TITANS OF NUCLEAR

Bret Kugelmass
We are here today on Titans of Nuclear with Dick Meserve. He's a former Chairman of the NRC and, quite frankly, one of the most well-known people throughout the industry. When I first got started talking to everyone from Paul Dickman, to God knows who, everyone keeps saying, now you got to talk to Richard Meserve, Dick Meserve, he's the guy. So, super excited to finally get the chance to sit down with you today.

Richard Meserve
I'm glad to join you.

Bret Kugelmass
So, please, as we like to do on Titans of Nuclear, we love to just get to know someone's background, even before they're in the nuclear sector. What was it for you?

Richard Meserve
Well, let me say I actually backed into nuclear by accident, I mean that literally by accident. I am someone who has a PhD in physics, actually condensed matter physics, nothing to do with nuclear energy, and a law degree. I was working in the science advisors office in the Carter administration and I just finished up a big project with the science advisor, and it was March 1979. This science advisor came into the office and said to me, Gee, we seem to be having a problem at Three Mile Island. So, I got very much in the middle of the nuclear business there and there was a sort of a team of staff people inside the White House that was following the accident. I was very actively and- I basically ran that staff level process and then was influential in forming the Kemeny Commission, which was the group that studied the accident for the President, suggested various changes in how nuclear was regulated and then was read the staff level part of the process about the President's response to the Kemeny Commission. So, I was very much involved in nuclear and had not been at all before that.

Bret Kugelmass
Can you share with us a little bit about the perspective at that time of the administration and what they were thinking with respect to Three Mile Island? Was it- because I've heard, by the way, I've heard mixed stories about Carter and his level of interest in liking towards nuclear energy, everything from the, Oh, he used to scrub out the decommissioned tanks and therefore, he hated it, to, someone told me when they when they commissioned a nuclear Navy sub, a nuclear sub with his name on it, he shed a tear, because he was so happy about it. Do you know where Carter actually fell in the spectrum?

Richard Meserve
Well, my impression was that he was always very favorable towards nuclear, actually. He'd been part of the Rickover Navy, as you've indicated, and that was really a turning point for him in his life, and he was always an advocate. Or at least I perceived him to be an advocate. A realist, nonetheless, but an advocate for nuclear. I'll tell you one funny story that reflected him is that, I did not go with him, but the President flew to Three Mile Island in a helicopter with the science advisor and visited the plant, visited the control room, talked to the people. The amazing thing was that they had forgotten to zero his dosimeter before he arrived, and so everyone that was with him had trivial doses except the President. quite substantial dose on this dosimeter. Fortunately, he was sufficiently sophisticated about nuclear that it didn't make a big deal for him. So, it was okay. But, I mean, it always amuses me, the one person you'd want to make sure you had accurate readings on didn't. The other funny thing I'd say about that, to sort of move us on a little bit, is that one of the outcomes of the Kemeny Commission Report, which the President endorsed and the Congress allowed, was to give exclusive powers to the Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in the event of an accident. One of the lessons from Three Mile Island was how hard it was for the commission to actually make decisions, because at that time, you needed to have five people have an opportunity for a vote. That was seen as, I think correctly, being one that we needed to act swiftly. You needed to give the President through the Chairman, some unique powers, as well as the opportunity to be the spokesman for the agency, so it's one voice speaking in the event of an accident.

Bret Kugelmass
What were some of those powers that, in the case of an accident- like, what are the decisions that the Chairman has to make? Is it essentially evacuate or not evacuate? Or is there a more complex set of decisions?

Richard Meserve
Well, you're trying to- obviously, there's huge public concern, and you don't- so, the so the situation is one where there's a very delicate situation. The NRC has to be on top of the situation, technically, be available. The licensee has a responsibility to run the plant. And that continues for the accident. The NRC obviously closely monitors what's going on and, before dramatic actions are taken, the licensee almost assuredly would talk to the NRC about what they're contemplating and get their approval. But actually, in a formal sense, the NRC might need to have authorization to do something that's outside the tech specs, for example, which the NRC would be fully prepared to do in an accident situation if it was a wise action. But, if you disagreed with a licensee, definitely you'd issue an order and tell them not to do it.

Bret Kugelmass
I see. So, if they wanted to, let's say, jack into a coolant pipe somewhere, normally, you'd need to get permission from the NRC to do that, if it was just a normal operation. But in the case of an emergency, that might be something that they might want to do or not want to do and that's when the Commission might get directly involved and say, yeah, we don't need to go through three months of paperwork to allow you to create a valve on this coolant pipe or something.

Richard Meserve
Sure. That's it. That's exactly right. You may give them an immediate authorization to do something. Well, of course, the amusing thing about this story is that there is only one other Chairman, who exercised emergency powers. And this came home to roost in a certain sense. I was the Chairman during 9/11. All of a sudden, we were very worried about, as you well recall, about nuclear plants might well be targeted. There was some information that we were all reading about the fact that Al Qaeda had thought about attacks on nuclear plants. So, I exercised authority to put the plants on highest alert. I was very actively involved over the next several months, actually, on. Basically, the response to Three Mile Island. All the time in the White House situation room as a result of that, as part of the process was there was always great interest in other cabinet departments about what the NRC was doing to a point..

Bret Kugelmass
And what can a plant do in that highest alert mode? If what they're worried about is an airplane attack? It's not like they can set up their own Iron Dome missile defense system or something?

Richard Meserve
Well, no, we were obviously not able to do anything about airplane attacks, other than we established no-fly zones over nuclear plants. And, you may remember, that there were combat air patrols that were deployed. So, if there happened to be an aircraft attack, we did have the possibility that the Department of Defense might take some action to avert an airplane attack on a nuclear plant. And we were constantly monitoring and in coordination with the DOD on that. But we were giving instructions on licensees as to put them at the highest alert level. We basically shut down the owner controlled areas for public access. We took steps to assure a capability to heightened scrutiny to make sure that the ground attack was-

Bret Kugelmass
A ground attack, got it.

Richard Meserve
And we would be coordinating, and our licensees in particular would be coordinating, with local forces to enable that there were some capabilities. That might be state police. Some cases, it could be the National Guard that was involved. And then we get constant reports from licensees as to suspicious actions. There was a lot of intelligence activity that was directed at, what are the threats? Were we seeing any preliminary actions. We did have particular heightened sensitivity to aircraft, to possible intrusions. I can remember being woken up in the middle of the night to get a call that someone had gone over the fence at Seabrook. I'm sure there were lights going on all over the East Coast of the United States, this report went on. So, we reduced the number of people in the plant, heightened, obviously, the security presence, reduced the number of people in the plants in the event of an attack, there wouldn't be- people weren't needlessly in the middle of what could have been a firefight. In any event, by morning, we discovered that what had come over the fence was a wild turkey and he did set off this set off the sensors. I'm not talking about a bottle, either, I'm talking about an actual wild turkey.

Richard Meserve
Talk about a wild goose chase.

Richard Meserve
It was a wild goose chase. So, I started out, that's how I got involved in, basically, in OSDP. Then my boss, the science advisor, became the president of the National Academy of Sciences. And in 1986, the Chernobyl accident happened. The National Academy, our National Academy, has always had a very close association with the Russian Academy, hugely important when arms control issues, because technical people actually knew each other, and trusted each other. Made it possible to actually have arms control agreements. When 1986 occurred, Frank Press the science advisor, now then the President of the Academy, called me and said, We're gonna have some activities with the Russian Academy and some studies that we will do in the United States, I just want to put you on alert. So, I was involved over the next several years with activities both with Russia and in particular, in the US, we were looking more at DOE plants and their nuclear facilities and the implications in the Chernobyl accident for them.

Bret Kugelmass
And what were the concerns there? I guess, given how different the DOE plants are - or I mean, these weren't like, the Hanford plants, are they? Those would be the only ones that were graphite core similar to Chernobyl.

Richard Meserve
Yes, that's right. It was the graphite plant and reactor in particular, at Hanford, which was still in operation was a graphite, a very old graphite moderator prismatic core. It was a- we looked at the vulnerability of all the DOE plants, as well after Chernobyl. And that actually did result in the decision that the head reactor should shut down. Not for the same- it didn't have a positive void coefficient the way that the RBMK reactors at Chernobyl did, but it had other problems. It was a very old reactor. So, that that sort of got me into- so, it was really two accidents, as much as anything else, that got me into the - by accident - into the nuclear business.

Bret Kugelmass
And then, when was your introduction to the commission? What prompted that?

Richard Meserve
Well, I had been, as part of, I was working, I was a partner with Covington & Burling, which is a big Washington law firm. I had a diverse practice, it basically looked at science and technical issues, given my background. Among them were examination of nuclear issues, but mostly on the material side. I had experience with the NRC and with the officials at the NRC as a result of materials work, rather than, basically did some reactor work, but very little. It turned out that, when Clinton was in office, the retirement of the then Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Clinton personnel people call the National Academy of Sciences and says, Is there anyone you'd recommend? And I had been doing a whole bunch of things for the National Academy of Sciences. I then got asked if I would do it. I always said if I stayed in Washington and if an interesting federal job came along, I would take it. I wouldn't lobby for this. This came out of the blue.

Bret Kugelmass
Wow.

Richard Meserve
So, I agreed to do it. There's a funny story associated with that as well is that part of the process involves confirmation by the Senate. I was having lunch in the cafeteria at Covington with a former partner and I mentioned to him that I was going up to see Senator Chafee that afternoon. We've headed the relevant committee that I was going to have an informal meeting with him. He mentioned, Well please say - my partner said to me - Well, please say hello to him, he was my roommate at Deerfield Academy, which is sort of a prep school in New England. So, I went up to see Senator Chafee and I mentioned that my colleague had asked me to say hello. We spent the next hour talking about Deerfield Academy - which I knew nothing about - but he was telling me stories about what they had done together, and so forth. Then, he very promptly scheduled a hearing. I went into the hearing, and there was a chemical regulatory commission - I had never even heard of it - who had a guy who was also subject to this public hearing. He got all the questions, I got made an opening statement, got a few creampuff questions. So, I was a little surprised, I thought I was gonna get grilled. I wasn't, it was very pleasant. I came out and I got a report that the committee had recommended my confirmation, basically immediate. I didn't think anything about it, I had counted on it- I was told it would take several months to get through the Senate. And it turned out that - I happened to know there was the, I think his title is the Sergeant at Arms in the Senate, he was an influential figure, much more influential the name would suggest, who is - I hadn't even quite focused - who was the Sergeant in Arms, but he was a friend of mine in another job. And he put me on the consent calendar. And so, next thing I know, I got a call and said, You've been confirmed

Bret Kugelmass
Five minutes, the whole thing.

Richard Meserve
It took about a week after I got out of the out of the committee hearing. The funny thing was, the Clinton White House personnel office called me and said, How did you do it? I said, By accident. So, I lightning speed through and I actually hadn't fully disengaged myself. I actually delayed my being sworn in for a week or two, so I could wrap up things with clients and wrap up things and be able to pass things off. That brought me to the commission in 1999 and I stayed until 2003.

Bret Kugelmass
Great. And then, obviously, we know September 11 was in that time period. That was one of the more momentous events. Then, I guess after that, did you oversee a lot of- besides emergency powers being part of it, were there upgrades and changes and stuff that happened as a result that that was under your purview as well?

Richard Meserve
Well, we did have, had upgraded the- we issued a series of orders that basically upgraded the security function at nuclear power plants. We went to the highest level, as I mentioned earlier, right on it, immediately after the event, the same day the plane crashed. I had been expecting we might be at the higher level for maybe a week or two. It ended up being months, because there was no real way, based on the intelligence briefing to say, Okay, the threat has gone away, it was continuing noise in the system, I would have to say. It's like an amplifier where the volume is turned all the way up and everything that comes through is viewed as a signal, when a lot of it was just noise, as it turned out. Of course, we didn't know that. So, we did various steps to upgrade the security, had a lot of interaction with the operators to make sure that they were alert and then we would be constantly dealing with them as there was threat information, most of which turned out to be like the wild turkey story, but nonetheless, required that attention by us. That was, and the basically the security stuff has basically become more regular after that. But with the idea that the force-on-force testing that we did until forth was something that got a lot more serious after 9/11. And we had an expert team of attackers that were, I would presume, much more capable than a terrorist team would likely be.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, so, what's the theory behind all this? Because it seems to me like it's not a very credible scenario that you have an elite SWAT team come in, and penetrate even a normal containment without upgraded security measures, and be able to actually do anything that serious, other than cause fear and panic. I get the fear part. If someone's attacking a nuclear plant, that's scary, no matter what, even if they can't do any damage to it. But in terms of actual risk associated with it, it doesn't seem that- and of all the things that a team of like terrorist SWAT people could do, I mean, they could just go into an elementary school and kill 200 people in five minutes and that seems to me a lot more likely and scary than than getting into a containment building before the local police show up or the local army shows up.

Richard Meserve
Well, I have to say that it was believed at the time, and I think it's still the case, that people think they would be unique concerns that would be raised if a successful attack were made on a nuclear power plant. This is part of the backdrop of people's fear of accidents at nuclear power plants, and that might be exploited in a way that would have even greater influence on the attack on a much more vulnerable site. But one wouldn't have be as dramatic. So, the idea is to have a very expert attack team just so you have confidence that something that is less capable would have an even greater difficulty attacking. There would be- and we'd learned things of these attackers to find vulnerabilities. Less so these days, because we've done a lot of these tests and people become more sophisticated. But in the early times, you could find vulnerabilities that they would exploit, and you would have a lesson that would come out of that about what needs to be done to upgrade the security. I strongly support the idea of force-on-force drills involving a skilled team.

Bret Kugelmass
I guess, I'm just wondering, what's the maximum credible accident that they imagined what happened. Because, even if they messed up enough equipment to trigger a meltdown, you still have the whole containment structure preventing the release of radionuclides that would actually cause serious damage. Even in the case of Fukushima, where we lost containment, no one really died from the radiation. So, I guess I'm wondering, what's the hypothesis that terrorists could come in? And what actually is the worst case scenario that they were imagining?

Richard Meserve
Well, let me say, we were worried about the possibility that could be a severe accident that resulted in a breach of containment and dispersal of radioactive material. It is, in fact, the case that there were no radiation related deaths at Fukushima. But there were huge adverse societal implications of the accident, huge economic costs. In fact, a significant part of an agricultural area is still foreclosed from use as a result of the accident.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, but that's not a result of radiation. That's a result of our reaction to it.

Richard Meserve
Oh, yes, the adverse effects from radiation were not the source of the real damage in Fukushima. It was lots of other things, but the damage was huge, hundreds of billions of dollars, and huge disruption of people's lives. A lot of people died as a result of the evacuations. This was resolved that they - and they've now learned something - they should have sheltered people and done more orderly evacuations. But they took people out of intensive care units and put them in the back of trucks and so forth, to get them out of there in a hurry and people died. There's a lot that's been learned about that. So, there were severe consequences from the accident and consequences I think anyone would want to avoid, even though it turned out that the radiation related injuries were, even the ones that will occur over time, to be very slight.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, I guess what I'm wondering is - and I understand it's difficult in the heat of the moment, especially with September 11, of course, you want to ramp up security and everything - but I think just now that we've had an opportunity to look at a few different accidents - Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima - it seems to me, when I talked to so many nuclear experts, that we're still kind of cemented in our old ways of thinking, that the maximum credible accident is one where thousands of radiation, if not millions, of radiation deaths can occur, we just know that to empirically be false now. So, I'm wondering if this calls for an overhaul of what we think the real danger, the real threat is, from nuclear. As we just talked about, it's really our overreaction that causes more damage than radiation does. And if this almost, now that we can like sit back and reflect upon these different accidents, if we can maybe declassify nuclear from being this like inordinate threat, as opposed to any other type of industrial facility?

Richard Meserve
Well, you know, you have had three real cases that are reassuring from the viewpoint of dispersal. I guess, in fairness, the Chernobyl accident wasn't reassuring, because it was huge dispersal of radioactive materials. But, Three Mile Island, negligible release. Fukushima, even though containments were breached, negligible health effects as a result. So you have- that doesn't say there aren't other types of accidents that could occur in a way that have adverse impacts… I do think it does encourage much more expansive thinking, put the radiation realists perhaps in a different perspective and by probably elevating the non-radiation risks, as being, Fukushima accident, being an example of the environmental and societal impacts of the accident were very severe. Economic impacts was severe. You don't escape aid for emergency preparedness as a result of this. Perhaps it should result in some change of focus. Perhaps the production of the singular focus on radiation related injuries and realizing that there are other things, that may be akin to what would happen at a severe chemical plants were to be destroyed, that would be worthy of consideration. But this is sort of a giant ship that's focused, it's been, all around the world, focused on radiation related injuries as the foundation. So, sort of pointing it out and changing it actually has disruptive effects all the way through the system, so it's not easy. I have actually, since I've left the NRC, spent a lot of time on nuclear-related issues, both for the IAEA and in Japan, trying to help them in their response to the challenge that arose from the accident. These are very much issues that are with us.

Bret Kugelmass
And we mentioned the evacuation-related injuries. Does Japan acknowledge that, at this point, do they acknowledge that, in the future, if this were to happen, that the evacuation can cause more harm than good? Is that spoken about? Or is that still like, you're not allowed to say that?

Richard Meserve
Oh, I think the Japanese are very much aware of that. That is the conclusion of a variety of the international studies of the accident. I'm not anyone who can read Japanese, but this is not lost on the Japanese public at all. In fact, it sort of has aggravated the situation in the sense that, it's not an accident where, Okay, the consequences occur and it's over. This has been a situation, evacuations and the impacts and destruction of people's lives that has been going on for over 10 years. And they're very conscious of that. It creates a big problem, because Japan is a country that does not have any indigenous energy resources. The cheapest electric power in Japan is nuclear, and if they rely on fossil sources, obviously that creates a greenhouse gas problem. But beyond that, a lot of their supply line has to come through the South China Sea. So, they have a national security risk that's associated with dependence on foreign supplies of fuel. Japan is a natural place to rely on nuclear power. I think the government realizes that, I mean clearly realize that, because they've been basically, not very visibly, but basically trying to encourage these plants to continue to operate. Not very many are operating. But the Japanese public is still very hostile to nuclear as a result of the accident. And that is a very unfortunate situation for Japan. They are in the middle of effort to review their energy policy that will look at the situation as they're going up through the century as to what role nuclear should have. They need to start thinking about the prospect they may need to build some plants.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, that's what I was gonna ask you. That's the next likely thought, yeah.

Richard Meserve
If they are going to- and there are advocates within the government and outside the government. But it's not an easy decision to make politically given the Japanese public's understandable concern about nuclear power. We have a situation in which they had like 52 plants beforehand, and they've got instead 16 that are sort of formally authorized to commence operation. Nine have been in operation and some of them have shut down for other reasons. But they're basically, it's a small shadow of what it once was in terms of nuclear power's contribution. They are looking at advanced reactors. They are looking at and thinking about alternatives that ideally would be safer and would be ones that might be appropriate to encourage usage in Japan.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah. Though, on the safer point, I hate to push back on it, but I feel like those plants were safe and the accident proved that they're safe. What was dangerous was the reaction to the accident, not the power plants themselves.

Richard Meserve
Well, I wouldn't say that you have several plants that got destroyed, you've proven they're safe.

Bret Kugelmass
Nothing can survive, I mean, come on, we can't expect anything to survive- you don't say a Ford isn't safe in Japan because it got hit, it also got destroyed by a tsunami, right? There are plenty of cars on the road that you say are still safe cars, but got wiped out by a tsunami. That doesn't mean they're not safe. That means the largest tsunami in the world can destroy infrastructure.

Richard Meserve
Well, that's true. But I wouldn't take a lot of comfort in the fact that you had a tsunami that took out a bunch of nuclear plants. One could imagine a dispersal that was more severe that headed towards Tokyo or what have you. Maybe very unlikely, I agree. But nonetheless, there is a concern.

Bret Kugelmass
Tell me about the Blue Ribbon Commission that you served on, looking at more domestic issues with respect to nuclear development.

Richard Meserve
Well, yeah, I did serve on the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future that was, Lee Hamilton and Brent Scowcroft were the chairs of it. I think there's still some very common sense recommendations about how to proceed and strongly urged that we need to deal with this waste problem, and then some suggestions about how we could how we could do it. And it keeps on getting cited as being something that is a sensible approach, but we don't seem to be able to move off the dime on that. Some of that has to do with, this issue, unfortunately, has been caught in the middle of the partisan politics that are a problem across many areas, many substantive areas in our country right now. So, it's a Republican-Democrat issue, as well as a pro- and anti-nuclear and every other kind of view. It would be wonderful to find a resolution to this issue, but I don't think anyone has the appetite to do it right now and I don't think we have - given the state of partisan politics in the United States - I don't think it's very likely that we'll be able to find a route forward. The report is there, its recommendations, I think, still are sensible. And I hope someday we'll go forward and implement them. The one thing that has changed is that there's some international progress. There's a nuclear waste facility that will be going into operation in Finland. There's a lot of progress that has been made in Sweden. The Canadians have made some great progress as well, the French are making progress. We don't have quite the same story around the globe. There is some recognition of the need that this is a problem we need to solve and some countries are being responsible and doing it. There is an aspect of this problem, though, that I've been worrying about internationally, including within the last week. We view, and have advised through the international entity IAEA, that every country that has a nuclear power plant should make plans for the disposition of its fuel. The vision that the IAEA has had over the years is that every country will have its own repository. Well, that doesn't make any sense, right? Countries with small numbers of reactors will be just hugely expensive to have a repository. It may not even have the geology.

Bret Kugelmass
I agree. So, why did the IAEA ever get into that position? They couldn't have had one conversation before making that recommendation to say, if countries only got one plant, why can't it just work with its neighbor instead?

Richard Meserve
Well, they would say that every country has a responsibility for taking care of its nuclear waste - and it does - and they would now say that if you could make a multinational arrangement, that is allowed under their safety standards. They are starting to think much more deeply about how to accomplish that. You need to have- you can see in the Middle East, you might well have a disposal facility, for example of these new entrant countries coming together. You might be possible to do something there, but there's got to be one country that agrees to be the host. You don't want to have the Nevada situation recreated in the host country all over again. I'm chairing the International Nuclear Safety group and that was one of the subjects that we were briefed on by the IAEA staff in a meeting we held in the last week, virtually.

Bret Kugelmass
And what type of time periods, when they talk about disposal of nuclear waste, I've always thought this million year requirement is just truly absurd. Why isn't something more realistic? Can't we assume that society will be more advanced technologically 100 years from now that, whatever tools it has at its own disposal is going to be way better suited than anything we could come up with right now? If we look back 100 years, they had horses and buggies. Now, we have super computers. Can't we assume that 100 years from now they'll be better equipped, and we just come up with 100 year solutions instead of million year solutions? Well, 100 years, we could store it above ground.

Bret Kugelmass
I don't understand why that's not a very reasonable proposal.

Richard Meserve
Well, the argument is that we're leaving a problem we created, that we produced, this use fuel, for our, in this case, our great grandchildren to solve and they have to bear the cost of doing that.

Bret Kugelmass
You could also argue, if I put, instead of putting $6 billion into research now, if I put $50 million into a fund, and just let it accrue interest for the next 100 years, that we will also be better equipped financially to deal with it, not just technically, right?

Richard Meserve
Well, perhaps. That does involve some assumptions about the preservation of society and so forth.

Bret Kugelmass
But nuclear waste is the least of our worries,

Richard Meserve
Probably. I do think that one has to approach this recognizing that there will be technical change, that there are opportunities that will arise to do things. I mean, there's a lot of energy value that's in some of the spent fuel and we may create this disposal facility and then, within 100 or 200 years, we then view it as a mine.

Bret Kugelmass
Within 20 or 50 years. It seems like the nuclear people should be the most intellectually equipped to understand the value of the resource of the waste in terms of future energy production more than anyone. Just another reason, it blows my mind, why the recommendations are to think about this as a million year problem that we have to solve today, given everything that we know about how technology changes, including nuclear reactor technology, and what a great resource this could be for future reactors.

Richard Meserve
Well, whatever you say here involves certain assumptions about opportunities and capacities, and so forth. I do think that we have overblown the risk from a disposal facility. But the aim has been this show, we can solve this problem. In anything, that sort of leaves that open then presents an issue for the nuclear people while we're assuming something that may exist, but may not and that this is a vulnerability for nuclear power. I do remember a chairman of Exelon, who was on the Blue Ribbon Commission, who said at the time that he was never going to build a new nuclear plant if he couldn't assure that you could take care of the spent fuel. It just felt like it was a societal obligation he had.

Bret Kugelmass
But Exelon also owns coal plants, and he doesn't realize the societal damage that is caused by every gigawatt-hour that's produced by coal instead of nuclear?

Richard Meserve
Oh, he very much would realize that. But he very much was a big advocate for dealing with climate change. It's just that he had a personal issue associated with producing-

Bret Kugelmass
Forget climate change, let's talk about short term impacts. Air pollution. I mean, every minute that we leave a coal plant open, in terms of air pollution, we are just tallying up the real deaths and real injuries. Meanwhile, commercial nuclear spent fuel has never hurt a single person in human history. I just don't understand how someone responsible for a utility could even- unless he's anti-nuclear, I don't get it.

Richard Meserve
No, he wasn't anti-nuclear, but he saw climate change, he just saw this as a vulnerability for nuclear that needed to be solved. I very much agree that you have real deaths that are occurring from coal plants that are not hypothetical deaths you get from imagined releases from hypothetical releases from nuclear plants. And this is something for many reasons we need to deal with. Fortunately, the economics now, at least in the United States, are such that coal plants are going to disappear.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah. Though, I mean, compare nuclear against any other energy source, including renewables on a material consumption or even on a waste basis per energy. I mean, you're talking about a thousand-fold less waste, even than renewables, when comparing against renewables.

Richard Meserve
The interesting thing, I encountered a fact that I had not quite realized before that everyone says that hydro power is this wonderful answer to climate change. That can be true, but where you have a big impoundment behind a big hydro facility, you often have layers of anaerobic decomposition which is producing lots of methane. So, they're actually, the analyses of what the climate change impacts of hydro were all over the map, because it's dependent on the particular circumstances and the algae and the anaerobic decomposition that can occur in the impoundments can be significant contributors.

Bret Kugelmass
It can be as as bad- hydro could be, although thought of as clean, could be as bad as fossil fuels from the methane. It's insane.

Richard Meserve
I had not known that. I encountered that doing some work on something looking at comparative greenhouse gas impacts of various energy sources. So, the scale of uncertainty for hydro plants is huge as a result of this. Of course, we don't have very many areas that are necessarily going to be available for hydro, so this is not hardly a long term solution anyway, particularly for this country, but for many others that don't have the relief and capacity to exercise more hydro than they currently do. True, there are some other opportunities, but this is not the response to climate change we need.

Bret Kugelmass
Have you taken a look at the next generation of nuclear technologies that are coming back? Do you keep apprised of this?

Richard Meserve
I do. Actually, at the moment, I am chairing a committee of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, that is looking at the opportunities for advanced reactors as a response to climate change and what are the barriers and the problems. We're sort of at the outset of a major study of this issue that will go on for a year. And later this week, I'll actually be having a meeting, a public meeting, and we'll hear from X-energy and Terrapower both, and ATRIUM reactor. So, I'm very much in the middle of that now and learning a lot. And similarly, there are major activities underway at the International Atomic Energy Agency to prepare for the prospect of advanced reactors and trying to understand what the safety implications of them are. They're doing a lot of work to try to determine the gaps in their regulatory system. They have standards that are like ours, much more general than the NRC requirements, but which are basically ones that are written against the thought of light water reactors. They have a major effort to identify what things they need to consider reviewing. They're trying to look at a technology inclusive, set up requirements, so that they don't have to try to rebuild a whole new set of requirements for each different type of reactor. That, of course, is what the NRC is trying to do as well and Part 53, of course, is underway now. Trying to accomplish that. So, this is something that has many regulatory dimensions that are going to have to be fixed, and of course, many economic and other issues that need to be resolved as well. But it is encouraging that there are so many vendors who have ideas that have been able to raise money to actually proceed to develop them, being taken seriously by investors, and recognition that nuclear, at least in my view, has to be part of the response to climate change.

Bret Kugelmass
Dick, as we wrap up today, any kind of final thoughts that you want to leave the audience? I know we've covered a lot here. This has been excellent, but I was wondering if there are any other topics we haven't covered yet?

Richard Meserve
Well, I think we have covered most of the things that I've been involved in. I mentioned I'm involved in Japan on something that actually was a theme that goes from my days at the NRC, which was, we're trying to encourage much greater use of risk informed insights in their regulatory process. That was something I championed when I was at the NRC. The reactor oversight process was put into place when I was there, as an example. And so, I guess, I think that is the theme for the future and that is something the NRC is of course, is bedrock now for how the NRC thinks about his regulatory system and they're trying to use a risk informed approach as they deal with advanced reactors, as they should. I think that I would just sort of emphasize that as being an important element that we also need to pursue, for existing reactors as well as advanced reactors. But thank you for allowing me to join you on this. It's been interesting. It's been fun. Hope it's been useful to you.

Bret Kugelmass
The pleasure is all mine. Dick Meserve, thank you so much.

Bret Kugelmass
We are here today with Esam Hussain, the Dean of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Regina in Canada and an expert on SMRs. Esam, welcome to the show.

Esam Hussein
Thanks so much. It's a pleasure.

Bret Kugelmass
You'd think for a Canadian university, I get it right, but no, always screwing it up.

Esam Hussein
No problem. Happy to be with you.

Bret Kugelmass
Yes. You know, I was super excited to get you on the program after I was able to read through some of your papers. I think you've got a very similar perspective to me when we look at the topic of SMRs, actually asking the question, what is modularity? I think sometimes people don't do that. But before we get into that topic, I'd love to just learn a little bit more about you in general and what your upbringing was, like where you're from and how you got into the sector?

Esam Hussein
That's a very interesting question. I was born in a small town in the middle of the Nile Delta in Egypt and I went to school in Alexandria University. I really wanted to be a scientist. My parents said, No, choose a profession. So, I got into engineering and nuclear engineering was the closest I could get into satisfying my appetite for math and physics. It's really an engineering physics program. At the end of my undergraduate studies, I did a Master's degree in an area related to solar energy, but I was also fascinated by the CANDU technology, design in particularly, the fact that it uses natural uranium. It's quite a safe reactor To make a long story short, I applied to one graduate school in the entire world to get to and it was McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, because it had I think, at the time, perhaps only nuclear engineering program in English. So, I came to Canada, did my PhD with McMaster University, and then was hired by what was called then Ontario Hydro, which has called now OPG Ontario Power Generation. I was with a department called nuclear studies and safety and one of my first tasks was to implement some learnings from Three Mile Island into CANDU business. As you recall, the problem with Three Mile Island was that the operator thought the vessel really had sufficient water, the water level was rising, while in fact, it was being sucked up, because the valve was stuck off. So, one approach to deal with this is to monitor the water level in the vessel. The CANDU reactor is horizontal. There are no water levels. So, one of my first tasks was to find a way to deal with that and I developed the scheme to monitor the volume of the heavy water - we use heavy water in CANDU - in every component in the system and see if it is increasing or decreasing, and that will give an idea whether the reactor has sufficient water for cooling.

Bret Kugelmass
How did you monitor the volume? Are there other things, easy to capture values, that you can use as a proxy? So, like pressure or temperature? How did you actually calculate volume?

Esam Hussein
Exactly what you said. Computer with CANDU reactors had two computers, two computers, just in case one fails, the other one monitors all the instrumentation in the system. So, in some cases, like if you have a tank, you will have 11 measurements: the pressure, the temperature, the flow, and if you know those, you can determine the volume of the water that is there based on physical properties. So, essentially estimating the volume and in turn the mass from information that was already available. And that was really the condition, use what we have.

Bret Kugelmass
In the CANDU reactors, are there sensors attached? How are the sensors distributed throughout the reactor? Are they on each fuel - I know the fuel bundles for CANDU are much smaller, these little canister size things - did they each have a sensor? Or do you have to measure it in the aggregate across a longer column? How to how do you take the measurements?

Esam Hussein
Yeah, there are some what we call- the CANDU reactor will have typically 300-400 channels. And there are some of them that are fully instrumented, they're called instrument channels and they are really representative of the core. So, you have that information available, the inlet flow and the pressure and the temperature and the other side of the channel. The idea was, really, what you're looking at is measuring change, rather than measuring absolute quantities. So, if the water is swelling, the volume will go up. If it is going down, you will lose it. And I should tell you something interesting I remember from those days. Well, if you look at any instrument, particularly pressure measurements, are very noisy. So, I added artificial noise to the simulated data I was getting in a way and I showed the results to my supervisor and he said, How did you create that accident? That was all simulation, right? Simulated accident. I said it wasn't an accident, it's just noise. So, noise can give you, in a way, can mislead you. And so, we took we took care of this. After about close to four years, there was an opportunity to move to academia. I applied for a position at the University of New Brunswick in eastern Canada, which was starting a nuclear option as we call it. They had mechanical engineering and chemical engineering. Just happened, my boss at Ontario Hydro, the senior chair there, industrial chair, and I joined him and this is where, really a turning point in my career. I'm showing my age here I guess, one of my colleagues passed away in the infamous Air India bombing, where a plane was brought down and he left behind a young family. I decided that, from that point on, I am going to devote my career in a way or my research program to detecting what I call contraband or threat materials. So, I got into the detection of explosives and luggage. Eventually, landmines and narcotics in general. My research started us looking into the non-power applications of nuclear radiation, a bit of medical imaging, non-destructive testing, industrial non-destructive testing, and so on. It's a very satisfying career, for a number of reasons. I was open to opportunities. I had a sense of mission. There was funding. And it's- my really dream was, when you walk into a hospital and you find a nuclear medicine department and the radiology department, why don't we have the same thing in industry? It's the same really diagnosed techniques.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, sure.

Esam Hussein
Yeah. Anyway, I spent almost my entire career in that field, then almost about, I guess seven, eight years ago, I got recruited for a dean position here in Saskatchewan at the University of Regina. As you know, Saskatchewan is a uranium producing province, but the uranium is exported, with really very little added value. The province as a whole was talking about SMRs, the small modular reactors, really looking at small, because the grid is about 1,400 megawatt and, if you get one of the usual conventional reactors, which is about 1,000 or so 900, and it goes down, you lost most of the power. So the ideal power station should be in the range of 300, 400, 500 megawatts. There was talk about it, there was no commitment, but there was talk about it. It wet my appetite as a nuclear engineer, and I looked at it this way: in a province that has no nuclear power, the first step will be to find the site work for the reactor. How do you select a site? In Ontario, for example, this has been done, and there are sites that already has nuclear reactors, New Brunswick has sites as well. The site selection is very interesting, because it's not only a nuclear engineering problems, actually very little nuclear engineering, it is all other fields. I thought it would be a great idea to get my colleagues and other disciplines to be aware of how thorough in the nuclear business we do things. So, I put a team from the two universities, University of Regina and University of Saskatchewan, that felt from, for example, a lawyer who looked at duty to consult with indigenous people, and how would that affect the site selection, to geography, geology, water management, transportation. If you're gonna transport nuclear material, do we have the routes. What are the best routes?

Bret Kugelmass
Did you pursue this analysis with some sort of technology agnostic framework? Because it seems to me that there is a coupling of the unique characteristics of some reactors versus others in terms of their impact on the environment? And certainly even just on the balance of plant side in terms of water consumption and what technologies you're using. How has that factored into this site analysis?

Esam Hussein
This is a very good question. If you look at it from a risk analysis point of view, we look at what we call the source time. And that is the amount of radioactivity that can be released to the environment in case of an accident. Well, the radioactivity every reactor has nuclear fuels and in case of accidents, some of that radioactivity will be released. From a point of view of site selection, you want to choose a site in which really can obviously evacuate people as quickly as you need minimize the contact between the radioactive material and the environment, so water streams, wind, and so on. So, to answer your question, yes, we looked at it as the selection of a nuclear facility. Some technologies, for example, if you have a reactor with a double containment. Double containment means, if radioactivity leaks from the first container, there is a second container or if you have a small modular reactor buried underground, there are protections, but nevertheless, we assume that some levels of radioactivity will be released and we want to choose a site that minimizes that.

Bret Kugelmass
Can you explain the double containment principle a little bit more? Are there certain reactors that that is more common on? Or is it just a design choice, irrespective of the reactor that you'd factor into your containment design criteria?

Esam Hussein
The double containment business comes from the oil industry shipping, oil and vessels, right? Sea vessels. That's essentially the idea is, if oil leaks from a vessel, it will not leak into the ocean or the sea. Not all designs have that. But there is a particular design, the Indian, the small modular reactor, is designed that way, to have a double containment. If you put the reactors underground, in a way, you have the reactor containment and the ground as as a containment, in an essence. In a CANDU system, you really have double containment indirectly because, as you said, the CANDU system is a pressure tube. A pressure tube means that the vessel is designed to withstand pressure, and that's the containment and they get the outside containment. In a Pressurized Water Reactor, you have the vessel, which is sent by a containment and you have the containment structure itself. Chernobyl's problem was it didn't have the outside containment. So, in essence, the concept of double containment is already existing, it just has been articulated as an extra layer of protection. You will have, in the Indian design, for example, you have the pressure tube, which is also the Indian design is pressure tube base, we have the regular containment and you have an extra containment. And that, as you can tell, created a dialogue among people, the questions you just asked. So, that project just finished and in a way, just by luck, it was timed, so that it finished at about the time the province formally committed itself into looking into small modular reactors. Then an idea, of course, is to have people who can assist the province and graduated, I think it was about 25 graduate students that came out of that project. It involved 14 faculty members as co-investigators, there are people there whose expertise. We even look at grid considerations, right? As I mentioned, the grid can take about 300-500 megawatts. So, what's the effect of having an SMR in that grid? Can the SMR output follow that demand if the demand goes up? Can you increase the power? If it goes down, can you use the power for something else? And also look at cybersecurity, because some of those reactors, obviously, will be connected to the grid and they may be vulnerable. So, choosing a site to this grid, cybersecurity is assured. It's very important. Many, many factors, it was a fascinating project. Then, I think the reason you're talking to me is because you saw my critical review. I took a six months research leave from my first term as a dean and I decided to dig back into the history of small reactors. Small isn't new. The reactor concept isn't new. So, what obviously is new is two things, the modular, and the generation four designs. That is, essentially, the inherently safe, passively cooled and controlled system in a way. I spent six months going back into the new designs - there are 100 plus new designs - and all designs. To my delight, and surprise in a way, I realized that all those designs have been tried in the past.

Esam Hussein
That's good, because it's reassuring. And you can obviously, some designs do this, new features to add protection, add safety, and make use of the operating experience we had for decades. The modular is the thing that I found difficult in the literature really to pinpoint and say, What does this really mean? And I can talk about this if you like. But again, just like the double containment, it goes back to the ship building industry, where the idea is that shipbuilding, and like any other mega project, is usually over schedule and over budget. So, the shipbuilding industry looks at building a ship from materials that are manufactured off-site, bring them and assemble them to save time, construction time, and avoid cost overruns. So, that's one definition. The other definition of modularity is to build a power station from small units. If you need 1,200 megawatts, you don't have the money, start with 300, and when the money comes in, you add the next unit, and so on. So, a commitment in terms of capital cost is much less. In a way, most nuclear power plants are built from four units really, sometimes they're built at about the same time, but usually they are stages and the difference, of course, is rather than building 1,000 times four, you're building 300 times four. My view that is really an old definition of modularity. The interesting thing in modularity is what I said earlier, being able to build components off-site, test them, bring them and assemble them on site to save the construction time, the construction costs. I may not have access to industrial information, but at least in the open literature, the information that's available, in my view, is quite thin.

Bret Kugelmass
I'd like to hear your reflection on this, because one thing that I've seen, I've seen a big difference between modularity as it exists in other industries and how it's shown to be economically successful and then modularity as we've seen from some of the nuclear startups that claim to be modular, but in my opinion, somewhat missed the point of the modularity. In one of the cases that you gave, where you say you're adding additional modules over time, because you can't afford, maybe just kind of spread out some of your costs, it seems that only works if what you're adding in each increment is a significant portion of the overall expense. But if you build this facility with the anticipation of 12 reactor modules, and you're paying for 85% of your total facility cost up front and only saving 15% on the additional module units, I feel like the economics don't work to your advantage, that it makes more sense with the previous instantiation of building multiple, totally independent units on site, where you really do get to, if you have, let's say four units, you really are only taking 25% of the cost after your first unit is built, can you reflect upon that?

Esam Hussein
This is a very, very good point. It's like every other industrial, mega-industrial project, and I don't know why, but most mega projects end up being over budget and behind schedule. Because mostly, we don't really know the unknowns we're going to face. So, we'll need thorough economic analysis to decide what's best. For our particular jurisdictions, some jurisdictions may have the need and the money, and they can go the way you mentioned. Some others may not have the money now and in a way, even it may appear as initially a bit costly to go that way, because as you said, once you build an infrastructure, you really have to build it for more than one unit. But if you don't have the money now, and it can be a bit a burden, then that's a choice. It's a political and government decision, in which way it goes. Whether you do it all at once, if you do it in stages, I think the cost or the benefit we're going to get from the reduction in greenhouse gases is going to play a big part. Because there is now cost to building fossil fire station, aside from the capital costs, there is environment costs. And carbon pricing now, in most jurisdictions, is becoming a big, big issue. These factors have to be really taken into consideration. If I were a decision maker, I will simply look at it as a small reactor with modularity as an add-on that may have some benefits. If I were a vendor, I want to demonstrate that I can build a plant on time and on cost.

Bret Kugelmass
The other aspect of modularity that I've seen interpreted one way, but looking at other industries, I've seen work successfully a different way, is this idea of breaking things into nice small modules, like a ship industry that can get snapped together on-site, versus what I've seen some time in the nuclear industry, as the interpretation of modularity is, they put as much as they can into a single module, and make the most, the largest monstrosity of a complex piece of technology, kind of like an airplane, and then ship that thing to the site. Do you also see that dissociation between what the nuclear industry does and what and what other industries do in terms of that quality of modularity?

Esam Hussein
Well, both of them in a way have pros and cons. When you build small units and assemble them together, the communication between the units and the fitting - but not only in terms of structure, but the fitting in terms of instrumentations, in terms of fluid flow, in terms of controls, and all that stuff - becomes complicated. And some people think that modularity in a way handle hinders innovation, because it limits your ability. If you go the other way, altogether, you're obviously hopefully reducing the construction time and the cost. What frustrates me going back to CANDU is, that's quite simple. In essence, each pressure tube is its own standalone reactor, if you like, cannot be critical, but if you have a problem with the pressure tube, you can deal with it. You can unplug it, you can replace it, and in a way, you can think of the CANDU design as a modular design. 380 channels, each one of them is a module, you can manufacture those off-site, bring them, assemble them, put them together, build the vessel. That's the feelers, from both sides, and so, we'll see, we'll see.

Bret Kugelmass
I think that's one of the very interesting things about the CANDU and one of the things that I like in terms of modularity, is how it's broken into so many of the same piece, you just stack them together. I like that, it seems to make more sense to me.

Esam Hussein
Yeah. And that's one of the things that really I found interesting. Just up to recently, there was no more CANDU SMR. Candu Energy came up recently with a design, in a way, there has been a 300 megawatt electric CANDU design. There is also experience with natural uranium, using organic cooling. There was a reactor that run in Pinawa, Manitoba, what used to be called Whiteshell Laboratories. The advantage of using natural uranium is, of course, you don't depend on another country to provide you the enriched fuels. The disadvantage is that, because if it's not enriched, you have a lot of uranium-238, which can interact with, some of it is converted to plutonium. So, it becomes a nuclear safeguarding issue. But I think that is doable. When I talk to colleagues and ask, Why don't we simply take a CANDU reactor? We just reduce the number of channels and you get the power you want. Yeah. And I even dreamed of a one channel reactor, right? If you want to go that far, in terms of small, it's really, they think, it is the capital cost.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, that's a fair point. What you're saying is, the overall capital cost of the system, there are some fixed costs that you have no matter what. And so, irrespective of your reactor, if you go too small in terms of your power production and revenue production, you might never pay back whatever those fixed costs are, just simply because it's a nuclear project or because simply it's any power plant infrastructure and that sets a lower limit on the size you can go. And then it's almost, there's some function that shows the profitability as you go greater than that, up to a certain point. Is that the point they were making?

Esam Hussein
I think that applies to any mega project. You're aware of the hydro project in British Columbia, Newfoundland and Labrador? They faced the same the same problem. CANDU is a big reactor. It's big, physically big, because it uses natural uranium and natural uranium, you don't have enough fissionable uranium-235, so it tries to save every neutron that's produced by avoiding absorption and this is done by using heavy water. On the other hand, you want to slow down the first neutrons that comes out of fission, so that they can cause fission. So, heavy water is not a very effective way of slowing down neutrons compared to light water, light water as hydrogen, heavy water has deuterium. So, you need quite a bit of heavy water to do that.

Bret Kugelmass
You mentioned organic coolants. Is there a good organic coolant that has the right cross section of absorption to cross section of reflection parameters that you'd like?

Esam Hussein
Yeah, I don't remember the name of it exactly, the coolant that was used in modular WL-1 as you call it, the modular reactor which ran as a neutron source for a number of years. Yeah, we achieved criticality. You can do that without heavy water, they are organic coolants that can do that. There are problems with stability and so on. My understanding that if the reactor runs for a long time, they're able to overcome that. Using natural uranium is contentious for some countries. The other aspect is that those reactors can also burn fuel produced by plutonium. So, that has been studied and CANDU, bring spent fuel or weapons grade plutonium from some other countries and burn. I am biased towards CANDU for a number of reasons, yes, and Canada is one big part of it. The industry has a superb record in terms of safety, and in essence, because if there is a water leak, it's going to be in one channel, and you can control it. It will leak into the moderator, which is a huge pool, a number of reasons, we have many years of experience. The challenge that faces the nuclear industry has been always my view of public acceptability, social licensing, if you like, and, to some extent, technical licensing is worse. I think - and I could be wrong - the cost of building the first-of-a-kind SMRs, physically, may be comparable to the cost of licensing it.

Bret Kugelmass
Crazy. This drives me crazy, because it's like, imagine if you were to say the same thing for like a skyscraper. To me, a skyscraper has a way higher element of risk if it's designed incorrectly, because there are thousands of people inside of it. It can be hit by an airplane, just like we have to protect against the nuclear industry. And yet the costs to license a skyscraper, never come close, 1%, or point 1% of the cost to build the skyscraper. And yet, you still have to do the right, like the same things. You have to make sure the steel is good, the concrete is good and is poured well. That there are certified professional engineers that looked over your structural calculations. That it's seismic. It's like, we have to do all these things for a skyscraper, there are way more lives at risk in a skyscraper. And yet, we manage to do it at 100 times more cost effectively than a nuclear plant.

Esam Hussein
Well, I was reading recently on the 10th anniversary of Fukushima. The number of people who died in the evacuation or injured is much higher than the number of people who would have died if they stayed and were exposed to radiation because the amount of radiation level was low. But here is the difference. When a building collapses, yes, unfortunately, people die, and you will get more people dying than you will get, because of radiation in any of the big, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl or Fukushima. But it's done with. When a nuclear accident happens, you live with it for a long time. And so the regulators, rightly so, don't want this to happen.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, no, listen, I agree. We don't want accidents to happen. My only critique was that it can't be done more cost effectively. Given that, at the end of the day, it's engineering. And I mean, I think part of the problem is our approach to licensing Our approach to licensing is, well, at least in some countries is so prescriptive, rather than just kind of achieving safety goals, and allowing the vendor to describe how they achieve the safety goals. And even in the countries that say they're not prescriptive, and they say in the law, yes, you the vendor, bring your idea to us and tell us how you are going to achieve safety goals, culturally, they're still prescriptive. Culturally, they still want you to do the same checklist, as a country that has in law that you have to meet these criteria. Even if they say they won't.

Esam Hussein
That's why I am inclined to support the designs we know. In essence, CANDU designs I will try, PWRs, Pressurized Water Reactor, are being used. We have them even submarine reactors, boiling water reactors. It it's much more easier to license those, scale them down, try to bring the cost of construction down, capital costs down. You will have a much easier time with the regulator, because of the tremendous amount of operating experience we have. If you go back to the history, why all the other technologies, which really started in the 50s and 60s, why aren't they dominant now? They found reasons to terminate the programs. Some people say it was political. Some people say it was lobbying. But the fact of the matter that the three technologies I just mentioned, survived and endured. Yeah. So, if we want a quick solution and build reactors so we can offset the carbon emissions, start with what we have.

Bret Kugelmass
I couldn't agree more. I literally couldn't agree more. And, yes, for the reason that you mentioned, listen, these were the ones that survived and prospered. I think, and I'll just speak to that for a second, then I'll give another reason around supply chain. But I think what people tend to overlook, especially if they've never started a company before, or they've never developed or been responsible for developing a totally new technology before, is that the reality is different than what's on paper. And it's only until you actually try to build something that you understand the really fine tuned reasons that might affect this odd operational characteristic, or this odd maintenance characteristic, or this odd, we can't just find enough welders for this really weird alloy that we need. But we do have this, the historical, at least we have this empirical evidence. Hey, we tried these 50 or 60 different types, for one reason or another, they were discontinued. And these three moved forward. I think that gets discredited too much, about how does that history, how important that history is, in terms of giving us a clue to the unknown unknowns that might affect cost and engineering challenges.

Esam Hussein
One big factor that's causing this, and directly I think, is that the nuclear industry has been stagnating for a few decades now. Since Three Mile Island, the expansion has been very limited, which meant also the experience and expertise in design and construction, retired, faded away, or died. And I'm very likely among the youngest, and my time on earth is limited. We lost a tremendous amount of knowledge and expertise over the past three decades in terms of design and construction of nuclear plants, design in particular. With due respect, yes, new ideas are great. But why don't we build on what we know best and improve on it, and improve on it gradually, sensibly? And take the time to let other industries evolve. Traditionally - and I don't know if that's good or bad - but traditionally, the nuclear industry is and was dominated by big companies, the big utilities. They have the ability to invest human resources and technology and have long term goals. And I hope that stays that way.

Bret Kugelmass
Supply chain in general. I mean, your research, have you come across- That's the other thing that always comes to mind when kind of focusing on how to get going again. One of the other things that I like about sticking with the technologies that you've identified as the ones that have kind of made it through, is that there's still , even though it's a dying supply chain, there is still some supply chain. You can get, you can buy PWR fuel bundles, you can buy CANDU fuel bundles tomorrow. You don't have to spin up a brand new factory to supply your fuel. And then, not just that, but other components and systems as well that are identified in common amongst PWRs, BWRs, heavy water reactors. You can pretty much buy one of anything that goes into that reactor today, if you needed to. Does that play a role at all in terms of how you see where to direct your development efforts?

Esam Hussein
Yeah, and I can add to that. You very likely will buy better components as well, because there has been development in materials and they've been learning processes that went through. We know now where, if the material is weakened something, we do something about it. The pressure tube is a good example in the CANDU business. So, you not only have a supply chain, but you are also getting a better product, even if the supply change is weak. As you said, there is a nucleus you can build on. You can always bring it back very, very quickly. This, in addition to the licensing, in addition to the operating experience that we have for decades, will add up to a product that is very likely reliable. You may have, still, some challenges in cost overruns and delay in construction and so on, it's just inevitable with any big project, because you can't control outside forces. You can't control labor disputes, currency fluctuations, and so on, but the new technology will face the same thing.

Bret Kugelmass
That's right. What about- switching gears for a second? Have you looked into the SLOWPOKE reactor? That's a version of the CANDU or is it heavy water? I know that was another smaller reactor that was supposed to come out of the Canadian industry?

Esam Hussein
This is really a sub-critical assembly to produce neutrons.

Bret Kugelmass
Okay, that's all. That's a SLOWPOKE. Okay.

Esam Hussein
Yeah, it's a small reactor. And of course, it uses highly enriched uranium, downgraded a bit with the new regulations, but it's not a power plant.

Bret Kugelmass
I see- please continue.

Esam Hussein
I was just gonna say the closest to small modular reactors are submarine reactors.

Bret Kugelmass
Right. Internationally. Who do you meet with on this topic across the world to share learning? I mean, I imagine the Canadian nuclear industry is tied to Romania and Argentina, and maybe India, maybe a few of the heavy water countries. Are those the ones that you're closely tied to as well? Or do you participate in other international forums as well?

Esam Hussein
Well, I have to confess, I am an independent academic researcher. And being out of the nuclear power business, as I mentioned earlier, most of my career was manpower applications. I haven't really established the personal contacts. I think this has been advantageous in being able to provide a neutral point of view, not influenced by, all humans, right, you interact, you get biased. I was surprised and amazed of how much information is available in the open literature from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. If you saw my paper, there are about 200 references and the information is rich. And we can go back and build on those and learn from them. And hopefully, that will ease and facilitate the licensing process a bit.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, one of the other historical points that I think kind of changes, maybe a little bit of the cost calculus as to whether to go big or small, is that, back in the day, because we had less compute- like in the 50s and 60s, we didn't have like many computerized systems to run power plants in general. Not just the whole power plant, but let's say like a chemistry system, or chemistry skid or something. So, you needed these 500, 600 people to run a power plant and didn't matter if it was coal or nuclear. You just needed hundreds of people, because there was no automation. Of course, it made sense then to go bigger and bigger and bigger. But now you can see - and well, nuclear industry still has 500, 600, 700, 800 sometimes people per power plant, mostly by regulation - the coal industry now has like 20 people per power plant. And that changes the ratio of CAPEX and OPEX. I'm wondering if there's ever been, if you came across any analyses that say, one of the reasons that we just didn't go smaller with nuclear was because we assumed this high operational costs for just the amount of people that you needed to run a power plant. But if the nuclear industry would adopt the same personnel profile that a coal plant had, and only now needed 20 people, instead of 800 people per facility, that might allow us to go smaller and still be cost effective. Did you come across any analysis like that in the literature that you read?

Esam Hussein
No, actually, my understanding is that most of the people who work in a nuclear plant are not really in the nuclear area. It's a power plant. Once you produce the heat, it's a conventional power plan. The number of nuclear engineers you will need mostly for fuel management and for criticality analysis, is a very reasonably small numbers. CANDU reactors have been always computer controlled. There was a debate after Three Mile Island accident, what's better operator intervention, or computer control? So, I'm gonna put it that way. My understanding is in a nuclear power business, the big cost is the capital costs. The operating cost, even if you have more people, is lower than conventional power plants, because the fuel costs is really low. Once you build the plant, the operating costs. So, that may not be a factor. What will be good, and many have done that already in the nuclear industry, is two things. One is using the available data to provide better monitoring of the current status of a system and perhaps extrapolate and predict the behavior system. Computer power can do that. Valid thing, which again, was a result of, unfortunately, accidents we had, is better communication between the operators. Where the industry really should be, and is, getting close to being cooperative, rather than competitive. We learn from each other, because it's an industry where one mistake in one place affects the entire industry. So, it's easy now, you're communicating with me miles away? It's much easier to do that. Talking to each other, opening up, being honest about what's right, and what's wrong and how we can improve, because they're all in the same boat.

Bret Kugelmass
Then, I want to pick up on one thing you mentioned before, just because I'm less familiar with the CANDU systems, can you elaborate on the computerized control and how that's set up? Does that mean that operators don't make decisions unless there's like a true emergency and everything is just monitored and adjusted by computer, I guess, with a CANDU, on an ongoing basis, right? Just because the refueling happens continuously, and while the reactor is still online. Does that mean that really, there's no one in the control room that's turning a dial that says let's turn down power or this or that or anything like that?

Esam Hussein
Well, they can turn the power up and down, but in terms of a reaction, if there is a significant event, the computer will kick in. So, they'll set back the reactor in terms of power, if things are not going in the right direction. They all have dual control computers so that two computers are running at the same time, just in case something goes wrong with one computer, the other is a variable. All instrumentations are typically replicated, so you have three sensors for the same thing and the computer system will kick if there is a two out of three vote.

Bret Kugelmass
And on that note, just a quick question on that. Is it continuously doing a majority voting? Or is it relying on a specific sensor or an averaging until they see that there's a big problem with one of the potential sensors and then it switches to majority voting?

Esam Hussein
I can't answer that directly, but any control system will be based on what we call three points or set points. So, if the pressure reaches a particular certain level, then the control system will kick in. It may have to trip the reactor, meaning shutting it down completely. I'm not an expert in controls, but I think common sense says, you base your system on the most dominant factors. Temperature and pressure and flow are obviously very important parameters. There is also flux mapping. That is neutron sensors that give you the flux level in the reactor at different places and you map, the computer will map those and will make decisions on those. But the idea is to have as much as possible, flat distribution of neutrons and power in the system for best burn up and avoid oscillations within the system and the control system will try to adjust that as needed as well by control rods going up and down. So, operator intervention, as far as I know, is minimized and they get quite a bit of training on simulators. Simulators are the big business, I think in every industry, nuclear industry as much as the aerospace industry. It's proved to work well. Early on, there was a debate on digital versus analog control. I think those days are over now, but the fact of the matter is that most of the systems were designed in the 60s and 70s, so that's an area of improvement, obviously, in terms of digital versus analog.

Bret Kugelmass
Another point that you made earlier that I wanted to come back to was the ability of the CANDU reactors to consume the waste of other reactors. Has that ever been tried, where it's literally as explicit as, let's take an old PWR fuel bundle - which we have a lot of sitting around our country, at least - pop open the top, pour the - in a controlled environment, of course - pour the pellets into a CANDU assembly, and just literally shove it in and let it go? Has that ever been tried?

Esam Hussein
I'm not sure. But if I remember correctly, there were attempts to look at burning weapons grade plutonium in CANDU reactors. Whether this has been done or not, I'm not sure, but I know that there were studies as part of the treaties that were signed between the former Soviet Union and the USA in that in that direction. When you really think of CANDU, you have a very small amount of uranium-235, 0.7% or so. The 99.3% or so, the rest is uranium-238. What happens is that uranium-238 absorbs neutrons and is converted to plutonium-239. The reactor runs on that plutonium as well, because it's produced within the reactor. You continue doing that until the amount of neutron absorbing fission products overcomes the gain you get from production of plutonium. So, you can say that the CANDU is a plutonium burning reactor. The difficulty comes when you have a spin through and you have a number of neutrons absorbing fission products and you have either to wait until they decay or you have to extract them from the system process the fuel and bring it back. Some of the new designs, SMR designs, are burners. They're designed to burn that way. The other thing, which is fascinating, I think that applies to most reactors in a way. You can surround the reactors with thorium and produce uranium-233. You put a blanket around the reactor and you take that uranium-233 and use it as a fuel as well.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah. But I think the only problem with that are the proliferation concerns, because you have to let it decay through the protactinium 80-day decay half life, so you've got like these buckets of uranium-233, which is all weapons grade, just like sitting around somewhere.

Esam Hussein
Yeah, yeah. And this is another factor for the nuclear industry, in a way depends on the user.

Bret Kugelmass
Actually, can I ask on that real quick? Given that the thorium-232 has some similarities and in its ability to fission as the uranium-238 does, since they're both even numbers, can you just put thorium straight into a CANDU and not have to, then like remove it outside for its decay chain to follow and just hit it directly? Or do you still need to separate it for a period of time?

Esam Hussein
Well, thorium is the neutron absorber. You convert it into uranium-233, which is fissionable material. If you put it inside the core, you will have to compensate for the neutron absorption some other way.

Bret Kugelmass
I see, right.

Esam Hussein
But if you put it as a blanket outside, the neutrons are escaping from the system anyway. And so, rather than skipping an absorption and destruction, absorb them in thorium, and convert thorium-232 to uranium-233. So, it's really the uranium-233 is the fissionable material.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah. But you could also do that with just depleted uranium. We have plenty of depleted uranium sitting around, and you could also create a blanket out of that, right?

Esam Hussein
Yeah, I agree. I agree. This is another aspect of using enriched uranium, is the generation of depleted uranium. What are you gonna do with it? It's a good shielding material, and it can be used for some purposes, but as you said, you can also that to plutonium.

Bret Kugelmass
Great. Okay, we've covered a lot of topics. This has been very interesting. I wonder, just before we wrap up, if there are any other topics that you wanted to share with the audience, or just kind of insights that you want to share?

Esam Hussein
Yeah, the only observation I have - and I could be wrong, but it came as a delightful surprise to me - is that young people like yourself, and young women in particular, are getting interested in nuclear power, because they see it as a way for the future. And it is that generation, your generation and the generations that come that will benefit from the nuclear industry. And if we take a long term point of view, I was born in Egypt. So, 500 years in the Egyptian history is a short period. They pyramids have been there for thousands of years. The country has been occupied and invaded and so on. Keeping nuclear spent fuel for 500 years, is unreasonable. Think of those materials when they decay and cool down, all the precious metals you're gonna get out of that and all the new nuclear fuel you're gonna get out of that. So, in a way, I'm saying the youth in one hand are the hope for the future, and the old as well, taking a long term point of view. We are facing a climate change crisis. We need all the help we can get. And the other point I would make is that nuclear, actually, nuclear power will aid in introducing more solar and wind energy, because you have a reliable backup that's always there when the wind is not blowing, when the sun is not shining, you can use nuclear power. When they produce the electricity, you can use a nuclear power for some other purposes, water desalination or process heat or even hydrogen production. And if you use it for hydrogen production, you are using it and transportation, you are reducing the greenhouse gas emissions and then and so on. So, nuclear powers can play a big part. I'm still of the belief that, yes, the licensing process is more rigid than any other industry. But, in the long term, it protects all of us. I think it's a short term pain for long term gain. And I think that has been proven. So, that's just some of the thoughts I have.

Bret Kugelmass
Thank you. Esam Hussein, thank you so much for taking the time today. This has really been a pleasure talking to you, learning from your expertise and hope to talk more soon.

Esam Hussein
Thanks for giving me the opportunity, was a pleasure.

Bret Kugelmass
We're here today with Anicet Touré, who is the Product Manager of SMRs and Advanced Technologies at Tractebel ENGIE. Welcome to Titans of Nuclear.

Anicet Touré
Thank you. Thanks for the invite. It's a real pleasure to be here today. I look forward to talk to you about these marvelous things.

Bret Kugelmass
Yes, of course. I mean, listen, I've known you for years, we've sat on panels together. It's a real pleasure to be able to have you all to myself for an hour and be able to get to chat about, I think, what is probably both of our favorite topic in the world.

Anicet Touré
Right. That's right.

Bret Kugelmass
Let's start off by learning a little bit about you. Where did you grow up? And how did you get into the energy space?

Anicet Touré
Well, I grew up - well, first of all, I'm Belgian - so, I grew up nearby the border of France with a nice family. My dad is from Africa, from Mali. I grew up with him for a few years, then he went back to Africa. It was quite a journey.

Bret Kugelmass
how old were you when you were in Mali?

Anicet Touré
No, I was never there. I lived in Belgium my whole life. But he came here to study, met my mother, and that's how I came about.

Bret Kugelmass
I got it. And what did he study? Was he an engineer as well?

Anicet Touré
He is an architect. So, not far away. Actually, my passion for engineering came from my grandfather. He learned engineering in the army. I mean, when my dad was gone - my dad was gone when I was nine years old -so, my father figure was a bit my grandfather, and we spent a lot of time playing with computers and so on and that's where I got into got into engineering.

Bret Kugelmass
Amazing. And then when did you begin to study? And what was that process like?

Anicet Touré
Well, actually, initially, I wanted to become an astrophysicist. That was my dream when I was probably 14 years old. I was like, Yeah, I want to do hard science and basically do equations to calculate how the stars move. Then, when I was a little bit older, I realized that I wanted to do something to have a real impact in the world. And doing equations on the blackboard doesn't exactly fulfill that vision. So, that's how I got into engineering. In the mix between my passion for physics, and engineering, I think energy, especially in nuclear energy was the right and obvious choice.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, it's pretty amazing. It's like the type of engineering I think anyone who just gets a little bit mesmerized by how it almost takes you to a different universe, right? It's got some new rules of physics, still the same type of stuff that we're all used to, basic equations, but then all of a sudden, there are some orders of magnitude differences that can really like capture the curious mind.

Anicet Touré
Yeah, that's for sure. And, I think what's crazy about how I got to study nuclear engineering is that I started my specialty in nuclear engineering in 2010, so, right before Fukushima. My first year was during the Fukushima accident, which is kind of amazing because, in a sense, you get to learn about nuclear engineering in another way and you get to think about things differently. But at the same time for a young man going through this, you really question, Is that what I really want to do with my future? And in the end, I think this is how I really came to I'm pretty sure that I want to do my career in nuclear engineering because of that, because I looked into all of the aspects of nuclear waste, safety, everything. And I'm pretty convinced that nuclear energy is actually a great form of energy, safe. When you get to know things in the details, you realize that people are afraid of it because they don't know it that well. I'm really convinced that this is what got me as passionate and as dedicated as I am today.

Bret Kugelmass
Just one more second on this, because you know, I wasn't in the industry during Fukushima, I can only look at it in hindsight, and that maybe has informed my beliefs. In in the moment, what did your professor tell you guys was happening? You probably had a couple different professors. Were there differences? Were some saying, Listen, you know, this proves the safety because nobody got hurt. And others were saying, Well, we have to wait a few years to see what really happens. What were the different conversations?

Anicet Touré
I think there was a bit a bit of both. I definitely remember one of my professor was really analytic about the accident and how things went down, how the tsunami flooded the diesel generators. We got to learn about all the backup systems, which you normally don't do, traditionally, in the course of your nuclear engineering training. That comes later on, even probably when you are in the job. So, that was really interesting. Some of them took it as an opportunity to teach us about what was going on, what are the safety systems in the nuclear plant, and also our plants. The plants operating in Belgium can be different from the Fukushima plant. For sure, there was a bit of interest from that point of view. Now, I also had a course in, what are the impacts of the radiological impact of an accident. This was really interesting, because there were people where, Yeah, we need to wait a couple of years to know exactly what was the impact. Yet, we do see that it's very- at the same time, there was already this feeling that this was a very different accident from the Chernobyl accident, and was not of that magnitude at all, which was kind of the feeling in the media landscape, if you look back at it.

Bret Kugelmass
After you completed your studies, was it a foregone conclusion that you'd work for Tractebel? That's one of the largest companies in your country, right, that specializes in nuclear, or were there other- did your classmates go different places? How did you transition into the workforce?

Anicet Touré
Well, that's a great question. Actually, I think Tractebel and the ENGIE group were quite an obvious choice, because they have a great nuclear traineeship program, where you get to learn about practical stuff about how you operate a nuclear reactor, and you go in the field, you really see things hands on. Starting a career in Belgium, in nuclear energy, this is the place to go. For sure, I wanted to go there. At the same time, the first year I applied, I was a little bit late. Because of that, I had to do one year, where I basically supported a PhD thesis in economics, also, applying Monte Carlo tools, which were complete over here. This was really, really interesting. And I listed it at the time, I had the interviews with practical and I knew that there was an opening there for me if I was willing to wait for one year. I was pretty confident that this was the right choice and I was learning so many amazing things on the side that, it wasn't a question.

Bret Kugelmass
What does Tractebel do, for those who aren't familiar, especially with the European context of nuclear? Walk us through, what is this organization?

Anicet Touré
Tractebel is kind of the engineering branch of the ENGIE group. The ENGIE group is a worldwide big, big company utility operating about 100 gigawatts of assets in the world. They own also the six gigawatt of nuclear power plants in Belgium. In Belgium, I would say ENGIE is divided in many sub companies, but the two most important ones are Electrabel which is the operator of the nuclear plants and Tractebel, which is, historically speaking, the architect engineer of the plants and now the responsible designers. So, really, all the engineering. For example, we were busy with the designer grades after the Fukushima accident, the lifetime extension of the plant as well.

Bret Kugelmass
Tell me about the history of nuclear in Belgium. I mean, it's a small country, I've walked around, so I know you've got these beautiful palaces. How did it get so much nuclear?

Anicet Touré
Well, it's actually a great question. I mean, nuclear energy in Belgium became a topic really early on compared to the other countries. The first Pressurized Water Reactor to produce power in Europe was operated in Belgium was the BR3, and this is because - I don't know if we need to be proud of that, or not, probably not so much - Belgium, at the time of World War II, was one of the countries that provided the uranium out to the Americans. In exchange for that, we received nuclear technology. So, this is how it started very early on in the 60s. And in the 70s, during the oil crisis, Belgium decided to invest massively in nuclear energy. We built several nuclear reactors in about 10 years and they provided up to 50% of the electricity in Belgium for about forty years. Quite a feat.

Bret Kugelmass
Does that mean that the public sentiment recognizes the value that it's created, all the clean air, the stable electricity, do people know?

Anicet Touré
I don't think so. It depends when you will be asking the question. I think in 2003, actually, in Belgium, the Green Party came into leadership, and they decided of gradual phase out of nuclear energy from their own. This was revisited a couple of times, I think the Fukushima accident cemented that reality into the minds of people, especially because Germany, which is our neighboring country, was doing it so obviously, as well. Now, in 2015, this course we discussed, because the question is - the very big question in Belgium is - how are we going to move on from nuclear energy without going back to fossil fuels? Basically, there is no, I mean, there is a bit of wind in Belgium, there is not so much sun, as you can see right now. We're in a very dark place, this just because the sun coming from the window is not so much. This is what strikes me as a challenge that we do face in Belgium, in Europe, and worldwide, in fact, is that, when you look at the place, first if you occupy the worldwide energy landscape, you realize that we need all the assets that you can to get to zero carbon, which is really the goal. And so, the plan in Belgium, unfortunately, has been shifted a little bit away from that. I mean, the political discussion right now is, as is the case in Germany, to boost the presence of renewables, but to do it with a partner that, as of right now is gas. We are trying to see if there is still an opening for that, but that's the reality right now.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, it's interesting, just kind of the tug of regional politics. And I mean, it's just hard to imagine, I'm not from Europe, but just to see so many countries that had so many successful stories. You guys had as many reactors combined as the US does, so to see people want to phase it out, and especially when you have all these cultural differences, you would hope that there'll be one or two countries - and there are I guess, you know, some in Eastern Europe - that really stick out for it and say, No, no, you guys have it all wrong. But it does seem that Germany has this undue influence, which I just think it's just so crazy.

Anicet Touré
At the same time, it's counterbalanced by the French example, on the other end, which is the country most reliant on nuclear energy in the world. I do think that there is this dual view, which is not that easy and, in my opinion, is there because the public is a little bit misinformed about nuclear energy. I started this interview with you by saying, Well, I learned about Fukushima that convinced me that I was gonna do nuclear energy. People don't understand that and, this is what's the most crazy thing about - I don't know how it is to be a nuclear engineer, outside of Europe - but in Europe and in Belgium, for sure, when you're sitting at a table dinner table, Well, I'm a nuclear engineer, you always have that weird look like, But why are you doing that? People see you as an evil person, which is kind of crazy. What I'm seeing, and I've managed over the years to debate, even with people from the Green Party, I have a couple of friends working there, I can say, Well, I'm really convinced about it. I do feel the reason why I'm working for in the nuclear industry right now is because I deeply believe that the world needs nuclear energy to succeed in its energy transition. And people don't really understand that.

Bret Kugelmass
It's interesting. Some of the things that you were saying, were just like, a classic engineer mindset. You just get to look at the facts, be analytical about it, change your mind if you read different facts, but not everyone takes that that same analytical approach. Okay, so tell me, as you kind of started moving in your career, how did you take- you've taken some real deliberate choices, like you specifically, to become very involved in the SMR space, the advanced technology space. I mean, I see you putting in the extra effort, I see you around the world, like I literally run into you in this country or that country. So, how did you decide this was going to be the thing that you were going to take some young leadership action on?

Anicet Touré
Well, actually, when I started at Tractebel, my first assignment was to review a technology watch study on SMRs. I fell in SMRs when I was really, really young as a nuclear professional. From the onset, I was really convinced that there is something interesting about what SMRs are. I think I met the right people. In Tractebel, we have so many great experts and people you can exchange with and they will tell you their opinion about the concept. From the get go, I realized that there is something beyond the business model of SMRs that is really attractive. I felt like people in the industry were not putting the right word on it. So, my journey on SMRs started from that, started from trying to understand why I was so deeply convinced that there is a kind of beauty behind it. And in the end, over the years, I materialized that into, the reason why I believe so much in SMRs, is because it is a business model that starts from the right questions.

Bret Kugelmass
Yes. Ah, you are speaking my language now. Okay, so tell me, what are the right questions?

Anicet Touré
Well, I do think, if you look at the global energy landscape - because the right questions are not exactly the same in every country in the world - but you should look at the global energy landscape, I usually put them in four categories. The first one is, How do you recreate trust in nuclear safety again? Because I don't think it's a problem of nuclear safety we're facing, it's a problem of the trust of nuclear safety, and you need to be able to tell a different narrative about how nuclear safety is achieved and how it's done, and I do think SMRs bring something to the table that is really amazing, going from more inherent safety, so, not trying to engineer solutions against the problem that you might face in case something goes wrong, but trying to make sure that nothing can go wrong in the first place, which is a great mindset. It's a great approach. The second question, I would say is, How can nuclear energy play a role in the zero carbon transition? And for that to be a reality, I think the mindset that has changed is that nuclear energy - I mean, SMRs at least - are not anymore baseload generation that don't really look at what's happening beside their own power production. It's more becoming something integrated into an energy ecosystem. We've built in flexibility to complement intermittent renewables, with the ability to decarbonize industries with process heat and with hydrogen. Those are the kind of questions that SMRs are addressing to say, Well, we want to be part of the fight against climate change and we need to be thinking about in what environment are we going to evolve? So, this is one big difference. Then there is the question of why going small in the first place. I feel that the industry as a whole, not people working in SMR, specifically, misunderstand them. I don't think that going smaller has to do with real better economics or anything of that nature, but just because, when you look at nuclear endeavors right now, there is no more private actors and there really never were private stakeholders in the world that could afford the nuclear plants. We know that the world energy context is that, at least when you look at Europe, there are more and more private stakeholders in the energy market, so you need to de-risk the nuclear projects. We've seen Westinghouse struggle just because of of the difficulty of building the AP-1000. That's where SMR gets to be right, going one of those magnitude below in terms of capital investment. Yeah, I think that's really cool. And then, of course, they're all those ideas of how you streamline delivery, how you modularize them, or how you make them built in, more at least, factory than on-site construction, but this is to get back, I would say, the economies of scale that you lost in economies of mass. The real benefit is, because you're going to de-risk the projects, you're going to pay lower return rates at the bank and in the end, for such capital intensive project, that's where you're going to regain the margin.

Bret Kugelmass
Wow, okay. You said a lot of important things there. I want to unpack them, because you just went through so many things, I think all of them are so important. But you laid out a bunch of good cases for SMRs that aren't necessarily the obvious ones. You laid out being able to shift the narrative. You laid out how the market of electricity itself has changed,. You laid out how there is this advantage of economies of scale that you can make up for when you do. Listen, everyone knows you're gonna lose something when you go smaller in terms of the efficiency of your system, but you can make things up in terms of quantity of production. Also, that last point that you touched upon is from de-risking from the capital perspective, as well. I just wanted to kind of highlight those things, because I think everyone who's interested in this space needs to really dive into each one of those things pretty deeply to understand where these many advantages are coming from. It's not just one, you just laid out four serious advantages there. That was just so well articulated. How did you come across this information? I know that you guys published a big report recently. Was it that you were instrumental in putting together this report and you just really took these things to heart? How did you discover these advantages?

Anicet Touré
It's been a process. Basically, if I step back from the journey on SMRs of being practical, my first study on SMRs was in 2015. About 2018, I went to my management and said, Well, look, we really need to investigate SMRs as a business case for Tractebel in the future, and really, from the get go, because we have such a great management structure really open to new ideas, they were like, Okay, go for it. Kind of, prove us that there is something there in the market. We have a small team of people who are actually the people who wrote this white paper, The Rise of Nuclear Technology 2.0 that you were talking about, and we started deep diving a little bit the concept of SMRs looking at every aspect, and what was really the strength of this is that we built it on people who were not believers of SMRs, were like SMRs is not something that is going to work. The process was, Why are you saying that? I mean, what is it in the SMR business model that you think is not going to work? And we were starting from that point, trying to go through, again, trying to ask the right question and doing studies, basically market studies, technical studies on SMRs, to see if those worries were right. In the end, I think, after spending two or three years tackling every of these issues, we were like, Well, there is something real there. Now the question is, Can we get stakeholders of the energy market convinced that this is the solution they need? If we can do that, there is something there is definitely something that is going to happen in a revolution that can be centered around renewables, SMRs, and other solutions, but where SMRs would be integral.

Bret Kugelmass
Where does Tractebel play into this? First, literally, what would you guys do? Is this just the engineering services for SMRs? And then, the second question would be, what is your responsibility in terms of convincing these other stakeholders, like industrial purchasers of energy, does Tractebel see that they have to both create the market to also serve the market, or just talk to enough SMR players so, once they sell their systems, you guys can come in and help them perform it the best they can?

Anicet Touré
Yeah, I think there is a little bit of that. If you're looking at the SMR market right now, especially if you're looking at Europe, there are a couple of projects only that are in the starting blocks and I wouldn't say that they are even far. The market as it is, there is not much money or business to be made in SMRs as we speak. One of the beliefs we developed, especially with the core team I was talking about, is that we need to create the market. It's not about sharing a small pie, it's about making the pie so much bigger, that there will be enough for everybody to eat at the table, and in the end, I do think that this is something that the nuclear industry has to realize is that it's not about wanting to get it, sure, I mean, the real enemy right now is fossil fuel.

Bret Kugelmass
It's just so crazy. I saw this in my previous industry, the drone business, where there's so much - especially when you introduce a new technology - your biggest challenge is actually customer education. It's not competition on any given individual contract. It is just so important, I cannot stress this enough, for the various vendors to get on the same page, work with - you don't have to work with each other directly - but like, help each other succeed, help break down roadblocks together, because that'll create a huge market. Even if you're not the best technology, just by creating a huge market, the slice of your pie is going to be better than if you went off and just did it on your own.

Anicet Touré
Yeah, definitely. And so, that's why we started, I would say, canvassing stakeholders outside of the traditional nuclear market, actually. We are also going to industrials right now and saying, Well, you need to decarbonize your footprint by 2030, 2040, 2050. What are the solutions that are out there, as you consider SMRs? And what are your requirements? Look, we are going to work with you. What can SMRs bring to the table? And that leads me to the second question you were asking, which is, What's the role of Tractebel in that? Yeah, indeed, we are an engineering company providing engineering services. I would say that Tractebel is a bit of a weird beast in the nuclear industry, because we were the architect engineer of the nuclear power plants and working so close to the nuclear operator, which is from a sister company, we've really developed competencies that you would find in a nuclear engineering company. That goes from even things that are normally more found within vendors themselves. I mean, we have competencies in core and fuel studies, which is quite rare for engineering companies. And so, the idea is really, How can we help stakeholders bring that market about? I do think that, on that note, there are two type of clients that we are helping. There are the vendors who need engineering to get them past the finish line or at least get them advanced or conceptual design to a detailed design and incorporating that into a supply chain, this is definitely something that we've been doing and for which we can help. And there are utilities or future operator owner of the plants which don't always know how to be the nuclear plant and this is, for me, maybe the most, from a conceptual perspective, the most interesting case. You have in this world, we say, Well, okay, your SMR business case sounds interesting, but our core mission is not to operate a nuclear plant, we are producing whatever goods we are producing. How can we build a model where, basically, the plant is going to be operated or built without us, where we are okay to invest, but we don't want to operate it. And we are trying also to go with those stakeholders, to go with those industrials, think about how the business model around nuclear energy can evolve in this concept of SMRs.

Bret Kugelmass
Amazing. Can we talk about some of these industrial stakeholders? Can you maybe rattle off a few industries that, either you guys have spoken to or that you think might be applicable for this type of technology?

Anicet Touré
Sure. And I do think there are a couple of people that we've met also together at a couple of events, I'm thinking for example, in Eastern Europe, a well-known industrial in the rubber industry is looking at SMRs. I think there is an interesting thing happening in some of the countries in Europe, where basically actors are seeing the energy markets evolve. And industrials are seeing their rules and themselves evolve with the market and saying, Well, we are a consumer of the electricity market or the heat market, what about being prosumers in this market?

Bret Kugelmass
What is prosumer mean? Define that for us.

Anicet Touré
Producers and consumers at the same time, then having kind of a hybrid role, because you play such an integral part of the of the market being such a big consumer, that issuing of your own production that can also serve some of the challenges like balancing the intermittency of renewables. This is a win-win situation for everyone. I think that the realization is that the integration of the market is going to bid to become more and more performance. The market has become more and more complex with different solutions, really integrating themselves and not something adding up on top of the other and a grid operator doing the dispatching. That belief has changed. We see the nuclear industry, we see also other actors, one that I'm very proud to work with is Fermi Energia and, actually you did an interview of Kalev Kallemets on your podcast.

Bret Kugelmass
We're very proud of them, and we were an investor in that company as well, so, we're very proud of the work that they've done.

Anicet Touré
This is for me, maybe one of the most brilliant companies to work with, and bring in people to work with, because they have the same vision that we have in our core team that we need to change the energy markets. They are sitting ahead of everyone and basically want to set up that first-of-a-kind project SMR in Europe and we're really glad to be part of their team to advise them, also because, while we know that building an SMR on paper is a great adventure, when you're doing it, it takes it takes a whole lot of skill. Building that with them, but with the vision and the drive of a CEO like Kalev Kallemets, it's been an amazing journey. There are a couple of other companies. Because companies in Europe are still in the phase where they are looking at it, but trying to see what's happening on the European Commission level, for example, with questions such as the taxonomy and what is about sustainable finance with nuclear energy be included in that? How nuclear energy will be perceived in the near future? I think there are a lot of actors that, right now, don't want to publicize too much about the activity there, but we have more and more stakeholders saying, Well, SMRs look really promising and we are going to go step by step, see if there is a market, if there is a business case, and if we see that all the licensing is possible, and if we see that all those steps can be can be fulfilled, we are all in for SMRs. And that's quite great to see.

Bret Kugelmass
Amazing. Can we talk a little bit about economics, though? What do you think that the SMRs have to be able to produce electricity at to be competitive? What do they have to produce heat directly at to be competitive? I think, at the end of the day, it's great to engage the stakeholders, yes, they definitely see benefit, okay, great. But at the end of the day, I think when they need to convince their boards, it comes down to dollars and cents, I think you're gonna be very hard pressed to find an industrial stakeholder that is willing to do it just to advance the industry and is willing to take a loss on the first unit. So where do these SMR vendors have to come out on in terms of dollars per megawatt-hour in order to really make their case?

Anicet Touré
That's actually a great question. Because, I do think that, from an investor point of view, if you can produce electricity at $50 per megawatt-hour, then everyone will be saying, Yes, let's do that, it's the solution.

Bret Kugelmass
Well, 50 is very competitive, 50 is what you'd need to compete on the grid itself, I thought you would say a much higher number when it comes to industry that has to pay for it at the end of the grid.

Anicet Touré
I was getting there.

Bret Kugelmass
Okay, sorry.

Anicet Touré
I think 50 is the obvious number, 50 is where you start having the discussion and saying, Well, okay, how can we align on this project, when can we make it happen as soon as possible? Now, the reality is also that production costs, which is traditionally the traditional measure of energy costs everywhere is not the right metric to study SMRs. And, of course, it depends on the market you're considering. I'm going to talk about the electricity market for a minute just for me to be able to exemplify what I've placed. On the electricity market, what you see - and we've done in this white paper, The Rise of Nuclear Technology 2.0, an analysis that shows that, basically, production costs in tomorrow's energy market is not the right metric anymore. Because when you have a lot of intermittent renewables on the grid, which is going to be the case, and it's already to some extent, the case, in countries like Germany.

Bret Kugelmass
Or California.

Anicet Touré
Yeah, or California, but it's a really good example, because in the end, you see that there is a hidden cost, which is the cost of storage, the cost of transmission and the cost of distribution. And we've looked at that and we've looked at SMRs with a specific angle with that was, If SMRs can be flexible enough - and there are different ways to achieve that, hydrogen is one of them, heat storage is one of them, you can also down ramp the power. If you can be flexible, then you bring something really interesting to the market. Because in the end, you will decrease the storage and transmission cost of renewables. So, basically, you're going to improve the profitability of renewables, as well as you're producing and making a competitive offer yourself. What we show in our study, to make it specific, is that basically at $70 per megawatt-hour, you're not competitive with wind, onshore wind, for example. But at the same time, if you model the whole market, and all aspects of cost production, storage, distribution, transmission, you see that the system, from an economic point of view when we reach the optimum by investing more in flexible nuclear than in onshore wind, because of those costs. I would say that 70 is is kind of the right metric where you see real benefits. And beyond that, it just depends on the flexibility metrics that you can reach.

Bret Kugelmass
Just to be clear, I tried to pull this out for a second. Are you saying that at 70 - even if you didn't have hydrogen, you don't have heat storage, you don't have down ramping involved - can an SMR still be competitive at, let's say, $69 per megawatt hour just by selling direct to an industrial player?

Anicet Touré
The answer to the question is unfortunately complicated? But for the sake of simplicity, let's say, yes.

Bret Kugelmass
Okay. And then, beyond that, you're saying, with all of these extra things, it depends on the situation, of course, on where the electrons are coming from and how the grid is set up and how the market forces are aligned. But even beyond that, there's a possibility that it still makes economic sense.

Anicet Touré
Yes, yes, exactly. And, in fact, what I was trying to get at was that, with simple flexibility - and by simple flexibility, what I mean is, basically, what the French nuclear reactors are capable of doing - 70 is basically a good target. If you're trying to consider things like historic solutions, like, I don't know, Moltex Energy is doing, like Terrapower is doing, those kinds of things have such an interesting value in highly intermittent driven grids that you can reach costs that are beyond that. Obviously, I wouldn't recommend for anyone- I mean, at this point, what becomes really difficult is not the overall business case, because the business case, when you look at the macro economics, okay, it can make sense. But what are you as an individual investor in a specific project going to get from that? That's where things becomes become a bit more complex. Now, I want to come back on what you were asking about things like an industrial or something that would receive that power, because then you're starting to consider something completely different, which is, if you're producing, for example, hydrogen as a byproduct, or as a main product, depending on the industry you're in, then you have a business case that completely shifts, because you can say, Well, I'm going to produce hydrogen baseload and when the price of electricity reaches high value on the market - which is definitely going to happen, and is happening more and more regularly, because of the pace of renewables - then you can sell your electricity to the grid. And these are business cases that makes sense, but we will need time to convince the market stakeholder that this is where the market is going and there is a business case. Here, I would say, we need to go into the details, we need to go into the specific business case, to make it happen. But at least, let's say, under 70, you can be pretty confident that there is a good business case to be made.

Bret Kugelmass
Excellent. Okay. Any other industries? I know we talked about chemical, but just so people can brainstorm and think a little bit more, can you just rattle off a few more industries that might make use of SMRs?

Anicet Touré
Sure, actually there are quite a lot. I would say the chemical industry, in a large sense- when you see the chemical industry, there are sometimes organizing chemical clusters where you have plants basically sharing the cogeneration mean and using the steam and power. This is something where we see a lot of potential for these industries. In fact, what is also quite curious, in a sense, or might seem curious, when you look at it from the outside, is that I do feel that the petrochemical industry could benefit from SMRs. Not necessarily to produce the old fossil fuels, but to produce synthetic fuels.

Bret Kugelmass
And that's the future. That's the future. Yeah, they're not thinking about this. They're crazy right now. Yeah.

Anicet Touré
I do think so. The reality is that there are applications for which it will be very difficult to replace the fossil fuels. If you're thinking about airplanes, or boats, or even long-range transportation, basically, well, you do see that it is really difficult to go towards something else. And so those synthetic fuel ideas are something that we do believe can be a game changer, but synthetic fuels are only a game changer if you can produce them with low carbon energy, because if you're producing synthetic fuel from gas power plants, it's also making less sense. So, SMRs are good candidate for that. Yeah.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, absolutely. And any others? Steel comes to mind, data centers.

Anicet Touré
Steel is also a very good business case, because through the process of DRI, which is a specific way to produce steel, you could actually produce hydrogen as a feedstock. Again there, if you look at it, I do think that nuclear is perfectly fit for that. And I have a number to give you an idea. We looked at it in Belgium, if we were to replace the steel production of Belgium, or one of the largest in Belgium, and again, through SMR, producing hydrogen and the DRI process, it would represent probably about one gigawatt of SMRs, one gigawatt of electrolyzers.

Bret Kugelmass
That's a cool market.

Anicet Touré
Yeah, it's a great market. At the scale of Belgium, this is meaningful, because the whole electricity market in Belgium is about 10 gigawatts. So, it means that there is something out there. And it's the same thing, if you're looking at, we also did something which is kind of crazy exercise. What if we work to replace all the fossil fuels produced in the Port of Antwerp, so in Belgium, by synthetic fuels produced through SMRs, and then you cannot even believe numbers, beyond hundreds-

Bret Kugelmass
Hundreds of billions of dollars, maybe?

Anicet Touré
Oh, yeah, easily. It's 50 gigawatts of power. It's crazy numbers. So, there is a market big enough. Now, the question is, can we convince these actors to go there. I want to share something with you that was told to me by some people working within the European Commission. They were saying, Well, we see a place for nuclear energy in the current context, the current political context, it's not a simple discussion to have. But at the same time, everyone right now is focused on reaching the targets for 2030. So, basically, in the European Union, it means reducing carbon footprint compared to 1990 by 55%. But getting there is only part of the problem, because when you're considering that, you can say, Well, let's replace coal by gas, that kind of works in the equation. But it doesn't work on the overall equation of climate change. And so, when you're really trying to get to zero carbon, and that's your objective, even people within the European Commission say, Well, we need to consider nuclear energy at some point, and we are glad that some of the countries are doing it.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, I think Bill Gates made that point in his book, he very specifically called out, he said, watch what like your final goal is. If you just aim for the 2030 targets, you might actually make technology selections that actually make it harder to get to your 2050 targets if you don't think long term. So, I thought that was very, very smart that he called that out. Quick question on Belgium as a potential first market, since we've been talking about it. Is it a possibility? Could a first-of-a-kind SMR get licensed in Belgium? Is there a regulator that's equipped for it?

Anicet Touré
At this stage? I don't think so.

Bret Kugelmass
And why not? Why couldn't they just borrow expertise from, like what they call a TSO, technical support organization?

Anicet Touré
I do think that the capability is there. If you're looking at the Safety Authority, the TSO, the whole nuclear industry, as it is built right now, it is capable of doing that. And in fact, the Belgium nuclear industry has been a pioneer in nuclear engineering. From the very start, it's been an industry that has greatly contributed to the development of fuel reprocessing. We were one of the first countries to look at our geological disposal. I mentioned the first EPR we are now looking at transportation. We have a research center, the Belgian Research Center looking at transportation. We have fast reactors, so technically, we are equipped. The question is that the current political context, in my opinion, wouldn't allow that. We might come back on that later on, but I do think that there are other countries in Europe that will be the market initiators and where we see things moving forwards first.

Bret Kugelmass
Which ones? An example, yes, please.

Anicet Touré
Well, Estonia is one of them. We mentioned Kalev Kallemets.

Bret Kugelmass
Estonia is still further off, just because they don't have the experience. I was hoping you'd say something more like Czech or something that has a bunch of nuclear already. Other countries?

Anicet Touré
Yes, I was going to get there, I think Czech Republic, Finland, Romania, are countries that are already equipped with nuclear power that are seriously considering the SMR option. I do think also, the fact that we're seeing France with a newer initiative moving towards SMRs is quite telling, because it means that they see a shift happening there. I don't know if you can consider it Europe or not anymore, but the UK is definitely a good candidate as well, to be a groundbreaking country. And there are even some less expected countries, I think, of a country like the Netherlands, where the discussion around nuclear energies is really shifting. They might probably not as a first-of-a-kind, because it's still a small nuclear country, they have only one nuclear reactor, at least one that is operating and producing power, but they're considering for the future. So, maybe as a second or third-of-a-kind, behind a country like Czech Republic, Finland, Poland?

Bret Kugelmass
Great. Tell us about Horizon 238. I know this is something you're proud of. I just want to make sure that we spend a little time on it.

Anicet Touré
Sure. Well, Horizon 238 is something that I launched, I will say, outside of my professional activities, because I wanted to relaunch the debate about nuclear energy in the broad public domain in Belgium. And that's because I feel like, when I look at debates on television, I feel like the way nuclear energy has been debated is not the right approach. It's too much about even renewable energy bashing, or even just having that position where you're seeing, Well, nuclear energy is good, and we are not really going to explain you why because you're not able to understand why.

Bret Kugelmass
I hate that.

Anicet Touré
Yeah, that just doesn't work. We wanted to do something different than saying, Well, I personally am convinced that one of the reasons why nuclear industry and nuclear energy is in such a bad spot in the public debate is because, for too many years, we've not been willing to talk about nuclear energy, because we were saying, Well, it's secret, or it's confidential information, we don't want to.

Bret Kugelmass
I know, I hate that attitude I see it all the time. And I hate it. Yeah.

Anicet Touré
And basically, that's how Horizon 238 came about, with different people from different companies in the nuclear industry. We're not talking on behalf or for any of the nuclear industry stakeholders, just in our own name. I'm trying to share a vision where we're actually thinking of the real future of Belgian energy, so, not trying to look only at how to push renewables actually increase the carbon footprint, but trying to make a plan on the table where renewables can work with other low carbon energy sources, to get to the goal, to think about the real question of the transitioning to go beyond the obvious question within the political debate, and energy debate in general. And also, I think about educating people about how a nuclear reactor works. How does special handling and special management and special storage works? Because those are kind of things where people would easily say to you, Well, I'm against nuclear, because what about the waste? But if you're responding to that question, that conversation and say, Yeah, what about the waste, and really starting to get into what's being done, how much volume is represented, what's the level of danger, what is the toxicity? How do you compare it to other things? I think this is where you really get to the point where you can really have a normal conversation with people where you can say, Let's think together about our future. Let's start the conversation with the belief that, I think that you're being sincere when you're saying you want to get to zero carbon and you want a better environmental future. But let's take the other approach. And let's say, Well, we are being sincere. And this is why we founded Horizon 238 with young engineers, because the whole idea was, we have this incredible team of young engineers that are really passionate about their job, and that chose to get into nuclear energy, even though they knew that in Belgium was probably not the best career choice, if you wanted to have a long future in Belgium, but you were so passionate that they wanted still to be in this field, in this industry and fight for it to really embrace it and good fun.

Bret Kugelmass
And that's a great name, too. By the way, I have to compliment you on that. I think, you know, one thing that I've really learned to appreciate about you specifically, as I've talked to you more and more is that you're an engineer, but you seem to have like a very good business mind as well. I don't know if that's something that's natural, or something you've been working on over the last couple of years. But I think it's just like a superpower of yours that I really enjoy.

Anicet Touré
Thanks. Well, I don't know exactly. I think that it's something that I try to work on. Specifically, because, I've always said, in the back of my mind, that it's not about only building technical solutions, but making an impact. And I do feel that engineers tend to shy away from that saying, well, only techniques, we don't want to get into the business stuff and so on. But at the same time, if you're not the one doing it, are you letting some other people who might not be as knowledgeable as yourself, do the job and you might miss something in the process. So, I'm trying to get to learn from people we know about business and communication, because it's also part of the job in the nuclear industry right now.

Bret Kugelmass
Anicet, as we wrap up right now, I'm hoping you can just leave us with your vision for the future. If we were to look forward 10, 20 years, what does the world look like?

Anicet Touré
I think the world 20 years away from now looks like, first of all, a realization that we need to fight climate change with all the solution possible. That includes nuclear. And I really believe that. And then we start thinking about how to integrate renewables into a global energy landscape, not only producing baseload electricity, but flexibility in electricity to complement renewables, producing high temperature steam to feed or industries, producing low or medium temperature water to feed or cities with district heating, and producing hydrogen as a feedstock or as a synthetic fuel for all those industries that will not be able to decarbonize. I do think that if you look at the future, I have a very integrated vision of the energy landscape of tomorrow, where, when you're a nuclear engineer, you will need to work with people from the renewable industry, from people from the industry, and where you get to touch of a bit of everything. Because if we don't connect all the building blocks, I'm not convinced that we can really succeed in the zero carbon transition.

Bret Kugelmass
Anicet Touré, thank you so much for your time today. It's been a pleasure talking to you.

Anicet Touré
Yeah, the pleasure was shared. Thanks for the invite, was a real pleasure.

Bret Kugelmass
Absolutely.

Bret Kugelmass
We are here today with Sama Bilbao y León, the Director General of the World Nuclear Association, a good friend, and I just can't wait to have you on Titans of Nuclear, so welcome to the show.

Sama Bilbao y León
Wow, it is my pleasure. I mean, it's been how many years since we have talked about this?

Bret Kugelmass
And you jumped all over the world. For anyone who doesn't know you, I just want to start off with the introduction that you're probably the most liked person in the entire nuclear industry. Everyone I've ever met only has the most positive things to say about you, across the entire industry.

Sama Bilbao y León
Well, that's great to know. Thank you. Wow. You just made my day, thank you.

Bret Kugelmass
Okay, so now that we're done with that introduction, I'd love to take the opportunity just to learn a little bit about you. Can you tell us where you grew up and what your upbringing was like?

Sama Bilbao y León
I'm originally from Spain, as you can obviously hear my accent. I was born in Bilbao in the north of Spain., but my parents moved to Madrid when we were very, very, small, so, I grew up in Madrid really. Normal childhood, but my father is an engineer, my mom is a fashion designer. Quite different sides of the equation there. I grew up to be an engineer and my sister grew up to be a fashion designer. So, we have that side. I went to school in Madrid, I got my degree in the equivalent of mechanical engineering in energy technologies. We learned about all energy technologies, of course, and I fell in love with nuclear energy. I did my final project on nuclear engineering and then I had this crazy opportunity to go to the US to pursue a PhD. So, I just jumped at it. I moved from warm Madrid to frigid Madison, Wisconsin and I had the fabulous opportunity to do my PhD in nuclear engineering, under the supervision of Professor Corradini, who is god when it comes to thermal hydraulics. Not only is he fabulous as a professor, as a mentor. But really, he's just incredible and he's the person that has instilled in me this desire to learn about everything. He's always curious and I think he's instilled it in me and all the other students. So, I just went to Virginia, I went to Wisconsin, and I got my PhD. So, that's my career.

Bret Kugelmass
I want to learn first, how you narrowed in from just general engineering studies and energy studies into nuclear? Where did that passion come from? What did you see about the space that drew your attention?

Sama Bilbao y León
Right, well, I decided to focus on energy. In my school in Madrid, there was a specialty that was energy technologies. I always knew I wanted to do energy technologies. Basically, they walk you through everything, wind, solar, coal, natural gas, geothermal, whatever, nuclear, of course, nuclear fission, and nuclear fusion. Just learning about everything, certainly nuclear fission seemed what I really wanted to do, I thought it had all the pros, most of the pros and very few of the cons. And I saw the future. So, that's why I went for it.

Bret Kugelmass
Spain had nuclear power, correct? Did you have any familiarity with how nuclear was built into the fabric of your surrounding infrastructure?

Sama Bilbao y León
Yeah, so, Spain has had, for the last, I don't know, 20-30 years, about 20-25% - I mean, it depends on the year, right- but about 20-25% of our electricity comes from nuclear. I think right now, we are down to seven units. But nuclear has been a strong part of the energy fabric in Spain. And frankly, I'm going to brag for a second, but Spanish nuclear engineers are well known around the world. There are Spanish companies that are very well known in the nuclear sector overall. I have seen Spanish fellow engineers here and there in my career. Definitely nuclear was something that I was aware, I didn't really decide to go for it from the beginning. Yes, only when I learned more about it in school, is when I said, Oh, this is it, this is what I want to do.

Bret Kugelmass
Did you have any sense of the wider perception of nuclear and culture? When you started telling your friends and family, Hey I want to dive into nuclear, were they excited? Were they nervous? What was the general feeling about that?

Sama Bilbao y León
I think that's probably not very different for everybody else, not everybody when you tell them, Yeah, I'm a nuclear engineer, I am studying nuclear engineering, there are two things that they tell you: Oh, you must be very smart and you must be very evil. So, that's the things that they tell you. I mean, it's always the same. Whenever you go and you're having a coffee with a colleague, or you're talking to anybody, everybody, there is always this relatively not very positive conversation. Oh, what about the waste, too, I can't believe you can support nuclear, it's so unsafe. There are these conversations, but maybe because of that, I've always been so proactive and so willing to say, Okay, wait, let me let me walk you through it. Let me tell you why I'm doing what I'm doing. I am neither as smart as you think I am, and certainly not as evil as you think I am.

Bret Kugelmass
Now, something I've noticed about you in the years that I've known you is you do have this, this extra superpower. In addition to your engineering capabilities, you have this communication ability that's quite frankly unparalleled. Where does that come from? Did you just practice that over the years? Or did you have some formal training?

Sama Bilbao y León
No, I've never had any formal training. I guess, maybe, I'm a Spaniard, I like to talk, maybe that's what it is. I really enjoy speaking about nuclear and this is part of the reason, and maybe we'll go about it later, when I had the opportunity to teach, every once in a while, where you are able to explain what you're doing, why you are doing it, why it is important, and then you see every once in a while this spark in the eye of the person that you're talking to, suddenly is like, it just makes my day. I really love to do that.

Bret Kugelmass
Amazing. So, you move to frigid Wisconsin and you started studying thermal hydraulics. What was your focus there? Was there a specific system that you looked into as part of your thesis?

Sama Bilbao y León
I guess the focus of the hydraulics was, because of my advisor, Professor Corradini, who does what he does. I was doing something that was very specific at the time. Professor Corradini was quite focused on molten corium concrete interactions. I started doing some computational work using MELCOR which are the computer codes that are big system calls that look at overall Nuclear Safety Analysis. One of the things that is notable about them is that, once the core melts down, it actually looks at the corium concrete interaction, basically, the molten core with the substrate of concrete that you have in the unit. So, we were looking at that. I started doing computational work, but then Professor Corradini insisted that I really needed to do some experimental work. We set up some experimental study, we really wanted to understand the heat transfer correlations when you have these multi effects mixture, when you have the corium, which is really a two phase mixture, is the slurry. And then you have the concrete that is melting with all these gases that are being produced as the corium melts down. We were trying to understand where is the heat transfer correlation in that mixture. Obviously, we didn't real materials, we were looking at simulants. And in the end, that was my work for my thesis. We came up with a few correlations, and we were able to benchmark them against existing data. And then of course, the new data that we achieved.

Bret Kugelmass
How do you run an experiment? Because to me, it seems like the hardest part is that in the case of an actual meltdown, you've got this material that's producing heat itself and continuing to produce heat, so, that would have some effect on the material over time. That would be very different than if, let's say, I just poured a bucket of hot steel onto a surface and then it immediately starts cooling down and doesn't add any additional heat. How do you rectify that?

Sama Bilbao y León
That was one of the challenges, because as you said, clearly this corium has this volumetric heating, so, not only is, as you said, is ongoing, but it's volumetric which is very important. It's not surface heating, it's volumetric heating. In our case, we used simulants. We actually had electric heating, we had these electric wires going through our simulant material, and obviously it wasn't 100% volumetric heating, but yes.

Bret Kugelmass
What kind of wire these, just like really thick tungsten or something? What can withstand the heat?

Sama Bilbao y León
Yeah, so they're actually very thin tungsten that we had. Yeah. So, it was electric heated.

Bret Kugelmass
Are there any other things that you learned from the experiment? I mean, the different materials, did they stratify out or did they mix in?

Sama Bilbao y León
Oh my gosh, it was quite a complex experiment because as I said, it was three phases. We have the liquid, we have the solid materials that we were simulating, plus, of course, the gas. Yes, we did see some stratification, which we weren't quite sure that really was happening in the real case, we weren't really sure that their certification was going to be so clear. We were playing with different flow rates for the gas that was being generated. We were trying to look at the buoyancy of the different materials, basically, the difference in density between the liquid and the solid materials that were being created. It was quite complex. And I mean, I think that we came up with correlations, but clearly, for example, you know that Argonne National Lab is a group of scientists that are doing experiments there that are actually using prototypical materials. Obviously, we really try to benchmark to those, because those are one of the best set of data that we have for this type of experiments.

Bret Kugelmass
And sorry, one more question. That's just because I'm personally fascinated by this particular line of study. And then we can go on with the rest of your story.

Sama Bilbao y León
No worries.

Bret Kugelmass
Are there any real life examples, like Three Mile Island or anything, that that we can look at the final result and then scrape off layers and just kind of see where things might have ended up? Have we done that with any real life meltdowns?

Sama Bilbao y León
I think that there is a lot of data from Three Mile Island, I am sure that we will be able to see some data from Fukushima in the future. I mean, I don't know to which extent there was an interaction between the corium and the competent Three Mile Island, so I never had any data for that. If there was any, it was very much minimum. I suspect that from Fukushima, we may get more data. And the only thing is, of course, what I was looking specifically at the heat transfer in that kind of moving interface between the corium and the concrete. I would really love to see what data do they get, whether they are useable for the type of heat transfer correlation that I came up with, or for the work that other people are doing. And let me just say, as far as real data or maybe more useable data, I've seen that there are- I mean, we did look at this when we were doing the experiments in the area of volcanology when they are looking on how the magma advances.

Bret Kugelmass
Volcanoes?

Sama Bilbao y León
Volcanoes, exactly, so, how the magma advances and the interactions between these molten magma and whatever rocks or substrate that it's heating and how that works. There is some data there. I mean, clearly, the configuration is not not the same, but there were some things that we looked at as we were looking at our our literature review, and potential applications of what we were learning.

Bret Kugelmass
Amazing. Okay, enough of that, we can come back to that some on some other conversation. But where did your career go from there after you got your PhD?

Sama Bilbao y León
Afterwards, I stayed at Wisconsin for a little while as a postdoc, because I was having a lot of fun over there, of course. I guess when my mom calls okay, yes, stop, get a job. So eventually, maybe after a year after graduating, I got a job. I was super lucky, because I was able to move to Virginia - another of my most favorite places - to work for the Dominion Energy. I mean, they are called Dominion Energy right now, they used to be Dominion Generation. They offered me this fabulous opportunity to work in their nuclear safety group. They actually gave me this this challenge to develop methodologies for the heat flux, the critical heat flux correlations that we were using for our fuel. Essentially, what Dominion wanted to do was to have the ability to switch fuel relatively quickly, to go from one fuel supplier to another fuel supplier, relatively quickly. And of course, relatively quickly may be three years. The regulatory process is not is not very short. We wanted to get in-house the ability to perform all the safety analyses for this for this fuel, which means to create all the software, basically computer codes, that we do this analysis.

Bret Kugelmass
The historical context is that, this was within the domain of the fuel vendor for a very long time. The fuel vendor was the one performing the analysis, the calculations, helping submit to the NRC. And it was not within the domain of the of the utility. But the utility was dependent on a single fuel vendor and didn't have the analytical tools in-house to be able to perform the analysis, which would allow them to switch vendors, thus applying competitive pressure to drive the cost of fuel down.

Sama Bilbao y León
You got it. And you know what? I would say Dominion is one, I mean, it continues to be, one of the few - I think there may be another one - utilities in the US that actually have in-house capabilities for doing all the nuclear safety analyses, or most of it, maybe not the local analysis, but everything else, yes. Having this additional capability, as you said, would be incredibly positive, because they would allow us to negotiate with more strength with the with the fuel providers, because typically, as you said, this service was bundled with the purchase of the fuel.

Bret Kugelmass
I know you've been to so many other places as well, what was next for you? Did you stay in Virginia to work at VCU? Or was there another part of it?

Sama Bilbao y León
Actually I left. The VCU program was one of those things that, when I was at Dominion, we had a huge, huge problem keeping talented new engineers, so we were very good at recruiting new engineers. I mean, people have heard of Dominion and people came from many of the very best schools, but you know how it is, I mean, after a few years, you get married, you have children, and people needed to go back home or move to family and support. We were having a very hard time. So one time, one day, maybe having a beer with my boss and other colleagues, we were like, you know, we just really need to start a nuclear engineering program in Richmond, we just need to go to VCU, and convince them that they need to start a nuclear engineering program. And this is where my boss from Dominion at the time, told me you know what, Sama, tomorrow, you go and convince them. It's like, Okay!

Bret Kugelmass
That's incredibly brash for the nuclear industry.

Sama Bilbao y León
Well, you know, so I have to say, I've always been super lucky with my supervisors, my managers, my mentors, because they've been quite open minded to crazy ideas. So, this crazy idea, not only did he embrace it, and he let us do it, but he fully supported it. So, we started that, I mean, obviously VCU started the program, but it was with the support and with the advice of Dominion. That's what we did. When we were just starting this, I actually taught the first class together with Jim Kelly, who was a professor from the University of Virginia who was fabulous. Then, I got the opportunity to go to the International Atomic Energy Agency. I was able to get a leave of absence for a few years to go to Vienna and work for the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Bret Kugelmass
What did you do there, at the IAEA?

Sama Bilbao y León
At the IAEA, I was the unit head for what was called the Technology Development for Water Cooled Reactors. I led a very small team of incredible analysts. We were working on everything related to water cooled reactors. That was obviously light water cooled reactors, but also heavy water cooled reactors. Also, fuel, basically the entire fuel cycle, anything that was related to water cooled reactors, but it was specifically technology developments, we were looking at advanced technologies. At that time, we were already looking at supercritical water cooled reactors, we had a lot of work in that area. We were starting to look at small modular reactors, the light water cooled reactors that were small modular reactors. It was fascinating and it opened my eyes to this whole concept of working with governments and having the expertise of all these different organizations and all these different governments. Iit was a very, very fantastic experience.

Bret Kugelmass
What was the IAEA's goal, other than just research and maybe kind of dissemination of their learnings? When they form a unit to look into a set of technologies, what do they want to see accomplished in the real world?

Sama Bilbao y León
I think that, obviously, right now, I think that Rafael has much more proactive and visionary look about the role of the International Atomic Energy Agency in disseminating and advocating for nuclear energy. At the time, I'm not sure that we were as proactive, but the idea was to have the best information about all these advanced technology technologies for all those countries that wanted to use them.

Bret Kugelmass
So you could help newcomer countries specifically?

Sama Bilbao y León
Well, in this case, it was more specifically newcomers. Newcomer countries wasn't specifically in our section, but we did work with newcomers quite a bit, basically, to provide them all the information, but because I was in technology development, so it was a little bit looking further than what is available right now. In our case, probably what we were producing was most useful to countries that were already using nuclear. Basically, you know, what are the next more efficient ways to build nuclear power plants? At the time, we started to look at this modular construction and standardization, and all these new technologies to streamline the construction of nuclear, or we were looking at what is the decision-making that our country needs to have in order to choose these of that technology? I mean, how to choose between technology "X" or technology "Y"? What are the criteria that our country needs to use and things like that, so, it was a little bit more advanced.

Bret Kugelmass
Who are the recipients of this information? Is it typically the governments themselves? Or is it utilities within the countries? Who is most engaged?

Sama Bilbao y León
With us, we were most engaged with governments and often with research organizations, or maybe R&D related organizations in the governments. Depending on the country, sometimes those are very closely linked. In some countries, you have utilities, or suppliers, or research organizations that are very closely linked. For example, if you look at Argentina, you see that the entire nuclear industry in the nuclear sector is very tightly linked. But in some other countries, it really was directly just the research organizations and then they would disseminate this information maybe more themselves.

Bret Kugelmass
What was it like moving, first from home to the US and from US to Vienna, and then I know you had a couple more tours... How does that fit into your life?

Sama Bilbao y León
I am an adventurer, I love to learn new things all the time. I'm very curious of everything, so, moving to Wisconsin was a fabulous adventure, and I loved it. Moving to Virginia was great. I love Virginia. And then Vienna, I have to tell you, Vienna was one of the places that I enjoyed the most. Living in Vienna is great, because in reality is teeny, teeny, tiny. I don't know if you know, Vienna is a very small place, but that it has everything. And it is so well located that you can really explore everywhere in Europe from Vienna, so I love Vienna. I love Paris, the couple of years that we were in Paris before I came to London, and London, you know, I've been here for six months. And I think I'm gonna love it, of course.

Bret Kugelmass
You don't know what it's like yet because everyone's been locked up.

Sama Bilbao y León
Exactly, I didn't love that. So, I know my neighborhood, not very well, basically the walk that we do with the dogs. That's all I really know. But I look forward to getting to know London. The thing, though, is I'm super lucky that my husband is also a very flexible and very adventurous person. Whenever I say, You know what, there is this opportunity, what do you think? Oh yeah, let's do it. So that's the second thing.

Bret Kugelmass
And you have kids too? What's it like?

Sama Bilbao y León
No, I have two hairy kids, I have two dogs. The good news is my dogs, I don't have to worry about putting them in school or things like that. I just have to find them a good park, that's all I have.

Bret Kugelmass
Let's touch upon your time in Paris and then I want to move on to what your goals are right now in your current organization. But I don't want to leave out the NEA either.

Sama Bilbao y León
I moved to Paris a couple of years ago, two and a half years ago. I was the Division Head for Nuclear Technology Development and Economics. And I will tell you that the description of that job was just like, Oh my gosh, have I died and gone to heaven? This is exactly what I want to do. Because, obviously, everybody knows the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency. It has an incredible reputation when it comes to everything related to the nuclear sector and the nuclear fuel cycle and nuclear energy. And I thought that, given the time to be in that particular point, at the nexus of technology, innovation, economics, policy, is perfect, because I think that, well, frankly, because I think that's where we need to be working right now. There are a lot of things in nuclear that we already know how to do. And the things that we really need to move the needle a little bit more is exactly there is innovation, economics, technology, how that fits together, and how that translates into suitable policies to advanced nuclear. I was there for a couple of years, two and a half years. It was great. I had the opportunity to work in a number of incredibly impactful, in my opinion, projects with that incredible team. The team that the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency has is incredible. I was very lucky to work on, things like, for example, system costs, which, as you know, they are pioneers. The NEA is pioneer in the work of system cost. So to be there at the time that they released one of these reports, and be able to actually help disseminate all this information and to help educate policymakers, decision-makers, and the people that are putting together these plans for the energy mix of the future, to understand how system costs work, and the role of dispatchable technology in that. It was quite fascinating.

Bret Kugelmass
Amazing. To me, it's that type of work, the economics work - it might not be the most interesting to every engineer - but I feel like that is what should be driving the design decisions, the engineering decisions. At first, at the nuclear design level, but then at the system design level, I mean, at the end of the day, what are we really trying to optimize for? It's for economical power to the people. That is our number one goal is to get people cheap, clean power. How do you do that unless you have a fundamental understanding of what the actual costs are? Not just what you think they are, but what they are from, like real data. You've sourced around the world, understanding an actual application over many years. That is the economic input that we need to drive our engineering decisions?

Sama Bilbao y León
Yeah, I agree. The nuclear technology is very good. I mean, we can always make it better, we can always take in all these innovations to improve the technology and, more importantly, to streamline things to make things more cost effective. I think that, right now, our first priority in the nuclear war is definitely economics. This work that the OECD NEA and others are doing, I think that the International Energy Agency is doing a great job, the International Atomic Energy Agency is doing a very good job also, of putting together this techno-economic study so we understand how everything fits together is important. Because one thing that I'm a little bit sick and tired of hearing, everybody tells me about the levelized cost of electricity for this energy source or the other energy source. Nowadays, levelized cost of electricity is no longer sufficient information to be able to compare.

Bret Kugelmass
It drives me crazy, because it's a misnomer. It says levelized. But it's not really levelized. It's levelized in accordance to like a discount model. It's not levelized in terms of total system benefits across electric.

Sama Bilbao y León
Exactly. That's exactly why I thought that the work that we did in system cost was so important. People need to understand that, yes, the cost of each one of the components of the system is important. And obviously, the lowest the cost of each component is better, right? In that sense, we all have to strive to lower levelized costs, but then you need to look at how all the pieces of the puzzle work together and look at the cost of the system as a whole and reliability of the system as a whole, and the resiliency of the system as a whole, and all those things cost money. Even though some people may not actually see it when you see the whole sale of price of electricity, or when you look at, say, carbon pricing and things like that, but those things actually have a cost. We need to start considering how the system as a whole functions most cost effectively. And, of course, that this is where nuclear, in particular, but in general, I would say, you know, baseload electricity is indispensable. And of course, if you want to decarbonize, nuclear is what you need to take into account.

Bret Kugelmass
Absolutely. Did you find that, as you kind of brought this information around the world, that people got it? And I shouldn't say people, I should ask who. Who really understood these arguments around total systems cost, and who didn't understand them? And I don't mean, to point out specific people, I just mean, generally, types of governments get it that certain types of utilities get it? Did bankers not get it? Like, what was the response?

Sama Bilbao y León
Well, I think it's a learning process. In the first instance, when you are talking about system costs, people think that you're talking about transmission and distribution. And you're like, Yes, okay, that is part of the cause. But that is just a teeny, tiny part of the cost. You really need to consider all these other costs, the balancing costs, the fact that you have all these spinning reserves, the fact that you have to have inertia and to have that you have to have all these ancillary services. It takes time, it's not immediately obvious to everybody. But you are seeing this more and more, and you are seeing, for example, that even now, the International Energy Agency is moving beyond only providing levelized cost of electricity, they are also providing the VALCOE, which is another way to measure system cost. There are a couple different models for that. I love the way we do it at the OECD NEA, which is different the way the IEA does it, but again, as long as there is a model and a way to account for the overall system stability, system reliability and system cost, that's what's important.

Bret Kugelmass
Tell me about your new role. How did they find you first? And what was the call like when they wanted you to come take leadership at the WNA?

Sama Bilbao y León
The disposition was not advertised, of course. Somebody actually reached out to me, and they told me, You know, they are looking for a new Director General, and yet I was looking to retire. Would you like to consider applying for that job? And then I thought about this like, Okay, well, I think it's a long shot. But sure, definitely. I mean, I'm up for the challenge. There were a couple of interviews and several conversations with the board of the association and they offered me the job. I couldn't believe it.

Sama Bilbao y León
I'm so excited, because once again, it's a different point of view that when I was at the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, but once again, I feel that World Nuclear Association is also at a very, very good spot to help broker all these conversations that we need to have, to help, on the one hand, have some sort of thought leadership when we talk in general about energy and we look at the decarbonisation challenges, the energy supply challenge, the sustainable development challenge. All those are many challenges that take us in different directions, and to be able to put nuclear at the center of that debate is very, very important. I'm thrilled that we have the resources and the talent and the expertise here to really bring over there the facts and information. Then, on the other hand, another role that we have that is very important is our working groups. Basically, the fact that we work with the industry and we make sure that the industry talks to each other. Try to make sure that we put our joint point of view that we achieved consensus when there are questions or different points of view. And also, try to help the industry get aligned, so that we can truly deliver on all these promises that we are making, whether it is small modular reactors, or affordable nuclear, even more affordable nuclear energy, or building nuclear power plants faster. All these promises that we are making, we are trying to work together with industry to make sure that we are actually, as an industry, able to deliver those promises.

Bret Kugelmass
Everyone else could believe it.

Bret Kugelmass
How does that happen? Can you tell me more, like structurally about the organization? Who are members? Do they pay fees? How does it get funded? And what's your position like, overall?

Sama Bilbao y León
We have, currently, a little more than 180 members. They are from more than- I think it's 43 countries. And this is all continents. It's a truly global enterprise. We represent the entire nuclear fuel cycle, which I think is very, very important. We have uranium mining companies, commercial enrichment, fuel fabrication, of course, we have a number of utilities. About 70% of the nuclear utilities are represented in the World Nuclear Association. Then we look at the back end of the fuel cycle, whether it is the management of used fuel, the management of nuclear waste, and, of course, the commissioning. Basically, the entire nuclear fuel cycle. Then, we also have the majority of the fuel vendors, and if you're not the suppliers, whether you're looking at reactor designers and suppliers, and many of the suppliers in the supply chain. And then we have something that I was not very aware until I came here, this universe of companies and services that support the nuclear industry that perhaps are not very well known to everybody. We are looking at, like, the nuclear insurance, nuclear transportation, nuclear lawyers. There's a lot of engineering and consultants that support all these pieces and parts. It is quite comprehensive. All these companies, they pay fees, basically, that is the number one revenue source that we have to do our work. That's basically how we do it.

Bret Kugelmass
What is the most common request from the members? What do they want to see your organization accomplish?

Sama Bilbao y León
It depends on the time, right? Number one, we have what we call the working groups, where the industry works together. There are specific items and issues, or topics that are specific interests to the industry at a given time. So, let's say, for example, long term operation of lifetime management of nuclear power plants, clearly that is a really big issue right now, when many companies are looking at extending the life of the current fleet. This is when all the members get together and they explore questions, lessons learned, best practices, who's doing that, who's doing what, how you are facing this issue. That is one way in which we address the members' needs. Then another area is more related to bigger picture items that are more communications strategy, thought leadership. For example, we've been working a lot on this area of sustainable financing. Obviously, we've been working with our colleagues at FORATOM in the context of the European Union, this sustainable financing taxonomy. I know you have talked with several of your interviewees. So, we've been following that. This is a very important issue, that, even though it is European focused, it is going to have an enormous impact at all levels globally.

Bret Kugelmass
Tell me more about it. Give our audience a little bit of a brief lesson as to what is taxonomy and what might change, when is it going to change, and how's it is it going to affect?

Sama Bilbao y León
The European Union taxonomy regulation is essentially, the European Union wants to maximize the financing that goes towards sustainable activities, whatever that is. So, then, what they are doing is putting together a classification of all economic activities, and trying to determine which classification can make which economic activity can be considered sustainable and which cannot. Of course, assuming that the ones that are sustainable, they will be suitable or eligible for this financing and the ones that aren't, no. They're in the process of creating this classification and they are putting together all kinds of technical criteria in order to say, Okay, this or that technology, or economic activity, could be sustainable if this and that and the other thing can be can be met. The problem is that, at the very beginning, they decided that nuclear energy, they weren't sure whether it was sustainable. There was a couple of expert groups that looked at nuclear energy within the context of the criteria that they were setting up. In one group - that, when I was at NEA, we were working on - so in this working group, they decided that it is undeniable that nuclear energy can contribute to decarbonisation to mitigation and adaptation in the context of climate change. It is undeniable, so, in that sense, great. Now, there was another working group that was looking at the - what they call - do no significant harm, essentially, yes, there are positive impacts for nuclear, but are there negative impacts that are intolerable that would preclude us to consider it? Unfortunately, this working group was not very serious - I can tell you this because I was there, so this is first hand information - basically, the people that were in this group, they essentially had a foregone conclusion that nuclear energy was not sustainable because of the radioactive waste.

Sama Bilbao y León
And this is a group that is formed to combat the climate change challenge, right? It's all about climate change?

Sama Bilbao y León
It's about sustainable development. I mean, clearly, decarbonisation is part of that, but of course, is beyond that. Right. So, we want to continue developing within decarbonisation.

Bret Kugelmass
Okay. But these are people who have, in theory, dedicated this part of their career, their lives towards helping others towards achieving these sustainability goals. And they won't even question their foregone assumptions? They won't even look at data? They won't even consider the fact that this miraculous technology that has provided so much and had so little impact, over so many years, it's not like this is some theoretical technology, and they won't even give it a reasonable look?

Sama Bilbao y León
You're right. This was quite political. And as I said, this particular working group was not particularly science-based in this conclusion. The good news about this is they didn't succeed on get nuclear excluded. They were only able to put nuclear on the line. Basically, we were still on the fence. What the European Commission said is, Well, you know, we are going to need another expert group that looks at nuclear very, very carefully, and we will base our decision based on that. Now, more good news. The European Commission asked the Joint Research Center to do that analysis, which they did, and in fact, they just published their report, I think it was in March. So, basically a month and a half ago. In this report, they absolutely inquestionably said that, After a very thorough analysis - and you have to read this report is incredible - they have found that nuclear energy has no adverse consequences to the environment of humans, any more or less, I mean, certainly no more than any other of the technologies that are being considered. That is excellent news. Now what is happening is that the European Commission is looking into what is the process by which nuclear energy, may be incorporated into the taxonomy regulation.

Bret Kugelmass
And what happens if it is? What, literally, does that do? Does it open it up to World Bank funding? What does it do?

Sama Bilbao y León
This is obviously a European taxonomy. It focuses on European funding. What it means is, number one - very important - nuclear gets labeled sustainable, which is very important, because I think that every other financial instrument that people even outside of the European Union put together will look at what the European Union is doing. What is happening is this. Nuclear energy projects would be eligible for maybe more affordable financing, which is this sustainable financing, green financing, whatever you want to call it. That is nuclear projects per se. You could have nuclear companies or companies that have nuclear assets included into financial instruments that can be labeled as sustainable. When you look at your 401K, for the American audience or your retirement for everybody else, and you're trying to invest on this or that mutual fund, some people really want to look at sustainable mutual funds. If nuclear is considered sustainable, it would be possible to label it as such and included into these mutual funds. If not, it would have to be excluded, which is a huge penalty, right? Or things like, actually, the European Commission goes even further. Because it's not only its economic activities and the entire lifecycle of the economic activity. Let's say that the economic activity is the manufacturing of aluminum, for example. Let's say that you are an aluminum smelter in Finland and you want to expand your facilities, well, because a very large percentage of your electricity comes from renewable, sustainable nuclear energy, you might be eligible for sustainable financing for your extension.

Bret Kugelmass
Oh, my god, so, what it really addresses is the market pull for nuclear. When all of these other industries, whether it's aluminum, or data centers, or chemicals, or water processing, or anything, have to invest in energy infrastructure, and they might be mandated by law to only access sustainable energy resources, otherwise, they'd be taxed out the wazoo.

Sama Bilbao y León
Exactly.

Bret Kugelmass
It forces them to either consider nuclear or not consider nuclear in their portfolio of options. I've always thought that one of the best new markets that nuclear should be going after is directly to industry itself, especially these small modular reactors, which might be perfectly suited for it, very complimentary to the processes, not just only in electricity production, but in heat production, being available all the time, being clean, and literally everything. Exactly, exactly.

Sama Bilbao y León
Exactly. This is why the sustainable financing taxonomy in Europe is incredibly important. Yes, it only applies to Europe, but the reality is that, nowadays, the markets are absolutely global. Most companies, even if they are Canadian companies, or Chinese companies or Japanese companies, they are going to want to invest in Europe, or European companies are going to want to invest in Bangladesh, so, certainly, we saw this as a huge, huge impact, potential negative impact.

Bret Kugelmass
When is the final ruling made?

Sama Bilbao y León
This is still ongoing. As I just told you, the report from the JRC came out a couple months ago, a month and a half ago, and currently, the European Commission has proposed that they are going to put together what they call a Complementary Delegated Act - this is just the nomenclature that they use in in in Europe - and this needs to be approved by the European Council and the European Parliament. Then, essentially, if all goes well, by the end of 2021, early 2022, all this legislation will be put in place.

Bret Kugelmass
Before the end of 2022, do we get any insight ahead of that, where it's like, the people talk to the people on the commission, and ask them who you're gonna vote for, and that kind of stuff?

Sama Bilbao y León
No, this is all going on right now. Obviously, the World Nuclear Association, we don't talk directly to member countries, we talk to our member companies, but we certainly are encouraging our member companies to talk to the appropriate people in their countries to make sure that the importance of this legislation is well understood. Because, as I say, it's not really just the nuclear industry. I mean, it could be incredibly important to the overall economy of a country, even think a country like France. If nuclear were to be deemed non-sustainable, a lot of industries in France would be penalised, because basically, a huge chunk of their energy would be non-sustainable.

Bret Kugelmass
So, how come France doesn't swing some muscle around?

Sama Bilbao y León
Don't worry, I mean, if you can encourage policymakers in France to continue pushing this legislation, please do that. But certainly I think that France is very aware of the importance of this legislation. And they are moving forward on that.

Bret Kugelmass
Amazing. We're coming up on our time, but I would love to just kind of give you some final thoughts. Where do you see the industry going and why it's important to you? Any note that you want to leave on, it's up to you.

Sama Bilbao y León
Maybe one thing that we can touch very briefly just now, but I think it's very important, is this concept that nuclear energy produces electricity and heat with zero carbon. For some reason, everybody remembers the electricity, which is great. And please don't let them forget it. But I think that the visibility of zero carbon nuclear heat is not quite there. That's something that we've been working on. I mean, not just as the World Nuclear Association, clearly there are many others. But I think it's very important in particular, for policymakers, as we are looking to be serious about these net zero goals and decarbonizing the entire economy, we really need to look at the very important role that zero carbon nuclear heat can make for this. We can help decarbonize many sectors in the industry, we can help decarbonize clearly the heating and cooling for conditioning of buildings, we can help decarbonize transportation, perhaps through hydrogen, I mean, electric cars also fuel cells with hydrogen. And then of course, we know that hydrogen per se, has so many opportunities by itself to be a very good decarbonisation vector. I really think it's very important for the industry to highlight that, that nuclear is electricity and beyond, and there are many things that we can do. That's one thing. And before we finalize, the one thing that I really would like to highlight is, I think that climate change is to the nuclear industry, something similar to COVID has been to the pharmaceutical industry. It is our opportunity to shine. Yes, there are challenges, but with those challenges, there are huge opportunities. And I really, really think that we need to instill this sense of urgency. And this can-do attitude that maybe, as an industry, we need to start consider, Okay, what can we do differently? Or is this something that we can streamline, so we can really, really address the urgency and the enormity of this climate change challenge that we have? And do that while leaving nobody behind. It's very important to recognize that a lot of the proposals that we see for decarbonisation talk about this pie is of a fixed size, this zero sum mentality. I really think that nuclear energy gives policymakers the opportunity to think about, No, this is huge, everybody can have more because the pie can be much bigger, because we can actually allow everybody to reach the same standard of living and do that with without having enormous damage to the to the planet and the overall system.

Bret Kugelmass
Sama Bilbao y León, thank you so much for your time today, for everything that you shared with me over the years, for teaching everyone that you have, for contributing to the industry and everybody you have. You're a real gem and we all can't wait to talk to you again.

Sama Bilbao y León
My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, Bret. You know where we are. Anything you need, please don't hesitate, come and tell us.