's very interesting. Was it something more towards benchmarking or really defining some new edges in the sector that you are expecting?

Laura Leay
I would say that some of it was about something has been observed in industry and they can't dig into what it is. Again, if you're working with radioactivity on a nuclear license site, you're very restricted on what you can do. But in a university lab, it can take you down a very precarious route. You can look at more variables and you can control the variables a bit more as well. You've got more ways of looking into whatever process might be happening in industry.

Jadwiga Najder
All right. So you crossed several positions in the nuclear industry. You came inside, you jumped out, you came back. What do you think about the image of nuclear industry? What was your perception, being the safety consultant, being the scientist doing your PhD? What are your observations for the moment?

Laura Leay
When I first joined the industry, I knew pretty much nothing about it. Working at Sellafield site was my first introduction to how they do things. What they do is very, very thorough and very careful. And very slow.

Jadwiga Najder
You think it's based on something objective, or it's just like outdated methods that the process is so slow?

Laura Leay
I think, because they have- they're so cautious about everything they do, because of the public perception that nuclear is really dangerous. It just it takes time to get all your paperwork written and to get all your training done and to demonstrate to each and every individual who is coming into it as a newbie - like I was - has the skills and the knowledge to do what needs to be done. In contrast, academia is a bit more- there's a term called academic freedom, where it's almost like you can do what you want, but it's not quite what I'm trying to say, because obviously there are still safety procedures to follow. But you've got more free rein of the direction that your research takes. There's a lot more freedom. I think what I learned from the safety consultancy is there are many ways of doing the same job safely. It would be nice if people could just agreed with what you said you want to do is safe and you can get on with it. I felt like that's what wasn't happening on the projects that I was working on. That might just be my own experience. It's probably very different for other people, but that's what it felt like to me. I wouldn't say the safety was a barrier to doing anything, but it just it didn't fit my piece of work.

Jadwiga Najder
Alright, yes, I guess there is a certain profile of an employee that fits well in the nuclear industry, while maybe for some people may be a little bit, let's say, too rigid to continue working in this scheme. But what I'm wondering is, to which extent is it the problem of the, as I said before, outdated methods that can be maybe upgraded? For example, with the digitalization of the documents with, I don't know, harmonization of the process between the plants, between the between the factories, even just so that one well-developed method can serve in in different facilities. And do you think this could help permanently change this problem that you are seeing, or there is something more inherent to the nuclear industry that cannot be fine-tuned with these small updates?

Laura Leay
And I think the sort of technological changes, they do serve a purpose. But it also feels like there are a lot of people that are so used to doing things the way they've done, you don't necessarily want to do it differently. And I can see how that comes about. There's talk of an aging workforce, right? So people have been in the industry for decades and they're used to their way of doing it. And maybe they were some of the pioneers of the industry as well, so they have a certain prestige. Whereas there are people like me coming in and all new and keen to get things done. Hold on a second, let's think about this. Think about the long-term implications of what the young people want to do. But then equally there are young people that can sort of see that long-term view and can see that the industry could be doing so much more. But it's holding itself back because it's so used to this slower pace of work. It's more about, I guess, changing behaviors, and making people more interested in taking up the new technologies and exploring those possibilities and then doing the work to say, Oh, yeah, actually, that technology, having done all the research into it, that makes sense. We can use that technology.

Jadwiga Najder
Could this maybe - this update and these improvements - help to get more people to the industry into the science, which is always an issue or was a problem. Having not enough students, then not enough professionals. Professionals changing the industries, because of the, I don't know, burnout, or just let's say slow pace of the development. And how could this be helped with the improvements of the industry? How do you think?

Laura Leay
Good question. I suspect that it's the behaviors that need to change before the technology. And I think that will be very difficult to do because people I guess don't like changing their behaviors. I think everyone's a bit stuck in their ways. And they don't necessarily like having to learn a new way of doing things. I mean, there are definitely things I do in my work that I know probably take me longer than they should but I'm so used to doing it. And it seems like it will take me longer to learn something new that I'll just keep on doing what I'm doing. It's not the main focus of what I'm currently working on.

Jadwiga Najder
Oh yes, the development is an effort, that's for sure. And I guess, using what already works is very tempting. However, I also think that the generations are changing. With the new generation, there is always some freshness that is coming and the new skills that were not familiar- that former generations we're not familiar with. I guess this may help a little bit to update these behaviors and to look a little bit outside of the bubble, also. Because what I really spotted in the latest piece that you wrote was that this attitude of the employees, of the whole industry - most of their executives, because the employees are just executing the recommendations or the orders, the procedures from a higher level - is it's actually being projected to the general public through the image that the nuclear is creating of itself through this identity that it holds in inside of the industry. Could you develop it a little bit? Tell us a bit more about this idea.

Laura Leay
Yeah, so I guess this sort of stemmed from the work that I've done with radiation. It's a very different way of working with radiation in a university laboratory to how you'd work with it on a nuclear license site, in that we were using sealed sources and it was well-controlled. And some of the sources were from a particle accelerator that we can turn off and turn on, not just a source that's sitting there constantly emitting radiation. But I think, for quite a long time, the nuclear industry has not really talked about what it's doing and it's not made it clear to people outside of the industry what it's doing, what the hazards are. And it creates this sense of fears. It's something that you don't know, that's a bit scary.

Jadwiga Najder
The fact that the nuclear is not talking, is not transparent towards the general public, this is what creates this whole gap in understanding between what we know inside of the bubble and what is known outside of the bubble.

Laura Leay
Yeah, yeah. And I think there are a lot of people that like- well, the gen- people don't really need to know what we're doing, we just would get on and do it. But I think that if you have the support of the people who ultimately you're doing this work for, then it will be a lot easier to do your job will be more recognition for it. And I think it will feel a lot more comfortable to do something that you know, that the vast majority of the general public is on board with, rather than saying to people, Oh, as a new scientist, I'll come work in the nuclear industry. There is some really interesting science going on. And people are like, But isn't that a bit dangerous? But is it any more dangerous than any other industries? Do you understand how different it is to the other industries, if it's different at all? Are there just things that are no more dangerous? They're just portrayed differently?

Jadwiga Najder
What do you think about the fact that people do not understand nuclear enough, the nuclear industry what it's doing. Who should actually educate them? Is it schools? Is it the industry itself? Is it the scientists? Who bears this responsibility for the good education of our neighbors, of our families, of friends that are coming to us and are giving these insane arguments?

Laura Leay
I mean, so I'm a scientist, I'm curious. I would say it's down to the individual to seek out information that is backed up by a lot of people and people that have worked on that for long enough to have some sort of authority on the subject. For example, I keep saying to people, I'm not a chemist, so don't ask me about chemistry, I can give you my best guess. But if you want to know about chemistry, speak to someone who has studied chemistry. They understand key principles that they will need to be able to tell you about. I think it's down to everyone to do that digging for themselves. And I appreciate so many things going on in your life. The nuclear industry isn't forefront in your mind, right? You might have other things you'd want to look at. But then the nuclear industry could have a lot of benefit to society, so maybe it's one of the things people should focus on a bit more. And then, therefore, maybe it is a sort of thing that should be talked about in schools or maybe portrayed in the media in a more holistic way.

Jadwiga Najder
Yeah, yeah. Because what I'm scared about is that we can't really trust people's curiosity. We cannot trust that everybody has the same level of curiosity as the curious people. And what I see more and more, my friends and well, generally people around me is that they only know what they see, what falls on them from the media, from the internet. They do not look for it. They just react to it. This way, the only information they will have about this topic is what they see in the news, what they heard somewhere, I don't know, maybe in the physics class, but maybe it's clear to them more than or made them more bored than interested. And so they do not dig further. For this reason, I guess, more effort should be put to really establishing how to inform public. Because, as you said, nuclear has a benefit to the society, just the society doesn't realize it. It's just shooting its own foot at some point while going really- not even being neutral, but like being negative, and influencing politicians further. The cycle goes on. What do you see the- who should be actually focusing on the information to the public? Should this be a systemic change? Or should this be every company on its own to its local people around the power plant? Or maybe the industry should pay for some large scale? I don't know, billboards that are encouraging people to dig further.

Laura Leay
Ah, yeah, that's a tricky one to answer, isn't it? Because obviously, if it's the industry that's paying for the advertising, you could just say, Well, that's just propaganda. Of course they're going to say that. Of course they're going to want people to buy into their own technology, because they stand to gain from it. I guess maybe one solution is to find people that are more impartial and seen as being impartial and find some advocates that don't have an agenda. I heard in a podcast I was recently producing - I think an audience member mentioned, it might have been after the episode was recorded - they said that someone like Greta Thunberg is probably a good example of someone that's impartial, because she's quite young and she obviously doesn't have an agenda, as someone who's been around for 40 years, worked in industry for all that time, would have to push on people. Maybe the younger voices have more to contribute.

Jadwiga Najder
Yeah, that's what I totally agree with. And I can see more and more- this makes me happy actually, to see more and more young NGOs who just start being a group of friends and then organize themselves and just become a front of the communication about nuclear. However, I guess, what is always the problem is the funding and how to make this organization alive, how to pay these people to do not pay their bills while they are working for the benefit of the community.

Laura Leay
I'm sorry, was there a question there? If there was, I didn't quite hear it.

Jadwiga Najder
It was rather a remark. But as we go on, one thing that I really got interested in, among your observations in the article and in the pieces that you create, was the remark that nuclear is not an industry that is special in its concerns in its safety regards and its interests to stay afloat while the public is going against it. Which industries shared the same fate as nuclear in your opinion?

Laura Leay
I actually honestly don't know how the safety record of the nuclear industry compares to other industries. I think some of the things I was thinking about when I wrote that piece was, I'm a cyclist. I spend a lot of time on a mountain bike or on a road bike. And a lot of people say that cycling is dangerous. But to me, it's not. I've never been knocked off my bike. I've never had a serious accident. I've maybe grazed my knee on a mountain bike occasionally, doing something I possibly shouldn't have. But to me, cycling isn't dangerous. But a lot of people that aren't as familiar with it would say that it is. I do know people that have been knocked off their bikes, but I think sometimes it comes down to how you react to a situation and what's going on around you. It depends on where you're doing that thing. I think it's more about this perception that one industry is more dangerous or more difficult than another. But that may not be the case.

Jadwiga Najder
One example that I could think of that I actually see quite often and being compared to the nuclear industry is the aviation industry. We work quite a lot on the examples from the aviation industry. But what I always see is trying to draw conclusions from the accidents, trying to analyze the human factor in them, trying to analyze the technological part. But I don't see much of the examples of the industries that where in this misery, where in this image crisis, or they got out that they managed to communicate efficiently enough to be perceived as not even saved, but an industry that does not raise concerns on everyday basis to the general public. Is there an industry that managed to do this? And can you think of any example of like, efficient communication that nuclear is missing that could be drawn as a conclusion from somebody else?

Laura Leay
You often hear it said that, if you keep talking about safety, and how safer a thing is, people will question why you're doing that. And it sort of raises this idea in your mind that it is unsafe, because people keep focusing on safety. I do wonder if simply talking about the benefits and acknowledging that there are some hazards associated with an industry - which may be the same as another industry, but they may not be - but simply stating that I can see that people may be concerned about this. Here are the facts. And here are the benefits as well, would allow people to weigh things up a bit more. I don't think any industry is without its challenges. No technology is perfect, right? I guess is what I'm saying. Everything has its plus points and its minus points. Yes, renewables are probably quite a good example of where they've sort of explained the benefits and sort of suggested it's almost free energy, but without explaining the technology. And without explaining that, no one really knows how to dispose of that technology at the end of life, because it's relatively new technology compared to something like a car or a nuclear reactor. That sort of forward thinking should maybe be talked about a little bit more. If renewables are saying, Yes, we can solve this problem. And look, this is what happens when a piece of our technology gets to the end of its life and here's how we responsibly manage our waste, that would be a similar story to what nuclear is saying, Here's how we responsibly manage our waste. Not many other industries talk about that.

Jadwiga Najder
No, that's true. And I guess this is one of the topics that are mostly raised by the general public, by people that you just talk to on an everyday basis. And when you tell them, Well, I work in the nuclear industry or in the nuclear science, one of the first questions is, what about the waste? People just don't really have the information that is written in a vocabulary, in a simple manner that can explain them with their level of understanding, without the years of studying, without the years of experience in the industry. And I guess there are so many topics in nuclear that have the same problem and that's our concern for people. Do you think that there is a part that is played by the history of how the nuclear started, the nuclear weapons and the Cold War that is still in the minds of people that nuclear is so concerning for them?

Laura Leay
Possibly. I think I only really learned about the history because I'm in the industry. But you hear that there are sort of- there are ideas that pop up in social consciousness that you don't really know where they came from. I guess, I mean, for example, the Godzilla films. I didn't know that they were based on this idea of radiation that was bringing this fictitious creature out of the depths because we were suddenly using radiation. And I think people are sort of, they get the impression something is a certain way. But you don't really stop to question why, because it's inherent in the language that we use. That's a very vague answer, but I don't- it's not really, it's not a science that I'm familiar with, how language shapes how we view the world.

Jadwiga Najder
As we are slowly wrapping up, what I would be super interested in is what you would like to see in the coming three to five years to change inside of the industry, maybe outside of the industry, so that these concerns that we just raised and they have a bit of the concerns that the public has that are not always founded. Go a little bit to the positive sides and say, they either get solved or they get better understood.

Laura Leay
I think, as an aim for the industry, it would be nice to see a commitment from government for new nuclear reactors to be built. There's been a lot of talk about it for a very long time. Exactly what technology we're going to build seems to keep being uncertain. It would be really nice if government said, This is how much capacity we need. This is the technology we're interested in. We will supply this funding to allow it to happen, within the UK anyway. That would be a good solution. And I guess the other thing is having a community step forward to volunteer to host the geological disposal facility would make a huge difference. There are so many scientists and engineers putting so much effort into trying to build safety arguments with so many unknowns, because we don't know where the repository will be based. It would make such a huge difference. I can't even begin to describe how many scientists would suddenly go, We know what we're doing now, we can get on and do it. It would be like a revolution, I think. I know so many colleagues would probably have a party if they knew what sort of geology we were going to build the GDF in.

Jadwiga Najder
Yeah, totally. Do you think that the governments are not really committing enough in this moment? Or they do, but they need to do more because of the kind of crisis that we are in right now? Especially with the latest IPCC report, I guess everybody's really focusing on this problem in this moment.

Laura Leay
I think a lot of industries are in the same boat in that respect, that it always seems like it's the individual and the companies that have to put all this effort into making change happen. And government will kind say something or say, We should be doing this. But they don't say, We need to do this and this is how we'll do it. There's no definitive plan for how, as a nation, we'll get from where we are now, to the targets that we need to achieve. So yeah, I think, I feel like government could be doing more. I suspect, not being in government, there may be more to it. But it would be nice to have that certainty of knowing this is what we're working towards and this is how we need to achieve it.

Jadwiga Najder
Yeah, with the latest timescale that was shown in the IPCC report, I guess there's really no time to waste. So no technology that is low carbon, low emissive, and capable of providing the electricity for the electrification of the cars that need to be phased out, if they use petro, for preserving our lifestyle, even though we need to remove emissions. This is, I guess, really crucial and the climate change will not wait for us to decide whether nuclear has a good image or not or whether we are able to improve our methodologies. Thank you very much. It was amazing to talk to you and I hope that you enjoyed the conversation as well.

Laura Leay
It's nice to meet you, too. Thanks for inviting me onto this. It's been enjoyable.