TITANS OF NUCLEAR

Bret Kugelmass
We're here today with Austin Lo, who's a postdoctoral researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Austin, welcome to Titans of Nuclear.

Austin Lo
Great to be here. Love the show. Thanks for having me on it.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, super excited to have you as well. I think the way that we got connected was someone wrote into the show and referenced an article that you were featured in. Why don't you tell us your story?

Austin Lo
Yeah. I mean, I guess the story starts pretty early, because where I grew up had a big part of how this all happened. I grew up in a very small town in northern Michigan called Petoskey, a town of about 5,000 people. And people summer vacation up there during the summers, because it's absolutely desolate during the winter. And so my dad was a doctor and he sees most people, most summer vacationers that kind of come through. And so, I don't know if you want me to start with like my dissertation work or-

Bret Kugelmass
No, I'd love to- yeah, I think that's relevant.

Austin Lo
Yeah. Let's just go from, let's go from the actual upbringing part. So I grew up, grew up in Petoskey, basically playing classical piano with tennis throughout my whole life. And it really wasn't until high school where I actually got into the sciences and whatnot. One thing came to another, went off to college in Michigan State, and studied physics there, love physics. Eventually, that led to me pursuing nuclear engineering at Berkeley for graduate studies. However, the first time around, I really wasn't feeling grad school that much. And so I took a leave of absence after my master's degree. I got a Master's in nuclear engineering from Berkeley and I left and I joined the Navy for a while.

Bret Kugelmass
Why did you join the Navy?

Austin Lo
So I didn't necessarily want to be doing graduate school and nuclear engineering at that point, but I really did like nuclear engineering and I wanted to still sort of pursue studies, pursue a career in that field. And so honestly, I think it was just a random sort of look up on the internet about careers in nuclear and the nuclear Navy came to be. That's how I joined. It ended up not being so-

Austin Lo
I was originally slated to do nuclear submarines, naval nuclear propulsion. It did not end up working the way I intended it and not- I didn't get along as well as I thought in the naval, sort of, regime. Actually, that's probably where I met the person who sent you the article, because we reconnected sort of on his last stint. He's getting out now and so he was calling me up to kind of see what options might be. So I did my time in there and, as I was coming out, I started working sort of remotely for the startup that was working on a novel sort of energy conversion method for nuclear-based applications. He had sort of a different spin. He wanted to use what's called thermionic energy conversion for radioisotope energy conversion. Basically, being able to extract the heat from waste products from nuclear, and then make direct electricity out of that. And so this is kind of where I fell into a very unique and honestly kind of forgotten area of nuclear, which was in this direct heat to electric energy conversion. And so I worked there for about a year. Then as I was transferring out of the Navy and as funds were running a little short, for the startup, I recommended that I could take this idea and pursue it partially as a PhD dissertation back at Berkeley. And so I went back to Berkeley and my advisors really liked the idea, so they allowed me to continue this energy conversion scheme.

Bret Kugelmass
What did you do for them?

Bret Kugelmass
How exactly is the heat converted into electricity?

Austin Lo
It's a process called thermionic energy conversion. Thermionic energy conversion comes by this process called thermionic emission, which is when you get a material, usually some sort of metal or refractory metal, hot enough so it starts boiling off its own electrons. The short of it is that, if you get a material, two dissimilar materials - one that's called your emitter, which is going to emit the electrons where you heat up very hot, and then a colder collector, that those electrons will traverse this gap and sort of condense on the collector - then you can generate electrical power from that based on the fact that they have two different- it's called the work function, which kind of describes the minimal thermodynamic energy it takes to take an electron out of that material. If you get these two metals, one with higher work function, one with lower work function, you can drive a potential across that.

Bret Kugelmass
Do these two dissimilar metals need to be separated by some sort of vacuum? Can they be touching each other? What are the conditions that allow for the electrons to jump?

Austin Lo
There are a couple of different- thermionics sort of had this development period in the 50s, all the way up until the early 90s for this whole slew of technologies. One of them- there's called the vacuum type where you have nothing in between the two plates. And one of the major difficulties of this device is that they these plates have to be about three to five microns away from each other or anything under 10 microns, which, when you're talking about heat systems that get in excess of 1700 C, that's really tough. So that's the vacuum type. The type that we were working on, and that I pursued for my dissertation, requires this plasma, this low temperature plasma in order to mitigate what's called the space charge effect. I guess, going back to the reason why the plates have to be so close together for the vacuum devices is because the space charge effect becomes a big deal where basically electrons that are preventing other electrons from coming out of the emitter and going into the collector. In order to mitigate that, you either get the place really close or you get a low temperature plasma in between them that sort of buffers that zone.

Bret Kugelmass
Okay, and what does this plasma consist of?

Austin Lo
In the early- well, actually, the only practical devices, the plasma almost exclusively was made of cesium vapor, because cesium has a really, really low ionization potential, about three or 3.9 electron volts. And so, with cesium, the electrons being emitted from the surface themselves can ionize this gas, because the electrons will be emitted at 2000 degrees, or 1700 degrees, but the very tail end of that Maxwellian for these electrons, those are at much higher energies, and they can actually ionize the cesium plasma. That's the way that the most practical cesium diode works is through electron emission, ionizes this plasma, which allows more electrons to sort of travel across.

Bret Kugelmass
How do you mitigate material degradation from that original material? If you're boiling off all these electrons, don't they need a certain amount of electrons for the structure of the material itself to remain stable?

Austin Lo
Short answer is that you use refractory metals for the most part, which do not, or at least, are very less likely to degrade. For any plasma, any low temperature plasma, you're also- at the same time you're boiling off electrons, you are getting plasma electrons that are coming back and replenishing that the surface. And then cesium season also helps. It has a special property where, when bonded to refractory metals, it lowers their work function, making it easier to emit electrons. So that's another big thing.

Bret Kugelmass
Where's the potential being created, exactly? Where do you hook up your wires to continue the circuit?

Austin Lo
You can, honestly, you can hook up a battery or any sort of load right between the emitter and the collector if you wanted to.

Bret Kugelmass
Okay, so literally, I can just imagine this circuit and you've got some sort of connection- you got some sort of circuit where one side is connected to, let's say, this outer cylinder and one side is connected to an inner cylinder, essentially. You shoot up that inner cylinder and then that is what creates a potential.

Austin Lo
It's not the actual heat that creates the potential. The two materials themselves, regardless of heat, there's a- it's called a contact potential. Say it's tungsten and molybdenum, two dissimilar metals, two similar work functions. If I took a wire and I connected those two and I had a gap in between them, I would measure this contact potential. If you were to apply the same- the equal and opposite potential to that, that's really where you're getting your energy, just by applying the equal and opposite potential and then collecting the electrons across that potential.

Bret Kugelmass
So what does the heat then do?

Austin Lo
The heat is there to actually boil off the electrons to make sure they- to force them to go across the gap. Otherwise-

Bret Kugelmass
So it just it increases the current then essentially?

Austin Lo
Yeah, it provides the thermionic emission current which drives the current of the device.

Bret Kugelmass
Okay, got it. Okay, go on.

Austin Lo
Where was I?

Bret Kugelmass
So you're building experience at the startup with these thermionic generators?

Austin Lo
Yeah. Okay. And then back, basically- back as pursuing this PhD thesis at Berkeley, my advisor- because one of the major breakthroughs that this device would have is that, instead of using these emission electrons to ionize the plasma, you would use radiation coming from alpha particles, beta particles, fission fragments, that actually ionizes plasma. And so, immediately, my adviser said, Yeah, that sounds good, but I think this is only going to work with fission fragments, so immediately set focus on fission fragments in order to do this. That directly puts you into more nuclear reactor design type work. That was more or less how my dissertation was gauged or kind of framed.

Bret Kugelmass
And when you say fission fragments, you just mean the fission products from a fission event, essentially?

Austin Lo
Yeah.

Bret Kugelmass
Something that was roughly half of uranium-235.

Austin Lo
Yep, yep. Correct.

Bret Kugelmass
And then where would you get these from? Do you just get used fuel pellets, essentially, and shove it in the middle of this thing? Or do you have to go through some sort of isotopic separation process and just pick out the ones that you want?

Austin Lo
No. For any reactor system, this would be a very small layer on the fuel element. Because fission fragments in solid material, they only have a range of about five to six microns. In order for these to escape into the gas to begin with, they have to be very, very close to the surface. You're talking about, I mean, the fuel element design would be something like just an unclad, uranium carbide type fuel.

Bret Kugelmass
Oh, what you're saying is you would actually have an active reactor providing the source material to then create the thermionic generation?

Bret Kugelmass
Yes.

Bret Kugelmass
It's all coupled together. Why bother with the active reactor? If you can do it with the fission fragments, why not do it from spent fuel, and that way you kill two birds with one stone? You don't have to license a real reactor, you get to use up the spent fuel?

Austin Lo
Yeah, right. I mean, that's definitely, that would be a good starting point, as well. But I think the main objective was to design more or less a nuclear reactor for space. And so that was, I mean, of course, gonna involve a space reactor.

Bret Kugelmass
And how much power do you need? What are the requirements of the space reactor?

Austin Lo
Well, that- I mean, there are a lot of- I guess, so right now, well, the thing with this particular technology is that it gets kind of scalable from anywhere from the kilowatt to megawatt range. Right now, I think NASA is sort of pursuing very low level right now, and so honestly, any range would be fine.

Bret Kugelmass
And is there something specific about the space application that requires a different power conversion cycle, other than we see in standard commercial reactors?

Austin Lo
With space nuclear power, you're really concerned about the mass in your system. Especially as you increase the power output of your system, what eventually becomes the limiting piece is the thermal radiator that comes, that has to reject the heat. It's very important that these higher power operating reactors are running very hot. That's kind of why thermionics was pursued in the first place, and that's kind of where the technology is born, because it's very high temperature heat production for electrons and then also high temperature heat rejection, which makes the thermal radiator much smaller.

Bret Kugelmass
Got it. Great. Okay, so where did all this lead to?

Austin Lo
Let's see, there were a lot of sort of unknowns about the problem, especially in the plasma. It had not been very well studied under the context of thermionic energy conversion, except this one study back in the 1960s. And this was a study that was done by General Motors and the Office of Naval Research. Big story back then was that there was a time where General Motors was thinking about getting into the nuclear sub business. They went in on a 10 year sort of study with the Office of Naval Research, sort of pursuing this novel electric- or heat to electric energy conversion method, which was thermionics that used fission fragments to ionize the interelectrode plasma. And this was led by a man named Frank Jamerson, who I had the pleasure of meeting one fateful summer. I'll get into that in a little bit. But yeah, so one of the main issues that came out of the study was that essentially - and this was out of the classified part, which was declassified later - the device performed better than they anticipated, by like a factor of three. And so they really didn't have the requisite plasma physics knowledge to kind of put the pieces together.

Bret Kugelmass
That was why it happening. That's very interesting. Yeah.

Austin Lo
And so at the end, this program got canned. Basically, after the 10-year study was over, General Motors decided to go about their way and make cars and Naval Reactors decided to make PWRs until now, well, I mean, probably further from now. So the plasma physics needed to be solved and that was the bulk of my dissertation work was kind of unfolding what this problem was and how come this thing actually performed the way it did. In the end, the pieces that were missing were their sort of energy that they performed on, on what the temperature of the electron should have been, as well as sort of the recombination phenomena that were happening in that plasma. It turns out when you crank the temperature up in the gas, the electrons are not as likely to be combined, because they're these low energy sort of vibrational states that kind of allow them to still be free. But anyway, that's the boring answer to my dissertation. But really, the fun part about this was that this guy, Frank Jamerson, being from General Motors, which is in Detroit, Michigan and a lot of people from Detroit go up to Petoskey, Michigan during the summer, because it's a great vacation spot. One day, he actually rolls into my dad's office. My dad's a general practitioner, he has his own practice. So Frank came in and they started to get talking. My dad asked, Well, what did you do for a living? He's like, Well, I was a was a nuclear physicist for General Motors. And my dad's like, Oh, my God, really? And so, I mean, they talked for a really long time. My dad, I talk to him a lot about what I do and kind of keep him up up to date on my research and stuff like that. I always mentioned this one guy named Ned Razor who's kind of like the godfather, or just the father of thermionics in the United States. And so he gave it a shot. He said, Yeah, I wonder if Frank knows of this guy. He said, Hey Frank, do you know a guy named Ned Razor. And Frank just stopped in his tracks and threw up his arms, Oh my God, I worked with Ned Razor on nuclear thermionics! And he said, Wow, I've gotta give my son a call. And so he says - Frank is like 92 at this time - and says, Hey, Siri, send a text message to Austin saying, Call me, and Frank said, Wait, your phone can do that? Can my phone do that, too?

Bret Kugelmass
This guy’s totally, totally overwhelmed by the phone technology.

Austin Lo
Yeah, so that happened and we ended up meeting up for lunch at first. We talked about all this nuclear thermionic stuff. This is actually before I had come up with this huge 10-year study. I had only had one of his previous papers that- I mean, they basically, out of that 10 years, there are hundreds and hundreds of pages of experimental data and all this stuff. And afterward, they basically compressed all that into like two or three papers. So I had those three papers, but it wasn't really enough to string anything together. He said, You know what, why don't you come on over. I have all of these documents, I've got a patent on this, and I've got all these contract numbers that are really important. And I said, Oh my god, yes, of course. And so we run over to his house, and I get all the information, get all the contact numbers and stuff, and then I basically use my Freedom of Information Act in order to get all of those documents released, and that was that was kind of the amazing part about it, because there's probably- I'm not gonna say there's no way I would have gotten a hold of those documents, but there was a good chance that I would not have ever gotten hold of documents and that would have changed the entire course of my dissertation, because I did not know that there was this experimental, 10 years worth of experiments on this stuff, and I was going to have to reproduce all of that, which would have been a huge mess.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, which would have been impossible in today's age where you can't just whip experiments together like that. Just like so much overhead. No, I honestly think that some of the stuff that they did back then, unless we make a fundamental change to how important we think nuclear is, or a fast track way to cut through the overhead, both bureaucratic and from a licensing perspective, I think that what they did back in the 50s and 60s will outpace what we can do, maybe forever, unless we fix the bureaucratic issues. Because they were able to experiment. They were just able to just activate some reactors, put it in the middle of desert, do whatever you want, collect some results, send the guy over there without 10 years of prepping exactly how he's gonna walk over there and just grab some samples, thrown it in, take a look.

Austin Lo
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's tough, because we're well set up for small incremental changes, which I would call growth. But in terms of true exploratory invention, discovery, I think it's really, really difficult, because of all the things you just said to make any of that happen. Yeah.

Bret Kugelmass
Pretty amazing coincidence, though, and making that all came together. So, what was- any big conclusions from what this work amounted to?

Austin Lo
Yeah. Actually really, really big conclusions. Their experimental data was right. And actually, from that, I was able to design my own reactor using MCMP and a thermal model and now a good plasma model to generate a very, very high specific power nuclear reactor, which has not been designed to date. I mean, right now, actually-

Bret Kugelmass
Can you actually break out that term specific power, please?

Austin Lo
I mean, watts, energy per unit time, per unit mass. The amount of electrical power we can produce per unit mass. On the one hand, this may be some sort of power, or specific power range that the next competing thing can create, like a Brayton cycle or something like that. But really, my big takeaway was that this particular nuclear thermionic reactor is no longer a heat engine, because it has a supplemental sort of- First of all, you gain extra sort of heat coming from the electrons themselves, because in this electron, this low temperature plasma, the temperature of the electrons is actually much higher than the temperature of the ions. So you've essentially increased the upper limit of your hotlink temperature, because it depends on the temperature of the electrons and not the temperature of the rest of the system. And so you've made a much, much more energy dense, or power dense system, just because you've been able to- now you've taken the heat of the material out of the way, and you only depend on the heat of the electrons as they are, quote unquote, your working fluid, in this case. This is a direct energy conversion scheme. I think given that, that kind of makes the possibilities so much more in terms of looking at specific power and how much power we can put out to space and there are some figures out there saying, We will never be able to get things beyond five megawatts out there, because X, Y & Z. I mean, this kind of breaks that mold, because I think we're forced into these criteria based on these out of date understandings of how we can actually use nuclear power. I think that's kind of, it's important to pursue as a study, and it's important to bring to light once you figure something out.

Bret Kugelmass
That's pretty amazing. And then also, the system just feels a lot more solid state than other power conversion cycles, too. Is that right?

Austin Lo
Yeah. It is completely solid state. There are no moving parts.

Bret Kugelmass
Before we move on, how did it- your relationship- did this - I know he passed away recently - but did this blossom into something more throughout the course of this research?

Austin Lo
I mean, we got together for lunch every summer, so it was for the past couple of summers. I most recently saw him in the winter. He was really the one that encouraged me to go for nuclear power as a career. Otherwise, coming out of Berkeley, we're kind of a kind of a farm for Livermore, which is not too much into nuclear reactor design. And so it was really the influence of Frank that kind of put me on on this path that I'm on right now. I'm super thankful to have known him. Yeah, I was at his memorial service last week. And I mean, it was great to hear other stories about him. He was such a lively guy. It was always awesome to be in his presence.

Bret Kugelmass
Amazing. Well, I'm glad you got a chance to tell the story then. Now, there are kind of two ways I want to take the rest of our conversation. I do want to hear about the work that you're doing right now as well, but before we get there, can we just explore the constraints of space energy systems a little bit more? What exactly are the limits, like the mechanical limitations on rejecting your heat load? Can you describe that a little bit more? What's been tried and where do people run up against walls?

Austin Lo
We break it down into two types of energy conversion systems. The first is static, which is- actually, those are actually the only things we've ever deployed in space so far. And that goes down into thermoelectrics and thermionics. Thermoelectrics has, of course, a solid state, so it's very simple, but it really suffers from having one, kind of this low operating temperature and kind of a low rejection temperature, which is a problem. And then two, it suffers from efficiency. None of these devices have cleared 7 or 8%. And there's talk of things in excess of 12 to 15%, but that doesn't even come close to any of the dynamic systems we know up today. Moving into the dynamic systems, we have the Brayton cycle, the Stirling engine, and then for a brief period of time, they were thinking about doing Rankine cycle, using liquid metals. That actually fell out of favor, because it was not going to work very well in low G, and so they kind of cast that away in the early 1960s or 70s, or something like that. Now, we're kind of down to four options. We've got thermoelectrics, we've got thermionics, Stirling, and Brayton. Good thing about Stirling is that it's a very simple, dynamic system. That's what they're using right now for things like Crusty. I think the next, the higher power version of that - we call it megapower. And the good thing about Stirling is that, okay, yeah, simple, relatively efficient. And then moving into Brayton, that has a much higher operating temperature, which, advantage there, which means a higher rejection temperature, and the main drawback - well, not a drawback, I guess a drawback - is the complexity. You really want things to be simple out in space, because you really don't want them to break, otherwise you're kind of dead in the water, dead in space. Brayton cycle is kind of slated as the only technology being applied to these higher powered systems, which I would have to push back on, because I think, especially when you're talking about- you never want to put your eggs in one basket. And I think putting your eggs into the Brayton cycle basket might be a mistake, especially if something like thermionic energy conversion that's scalable from kilowatts to megawatts and has been flown in space-This is another fact that most people, I guess, have forgotten in the US is that the Russians put up two of these thermionic nuclear reactors that operated for six months and a year at a time, like completely autonomously. So thermionics is really the highest power proven technology in space. I think it could be a big mistake, sort of, not to at least pursue that on a research level, which I have not seen so far.

Bret Kugelmass
Tell me a little bit more, though, on the heat rejection side of things. In the Brayton cycle, which seems to be the favorite right now, you still need to create, essentially, a low temperature side, right? Is that correct?

Austin Lo
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's gonna be taken away by heat pipes, for the most part, when the heat pipes will extend into the thermal radiator. Then, just by thermal contact, that's how it needs to do thermal radiation.

Bret Kugelmass
So yeah, what form is the energy actually leaving your system? You said thermal radiation, but what is that? And what materials allow that? Do those materials last forever? What are some of the limiting factors on how much thermal radiation you can get out of your system?

Austin Lo
Sure. Thermal radiation just means photons. Just like- I mean, take some hot piece of metal out of the oven, it's mostly thermal radiation that's coming off of that. There's a little conduction in the air and stuff like that. But yeah, the physical mechanism is emitting photons of a certain longer wavelength, that's actually taking away the heat. There's definitely a lot of work going into these materials that can handle higher heat loads. It all depends on two- yeah, two terms. There's a thermal emissivity, which is the, basically kind of a physical property of the material of how many photons it can let off or how many photons it's going to let off, and then there's the temperature. And we really harp on the temperature, because the relation is temperature to the fourth power. Immediately, if you're raising your temperature by 10 or 15 degrees, you're emitting or sort of rejecting way, way, way more heat. That's kind of why, especially at the higher power levels, the heat rejection system becomes the limiting factor.

Bret Kugelmass
And then just so we can fully understand the system - and correct me if I'm wrong on any of this - the problem is your efficiency comes from your delta between your high temperature and your low temperature, right?

Austin Lo
Yeah.

Bret Kugelmass
But your ability to reject heat, you want it to be a higher temperature. So your low temperature, you actually want to be high temperature? That's like a fundamental problem here in space?

Austin Lo
Yeah, because the surface area required- the lower your temperature, the higher the surface area of your thermal radiator and basically, surface area is going to equal mass, so that's why you really want to minimize that. Especially when you get up to the past 100 kilowatts, your rejection temperature has to be in excess of like 600 C, 500 or 600 C.

Bret Kugelmass
That's the T low side.

Austin Lo
The T low side. Yeah, so that's really a limiting factor for dynamic systems too, because that means your hot link has to be that much hotter. And once you get up to those temperatures, especially for Brayton cycle where you have the turbines - I don't even know what the RPM is - but you're really reaching the limit of the materials that you're using, especially when you're talking about systems that haven't been tested in space, which are subjected to cosmic radiation, all sorts of stuff out there. Space is a very hostile environment.

Bret Kugelmass
Very interesting. Okay, cool. Now I think I understand the Space Systems a little bit better and some of the constraints there. Not such- so it's like, there are a lot of reasons that nuclear actually has some trouble in space, but once again, the advantage is you're starting with such an incredible energy density advantage from the fuel itself. That's where- so it's got its disadvantages, but it's also got its super duper advantages, and it's just a matter of balancing those out.

Austin Lo
Yeah, well, when it comes down to it, there's virtually no other option for sustaining human life in space on other planets.

Bret Kugelmass
Well, other planets would be a different story, because your ability to reject heat is a lot easier.

Austin Lo
Oh, that's true, yeah.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah. It's just the traveling through space and how you're going to do that, that's a bit tricky. Okay, cool. Yeah, I'm always fascinated by this. I think a lot of people are, even if it's not as like directly applicable or practical for our lives. There definitely is a certain fascination with space stuff. I think maybe it's just bred into us from the 1960s, like from the culture. I don't know if it's innate to humans, or if it's like, just generations of hearing that the coolest thing that ever happened in the 60s was going to space.

Austin Lo
Yeah. I mean, I think curiosity is bred into humanity. And I think it's very important to keep feeding that. And that's, I mean, that's one of the reasons why I even thought about doing a dissertation with space nuclear power at all. everybody has that exploratory curious side.

Bret Kugelmass
Cool. So what are you working on now?

Austin Lo
I recently started a postdoc at Oak Ridge National Lab as an advanced nuclear reactor analyst. And so that sort of- right now, a lot of our work is focused on a recent sort of call for the reformation of the NRC to- basically, we need to give the NRC tools to start certifying or validating these advanced nuclear reactor concepts that are coming out. We've worked on most of the development of our code suite for nuclear reactor safety codes, called SCALE. There are a lot of different modules that come with that. But I was particularly tasked to focus on molten salt fuels and molten salt cooled reactors and sort of the reforming the codes and kind of validating the codes to make sure that what we were seeing in some of these designs is what we expect. Yeah, I've been here now for, yeah, about four months. It's been really awesome to kind of work with the big leagues, because before doing my dissertation, it was me all alone. I realized after starting this postdoc that it's something that at least the nuclear side that I was doing, probably could have been knocked down in a few weeks versus a few months.

Bret Kugelmass
What are some of the ways that you validate these codes?

Austin Lo
We have, particularly for molten salt reactors, we were also very lucky to have some research from the 1960s called the- so the main one is the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment. And thank God for that, because I have no idea what we would do otherwise. They did- there are a lot of sort of zero power experiments that they were doing. What we like to focus on the most for the molten salt fuel reactors is sort of the flow of new collides in and out of the system and kind of keeping track of where they are. That is the most- that's kind of where we're doing the most validation work so far.

Bret Kugelmass
When you're reading these papers and trying to get an understanding, do they also tell you the operational setup? They're like, for MSRE we built this building and-

Austin Lo
Yeah, oh, yeah.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah. And I should- sorry, I hate acronyms. I should've said Molten Salt Reactor Experiment. Okay, so Molten Salt Reactor Experiment. So they tell you, hey, we built this building and here's the size of the reactor and here's where the pipes went and here's our-

Austin Lo
-dimensions, here's the schematic of where everything was going, and blah blah blah. And there are even separate manuals of the actual operating procedures, what they were going through and-

Bret Kugelmass
Is this open to the public or only to people with special clearance at or at Oak Ridge?

Austin Lo
I think it is mostly open to the public. But being- I think I have the most experience now in looking up very esoteric nuclear reactor information. And I can tell you, it's an art form. It doesn't matter if these things are in the public domain. Good luck finding them, because it's been quite, quite difficult.

Bret Kugelmass
I know, I spent six months just trying to look up data that I knew was collected, like economic data that the government collected, but it just like, was not easy. And it wasn't restricted, it was just not easy to get a hold of, and you have to email this guy, and then they have to send you a CD, like a CD ROM, like yeah, you can have it, you just need to now buy a CD ROM player, because that's how we store this data.

Austin Lo
Right. Yeah, same thing goes with all this old nuclear reactor data. I always wonder how much are we being held back just by the fact that it's very difficult to find this information?

Bret Kugelmass
I know. And then we should give credit to- God, I can't- whoever it was, thank you. They did release a bunch of information, like five years ago. Someone went through some sort of- I can't remember which organization it was, maybe the DOE or some function of the DOE. They did release a lot of data that wasn't available before. That is pretty amazing. But you're right, there's just so much more out there. And if like, yeah- if it doesn't have a national security implication, I just, I don't know why someone just doesn't digitize it and get it up online and make it searchable, text searchable. If you made it text searchable, it's like so easy for researchers to get ahold of whatever they want. But what I wanted to ask you is, you're reading through all these manuals, and you're getting some perspective of what - and when talking to Frank, too - you get some perspective of what things were like back then. And now you see how difficult it is to even just do anything. What was different back then? Why can't we just do- I understand the culture was different. But do you see any fundamental, glaring issues about how they did things that we couldn't just do it the same today. If we really cared about pushing technology, and we really considered climate change threat and clean energy a priority, we consider it like a World War style priority, why couldn't we just do what they did back then and set up 50 different experiments in three years?

Austin Lo
Yeah, well, of course, I mean, the party line goes back to regulation and whatnot. But I think that's kind of a cheap answer. I really, I think, back then, I think there was a lot more interest from industry to do these nuclear-based- I mean, look at GM, they were a car company.

Bret Kugelmass
Not GE, GM.

Austin Lo
Yeah, GM. And they partnered up with the University of Michigan and their swimming pool reactor, and then in comes the Navy and they set up a contract. One of the things I think is kind of important is that we actually have experimental test facilities that are available, not just at the DOE. That's kind of a big focus lately, especially, INL is coming up with a fast neutron reactor test facility. But I really do think it's important for universities even. I mean, why can't anybody just buy a TRIGA reactor? Why can anybody, why can't they putz around with and get some experiments going on? Because that's really where- that's where these groundbreaking type things happen.

Bret Kugelmass
I mean, I've never actually heard anyone say it quite like that, but let's, can we just double click on that for a second? Why can't anyone buy a TRIGA reactor?

Austin Lo
Okay, I only bring it up because I was actually thinking about that the other day. And I haven't quite looked that up, but I I'm actually quite curious myself.

Bret Kugelmass
For God's sakes, like Michigan, one of the top engineering, nuclear engineering schools in the world, they don't have a research reactor, right?

Austin Lo
Yeah, well, same with Berkeley. We got rid of our TRIGA back in the 90s. And this is kind of where a lot of people got rid of their TRIGA reactors. Yet Berkeley replaced it with a with a DD/DT fusion neutron source for various purposes, but that's kind of, I think that's kind of the direction people are going. They're getting rid of reactors and they're creating fusion neutron sources. But that doesn't- it's not the same, it's just not the same. You don't get the flux levels that can do a lot of different types of experiments with. It's not the same energy, blah, blah, blah. I really would like to get to the bottom of why or maybe there is no reason. Maybe you can't. Maybe there's no research interest for whatever reason.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, maybe it's not- yeah, maybe it's just a confluence of a few things. It's just like, with a bureaucracy and convincing people, it's just- it's not impossible, but it's just a little more expensive. It's a little more expensive. It's too hard to justify to the department heads. If it's too hard to justify, there's no political will within a university. There are maybe just a few factors piling up there.

Austin Lo
Yeah.

Bret Kugelmass
Okay, any other just kind of general thoughts as a young guy in the industry, done some research, met a bunch of other nuclear engineers, just kind of general thinking about where the industry should go? Or other things maybe you don't understand or other areas that we should explore?

Austin Lo
Yeah, for sure. I mean, like you said, I'm very young. I just sort of started my career in nuclear energy. My general outlook, I'm not worried about nuclear growth. But what I define nuclear growth to be is more of this sort of continued moment of traditional heat engine-based nuclear power. It's your light water reactors, even advanced nuclear reactors, and even further on into fusion. In the end, they all produce heat. I think these problems are going to be solved through innovations and very small, small steps. And it's going to happen by looping in things like additive manufacturing, robotics, AI, machine learning, insert any buzz techie word in here. That definitely has a role in making nuclear energy grow. And I think we've set ourselves up really nicely for making the innovations happen. But that's not necessarily my outlook on the actual progress of nuclear energy. I would define nuclear progress to be something that really pushes us beyond this traditional mold that nuclear has lived in, literally since its inception. I’m talking about nuclear thermionics, nuclear pumped lasers, direct energy conversion schemes. I mean, literally, the ideas are unlimited, because they're brought about by discovery and invention, and those don't have limits. And so I think we're definitely on this path to come out of the dark ages of nuclear, which was basically from the 1980s onward, but I don't know if we're necessarily setting the stage for this nuclear renaissance that everyone keeps on talking. Because a renaissance, a renaissance isn't just like, Oh, this population boom. There's this cultural growth and invention, innovation, discovery, new science. I love, I absolutely love nuclear energy and it gets me excited every day to work on it. But the aspect that's getting me excited is not the prospect of putting out the next small modular nuclear reactor. That doesn't get me excited. It's more of the progress aspect, it's really pushing that boundary. And I know I'm not the only one who sort of has that thought. My real hope for nuclear is that we find a way where both nuclear growth and progress can truly be pursued simultaneously. And it's really only then where we can even think about reaping the benefits from a nuclear renaissance. That kind of leaves the question, I mean, who's gonna pick up that gauntlet? And that's kind of my burning question out of all this. Who is going to make nuclear progress actually happen for real?

Bret Kugelmass
Wow, that is- man, whew, you went deep. I didn't know what you'd come up with, but that was a good one. Yeah, I've got a couple thoughts on that, actually. It's interesting. I've never heard someone criticize the nuclear renaissance that was supposed to occur like around 2008, 2009, 2010ish from that perspective. It's actually not that it failed, but it's actually the word renaissance was always wrong. That was supposed to be like nuclear boom years, but you're right, there was no renaissance. There's no cultural growth. And I do- I agree with you. We do need cultural growth and the opportunities, I think, with nuclear are so profound, because you get to break the laws of classical physics.

Austin Lo
Yeah. And even the way it's structured right now, it attracts- I mean, there aren't that many- because by training, I'm a physicist, and actually, by my dissertation, my advisor always said that this dissertation was basically physics. I don't know if nuclear attracts very different fields of thinking. It's a lot of mechanical and thermohydraulics for nuclear power. The only physicists- basically, the only physicists I see are working on nuclear weapons or fusion.

Bret Kugelmass
Or fusion. Yeah.

Austin Lo
For the plasma aspect. Yeah.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah. And that is kind of a shame. Yeah, that is kind of a shame that we don't have more of those conceptual physics or even applied physicists, but more broadly, physics, thinking about fission. You're kind of right.

Austin Lo
That's kind of what I hope that my work kind of brings out is like, hey, there's actually this- there's this direct application that fission plasma can sort of give to the world. And I hope that's at least attractive to other fields, because that's really what it's going to require. It's going to require different people thinking about these fundamental problems.

Bret Kugelmass
I think part of the problem is the government is a little bit too -well, that's not a problem, that's actually a good thing in many ways - the government's a little too responsive to the public, and the nuclear industry has really kind of done itself in in terms of public support over these years. It seems to me that the way your vision would have to happen is driven by the private sector. I think that - and I've been saying this for a while now - I think that we need one- or sorry, I think we need many really successful and competitive companies that build a huge foundation from resources, like both financial and talent, through the construction of near term technologies, like your conventional light water reactor.

Austin Lo
I mean, we need growth.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah. And then out of that- and it's so crazy. Because these projects are so big and so valuable, the nuclear industry spends- the industry itself spends $0 on - I'm exaggerating, but close to $0 - marketing and on true R&D, like scientific R&D. But it'd be so easy if you just said, Hey, listen, for every - and these reactors, they go for $5 billion apiece - if you were to say, 10% of ever- let's say I'm selling a product, say sell a pair of shoes. 30% of that would go to marketing. Let's say, sell a nuclear reactor. Why doesn't 10% of that go to marketing? Now you've got a $500 million advertising budget per year - which they don't spend, they spend nothing - and then another $500 million goes to like true R&D. You could conduct a lot of your experiments like that if you had like, the Google X of nuclear. And that's just from one plant. If this company was popping out 20 plants a year - and even I think that's extremely low for what we need for climate change - let's say we got up to five companies spitting out 500 gigawatts of power plants a year - which I think that's closer to where we need to be - then you've got multi tens of billions of dollar budgets to explore these frontiers of nuclear science. And that could all happen within 10 years, by the way. That is not crazy to say that could happen within 10 years. The demand for energy is that high and these systems, I'm talking about these conventional systems, we could start building them today if someone could just figure out how to do it cost-effectively.

Austin Lo
Yeah, and build out these systems to run for more, to explore further. I agree with that. And that's definitely that's something I can foresee based on your model, but something like that we wouldn't be seeing for 10 years. I don't know if that's actually anyone's, in anyone's business model. I haven't seen anybody think about it, or kind of pose it that way yet, but I would hope so. I like your point. I like your point on the advertisement aspect, because that really is a pain point. That is not something I've thought about and why is no one even setting aside any effort to really confront a real issue of sort of public support? Well, I mean, of course, it's gotten a lot better. I mean, I think there's a stat a couple of weeks ago saying that, I think 64-65% was in favor.

Bret Kugelmass
I actually don't think it's that bad in reality, and I probably shouldn't play into what everyone else says, like the whole, oh, everyone hates us type of thing. I actually don't feel that way, but it is hard to get government policy support in place, unless the people who support it - that 64% or some portion of that 64% - are extremely vocal and extremely proud and are willing to be ultra public about how much they love nuclear. And right now, it's like Eric Meyer and a few other people are the only ones who are willing to sing about it. Come on, we need- like that's where I think the $500 million should go towards, to sponsor high school students to fall so deeply in love with nuclear that they go out and sing about it from the hilltops.

Austin Lo
I was toying around with the concept of- I think, also, it's hard to hop on board with something that you can't see, you can't taste, you can't smell. Even with something like solar or wind. Solar, look up into the sky, that's where the energy sources come from. You can connect to that. The wind, when you just look out in the field, there's a wind turbine, you can connect to that. But with nuclear, it's really difficult.

Bret Kugelmass
Maybe that's the marketing challenge. Maybe that's the cookie nobody's crunched yet is figuring out how to relate nuclear to our everyday experiences.

Austin Lo
Yeah, yeah, I think crunching that cookie will be very worthwhile. For sure. You need a product that someone can align with.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Anyway, this has been a great conversation. We're about out of time. Any final thoughts you want to leave the audience with?

Austin Lo
Yeah, I mean, I guess mostly, whatever comes out of the future of nuclear, I would really, really love to see a world where people are inspired by nuclear, people are proud to work on it, and people feel free to explore new ideas of how nuclear can apply to everyday life to the next final frontier. Anything. And I think we're getting much closer to that reality and I can't wait to see it actually come to fruition.

Bret Kugelmass
Austin Lo, everybody.

Bret Kugelmass
We are here today with Allan Carson on Titans of Nuclear. Allan is a Project Manager at the World Nuclear Association. Allan, welcome to the show.

Allan Carson
Thanks very much, Bret. Good to be here.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, so let's get started by just learning a little bit about you. First, tell us where you grew up?

Allan Carson
Oh, well, as you can probably tell from my accent, I grew up in in Ireland, specifically Northern Ireland, and I grew up on a in a farming community. My parents worked- well, my dad worked as a mechanic and my mother worked in health care all her life, so there's engineering or nuclear background there. And then I left Ireland, went to university in England to study process and chemical engineering-

Bret Kugelmass
And just because I- not to just pass over the Ireland thing too quick, did you grow up in North Northern Ireland? Or South Northern Ireland? Or where, exactly?

Allan Carson
West Northern Ireland, so I was pretty much 20 minutes from the border with the Republic of Ireland.

Bret Kugelmass
I was gonna ask, and when you were growing up was anything going on? What years was this?

Allan Carson
Yeah, this was going back from, I can't remember exactly - but going back maybe 30 years now? I would have been a child, but I still remember there being quite a lot of military presence around. There were no border checks at that time, but I still remember a lot of military presence and quite a lot of training happening in the area, etc, etc. And there was still quite a lot of angst in and around the local area or so.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, and probably a bunch of stories from your folks also, huh?

Allan Carson
Plenty of stories. I'm not going into any detail right now.

Bret Kugelmass
But I am curious how that, maybe if you've ever had a chance to kind of reflect on that and kind of piece it together with the rest of your life and kind of where you went? Did you think it had any influence?

Allan Carson
I think it made me quite strong-willed and I think it made me quite resilient to challenges in my life, and made me quite determined to sort of do something, to sort of move myself forward, not grown in sort of a cyclical, nonsensical argument. I think it probably did those things. I've not reflected on it too much, but if I was asked the question, I think those would be the key areas.

Bret Kugelmass
Okay, so tell us - it's always great to get some perspective on who the person is - but tell us, what did you want to make of yourself?

Allan Carson
Well, to be brutally honest, Bret, I didn't know. Still, I'm not entirely sure, if I'm being truly honest. I sort of take it one sort of day at a time, and I'm trying to deal with the challenges in front of me and I like fixing problems, so engineering came quite naturally to me, as in I was always good at this sort of the math, physics, chemistry side of school. To me, engineering became a sort of a natural transition from that, so I went and studied chemical process engineering for four years in Newcastle.

Bret Kugelmass
Where is that, exactly?

Allan Carson
Northeast England.

Bret Kugelmass
Okay.

Allan Carson
Cold in winter. I haven't. And then, that degree very much oriented me towards the oil and gas industry. It's very refining, distilling oriented. That's very much sort of where a lot of that training and coursework was going. Then, when I finished that, the natural progression was going to be into petrochemicals industry, but I ended up taking a job with what ultimately became Jacobs, an engineering consultancy company. Because I have a slightly different perspective, and I want the opportunity to work across different fields, not necessarily pigeonhole myself too much.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, give yourself options.

Allan Carson
Exactly, because you don't know what you're going to like or what you're not going to like in three years time, so it's about giving myself options. And then that's kind of really where I got introduced to nuclear power and the nuclear industry. And that I think, is most people of my generation in the UK will have started off working in some form of decommissioning at Sellafield, or all the projects that are associated with that and with waste management, etc.

Bret Kugelmass
Because that's where the money is. A lot of government money goes into it, that creates a lot of jobs and that creates a lot of training opportunities, especially for up-and-coming engineers.

Allan Carson
Well, yeah, exactly. And to be honest with you, when I was starting my career 15 years ago, the UK barely hard a new build program. It was only very fledgling at that point. There wasn't a lot of work in it and nobody was really sure where it was going. They hadn't built anything for 15, 20 years before that, so the decommissioning of nuclear was the only thing going in the UK at that point.

Bret Kugelmass
And what kind of decommissioning activities? Just kind of set the scene for us: what happens?

Allan Carson
What happens... some people would say nothing. But in truth, quite a lot happens. And a big part of it is a lot of the planning. It's about the de-risking of getting the fuel off the site, because once you can get the fuel off the site, then you can sort of put in the care and maintenance time, and you can start to strip things up with much more speed, basically. It's kind of thing of looking at how you take waste out of certain places where maybe that we shouldn't be, process that waste, and manage it and take it off site. When I'm talking about waste, so I'm not talking about spent fuel here. I'm talking about sort of the other tailings that have come out of legacy nuclear sites in the UK.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, I was just gonna ask you. I was gonna ask, what form is it even in?

Allan Carson
Some of it is just bits of steel, some of it is-

Bret Kugelmass
Just on the ground? Or it's already-

Allan Carson
No, no, they're normally put inside sealed vaults and then filled with water, etc. Sometimes it's in a resin form, sometimes it's in liquid form, sometimes it's in a slurry form. And so there are all the challenges to how you get it out of where it currently is, how you end up processing it, what the waste production is going to be, how they're going to manage it, how you're going to transport it to which final disposal site, etc. Those are the sorts of projects that you normally get involved in, or surely those were the early projects that I was involved in in the nuclear industry in the UK.

Bret Kugelmass
Got it. Okay, so what happened next?

Allan Carson
What happened next was Jacobs won a contract to provide the environmental case for the GDA for the AP-1000 in the UK. And I was very interested, because I, through the decommission work, you start doing a bit of research, you go down rabbit holes, and you think, okay, hang on, this industry is quite interesting. It would be good if we could build some new ones. When that opportunity came along, I jumped at it with two hands. Got myself involved as a relatively young engineer at that point, doing some of mass energy balances and looking at the waste volume, building up the environmental case, and then looking at the emissions, etc, etc. Supported reading the chapters of environmental case and supported the meetings with the environmental regulator in the UK at the evaluation. And then I got a bit of a crazy opportunity really, in that Westinghouse wanted somebody as sort of a UK liaison for the project to go over to the US, and so again, jumped at it with two hands.

Bret Kugelmass
And when I say you got that opportunity, how? Did somebody email you? What happened?

Allan Carson
No, I proposed it. Let's be clear, I suppose in fairness, I thought it was- because they were starting to struggle with sort of understanding what the UK regulators were actually asking, because there's a different- we all speak one language, but we don't really.

Bret Kugelmass
When you say we all speak one language, you mean we all speak English.

Allan Carson
We all speak English.

Bret Kugelmass
But we all mean different things when we say it.

Allan Carson
Correct. Yes, yes. Of course I've got some stories with that as well. But they needed- the UK regulator requires much more of a story. I got the impression at that stage that when you submit a response to a question to the NRC, it's pretty much just facts and figures, here's the answer, job done. The UK regulator requires much more of a, here's the background, here's why we've done it, and here's the decision process we've gone through. This is why we made these decisions, this is the outcome, and this will be the final design decision, etc. The environmental regulator and the safety regulator are one in the same to some extent, in that respect, because for the GDA, they actually form a joint office and they work hand in hand, so one submission goes to both essentially.

Bret Kugelmass
But let's not brush past this too quick. I think this is a great lesson learned that we can talk about to help others navigate the UK regulatory process in the future, the differences between the US regulatory culture and the UK regulatory culture. Are there any other examples maybe that you can dive into where the US way of doing it didn't work?

Allan Carson
There's nothing I can go into in too much detail. What I can say is there are a number of examples where- and I'm actually writing a report right now about different interpretations of regulatory requirements that delves into not just US to UK examples, but also France to Finland, France to UK, Russia to Hungary, etc. It delves into these- the regulatory mindset and framework sets up a set of interpretations that, while consistent with the IAEA safety guidance and standards lead to very different design decisions at the endpoint-

Bret Kugelmass
Like what?

Allan Carson
I&C systems, off the top of my head. If you pick the EPR, the I&C system in France is different to the one at Olkiluoto and it's different, again, to the one at Hinkley. Waste management systems between sort of how the waste gets managed and processed in the US or Japan to how the UK and or France would want it to be processed and managed and the time involved in that, and also what the envelope needs to look like. The famous one is the thickness of the pressure vessel between Russia and the US. I think it's 19 or 25 centimeters is the difference. Yes, both are considered safe in their own respective territories. These are the challenges that we've got when we move reactors from one territory to another territory. The requirements- and it's not just numbers and figures that are different, because in a lot of regulatory regimes, like the UK, you'll have set numbers and figures. What you have is an expectation to demonstrate it's as good as it can be and that can lead to some challenging conversations, because from the US perspective - and we'll get into sort of, I had some experience with the Japanese bringing the ABWR to the UK as well - they have a design that is safe and operating and why they're having to change that because the regulatory requirements or expectations are slightly different is a very challenging conversation to have with companies.

Bret Kugelmass
You said something that I want to dive into just in case I'm- it's one of those language things that we talked about before. You said as good as it can be. When you say that, what do you mean? Do you mean that it's as good as possible, or it's as good as it needs to be to fulfill-

Allan Carson
Well, they're two different things and it's kind of the essence of the conversation of radiation. It's all based around this concept of the ALARA or the ALARP principle, As Low As Reasonably Achievable, As Low As Reasonably Practical in the UK. Where I think we get ourselves into problems with this principle is we're always driving to a lower number. If we think about off-site emissions, for example, there comes a point where another three fifths of nothing makes no difference and so-

Bret Kugelmass
Who is missing that. Is it the regulator that's missing that or is it the applicant that's missing that point?

Allan Carson
It's the regulator in a lot of cases that is missing that point. And the regulator is driving more and more stringent requirements that- because it's this massive emphasis on more and more safety, more and more regulation as a good thing. But actually what that does is it stifles innovation, it stifles deployment times, it makes everything more expensive, etc.

Bret Kugelmass
And is this true of all regulators?

Allan Carson
I mean, it's true. I want to be clear, I don't want to upset the regulators, because let's be honest, we have an extraordinarily safe industry. And we have that industry because the regulators have learned lessons and have moved things forward and adapted.

Bret Kugelmass
And by the way, I actually don't think you'll be upsetting the regulators, even if you criticize them, because I've spoken to so many of them that want us to be critical of them, because they want- because they actually- many of the individuals want to change things, but they feel like the inertia of the organization doesn't allow them to. They actually welcome critical voices to give them more standing to have internal conversations that challenge the way of doing things. I would actually not hold back, if I were you, be as critical as you want and I think they'll appreciate it.

Allan Carson
No, I absolutely agree, but I did want to get the point across that I do think they do a fantastic job, and a very challenging job. And you're absolutely right, a lot of the individuals that I've spoken to as well are very keen to change things and very keen to be a bit more progressive and sort of collaborative between different regulatory bodies so that they can learn from each other. And you're absolutely right, the sort of the inertia and all the background within the associations, it's turning a tanker ship around, isn't it? It takes a really long time, or one of a better analogy. But yeah, it is the regulators. The regulators need to start having serious conversations about where this is going, because if we keep adding more and more layers, it will suffocate the industry.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah. And I actually don't think it helps them achieve their goals either. If their ultimate goal is safety of people in the environment, I actually think there's a very strong argument to be made that adding additional layers adds complexity. Adding complexity, adds risk, risk that the layers are misunderstood, risk that the layers will interfere with each other in an unpredictable way, risk that there's just so much stuff going on that it actually becomes impossible to keep track of it all and then you miss something and you allow mistakes to happen. So I think we need to actually have that conversation as well, that more layers can be actually more dangerous, not more safe.

Allan Carson
You're absolutely right. The more things you have to engineer, the more things that can go wrong. The machine that doesn't break is the one with one moving part.

Bret Kugelmass
I love that. I haven't heard that one, but that's perfect. Okay, so tell me, let's just continue through your career a little bit so we don't lose track.

Allan Carson
Right, so we just got to the US with Westinghouse. I was there for a year living in Pittsburgh. Absolutely wonderful experience, met a very large number of very good friends and colleagues I still have to this day, both inside and outside of Westinghouse. That was absolutely brilliant. I really enjoyed that. And then I returned to the UK because Fukushima occurred and the whole industry went into sort of, it just collapsed in on itself a little bit and recoiled from the world scene a little bit. That was sort of the coming back to the UK and at that point, obviously a lot of the new build was just a little bit on hold, everybody was sort of locking up, like what are the next steps. That was the point I decided to sort of make a bit of a career jump and move to Rolls Royce Civil Nuclear Division as a lead engineer, and was part of their business development program to help them build their civil nuclear program, did business development work with various clients around the world and in the UK, looking to win contracts and bids and some of them they're delivering at Hinkley Point C today. I was there for about two years. Again, enjoyed it, but after about the two year period there, or two, three year period at Rolls Royce, the new build market was picking back up again in the UK and Hitachi had entered the fray and they were looking to build and develop a project of Wylfa, so I went and became part of the contract management team for the Horizon project and essentially managing parts of the contract to bring the ABWR to the UK and all the interfaces that that had with regulators, with design teams, with the licensing team that have been run in parallel to the to the project development team. I did that for about three years.

Bret Kugelmass
Now you're getting actually quite a bit of different experience seeing kind of fits and starts of outside international companies trying to play a role in the UK market, right?

Allan Carson
Yeah, exactly.

Bret Kugelmass
At this point, are there lessons learned or patterns emerging that you're seeing about what people are doing right and wrong?

Allan Carson
Yeah, I mean, I think the familiar pattern is the regulatory one. Everybody underestimates the regulatory challenge coming to the UK, particularly if you have a design that's already operating, because the cost of change is very high.

Bret Kugelmass
And why change it? If you- that's what I never actually understood. If you already have a design and it's working somewhere and someone- obviously, it's kind of gone through all of the, it's gone through the processes and the inspection and people looked at it, and it's really lived up to muster, why change the design at all? Why not just go to the regulator and say why the existing design meets their criteria, rather, and literally not allow for a single bolt to be changed. And just say, Listen, you can take it or leave it. Obviously, other people think this is safe. Obviously, we have a compelling case. Obviously, we have hundreds of engineers that can talk to you about why it's safe in its current form, but we are not changing this design. Period, end of story.

Allan Carson
They probably wouldn't let you build it.

Bret Kugelmass
And why?

Allan Carson
That's a really fascinating question. And it's kind of what I'm trying to solve in my job today. A big part of the objective of where I work today is that you can take a standardized design that has been approved by a competent authority and build it anywhere with next to zero change.

Bret Kugelmass
And why - I know we're gonna get into this - but why does that actually require any change in policy or procedure whatsoever? Why is that not just something that a few people have a conversation in a room, a few lawyers, a few engineers, a few heads of government, a few heads of state, and in one afternoon they all discuss it, people bring up their concerns, and then they come to the conclusion that, obviously, if another competent regulator approved it, it's good?

Allan Carson
Well, I think I'll tackle that in various stages. I think the first one is most of the regulators will tell you that they're independent. That would be first.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, but independent is supposed to be independent from undue influence from like an executive branch, where maybe a dictator takes control of a country and says, You build these plants with cheap parts or else, because my cousin runs the cheap part factory. And then they're supposed to be independent and be like, No, you don't control me, but not necessarily independent from each other.

Allan Carson
No, they're supposed to be independent from undue influence from heads of state and or other ways, right? The main reason I can work out - I don't have an answer as to why it doesn't happen, I'm still trying to look for that answer, by the way, I don't think anybody has that answer - but you're quite right. Just knocking heads together might be a good idea, but I think a lot of it has to do with history. I think a lot of it has, to some extent, from my personal perspective, I think a lot of it has to do with where did the nuclear power industry come from. It came from the desire to make weapons. And, as a result, a level of secrecy and security and control got built around it. That then manifested itself, when we started looking and each individual country start developing their own civil nuclear program for power purposes, that level of secrecy and security etc. came with it and as a result, it's sort of embedded into government and ministers' mindsets that this stuff needs to be protected. And it does need to be protected to a level, but maybe not to the level that we can't have a conversation with some friendly neighbors.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, and then also just making that distinction clear between weapons and civil. I mean, I just think the distinction is so obvious. You can use a proxy, like enrichment level, to just make a very clear distinction between the two. Like you can't make weapons with sub 5% enriched uranium, so why is anything that clearly is just using sub 5% enriched uranium not subject to the same levels of secrecy and concern.

Allan Carson
Exactly. But like I said, I think it's a historical mindset thing.

Bret Kugelmass
I see, it's cultural. It's beyond logic, it's cultural.

Allan Carson
Exactly, exactly. That's my personal perception, at least. I think the answer will only come out in the wash once you've actually solved the problem.

Bret Kugelmass
Okay. So I guess, how do you- actually how did you become part of the World Nuclear Association?

Allan Carson
Yeah, so that sort of came- after I came back from Japan - I lived in Japan for six months with Hitachi and then to come back and spend a little bit of time being a project management consultant for numerous projects, delivering a project into Hinkley Point C. And then I sort of had a bit of a decision to make really, in terms of I realized I could continue to ride the wave up and down of project development in the UK and come across all of the same challenges and same problems that every project I've worked on to-date has come across, or I could go and try and do something about it. I looked around and there was an opportunity with the World Nuclear Association and very specifically with their CORDEL Working Group, which is the Cooperation in Reactor Design Evaluation and Licensing working group.

Bret Kugelmass
Can you tell me a little bit more about that acronym? Is there a reason it spells out CORDEL?

Allan Carson
I's titled the Cooperation in Reactor Design Evaluation and Licensing and they just managed to pick the right letters in the starting two or three letters of each of those words to pick CORDEL. That's all I know about it.

Bret Kugelmass
It doesn't- I guess just thinking it sounds like cordial, because it's like people working together. Is there anything like that? Or is that just me making stuff up?

Allan Carson
If it is, it's before my time and then nobody's told me.

Bret Kugelmass
Okay, keep going. Sorry.

Allan Carson
No, you're fine. Very specifically, their standing mandate, as I've mentioned, is to have a situation where you have standardized reactors that you can build anywhere in the world. And so I thought this is a good fit. This worked quite well in terms of kind of where my mind is, in terms of what needs to change. I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to go and work there and then my focus there is on SMRs, on licensing and permitting, and on digital I&C. Those are the three areas that I'm responsible for.

Bret Kugelmass
Tell me about licensing of SMRs and does this change the story at all? Some of the things we were talking about before about how regulators do them. Are SMRs the opportunity to kind of press the reset button on our licensing cultural expectations?

Allan Carson
It might be. I'll probably answer that in three ways. The first one is sort of I wrote a- well, the association has written a report titled "Design maturity and regulatory expectations for SMRs" that looks across a number of countries trying to mesh together the design stages that you go through when you're deciding a reactor versus the design expectations of the licensing process in nine different countries. And it turns out that, as far as getting a construction license goes, everybody's relatively well-aligned. As far as the pre-licensing processes go, we're not all that well-aligned at all. Some of them start very early in the process, some of them start quite late in the process, and there's anything in between those two.

Bret Kugelmass
And what are these countries? I'm looking at a list right now, is it Belgium, Canada, China, France, Korea, Russia, UK, Ukraine, USA?

Allan Carson
That's the one.

Bret Kugelmass
Okay. And how did you choose these to look- because there are probably like 20 more. How are these chosen? They

Allan Carson
The way the association works, the way our industry cooperation groups work is we put out a request to our members that we're going to do, or we're proposing to do this report. Who wants to be involved, who wants to contribute? This is the information we're looking for and then we get back replies and responses. And thankfully, we have quite a lot of contributors to this report, quite well-detailed.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, it's amazing looking through it and I'm really glad that you guys put it together. I actually think certain reports are better than others in terms of clarity and I think this one hits the nail on the head, so to speak.

Allan Carson
That's good to hear. Thank you. A long time formatting and writing it.

Bret Kugelmass
I think that's important. And then so, I guess, I want to ask this question, but I know you can't answer, but I'll ask it anyway. Why doesn't everyone participate? I don't get it, why doesn't literally everybody jump at the opportunity? Because it's the World Nuclear Association. It's not like some gotcha organization. It's gonna be helpful to have- it'd be helpful to even see yourself in comparison to others. It's free education for yourself. Why wouldn't everyone participate?

Allan Carson
Absolutely. That's pretty much the premise of the way the working groups and task forces are set up is that it's freely publicly available information, and it's for everybody to contribute to and learn from. I can't answer as to why everybody doesn't necessarily get involved. I know it from the other side, as in having worked in organizations like that contribute to the World Nuclear Association is that there's always slightly different time pressures. You're always up against the clock on something, and then to take on something else that might be another two months of work might be a bit of a challenge. That's certainly a factor, but it's not the only factor. And so it's an interesting question, but not one I can definitively answer.

Bret Kugelmass
And do you think that now this report has come out that there's an opportunity you can send it back to everyone who didn't participate and say, Hey, we'd love to do an addendum. Now you can see everything that's going to be in it, will you now contribute? And then we'll come out with another one in six months, or something that has everyone?

Allan Carson
Well, to be honest, just to sort of get back to your original question about are SMRs the opportunity to reset the licensing button, for us, it's more about kind of the next step. It's kind of, we've sort of done this report. The level of detail about the content is really interesting and it's really useful, but for us, really, it's about how do we take those recommendations about international cooperation and bringing the regulators and industry and government closer together and make that work? That for us is the bigger thing. If the opportunity came along and other contributors wanted to add to it, we could absolutely do an addendum. That wouldn't be a problem, it would certainly add to the weight of the report and have other countries involved. Really, for us, it's about what do we do next? How do we move this to the next step, because the licensing challenge for SMRs is, to some extent, it's even worse than it is for PWRs, because we have the risk that things will diverge even further. If you separate SMRs, between light water reactors and the Gen IV concepts, the light water reactors will probably have similar challenges when moving between countries, as we've seen so far. The Gen IV concepts, if you pick, for example, a molten salt reactor, some of the countries listed in our report won't have any experience of it, so then they're gonna have to go and find something if they want to use it. Then there's a risk that that diverges even further from the other countries that are also reviewing molten salt reactors. It's ultimately urgent that we start to bring this together in an international forum, and get people thinking about how do we come up with an approach at an international level that can satisfy everybody from a regulatory safety standpoint and also can actually help A, both the mature nuclear countries deploy reactors faster, yet also help developing countries who don't really have the regulatory frameworks to pick up some of these technologies and utilize them.

Bret Kugelmass
And when you say - I want to be precise - when you say the developing countries, do you mean the developing countries that don't have nuclear or just don't have as many nuclear plants as the bigger countries do?

Allan Carson
Both.

Bret Kugelmass
Because one of the things that - I want to hear your thoughts on this - one of the things that I've been considering is actually, the nuclear countries - countries that have a nuclear reactor, but don't have a giant entrenched industry, don't have incredibly entrenched cultural values also in their regulatory scheme - might actually be the best pioneers to lead the way, which sounds a little counterintuitive. You think, okay, maybe you want the most resourced countries, the most ones with the most experience. But it's- let's take a small country like Czech Republic or something. They're extremely competent, they've got great nuclear engineers, they've got research reactors, they've got a couple commercial reactors. Is it possible that they're actually far better positioned to lead a new regulatory paradigm, than a country that has 1,000 stakeholders in their licensing organization?

Allan Carson
It's certainly possible, but in order for that to happen, though, it's very much- we sort of, I see the first step to that process being that we get ourselves comfortable - when I say we, I mean, this sort of international nuclear community - to get ourselves comfortable with the idea that the Czech Republic or another would take the design of an SMR that has been licensed in the US, Canada, the UK, France, Russia, wherever, and essentially, just does the site licensing activities required to sort of look at the seismic spectra, etc, etc, etc, to then build it on their site, without significant changes to core design, etc. and all this stuff that costs a lot of money.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, I mean, that's a no-brainer to me. That's just general reciprocity, right?

Allan Carson
Exactly. That's what makes a lot of sense. That, to me, I think, is the first step towards this new regulatory paradigm, because then, if you can get that done, you can then bring in other regulators to sort of look at that and say, Okay, there's a model here now, maybe this will be a way to go. And then you start to build and develop trust between how those activities are happening, and then all of a sudden we have a process, we might be able to harmonize.

Bret Kugelmass
Don't we have historical precedent for this? I mean, I went down to Mexico and met with the regulator down there and - I forgot how many people they have there, maybe like 100 or something - and they have a GE reactor. I think their basic premise was, Yeah, we're not going to ask GE to redo their reactor - like a BWR, this is like from the 70s, 80s, 90s, whatever it was - and they're like, Yeah, we're not gonna ask for any changes, we believe that the US did a good job and so we're here to make sure that the continued operations meet standards, but we're not gonna ask them to redesign their reactor.

Allan Carson
There is - I don't know this specific case in Mexico - but there's definitely precedence for it and there's also precedence in Europe where some countries will have their - particularly in Eastern Europe - will have accepted the Russian regulatory sort of findings and have moved on to construction on that basis. Others are less willing to do so. Again, that's sort of part of the mindset challenge that I believe we have to move past and get on to a point where we're a competent authority, deemed a competent authority, because they are just not.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, exactly. Okay, so what do you- let's get some- let's get action-oriented here. What do you think literally needs to happen to move forward on that?

Allan Carson
Right. And this is the other report I want to mention, CORDEL produced a what's called a lessons learned from transport report, because, believe it or not, the nuclear industry has actually managed to harmonize regulations previously in association with transport. It was one of the first activities the IEA really did.

Bret Kugelmass
When you say transport, what do you mean? Transport what?

Allan Carson
Transport of fuel, transport of new and spent fuel. We do it-

Bret Kugelmass
New and spent fuel. Okay, interesting. I would imagine those to be two wildly different cases. It's like new fuels and radioactive.

Allan Carson
Yeah, I mean, we have - what is it, I'll probably get this wrong - but the Type B package containers that are universally accepted for transport of spent fuel around the world. There are local challenges to it, but fundamentally, the regulations are harmonized at an international level. They're not defined by every country and there are no changes in requirements as you move from one territory to the next territory. We've been doing this for, well, since the 1960s, years ago. There's a large amount of precedence there in terms of something that we can do properly and we can harmonize.

Bret Kugelmass
And okay, you're using the word harmonize, which actually scares me a little bit. I like the world reciprocity better, because reciprocity means that you can actually have two different systems, but you trust the other system and you can go with either, and that makes it actually easier to get things done. With harmonizing - and maybe this is just the words and coming back to our English - I'm afraid whenever I hear harmonizing, because the first thing I think is, okay, everyone has to get in a room and agree on a common set of standards - and that's impossible - and then that common set of standards, there's no guarantee that's going to be the best final outcome. I mean, they're usually called common laws for a reason, and it might be overly conservative, and it might be maybe harder to get things done.

Allan Carson
No, you're absolutely right. And you raised a really good point. And harmony is- the word harmony scares a lot of people. I'm using CORDEL's language, because that's what they have traditionally used. What it really means is a harmonization of approaches or a streamlining of approaches in terms of, we're not talking about- what we definitely don't want to happen is everybody get in the room and agree with the most strict requirements are the ones we're going to follow, because that race to the top is just going to kill everybody.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, exactly. That's going to kill the whole industry, as if it's not already dying.

Allan Carson
That's the one thing we definitely don't want people to understand by harmonization. What we really mean is that there is an agreed approach and - I'll let you say that word.

Bret Kugelmass
Reciprocity.

Allan Carson
Reciprocity, that's the word, yes, thank you. That's quite a good way of thinking about it, because it means that one regulator can accept the output of another regulator's review, and/or they can do separate bits of a review and come together and share conclusions so that there is one whole part. That is kind of really what we're trying to drive at, but it's not everybody getting in a room and agreeing on a set of requirements, because that will never happen.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah. Okay, so back to my other question. Literally, what do you do to move this forward? Do you host a conference? Do you get two people in a room and then add a third? What would you do to make us move forward?

Allan Carson
What we've proposed is the development of a - it's a long title - a multinational advisory panel, which essentially is constructed of competent regulators - and by competent regulators, I mean, the big regulators have been doing this for 40, 50 years - representatives from them, and they have a mandate from government to essentially dictate and control the activities associated with licensing of reactors around the world. It may start off quite small. It might start off with maybe two or three regulators coming together and working out how they're going to review designs of a number of SMRs. That may expand to get in, you may get a fourth and a fifth coming in for the second set of reviews, and then you have six and seven coming in for the next set of reviews. And ultimately, you build a repository of all these designs that have been reviewed and accepted by this panel and group of regulatory experts that have a mandate from the government and the mandate from the government is important, but really-

Bret Kugelmass
Does that mandate come with money, is that the idea?

Allan Carson
It has to come with money, because regulators have budgets for international collaboration, but they don't have budgets for this scale of international collaboration. This is- they're going to need more people, basically.

Bret Kugelmass
And when you say they come together and they approve designs, what exactly are they approving in these designs?

Allan Carson
That's sometimes the challenge, in terms of what are we actually going to lock up, because when we think about licensing, in the - I'll go back to the US and UK as two very different examples - in the US, you approve - if you think about the design certification process, or the design approval process - you approve a design, essentially the NSSS and supporting systems and then you can move that into your call application or your site license application. In the UK, you don't really approve the design. Your license application is for a site and activities on that site. Now, obviously, the design has a huge influence on that, but it's fundamentally slightly different criteria. Actually, one of the first things they have to get together and agree on is, what is it they're going to review and what does that mean? It's kind of part of that- part of what we're trying to develop now is, how do we take what they're going to review - and it's not about all of a sudden, this isn't about taking away regulators' national sovereignty, either. This is about them being part of an international pile of reviews and designs. There will then be, in theory, a process that takes that review and puts it back into their regulatory process. It just skips most of the front end and gets to the back end where you can apply for site license.

Bret Kugelmass
But how many, how much staff would this organization have? Because it's like, I've seen what NuScale had to go through, like 10 years - they say four, but it was like 10 - $500 million worth of- and this is for a very well-characterized technology and a giant bucket of water. Like what's- how could- if it took them all of that time, resources, effort to get, approval, how could this new organization possibly have the resources to license advanced - quote unquote advanced designs - that are not as well-characterized as just a small PWR?

Allan Carson
You're right, resources are probably- the initial intention is that you would reach back into existing organizations, you reach back into the ONR, reach back into the NRC-

Bret Kugelmass
Borrow people and borrow expertise.

Allan Carson
Borrow people and borrow expertise. And actually, a big part of the concept behind this is the working collaboratively and the development of trust. So if somebody from the NRC or from the ONR can work alongside somebody from the ASN in France and understand how they're doing the review process, such that they understand why they've done what they've done and understood what the output is, and they understand the implications of that, then that develop- that collaborative sort of working develops a level of trust, but then when a design comes out of the French regulator, it's a much smoother path through this process, because there are less checks and where you don't require as many checks and balances, because you get to a point where everybody in the room knows what everybody else is doing. And that's- that unfortunately takes time and effort and resources.

Bret Kugelmass
Yep. And then this might take a while to actually get spun up, also, right? Or do you think that there's a pathway to make this happen next year?

Allan Carson
There's not a pathway to make this happen- let me rephrase that. There is a pathway to make it happen relatively quickly. The challenge is the government funding. Just going back to, if you speak to regulators, regulators are generally quite keen to have more international collaboration. They are keen to work together, and they're keen to sort of learn from each other and take on board what they can do. It's how do we make it happen? How do we fund it? How do we get governments interested in making this happen? That's where some of the challenge is.

Bret Kugelmass
Can I ask a question - this might just sound insane, but you tell me - given how important moving nuclear forward is - and I think everyone in the nuclear industry internalizes that and they also kind of see what's been happening these last couple decades and know that things are not going in the right direction - so given that - also given, depending climate issues, and just like general clean energy and energy poverty issues that we know nuclear can solve - is it so crazy to ask people to volunteer 20 hours a week? I understand it's a lot of time. They're working 40 hours a week and I'm asking them to work 60 hours a week. But is it so crazy to ask for volunteers across the world to commit to 20 hours a week for two years stints or something and just say, I'm going to buckle down and I'm going to do this and form a corps, a volunteer corps of 2,000 people in the next few months that are just willing to do it, and then just say, this is too important. I want to leave, I've got kids, I want to leave a legacy of having moved the world forward. I know nuclear technology is going to be absolutely pivotal in doing that. And this is just my duty as a nuclear engineer to volunteer my time. Is that crazy? Is that insane?

Allan Carson
No, I don't think it's entirely insane. I don't think you'll get the numbers you need. I think you will get some extraordinarily dedicated individuals who would be willing to do it, but I don't think you'd get the numbers required. I think one possibility might be- and there's always been a question around what industry's role in this is, because this multi advisory panel sort of sits in the middle of industry, regulators, government, basically. We understand what the government's role is, we understand what the regulator's role is, there's always been a sort of a question around what can industry do to help move this forward? And maybe there's something not too far from your suggestion there, but where there are lots of extraordinarily competent safety engineers in industry. And it's not beyond the realms of imagination that maybe industry can provide some of those highly qualified safety engineers to this honor, sort of a rolling one, if you're based, a monthly basis, etc, as part of a common program, etc, etc. That, I think, is possibly a more realistic route of getting the numbers we need.

Bret Kugelmass
Industry. Yeah, I'm just trying to think of which companies, though, would actually do it. And the problem is the largest nuclear companies that have the people and can afford it are also generally the most conservative and also kind of, I feel like they're just like, they're dying for a reason. And I'm afraid- yeah, I don't know, maybe when you say industry, there are more medium-sized organizations that will be up for the challenge.

Allan Carson
I mean, straight off the top of my head, I was thinking more of some of your engineering consultancy organizations.

Bret Kugelmass
I see, like a Jacobs or one of those.

Allan Carson
Something along those lines. They have extremely competent people all over the world. And there might be- there's obviously something, there's a fair level of incentivization there for them as well to actually do it. Yeah, I understand you're saying, but it's a challenge. We have to find the people somewhere. I guess here's the thing, if we're serious about trying to solve climate change, and we're serious about doing that through the development of nuclear power - which I believe is the only way we're really going to do it in time - then we have to find a solution to that. And there are lots of roadblocks or other problems, and we have to find a way through those. And we have to do it far sooner rather than later, or I'm going to be sat here in 10 years talking to you just telling you that we haven't learnt the lessons from the deployment of the Gen III reactors, we made the same licensing mistakes as we did with the SMRs.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, I think at that point, we might as well just all give up and go home, because I think what nuclear has going for it right now, actually, is the climate message. I mean, it's always had the clean air and energy message, but I think that what's really kind of gotten more broad support outside the nuclear industry is the climate message. And in 10 years, we're either going to be at a tipping point where there's a clear solution in sight, or everyone just gives up because it's like literally too late. I mean, it won't be like the oceans are boiling then, like the math will show at that point that there's no going back. I think we have to move quickly, or just say we don't, just like admit we don't care.

Allan Carson
Yeah, yeah, we kind of have to do one or the other, don't we? We definitely have to get off the fence. Yeah.

Bret Kugelmass
Please. Yeah, just tell me more about- let's just switch gears for a second. Tell me more about just what you see happening in industry that makes you- not industry, but just like the nuclear sector in general that makes you optimistic.

Allan Carson
I think this is- I mean, I definitely think the advent of the amount of energy around SMRs at the moment and around the timescales of deployment and the ambition of all of the companies that they're bringing to the table and the enthusiasm and the energy they're putting into the sector at the moment is absolutely fantastic. I've never seen anything like it in the 13, 15 years I've been in the industry. That's really exciting. It's quite empowering. It's good to see that there are so many people engaged, and with so many people interested in it. And I actually think that's helping to drive a little bit of sort of cultural change and change the conversation a little bit around nuclear, because there are a lot more people who are periphery or are actively involved in the industry at this point, so that's quite positive. The other thing that's quite exciting is the amount of work that we are seeing regulatory enthusiasm about working together. We are- there's been signs with the MOC between the US NRC and the CNSC in Canada who are jointly working on some reviews of SMRs and CNSC have also signed in the MOC with the ONR. It looks like there might be some joint work there at some point in the future, hopefully, as well. That international sort of collaboration is starting to take some sort of shape. It feels a little bit like we're at a tipping point with it, where we need to kick it into the next gear, and then see where it takes us, or it will sort of settle itself back down again, and it won't go anywhere. That's kind of exciting that we're trying to drive that at the moment.

Bret Kugelmass
Allan Carson, everybody. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Allan Carson
Thank you.

Bret Kugelmass
We're here today on Titans of Nuclear with Jeremy Gordon, who is the Director of Fluent in Energy and a communications professional that I've known for a while in the nuclear industry. Jeremy, welcome.

Jeremy Gordon
Oh, hi, Bret. Thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure to be a Titan of Nuclear, this grand project that you've been undertaking for a long time. Great to be part of it now.

Bret Kugelmass
Thank you. Yeah. Well, you won't be a titan until the end of the episode, but we'll assume it goes there.

Jeremy Gordon
If you can't kick me off halfway through.

Bret Kugelmass
I was so excited to have you on the show. I mean, I've known you for years. And I remember we got lunch together in, where was it? Was that in France or?

Jeremy Gordon
No, that was in London.

Bret Kugelmass
But you wouldn't, but we were having escargot or something. You wouldn't eat escargot, is that it?

Jeremy Gordon
It was a really nice French restaurant and they were so proud of their snails. And I was like, no, not interested.

Bret Kugelmass
I wanted to try it. I'd never tried it before. It was like on the menu as their recommended appetizer. And you're like, nope,

Jeremy Gordon
Not interested, no, and the guy was so offended.

Bret Kugelmass
Okay, well, we got past that part and then we got chatting about the nuclear industry. And you were at World Nuclear Association at the time, is that right?

Jeremy Gordon
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. World Nuclear Association. I was kind of in a management team working on their harmony program.

Bret Kugelmass
Okay. We'll get to that. But before we get there, I just want to learn a little bit more about you. I'm not even sure I had the full opportunity to learn about your history and this is the most exciting part of this job for me. So tell me, where did you grow up and what got you into energy?

Jeremy Gordon
Okay, well, I mean, I grew up where I live now, which is in the suburbs of London. Fairly ordinary kind of reasonably comfortable life.

Bret Kugelmass
Which suburbs? And and how is London structured in terms of suburbs? Do they have different characters? And is there- is it like the East, the West? How do you break that out for us?

Jeremy Gordon
London is a collection of villages that all grew together, right? They do all- each area has its own character. And I'm kind of out, I live in Kingston and that is on the River Thames, and it grew up around a bridge. So like "x" amount of years ago, it was the only place you could get across the river apart from using a boat, other than London Bridge. It grew up around a kind of a market. And just the next door down the river is Hampton Court Palace and so the Royals were always coming and going, and Kingston grew up around that as kind of a royal market. It's got this kind of nice history, it's kind of leafy. And because the river comes down there, there aren't very many big roads. It didn't really grow up and get over-developed. It's quite obvious, people will say it's kind of a leafy, middle class kind of place. It's got its own character. Everywhere has its own kind of pros and cons.

Bret Kugelmass
The place that you grew up, what do most people end up doing? Do they go to college? Do they- what do they study? Tell me about your friends? Like, where did they all end up?

Jeremy Gordon
Well, they all worked in video games. Actually, most of my friends who I went through college with, we were studying physics, computers and math. That's what we tend to do for our A levels when we were kind of 16, 17, 18. I didn't really want to do math, but they told me I had to do it if I wanted to do physics, which I was interested in. I wanted to be a video game programmer, because I was kind of, I'd become interested in computers and programming at home just messing around. And a few of them managed to get connection to the video game companies. There are quite a few in the southeast of England. They've managed to get themselves jobs on the basis of no experience, just lagging ability. There's kind of- but what we're interested in at that time.

Bret Kugelmass
And then what did you go on to do?

Jeremy Gordon
Well, I started out on that route. I got myself a degree in artificial intelligence, which was, you know, science fiction in those days. Now it's for real, right? But that was kind of '97 to 2000 I did that and it was a bit more rudimentary. But I wanted to work in video games and make the make the enemies more realistic, make them like, hold a grudge against you and make them change tactics, make them kind of play dirty. Things like that.

Bret Kugelmass
And that's kind of the way the industry has been heading, too, at least in terms of visuals and the physics engines behind these behind these games. It's just unbelievable.

Jeremy Gordon
It's all absolutely standard now. Yeah, so I worked in it when that was kind of becoming standard. I wasn't really very good at it, though. Because I mean, it is very, very highly technical. And although I get the broad strokes of it, I understand the reasons why we need the technical aspects, I wasn't particularly good at actually implementing them in like a properly robust sort of way. So that didn't work out for me. And I got basically kicked out. I got sacked from that and then I didn't really know what to do. Then I was super fortunate to get an offer of some casual work on a newspaper on The Daily Mail weekend magazine, which kind of a friend of a friend, the father worked there. He said, Look, we need somebody to fill a gap, one of your friend's interested? And I was like, I'll do it. And that's like a real piece of privilege to get that. But once I was sort of working with words, I found, I'm good at this, I can do this and this kind of makes sense to me. I kind of got on an editorial path after that.

Bret Kugelmass
And what type of stuff do you write about?

Jeremy Gordon
Well, I mean, in those days, it was really simple work doing the tv listings, basically, for this big magazine full of TV listing. It's just copy fitting to be the right length and getting stuff to fit on the page and just basic work like that. But it proved to me that I could do it, and then after that, I still needed a proper job and I didn't know which direction to go. While I was thinking, Okay, let's look at editorial work, I applied for a job. And it said, Assistant Editor on a Technical Title. I was like, Okay, well, let's have a look. I'm a semi-technical guy, let's try it. And it turned out to be Nuclear Engineering International Magazine. And that was when I randomly started working in nuclear.

Bret Kugelmass
So cool. And who owns nuclear- that magazine? What's the structure of that?

Jeremy Gordon
Okay, so that's- it's a very long running publication that's been going like more than 50 years.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, the website looked like it.

Jeremy Gordon
It does a bit. That is just one of 100 magazines owned by the same company. And the way that industry works is that publishing company will turn out those magazines and they have a very kind of predictable base of subscribers. Then after a while, they'll kind of cut costs a little bit, make the company worth more, sell it to somebody else, and then that will repeat. It seems to repeat like every four or five years as a kind of ongoing kind of churn.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, it's like one of those, they aggregate a bunch of niche audiences that they know will have a high retention rate, but they don't have to compete against the broad public.

Jeremy Gordon
Yeah, that's right. Well, I enjoyed working there.

Bret Kugelmass
And what exactly do you have for them?

Jeremy Gordon
Well, as the assistant editor, I was support to the editor. There were only two of us producing, I don't know, like 38 pages of pretty dense material about nuclear engineering on a monthly basis. If you think about it, you've got to produce like a page a day. There's more than 1,000 words a day.

Bret Kugelmass
And this was online at the time or as a strictly a print publication?

Jeremy Gordon
It was print, but there was a bit of a website, a little bit neglected, not much to it. Not much of a business around that, like it is now, because this was 2004. We were doing everything. We were writing some features ourselves, writing quite a lot of news in those days, six or eight pages of news a month. But mainly, the content comes from - or it came from - the industry itself and the engineers actually doing the work and the scientists who are out there researching stuff. We would spend a lot of time going to conferences, meeting people hearing what they're doing. And when we found something which we reckon would be interesting for the audience, we would get them to write an article for us and then edit that and put it all together. It was a really nice job to visit power plants, to meet engineers, to see how things work as a very naive, kind of an outsider, without any real knowledge of nuclear, without any deep knowledge of physics, have these guys patiently explaining everything. It was a great place to learn.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah. And then, tell me, at what point did you start feeling pretty confident in your understanding of the technology?

Jeremy Gordon
I kind of want to say never. I'm definitely on this curve where you feel quite confident, then you realize you know nothing. I'm still heading down, down further on that. Happy to leave the technical things to the technical experts and always follow their lead. But I mean, it took about two years to have read and written about every topic that was out there. Every country, every aspect of the industry, every part of the fuel cycle, figure out what is a safety issue, what is a real issue, and what's not. It took about two years. A magazine is a great place to do it, because it has an annual kind of editorial cycle. You're guaranteed to look at every single aspect during that. Once I had seen them all two or three times, just liked to know what was going on.

Bret Kugelmass
How long did you do that for? And then when did you switch to your next role?

Jeremy Gordon
It was about two and a half years. And sort of during that time, I made quite a lot of contacts around the place. And I began to also feel that the industry could be doing better in its communication, because I joined as a naive, ordinary person with the same hang ups about nuclear as everybody else, not very confident in it, wanting to be reassured that it's being done properly and I can trust these organizations. And through the course of meeting people and seeing things through my own eyes, I realized, well, actually, this is not the kind of thing we need to be getting rid of this. We need more of this. It actually works pretty good. And what I thought was a big problem, no really, no really big problems. We do know what to do. Well, what's the problem with us doing some more of this? I began to personally become pro-nuclear basically, through that as an education. Among the people that I was kind of making contact with and seeing around with some people from World Nuclear Association, in particular, Ian Hore-Lacey is kind of a legendary guy. I'm not sure if you've spoken to him yet.

Bret Kugelmass
I haven't come across him yet.

Jeremy Gordon
He's probably the most prolific nuclear communicator that has ever lived, or perhaps that ever will.

Bret Kugelmass
Alright, well, I have to make a note to get ahold of him.

Jeremy Gordon
I think you need this guy, you need to go. Because he basically, pretty much single-handedly had written these long information papers about every topic that you can imagine in the nuclear business - every country, every technology, every issue, every single thing - and kept them meticulously up to date, as meticulously as one human can maintain 200 long documents. He's a very knowledgeable guy, and was using that base of information. They were just providing talking points for everybody who's out there who wants to talk about nuclear, so a base of understanding that supports more message-based communication or more story-based. You provide a really good layer of fat for everybody. It's still underlying a lot of what you see out there today, because if you just Google nuclear Bulgaria, because you want to know what's going on in Bulgaria, you'll find it and you'll pretty quickly find the readings and stuff.

Bret Kugelmass
Where's he from? Which country?

Jeremy Gordon
He's Australian.

Bret Kugelmass
Okay. Alright. This is- I know exactly who you are talking about. Okay, now, I thought maybe you're talking about someone from the UK or something. Yeah, I know exactly- he wrote all of those just like knowledge pages that sit on your world nuclear.

Jeremy Gordon
Exactly. He was doing that and he was he was looking for somebody to replace him to kind of take over kind of hard pass on the baton, or what have you. And he thought that I maybe could do that. We were just talking to each other and he realized this guy's pro-nuclear, you can read or write about it without getting the details wrong, so let's give him a try. I ended up working at World Nuclear Association with Ian Hore-Lacey, working on those papers for a little while. That lasted a few months before my role at WNA really began when I was asked to create a new news service for them, and the result of that is World Nuclear News that we set up in 2007.

Bret Kugelmass
Tell me about the process. How do you set it up? How do you get your content coming in? What's the technology? Tell me all the challenges.

Jeremy Gordon
Well, what I realized, what I actually realized when I was on the magazine is that there's a huge demand for information about nuclear, especially when anything seems to be perhaps going wrong. People want answers and they want information. At that time, the internet had become decent enough that companies did have websites, and they did have press releases on them and they did have pictures. The information was actually out there and it was possible, I think this is what I realized, it was possible to actually get the information together quite quickly, but sort of nobody was doing that. And it was still, there was no social media for sharing. In those days, they hadn't really begun, Facebook hadn't begun yet. So what I realized is, well if we just make that our job, we find the information about what's happening from the company press releases, the organization press releases, and what we already know - because we're the World Nuclear Association, so we know a lot - and we source pictures and put them on our website, this is going to be valuable, useful, it's going to be important. It's going to be a good service for our members, good service for anyone who happens to be interested in nuclear, with the objective that you could get more people interested in nuclear. And we wanted kind of for it to organically grow. The industry is happy reading about itself. Because you also have to remember that parts of the industry don't understand each other's technology, or what's going on or why in different countries or with different parts of the fuel cycle. They don't necessarily understand each other. We help that understanding and we help people like say, a fellow like you interested in nuclear, but starts out not knowing about it, here's a starting place. You can read what's going on and why in plain English, with links to find out more. That was the crux of World Nuclear News in those days. So we began doing that. It was me and one other guy, Warwick Pipe and we were writing one or two stories a day each day, just absolutely cranking that out on a simple website, really., basically just used the most simple website we could do to actually launch.

Bret Kugelmass
And what about building up a viewer base? How did that happen organically? Or did you have some sort of email lists that came with World Nuclear Association?

Jeremy Gordon
Yeah, we have a whole load of contacts that came with the association and had a project to get everybody's business cards to put everybody in.

Bret Kugelmass
How big is that database? How many people would view, how many people did you guys have and how many people would view the content?

Jeremy Gordon
Well, I'm a bit out of date now, because I haven't been there for a few years, but we had like about 25,000 getting the email. It was sort of gradually growing. A few would get the daily email, more get the weekly email. And yeah, you would get tens of thousands perhaps on a really big story. It really went through the roof of Fukushima.. A normal story will have kind of a normal audience, industry audience, but the potential is there to scale to magnificent levels of viewership.

Bret Kugelmass
Yep. And tell me about Fukushima. You know, when you guys first started reporting on it, I still always like to track down like, what did people think at the time? Because in hindsight - and this is from my perspective, I only came to the industry a few years ago - we already knew there were no deaths. It seemed like the industry really fumbled on, instead of using Fukushima as a reason to kind of calm everyone down, it went the opposite direction. What was it like at the time reporting on it?

Jeremy Gordon
It was pretty scary, to be honest. Well, but by that time - let's put it in the context of what I was doing - we launched World Nuclear News in 2007. So by 2011, it was well established, much better website, good brand recognition, and the emails had a following. We had a really good routine. We knew all the original sources to get information all over the world using the WNA resources, the people inside the office, which is super International. We had a Japanese… working there. so we were instantly kind of able to get a handle on what was going on. We were also working on projects to connect the communicators of the world as well, because they're kind of operating on their own, answering questions about different events and things. But WNA has really central position, so it formed a really nice synergy that what we do every day on the news - or what I was doing every day on the news, and they still do now - is here something that's going on, research was how we gather facts together and written down in plain English. It's perfect to support the whole industry. And it means that you know the right contacts all over the world. We really, really relied on that. I mean, I remember the morning of the accident. I was not out of bed, but my wife said, Oh my god, there's been a huge earthquake in Japan. And in the news, natural disaster is always news. Until that day, it has always been good news, because we could always write the nuclear reactors absolutely sailed through this problem. Everyone reported it was fine, really no story, but just put it there, include that in the body of knowledge that they say all through these incidents. And in fact, on the 10th of March, the day before the big earthquake, we'd written a little story like that. There had been an earthquake - I can't remember the magnitude, 4, 5, 6, nothing spectacular - and we'd mentioned Fukushima Daiichi and Daini got through it, no problem. But then that day was different. What did we do? The first thing I did was try to get some data and you always go to the geologic survey websites of the world, especially the US one is really good, just kind of naturally taking a global view of that. And the Japanese one is also very good, so sort of share that information and we tried to do that, say this has definitely happened, this is the location, scan the company websites for whatever status they put out, but it was nothing. But we could see from the pictures on the TV it was super serious, so just hurried in to the office and we were working on gathering the information. But it wasn't until like 11, 11:30 in the morning that we realized the scale of it, what had truly happened. And I'll always remember this moment where we're hearing that the diesels at the plant, they're not working. Well, we've heard before occasionally a diesel won't start. They've got like eight diesels or something. It's happened before that one of them didn't start and everyone, it's not supposed to happen. That's a problem, need to look into that and why. That's not really a problem, because you don't need every single one. And then we hear, no, actually none of them are working. We're looking at each other, what on earth can cause that? How could none of them be working? This is just like, our jaws dropped. That moment when we realized the trouble we were in, so we swung into a kind of emergency response configuration at that time. Yeah, it was really a blood running cold moment, especially because the realization was that this had all occurred hours ago, and we've only just figured it out.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah. And then even though it still did take three days until there was significant core damage or until the roof blew off, right?

Jeremy Gordon
It was a good 24 hours, at least before Unit 1 had that explosion. And then it just kept rumbling on for- yeah, yeah, it got worse every day for a week, basically. It was worse and worse and worse.

Bret Kugelmass
And the big news companies like CNN, did they reach out to you guys to source people? They've got nuclear people on?

Jeremy Gordon
Yeah, they did. The phones were going absolutely mental. I was pretty much the press officer at that time, as well, which worked nicely with my role on the news, because generally, whatever issue would come up, I will have already looked at it and have kind of an idea of, an understanding of it. And journalists don't generally want a comment from somebody like the WNA, because it's obviously a promotional organization. It's not directly involved in whatever issue.

Bret Kugelmass
Right, they probably just want you to route them to somebody else.

Jeremy Gordon
They want some context, or to get a bit closer to an original source. It was quite a good role as press officer to help them understand what's really happening, what's real, what's not for real. That was really busy. And Ian Hore-Lacey did like 200 interviews literally in two days, it was absolutely non-stop. We absolutely were like crazy. It's kind of like a war effort to keep up with the information. What worked really, really well for us is that we were very well-practiced in our communication, because we were a news organization publishing every day. We had in-house resources who understood how power plants work and can help us read Japanese. And we had the context all over the world, particularly in the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum, which is like the Japanese version of NEI. It was really them that had the best information on the status. We were relaying their information and trying to contextualize it, trying to keep up with that most of the time.

Bret Kugelmass
What about like technical experts? Did you guys hunt down any boiling water reactor experts? It was a boiling water reactor, right, and does that use GE's design?

Jeremy Gordon
Yeah, it was a GE design boiling water reactor. It doesn't matter like that much. For our point of view, it didn't matter that much. But one of the first things I did after the explosion, the first explosion, I watched that from my dining room table. Uh, okay, I'm coming into the office. We had gone to bed the night before thinking, Okay, it's probably going to be over in the morning. But then obviously, it was the opposite. Going into London on the train, I just rang up everybody I knew who knew about BWRs.

Bret Kugelmass
I feel like the most important thing to communicate to the world in that moment is that like, Hey, the explosion was not a nuclear explosion, it was a hydrogen explosion, right? I mean, that matters, right? And that's, I think people were probably thinking at the time, Chernobyl. And that was more of a nuclear slash steam explosion that blew apart the reactor and so it's probably important to communicate to people that that can't happen in a boiling water reactor and that it's just some other chemical explosion that is just a result of the accident sequence, but isn't one that would project a nuclear material outward, like the Chernobyl situation would.

Jeremy Gordon
Yeah, right. I mean, some people might actually be concerned that it's like a nuclear explosion.

Bret Kugelmass
Right, that's what's important to communicate

Jeremy Gordon
That's what's important to communicate. Number one, rule that out. Number two, say, Yeah, this is a hydrogen explosion. And we were very fortunate in the UK. It just so happened that Malcolm Grimston, who I think you've spoken to.

Bret Kugelmass
Oh, yeah. Guy had a huge influence on me.

Jeremy Gordon
Yeah. He was live on TV on Sky News at that moment and I cut to him and go, Well, Mr. Grimston, what do you make of this? And straight off he said, This is a hydrogen explosion. This is part of- this is an implication of damage to the reactor core, but this is not the reactor core exploding and calmed the situation down slightly.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, thank God for that guy.

Jeremy Gordon
I mean, the general feeling I had was that any radiological release was just extremely bad news, from a PR point of view. That's a rubicon that you cross. If you have to vent the reactor-

Bret Kugelmass
Isn't that the problem with the industry overall? That's how we've indoctrinated the world, like to be afraid of nuclear by treating it as if any radiological release is a hazard. Because every single time I breathe, I'm breathing out 1 billion - 1 billion - radioactive carbon-14 atoms. It's like, the potassium in my body, every person I walked near, 500 gamma rays per second, literally just by walking by somebody. Isn't that the problem that we have to figure out a way to communicate that magnitude matters? Quantity of toxin matters. It's like, people can see it in their everyday life. You don't hold your mouth up to an exhaust pipe, because you know that'll cause problems. When you walk by one, you kind of hold the nose a little bit, because you're a little further away, and it's a little bit more dilute. And then if you're a mile away from the closest car, you don't worry about the exhaust pipe. Just because- you're still breathing in atoms from it, don't get me wrong.

Jeremy Gordon
Yeah, it still reaches you. Yeah, I mean, you've explained it really well. I think it is a kind of internalized radiophobia. Actually internalize that ourselves and that is the way I saw it. If that happens, this event is of a completely different character.

Bret Kugelmass
In terms of psychiatric perception.

Jeremy Gordon
Yeah, the seriousness of it just goes way up.

Bret Kugelmass
Okay. Then, alright, so that's the big event, obviously. Were there any other big events or any other like really even newsworthy things that have happened since that, kind of in this position that you've seen people kind of really gravitate on towards anything with Vogtle or anything else that people really drew their attention or interesting to the to the industry? Or is that it?

Jeremy Gordon
Yeah, well, that is the big, big news event of all. From our sort of global perspective, we weren't particularly sort of invested in the story of Vogtle or the saga of Hinckley or of Olkiluoto. I mean, these are all sort of, let's say bad news stories, unfortunately. We didn't get overly invested in those. We just would continue to cover and to monitor them

Bret Kugelmass
Any good news stories? Any new technologies that came out of China, Russia, or anything like that that was worth-

Jeremy Gordon
Well, the big sort of development is the small reactors, isn't it. That kind of- we saw kind of a, there was a swelling of interest around thorium and there's the whole idea that you can do nuclear in a better way. Thorium, you know, is a bit of a red herring, isn't it?

Bret Kugelmass
I think the whole concept of doing nuclear in a better way is a bit of a red herring, because what it does is it reinforces this underlying negative sentiment towards the old way of doing things. But it's like, the old way of doing things was so great. I keep coming back to 1968 to 1973 in America. We built 50 plants that were the cheapest, fastest, cleanest source of power the world has ever seen. And that was like the old way, that was when everything was the first-of-a-kind. And I hate how we disparage these concepts now, because we've proven that nuclear can rise to the global scale that we needed to for energy prosperity, for climate reasons, for air pollution, for water. We have the historical evidence, and yet we continue to say, Oh, no, it has to be some like, fundamentally new way if it's going to work.

Jeremy Gordon
Well, I mean, people inherently like new things, don't they. Anything that has a new label on it, it's automatically interesting. And it's a natural feature of planet Earth that new young things usually are better than what they replaced. This is what we see all the time. It's natural to think something new is going to be better. But I think the other the other flip side is it comes back to the big communication problem, doesn't it? The industry has often, let's just say the whole sector, has let its reputation become so tarnished. That it as it is, even it is not very happy with itself.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, exactly. I know, it's so funny because, over the years, I've started to criticize the industry more and more. And that's only because the industry rewards me for doing so. They keep telling me, Yes. Tell us, tell us. It's like some punishment. Yes, you're right. Like, tell us we're bad, so we can rally up the internal support to make the changes that we need. Shame us, they tell me to shame them.

Jeremy Gordon
That's, I mean, that's so it. I'm coming to believe that the industry can only really be helped by people who are actually coming from the outside perspective. It's a difficult life for those people, to not be accepted by industry. Probably, they don't have a position where they can be funded by it. They're dedicating their time to try to help it. Always being rejected. It's a nightmare. There's a few of us in this sort of position.

Bret Kugelmass
There are like three or four or five organizations just as you described. But it's so funny, because they're very warmly received by individuals throughout the industry, individuals in high places of power as well, like in social scenes, and just like, informally, very high, highly praised. People are very grateful for what they're doing. But the formal structures in place, it's like, yeah, like a big utility can't fund an organization that is criticizing that big utility.

Jeremy Gordon
Yeah, they have to beg for money and exists on a shoestring, permanently on the edge of actually closing down. We see people have to quit what they're doing to just take a regular job or something.

Bret Kugelmass
Some remain gluttons for punishment. Why do you think that is? And let me ask you, in your context, as well. You kind of got- haphazardly found the industry and it's not- Oh, yeah, it's not always the friendliest thing to mention amongst your social circles and stuff. How come? How come you stuck with it all these years? You could have written technically about anything. How come you stayed with the nuclear industry?

Jeremy Gordon
I really found it very rewarding, and constantly interesting. There are so many unsolved challenges. I really had a good time working on the magazine. There was a lot of travel and seeing stuff. There's a lot of learning all the time and working at WNA was the same. It was super rewarding. It's really just privileged and lucky to travel a lot. Meet tons of amazing people, so much smarter than me, and actually have a role in all that somewhere along the line. Yeah. So I kind of stuck with it. Um, but I mean, let's be quite honest, when it came time for me to leave WNA, after 12 years, I was looking around for other jobs and I just couldn't find one. Couldn't find one in industry that suited me. I couldn't find a part of the industry that wanted what I had.

Bret Kugelmass
Within the nuclear industry?

Jeremy Gordon
Yeah, within the actual sort of nuclear industry.

Bret Kugelmass
But you wanted to stick with it, because you could have easily gotten a job outside the nuclear industry.

Jeremy Gordon
I guess. I mean, it's what I know. I've got 12 years of this unique kind of knowledge. There are not many people who understand nuclear well enough to get the details right, and can actually communicate well. I'm one of them. So surely, surely, there's a role for me here. But I couldn't find one, so I had to create one by starting my own business. A business of being me, called Fluent in Energy, where you could hire me to help your nuclear company to get better at communication.

Bret Kugelmass
Tell me about some of the clients - I mean, you don't have to give names - but like some of the projects you've involved in, the types of clients.

Jeremy Gordon
Well, I'm still finding my feet, because I started the company, like I said, literally because I didn't know what else to do. Didn't know what other roles to give myself. I can offer basic communication services like interviewing, sort of thought leadership, blogging, and social media and things like that. I've been doing that for certain clients to help them up their game. And most of those are the ones who generally recognize nuclear must need more in communication. Then they recognize that, I recognize that. We kind of partner to try to improve things. That's been okay. Yeah, that's basically paid the rent. I think what I'm going to kind of pivot towards is actually training, sort of a training offer to nuclear companies who want to do more in communication, and they aim for the larger ones. And my kind of approach is that I really think the individual humans of the nuclear sector need to level up and become better communicators themselves.

Bret Kugelmass
I couldn't agree more. I chat with Chris Keefer a lot, who's got that Decouple podcast. Brilliant guy, also from outside the industry.

Jeremy Gordon
Another one.

Bret Kugelmass
Another one. I mean, it's just like listening to him is just such a breath of fresh air and hearing him interview. He does the interviews I want to do and listening to him is like, literally the greatest entertainment. Him and I chat a little bit about, Okay, well, how can we rally up the human capital that the industry has? Because it's not a small industry, right? It's 10% of global electricity. There are hundreds of power plants operating around the world, each that have - not exactly, but close to - 1,000 people. You're just talking about a million people that you can put to work.

Jeremy Gordon
A million people. And they're smart people, right?

Bret Kugelmass
Brilliant.

Jeremy Gordon
All of them.

Bret Kugelmass
Hardworking, dedicated. Everyone that I've met in nuclear industry, whether or not I think they've got all the facts, right, or the kind of the incentives of their organization are aligned with future growth of the industry, the people themselves - and that's been the most rewarding part about this job as well - the people themselves are amazing. I could have a beer with any of them, talk with any of them for hours. They're good people, like good people, every single one I met.

Jeremy Gordon
They are genuine, aren't they? There were no kind of chances and liars or dishonorable people. I don't meet them anyway. These are excellent people. They should be brilliant spokespersons. Obviously, not all of them. Not everybody is cut out for that. But among that million, I'm sure that by getting them to represent nuclear, like in a human way with the human face as themselves with the same values and daily concerns as anybody else, I'm sure that can help to build support. And I think it's super important, because nuclear is extremely resource efficient, isn't it? That's one of the big advantages. But the disadvantage of that is that it's actually kind of a small industry, although it's 10% of global electricity. It's a lot smaller than you might think that.

Bret Kugelmass
The relative proportion of people. Yeah, its greatest strength is one of its greatest weaknesses.

Jeremy Gordon
Yeah. Nuclear's just like that all the way, isn't it? Everything you think is big turns out to be small. It's always a challenge to communicate. I mean, what I always say, this factoid, to try to prove my point, which is that the annual consumption of uranium is like 65,000 tons. That will fit on one ship, one Panamax ship. Not even the big ship by today's standards. You've got one ship, compare that to the oil tankers in the world.

Bret Kugelmass
Oh, you're saying the oversight is the whole world's consumption on an annual basis.

Jeremy Gordon
All that nuclear fuel comes from 65,000 tons of uranium, and it's all one ship. It's so- the crew on that ship really needs to start talking about what they're doing. Otherwise, who's gonna even know they exist? These days, you have to communicate continuously, otherwise, you don't exist in the modern world.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, I mean, it would be awesome if you could get a gig with one of these big utilities that has thousands of workers and literally figure out a way to just kind of scale their voices. Like hold lectures and seminars and develop educational materials, all to be able to enable them to make their voice heard in the public sphere, because it doesn't take much. If you had even 1,000 people consistently writing in to politicians consistently, writing into journalists, and just saying- 1,000 people is not that much, but it can appear very large. I mean, the anti-nuclear people, they're really only like five of them. I can count them on my hands, and yet they're able to have this huge voice. You think if you said 1,000 actual nuclear industry workers to work socially, that you'd wield just tremendous power. You'd think that their parent organization would have an incentive in enabling them to do so.

Jeremy Gordon
You'd think so. There's so much that organizations can do to just build alliances outside the nuclear sector, build alliances with other organizations out there in your region, which are not connected with energy, which don't ever think about nuclear power, but they have some kind of value alignment, or they're working on or are concerned with similar sorts of social issues. Just invest in that. Turn up, turn up and make friends with people. It's got to do it. As well as like basic things like, Why can power plants not invest to get every child in any given country to visit a nuclear power plant at least once?

Bret Kugelmass
They used to and then they stopped. I mean, it drives me absolutely insane. It's like, in France and Switzerland, I heard it used to be part of the school program is you take the school bus full of children to the local nuclear plant, you learn about energy, and then people grow up to love it. They stopped doing that. I don't know, they probably can't do it in the US, because of the security regulations are just absolutely out of control. They make no sense. I mean, even for me, it takes me an hour to get past - or more - to get past security and to get into a nuclear facility. Imagine doing that with a school bus full of children. It would just be like a logistical nightmare.

Jeremy Gordon
Yeah, I mean, Russia has a good example. Some of their plants are super, super remote, even by their standards. Something that they've done is create visitor centers in the regional capitals. It's sort of like a store and they're coming into a mall or something, and you go there. There are really exciting presenters who tell you about energy. That's a great day out for school. But I mean, it's investment.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, it is investment.

Jeremy Gordon
You have to take it seriously and put money into it. But if you don't do that, how are you going to keep the social licence?

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, I know. That's absolutely right. And it just also drives me crazy that the leadership of these organizations doesn't realize how much money you have and should be putting into marketing and communication. I mean, I don't know if this is true across the entire utility sector, maybe, maybe not. But in the technology sector and products, it's like 20%, 30% of your budget is going to marketing. That should be the industry standard.

Jeremy Gordon
They don't have, they don't even have our problems of all the imagery. Then you have problems that people want their stuff already.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah. And then you hear the nuclear people complaining about, Oh, well, we don't have a social license. And that it's like-

Jeremy Gordon
You know, I wonder why. I just wish we could take it as seriously as the operating licenses. It's absolutely right. If you don't have competence and the technical ability, your operating license is a risk. So you've got to- and they will correctly take that away from you if you're not safe enough. That's absolutely right. And so your social license is decaying continuously if you're not building relationships, and maintaining, earning the trust that you need. It needs a serious program of investment. I don't know why that's hard to understand.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah. As I'm musing with you, I realize that I'm also afraid of what might happen if they do do that, because I also think that the nuclear industry itself is to blame for the radiophobia. And so it's like, if they set up all these information centers and all they do is talk about how microscopic amount of radiation is the worst thing in the world, then it might have the opposite effect that we want.

Jeremy Gordon
Yeah, they could happen. Let's not rush too quickly to do that, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've heard stories about some newcomer countries where they launch an education campaign, and it's all about radiation. They just go to people who never thought about nuclear before in their lives and they say, Look, don't worry, radiation is not that bad. We're only gonna let a little bit of it out.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, it's so funny. This reminds me of- and even big, modern successful companies make these classic mistakes. There was a Facebook ad, a Facebook ad that was telling- they were spending their dollars, nationwide ad talking about how much they value election security, and how safe they're going to make their systems for election security. And I'm like, you guys are idiots. All you're doing- like I understand that is a problem, you got brought in front of Congress for that, and yes, you're wrong for letting that happen. But by creating a marketing campaign that says you're going to solve it, all you did was just educate all of the people who weren't reading the news vociferously that you are at blame for election security issues. You're literally advertising your greatest weaknesses.

Jeremy Gordon
Apparently there's a problem with security. I wasn't aware before. Thank you for the information. In the nuclear example, I think some great research from Breakthrough Institute was done a few months ago and they basically were saying that in most nuclear new build projects, the concerns of local people are not radiation or safety or nuclear scare stories. They're just worried that our local official is going to be corrupt. Can I trust the government to be my best? Which is the same stuff as any infrastructure project.

Bret Kugelmass
Any. Exactly, yeah. Oh, it's so funny. I was just - who was I talking to - but we were talking about this - oh, project finance people - we were talking about the challenges with siting and like getting local community buy-in. They're telling me the horror stories around wind and solar, just dealing with the local community to get buy-in to place their facilities, and like what a nightmare it was and how it killed projects, and how there was a concerted effort, not just amongst the local people, but then the state legislators to block solar and wind projects. I'm like, Oh, my God, nuclear actually isn't special in that way. You're gonna run into that forever.

Jeremy Gordon
It seems like there's kind of a threshold. Once you go over that, they stop being against you, unless they realize that, unless they realize the benefits.

Bret Kugelmass
Well, we're running out of time, so I want to let you have last word. Anything that you care to share with our audience about your vision for the future of industry, maybe?

Jeremy Gordon
As a vision for the future of the industry, it really is a mixed picture. We never really know what's going to happen with the large scale technology that we have now, these large reactors, but the potential for- there's excitement around offshore deployment of SMRs. I could really see that that could-

Bret Kugelmass
What do you mean by offshore?

Jeremy Gordon
Putting small reactors on seagoing vessels.

Bret Kugelmass
Literally offshore, not just another country. You mean like in the water.

Jeremy Gordon
Yeha, actually in the water. I mean, that seems to be something with the potential to really scale. Really, really scale. A potential game changer. I mean, not to highlight that technology as my very favorite or something like that, but that seems to be the main possibility for nuclear to actually get more than the current 10% for electricity, of global electricity, which, let's remember is only like 5% of global energy. I think the story of nuclear power is really a massive opportunity missed. I hope some of the opportunities coming, we'll be able to seize them and make a difference. Something that I keep in mind is, if my work helps one reactor operate for one more year, that more than makes up any carbon I emit in my whole life. That's such a huge contribution. The gains from the work we're doing trying to help nuclear are ginormous. I encourage everybody else, keep going. Don't give up.

Bret Kugelmass
Well, Jeremy Gordon, thank you so much for your time today. Always a pleasure talking and the next time that we meet in person, you have to eat escargot with me.

Jeremy Gordon
Okay, alright, I promise. Thanks. Thanks for the conversation, Bret. It's been great.

Bret Kugelmass
We are here today with Callum Thomas, who is the CEO of Thomas Thor. Callum, welcome to Titans of Nuclear.

Callum Thomas
Thanks, Bret. Thanks for having me.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, so you know, as we do on these episodes, we'd love to get to know you a little bit, how you got into the industry. But let's just start off with where you grew up.

Callum Thomas
I grew up in the UK, about one hour north of London place called Milton Keynes, which is not a very famous city, but a lot of Formula One teams actually were based around there. So that's probably the thing it's most famous for, yeah, the middle of kind of the South of England.

Bret Kugelmass
And do you know what that town like historically? With UK towns, it's always so interesting to hear their history, because some of them are just so old, and get back to different industry focuses. Do you know what the historical industry was there?

Callum Thomas
Well, Milton Keynes is a new city built in 1975. But there's a village which it took the name from, but I know not much, not much, I don't think is famous for in history. But the area is near North Hampton, which is famous for making shoes back centuries ago. So there's quite an industrial area, but they decided to build a new city that was halfway between London and Birmingham. So that's where I grew up.

Bret Kugelmass
And where do you start to study?

Callum Thomas
I went to- so I did like a finance and business degree, not really knowing exactly what I wanted to do and so it seemed like a good general thing. I think I knew I'd start my own business at some point. But how I was going to get there and when, I really didn't know. It seemed like a safe thing to study to give me options.

Bret Kugelmass
Where did your early career take you then?

Callum Thomas
After university, I went to work for a big recruiting company in London, which is international. I was there for 10 years, so I did four startups for them in different countries and in Europe, and had a great time really learning the business for 10 years, and starting in London, and then Amsterdam after that. That was my first 10 years.

Bret Kugelmass
When you said you did four startups for them, what does that mean?

Callum Thomas
They were a recruiting company working in different sectors, including energy, but also pharmaceutical, IT, some public sector work as well, government work. So they would build businesses in different countries to access those markets and I was one of the people building these companies in different countries in Europe.

Bret Kugelmass
I when you say building, you're like adding staff, you're trying to- where did you sit in terms of, is it how to add staff or strategically who to add? Or where does that come into play?

Callum Thomas
Yeah, well, I guess there's the internal aspect, which is building the team of people to do the recruiting and go out and build the relationships. And then there's the service delivery itself, which is working out what an industry needs, and then meeting the needs. So there's, I mean, related to human resources, is there a skill shortage? Is there a diversity issue? Are they looking to hire internationally? Are they looking to attract more people into the industry? What are the challenges? What are the rare skills that they're looking for that are struggling to find? And then how do we find those? And then doing the legwork to go and find those people and then providing that as a service to the industry.

Bret Kugelmass
Can you tell me about a particular period of time or a set of activities that you had to take on that was particularly challenging in this regard? But was there a specific industry or specific company that you were just having a really tough time but figured out how to battle through it?

Callum Thomas
Yeah, I mean, in the early years, it was it was really, I mean, I started my career in 1999. When I came in the tech sector, it was absolutely booming. And then it was just about finding enough people. There was just a massive shortage of people and there were so many companies trying to grow from scratch or trying to grow their tech startups that there was just a struggle to find people. Then it was a case of looking internationally and bringing people from other countries where they've got the skills they need, and then bring them to wherever it was the UK or the Netherlands or the US or Canada. There's always, there seems to always be a solution to the talent shortages. It's just a case of how flexible can you be? Can you bring people from other countries? Can you bring people from other industries? Are you willing to provide some training? Or do you need people to be up and running immediately? And of course, most organizations, they want someone who's 100% perfect for the job who can hit the ground running who is an amazing cultural fit as well. And, unfortunately, in competitive industries, it's not really possible. Something has to give. But often it can be just taking a wider view, and hiring different people from different places and then train them up into your industry. And that's a lot of the work we do is working out, okay, so if the perfect people are not growing on trees, then what's the next best thing you can do? How can you bring people in and which other industries have got compatible skills that we can cross-train into nuclear in this case.

Bret Kugelmass
You mentioned nuclear. When did nuclear first came across your radar?

Callum Thomas
Well, I mean, I hadn't really, I'd obviously heard of nuclear energy. But before I started, Thomas Thor, I didn't really know much about it. When I started my company, I wanted to do something that was doing something good for the world and clean energy was something I was really interested in. I assumed that it would be wind and solar, that's where the demand would be. I mean, with everything in the media and in the public psyche about renewables, I just assumed there must be millions of jobs in this area and there must be a real problem to find the best people. And this is in 2009, when we started the business, and it just wasn't the case. A lot of companies in wind and solar were subsidy-driven and they were hiring a lot of people early in their career. They were- their main kind of jobs were in manufacturing and installation, and then some maintenance. So there wasn't this huge density of experts required. There were loads of people rushing to work in the industry, and the companies, they amazingly kept on going bankrupt. Germany put a load of money into solar and then companies kept going bankrupt. When we took away the subsidies, they couldn't stand on their own. So I started to look at renewables and I go, well that doesn't make sense. That's not where our business is going to be. I looked at other forms of clean energy, and very quickly found nuclear and just realized that it was just a huge, huge opportunity. It just ticked all the boxes. It's a truly global industry full of experts with skill shortages and high mobility of people in the industry, and it's creating low carbon electricity. It just seemed like the ideal place. The more I researched into it, the more I looked into it, the more I kind of realized this is where the destiny was taking us.

Bret Kugelmass
Amazing. And how come you decided to start your own firm? What was going on in your life that lead to that conclusion that that was right next step for you?

Callum Thomas
Well, I think when I was seven years old, I knew I was going to start my own business. I was already kind of doing it when I was at school, so it was always my path. But to start in this particular area, I think it's just, I spent 10 years in a company which was extremely successful, but it was transaction driven. Much of the staffing executive search recruiting industry is transaction driven and it isn't as professional as it should be in many countries. I just felt that was just a shame. My approach was always relationship driven. I knew if I really wanted to do it, how I thought it should be done, then I needed to start my own company. And so that's basically what we've done. I'd learned the ropes. I always knew I was going to start a company and it was just taking what I learned adding in the bits that I thought were kind of missing and then then off I go.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, but you make it seem easy. I mean, you were at your previous company for 10 years. That is not an easy decision to go off and do your own thing. I mean, there's risk involved. Where were you living at the time? Did you end up moving? I want to hear about the struggle.

Callum Thomas
I moved from London to Amsterdam to start a business for them here in Amsterdam. Do you know what, for some reason - and I know because I speak to a lot of people and certain people helped me when I started my business that I'm really, I spend a lot of time and effort helping others that are starting their businesses is really important to me - and for some reason, because it seemed to be my path, it wasn't really a struggle. I kind of knew two years out that I was going to do it, so I prepared for it, financially prepared to give myself some time to create a business plan and not be under pressure. I think it could be extremely stressful to start a business and be on the clock, where the clock is ticking, that you have to have the income coming in, it has to succeed. That's incredibly stressful. So I tried to give myself at least a year to get through that point. And I just did- my approach to everything has always been ask people. If I can't find someone else who's done something that I'm trying to do, then there's something wrong. Am I truly a pioneer doing something for the very first time? Or is there something wrong with what I'm trying to do, and I take the same approach. I spoke to everyone I could possibly speak to, in all generations, about starting businesses and just listen to their experience and what went well, and what they would have done differently. And then when I wrote the business plan, it just felt right. I then teamed up with… who are the two of the other founders and then we got cracking in the beginning of 2010. What was tough at the beginning was I didn't really know that much about nuclear in 2009. I knew it was a form of clean energy. I knew that it had huge advantages and that it had a massive reputation issue. And it was quite, it felt like quite a closed industry, I think at the beginning trying to get in and get trusted. And I think, reflecting, probably the first five years of our business was spent building trust, building our reputation, becoming known and becoming known as an organization that is credible. Took a while. And I actually quite like that in a way, because it gave barriers to entry. But your question about challenges the beginning, that was a challenge. I remember going to the first nuclear event and it being quite intimidating, really, not really knowing anyone and not really having spent- they all seemed to have known each other for decades. And now I know that's actually the truth. So it took a while to crack that, but I just took the approach of finding friends in the industry and getting their opinion. I hadn't spent decades in the industry, but I built relationships with people who had, and then they've kindly gave me their insights and their perspectives. And that kind of kept me on the right track.

Bret Kugelmass
Tell me, I mean, so you started off with a few co-founders. What were the types of roles that you were looking to place initially? When was your- how deep into the journey was your first real success that you could hang your hat on? And also, how did you answer the question when you're trying to offer your services, but you haven't made that first nuclear placement? How do you answer the question from the customer? Like, have you done this before? How do you build trust?

Callum Thomas
Good question. We only work in the nuclear industry. That is 100% of what we do, so we gave ourselves no choice. We knew it was gonna be difficult. We knew that other organizations do nuclear and other things and a lot of them can't be bothered with nuclear, because it's just hard, things take a while, and compared to the other industries they might recruit for, it's hard work. We gave ourselves no choice. That was one thing, but you're right. I mean, I remember going into our first clients and yeah, we had to tell them, We're new, but we've basically identified there's a huge opportunity. We are experts in recruitment. There was nobody, no organization focusing on just nuclear, serving the nuclear industry in the world. So it makes sense that we bring these skills that we've honed across other industries, and focused them 100% like a laser in the nuclear industry. Some people decided to take a chance on us. At the beginning, some didn't, and now they do. So we had to earn that.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, of course. What were the initial roles? Were they business roles, were they technical roles?

Callum Thomas
Well, normally, because at the beginning, we've gone out and said, Look, just try it. Try us out. And so, of course, they would try us out on the hardest possible roles. I'm sure they won't mind me mentioning, but one of our first clients was in Belgium, part of the ENGIE group, Tractebel. They sent us out to find out safety case analysts who were able to speak different languages, work in different countries. It was like a wish list of a pretty impossible combination. And we managed to find some of these people.

Bret Kugelmass
Were they from outside the industry? I mean, often now is that your strategy? Or you found people inside the industry?

Callum Thomas
No, with the safety case, they had to have the nuclear experience, that's what made them particularly difficult. Whereas other areas, some of the areas in management, some of the areas in I&C, for example, as a technical area, we can get people from outside of the industry, but often-

Bret Kugelmass
It's interesting, just to dive into that point a little bit, that they had to be within the nuclear industry, because I feel like there are plenty of other industries that have to produce really thorough safety documentation, such as the airline industry, or even like oil and gas doing some offshore platform stuff, or just in general, I guess oil and gas. I know nuclear loves to tout the safety, but other industries do this, too. They tout the safety, they say, No, no, that's our number one priority, we're going to start off every meeting with a safety meeting. And then, no matter even if they're nuclear, they can't be an expert in every aspect of nuclear safety. There's going to be something that they focused on in their career, the containment building, or health physics, or systems, or probabilistic risk assessment. It seems like, even for a safety case manager or analyst, you could really pull from outside the industry, train them up on that the specific nuclear aspect that still apply the best practice from wherever they came from.

Callum Thomas
Yeah, you're right, you're right. But the preference of organizations is to have someone who fits 100% of their criteria. A lot of our time is spent taking a list of 16 absolutely essential criteria for the person, and then trying to work out which of the three that are really essential. Often having previous nuclear experience is one that starts off in essential bracket and isn't necessarily essential. But there are, I mean, probably the safety case, some of that work, where they've worked with the regulator, and they've written safety cases before in nuclear for the regulator in that country. It's pretty hard to convince that you can bring someone else in. Of course you can cross-train, but then it just takes more time. I was gonna say, so basically when we were getting started, we were tested out on all of these virtually impossible people to find, and then we just buckled down and managed to find a few of them, enough of them to kind of say, okay, we haven't seen that before so thank you. And then we built the relationships from there and got more kind of bigger relationships, and quite frankly, slightly easier assignments.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, of course. And then with these big companies, I assume that they've got quite a few staffing needs. Is the idea that, if you're able to do one for them, then they've got five more ready to go that month, or it takes a while to build trust? It's like, okay, we'll give you one here, three months later we'll give you one there.

Callum Thomas
Yeah, it depends. It really depends on how many people they need, and also depends on how hard they are to find, because if an organization can use their own methods, their own internal function, or advertise and find people, then that's the preferred route. Whereas, if they're struggling to find people, then they'll come to us. They may try it themselves first, and then come to us afterwards. That quite often happens, which means it can go in kind of fits and starts sometimes. But yeah, it depends on the type. If there's a new build project, roles can come through like 50 or 80 a time. And if it's a smaller organization, it can be one or two a year. It really depends on the organization.

Bret Kugelmass
The first example you mentioned was European-based. You're based in Europe. I assume that you serve nationwide, but how long did it take before you moved from a more local model to a more global model?

Callum Thomas
Pretty early, really, because we recognized that this is a global industry. And that we needed to be a differentiator, that we could stand by, in that we have these global capabilities. First five years, we were based here in Amsterdam. Now we have offices in UK, Finland, France, the UAE, Canada and the US. Now we're quite spread out.

Bret Kugelmass
How many people work for you right now?

Callum Thomas
It's just under 100 people.

Bret Kugelmass
Absolutely amazing.

Callum Thomas
Just working- I mean, our mission is building and sustaining the global nuclear workforce, so we have 100 people whose entire days, months, years are focused on bringing people to the nuclear industry, from other industries or recruiting people from within the pool that exists.

Bret Kugelmass
What a success story. Between you and your partners, how did you divvy up responsibility in those early days and then at what point did you personally take a step back from the like, I have to actually roll up my sleeves and do the recruiting myself to I can now manage and grow a team and have other people do the cold calling?

Callum Thomas
Yeah, I mean, I feel like I've done every single job in the organization, because I tend to do a job and then hire someone to do that job and then backfill. At the beginning, I was running all of our back office and finance function, and my colleagues were going out and meeting people in the nuclear sector. And then the next big thing I was leading was around our resourcing capability. If we're promising people we can find the experts that are hard to find, we need to develop a world class machine to be able to do that. A huge amount of work went into developing a global resourcing function to uncover these people with rare skills and look into which other industries, like you just said, looking into industries like aerospace, or rail and places like that, looking at some of these other huge infrastructure projects, where we can get people. A lot of that work goes in in there. But at the beginning, we were all doing everything, really. And then as we got a little bit bigger, my focus became very much external focused, talking to people in the industry and understanding what the challenges are around human resources, and then working out what we could do to support.

Bret Kugelmass
Tell me about that a little bit, because I'm sure the challenges changed from 2009 to 2010 timeframe for a whole bunch of reasons. I mean, because first they thought there was going to be a Renaissance and then Fukushima. Let's fast forward past those early days and talk about maybe the last five years. What are the pressing challenges today? What are the trends that you see in terms of hiring and moving people around?

Callum Thomas
Yeah, it's interesting, because we started in 2009, '10, so the word "renaissance" was the word of the moment, and then Fukushima hit and a lot of people took a step back. And now it turns out 10 years on that actually, that was an amazing example of how safe nuclear is, but it took the world a while to see that, yeah, as you well know. And it caused a lot of a lot of upsets. I mean, we were on the verge of a huge piece of work to support the Swiss new build program, which is gathering pace there. It was quite a developed organization that was starting to look at the new build, and about to really ramp up and then they stopped. And they haven't started it back ever since. Yeah, you're right, after Fukushima, there were a few years where it was really, I guess, public perception was kind of recovering. And it really has, it did recover quite quickly, actually. But it was quite a difficult time, I think, for the nuclear industry. In the last five years, I mean, I've been tracking it now for 12 years very, very, very closely and I've never seen so much enthusiasm, support for nuclear, as I do now.

Bret Kugelmass
Globally, you're saying globally.

Callum Thomas
Globally, yeah. And it's not just people from the nuclear industry - which it has been historically now - it's all kinds of people with environmental motivations, or political motivations, or economic motivations are thinking, Okay, this is a solution. If you can iron out some of the challenges, then it's a massive solution. I think in the last five years, your question, what kind of themes in the last five years, I think the industry still struggles with a branding issue, which has come up in a lot of your podcasts, I know. And people think that you need to persuade people to join the nuclear industry or support, but from a human resources point of view, we don't find ourselves trying to persuade people, Oh, it's a good industry, you really need to join. When we start talking to people who have got experience in technical industries or regulated or safety-conscious industries, they already know about nuclear. They may have not spent any time looking into it, really, but they know it's there and they are very open-minded. We've actually had a lot of success attracting people in from other industries. The issue is nobody knows about it. The human resource, the theme is that the industry is great operating in its own world, but just a lot of people don't know about it.

Bret Kugelmass
Okay. So we were talking about, I want to pull apart two things that you were saying there, because one of them is that, to bring technical people who are outside the nuclear industry, there's not much convincing that needs to happen. I can actually see how it's quite easy to convince a like a steam process engineer from oil and gas to go over to nuclear. They get it, they understand systems. They were never really afraid of it to begin with. I think the more important critical roles, which I think you were alluding to a minute ago, is this marketing and branding aspect, where I think it's even more critical that we bring outside skill sets into the nuclear industry, because nuclear industry has historically just been so terrible at communicating their value to the world. And I've got different theories on why that is, some of it, I think, is by design. But I'm wondering, it's like, okay, either way, it doesn't matter. We need to bring in the best branding and marketing experts from outside the industry into the industry. How have you found that process?

Callum Thomas
Yeah, I mean, we're not- I can't say we're responsible for bringing all of the people in communications into the industry. One thing I will say, I mean, there are some really good people that have moved from other industries into nuclear in this space. The challenge I see is starvation of resources, because if you look at what other industries spend on communications, external relations, outreach, it's absolutely huge compared to what the nuclear industry spends.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, like a notable percentage of overall budget revenue, you're talking 10%, 20% of all revenue that comes in goes to marketing, branding, and communications going out in other industries. And the nuclear industry, you're talking like, 0.01% percent or something.

Callum Thomas
Yeah, exactly. And that's it. So, whereas the industry could and should be hiring more people in the commerce space, there isn't really a central capability, because it's one of these areas, that we all, everyone benefits from it. It will be awesome for it to be a collective effort. And there are some collective efforts and of people in communications and marketing and nuclear industry. But that set of people is probably not big enough with enough resources and enough power to actually do what really maybe needs to be done.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, I mean, I think some of the people who are best at communicating it have zero resources. I've seen organizations pop up that are really just grassroots effort, or maybe they've got a little bit. Maybe they were able to get a grant for $100,000, or something here and there. But I still don't understand why the major nuclear players, each power plant is producing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each year. And some of these guys might manage dozens of power plants. I don't understand how they don't have a 200 person marketing team. A lot of times I find they've got like, two or three people, they've got an outside communications firm they rely on. And, oh, everyone's kind of stuck in a 1990s mindset of how things are done. What's going on there?

Callum Thomas
Yeah, I mean, I don't- I can't answer that question. I don't know. I mean, my insight is looking at the industry as an active participant in and really enthusiastic participant in the industry, I can see kind of what the need is, but it's very easy, isn't it, to throw stones, it's very easy to say the industry needs to be more- I hear that a lot, the industry needs to do more. The industry doesn't really exist as a collective kind of entity. Anyone, any kind of thought of the industry should do this needs to understand that there isn't really- I mean, you've got the World Nuclear Association part, which is part of the industry, but it's not really set up to do that kind of thing. You've got the IAEA, which is not really set up to do that kind of thing. There isn't- the industry as a collective doesn't really exist. But I will say there is some good work going on with some of the bigger organizations. I think you're exactly right, I think, there are some of the best ideas that come in with zero budget. We just did a project here where we went to the School of Communication Arts in London, and we gave their students a brief and we asked them to re reimagine how nuclear could represent itself in the build up to COP26. We gave it to about 50 students. This is a professional arts school, which generally feeds people into the advertising space. It's a very interesting group people to give it to.

Bret Kugelmass
How did you get involved in that, though? I don't understand the connection between your organization and that.

Callum Thomas
I think it's really, I mean, I think as a general advocate for the industry, and if I see something that could be done and isn't really being done, then my natural inclination is to do it. It was one of my colleagues that came up with this idea. She knew that the School of Communication Arts takes briefs from companies and industries and then they spend, you've got 50 people spending two weeks of their lives dedicated to thinking about the messaging for nuclear. And so we sponsored it, we gave a donation to the school and we said, Look, go ahead and come out with that. But we haven't done this, there's no real commercial gain to Thomas Thor for doing this. We just thought, what a great thing to do and we partnered with EDF. The two of us gave a donation to the school and then they came up with the project. But it was awesome, because what it showed us was, at the beginning, these 50 people were all in their kind of early 20s, I guess, very, very cool, very hipster, very advertising, and none of them really knew about nuclear. At the beginning, when we gave him the brief, after we finished, they had an internal meeting, because a lot of them had ethical challenges to actually working on this. Then, by the end of the project, every single one of the 50 was not just pro-nuclear, but was enlightened. What it showed us was, one of the things it showed us was that, if people just spend the time, I mean, they've gone out and done their research online. Very quickly, they became pro-nuclear. Their initial stance was anti, but then just a little bit of self research and then they were done. It made me think the best thing the nuclear industry could do is just stand back and let people do their own research. Instead of trying to give people information, let's just encourage people to do their own research and generally, the positives far outweigh the negatives when people do their own research. But they came up with a load of pictures, we got about 20 or 30 pictures or video, including a song about how nuclear doesn't really kill anyone and vending machines kill more people than nuclear. I think you'll see that song being released soon. Someone's got a hold of that and is producing it. That's an example of something that came, it was just a real kind of, from nothing initiative that then led to a huge ripple of - more than a ripple, actually - a wave of enthusiasm were circulating their ideas, and some of them have actually been tried before by people, like Generation Atomic and others are just completely new and just great. And it just gave us an insight into how people think who've got nothing to do with the nuclear industry. A very rewarding, very interesting project.

Bret Kugelmass
It's amazing, I'm glad you told me this story. Yeah, that's pretty interesting. It's so funny. The part that you mentioned, though, about someone having ethical challenges up front. It's like, okay, you're going to school to learn how to do something. You should be given a hard challenge, even if it's not something you do in real life. I don't know, if my professor told me l, and I was in a marketing class, like, figure out how to make the coal industry seem clean, I wouldn't say I have an ethical challenge with that. I'd say it's a school exercise, it's a chance for me to really flex my creativity. It's like, do it, don't complain.

Callum Thomas
It worked out beautifully. And I think it's, there str all sorts of- I mean, your question about why are we getting involved in that, because that's not core to our business, I think we're in the people business. Anything around attracting people to the industry, giving people pride about the industry they're working in, we're involved in. We're involved in loads of initiatives like that that are really getting, communicating with people, creating awareness in new and creative ways. I think, because we're quite a small company, we can just do stuff. We're not really held down by layers of bureaucracy, or procurement and all these different competing interests. If you're a big company that has nuclear interests, but also oil and gas, and also renewables, you've probably, within your organization, you've probably got a lot of a lot of conflict. There are people that don't necessarily see things the same way. And so I understand why it's difficult for big organizations to do things, sometimes. But there's, as you said, there's a lot that can be done just with a bit of bit of energy and some ideas and then then a can do attitude.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah. How has your organization responded to COVID and everything over the last year or so? Were you guys always remote? Or did you have offices where people came into the office?

Callum Thomas
I mean, I'm in our office now and I'm the only person here.

Bret Kugelmass
Classic, classic CEO founder.

Callum Thomas
Right, but I live very close in my defense, so this is my home from home.

Bret Kugelmass
I'm sure that's by design as well.

Callum Thomas
Yeah. And there's people, there are some people where you just can't see them downstairs. We were remote way before the pandemic. We've had people working around the world. Very early in our journey, we mirrored the nuclear industry, and we went local, wherever the industry was. We've had people working full time, remote part time from home for a long, long time. So actually adapting wasn't that difficult. It was just an acceleration of what we were already doing.

Bret Kugelmass
And what about your own recruiting? How do you recruit recruiters?

Callum Thomas
I mean, we have a division internally for that, that does it. It's probably the most, if not one of the most, important aspects of our business. We recruit on values. We are looking for people who meet our values, which is fairness, diversity and inclusion, our core values of the business. Collaboration, credibility, and excellence are our values. We're looking for people who are naturally good at working together. We've got people from a nuclear background. We've got people from a technical background in science. We've got people from a business background or psychology, from all sorts of different types of people, because we can teach people our processes. In a couple of years, people can really get up to speed. We hire some people who have got very strong experience in in human resources, or recruiting and other sectors. And we hire some people earlier in their career who just are a really good match to our values, and we take them on the journey and train them up. Being in Amsterdam is actually- here, when we when we're based here, it's a real advantage, because it's a really international place. And even people that don't want to live here are often quite happy to relocate to Amsterdam. That was quite a draw at the beginning. But now it's really the fact that we're flexible. We have people, if someone wants to move to a different country for life reasons, quite often they've stayed with us and they just work remotely. We've managed to hold on to good people by being flexible.

Bret Kugelmass
And tell me about language differences, since you're a global organization. Is just all business conducted in English, or how does that work?

Callum Thomas
Well, we've got, I think at last count we had something like 21 different nationalities across our business. We just released, we just did a video internally where everyone said, I am Thomas Thor in their own language. And it's quite, this career made me realize how many languages we've got. I mean, English, generally, we're using English and French as the two core languages within our business. But then we do have people who are speaking Arabic or Russian, maybe Chinese, although we don't really have that much Chinese language capability. We may have people working with external stakeholders in different languages, but internally, we're using English as a core language. And then some of the French dominated entities might use French sometimes, but pretty much English is the working language.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, I'm glad you brought up Chinese for a second there, because it seems to me that the world is - the nuclear world - somewhat divided between the East and the West right now. Obviously, there have been projects and collaborations and the French went over to China to build a plant, Westinghouse went over China to build a plant, but things are changing geopolitically and have been for the last few years. The Chinese are kind of really moving forward with building a lot of plants, where some of the Western countries are having a real, real tough time getting new projects started and completing projects. Do you see a like a bifurcation in the nuclear industry between the East and the West and just kind of in the many conversations that you've had, can you offer any insight as to what you think is going to happen over the next 10 or 20 years along that parameter?

Callum Thomas
I mean, through work with the IAEA, I'm quite often working with Chinese, Russian, French, and American people all in the same room. Over the years, have had quite a lot of experience with that. I think Russia and China have been investing for a long time, internationally. Now we see the US really accelerating the efforts to get involved internationally. And I think that will make a big difference to the industry. I mean, ultimately, it's competition, isn't it? I mean, selling big nuclear reactors - and then maintaining them - to countries, that's big business, and so it's competitive. I think we'll see all three, and we could throw France in as a fourth, really, and maybe South Korea as as a fifth. But probably the three, you know, the biggest will be the US, Russia and China. I think the market is big enough, I think there are countries that will buy and they'll buy first from Russia or buy first from China, or they'll buy first in the US. That's okay, if it works out, but what it does mean is that it brings politics into proceedings, and I think in the next 10, 20 years, if the nuclear industry really grows, it'll become another one of those industries that's really political. We see that in countries like South Africa, where it's been, was it Russia that were going to build, or then it was US, and France. If a country is looking to build a nuclear infrastructure, then they get courted by the big countries and I think we'll see that continuing. It will be good See some joined up working. But I personally, I don't know what you think I can't really see at the moment.

Bret Kugelmass
I think it'd be tough. I also think that, I mentioned language barriers, I actually think that should not be underestimated when it comes to essentially projects deployment, I know in the UAE there were a lot of challenges there that just came from all the different languages on-site. And even like getting the operations set up. I think that was challenging. I mean, obviously, I want to see a lot of international collaboration,, but I do think there are some real tough problems in terms of engineering delivery when you mix too many languages, too many cultures all at the same time. Which is then another, like, just added layer of problems for very big projects, because when you do these massive scale nuclear plants, the gigawatt plus plants, sometimes you have to go in mixing and matching, especially across the supply chain across different countries.

Callum Thomas
Yeah, and that's the opportunity. I think the reactor vendors, really, you're choosing one or the other. But when it comes to supply chain, the big organizations are all working with each other generally. And that's where you see that real collaboration. I think the UAE, you mentioned, is a really good example. They came up with their own version of English, which they adopted for the plant, just to be sure that people understood what was meant when you said a certain thing. They actually have their own language really, albeit a modification of English, but it's a great example. I've seen a presentation of how they did that, and the benefits that they made. And I mean, having worked with that program for a while and seeing it develop, I think it's an amazing example of collaboration, multi-national, multicultural collaboration. It's a fantastic example. And it was never something they strove for, it's just something that happened. Okay, we're gonna build four nuclear reactors in the desert and we need the best skills in the world to come and oversee this project and get involved in this project. And that was their starting point. They didn't think, Okay, we need to bring people from different countries and take like a UN representative view to it. They've just built this melting pot of great talent and they've really benefited from that. And of course, it's difficult for people who are using it for whom English is a second or third language, and that will fare into it as well. Like Kazakhstan is building and they're just going to build the Rosatom reactor, because it's next door, they've got strong relations, the languages are very close. It works.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah. Tell me more about what you guys are looking forward to next as you kind of look into the future? What are some areas or issues that you think are important?

Callum Thomas
For me, I think the future workforce is where my head is that at the moment. I'm part of the Next Generation Nuclear Industry Council in the UK. We're running an exercise called the Future Workforce Consultation. We're looking for people who we want to keep in the industry in 2030 and beyond, or people we want to attract to the industry. And then we're asking them, what do you think of the industry now? What do you want it to be like? And how do you think we could get there? And then we're trying to understand what would attract people to the industry, or what would keep people in the industry if they're already there in 2030, and that's tied into bring the diversity into the sector that we all want to see and keeping the retention at a really high level. That's on my mind. My mind is thinking, let's engage with these people. Because a lot of people are talking about the future, without engaging with the very people who are that future. That's what I'm trying to do is understand the people that will be leaving the industry in 10 or 20 years, what do they see? Where do they want it to go? And then I'm getting involved in where they're going. And diversity and inclusion is a huge part of that. And I've been involved in setting up a not-for-profit initiative called Inclusion and Diversity in Nuclear and we're really making strides, I think, in moving from talk to action in those areas. For me, the future workforce is one that's representative of the societies where, where the industry is based in, in every country. And I think that's where I see the future. It's bringing the right people into the industry together, and representing the societies where it's based, and then getting them to collaborate and thrive. And I think that's- the industry, a lot of people comment that it's not that diverse, especially in Europe and North America. And so there's change there. There's real change. And I see that, I see Net Zero 2050 is something that nuclear can play a huge role towards. The workforce that are in the nuclear industry will be instrumental to whether that happens or not. And so my head is all about, I mean, I'll be 73 years old and 2050, and I fully intend to be accountable for what I've done until that point. And my contribution will be around the people. It'll be around bringing the right people to the industry, keeping them there, and helping to create an environment that's inclusive and fair. If I can do my bit in that, then I'll sign off on myself in 2050 when we hit net zero.

Bret Kugelmass
Callum Thomas, thank you so much for your time today. This has been awesome.

Callum Thomas
Okay, thanks, Bret.