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Speaker 1: How'd you like to listen to dot NetRocks with no ads? Easy?

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Speaker 2: Become a patron for just five dollars a month. You

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you that and a special dot NetRocks patron mug. Sign

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up now at Patreon dot dot NetRocks dot com. Welcome back,

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welcome back, Happy holidays to you, Happy New Year, and

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it's time for another amazing geek out first of the year,

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with yours truly and Richard Campbell. Mister Campbell, Hello, been

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working on this script for days and I am happy

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to be done.

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Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, let's create a record of it, shall we? Yeah,

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why don't we.

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Speaker 2: The Energy geek Out of twenty twenty four. But before

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we get started, I'm not going to do a better

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NO framework. But I am going to roll the music,

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So do that.

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Speaker 1: All right too.

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Speaker 2: Let's not a better NO framework, all right, And we're

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going to talk about the historical events for the year

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nineteen thirty one. Because one this is episode nineteen hundred

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and thirty one. So on January sixth Thomas Edison submitted

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his last patent application.

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Speaker 1: I wonder how old he was.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know. What do you think of Thomas Edison?

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Was he really like a kind of a thief and

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a jerk? You know, he also created a lot of stuff. Yeah,

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so you get into a situation there, right, like, yes,

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all of those things are true. Yeah, the whole battle

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between him and Tesla. Yeah, yeah, where he'd solved so

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much in DC power, he'd figured out metering and billing

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systems and all this stuff, except for that part where

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you couldn' actually distributed very well, that was a minor detaility.

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So I mean he literally orchestrated killing an elephant with

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AC power to meet people a frame. Remember, Like, that's

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not a nice guy, No, that's not no. And I

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also hear he stole a lot of patents and was

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kind of a jerk.

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Speaker 1: So but well, and that's sort of a running in

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the act, Like who knows if he did or not?

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Oh maybe to eighty four. So he died in nineteen

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thirty one, all right.

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Speaker 2: Continuing on February thirteenth, nineteen thirty one, New Delhi becomes

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the capital of India. February twentieth, the Congress of the

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United States approved the construction of the San Francisco Oakland

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Bay Bridge by the state of California. On March third,

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the United States adopts the Star Spangled Banner as its

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national anthem. And you thought it was all about the

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Revolutionary War, there you go. March nineteenth, gambling is legalized

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in Nevada, because why not?

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Speaker 1: What else am I to do?

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Speaker 2: Sit around and glow with the aliens. March twenty fifth,

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the Scottsboro Boys are arrested in Alabama in charge with rape.

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In March twenty sixth. On March twenty six Ho Chi

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Minh Communist Youth Union is founded in Vietnam. March thirty first,

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an earthquake destroyed Managua, Nicaragua, killing two thousand people. Also

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on that same day, twa flight five ninety nine crashes

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near Bazaar, Kansas, killing eight, including University of Notre Dame

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head football coach Knute Rockney. There's a name for you. Canute.

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Wasn't Canute like one of the leaders of Sweden one

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of the Kings?

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Speaker 1: Probably Norway? Yeah.

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Speaker 2: April fourteenth, first edition of the Highway Code is published

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in Great Britain. May first, the Empire State Building is

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dedicated in New York City. May twenty ninth, Michelle's Scuru,

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a citizen of the United States, is executed by an

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Italian military firing squad for intent to kill Benito Mussolini.

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June twenty third, Wiley Post and Harold Gaddy take off

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from Roosevelt Field, Long Island in an attempt to circumnavigate

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the world in a single engine plane. And the reason

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why you haven't heard their names more pronounced than history

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is because they make it that happens. You know the

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keyword there is attempt attempt. July sixteenth, the Emperor of

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Ethiopia called Emperor Hile Silassie signs the nineteen thirty one

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Constitution of Ethiopia called First Constitution of Ethiopia. July thirty first,

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New York City experimental television station w two XAB now

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known as WCBSTV, begins broadcasts. August twenty fourth, France and

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the Soviet Union side a Neutrality no Attack treaty. August

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twenty eighth, France and the Soviet Union sign a treaty

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of non aggression. September eighteenth, the mukten incident gives Japan

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the pretext to invade and occupy Manchuria. October first, The

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George Washington Bridge, linking New Jersey in New York opens

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October seventeenth. Al Capone's convictive income tax evasion. October twenty fourth,

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George Washington Bridge opens to public traffic. November seventh, Chinese

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Soviet Republic is proclaimed on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

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December ninth, the Constituent Cortes approves a Spanish Constitution of

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nineteen thirty one, which establishes the Second Spanish Republic. And finally,

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and I mean that, December eleventh, the Statue of Westminster

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Parliament of the United Kingdom British Parliament establishes legislative a

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quality between the UK and the dominions of the Commonwealth

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of the Nation's Commonwealth, Australia, Canada, Dominion of newfound Newfoundland.

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I think that's what that means.

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Speaker 1: That's it. That's all I got. You have anything to add? Yeah? Sure,

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how about in nineteen thirty one, the very first commercial

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electric guitar went on sale or Rick and Baker A

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twenty two. Wow. You know we're in between Paul barth

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At African Baker and JOJ Bokche You know, there you go.

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That's another.

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Speaker 2: Another example of things that we thought we being United

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States citizens, we thought we invented. You know, Les Paul

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invented the electric guitar blah blah blah. He just kind

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of perfected it.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is the A twenty two was a

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lap steel guitar, right like the Yeah, a different, different

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style before you get into that, you know, semi hollow

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body designs, those kinds of things like this is their

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early days nineteen thirty one. Yeah, very cool. As the

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first ballpoint pen, no kidding. Yeah, it wasn't Bick, was it. Nope? No,

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it was in the Auto Buddhapest See there you go. Yeah,

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all this time we thought Bick invented a ballpoint pen.

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I think they may have scaled it substantially into everybody

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can have a ballpoint pen. They were not rare.

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Speaker 2: And by the way, Bick is right down the street

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from me. There you go, about an hour away. Okay,

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all right, shall we get started.

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Speaker 1: Yeah. I got a comment from last year's Energy geek out, Okay,

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just around this time of year earlier. This comment comes

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from Pascal, who says, great show. I really enjoy the

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geek outs. I work for a virtual power plant company.

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In Canada, and i'd really like can know what Richard

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thinks about them. Do you think they're helpful to reduce

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the usage of peeker plants and do you think they're

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useful in general in the future. Thanks for all the

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years of great content. I have a question, yes, sir,

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what is a virtual power plant? It's where you get

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virtual power, man, I guess so it's kind of like

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so here's the issue. The power industry is used to

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having a handful of very large power plants that they

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keep in synchronization and gear up and down to supply

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power is needed, and of course they're struggling in the

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modern day with more and more power demands and more

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and more variability, and so the business of virtual power

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plants grew up around being able to provide power to

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the utility based on resources that are small. So this

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is mostly a software problem, right. This is the ability

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to do things like run backup generator plants or little

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run of the river hydro electric like all these little

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power generations, small scale wind, that kind of thing that

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isn't necessarily directly controlled by the big utilities and may

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distribute power in a bunch of different ways, and has

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this ability to provide this sort of flexible load.

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Speaker 2: So it's kind kind of like a proxy or a collection.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, you're right, it's an entity. You know, this is software,

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mostly software to be able to in okay, turn those

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things on, connect them to the grid, let the utility

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know here they are. It's even more interesting when you

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talk about things like maybe vehicle to grid. You got

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an electric car, we make you a deal where you

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leave it plugged in, we charge your lower rate, but

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once in a while we're going to take power from

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the car because the grid's in trouble. I've even seen

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versions of this with just being able to turn down

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thermostats for heat or turn them up for cooling, because

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if you're able to do that on mass you can

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actually make a dent in power consumption. So, like I said,

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it's mostly a software problem. It's these distributed energy resources

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and being able to coordinate them. Now some energy companies

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are getting more savvy to this and being able to

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do it. So, you know, to Pascal's question like what

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do you think they're going to look like in the future,

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it says, I think this is an interim stage where

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the power companies are sort of catching up with essentially

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Internet technology distributed peer to peer mindsets and what their

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consumers are actually using them, what they're able to produce.

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So in theory this should all consolidate someday. But you know,

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the VPP appeared because it served serves a problem that

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exists today. Okay, So, Pascal, thank you so much your commentating.

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A copy of music code by It is on its

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way to you, and iview'd like a copy of music

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code by. I write a comment on the website at

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don at Rocks dot com or on the Facebook. We

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publish every show there, and if you comment there and

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every reading on the show, we'll send you a copy

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of music Code.

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Speaker 2: And you can also get yourself a copy of music

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to code By by getting us on the social media

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as we've been on ex Twitter forever at Carl Franklin

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at Rich Campbell, and we're on blue Sky at those

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same handles, and also Masidon. I'm at Carl Franklin at

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tech dot Social.

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Speaker 1: And am Rich Campbell at masson social. There you go.

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So where did we start this long journey? Oh my goodness, friend,

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let me tell you. I A few things have happened

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this past year that were interesting for me. You know,

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I've been doing versions of this geek out at conferences

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in an hour, and I tend to tune it to

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the local country that I'm in, sure, right, So I've

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talked about Portugal, and I've talked about the UK and

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talked about Norway and New South Wales and so on,

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which is really fun, you know. I get to read

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government documents about power generation all the different places, like

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I have a weird version of fun. But I also

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ended up writing this year or in by the first

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time I did it was in August, was strictly an

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hour on nuclear power alone, just because it was it

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was only getting a few minutes in the general energy conversation, right,

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and folks wanted to know more. And my timing was

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right because suddenly all the tech giants jumped on to

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being interested in nuclear power too. Oh sure for cloud

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based AI stuff. Yeah, they want to build more data

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centers in the grid can support and so they're looking

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for more power availability, and so my knowledge jumped and

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digging into that. But I work, you know, a lot

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of the work that I do on these end of

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year geek outs ends up showing throughout the year and

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other content, and so this is My deepest dive is

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really reading up on all the latest and going over

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the IA's documentation and a number of other sources and

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onclude the links to where my readings for all of this.

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And there's a few things that are really important, and

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one of the most that impacts energy across the board

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is that the cost of money went up in the

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past year or so. The side effect of inflation was

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raising of interest rates to counter that, and so suddenly

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lending policies have shifted.

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Speaker 2: You're not talking about just the United States because that

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was my experience here, but it's worldwide.

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Speaker 1: Did interest rates go up worldwide everywhere? Yes? Absolutely? And

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would you say.

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Speaker 2: America was the cause of that or were they just

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a victim of globalization.

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Speaker 1: It is normal economic policy, at least in the West,

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to counter inflating prices with an increase in interest rate

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and slow that down, which appears to have worked. Inflation

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rates have dropped. Admittedly prices haven't dropped and won't like

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that's not generally a thing. In fact, it's dangerous to

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try and reduce prices. That creates a thing called stagflation,

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which this is not the economic s geek outside you know, yeah, yeah, Yeah.

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Speaker 2: Stagflation is what happens when people have money but don't spend.

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Speaker 1: It right, Because if you think prices are going to

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go down, why wouldn't you wait right? Right? And that's

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just it's too dangerous to do that, right, So it

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makes more sense to have incomes rise to meet the

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current cost of them. Okay, again, this isn't it not

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an economic This is an energy show. Yes, but it

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had a big impact on energy because energy projects use

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a lot of money. They do a lot of borrowing

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based on future returns. You spend a lot to build

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out infrastructure to generate electricity, and then you make it

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back over time. And these are expensive projects that can

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easily go into cost overruns, and so the cost of

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borrowing is a sensitive thing, which is interesting. The interesting

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part of this is also that you have the bank behavior.

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There's one of those things where it's like, if you

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owe the bank one thousand dollars, you have a problem,

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but if you own the bank a million dollars, the

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bank has a problem. Yeah. So, where when cost of

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lending was low and you could had rapid turnover, building

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small power projects made a lot of sense. It was

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cheap to borrow of the money, the returns were quick,

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you could pay it down off you go right, and

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big projects struggled more. But now with the cost of

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lending being higher, big projects in some ways are protected

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because once you've borrowed a billion dollars for a project,

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you're kind of not willing to walk away from it.

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The bank's days in there's more money lens. In some ways,

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big projects are because they have these huge budgets are

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harder to cancel.

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Speaker 2: You know, we we can't talk about the economics of

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energy without talking about what's expected to happen with the

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next American presidency in America anyway, we anticipate that the

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cost of goods, you know, at your local best buy,

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you know, Chinese made goods for example, is going to

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go up. And so what do we do today? Just today,

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Kelly and I placed in order for a brand new

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stacked washer and dryer because we needed a new one

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and we aren't going to wait. So the kind of

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the time is now.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, it's an interesting question of is that things are

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things going to get cost more, costs less? It's hard

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to know, and so yeah.

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Speaker 2: It's true, and it really is only going to be

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a problem if the tariffs go into effect because he's

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kind of using them as a threat right now.

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Speaker 1: It seems like bullying to me, certainly from the Canadian

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side of things. But the issue here is project A

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lot of projects have shuffled, and it's not that unusual

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for power projects to have problems because they're expensive and

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they're large and so. And the one of the things

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I think that now that money has started to cost more,

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we're seeing that the small that new generation technologies like

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solar and wind, which are very granular you don't have

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to build the whole thing all at once. You can

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build just a portion of it, start generating money, and

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then add more to it over time, really benefited from

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low cost money, and the bigger projects didn't near as much.

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You know, you kind of have to build a whole

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nuclear power plant before it makes any power at all,

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and it's very difficult to build those. And the other

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part of this, it's become really interesting. And why these

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bigger plants are becoming more interesting when money costs more

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is that bigger plants tend to be more efficient. Sure,

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so this idea in power generation called capacity factor, which

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essentially is like you're at one hundred percent capacity factor

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if you're running full power all over the time, right,

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and traditional power plants still need maintenance, So they talk

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about like what's the relative you know, utilization of it.

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A coal power plant back in the day when fifty

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to sixty percent of capacity factor that was considered good.

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The funny thing is has to become less popular and antiquated,

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their efficiency goes down and so their utilization is getting lower.

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That top of the line combined cycle natural gas plant

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sort of you're sort of go to plant if you

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want to make electricity quickly today is just under sixty

305
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percent efficient. Even a hydro electric dam. You're sort of

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the largest class of non carbon producing electricity thirty to

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fifty percent efficient. And this the want to I'm going

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to go back to this capacity factor issue as we

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talk about different methods, like I'm not going to talk

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a lot about hydro and coal and things. I'm going

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to talk about more of the newer stuff because these

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capacity factors come into play. So, I mean, let's start

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with solar, because solar had an unbelievably good year in

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twenty twenty four. It is staggering how much dolar soolar

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are installed, Almost six hundred gigawatts of new solar this

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this past year. I was I was one of them.

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Yeah you're not alone, right, which was like a twenty

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percent increase. Again, it was four hundred and sixty and

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twenty three. It was two hundred and fifty and twenty two.

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More than half of what installed in twenty four was

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just in China. China was like an inexcessive half. And

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then the next four that represent about a third. Again

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where the US, India, Germany and Brazil and the IA

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talks about there's more than seven million people working in

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00:18:25,319 --> 00:18:31,000
photovoltaics now, so that's between the manufacturing, distribution, all the

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production elements, and then the installations. This is both commercial

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as well as residential. It's a huge, huge business and

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it attracts a lot of talent. Australia has the highest

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amount of photovoltaic per capita. A. It's a low populated country. B,

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it has huge power demands and limited options, and it

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has a lot of sunlight, so they have one of

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the highest levels of residential solar anyway, you know, the

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number two is would be unexpended by kapita the Netherlands.

334
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Oh and again these like dense country windmills, right, and

335
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not a lot of area to cover and so forth.

336
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It was easy to put some solaring very quickly, and

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they did. But the capacity factors on solar are not

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that great. You know. You know that a given panel

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can generate a certain number of watts, but it doesn't

340
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all of the time. You know, depending on where you live,

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you're going to only get a ten to twenty five

342
00:19:22,200 --> 00:19:25,160
percent capacity factors. Yes, why we tend to overbuild solar

343
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just when we have it, we have lots of it.

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It's what makes variability. I think I told you Richard

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last year.

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Speaker 2: We had just put our solar panels on when we

347
00:19:34,000 --> 00:19:37,200
did the energy geek out, and we went with a

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company that had a very interesting deal. So the government

349
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will give you subsidies if you want to buy solar

350
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panels and install them. You get some tax breaks and

351
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all that kind of stuff. We went with a company

352
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that says, no, we're going to take those benefits and

353
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we're going to lease the panels to you at a

354
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flat rate, which is going to come in under your

355
00:20:03,599 --> 00:20:09,519
average electricity bill, way under it, right, and you basically

356
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you're the whole goal is that your bills will go

357
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down to practically nothing. But you will have this fixed

358
00:20:16,799 --> 00:20:22,039
you know, monthly fee for twenty five years, and.

359
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Speaker 1: It basically replaces your power bill.

360
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Speaker 2: It replaces the power bill. And the thing I like

361
00:20:26,359 --> 00:20:29,839
about I don't know what happens in Canada, but down here,

362
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our power company can just make up whatever fees they want.

363
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You know, when you look at the bill. They raised

364
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the rates, they doubled the rates last year, last January,

365
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and they also add other fees as they want, and

366
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so you could end up with you know, one thousand,

367
00:20:50,000 --> 00:20:54,599
two thousand dollars monthly power bills and there's nothing you

368
00:20:54,640 --> 00:20:55,200
can do about it.

369
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Speaker 1: Yeah. Generally, with regulated sources, they have to apply to

370
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the regulator to add fees where the regulator to proves

371
00:21:02,000 --> 00:21:04,160
them there they are. And you said there's not machine doo.

372
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So this was a good deal for us. Yeah, and

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it seems to be a fairly common model. Again, it's

374
00:21:09,160 --> 00:21:12,559
just playing games with how you lend money. Right. There's

375
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an upfront cost then dispersed over time based on the yield.

376
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And it shows the confidence in this system now that

377
00:21:19,720 --> 00:21:22,200
lenders are willing to put money into that system knowing

378
00:21:22,240 --> 00:21:26,359
they're going to get a return over decades. Literally decade,

379
00:21:26,920 --> 00:21:29,119
and the solar panel business actually got really interesting this

380
00:21:29,200 --> 00:21:31,920
year because we're starting to finally have some breakthroughs in

381
00:21:32,000 --> 00:21:36,920
improving panel efficiency. So we've been living on monocrystaline panels

382
00:21:36,960 --> 00:21:41,400
are the most popular kind by far. They're they're relatively expensive.

383
00:21:41,400 --> 00:21:43,480
There are thin film and pol crystalines that are cheaper,

384
00:21:43,680 --> 00:21:47,160
but they're slightly more efficient. The best thin films coming

385
00:21:47,160 --> 00:21:51,240
at about twenty percent efficiency and the monocrystals are as

386
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high as twenty two. And then you get into some

387
00:21:53,920 --> 00:21:56,319
weird options, right, there's some focus and so forth, but

388
00:21:56,359 --> 00:21:58,720
they all have questionable yields. But we've been talking about

389
00:21:58,799 --> 00:22:02,720
Proov's guide solar panels for years and years and year

390
00:22:02,880 --> 00:22:06,720
robs and the problem with perovskites, this is a particular

391
00:22:06,799 --> 00:22:10,759
kind of crystal growth is they are efficient, like they

392
00:22:10,799 --> 00:22:14,400
absorb more of the energy from the sunlight, but they

393
00:22:14,440 --> 00:22:17,599
don't last. They're fragile. The only way you make a

394
00:22:17,640 --> 00:22:19,640
deal for twenty five years in your solar panels is

395
00:22:19,680 --> 00:22:21,599
if you have a fairly good expectation at twenty five

396
00:22:21,640 --> 00:22:24,240
years and now those panels will still work. That being said,

397
00:22:24,319 --> 00:22:28,079
Oxford PV has built a hybrid cell that is now

398
00:22:28,160 --> 00:22:31,240
actually for sale they're starting to install them into commercial

399
00:22:31,279 --> 00:22:35,200
solar sites that are running about twenty seven percent efficient,

400
00:22:35,559 --> 00:22:37,440
which that's not a good way to describe how much

401
00:22:37,480 --> 00:22:39,440
better these are. The better way you say, is twenty

402
00:22:39,480 --> 00:22:44,799
percent more efficient than monocrystaline panels. They say they've perfected

403
00:22:45,400 --> 00:22:49,640
a manufacturing technique to protect them from wear and decay,

404
00:22:49,839 --> 00:22:52,680
so they don't wear any faster than the monocrystaline, which

405
00:22:52,759 --> 00:22:55,200
all of these things do wear. They lose about one

406
00:22:55,319 --> 00:22:59,279
or two percent per year. They think we'll only know

407
00:22:59,559 --> 00:23:01,680
twenty five years from now for sure if these proscuts

408
00:23:01,680 --> 00:23:03,079
are really going to last that long. But they they're

409
00:23:03,119 --> 00:23:05,440
pretty confident enough that they're actually putting it on the market,

410
00:23:05,960 --> 00:23:08,519
and they say they can improve efficiency further, they can

411
00:23:08,519 --> 00:23:11,480
get over thirty percent and what did what did you say?

412
00:23:11,519 --> 00:23:15,160
Speaker 2: How that did they improve their durability or something?

413
00:23:15,359 --> 00:23:18,160
Speaker 1: That's they they're confident that they've got they've solved the

414
00:23:19,680 --> 00:23:21,920
durability problem. Okay, they've come up with new ways to

415
00:23:21,960 --> 00:23:24,920
seal the material to stop it from decaying, so it

416
00:23:24,960 --> 00:23:28,680
should last enough that they have made it into commercial products.

417
00:23:28,720 --> 00:23:31,519
So and they're selling it not in residential sites so far,

418
00:23:31,920 --> 00:23:35,559
just to commercial Okay, Well, there's the red well. I mean,

419
00:23:35,559 --> 00:23:38,359
commercial states tend to be on the ground standard layout,

420
00:23:38,599 --> 00:23:41,400
like very conventional and good to selling into the grid

421
00:23:41,440 --> 00:23:43,319
as opposed to residential, which is get figured more for

422
00:23:43,359 --> 00:23:46,400
just replying power to your house right right. Solar panel

423
00:23:46,440 --> 00:23:48,759
recycling has continued to expand. Last year I talked about

424
00:23:48,799 --> 00:23:51,519
a company called solar Cycle in Texas who was able

425
00:23:51,559 --> 00:23:56,200
to take existing solar and use solar panels, take the

426
00:23:56,240 --> 00:23:58,960
metals off of them, cut the glass away, grind down

427
00:23:58,960 --> 00:24:01,079
the substrates so forth, pretty much be able to reuse

428
00:24:01,119 --> 00:24:04,200
the whole thing. They've opened additional facilities. Now they've got

429
00:24:04,240 --> 00:24:07,799
another facility in Georgia. They're also signing agreements with solar

430
00:24:07,839 --> 00:24:12,640
power companies both to take used panels and recycle them

431
00:24:12,680 --> 00:24:15,799
and to sell out materials those recycled materials back to

432
00:24:15,839 --> 00:24:18,119
the solar panel companies to make new panels with it.

433
00:24:18,799 --> 00:24:22,079
So we're heading towards this idea of a circular economy

434
00:24:22,079 --> 00:24:25,039
with solar panels. It's not a bad thing where a

435
00:24:25,160 --> 00:24:27,480
certain percentage of the material in a solar panel came

436
00:24:27,519 --> 00:24:28,839
from a previous generation solar.

437
00:24:29,079 --> 00:24:34,359
Speaker 2: Yeah, are there any minerals or rare earth things that

438
00:24:34,480 --> 00:24:38,519
need to be mined to go into your typical solar.

439
00:24:38,160 --> 00:24:42,799
Speaker 1: Panel, not very much. It's mostly silicon, which is the

440
00:24:42,839 --> 00:24:45,440
main substrate that they use, the monocrystal. It's mostly how

441
00:24:45,480 --> 00:24:48,039
you make the crystal that matters it. It really sets

442
00:24:48,079 --> 00:24:51,039
the quality of a certain amount of titanium, certain amount

443
00:24:51,079 --> 00:24:56,400
of aluminium. The glass is important, and it's got certain

444
00:24:56,440 --> 00:24:59,480
doping elements into it. But it's not like an electronics

445
00:24:59,519 --> 00:25:01,880
device that has a lot of the rare earths in it.

446
00:25:02,519 --> 00:25:06,880
Even the inverters are pretty straightforward electronics, so they don't

447
00:25:06,880 --> 00:25:08,359
need a lot of exotics here. We're not trying to

448
00:25:08,359 --> 00:25:11,359
make screens or CPUs or anything like that. Cool. I

449
00:25:11,440 --> 00:25:13,160
did put out the word when I was working on

450
00:25:13,200 --> 00:25:14,720
the street, which a minutedly. I put out the word

451
00:25:14,759 --> 00:25:16,039
a couple of weeks ago that I was working on

452
00:25:16,079 --> 00:25:18,559
the script and got some questions, and one of them

453
00:25:18,920 --> 00:25:21,920
came from Michael Zelenski, who asked, what are the options

454
00:25:21,920 --> 00:25:25,839
for excess residential solar power? Excess? You mean, what do

455
00:25:25,880 --> 00:25:28,680
you do with what you don't use? H yeah, okay, yeah,

456
00:25:28,720 --> 00:25:31,599
So you're generating more power than your house needs. The

457
00:25:31,799 --> 00:25:36,279
typical mechanism is the grid tie or the buy back,

458
00:25:37,000 --> 00:25:40,160
so you have a deal with your utility that when

459
00:25:40,200 --> 00:25:42,799
you produce to at a certain level, you're going to

460
00:25:42,799 --> 00:25:46,200
get a certain amount back as a credit for that

461
00:25:46,319 --> 00:25:49,920
power and depending on the setup it but we already

462
00:25:49,960 --> 00:25:52,920
know that that power is of questionable utility because it's

463
00:25:52,920 --> 00:25:55,960
already stepped down to residential level. It doesn't necessarily flow

464
00:25:56,000 --> 00:26:00,200
the other way. This isn't water and so the the

465
00:26:00,319 --> 00:26:02,119
utilities don't really want to do this, which is why

466
00:26:02,160 --> 00:26:06,160
they never set these deals up. It's always governments mandating it. Right. Sure,

467
00:26:07,240 --> 00:26:09,799
you know the utility, that's the thing they want, right,

468
00:26:09,839 --> 00:26:10,880
which is reduced to love.

469
00:26:10,960 --> 00:26:13,920
Speaker 2: You don't get the energy, They just they sort of

470
00:26:13,960 --> 00:26:16,200
pay you for not taking it from them. That's right,

471
00:26:16,240 --> 00:26:17,920
You basically got it, so they can sell it to

472
00:26:17,960 --> 00:26:18,519
someone else.

473
00:26:18,640 --> 00:26:22,640
Speaker 1: But it's happening enough now that it's actually putting stress

474
00:26:22,640 --> 00:26:24,839
on the grid because it does. You know, that power

475
00:26:24,839 --> 00:26:26,720
does get as far as a transformer, it can create

476
00:26:26,759 --> 00:26:30,440
loads of the transformer. In places like Sydney, Australia, where

477
00:26:30,920 --> 00:26:33,880
residential solar is so common, they've actually had to put

478
00:26:33,880 --> 00:26:38,200
in mechanisms to disconnect you from the grid wow, to

479
00:26:38,240 --> 00:26:40,799
try it to stop from destabilizing the grid. Again. It

480
00:26:40,799 --> 00:26:42,960
does because it doesn't flow evenly back upwards with what

481
00:26:43,000 --> 00:26:48,079
it's doing is overheating transformers. Yeah, sure, And so there's

482
00:26:48,119 --> 00:26:50,640
a big discussion about is there a better way to

483
00:26:50,799 --> 00:26:55,240
use your excess residential solar power? Now at the simplest level,

484
00:26:55,799 --> 00:26:58,079
if you've at least got some kind of monitoring going

485
00:26:58,160 --> 00:27:00,960
on and your house says, hey, you know we're making

486
00:27:00,960 --> 00:27:03,119
more power than we need, you can shift the load.

487
00:27:03,200 --> 00:27:05,160
Now is the time to wash the dishes or fire

488
00:27:05,279 --> 00:27:07,680
up the washing machine? Sure, run the dry like, just

489
00:27:07,759 --> 00:27:09,359
burn you more power if you.

490
00:27:09,359 --> 00:27:11,599
Speaker 2: Know how to do that, right, if you have appliances

491
00:27:11,599 --> 00:27:13,400
that are smart enough to do that, yeah.

492
00:27:13,480 --> 00:27:17,000
Speaker 1: Or you're present to do so. Yeah. Electric vehicle is

493
00:27:17,039 --> 00:27:18,920
a good one for this, Like, it's not that these

494
00:27:19,000 --> 00:27:21,920
days we have smart chargers that can actually say, hey,

495
00:27:22,000 --> 00:27:24,680
the power's free right now, it's coming from solar. Let's

496
00:27:24,759 --> 00:27:27,200
charge the car again. This is like, are you home

497
00:27:27,319 --> 00:27:29,720
during the day when you be able to do right? No,

498
00:27:29,880 --> 00:27:32,759
you get in. There are more expensive options, like there

499
00:27:32,839 --> 00:27:36,240
are smart hot water tanks and heating systems HVAC systems

500
00:27:36,279 --> 00:27:38,480
that we'll say, oh it's solar now, let's cool the

501
00:27:38,559 --> 00:27:41,720
house more or warm the house more, or yeah.

502
00:27:41,640 --> 00:27:45,160
Speaker 2: Or store the energy as heat as hot water, right,

503
00:27:45,240 --> 00:27:45,880
it's hot water.

504
00:27:46,000 --> 00:27:50,279
Speaker 1: Yeah. And then finally the most expensive option, which is batteries. Yeah, right,

505
00:27:50,440 --> 00:27:53,559
your power walls, although there's a bunch of better battery systems.

506
00:27:53,559 --> 00:27:55,799
And I'll talk about energy storage as we get further

507
00:27:55,880 --> 00:27:58,160
down the path, and that gets into you doing even

508
00:27:58,200 --> 00:28:01,400
more power shifting, that you can store enough power from

509
00:28:01,400 --> 00:28:04,680
your free solar at your excess solar so that in

510
00:28:04,759 --> 00:28:07,559
the evening you don't have to consume any power from

511
00:28:07,599 --> 00:28:08,000
the grid.

512
00:28:08,079 --> 00:28:11,480
Speaker 2: So we have a propane generator and like a five

513
00:28:11,559 --> 00:28:16,200
hundred gallon propane tank. And the salesman when they were

514
00:28:16,240 --> 00:28:19,599
talking to us about the solar panels, said, now you know,

515
00:28:19,640 --> 00:28:22,359
we also do sell a battery system. I think it

516
00:28:22,519 --> 00:28:25,240
was the Tesla wall probably, he says, But to tell

517
00:28:25,240 --> 00:28:29,359
you the truth, you have a generator, and you know

518
00:28:29,400 --> 00:28:32,119
you're you're going to get two weeks of power off

519
00:28:32,119 --> 00:28:35,559
a full tank twenty four to seven, right, whereas you're

520
00:28:35,559 --> 00:28:37,799
only going to get maybe a day or a day

521
00:28:37,799 --> 00:28:40,519
and a half out of the battery.

522
00:28:41,680 --> 00:28:45,119
Speaker 1: And it's very expensive, as you said, and I mean

523
00:28:45,119 --> 00:28:47,720
addutedly pro paying costs money. Sure, So if you were

524
00:28:47,799 --> 00:28:51,720
charging that battery off of excess solar effectively free and

525
00:28:51,759 --> 00:28:56,119
then discharging it each night. You know you're saving a

526
00:28:56,160 --> 00:28:58,359
certain amount of electricity. The question is is does the

527
00:28:58,400 --> 00:29:01,240
earnout work. Those batteries are expensive, Like it could be

528
00:29:01,359 --> 00:29:03,799
longer than the battery lifespan before you actually pay for

529
00:29:03,839 --> 00:29:06,319
the battery for those few hours a day that you

530
00:29:06,319 --> 00:29:09,599
would use. Right, there's a difference between it being a

531
00:29:09,680 --> 00:29:13,240
power shifting tool where it's like my evening power consumption

532
00:29:13,279 --> 00:29:17,000
comes from my battery versus a backup tool where the

533
00:29:17,119 --> 00:29:21,000
mains are out and I need electricity. Right. Power shifting

534
00:29:21,079 --> 00:29:24,279
is really what those power walls were for, is to

535
00:29:24,319 --> 00:29:26,880
get you off the grid when the solar when it's

536
00:29:26,960 --> 00:29:29,480
nighttime and you're you know, cooking food and doing all

537
00:29:29,519 --> 00:29:31,440
the things in your house or a high consumption. I

538
00:29:31,480 --> 00:29:34,680
also have in our house a pellet stove which we

539
00:29:34,759 --> 00:29:38,759
put in in the basement. There was one here when

540
00:29:38,759 --> 00:29:41,640
the house was originally built, but the owners when they left,

541
00:29:41,680 --> 00:29:44,519
took it with them, So we got a pellet stove

542
00:29:44,759 --> 00:29:49,519
and in the wintertime it's always on. It's either on

543
00:29:49,880 --> 00:29:54,000
low at night or when it's warm, or you know,

544
00:29:54,039 --> 00:29:56,000
when it's really cold. They crack it up and we

545
00:29:56,079 --> 00:29:58,920
leave the door to the basement open and we get

546
00:29:59,480 --> 00:30:02,880
radiant fl heating because it heats the floor right and

547
00:30:03,039 --> 00:30:06,359
also comes through the through the door, So that's it's

548
00:30:06,440 --> 00:30:09,599
really nice. It's just good to have options. Yeah, that's

549
00:30:09,599 --> 00:30:13,440
the way I look. We burn wood for heat here

550
00:30:13,480 --> 00:30:16,720
by the ocean, not that we also have electric heat,

551
00:30:16,880 --> 00:30:18,720
but one of the reasons to do that is aar

552
00:30:18,880 --> 00:30:22,559
wood comes from our property, so that's effectively free. But

553
00:30:22,599 --> 00:30:25,839
the other one I've noticed is the heat from that

554
00:30:27,599 --> 00:30:31,519
cast iron stove is very dry and in especially in

555
00:30:31,519 --> 00:30:34,359
the wintertime here, it's damp, and as soon as you

556
00:30:34,480 --> 00:30:38,319
light the fire up, the house dries out, like you

557
00:30:38,400 --> 00:30:41,720
feel better. Yeah, it makes a huge difference, especially in

558
00:30:41,799 --> 00:30:43,519
the winter, to have that heat, and there's something special

559
00:30:43,519 --> 00:30:47,480
about a fire. I love fire. I read on Reddit

560
00:30:47,480 --> 00:30:49,880
when I was looking on other options for excess as

561
00:30:50,160 --> 00:30:53,000
solo there is a guy who's set up home assistant

562
00:30:53,319 --> 00:30:56,440
to crank up the temperature in his hot tub during

563
00:30:56,480 --> 00:30:59,599
the day when there's excess solar too hot to get in,

564
00:30:59,640 --> 00:31:01,279
but he's just I'm not going to get in until night.

565
00:31:01,359 --> 00:31:02,839
But normally I have to run the thing for an

566
00:31:02,839 --> 00:31:04,319
hour to make it warm enough to sit in, So

567
00:31:04,359 --> 00:31:07,039
if there's excess solar, I just overheat my hot tub

568
00:31:07,440 --> 00:31:09,160
and then by night time when we want to get

569
00:31:09,160 --> 00:31:11,640
in it, it's nice and warm. And it was for free.

570
00:31:11,759 --> 00:31:14,279
Speaker 2: So we have a whirlpool tub. I'm talking all about

571
00:31:14,319 --> 00:31:17,119
my house here. Yeah, we have a whirlpool tub and

572
00:31:17,720 --> 00:31:21,960
it's it's it's big. You've seen it, and it's big,

573
00:31:22,319 --> 00:31:26,039
so big in fact, and it's indoors that the water

574
00:31:26,119 --> 00:31:29,680
heater doesn't have enough hot water in it to fill

575
00:31:29,680 --> 00:31:32,440
it with hot water. Right, how about that that's problem,

576
00:31:32,519 --> 00:31:35,079
isn't that? I mean, so we don't use it because

577
00:31:35,119 --> 00:31:35,759
what's the point.

578
00:31:35,920 --> 00:31:38,519
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, it's not hot, it's not fun. Yeah, it's

579
00:31:38,559 --> 00:31:40,319
not okay. I think it's also going to say about

580
00:31:40,359 --> 00:31:44,160
solar this year other than again, it's the banner year

581
00:31:44,240 --> 00:31:49,240
in terms of the non carmonymitting energy source, more solar

582
00:31:49,279 --> 00:31:52,519
than anything else, mostly because of Chila. Yeah. So moving

583
00:31:52,559 --> 00:31:55,160
on to wind power. So we expected to put in

584
00:31:55,160 --> 00:31:57,880
about one hundred gigawatts of wind in twenty three. We

585
00:31:57,920 --> 00:32:00,279
actually got one hundred and twenty and we're looking at

586
00:32:00,319 --> 00:32:03,440
about one hundred and thirty for twenty four. So the

587
00:32:03,480 --> 00:32:07,119
growth is consistent, it's going up slightly. Wind is a

588
00:32:07,119 --> 00:32:09,359
bit more efficient, and solar you get about twenty five

589
00:32:09,440 --> 00:32:13,039
to forty percent capacity factor, so still well behind traditional

590
00:32:13,079 --> 00:32:16,759
power plants, but you know, we're getting better doing more

591
00:32:16,799 --> 00:32:20,480
offshore wind. Yeah, the onshore seems to be kind of

592
00:32:20,519 --> 00:32:21,680
built out in a lot of ways. I feel like

593
00:32:21,720 --> 00:32:27,519
the wind industry is matured now. We're not seeing bigger

594
00:32:27,640 --> 00:32:29,960
wind turbines. They got bigger and bigger every year for

595
00:32:30,000 --> 00:32:31,480
quite a while, and they've seem to have topped out

596
00:32:31,519 --> 00:32:33,960
of somewhere around the fifteen megawatt range. It's a couple

597
00:32:34,000 --> 00:32:36,839
of fourteens and a couple of sixteens. But they're getting

598
00:32:36,880 --> 00:32:40,480
to a point now where they're so large that the

599
00:32:40,559 --> 00:32:43,599
weight of the equipment is a problem and they're not lasting.

600
00:32:43,839 --> 00:32:48,200
We're starting to see gearbox issues where a gearbox system

601
00:32:48,240 --> 00:32:50,480
that was supposed to last for twenty years broke down

602
00:32:50,519 --> 00:32:54,680
in seven and needed major repairs. So these really big

603
00:32:54,720 --> 00:32:58,000
wind turbines are problematic. Yeah. I've talked about this before too.

604
00:32:58,039 --> 00:33:00,000
Speaker 2: And if you come to my town, New London, Connecticut,

605
00:33:00,079 --> 00:33:03,319
you look out on the state here, there's just fuselage

606
00:33:03,519 --> 00:33:07,279
after fuselage, just these big white tubes because they assemble

607
00:33:07,400 --> 00:33:10,640
windmills here and they're they're doing an offshore project in

608
00:33:10,720 --> 00:33:13,559
Long Island Sound, and yeah.

609
00:33:14,680 --> 00:33:17,119
Speaker 1: It makes and these those projects are primarily what we

610
00:33:17,240 --> 00:33:21,799
call near shore or fixed bottom systems, where they literally

611
00:33:22,240 --> 00:33:24,480
the works up to about fifty meters or water about

612
00:33:24,480 --> 00:33:26,759
one hundred and fifty feet. They put a casement into

613
00:33:26,839 --> 00:33:29,559
the water, down into the bottom. Then they pump the

614
00:33:29,599 --> 00:33:32,759
water out of the casement. Then they drill a big hole,

615
00:33:33,160 --> 00:33:35,640
fill it with concrete, and then put the post down.

616
00:33:35,680 --> 00:33:38,599
Speaker 2: You know, it's it's kind of ironic that a hurricane

617
00:33:38,640 --> 00:33:42,319
could come through and really crank up those windmills.

618
00:33:42,319 --> 00:33:43,880
Speaker 1: They'd be generating a lot of power.

619
00:33:44,279 --> 00:33:48,680
Speaker 2: However, the hurricane could also knock the power lines down

620
00:33:48,720 --> 00:33:49,519
going to your house.

621
00:33:50,920 --> 00:33:53,880
Speaker 1: And windmills run in a particular range of winds, so

622
00:33:53,880 --> 00:33:56,400
they actually shut them all off for extreme wind events

623
00:33:56,440 --> 00:33:59,200
like that. Yeah, they'll destroy themselves. I didn't know that

624
00:33:59,240 --> 00:34:02,400
they can't move that. Not far from you, there was

625
00:34:02,440 --> 00:34:09,400
a big wind project in New Jersey's waters and ended

626
00:34:09,440 --> 00:34:11,360
up being canceled this year, all.

627
00:34:11,320 --> 00:34:13,000
Speaker 2: Them New Jersey. I just don't want to see them

628
00:34:13,159 --> 00:34:16,719
ugly windmills out there. Maybe this was more about financing.

629
00:34:16,760 --> 00:34:19,880
It was taking longer to build. Costs went up substantially.

630
00:34:19,880 --> 00:34:21,639
It was actually being built by a company called Orstev,

631
00:34:21,639 --> 00:34:24,039
which is a Danish company, like the Danes, being one

632
00:34:24,039 --> 00:34:26,480
of the most experienced groups for wind power anywhere in

633
00:34:26,519 --> 00:34:29,159
the world. One of the issues they ran into, and

634
00:34:29,159 --> 00:34:31,599
this is this one surprised me. I'd heard about it,

635
00:34:31,639 --> 00:34:33,679
but I didn't realize it would impact wind But the

636
00:34:33,760 --> 00:34:34,320
thing called.

637
00:34:34,119 --> 00:34:36,159
Speaker 1: The Jones Law, I don't know about it. So the

638
00:34:36,280 --> 00:34:39,159
Jones Law almost goes back to the Revolution, and it

639
00:34:39,679 --> 00:34:44,719
was really about a ship that's servicing ports in the US.

640
00:34:44,840 --> 00:34:47,000
Going from one US port to another has to be

641
00:34:47,039 --> 00:34:51,760
registered in the US. Okay, that's the law, Okay. And

642
00:34:51,880 --> 00:34:55,079
so the fact that they needed a ship that went

643
00:34:55,159 --> 00:34:58,360
back and forth for maintenance from New Jersey out to

644
00:34:58,559 --> 00:35:02,480
the windmills and back again meant it had to be

645
00:35:02,519 --> 00:35:05,360
licensed in the US, which is very expensive. In fact,

646
00:35:05,360 --> 00:35:08,840
it is so expensive that the situations like shipping a

647
00:35:08,920 --> 00:35:13,880
liquefied natural gas from Louisiana up to New England, the

648
00:35:13,960 --> 00:35:15,639
US doesn't do it. It is cheaper for them to

649
00:35:15,679 --> 00:35:18,559
sell the gas from Louisiana to another country and then

650
00:35:18,679 --> 00:35:21,880
buy natural gas from another country to bring to New England. Okay,

651
00:35:21,960 --> 00:35:25,440
that's really strange. Because of the costs of licensing and

652
00:35:25,480 --> 00:35:31,280
operating ships in license in the US. Wow, so it's

653
00:35:31,320 --> 00:35:33,599
like a two hundred year old law. It probably needs

654
00:35:33,599 --> 00:35:37,760
some updating. I would think, Yeah, weird little impediments. I've

655
00:35:37,760 --> 00:35:39,639
a little highlights on wind before we get into the

656
00:35:39,760 --> 00:35:43,320
nitty gritty details. This year, for a few hours, Ireland,

657
00:35:44,119 --> 00:35:47,039
a very windy place, operated entirely on wind power. What

658
00:35:47,679 --> 00:35:50,960
the whole country, the whole country for a while for

659
00:35:51,000 --> 00:35:54,360
a few hours during a particularly windy time that all

660
00:35:54,400 --> 00:35:57,480
of the electrical generation was win. That's impressive. Yeah, it

661
00:35:57,559 --> 00:36:00,360
just shows how much when they've got the UK Land,

662
00:36:00,519 --> 00:36:02,920
they've gone big on wind. They've got lots of shallow

663
00:36:03,039 --> 00:36:05,119
water that they can put these wind turbines up on,

664
00:36:05,280 --> 00:36:08,199
and they build them big. The big business now for

665
00:36:08,239 --> 00:36:11,360
wind turbines. A lot of that easy area, those fifty

666
00:36:11,400 --> 00:36:15,719
meters or less waters largely are allocated and being built out.

667
00:36:16,039 --> 00:36:18,599
So wind growth is going to slow until we can

668
00:36:18,880 --> 00:36:22,920
really mature floating wind turbines. Right. They have their own

669
00:36:22,920 --> 00:36:25,679
problems in British Columbia. Here, our water's all too deep.

670
00:36:26,639 --> 00:36:30,079
I get past fifty meters inside of my house. The

671
00:36:30,119 --> 00:36:32,440
water is very deep here, and so you need to

672
00:36:32,480 --> 00:36:36,519
have floating wind turbines, and generally these rigs are good

673
00:36:36,559 --> 00:36:38,119
up to but at least three hundred and fifty meters

674
00:36:38,119 --> 00:36:41,119
of water and theory more. This is all oil rig technology,

675
00:36:41,840 --> 00:36:44,199
but it is more expensive, is more complicated to install,

676
00:36:44,280 --> 00:36:46,320
and it tends to be further away from land, and

677
00:36:46,360 --> 00:36:48,119
you kind of need electricity on land, and so the

678
00:36:48,119 --> 00:36:49,960
wiring going back gets costly.

679
00:36:50,559 --> 00:36:54,800
Speaker 2: I'm just thinking about a floating wind turbine and the

680
00:36:55,000 --> 00:36:58,159
challenges that it would take. You would have to have

681
00:36:58,199 --> 00:37:01,880
some sort of ballast, their keel, something holding it down,

682
00:37:01,960 --> 00:37:06,119
otherwise it'll flop around in the wind and become really unefficient. Well,

683
00:37:06,159 --> 00:37:08,760
one of the benefits of a turbine is that it's rigid, Yeah,

684
00:37:09,000 --> 00:37:11,599
so when the wind blows across it, it doesn't fall over.

685
00:37:12,159 --> 00:37:16,039
Speaker 1: So there's a bunch of different platform approaches, right. There's

686
00:37:16,119 --> 00:37:19,960
the barge approach, which is the simplest. Just imagine a

687
00:37:20,000 --> 00:37:23,000
barge that you anchor it to. It's easy to toe

688
00:37:23,079 --> 00:37:25,719
to get into place. It gives you working area when

689
00:37:25,719 --> 00:37:27,800
you want to work on it. But it has the

690
00:37:27,800 --> 00:37:31,000
most motion, right, and we talk about six degrees of

691
00:37:31,039 --> 00:37:34,719
freedom when you're in the water. Heave yaw sway, surge,

692
00:37:34,800 --> 00:37:38,000
pitch and roll. So heave is going up and down,

693
00:37:38,559 --> 00:37:43,239
yaw is rotating side to side, sway is sliding back

694
00:37:43,280 --> 00:37:46,440
and forth. Surge is moving front to back, so the

695
00:37:46,440 --> 00:37:49,440
wind blows and it pushes it back. And then pitch

696
00:37:49,480 --> 00:37:53,119
and roll are both rotations and two different axises. So

697
00:37:54,039 --> 00:37:57,480
the anchoring process is important. And this is also a

698
00:37:57,559 --> 00:38:02,079
solved problem when you think about oil rigs. Right, So

699
00:38:02,320 --> 00:38:04,280
the bar just kind of the most primitive way to go.

700
00:38:04,320 --> 00:38:06,320
If you get into the oilry designs, you start talking

701
00:38:06,360 --> 00:38:10,880
about different spar and semi submersible designs. So one of

702
00:38:10,920 --> 00:38:12,920
the ones that's being tested thoroughly is is called a

703
00:38:12,920 --> 00:38:16,519
semi submersible spar so. This is three to five spars

704
00:38:17,320 --> 00:38:20,400
that can be filled with water. They actually are ballasting.

705
00:38:20,880 --> 00:38:23,039
One of those spars has the wind turbine on it,

706
00:38:23,079 --> 00:38:26,400
and then the others are ballasted to stabilize it. And

707
00:38:26,440 --> 00:38:30,119
then you have cables running onto the bottom, either in

708
00:38:30,199 --> 00:38:34,679
catenary or tension, that keep it essentially stay. And what's

709
00:38:34,719 --> 00:38:38,679
a spar so? Just imagine a cylinder, okay, right that,

710
00:38:39,400 --> 00:38:41,480
So take a bunch of cylinders, connect them with pipes,

711
00:38:42,360 --> 00:38:44,760
three to five of them, and so one of them

712
00:38:44,800 --> 00:38:46,320
has the wind turbines, so I has the most load

713
00:38:46,320 --> 00:38:49,079
on it, and the other ones at least two maybe

714
00:38:49,079 --> 00:38:53,239
more use water ballast to offset that mass and keep

715
00:38:53,280 --> 00:38:57,559
it alive. So there's a vertical yeah, verticaltical cylinder. Okay,

716
00:38:58,039 --> 00:39:00,599
there's single spar approaches where you literally you just put

717
00:39:00,639 --> 00:39:04,079
a floatation spar with the mast on it. They have

718
00:39:04,159 --> 00:39:07,199
more tipping problems, but they're very easy to build. And

719
00:39:07,239 --> 00:39:09,800
then the most complex one, the one that again comes

720
00:39:09,840 --> 00:39:12,360
to the oilery industry, is the one called tension leg

721
00:39:13,119 --> 00:39:18,199
where you're actually putting anchors into the bottom under tension

722
00:39:18,719 --> 00:39:22,880
to hold the mouths in place, so they're quite rigid.

723
00:39:25,000 --> 00:39:29,480
The problem is that it's not good with tides because

724
00:39:29,519 --> 00:39:31,360
it's kind of set to its depth, so you think

725
00:39:31,480 --> 00:39:33,760
kind of a minimal range of tide. They'll limit cinemarias

726
00:39:33,800 --> 00:39:36,840
you can put it in and they don't fail well.

727
00:39:37,239 --> 00:39:41,840
If one of those tension lines gives out for whatever reason,

728
00:39:42,719 --> 00:39:46,880
you're going to tip over. So part of this is

729
00:39:46,920 --> 00:39:51,519
start of figuring out what is the movement causes problems

730
00:39:51,519 --> 00:39:56,639
with generation. Right serge, especially when you lean into the wind,

731
00:39:56,719 --> 00:40:02,599
might actually speed up the turbine, but there there's dozens

732
00:40:02,599 --> 00:40:05,000
of test projects out there. They're not past the test phase,

733
00:40:05,119 --> 00:40:08,159
but they're real turbines generating real power, and they're learning

734
00:40:08,199 --> 00:40:13,000
how these things work. They're still relatively expensive comparative, about

735
00:40:13,000 --> 00:40:16,199
four times the price of near shore or fixed bottom. Okay,

736
00:40:16,239 --> 00:40:18,559
but the price. You know, the only reason that nearshore

737
00:40:18,639 --> 00:40:20,679
is as cheap as it is today is because we've

738
00:40:20,679 --> 00:40:22,239
built so much of it and we know exactly what

739
00:40:22,280 --> 00:40:24,480
we're doing. While we're in the experimental phase, is going

740
00:40:24,519 --> 00:40:27,760
to stay expensive, but as it matures, it should cut

741
00:40:27,800 --> 00:40:29,320
the price substantially. No.

742
00:40:29,679 --> 00:40:32,159
Speaker 2: Last year, getting back to solar here for a minute,

743
00:40:32,199 --> 00:40:36,880
last year we talked about floating solar panel rafts out

744
00:40:37,000 --> 00:40:41,519
on reservoirs in places where has have there been any

745
00:40:41,559 --> 00:40:44,840
new projects in that regard because I have seen nothing

746
00:40:45,360 --> 00:40:46,800
over here Yea, where I live.

747
00:40:47,199 --> 00:40:49,199
Speaker 1: It's it's more common, and it seems to be more

748
00:40:49,199 --> 00:40:53,599
common in Europe, but it's it's totally viable. It's just

749
00:40:53,639 --> 00:40:55,880
a question of can you get your grid tie. You've

750
00:40:55,880 --> 00:40:58,000
got to build all the infrastructure to actually use the power.

751
00:40:58,320 --> 00:41:00,639
Speaker 2: What we're talking about, if you'd missed it, is that

752
00:41:01,000 --> 00:41:05,519
when you have evaporation in canals, let's say, or in reservoirs.

753
00:41:05,960 --> 00:41:08,960
Evaporation is money, right, I mean, when you lose water,

754
00:41:09,760 --> 00:41:12,039
that's water you can't drink if it's from a reservoir.

755
00:41:12,159 --> 00:41:17,559
So some of these countries and cities are making floating

756
00:41:18,119 --> 00:41:21,480
barges with solar panels on them that cover the area

757
00:41:21,679 --> 00:41:23,559
of the top of the you know, of the water,

758
00:41:24,239 --> 00:41:28,239
and they solve the evaporation problem and they generate energy. Yeah,

759
00:41:28,320 --> 00:41:29,840
and I just thought it was a brilliant idea.

760
00:41:30,000 --> 00:41:34,679
Speaker 1: It is. I mean, in California, they started covering reservoirs

761
00:41:34,800 --> 00:41:39,719
with black plastic balls because they were primarily concerned about

762
00:41:39,719 --> 00:41:42,079
the evaporation. And that's a lot cheaper than putting in

763
00:41:42,079 --> 00:41:45,760
solar panels. True, but the solar panel approach has the

764
00:41:45,760 --> 00:41:48,119
additional advantage of generating electricity. You just got to be

765
00:41:48,119 --> 00:41:50,360
able to use that electricity. Yeah, so how do you

766
00:41:50,400 --> 00:41:52,440
tie it in? You know, this is where the reservoir

767
00:41:52,440 --> 00:41:54,760
model came in, where the excess solar then was used

768
00:41:54,760 --> 00:41:57,360
to pump water back into the reservoir, presuming you have

769
00:41:57,400 --> 00:41:59,280
a setup that works out. Yeah. So it's sort of

770
00:41:59,320 --> 00:42:01,119
a site by side situation.

771
00:42:01,480 --> 00:42:04,400
Speaker 2: That idea doesn't seem to be taking off like we

772
00:42:04,480 --> 00:42:05,079
wish it would.

773
00:42:05,800 --> 00:42:07,800
Speaker 1: I think it's very much. You've got to do the

774
00:42:07,800 --> 00:42:10,320
calculations in each location, and there's only so many folks

775
00:42:10,320 --> 00:42:13,679
who know how to figure these things out, so it's

776
00:42:13,880 --> 00:42:16,119
really you know, when those folks get to the project. Okay,

777
00:42:16,159 --> 00:42:19,360
but wrapping up on the floating wind project. So where

778
00:42:19,440 --> 00:42:22,599
are these pilot projects happening? Norway's big on this for

779
00:42:22,679 --> 00:42:26,920
two reasons. The first is their water's very deep, so

780
00:42:27,000 --> 00:42:29,320
they can't do nearshore. They're going to do wind at all,

781
00:42:29,360 --> 00:42:32,039
They need to do floating. They're also big on the

782
00:42:32,079 --> 00:42:34,800
oil platform stuff, right they know their way around it.

783
00:42:34,800 --> 00:42:36,199
They've done a lot of it. That's all that north

784
00:42:36,239 --> 00:42:38,920
sea work, and in fact one of their biggest projects

785
00:42:39,079 --> 00:42:43,039
right now is actually only providing power too deep sea

786
00:42:43,079 --> 00:42:47,480
oil rigs nearby as they develop and perfect the technology

787
00:42:47,480 --> 00:42:49,159
before they spend the money to send power all the

788
00:42:49,159 --> 00:42:52,159
way back home, because when you get that far off shore,

789
00:42:52,760 --> 00:42:55,880
transmitting the power back to the shore gets expensive and

790
00:42:55,920 --> 00:42:59,599
they have to experiment. They're switching from using AC transmission

791
00:42:59,760 --> 00:43:03,239
back to shore to DC transmission factor shore, which is

792
00:43:03,280 --> 00:43:06,079
not really proven as well in deep water like this.

793
00:43:07,480 --> 00:43:09,719
The UK is also doing a lot, mostly because they've

794
00:43:09,840 --> 00:43:11,960
used They've filled up most of their places for fixed

795
00:43:12,000 --> 00:43:14,440
bottom development, they've allocated them out, so they're starting to

796
00:43:14,519 --> 00:43:16,679
do more in deeper water. You also see this happening

797
00:43:16,719 --> 00:43:21,519
in France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Japan, China, Korea. The US

798
00:43:22,000 --> 00:43:26,440
does have a project called the Floating Offshore Wind Energy Shot,

799
00:43:26,599 --> 00:43:29,360
which is basically recognizing that that wind power is too

800
00:43:29,400 --> 00:43:31,280
expensive right now and they're trying to reduce the costs

801
00:43:31,280 --> 00:43:33,599
on it as part of the inflation production. Okay, all right.

802
00:43:33,760 --> 00:43:37,280
A section I hadn't talked about, you know, a couple

803
00:43:37,320 --> 00:43:40,559
of years, but sort of had a little resurgence, not big.

804
00:43:40,639 --> 00:43:46,039
Mostly experimental is wave power. Yeah, so wave power is

805
00:43:46,239 --> 00:43:48,880
an immature technology. It's been experimented in many ways. The

806
00:43:48,920 --> 00:43:51,800
ocean is remarkedly good at destroying things. This is trying

807
00:43:51,800 --> 00:43:56,360
to utilize the motion from waves and tides. Sure, their

808
00:43:56,480 --> 00:43:59,920
capacity factors are terrible, well, single digits, like less than temper.

809
00:44:01,039 --> 00:44:04,440
That's mostly because they barely function. But there's a group

810
00:44:04,519 --> 00:44:07,320
off the coast of Oregon called the Pack Wave Energy

811
00:44:07,360 --> 00:44:11,719
Project that is repurposing some older wiring already in place,

812
00:44:12,280 --> 00:44:17,039
part of a deal with Oregon State University to create

813
00:44:17,159 --> 00:44:20,920
sites to do experiments with wavepower. So part of the

814
00:44:21,000 --> 00:44:23,079
challenge if you want to build a wave power system

815
00:44:23,280 --> 00:44:27,320
is getting the onshore cabling in place and the instrumentation

816
00:44:27,519 --> 00:44:31,280
so forth. And so a couple of nautical miles off

817
00:44:31,320 --> 00:44:34,119
the coast of Newport, Oregon, they built out the site

818
00:44:34,159 --> 00:44:39,000
with the university to allow for prototype experimentation. So multiple

819
00:44:39,159 --> 00:44:43,440
bays essentially areas a few one hundred yards across that

820
00:44:43,519 --> 00:44:47,199
have both power wiring and control wiring, so that different

821
00:44:47,199 --> 00:44:49,480
groups can come in and test one of their wave

822
00:44:49,559 --> 00:44:52,599
systems without having to do all that infrastructure. It's kind

823
00:44:52,599 --> 00:44:56,000
of brilliant. And these are typically turbines, right, They sometimes

824
00:44:56,039 --> 00:44:59,920
turbines sometimes just like a boy that pumps oil, right,

825
00:45:00,159 --> 00:45:02,760
or even compresses air. So you fationed this boy is

826
00:45:02,800 --> 00:45:06,639
going up and down. Yeah, and it can build up pressure. Right.

827
00:45:06,639 --> 00:45:09,119
There's a couple of different techniques and the most common

828
00:45:09,119 --> 00:45:12,039
one in these days it is called a point observer absorber.

829
00:45:12,119 --> 00:45:15,320
So it's a sort of a linear process. The boy

830
00:45:15,400 --> 00:45:19,039
goes up, so it pull it creates some pressure and

831
00:45:19,079 --> 00:45:21,280
then as it comes down it pushes that pressure in

832
00:45:21,960 --> 00:45:25,599
and that you can turn into rotating motion to create power. Wow,

833
00:45:26,719 --> 00:45:28,679
there's been a you know, a zero was one of

834
00:45:28,679 --> 00:45:31,320
the ones I looked at that. They built a test

835
00:45:31,400 --> 00:45:35,079
unit on Hawaii making about twenty kilowatts of energy. But

836
00:45:35,360 --> 00:45:37,639
you know the problem here is, yes, it could make power,

837
00:45:37,920 --> 00:45:41,440
but it costs more than what the power's worth. Very

838
00:45:41,599 --> 00:45:44,239
really hard to make these things cost effective, and they

839
00:45:44,599 --> 00:45:50,280
don't last. The Life Skill Project in Sweden they built

840
00:45:50,320 --> 00:45:53,039
out eleven of these point observers with the generations they

841
00:45:53,039 --> 00:45:54,639
got to put about two undred and sixty kilowats and

842
00:45:54,679 --> 00:45:56,880
then a huge storm came through and destroyed them all.

843
00:45:56,960 --> 00:45:58,800
Speaker 2: I imagine corrosion is a problem too.

844
00:45:58,960 --> 00:46:01,760
Speaker 1: Yeah, the ocean always seems to win, right, just keeps

845
00:46:01,760 --> 00:46:05,000
pounding away. So the big news this year was that

846
00:46:05,079 --> 00:46:08,719
the Packwave South is going to open up a larger

847
00:46:08,760 --> 00:46:12,000
facility than the original Packwave North one in about seventy

848
00:46:12,039 --> 00:46:16,199
meters of water, so a little deeper that is already

849
00:46:16,199 --> 00:46:18,840
connected to the grid, so you can actually try selling

850
00:46:18,880 --> 00:46:21,079
power back if you want to do the experiments. If

851
00:46:21,119 --> 00:46:24,000
you read up on this, you'll hear that it's wired

852
00:46:24,039 --> 00:46:27,639
for twenty megawatts of power, which is true. They've got

853
00:46:27,880 --> 00:46:32,119
four five megawat conduits going to four bays, four tests berths.

854
00:46:32,920 --> 00:46:36,159
Nobody's making a mega wat of power with wave like

855
00:46:36,360 --> 00:46:40,480
that's just a ridiculously huge number. But I hope they

856
00:46:40,480 --> 00:46:45,039
get to that point five. But it's nice to see

857
00:46:45,039 --> 00:46:48,000
some experimentation going on here. It's just to recognize it.

858
00:46:48,199 --> 00:46:52,599
These are far away from commercial products. It's very difficult

859
00:46:52,800 --> 00:46:56,679
to operate in the ocean, and it's hard to get

860
00:46:56,679 --> 00:47:00,519
efficient utilization, and it's not consistent. Right. Sure, the waves

861
00:47:00,519 --> 00:47:03,239
are bigger, they're smaller. You know, there's high tides, there's

862
00:47:03,239 --> 00:47:06,039
low tides, so you can learn how to do them,

863
00:47:06,239 --> 00:47:08,960
but it's hard to make advantages. When we talked about

864
00:47:08,960 --> 00:47:12,119
this before, I talked about most of the tidal power

865
00:47:12,159 --> 00:47:15,880
systems we know of are actually flood management tools right

866
00:47:16,000 --> 00:47:20,159
that on the side also make electricity. I recently did

867
00:47:20,159 --> 00:47:23,519
a version of the Future of Energy talk in the

868
00:47:23,559 --> 00:47:27,679
Netherlands and we talk with who are flood management masters,

869
00:47:28,400 --> 00:47:32,559
and they're in the process of converting an existing flood

870
00:47:32,599 --> 00:47:37,440
management gait to install these little turbines one after the next.

871
00:47:38,000 --> 00:47:39,760
Be able to put forty of them in. But when

872
00:47:39,760 --> 00:47:43,960
they're done, it'll be ten megawats of power, like compared

873
00:47:44,000 --> 00:47:47,360
to a they're one, you know, the Netherlands one nuclear

874
00:47:47,400 --> 00:47:50,679
power print that produces a thousand megawats of power. Right,

875
00:47:50,719 --> 00:47:54,360
It's just wave power is small and incremental, even harder

876
00:47:54,400 --> 00:47:56,039
than wind in that respect. Yeah.

877
00:47:56,239 --> 00:48:00,599
Speaker 2: Well, maybe next year we'll have some news about breakthrough.

878
00:48:00,719 --> 00:48:03,960
Speaker 1: Well, you know, we will be fairly far along before

879
00:48:03,960 --> 00:48:06,719
we release you the news. Okay, let's take a break

880
00:48:06,760 --> 00:48:08,719
and then we'll talk about stories. Sounds good. We'll be

881
00:48:08,800 --> 00:48:10,440
right back after these important messages.

882
00:48:12,960 --> 00:48:15,880
Speaker 2: Did you know you can easily migrate asp net web

883
00:48:15,920 --> 00:48:20,000
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884
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885
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886
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more about app to Container at aws dot Amazon dot com,

887
00:48:34,760 --> 00:48:41,719
Slash dot net, slash Modernize, and we're back as the

888
00:48:41,760 --> 00:48:44,840
dot Net Rocks twenty twenty four Energy geek out with

889
00:48:44,960 --> 00:48:50,719
Richard Campbell. And as a reminder, how about this as

890
00:48:50,719 --> 00:48:53,920
a reminder, if you don't want these messages, you can

891
00:48:53,960 --> 00:48:57,000
become a patron at Patreon dot dot nerocks dot com

892
00:48:57,039 --> 00:48:58,920
five bucks a month to get you an ad free feed,

893
00:49:00,079 --> 00:49:05,559
and that list of patrons is growing. So what's next?

894
00:49:05,719 --> 00:49:11,039
Mister Campbell got a question from Kyle Nunnery on the twitters.

895
00:49:11,079 --> 00:49:13,679
I believe it was when he's asking about solid state batteries,

896
00:49:13,719 --> 00:49:17,519
and that just ties into power storage in general. Now

897
00:49:17,880 --> 00:49:21,039
we've heard about solid state batteries and then use for forever.

898
00:49:22,119 --> 00:49:23,679
It helps to try and to find what does it

899
00:49:23,760 --> 00:49:25,519
mean to be a solid state battery. This is the

900
00:49:25,599 --> 00:49:29,480
idea of having a solid electrolyte as opposed to a

901
00:49:29,519 --> 00:49:33,679
liquid or a gel or a lead acid battery uses

902
00:49:33,760 --> 00:49:38,239
lead as the cathode an anode, and the electrolyte is

903
00:49:38,280 --> 00:49:41,880
actually sulfuric acid. Right, don't get that stuff on your

904
00:49:41,880 --> 00:49:42,840
skin like it's bad.

905
00:49:43,519 --> 00:49:45,719
Speaker 1: When they get corroded, you don't want to just put

906
00:49:45,719 --> 00:49:47,360
them in the garbage. And then when you get into

907
00:49:47,400 --> 00:49:49,800
more of the gel based batteries, like a lithium ion batteries,

908
00:49:49,800 --> 00:49:51,360
a gel based battery, one of the problems with the

909
00:49:51,320 --> 00:49:54,599
electrolytes they grow dendrites. They throw these little crystal instructures

910
00:49:54,599 --> 00:49:57,679
that will eventually damage the battery and decreasely use. Can

911
00:49:57,719 --> 00:50:01,280
it cause a fire? You hear about a companies constantly

912
00:50:01,320 --> 00:50:06,320
talking about they got solid state batteries soon. Hyundai says

913
00:50:06,360 --> 00:50:09,320
they've got a pilot production for a solid state battery

914
00:50:09,320 --> 00:50:11,119
and a car for twenty twenty five. So that's supposed

915
00:50:11,119 --> 00:50:12,960
to be next year, but when you dig further, you go, oh,

916
00:50:13,039 --> 00:50:16,000
it's actually just a pilot. The mass p actually would

917
00:50:16,000 --> 00:50:19,239
be till twenty thirty. RUSSI finding companies that sort of

918
00:50:19,239 --> 00:50:23,280
manipulate the term solid state. There was recently you could

919
00:50:23,280 --> 00:50:27,239
buy on Amazon a little battery charger unit, you know,

920
00:50:27,440 --> 00:50:30,360
the size of a toaster. It was supposedly a solid

921
00:50:30,360 --> 00:50:35,280
state battery, although it turned out yes, the electrolyte was solid,

922
00:50:35,320 --> 00:50:40,440
but there were other liquids that were in it. So, okay, how.

923
00:50:40,960 --> 00:50:44,800
Speaker 2: Does the what is it the catalyst and the electrolyte,

924
00:50:44,880 --> 00:50:47,639
how do they How are they supposed to interact with

925
00:50:47,679 --> 00:50:50,239
each other? If they're both solid, it's supposed to be

926
00:50:50,400 --> 00:50:52,800
the electrons moving happily through a Rigis structure.

927
00:50:53,960 --> 00:50:56,360
Speaker 1: If you know, there's a reason they still have a

928
00:50:56,440 --> 00:51:00,360
release and it's got all the snake oil features, right

929
00:51:00,400 --> 00:51:02,679
Like when they talk about they talk about solvecyse batteries,

930
00:51:02,719 --> 00:51:04,440
they say it's going to be safer, and it's going

931
00:51:04,519 --> 00:51:06,360
to be denser, and it's going to last longer, and

932
00:51:06,360 --> 00:51:09,440
it's going to charge faster. It's going to julien your

933
00:51:09,519 --> 00:51:11,840
fries and washing toilets, Like.

934
00:51:13,360 --> 00:51:16,239
Speaker 2: Yeah, I remember graphine, Remember the promise of graphene that

935
00:51:16,320 --> 00:51:18,320
had a loss in that was going to be Yeah.

936
00:51:18,079 --> 00:51:20,320
Speaker 1: But again, all of the people that we're talking about

937
00:51:20,320 --> 00:51:23,960
that were the researchers who were looking for money, right, Sure,

938
00:51:24,000 --> 00:51:26,440
and maybe they got some money and now they're actually

939
00:51:26,480 --> 00:51:28,639
building things. We're seeing products here and there. But it's

940
00:51:28,679 --> 00:51:31,440
just not that simple, right turning something from something you

941
00:51:31,440 --> 00:51:33,840
can build in a lab is something you can buy

942
00:51:33,840 --> 00:51:38,840
on Amazon. It's a long difficult path, especially when it's new. Yes.

943
00:51:39,400 --> 00:51:43,320
So on the storage side, residential power storage just ties

944
00:51:43,360 --> 00:51:44,840
back into the question of what to do with access

945
00:51:44,880 --> 00:51:48,039
solar is about the batteries. The good news is if

946
00:51:48,079 --> 00:51:49,599
you don't want to buy power wall, you don't want

947
00:51:49,599 --> 00:51:52,480
to buy Tesla, you don't have to. Lots of companies

948
00:51:52,480 --> 00:51:55,360
now are making very good whole house battery systems. I

949
00:51:55,360 --> 00:51:59,239
would look at Anchor and Ecoflow, but try Phase. There's

950
00:51:59,280 --> 00:52:03,039
a bunch like Get and Face pick one like. They've

951
00:52:03,079 --> 00:52:05,920
all got merit and they're compatible. They're comparable to what

952
00:52:06,360 --> 00:52:07,000
Tesla's doing.

953
00:52:07,119 --> 00:52:13,079
Speaker 2: I remember talking about liquid methane and I remember hearing

954
00:52:13,119 --> 00:52:15,159
somebody on the radio a couple of years ago, now

955
00:52:15,320 --> 00:52:20,159
many two years ago now talking about how some sort

956
00:52:20,159 --> 00:52:22,000
of liquid. It might have been ethanol. It might have

957
00:52:22,039 --> 00:52:29,320
been methanol that can be generated by electricity and then

958
00:52:29,519 --> 00:52:31,239
used as a storage.

959
00:52:32,320 --> 00:52:37,320
Speaker 1: Mechanism. Am I well, am I hearing things? No, there's

960
00:52:37,440 --> 00:52:40,039
lots of different storage strategies out there. I mean, methane

961
00:52:40,079 --> 00:52:43,280
is remarkably simple to make because it's just carbon and hydrogen,

962
00:52:43,480 --> 00:52:45,880
But then you take certain amount of energy to make that,

963
00:52:45,920 --> 00:52:47,480
and you're only going to get a certain amount back,

964
00:52:47,719 --> 00:52:51,400
Like when you get into power storage, returns are really challenging.

965
00:52:51,480 --> 00:52:53,000
Just wait, I'm going to talk about hydrogen and then

966
00:52:53,000 --> 00:52:54,079
returns on their shock.

967
00:52:55,039 --> 00:52:58,320
Speaker 2: I think it was methanol that I was. Yeah, turn

968
00:52:58,360 --> 00:52:59,960
your excess energy into metha.

969
00:53:00,800 --> 00:53:03,519
Speaker 1: So yeah, if you think about power storage for your home,

970
00:53:03,920 --> 00:53:06,199
think about batteries. I'm going to talk about it at

971
00:53:06,480 --> 00:53:09,800
other storage techniques, but they need size to work, and

972
00:53:09,880 --> 00:53:13,760
so it doesn't make sense to really. They wouldn't work

973
00:53:13,760 --> 00:53:15,760
at a home scale. They work at a grid scale. Okay,

974
00:53:15,920 --> 00:53:18,480
because you know, Elon did us all a favor when

975
00:53:18,519 --> 00:53:20,679
they did that bet with Australia and put a whole

976
00:53:20,679 --> 00:53:24,639
bunch of power walls down in Victoria Province. This help

977
00:53:24,679 --> 00:53:26,840
stabilize power which worked, which is that he proved that

978
00:53:26,920 --> 00:53:30,719
grid scale batteries even possible. It's just that lithium I

979
00:53:30,800 --> 00:53:34,480
own batteries are exceptionally bad at that job. You know.

980
00:53:34,519 --> 00:53:38,079
Those Those batteries were designed to be light and power

981
00:53:38,280 --> 00:53:41,639
dense and quick acting, which is all features you want

982
00:53:41,639 --> 00:53:43,679
in a car, but isn't important for the grid. They

983
00:53:43,679 --> 00:53:47,920
also have a habit of exploding sometimes and they're costly. Right.

984
00:53:48,320 --> 00:53:52,320
So a spin off of some folks left Tesla to

985
00:53:52,480 --> 00:53:56,719
make grid scale batteries in a company called Form Energy.

986
00:53:57,199 --> 00:54:01,239
Their battery uses an iron air to which is resually

987
00:54:01,239 --> 00:54:04,280
pioneered by NASA. Yes, you are storing energy in rust.

988
00:54:05,559 --> 00:54:09,079
They are about the tenth the price of lithium ion batteries.

989
00:54:09,800 --> 00:54:13,239
They are much heavier, they run hot, and they are large,

990
00:54:13,960 --> 00:54:15,719
all things that aren't a big deal if you're just

991
00:54:15,840 --> 00:54:19,320
building grid power. They also have a natural discharge cycle

992
00:54:19,400 --> 00:54:22,840
of one hundred hours, as opposed to lithium ions six

993
00:54:22,880 --> 00:54:26,880
hour discharge cycle. Wow, so you're talking running for days.

994
00:54:27,920 --> 00:54:31,239
I've talked about them before off of Rust on Trust. Yeah,

995
00:54:31,280 --> 00:54:33,440
it's hilarious, isn't it. So I brought them up a

996
00:54:33,440 --> 00:54:36,599
couple of times this twenty twenty four They actually broke

997
00:54:36,599 --> 00:54:39,519
ground on a power storage facility in Minnesota for Great

998
00:54:39,599 --> 00:54:41,719
River Energy. This will be a one and a half

999
00:54:41,840 --> 00:54:45,079
megawat storage system and because it runs for one hundred hours,

1000
00:54:45,119 --> 00:54:48,719
that means one hundred and fifty megawatt hours. That's real power, man,

1001
00:54:49,079 --> 00:54:52,079
that's not trivial. And it is expected to be operational

1002
00:54:52,079 --> 00:54:54,320
in twenty twenty five. It was supposed to be done

1003
00:54:54,320 --> 00:54:56,920
in twenty twenty three, but you know, everything takes longer. Sure,

1004
00:54:57,400 --> 00:55:01,559
they are raising hundreds of millions, so they're not a

1005
00:55:01,599 --> 00:55:03,239
little bit of money. They're making the kind of money

1006
00:55:03,239 --> 00:55:05,079
that allows them to build bigger factory. So they've been

1007
00:55:05,119 --> 00:55:09,599
built a larger factory in Virginia. They've got a new

1008
00:55:09,679 --> 00:55:13,840
project going into Maine that is supposed to be eighty

1009
00:55:13,920 --> 00:55:17,159
five megawatts, So from one point five in Minnesota to

1010
00:55:17,239 --> 00:55:21,639
eighty five that is much one of the largest power

1011
00:55:21,679 --> 00:55:24,199
storage systems ever built. Very exciting.

1012
00:55:24,400 --> 00:55:27,559
Speaker 2: So I suppose you just need the space, right and

1013
00:55:27,719 --> 00:55:31,840
Maine's got some space some degree. It's they're not that big, right,

1014
00:55:32,519 --> 00:55:35,239
This is not as large as like a solar array.

1015
00:55:35,280 --> 00:55:36,840
It takes up a lot of area to make a

1016
00:55:36,840 --> 00:55:39,719
gig amount of power. These do days take a certain

1017
00:55:39,760 --> 00:55:41,519
amount of space. But this is a question of do

1018
00:55:41,559 --> 00:55:43,559
you have the offsets, do you need to store that

1019
00:55:43,599 --> 00:55:46,519
power then use it? How long do they last in

1020
00:55:46,599 --> 00:55:49,199
terms of years before they start failing.

1021
00:55:49,400 --> 00:55:52,760
Speaker 1: Well, everything needs maintenance. But the lifespan on these iron

1022
00:55:52,760 --> 00:55:56,320
air browders is very good. But we don't really know

1023
00:55:56,360 --> 00:55:58,440
because we've never built them at this size before. We'll

1024
00:55:58,679 --> 00:56:00,360
not really know if they last twenty years. The last

1025
00:56:00,360 --> 00:56:03,519
twenty years, but the expectations are x iron air battery

1026
00:56:03,599 --> 00:56:07,320
is okay. There's also a concept called thermal power storage,

1027
00:56:07,360 --> 00:56:09,400
and this is one of these things that works at scale.

1028
00:56:09,760 --> 00:56:13,559
So the idea is when you have excess energy right

1029
00:56:13,599 --> 00:56:16,360
your solar or your wind or whatever power source you're

1030
00:56:16,440 --> 00:56:19,039
using that's that you can't just shut off on demand

1031
00:56:19,760 --> 00:56:24,519
is doing this thing. Then you heat up a substrate

1032
00:56:25,000 --> 00:56:31,360
sand sand, graphite. I've also seen etwos thermal storage unit.

1033
00:56:31,440 --> 00:56:34,599
So these just you literally have a box full of

1034
00:56:34,639 --> 00:56:37,039
sand with electrical heating elements in it and it'll get

1035
00:56:37,119 --> 00:56:39,559
up to hundreds of degrees centigrade and then you have

1036
00:56:39,559 --> 00:56:41,000
a set of pipes running through it that you either

1037
00:56:41,039 --> 00:56:44,519
pump air or water through to heat that up, make

1038
00:56:44,559 --> 00:56:48,280
steam to spin a turbine, or even just to provide heat.

1039
00:56:49,360 --> 00:56:52,599
The big one that's being built right now is in

1040
00:56:52,760 --> 00:56:57,679
Finland Polar Night Energy, and it is a megawatt storing

1041
00:56:57,719 --> 00:57:00,119
one hundred megawatt hour, so comparable to what we're talking

1042
00:57:00,119 --> 00:57:02,679
about a Minnesota with form energy, Except this thing is

1043
00:57:02,760 --> 00:57:05,960
just a silo right now. Admittedly it weighs a lot

1044
00:57:06,039 --> 00:57:08,960
to store a mega wat they're actually using crushed soapstone,

1045
00:57:08,960 --> 00:57:11,719
which is a byproduct of a factory nearby. So they're

1046
00:57:11,719 --> 00:57:15,920
taking waste, grinding it down into smaller pieces and piling

1047
00:57:15,960 --> 00:57:19,440
it into a silo that's thirteen meters high and fifteen

1048
00:57:19,480 --> 00:57:23,639
meters wide. Wow, that's the size of a house. But

1049
00:57:23,679 --> 00:57:26,719
it stores a mega want of energy and can discharge

1050
00:57:26,760 --> 00:57:29,599
you know, over days and days and days with about

1051
00:57:29,599 --> 00:57:33,320
a ninety percent efficiency. So you know, especially in some

1052
00:57:33,760 --> 00:57:37,400
in Finland's place that far north, bright sunny winters, but

1053
00:57:37,440 --> 00:57:39,440
they only you know, the days are short, so in

1054
00:57:39,480 --> 00:57:40,960
those days you collect a lot of sort of power.

1055
00:57:41,000 --> 00:57:44,960
You heat up this sand, and then you have power

1056
00:57:45,039 --> 00:57:48,840
available to you in storage with you know, minimal moving parts,

1057
00:57:48,880 --> 00:57:54,079
nothing being burned. It's just a big container of powdered soapstone.

1058
00:57:54,119 --> 00:57:56,159
Speaker 2: Now, I haven't seen your notes, and I don't know

1059
00:57:56,159 --> 00:57:57,880
if you're going to talk about this or not, but

1060
00:57:58,480 --> 00:58:03,840
there's always seems to be people talking about using landfill

1061
00:58:04,280 --> 00:58:10,480
mass to burn and clean burn. That's the key, maybe

1062
00:58:10,519 --> 00:58:14,320
at such a high temperature that smoke doesn't get out

1063
00:58:14,679 --> 00:58:18,119
and pollute. I seem to hear about this, you know,

1064
00:58:18,199 --> 00:58:20,760
every once in a while, But I have no idea

1065
00:58:20,800 --> 00:58:25,880
what the state of this potential energy sources.

1066
00:58:26,239 --> 00:58:29,000
Speaker 1: I hadn't planned on talking about biomass burning. I do

1067
00:58:29,079 --> 00:58:30,719
talk about it in the Future of energy talking. You

1068
00:58:30,760 --> 00:58:34,239
can find that on YouTube. Biomass tends to be an

1069
00:58:34,320 --> 00:58:41,159
opportunistic power generation source. So you have waste biomass like

1070
00:58:41,360 --> 00:58:47,000
you are a wheat pool, and so as you clean,

1071
00:58:47,400 --> 00:58:49,400
remove the wheat from the chaff, and so forth, you

1072
00:58:49,440 --> 00:58:51,840
get the wheat packaged up to be shipped. You have

1073
00:58:51,920 --> 00:58:54,239
all of this agro waste that comes out of it.

1074
00:58:54,800 --> 00:58:57,599
You can take that agro waste and burn it to

1075
00:58:57,639 --> 00:58:59,960
boil water and spend a turbine and make a little

1076
00:59:00,039 --> 00:59:04,320
with electricity. They're small and they're localized. The technique you're

1077
00:59:04,320 --> 00:59:07,480
talking about that has the minimum emissions is called pyrolysis.

1078
00:59:08,159 --> 00:59:10,480
Typically there's two weight approaches to it. You either use

1079
00:59:10,519 --> 00:59:13,239
a digestion process where you use bacteria to change the

1080
00:59:13,320 --> 00:59:16,559
material so it doesn't mean as much carbon dioxide, or

1081
00:59:16,639 --> 00:59:18,719
you burn it a very high temperature so that the

1082
00:59:18,760 --> 00:59:20,920
carbon is blown off the oxygen and you end up

1083
00:59:20,920 --> 00:59:25,880
with graphic individuals they're not Pyrolysis is hot, and so

1084
00:59:26,199 --> 00:59:31,559
it tends to use more energy than it emits. So

1085
00:59:31,840 --> 00:59:33,840
it's it's one of the reasons these things haven't taken off.

1086
00:59:33,920 --> 00:59:37,280
They're just not that easy. The fuel matters and biomass

1087
00:59:37,280 --> 00:59:38,400
tends to be irregular.

1088
00:59:38,519 --> 00:59:41,639
Speaker 2: I have a fire pit. It's a Solo brand, a

1089
00:59:41,719 --> 00:59:45,960
solo stove, it's called, and it has just a mechanical design.

1090
00:59:46,039 --> 00:59:49,360
There's I mean, it's just a it's just the shape

1091
00:59:49,360 --> 00:59:52,719
of it works in such a way that once the

1092
00:59:52,760 --> 00:59:56,719
fire gets going, the smoke is like sucked in through

1093
00:59:56,840 --> 00:59:59,159
holes either in the bottom or the top or something,

1094
00:59:59,519 --> 01:00:03,119
and it gets it's burned again, and it literally is

1095
01:00:03,239 --> 01:00:06,239
smokeless when it starts. Of course you have all sorts

1096
01:00:06,239 --> 01:00:08,920
of smoke, but when that thing gets going, you don't

1097
01:00:09,119 --> 01:00:11,480
see smell anything.

1098
01:00:11,719 --> 01:00:14,760
Speaker 1: I mean, it's still emissions, they're just not particulate, right,

1099
01:00:14,880 --> 01:00:18,400
So yeah, hot fires burn cleaner. Yeah, all right, let's

1100
01:00:18,599 --> 01:00:19,159
finish up.

1101
01:00:19,239 --> 01:00:21,920
Speaker 2: So the idea is, you know, landfills are full of

1102
01:00:21,960 --> 01:00:25,719
crap that isn't going to biod grade, and you know,

1103
01:00:25,840 --> 01:00:29,519
people talk about burning that stuff in some sort of

1104
01:00:29,880 --> 01:00:35,119
really high hot, high heat manner so as to not

1105
01:00:35,239 --> 01:00:36,000
be as polluting.

1106
01:00:36,519 --> 01:00:39,079
Speaker 1: But anyway, it's going to cost a lot of energy.

1107
01:00:39,159 --> 01:00:41,639
It's all. If we had access energy, it's possibility. It's

1108
01:00:41,639 --> 01:00:42,840
a way to clean up the mass, but it's not

1109
01:00:42,840 --> 01:00:45,320
a way to make power. Okay, all right, finishing up storage.

1110
01:00:46,239 --> 01:00:50,000
China put online the largest flywheel energy storage system in

1111
01:00:50,039 --> 01:00:53,920
the world in ding Lundon. It's one hundred and twenty

1112
01:00:53,960 --> 01:00:57,920
flywheels able to generate about thirty megawatts of energy. So

1113
01:00:57,960 --> 01:00:59,760
what are we talking about? Yeah, what does that imagine

1114
01:00:59,760 --> 01:01:03,480
is cylinder about two meters across and six meters long,

1115
01:01:03,559 --> 01:01:07,840
buried in the ground with a large metallic cylinder inside

1116
01:01:07,880 --> 01:01:10,119
of it that you spin up with electricity and it

1117
01:01:10,159 --> 01:01:12,119
has so much momentum that you can then tap that

1118
01:01:12,159 --> 01:01:16,599
electricity back off of it again. Okay, just a spinning flywheel.

1119
01:01:16,639 --> 01:01:17,920
This is one hundred and twenty of them. They're buried

1120
01:01:17,960 --> 01:01:20,000
in the ground for a reason. When they come apart,

1121
01:01:20,239 --> 01:01:23,079
they fly, so you keep them in the ground to

1122
01:01:23,159 --> 01:01:26,440
keep them safe. They don't start power for very long.

1123
01:01:26,519 --> 01:01:29,880
They're good for stabilizing the grid, so if you're switching,

1124
01:01:30,119 --> 01:01:32,599
you know solars coming down because it's night and you're

1125
01:01:32,639 --> 01:01:35,920
powering up your other plants. As the power gets a

1126
01:01:35,920 --> 01:01:38,960
little unstable, these flywheels really come into play. It's the

1127
01:01:39,039 --> 01:01:41,320
largest in the world. The second largest, the one that

1128
01:01:41,360 --> 01:01:43,480
it beat out was actually in Stevens Style in New

1129
01:01:43,559 --> 01:01:47,360
York Beacon Power. It's a twenty megawat system. So these

1130
01:01:47,360 --> 01:01:51,199
are not that weird. They but they don't scale particularly

1131
01:01:51,199 --> 01:01:53,440
well and they don't start power for long. They're great

1132
01:01:53,519 --> 01:01:57,159
for the several minutes where you need to stabilize the grid.

1133
01:01:57,199 --> 01:02:00,239
They're not designed to run for days. Got it. Power

1134
01:02:00,280 --> 01:02:03,079
storage The largest in the world is pump tydro right,

1135
01:02:03,159 --> 01:02:05,000
that's pumping water uphills so you can let it flow

1136
01:02:05,079 --> 01:02:08,119
back downhill. Has about an eighty ninety percent efficiency ratio.

1137
01:02:08,559 --> 01:02:11,639
Today there's about one hundred and twenty five gigawatts of

1138
01:02:11,719 --> 01:02:14,599
pumped hydro in the world. There was a great study

1139
01:02:14,599 --> 01:02:17,719
I talked about last year from the Australian University about

1140
01:02:17,719 --> 01:02:20,199
how how many pumped hydro sites exist in the world

1141
01:02:20,280 --> 01:02:23,199
that could be built is the place different from a

1142
01:02:23,280 --> 01:02:25,239
hydro electric site where you need to have flowing water

1143
01:02:25,239 --> 01:02:26,960
at the top of a hill and you control it

1144
01:02:27,000 --> 01:02:28,360
going down to the bottom of a hill, and that

1145
01:02:28,400 --> 01:02:30,119
makes power. This is I have flowing water at the

1146
01:02:30,119 --> 01:02:32,400
bottom of a hill, right, so I put the reservoir

1147
01:02:32,440 --> 01:02:33,920
at the top of the hill, pump the water up there,

1148
01:02:33,960 --> 01:02:35,360
and bring it back down when I need it. There's

1149
01:02:35,400 --> 01:02:38,519
lots more sites for that. There are about two hundred

1150
01:02:38,519 --> 01:02:43,599
gigawatts of pump hydro indevelopment, so almost double what already exists. Wow.

1151
01:02:43,960 --> 01:02:47,000
So we're catching on to different ways to store power.

1152
01:02:47,000 --> 01:02:51,480
It's not just about batteries. There's thermal, there's gravity, lots

1153
01:02:51,519 --> 01:02:56,039
of choices for stormpower. Nice. All right, Let you wanted

1154
01:02:56,039 --> 01:02:58,000
to talk about poweralysis, It is probably a good time

1155
01:02:58,000 --> 01:03:01,320
to talk about hydrogen because hydrogen involves paralysis. Now, all right.

1156
01:03:02,559 --> 01:03:05,079
You get a lot of noise about hydrogen these days,

1157
01:03:05,199 --> 01:03:07,280
and there's a very good reason for it. It's good for

1158
01:03:07,320 --> 01:03:10,719
the oil and gas industry. Why why does the oil

1159
01:03:10,719 --> 01:03:12,800
and gas industry like hydrogen. I see the writing on

1160
01:03:12,840 --> 01:03:16,039
the wall that the pressure's on to burn less hydrocarbons,

1161
01:03:16,599 --> 01:03:20,000
But they own all these pipelines and things, and hydrogen

1162
01:03:20,079 --> 01:03:22,960
can be piped too, so instead of pumping natural gas

1163
01:03:22,960 --> 01:03:24,920
through those pipes, you could be piping through hydrogen. Not

1164
01:03:25,000 --> 01:03:28,880
that it's easy, hydrogen is remarkably good at escaping and

1165
01:03:28,920 --> 01:03:33,480
it's not particularly efficient, but they still it's an option

1166
01:03:34,119 --> 01:03:36,159
for them to keep running the infrastructure. So when you

1167
01:03:36,159 --> 01:03:39,239
hear about hydrogen economies, just remember that's because the oil

1168
01:03:39,239 --> 01:03:41,159
and gas industry likes it the most, because it's got

1169
01:03:41,239 --> 01:03:44,719
lots of problems. Now, it's not like we don't use

1170
01:03:44,800 --> 01:03:47,760
hydrogen today. It's used in industrial processes. We don't use

1171
01:03:47,760 --> 01:03:50,599
it for energy generation, we use it for industrial processes.

1172
01:03:50,639 --> 01:03:54,159
It's how you hydrogenate soybean oil. You need hydrogen, and

1173
01:03:54,239 --> 01:03:56,880
so the mechanism that's used to make the majority of

1174
01:03:56,920 --> 01:04:01,039
hydrogen today is called steam reformation, which is typically you

1175
01:04:01,079 --> 01:04:05,679
take methane and you blast it to blow the carbon

1176
01:04:05,719 --> 01:04:07,480
off the hydrogen. You store the hydrogen, you let the

1177
01:04:07,519 --> 01:04:11,480
carbon go as carbon dioxides. So for every ton of

1178
01:04:11,840 --> 01:04:15,880
hydrogen gas you make, it takes about six megawatt hours

1179
01:04:15,880 --> 01:04:19,440
of electricity, and you produce a ton of hydrogen at

1180
01:04:19,440 --> 01:04:22,639
about nine to twelve tons of carbon dioxide. It's a

1181
01:04:22,679 --> 01:04:25,800
messy process, but it works. And so again we will

1182
01:04:25,800 --> 01:04:29,480
only make a certain amount of hydrogen today for industrial processes.

1183
01:04:29,920 --> 01:04:31,320
But if we want to scale it up for the

1184
01:04:31,360 --> 01:04:34,360
so called hydrogen economy, we need to get more efficient.

1185
01:04:34,440 --> 01:04:36,880
That one is to get rid of the carbon dioxide.

1186
01:04:36,920 --> 01:04:40,079
So if you up the power consumption four times to

1187
01:04:40,119 --> 01:04:44,559
about twenty five megawatt hours, you can do methane pyrolysis.

1188
01:04:45,400 --> 01:04:49,559
So now you're blowing the oxygen, the hydrogen and carbon apart,

1189
01:04:49,880 --> 01:04:51,599
but you're not allowing oxygen to bind to it because

1190
01:04:51,599 --> 01:04:53,639
the energy levels are too high. So you get out

1191
01:04:54,079 --> 01:04:57,920
a ton of hydrogen and about three tons of graphite,

1192
01:04:58,239 --> 01:05:01,719
carbon powder and barry. If you want to secure the

1193
01:05:01,760 --> 01:05:05,159
carbon that way, it's questioning or use the graphite like

1194
01:05:05,199 --> 01:05:07,960
it's up to you. It just takes a lot of energy. Right.

1195
01:05:08,119 --> 01:05:10,320
The one that everybody wants, the one everybody loves, the

1196
01:05:10,440 --> 01:05:14,360
so called green hydrogen. The other steam reformation being gray

1197
01:05:15,039 --> 01:05:19,880
and making it water. It's making from water electrolysis, electronity.

1198
01:05:20,719 --> 01:05:23,679
So this is you've seen these experiments in your in

1199
01:05:23,719 --> 01:05:26,480
your science labs. Pretty easy. You can take a battery

1200
01:05:26,519 --> 01:05:28,599
and put two leads in water and you'll get bubbles out.

1201
01:05:28,599 --> 01:05:30,159
One of the bubbles will be hydrogen, the other one

1202
01:05:30,199 --> 01:05:33,559
will be oxygen. Beautiful. To do electrolysis at scale to

1203
01:05:33,639 --> 01:05:37,239
make a ton of hydrogen gas, you need about sixty

1204
01:05:37,480 --> 01:05:42,480
megawatts megawatt hours of energy. Okay, so ten times what

1205
01:05:42,599 --> 01:05:45,000
it costs to make an energy what it takes to

1206
01:05:45,000 --> 01:05:47,639
make a ton of hydrogen with steam reformation. You'll also

1207
01:05:47,639 --> 01:05:50,280
make eight tons of auction. But nobody minds that, right,

1208
01:05:51,000 --> 01:05:54,800
and so it's just too costly. Like here's the here's

1209
01:05:54,800 --> 01:05:56,679
the other equation. So I have this hydrogen gas and

1210
01:05:56,719 --> 01:06:00,320
I want to make electricity from it. So the most

1211
01:06:00,400 --> 01:06:03,960
efficient way to make energy from hydrogen right now is

1212
01:06:04,000 --> 01:06:06,400
in a fuel cell R right. We use these on

1213
01:06:06,440 --> 01:06:10,039
the Space Shuttle. They're pretty expensive and finicky machines.

1214
01:06:09,679 --> 01:06:15,039
Speaker 2: Reverse osmosis, I think, right, what's that reverse osmosis machine? Yeah,

1215
01:06:15,159 --> 01:06:15,559
kind of thing.

1216
01:06:16,159 --> 01:06:18,880
Speaker 1: It's a little more. Yeah, there's a protein exchange membrane.

1217
01:06:18,920 --> 01:06:21,639
You're basically forcing the hydrogen and auction back together. You

1218
01:06:21,719 --> 01:06:25,719
make water, you get electricity from it for a Typically

1219
01:06:25,719 --> 01:06:28,639
from a fuel cell, you'll get three point three six

1220
01:06:28,719 --> 01:06:31,960
megawat hours of electricity for one ton of hydrogen. You

1221
01:06:32,079 --> 01:06:35,159
pull the oxygen from the atmosphere. So that's about fifty

1222
01:06:35,239 --> 01:06:38,039
percent of the energy that it costs to break out

1223
01:06:38,079 --> 01:06:43,320
that hydrogen with steam reformation. It's five percent of the

1224
01:06:43,400 --> 01:06:45,679
energy that it costs to get it from electrolysis. So

1225
01:06:45,760 --> 01:06:46,880
this is a loser.

1226
01:06:47,000 --> 01:06:50,800
Speaker 2: It's a loser, especially when you consider electric cars are

1227
01:06:50,840 --> 01:06:55,039
already here and they're already efficient, and why would you

1228
01:06:55,440 --> 01:06:58,440
just add all these extra steps to put hydrogen in

1229
01:06:58,480 --> 01:07:02,360
a car. It's such a loss. Yeah, and it's hard

1230
01:07:02,440 --> 01:07:05,719
to store, all right, Hydrogen wants to escape. It goes

1231
01:07:05,719 --> 01:07:11,119
through most metals. It's the smallest atom, so it's very tough. Also,

1232
01:07:11,239 --> 01:07:14,679
it's tough to pump because it's a low density gas.

1233
01:07:15,239 --> 01:07:17,239
You've got to pump a lot more of it to

1234
01:07:17,280 --> 01:07:19,559
move the same amount of energy. Like methane is way

1235
01:07:19,599 --> 01:07:22,599
more efficient in every respect. Oh, there's another problem with hydrogen.

1236
01:07:23,039 --> 01:07:24,159
It goes boom.

1237
01:07:24,199 --> 01:07:27,519
Speaker 1: Well, so does methane. Right, we can cope with that,

1238
01:07:28,159 --> 01:07:29,000
but it's.

1239
01:07:28,840 --> 01:07:32,079
Speaker 2: Not that Yeah, Well, trying to trying to contain it

1240
01:07:32,159 --> 01:07:35,559
and keep it safe. You know, if you get into

1241
01:07:35,599 --> 01:07:39,559
an accident in a gasoline powered car, Yeah, you have

1242
01:07:39,639 --> 01:07:42,840
the gasoline kind of burns slow, right, so it doesn't

1243
01:07:42,880 --> 01:07:44,199
necessarily explode.

1244
01:07:44,199 --> 01:07:44,559
Speaker 1: But if you.

1245
01:07:44,559 --> 01:07:47,199
Speaker 2: Puncture a hydrogen tank, game over, man.

1246
01:07:47,239 --> 01:07:50,920
Speaker 1: Well it'll it depends. Yeah, it's not that. It's not

1247
01:07:51,000 --> 01:07:54,440
a fast explosive. So right now it costs about five

1248
01:07:54,440 --> 01:07:56,800
thousand dollars to make a mega to make a ton

1249
01:07:56,880 --> 01:08:00,800
of hydrogen about five bucks a kilo. They Department of

1250
01:08:00,880 --> 01:08:04,239
Energy is working has an initiative none of these shot

1251
01:08:04,280 --> 01:08:06,920
things called the hydrogen shot where they're trying to get

1252
01:08:06,960 --> 01:08:08,679
it down to a dollar keel or about a thousand

1253
01:08:08,719 --> 01:08:11,880
dollars and stuff. They don't have any way of actually

1254
01:08:11,920 --> 01:08:16,720
doing that. They're just trying, so it's a challenging project.

1255
01:08:16,800 --> 01:08:19,199
One of the areas where electrolysis kind of gets interesting

1256
01:08:19,239 --> 01:08:21,079
here is when you get back to that excess solar

1257
01:08:21,119 --> 01:08:24,840
thing or even excess wind, I mean, any of these

1258
01:08:24,840 --> 01:08:29,039
power generation methods where they we can't control when they generate.

1259
01:08:29,079 --> 01:08:31,399
They just generate. If you have access power, you could

1260
01:08:31,439 --> 01:08:34,720
be doing electrollsy essentially for free, but you do have

1261
01:08:34,800 --> 01:08:38,479
to store the hydrogen and move it and none of

1262
01:08:38,479 --> 01:08:43,399
that is free. Mm so, but it's still understanding that

1263
01:08:43,399 --> 01:08:45,800
the electrolysis is the most expensive part. It just consumes

1264
01:08:45,840 --> 01:08:48,720
a lot of energy. It's one of the possibilities.

1265
01:08:48,079 --> 01:08:51,720
Speaker 2: Well, and also given the fact that you know that

1266
01:08:51,840 --> 01:08:54,720
electricity could be just going right to the grid to

1267
01:08:54,760 --> 01:08:58,760
power electric vehicles and other things that require electricity.

1268
01:08:58,319 --> 01:09:02,520
Speaker 1: Yeah, or stored in batteries or thermal like strain batteries. Yeah, exactly,

1269
01:09:02,560 --> 01:09:06,840
it's just why do the hydrogen conversion? Exactly? That's my position.

1270
01:09:07,039 --> 01:09:11,439
All right, let's move on from hydrogen to geothermal cool

1271
01:09:11,560 --> 01:09:14,720
We're now getting into the area where geothermal power plants.

1272
01:09:14,800 --> 01:09:19,159
The ones that work traditional they're really efficient, like stunning

1273
01:09:19,199 --> 01:09:23,199
the capacity factors ninety percent. Wow, they're not big. There's

1274
01:09:23,199 --> 01:09:25,000
not a lot of geothermal in the world for a reason.

1275
01:09:25,439 --> 01:09:30,079
Most geothermal power comes from geysers Iceland, for example. So

1276
01:09:30,159 --> 01:09:33,439
you're looking for interface points in the earth where you

1277
01:09:33,640 --> 01:09:39,800
have a wet system being heated by the rock underneath it. Yea.

1278
01:09:40,000 --> 01:09:43,800
So places like Iceland, Indonesia, New Zealand, where they have

1279
01:09:44,319 --> 01:09:47,479
quite a lot of volcanic activity, they've got these geyser

1280
01:09:47,520 --> 01:09:53,039
basins think Yellowstone, Yeah right, so weird colored pools, occasional

1281
01:09:53,079 --> 01:09:55,039
spouting guysers, that kind of thing. This stuff, by the way,

1282
01:09:55,079 --> 01:09:58,560
all over New Zealand too. But they realize the energy

1283
01:09:58,600 --> 01:10:01,800
potential of it. Years ago, and so they drill into it,

1284
01:10:01,880 --> 01:10:05,239
put pipes down to bring that hot water up, spin

1285
01:10:05,239 --> 01:10:08,000
a turbine and then pump back down. It does destroy

1286
01:10:08,119 --> 01:10:10,279
the guys are bed in the process. These systems are

1287
01:10:10,359 --> 01:10:13,199
very fragile, and so as soon as you mess with

1288
01:10:13,199 --> 01:10:16,239
them in any way, they go away. Like one would argue,

1289
01:10:16,279 --> 01:10:19,600
they're more valuable as amazing tourist destinations than they are.

1290
01:10:19,720 --> 01:10:21,520
New Zealand destroyed a bunch of them. It's one of

1291
01:10:21,560 --> 01:10:23,720
the reasons that Yellowstone is so heavily protected because the

1292
01:10:23,760 --> 01:10:27,760
experience of any country trying to tap that power that

1293
01:10:27,840 --> 01:10:31,439
way is it's an industrial site after that, and they

1294
01:10:31,439 --> 01:10:34,399
do fail. Like you disrupt that water flow, sometimes that

1295
01:10:34,439 --> 01:10:37,319
water goes away. I just go right into a volcano.

1296
01:10:37,680 --> 01:10:40,159
You know, well, yeah, he's coming to Mount Saint Helens.

1297
01:10:40,520 --> 01:10:45,760
So there's the traditional geothermal is what call a wet

1298
01:10:45,840 --> 01:10:48,279
rock model. So you already have voids in the rock

1299
01:10:48,359 --> 01:10:50,159
that build up steam so that you can take that

1300
01:10:50,199 --> 01:10:52,479
power and so forth. But we know there's lots of

1301
01:10:52,720 --> 01:10:55,600
dry rock right that's very hot. It just doesn't have

1302
01:10:55,720 --> 01:10:58,119
water in it right, right, And you can't really pump

1303
01:10:58,159 --> 01:11:01,720
water into it because it's essentially in perma. So what's

1304
01:11:01,760 --> 01:11:03,439
happened in the past few years, and again I've talked

1305
01:11:03,439 --> 01:11:07,600
about this before. The companies have gotten together using fracking techniques,

1306
01:11:08,000 --> 01:11:12,600
so horizontal drilling combined with vertical drilling to make wet

1307
01:11:12,680 --> 01:11:16,479
rock structures. So they use horizontal drilling and fracking to

1308
01:11:16,560 --> 01:11:20,319
go into a dry rock bed. The fracking actually creates

1309
01:11:20,359 --> 01:11:22,119
the voids to give you a place to water. Then

1310
01:11:22,159 --> 01:11:24,800
you have vertical pipes coming down on one side of

1311
01:11:24,840 --> 01:11:27,119
that void to pump the water in, and vertical pipes

1312
01:11:27,159 --> 01:11:28,800
on the other side to take that hot water back

1313
01:11:28,840 --> 01:11:32,439
out and spinder and this we talked about this last year.

1314
01:11:33,279 --> 01:11:38,920
Fervo in Nevada and Utah built test plants, megawatt sized

1315
01:11:38,920 --> 01:11:41,960
power plants using this technique, and the big thing they

1316
01:11:42,039 --> 01:11:44,800
pointed out was that they even had one of them

1317
01:11:45,079 --> 01:11:47,000
break right then. One of the things happens when you

1318
01:11:47,039 --> 01:11:49,359
slam cold water down on hot rocks is those rocks

1319
01:11:49,439 --> 01:11:52,520
move and the water stop flowing. But they were able

1320
01:11:52,560 --> 01:11:56,359
to use the horizontal drilling method to re establish the bed.

1321
01:11:56,760 --> 01:12:00,880
So it's got possibilities and they've raised a ton of money.

1322
01:12:00,880 --> 01:12:03,560
In fact, Utah has now got this new project could

1323
01:12:03,560 --> 01:12:07,560
call Operation gigawatt where they want to start scaling out

1324
01:12:07,560 --> 01:12:10,640
geothermal and nuclear power to provide a farm or energy.

1325
01:12:11,119 --> 01:12:15,239
So they've licensed Fervo to build out a two gigawatt

1326
01:12:15,319 --> 01:12:20,520
geothermal power plant in Utah that would be as much

1327
01:12:20,640 --> 01:12:23,920
geothermal has has ever been built in the US. Wow.

1328
01:12:24,079 --> 01:12:27,079
Like you're really talking about doubling it. Wow, And they

1329
01:12:27,119 --> 01:12:29,279
are bringing the kind of money that's supposed to work.

1330
01:12:29,720 --> 01:12:34,039
On a previous show, I mentioned microwave drilling. So traditional

1331
01:12:34,159 --> 01:12:39,199
drilling uses diamond headed tips and casements and mud. So

1332
01:12:39,279 --> 01:12:41,279
you drill down in the ground and you're grinding up

1333
01:12:41,319 --> 01:12:43,079
the rock and that rock gets in the ways you

1334
01:12:43,119 --> 01:12:45,840
grind it up right, so you pump down a slurry

1335
01:12:45,920 --> 01:12:48,800
mud that helps lift that rock out of the pipe

1336
01:12:48,840 --> 01:12:51,520
so that you can keep drilling down. Eventually headwear is out.

1337
01:12:51,560 --> 01:12:53,359
You got to back all the way out, use casements

1338
01:12:53,359 --> 01:12:55,119
to stop the hole from classes. Like, drilling is a

1339
01:12:55,159 --> 01:12:57,880
complicated set of technologies. And don't even get me started

1340
01:12:57,920 --> 01:13:00,840
on horizontal drilling where they actually turn corners and things

1341
01:13:00,840 --> 01:13:04,439
with these casements. It's astonishing technology which the US leads

1342
01:13:04,439 --> 01:13:07,000
the world. Well, we should talk about fracking before we

1343
01:13:07,239 --> 01:13:09,039
wrap up here. I don't know if now it's the

1344
01:13:09,119 --> 01:13:11,720
right time, but we should talk about it. Sure, I

1345
01:13:11,800 --> 01:13:15,000
know that based on what I've learned in the last

1346
01:13:15,079 --> 01:13:19,399
few years, mostly from talking to you, fracking kind of

1347
01:13:19,439 --> 01:13:23,960
reinvented the energy boom of the United States. The US

1348
01:13:24,039 --> 01:13:26,479
is now export back one of the largest in the world.

1349
01:13:26,640 --> 01:13:29,880
Speaker 2: Yeah, also has its critics, I believe it or not.

1350
01:13:30,000 --> 01:13:35,560
My family is intimately involved in my bigger family. One

1351
01:13:35,600 --> 01:13:38,359
of my cousins out in Pennsylvania was the guy in

1352
01:13:38,399 --> 01:13:43,520
Bradford County who has that YouTube video of famously lighting

1353
01:13:43,560 --> 01:13:44,720
his tap on fire.

1354
01:13:44,960 --> 01:13:48,359
Speaker 1: Right, his methane was coming through his water's block, correct. Yeah.

1355
01:13:48,399 --> 01:13:51,960
And the oil industry did fracking very sneaky, right. Instead

1356
01:13:51,960 --> 01:13:54,119
of the big companies doing it, they had little groups

1357
01:13:54,199 --> 01:13:57,000
develop it so there was nobody to sue and they

1358
01:13:57,079 --> 01:14:02,079
experimented on people essentially. Yeah, they've now learned not to

1359
01:14:02,159 --> 01:14:05,239
drill into a water table. Yeah, but you know the

1360
01:14:05,359 --> 01:14:09,920
essence of this technology is to drill into non permeable

1361
01:14:09,920 --> 01:14:14,680
oil bearing rock, frack it to loosen the oil and extract, yeah, which.

1362
01:14:14,560 --> 01:14:18,399
Speaker 2: Means fracture, fracture it, and then extract the gas. And

1363
01:14:18,760 --> 01:14:22,520
there's also critics who say that it causes earthquakes.

1364
01:14:22,520 --> 01:14:24,640
Speaker 1: What do you say about that. I think it absolutely does.

1365
01:14:24,880 --> 01:14:27,920
But they're small and they're not fault line earthquakes. They're

1366
01:14:27,920 --> 01:14:30,239
not going to continue. But the bottom line is, when

1367
01:14:30,279 --> 01:14:34,840
you move rock to free oil, that's an earthquake. By definition,

1368
01:14:35,079 --> 01:14:37,920
you equaked the earth. Yeah, I guess you're right there.

1369
01:14:38,199 --> 01:14:42,279
Speaker 2: And so do you see fracking in the United States

1370
01:14:42,319 --> 01:14:47,479
continuing and expanding and perhaps being exported elsewhere.

1371
01:14:47,680 --> 01:14:51,119
Speaker 1: Well, other countries have rejected it, other countries have embraced it.

1372
01:14:51,680 --> 01:14:54,720
The US is a net oil exporter for a reason

1373
01:14:54,760 --> 01:14:58,039
that technology works. You've noticed this not in the news

1374
01:14:58,119 --> 01:15:01,880
much so they've largely resolved the issues. But I don't

1375
01:15:01,920 --> 01:15:06,239
know an administration in recent history that didn't say drill, baby, drill.

1376
01:15:07,119 --> 01:15:10,319
And it's certainly changed the geopolitics of the world to

1377
01:15:10,359 --> 01:15:14,560
have the USB and net petrochemical exporter, so it doesn't

1378
01:15:14,600 --> 01:15:18,079
seem like it's going away. Last year I mentioned microwave drilling.

1379
01:15:18,119 --> 01:15:20,600
The company is called Quay's Energy, where they had this

1380
01:15:20,760 --> 01:15:23,680
high frequency microwave that would drill into the ground by

1381
01:15:23,720 --> 01:15:28,359
melting the rock. Very cool, very science fiction, very demoable,

1382
01:15:28,680 --> 01:15:33,319
not particularly practical. It's a tremendous amount of energy The

1383
01:15:33,399 --> 01:15:36,520
idea here was that you vaporized the rock with microwaves

1384
01:15:36,520 --> 01:15:39,000
and that rock would embed itself to become its own casement,

1385
01:15:39,039 --> 01:15:41,640
which is a cool idea. It just doesn't work at depth.

1386
01:15:42,399 --> 01:15:45,239
Then you need to pump more and more pressurized air

1387
01:15:45,399 --> 01:15:50,239
in as you're doing that, which takes more energy. It's problematic.

1388
01:15:50,319 --> 01:15:52,520
So it's and then looking at their funding and what's

1389
01:15:52,560 --> 01:15:55,279
been currently going on, I think everybody's figured out it's

1390
01:15:55,279 --> 01:15:58,439
not going to go anywhere, So okay, it's not a thing.

1391
01:16:00,039 --> 01:16:04,520
Matt Furder asked on one of the social media's about

1392
01:16:04,600 --> 01:16:08,600
volcanic geo thermal, which hearkens back to the super Volcano

1393
01:16:08,680 --> 01:16:12,479
show we did fifteen sixty four back in July twenty eighteen. Yeah,

1394
01:16:12,520 --> 01:16:14,239
and I just said, why not just stick a pipe

1395
01:16:14,239 --> 01:16:16,640
into Mount Saint Helens to see what happened. This wouldn't

1396
01:16:16,640 --> 01:16:19,399
be my first choice. It's kind of a messy place.

1397
01:16:19,479 --> 01:16:22,560
Look all of the geo thermal it exists in the US,

1398
01:16:22,600 --> 01:16:27,880
which is in California, Nevada, Utah is volcanic geothermal. Right,

1399
01:16:28,319 --> 01:16:33,039
there's called errors is young immature volcano. Magma buds all over.

1400
01:16:33,079 --> 01:16:34,640
That's what's heating up the water on the rock in

1401
01:16:34,680 --> 01:16:38,359
the first place, relatively close to the surface. There was

1402
01:16:38,399 --> 01:16:40,680
the reason I did that super volcano show is that

1403
01:16:40,720 --> 01:16:44,359
I had read the paper from NASA about how to

1404
01:16:44,399 --> 01:16:50,520
defeat the Yellowstone supervolcano. Right that the Yellowstone super volcano

1405
01:16:50,520 --> 01:16:53,479
has erupted every six hundred thousand years for the past

1406
01:16:53,640 --> 01:16:57,079
two point four million years, and the last eruption was

1407
01:16:57,119 --> 01:17:00,560
six hundred thousand years ago, which is yeah, twice the

1408
01:17:00,680 --> 01:17:04,760
duration that humans have existed on the planet. What would

1409
01:17:04,840 --> 01:17:06,359
we do if we knew it was going to happen.

1410
01:17:06,399 --> 01:17:10,000
We're pretty good at understanding volcanic behavior now, So if

1411
01:17:10,039 --> 01:17:15,279
they Yellowstone Caldera was to start rising, aka magma pressure

1412
01:17:15,319 --> 01:17:17,680
is building up, what could we do about that? Because

1413
01:17:17,720 --> 01:17:20,319
that a volcano erupting a super volcano is hard to

1414
01:17:20,319 --> 01:17:24,239
conceive of it's several kilometers across. Would literally drop ash

1415
01:17:24,560 --> 01:17:27,199
in a swath going east all the way to the

1416
01:17:27,239 --> 01:17:33,239
Atlantic Ocean, several hundred kilometers across, Like it would be bad. Yeah,

1417
01:17:33,279 --> 01:17:36,439
And so the idea was put a series of pipes

1418
01:17:36,479 --> 01:17:39,359
down around the cult ara, not in it, but near

1419
01:17:39,439 --> 01:17:42,399
the hot rock, and pump the heat away by making

1420
01:17:42,439 --> 01:17:45,800
electricity with it so that it never melts its way

1421
01:17:45,840 --> 01:17:49,600
through the crust. You just extract enough heat. Now would

1422
01:17:49,600 --> 01:17:52,199
we win that battle? That's a good question, because the

1423
01:17:52,239 --> 01:17:53,680
other side of this is you're going to make that

1424
01:17:53,720 --> 01:17:56,319
plug stronger and stronger as you're stucking that heat away

1425
01:17:56,640 --> 01:18:00,039
until it does blow even bigger. But you're also and

1426
01:18:00,119 --> 01:18:02,079
you'd also destroy the park in the process. But if

1427
01:18:02,079 --> 01:18:05,479
the choice is between destroying the country and destroying a park,

1428
01:18:05,520 --> 01:18:06,720
I think the park's going to lose.

1429
01:18:06,920 --> 01:18:10,560
Speaker 2: And when you say destroy the country, it probably would

1430
01:18:10,560 --> 01:18:13,520
be a little bit bigger circumference than just the country.

1431
01:18:13,760 --> 01:18:16,479
Speaker 1: Well, you know, you think depending on the scope of

1432
01:18:16,520 --> 01:18:19,680
the eruption. Yeah, I mean you remember Mount Pinituba rupted

1433
01:18:19,720 --> 01:18:21,800
in ninety one. It lowered the average temperature on the

1434
01:18:21,840 --> 01:18:23,920
planet by half a degree for a year. It sent

1435
01:18:24,159 --> 01:18:28,039
ash all the way around the world. When Krakatoa erupted

1436
01:18:28,079 --> 01:18:30,079
in the eighteen hundreds, they called that the year without

1437
01:18:30,079 --> 01:18:33,560
a summer, So a super volcanic eruption. The last one

1438
01:18:33,600 --> 01:18:37,840
was more than sixty thousand years ago. Mount Taupo could

1439
01:18:37,880 --> 01:18:41,960
easily create the equivalent of a nuclear winter, several years

1440
01:18:42,039 --> 01:18:45,760
of darkness, plant death all over the world. But the

1441
01:18:45,800 --> 01:18:48,960
ash fall even from a smaller version of that eruption

1442
01:18:49,159 --> 01:18:53,600
would be several feet deep, a few hundred miles across,

1443
01:18:54,039 --> 01:18:59,560
running from Wyoming to Boston right through Connecticut. That's a

1444
01:18:59,560 --> 01:19:03,399
lot of economic destruction. And you know, who knows how

1445
01:19:03,399 --> 01:19:05,640
wide that band would be. So there's a case for

1446
01:19:06,479 --> 01:19:08,600
could we do this now? A minutely, this was the

1447
01:19:08,720 --> 01:19:11,479
Planetary Defense Group. The guys were also dealing with how

1448
01:19:11,520 --> 01:19:14,279
did we stop asteroids the planet? So forth? So this

1449
01:19:14,399 --> 01:19:18,640
was another project and very speculative, but not out of realms.

1450
01:19:18,680 --> 01:19:20,920
You know, the old joke is the dinosaurs died out

1451
01:19:20,920 --> 01:19:24,159
because they didn't have a space program, right, yes, right, right.

1452
01:19:25,399 --> 01:19:28,239
If we knew that there was a possibility of that volcano,

1453
01:19:28,319 --> 01:19:31,560
that super volcano erupting, would we want to try and

1454
01:19:31,600 --> 01:19:35,680
stop it? Is that feasible? I wouldn't say anybody other

1455
01:19:35,720 --> 01:19:38,800
than Americans would even consider it and take it seriously,

1456
01:19:38,880 --> 01:19:42,279
but it would be possible. Yeah, all right, what's next?

1457
01:19:42,399 --> 01:19:45,199
I've talked about all that because it was the easy stuff.

1458
01:19:45,239 --> 01:19:47,920
Because now we get to talk about the hard stuff. Okay,

1459
01:19:48,039 --> 01:19:52,000
it's time to talk about nuclear. Nuclear. So again I've

1460
01:19:52,000 --> 01:19:54,880
been doing talks on nuclear I've gotten a lot of

1461
01:19:54,880 --> 01:19:57,279
feedback from a lot of people. I've read deeper than

1462
01:19:57,279 --> 01:20:01,760
ever I come to appreciate how complex the industry actually is,

1463
01:20:01,840 --> 01:20:04,520
or at least understand more about it. You know, we

1464
01:20:04,560 --> 01:20:08,000
talk about the nuclear industry being stagnant, but at the

1465
01:20:08,039 --> 01:20:11,800
same time it kept improving in subtle ways like that

1466
01:20:11,920 --> 01:20:15,279
are not that obvious. Three Mile Island really stopped nuclear

1467
01:20:15,359 --> 01:20:19,279
development in the US, and in Chernobyl that was seventy nine,

1468
01:20:19,319 --> 01:20:22,439
and in Chernobyl, you know, arguably one of the large,

1469
01:20:22,520 --> 01:20:24,159
one of a significant cause of the fall of the

1470
01:20:24,199 --> 01:20:28,399
Soviet Union, and then Fukushima and twenty eleven, you know,

1471
01:20:30,239 --> 01:20:33,920
that being said, this year a new nuclear power plant

1472
01:20:33,920 --> 01:20:37,399
went online in Georgia and Waynesboro at the Vaugdeal site.

1473
01:20:38,159 --> 01:20:41,199
Speaker 2: Was it a traditional nuclear power plant or it is

1474
01:20:41,399 --> 01:20:45,279
absolutely Did it have any modern upgrades. It's an AP

1475
01:20:45,479 --> 01:20:47,520
one thousand, which is a Gen three plus. So the

1476
01:20:47,560 --> 01:20:51,199
Vaugdeal site had its original reactors, which are all both

1477
01:20:51,239 --> 01:20:54,079
Westinghouse reactors built in the eighties. They went online in

1478
01:20:54,119 --> 01:20:57,800
eighty seven and eighty nine, one point two gigawatts each.

1479
01:20:58,600 --> 01:21:00,760
They just got their license extended. They're in good shape,

1480
01:21:00,760 --> 01:21:02,920
so they expect to run them till twenty forty seven

1481
01:21:02,960 --> 01:21:07,439
and twenty forty nine, respectively. So in two thousand and nine,

1482
01:21:06,960 --> 01:21:11,760
the Volacteal group applied to add two more reactors, which

1483
01:21:11,760 --> 01:21:13,600
is unusual in the US. It's always just been a

1484
01:21:13,640 --> 01:21:16,079
pair of reactors in each site. Other parts of the

1485
01:21:16,079 --> 01:21:20,119
world have more. They'll do four or eight. Chernobyl was four.

1486
01:21:20,399 --> 01:21:21,880
It was a reactor for that blew up.

1487
01:21:23,439 --> 01:21:25,479
Speaker 1: So they applied for two more in two thousand and nine,

1488
01:21:25,479 --> 01:21:29,680
reactors three and four. They were the first, well they

1489
01:21:29,680 --> 01:21:31,920
applied earlier. Now they started construction in two thousand and nine.

1490
01:21:31,960 --> 01:21:35,199
Was the first new reactor since three Mile Island. So

1491
01:21:35,239 --> 01:21:37,199
they and this was this what they call the EP

1492
01:21:37,279 --> 01:21:39,359
one thousand designs. So this is also Westinghouse like the

1493
01:21:39,359 --> 01:21:41,319
reactors already there, but this is a newer generation. One

1494
01:21:41,319 --> 01:21:43,239
of these is a Gen where they called Gen three plus,

1495
01:21:43,279 --> 01:21:45,760
certified in two thousand and five. And the whole point

1496
01:21:45,800 --> 01:21:48,479
here was that reactors had gotten really expensive to build,

1497
01:21:49,079 --> 01:21:53,760
and so the eight one thousand design was to reduce costs.

1498
01:21:54,359 --> 01:21:57,359
The big one was passive shutdown. The thing that caused

1499
01:21:57,359 --> 01:21:59,840
all the problems in Fukushima when they lost the generators

1500
01:22:00,199 --> 01:22:02,439
that the reactors needed water pumped through them all the

1501
01:22:02,479 --> 01:22:05,479
time to stop from overheating. There were actually six reactors

1502
01:22:05,520 --> 01:22:07,560
in Fukushima. We never hear about five and six because

1503
01:22:07,560 --> 01:22:10,479
they did have this passive shutdown capability, so it didn't

1504
01:22:10,479 --> 01:22:11,840
matter y had no power to them. They cool down

1505
01:22:11,840 --> 01:22:13,760
on their own. So the eight one thousands are about

1506
01:22:14,319 --> 01:22:17,159
not only that they passively cool down so they're safe,

1507
01:22:17,159 --> 01:22:18,800
but it means you don't need a lot of the

1508
01:22:18,880 --> 01:22:22,720
complexity in the reactor. They're talking about half as many

1509
01:22:22,800 --> 01:22:26,439
safety valves and eighty percent less piping on the safety systems,

1510
01:22:26,720 --> 01:22:30,840
a third fewer pumps, eighty five percent less control wiring

1511
01:22:30,920 --> 01:22:34,279
and sensors, a smaller reactor building that reduces the amount

1512
01:22:34,279 --> 01:22:35,159
of concrete used.

1513
01:22:35,159 --> 01:22:37,520
Speaker 2: Like there's all about reducing Why didn't anybody think of

1514
01:22:37,560 --> 01:22:39,119
this in the seventies, Well.

1515
01:22:38,920 --> 01:22:41,399
Speaker 1: They did, That's why they had the design. They worked

1516
01:22:41,439 --> 01:22:43,760
on design for ages and they finally got it certified

1517
01:22:43,760 --> 01:22:45,359
in two thousand and five. So, I mean it's been

1518
01:22:45,439 --> 01:22:48,560
twenty years since this design was improved to again to

1519
01:22:48,760 --> 01:22:52,520
reduce the price of building a nuclear reactor. I remember

1520
01:22:53,319 --> 01:22:55,720
build the safety It sounds like two thousand and nine, right.

1521
01:22:57,880 --> 01:23:01,199
This design was actually lie to the Chinese in two

1522
01:23:01,239 --> 01:23:05,119
thousand and eight, and within ten years they built four

1523
01:23:05,159 --> 01:23:08,399
reactors with it. Okay, I hope you see the setup

1524
01:23:08,439 --> 01:23:10,399
that I'm getting to here. They only paid for one.

1525
01:23:10,720 --> 01:23:12,520
Oh no, they've paid for all four of them, and

1526
01:23:12,560 --> 01:23:14,920
they've actually improved on design. They're mailing one point five

1527
01:23:14,920 --> 01:23:17,640
and one point seven giga wat reck Wow Cool under license.

1528
01:23:18,479 --> 01:23:22,199
So two thousand and nine, the estimate is fourteen billion

1529
01:23:22,239 --> 01:23:25,920
to build Unit three and four. By twenty twenty three,

1530
01:23:26,000 --> 01:23:28,920
it was up to thirty four billion when the first

1531
01:23:29,119 --> 01:23:30,920
Then when we unit three was done, we haven't got

1532
01:23:30,960 --> 01:23:34,119
the budget yet for Unit four because it got it

1533
01:23:34,199 --> 01:23:37,079
went up and it came online in April of this year,

1534
01:23:37,199 --> 01:23:44,439
twenty twenty four. So bankrupted the construction company bankrupted Westinghouse

1535
01:23:44,880 --> 01:23:50,560
geez right, like wow, they went into bankruptcy and recovered, right,

1536
01:23:50,640 --> 01:23:53,079
they got additional financing and so forth. But I want

1537
01:23:53,199 --> 01:23:55,359
just to understand these this is quite a disaster, and

1538
01:23:55,479 --> 01:23:58,960
the story of Ougdall is long. It has a lot

1539
01:23:59,000 --> 01:24:00,640
to do with the fact that they're hadn't been any

1540
01:24:00,680 --> 01:24:03,039
construction for twenty years, so a lot of the most

1541
01:24:03,239 --> 01:24:06,359
knowledgeable people about how to build reactors and how to

1542
01:24:06,520 --> 01:24:10,760
certify them. Those people didn't exist anymore, and so everything

1543
01:24:10,800 --> 01:24:14,199
took longer, cost more. There were foolish mistakes and it

1544
01:24:14,359 --> 01:24:16,760
just cost a fortune, and it doesn't have to be

1545
01:24:16,960 --> 01:24:19,640
that way. I would also now compare this to the

1546
01:24:21,000 --> 01:24:26,439
Kashizaki Krawa reactors in Japan. These were advanced boiling water reactors,

1547
01:24:26,479 --> 01:24:30,119
also generate three designs, where they started construction in nineteen

1548
01:24:30,159 --> 01:24:33,279
ninety two and finished in ninety six, operational in four years,

1549
01:24:33,760 --> 01:24:37,960
Like it is possible to build full size reactors in

1550
01:24:38,079 --> 01:24:40,399
a reasonable length at time comparable to any other kind

1551
01:24:40,399 --> 01:24:43,800
of large scale power plant. Wow, the Chinese didn't let

1552
01:24:43,960 --> 01:24:47,000
in ten the first time they ever built AP one thousands,

1553
01:24:48,359 --> 01:24:50,680
and they still got it done. Now admitutedly the Chinese

1554
01:24:50,680 --> 01:24:53,039
will cut corners, but that the Japanese can do it

1555
01:24:53,119 --> 01:24:56,159
in four years, admittedly on a site that already had

1556
01:24:56,239 --> 01:25:00,119
reactors on a design that they understood pretty well. Like,

1557
01:25:00,279 --> 01:25:04,920
it's doable. It just has gotten little nuts out there.

1558
01:25:06,399 --> 01:25:09,560
So that brings us to small modular reactors, which is

1559
01:25:10,479 --> 01:25:16,439
the most common question. Andrew Clark, jen Artowski Peter Luiz piqued,

1560
01:25:17,039 --> 01:25:19,079
all these folks are like, hey, tell us where we

1561
01:25:19,159 --> 01:25:23,000
are at small reactors? So why why do we want

1562
01:25:23,039 --> 01:25:25,399
small reactors at all? And in fact, it's got to

1563
01:25:25,479 --> 01:25:28,600
the point now where in some jurisdictions in Illinois they

1564
01:25:28,640 --> 01:25:31,239
actually vetoed a pro nuclear bill because there's pro nuclear

1565
01:25:31,279 --> 01:25:35,239
bills coming out these days. They vetoed the bill because

1566
01:25:35,239 --> 01:25:37,640
it allowed for large reactors to be built, not just small,

1567
01:25:37,760 --> 01:25:40,760
which is silly, like why do you care about the design?

1568
01:25:40,920 --> 01:25:43,800
Like just you know, nuclear has got is having a

1569
01:25:43,840 --> 01:25:45,479
renaissance right now in a lot of ways. And I'll

1570
01:25:45,520 --> 01:25:48,760
talk about more of the stuff that's going on, but yeah,

1571
01:25:48,880 --> 01:25:51,119
it's California plast If you want to build a nuclear

1572
01:25:51,119 --> 01:25:53,479
power plant in California has to be small, modular, even

1573
01:25:53,520 --> 01:26:00,039
though none exists. Right, So why first question is the

1574
01:26:00,119 --> 01:26:02,279
first reactors that we built back in the fifties and

1575
01:26:02,279 --> 01:26:04,920
sixties were small. They were two hundred and three hundred megawatts.

1576
01:26:04,920 --> 01:26:07,479
Why did we scale them up in the first place.

1577
01:26:07,520 --> 01:26:10,199
Why didn't we just stay Well, the reason is that

1578
01:26:10,880 --> 01:26:14,800
it made them better. They were more thermally efficient, for

1579
01:26:15,279 --> 01:26:20,760
you needed fewer people and machines per megawak produced. They

1580
01:26:20,800 --> 01:26:24,880
were the same size as existing power plants generation. And

1581
01:26:25,079 --> 01:26:28,960
so you get into the situation now where SMRs would

1582
01:26:28,960 --> 01:26:33,600
become a nuclear engineering solution to a political and pr problem. Well,

1583
01:26:33,880 --> 01:26:35,079
last time we talked about them.

1584
01:26:35,359 --> 01:26:39,159
Speaker 2: You talked about some of the benefits being that they're

1585
01:26:39,239 --> 01:26:44,600
less dangerous because there's less waste and the waste is

1586
01:26:44,640 --> 01:26:49,520
more manageable or something like that. And also having distributed

1587
01:26:49,600 --> 01:26:52,880
power is just better for the grid than having everything

1588
01:26:52,920 --> 01:26:54,119
in one central location.

1589
01:26:54,640 --> 01:26:57,920
Speaker 1: And those things are true. I mean, first off, once

1590
01:26:57,960 --> 01:26:59,600
you get to a Gen three reactor, you have all

1591
01:26:59,640 --> 01:27:02,279
the safety systems, right, they are passively cool down. They

1592
01:27:02,319 --> 01:27:05,960
don't need any of that complexity. We've matured that. In fact,

1593
01:27:06,359 --> 01:27:10,000
the small modulars are utilizing the same technology. They are

1594
01:27:10,000 --> 01:27:16,199
also passive shutdown, and so okay. The the problem is

1595
01:27:16,239 --> 01:27:21,600
that when you have twelve reactors, you need twelve monitoring systems. Yeah, right,

1596
01:27:21,680 --> 01:27:24,960
and you need people to watch them all, so that

1597
01:27:25,119 --> 01:27:28,920
increases costs. Actually, now, the idea of having a central

1598
01:27:29,000 --> 01:27:32,159
place to build the reactors and move them around is

1599
01:27:32,199 --> 01:27:36,239
a good one because it simply separate the operation of

1600
01:27:36,319 --> 01:27:39,960
reactors from the refueling process. But that hasn't been built

1601
01:27:39,960 --> 01:27:43,520
out yet, right, We're still doing testing on this. The

1602
01:27:43,640 --> 01:27:49,199
point being the battle here is that small modular is

1603
01:27:49,279 --> 01:27:52,680
going to cost more than per megawatt than conventional reactors

1604
01:27:52,720 --> 01:27:56,680
of the other day, and insights where you need less power.

1605
01:27:56,840 --> 01:27:59,119
Not everybody needs a giga want of power. You couldn't

1606
01:27:59,319 --> 01:28:02,119
put one of these plants anywhere in Africa, for example,

1607
01:28:02,319 --> 01:28:05,239
because you can't use the power. Smaller reactors would make

1608
01:28:05,239 --> 01:28:06,560
a lot of sense, but in a place where you

1609
01:28:06,640 --> 01:28:09,840
need a lot of power, fewer, larger units do make

1610
01:28:09,960 --> 01:28:13,159
sense if you manage them well and it takes fewer

1611
01:28:13,199 --> 01:28:16,279
people to do so. So there's a case for if

1612
01:28:16,319 --> 01:28:19,279
the main goal was to get as much nuclear online

1613
01:28:19,279 --> 01:28:22,399
as quickly as possible, why wouldn't you go with the

1614
01:28:22,640 --> 01:28:27,359
known design. The modularity parts important, but couldn't we do

1615
01:28:27,560 --> 01:28:31,119
more of that modularity with a conventional reactor design? Stop

1616
01:28:31,239 --> 01:28:34,439
building them so Bespoke build more of them in components

1617
01:28:34,479 --> 01:28:37,159
and factories, build and build them at scale. The fact

1618
01:28:37,159 --> 01:28:39,119
that you you know, part of the problem with VAUG

1619
01:28:39,199 --> 01:28:42,199
TELL three and four is there's only two of them, right,

1620
01:28:42,399 --> 01:28:46,720
If you were building twenty, then there's then that you

1621
01:28:46,840 --> 01:28:49,039
have a bigger team. Folks kind of know what they're doing.

1622
01:28:49,119 --> 01:28:51,520
They move from site to site like you can start

1623
01:28:51,560 --> 01:28:54,840
to work at larger scale. Now that being said, I

1624
01:28:54,920 --> 01:28:57,239
don't just want to poopoo on SMRs because they're definitely

1625
01:28:57,359 --> 01:29:02,800
being built right China has has had the Linglong one,

1626
01:29:02,920 --> 01:29:05,159
which is an ACP one hundred small reactor abou one

1627
01:29:05,199 --> 01:29:08,840
hundred twenty five megawatts, started construction in twenty one. Their

1628
01:29:08,880 --> 01:29:12,079
pressure vessel went in in twenty three. They expect to

1629
01:29:12,119 --> 01:29:15,079
be in operation in twenty six, so they're the furthest

1630
01:29:15,119 --> 01:29:21,560
Along with this smaller design, the US has a demonstration

1631
01:29:21,760 --> 01:29:24,720
reactor that technically qualifies as an SMR, but it's a

1632
01:29:24,760 --> 01:29:26,520
little different than this is an oak Ridge. This is

1633
01:29:26,600 --> 01:29:30,800
the Keros Hermes Low Power Demonstrator. It's not for making electricity.

1634
01:29:31,199 --> 01:29:34,760
It's actually what they consider a generation for reactor as

1635
01:29:34,800 --> 01:29:37,039
opposed to the EIGHTP one thousand, most the s martial

1636
01:29:37,159 --> 01:29:41,560
Generation three. This is next generation and this is fluorine salts. Ah.

1637
01:29:41,840 --> 01:29:43,680
So I knew we were going to get to since

1638
01:29:43,760 --> 01:29:46,520
the Oak Ridge experiments of the sixties, right, the thorium

1639
01:29:46,600 --> 01:29:49,800
reactors in Staffe. Nobody in the US has built a

1640
01:29:49,920 --> 01:29:52,600
thorium reactor or molten salt reactor of any kind. This

1641
01:29:52,680 --> 01:29:55,079
is a molten salt reactor. So it's a small modular

1642
01:29:55,199 --> 01:29:58,119
and molten salt and molten salt. Yeah, but again it's

1643
01:29:58,159 --> 01:30:00,880
a demonstration reactor. It's just for testing. It's been licensed,

1644
01:30:00,920 --> 01:30:03,000
so it's under construction. It's going to become a thing

1645
01:30:03,439 --> 01:30:04,439
that's exciting.

1646
01:30:04,279 --> 01:30:08,279
Speaker 2: That's cool, and so if that goes well, do you

1647
01:30:08,399 --> 01:30:14,920
see molten salt moving into larger scale reactors nuclear plants.

1648
01:30:15,039 --> 01:30:17,600
Speaker 1: Yeah, and let me get there, because we're used doing

1649
01:30:17,680 --> 01:30:19,640
more stuff of malt salt all the time. Cool, but

1650
01:30:19,720 --> 01:30:22,760
most mall modulars are stuck with light water because it's known,

1651
01:30:23,199 --> 01:30:25,279
right we've got a knife variables. They're trying to stay

1652
01:30:25,279 --> 01:30:28,000
simple and that fits with what Canada is doing with

1653
01:30:28,159 --> 01:30:32,880
the SMR which is in the Darlington site. So they

1654
01:30:33,680 --> 01:30:36,520
have now prepared for four reactors on that site. This

1655
01:30:36,640 --> 01:30:38,640
year they got the preparation on the site, so construction

1656
01:30:38,720 --> 01:30:42,279
starts next year. They expect to They expect to be

1657
01:30:42,359 --> 01:30:44,000
up and running in twenty twenty eight. They will probably

1658
01:30:44,039 --> 01:30:46,279
miss that date because it is a first of a

1659
01:30:46,359 --> 01:30:48,920
kind and so of course they're going to be problems.

1660
01:30:49,000 --> 01:30:54,479
But yeah, SMRs are coming, but the problem here is

1661
01:30:55,119 --> 01:30:58,439
they shouldn't be coming strictly the exclusion of everything else. Sure,

1662
01:30:58,680 --> 01:31:00,720
you know there's a case for the Ape one thousand

1663
01:31:00,760 --> 01:31:02,680
and that you could build those at scale and get

1664
01:31:02,720 --> 01:31:05,039
a lot more power. You know, as we're starting to

1665
01:31:05,119 --> 01:31:06,880
have governments have these missions where it's like we need

1666
01:31:06,960 --> 01:31:10,199
to bring thirty gigawatts of nuclear online in the US

1667
01:31:10,279 --> 01:31:12,399
one of their mandates. Well, do you want to do

1668
01:31:12,520 --> 01:31:15,399
that three hundred megawatts at a time or one point

1669
01:31:15,479 --> 01:31:18,680
two gigawatts at a time? Right, right, depending on the location.

1670
01:31:18,840 --> 01:31:24,960
So there's cases for both. Right, let's talk about thorium. Yeah,

1671
01:31:26,520 --> 01:31:29,720
Peter Lewis asked about those. Folks are always interested At

1672
01:31:30,600 --> 01:31:33,079
Shanghai Institute had a test reactor put together in twenty

1673
01:31:33,119 --> 01:31:35,760
twenty one. It's a two megawatt reactor, and last year

1674
01:31:35,800 --> 01:31:39,199
they got the license a permit to build a ten

1675
01:31:39,279 --> 01:31:44,479
megawatt tests reactor. That site got identified this year. Construction

1676
01:31:44,520 --> 01:31:47,600
starts next year. So thorium reactors are on their way

1677
01:31:48,199 --> 01:31:50,880
in China. Very cool, and again tell us what the

1678
01:31:51,000 --> 01:31:54,680
benefit of thorium is over lightwater. So we talked about

1679
01:31:54,680 --> 01:31:58,039
this on the Thorium molt Salt Reactor Show because it's

1680
01:31:58,039 --> 01:32:01,640
a combination of three things. It's using thorium instead of uranium,

1681
01:32:01,920 --> 01:32:04,560
it's using molten salt instead of solid fuel, and it

1682
01:32:04,760 --> 01:32:08,159
was supercritical carbon dioxide. I believe for the turbine technology

1683
01:32:08,720 --> 01:32:11,399
because when you go molten salt your temperatures go way

1684
01:32:11,399 --> 01:32:13,920
way out. They're much hotter, and so thorium is safer

1685
01:32:14,000 --> 01:32:17,159
than uranium. Is that the idea or not really? What

1686
01:32:17,399 --> 01:32:21,199
thorium is five times more plentiful than uranium. Okay, but

1687
01:32:21,520 --> 01:32:23,840
to use thorium in a reactor, you actually have to

1688
01:32:23,960 --> 01:32:28,720
breed it into uranium. So you bombard it with a neutron,

1689
01:32:29,479 --> 01:32:32,680
and that neutron sticks and then has a beta decay,

1690
01:32:32,760 --> 01:32:38,800
so it becomes protectium. And then you which is AUM. Yes,

1691
01:32:39,399 --> 01:32:43,399
it's a real thing. So thorium is atomic weight ninety

1692
01:32:43,680 --> 01:32:45,680
so that means that has ninety protons and the number

1693
01:32:45,680 --> 01:32:47,760
of protons tells you what element it is, right, So

1694
01:32:47,880 --> 01:32:50,760
you hit it with a neutron. Neutron gets bored, turns

1695
01:32:50,800 --> 01:32:52,319
into a proton. I know, it's weird, but it's the

1696
01:32:52,359 --> 01:32:55,800
thing baited again. So now it's protectinium atomic weight ninety one.

1697
01:32:56,319 --> 01:32:58,800
Then it happens again, another pro neutron flips and it

1698
01:32:58,880 --> 01:33:01,680
becomes ninety two, and that's your UM two thirty three. Okay,

1699
01:33:01,880 --> 01:33:04,479
that's what you're running the reactor. Now you combine it

1700
01:33:04,600 --> 01:33:08,880
with fluorine to make uranium and a fluoride and you've

1701
01:33:08,960 --> 01:33:13,079
got you've got a liquid that is only it only

1702
01:33:13,119 --> 01:33:15,720
becomes liquid at four degree centigrade, so it's hot, but

1703
01:33:15,840 --> 01:33:18,199
it doesn't boil until fifteen hundred degrecentigrade. So you have

1704
01:33:18,279 --> 01:33:21,119
a huge working range, right, almost one thousand degrees. You

1705
01:33:21,199 --> 01:33:24,279
work it as supposed to water, which is one hundred right, right, Sure,

1706
01:33:24,960 --> 01:33:27,119
that big working range means you can deal with heat,

1707
01:33:27,159 --> 01:33:29,079
and as it gets hotter, it expands, so it tends

1708
01:33:29,079 --> 01:33:33,239
to slow down the reaction. It's moderated by graphite, so

1709
01:33:33,520 --> 01:33:36,159
you don't there's no water involved any of this. Now. Admittedly,

1710
01:33:36,439 --> 01:33:41,479
urinium fluorides are dangerous, like this stuff is corrosive. It's toxic,

1711
01:33:42,159 --> 01:33:43,560
but it turns to a solid as soon as it

1712
01:33:43,600 --> 01:33:45,960
cools down. And it sounds like you can control it more,

1713
01:33:46,359 --> 01:33:48,760
can you not? Well, it has some It definitely has

1714
01:33:48,840 --> 01:33:52,720
some advantages. Okay, it's not. Nothing is simple, or we'd

1715
01:33:52,760 --> 01:33:56,880
all be doing it for sure. Right, while it's in

1716
01:33:56,920 --> 01:34:01,079
the while it's in the graphite moderator, fission going on, right,

1717
01:34:01,199 --> 01:34:04,000
So this is uranium atoms are being broken apart into

1718
01:34:04,079 --> 01:34:12,199
different elements, and if it leaves the graphite, it cools down.

1719
01:34:12,520 --> 01:34:15,119
So one of the passive safety systems is you have

1720
01:34:15,199 --> 01:34:17,359
a salt plug at the bottom of the containment vessel,

1721
01:34:17,680 --> 01:34:19,399
and if it gives two hot say have over a

1722
01:34:19,479 --> 01:34:22,840
thousand degrees or so, that's all plug melts and the

1723
01:34:23,079 --> 01:34:27,560
fluid runs out into containment vessels that aren't graphite, and

1724
01:34:27,600 --> 01:34:31,000
the reaction just stops. They had this system at Oakridge

1725
01:34:31,520 --> 01:34:33,279
in the sixties when they're experimenting to do this, and

1726
01:34:33,279 --> 01:34:34,640
they do that on the wheat so they didn't have

1727
01:34:34,640 --> 01:34:37,079
to work on the weekends. They just melt the salt plug,

1728
01:34:37,399 --> 01:34:39,319
let the fluid run out, the whole thing would cool down,

1729
01:34:39,720 --> 01:34:43,840
and on Monday they would electrically heat the fluid back

1730
01:34:43,880 --> 01:34:46,159
up till the material uptil was a fluid again and

1731
01:34:46,199 --> 01:34:47,840
then pump it back in the reactor with a replaced

1732
01:34:47,840 --> 01:34:50,560
salt plug and continue running. Yeah, that's pretty cool, pretty safe,

1733
01:34:50,920 --> 01:34:53,640
and it's got some strengths. It also you can run

1734
01:34:53,680 --> 01:34:56,199
the reactor. You can keep the reactor running and add

1735
01:34:56,279 --> 01:34:57,920
new fuel to it as opposed to having to shut

1736
01:34:57,960 --> 01:35:01,640
a reactor down to change fuel rods. And it's there

1737
01:35:01,680 --> 01:35:04,640
are chemical processes you can run in line to remove

1738
01:35:05,600 --> 01:35:10,000
by products. So one of the issues you have with

1739
01:35:10,119 --> 01:35:12,920
solid fuels is that gases are made from some of

1740
01:35:12,920 --> 01:35:16,239
the transmutations like xenon and krypton, and they cracked the rods,

1741
01:35:17,079 --> 01:35:19,000
and so eventually I have to stop using those rods.

1742
01:35:19,079 --> 01:35:21,760
You don't want to crumble. That would be bad, and

1743
01:35:22,039 --> 01:35:24,840
so you take them out and you reprocess them, or

1744
01:35:24,880 --> 01:35:26,239
in the case of the United States, you store them

1745
01:35:26,279 --> 01:35:30,520
in polls them for decades because you stopped fuel reprocessing

1746
01:35:30,560 --> 01:35:33,920
in the nineteen seventies. It's really kind to turn around. Well,

1747
01:35:33,960 --> 01:35:35,960
that was the believe it or not, and it's relevant

1748
01:35:36,159 --> 01:35:39,960
the day we're recording this. That was the Carter versus

1749
01:35:40,760 --> 01:35:45,680
Ford election, a Carter one on nuclear nonprofilation, and it

1750
01:35:45,760 --> 01:35:48,800
was Ford that shut down fuel reprocessing in because it's

1751
01:35:48,840 --> 01:35:53,399
how we got plutonium and they've never restarted it. Rest

1752
01:35:53,439 --> 01:36:00,239
in peace Hunters yesterday, extraordinary man from this recording. So

1753
01:36:02,279 --> 01:36:05,439
the gases on naturally bubble out of the fluorium the

1754
01:36:05,520 --> 01:36:08,079
fluorine salts. Now that's a plus and a minus. One

1755
01:36:08,159 --> 01:36:10,319
is they're not in the way. The other is you've

1756
01:36:10,319 --> 01:36:13,119
got to keep it contained, right, So your containment vessel

1757
01:36:13,159 --> 01:36:16,239
is now accumulating these radioactive gases in the top of

1758
01:36:16,279 --> 01:36:18,880
the vessel. But fluorine salts also don't need to be

1759
01:36:18,960 --> 01:36:21,880
under pressure, so you're not running a high pressure vessel

1760
01:36:21,960 --> 01:36:25,039
like you do are with water reactors, where they're pressurized

1761
01:36:25,079 --> 01:36:28,479
to have enough heat the heat exchanging. We're getting better

1762
01:36:28,520 --> 01:36:31,439
at using these kinds of molten salts non radioactive versions

1763
01:36:31,439 --> 01:36:33,760
because they store a lot of heat, so it's really

1764
01:36:33,800 --> 01:36:37,039
a good way to move heat, make steam shpin turbines

1765
01:36:37,199 --> 01:36:40,600
or even try other turbine technologies like supercritical cover docs afterly,

1766
01:36:41,159 --> 01:36:43,680
so there's a lot we're getting some value out of

1767
01:36:43,760 --> 01:36:48,600
salts even without getting into the react radioactive versions. Relating

1768
01:36:48,640 --> 01:36:51,279
to this is Copenhagen Atomics, which are out of Denmark,

1769
01:36:51,720 --> 01:36:54,039
who are building a molten salt reactor that fits in

1770
01:36:54,119 --> 01:36:58,720
a set of containers so it could be shipped by truck. Again,

1771
01:36:58,800 --> 01:37:01,359
this sounds like science fiction, an unfundable and so forth,

1772
01:37:01,399 --> 01:37:03,760
but they've actually raised enough money that they are now

1773
01:37:03,920 --> 01:37:08,239
building a non They've built a pair of non fissionable

1774
01:37:09,199 --> 01:37:12,760
reactor prototypes, so they've got no radioactive materials because Denmark

1775
01:37:12,800 --> 01:37:15,800
doesn't allow it. But they are using both nitrate in

1776
01:37:15,880 --> 01:37:18,560
florian salts and they're heating up their reactor with electricity

1777
01:37:18,600 --> 01:37:22,560
to show that their fluid systems work right to the

1778
01:37:22,600 --> 01:37:25,399
point now where They expect the next year to scale

1779
01:37:25,479 --> 01:37:28,720
up to a one megawatt thermal a non fisional prototype.

1780
01:37:29,119 --> 01:37:31,199
Then they have to find a way to make it

1781
01:37:31,359 --> 01:37:33,720
legal to start working with fissional materials, which is a

1782
01:37:33,760 --> 01:37:36,199
problem in Denmark, or they'll get a license in another

1783
01:37:36,279 --> 01:37:39,920
country to do this. But they're basically proving out their models,

1784
01:37:39,920 --> 01:37:43,560
so they are bending metal and building things around this.

1785
01:37:44,159 --> 01:37:49,079
So again I'm combining two different technologies. Thorium is interesting

1786
01:37:49,720 --> 01:37:53,279
in certain places because it's more plentiful in uranium, but

1787
01:37:53,319 --> 01:37:55,800
there's lots of uranium were do not have any shortage uranium.

1788
01:37:56,279 --> 01:38:00,439
But India is very interested in thorium for the reactors

1789
01:38:00,479 --> 01:38:04,560
that are developing their own because India has thorium in

1790
01:38:04,640 --> 01:38:06,960
the ground there, they don't have uranium, so rather have

1791
01:38:07,039 --> 01:38:11,359
to buy uranium from another country like Russia or Australia.

1792
01:38:11,960 --> 01:38:14,600
If they can mature the thorium technology enough for themselves,

1793
01:38:14,760 --> 01:38:17,840
that's their own indigenous power system. Yeah, the US has

1794
01:38:17,880 --> 01:38:19,600
that would be good for them. The US has lots

1795
01:38:19,640 --> 01:38:22,039
of thorium, doesn't have an uranium, but Canada's got uranium

1796
01:38:22,199 --> 01:38:24,880
and we're buddies, you know, at least for now for now,

1797
01:38:25,960 --> 01:38:30,479
so that works out just fine. So, but the maturing

1798
01:38:30,520 --> 01:38:32,880
the thorium fuel chain is not a trivial problem, and

1799
01:38:33,039 --> 01:38:34,880
in the end you're only just the important thing to

1800
01:38:34,920 --> 01:38:38,079
understand about armies. You make it into uranium. Making molten

1801
01:38:38,159 --> 01:38:41,239
salt reactors is a different thing, and it's also valuable.

1802
01:38:41,279 --> 01:38:43,000
You could run out any kind of uranium you want.

1803
01:38:43,039 --> 01:38:46,359
Two thirty three to thirty five, thirty eight is fine.

1804
01:38:46,840 --> 01:38:49,039
You just got to mature all of the fuel processes.

1805
01:38:49,239 --> 01:38:52,840
There's some material challenges for the toxicity of the fluorines,

1806
01:38:53,039 --> 01:38:56,319
and you've got to do the extraction systems. But one

1807
01:38:56,359 --> 01:38:58,399
of the things that Copenhagen Comics bushes on is this

1808
01:38:58,600 --> 01:39:02,399
is a fuel wave burner. But the nature of molten

1809
01:39:02,479 --> 01:39:05,199
salt reactors is that you can leave the actinides in

1810
01:39:05,319 --> 01:39:08,760
the loop until they all break down and you run

1811
01:39:08,800 --> 01:39:12,000
a solid fuel and a light water reactor. Typically a

1812
01:39:12,079 --> 01:39:14,039
given rod is going to be the reactor for six years,

1813
01:39:14,039 --> 01:39:16,560
so it'll every two years you'll move it around, but

1814
01:39:16,680 --> 01:39:18,479
after six years it's run as far as it can.

1815
01:39:19,000 --> 01:39:21,000
But the vast majority of the uranium that went in

1816
01:39:21,079 --> 01:39:24,479
that rod is still in there right, It's just contaminated

1817
01:39:24,479 --> 01:39:26,560
with other things. And so if you're the French. You

1818
01:39:26,680 --> 01:39:29,119
reprocess that fuel and take the uranium back out of

1819
01:39:29,159 --> 01:39:31,720
it and make new fuel runs. Right. This is also

1820
01:39:31,720 --> 01:39:34,520
where you get the plutonium, and they've also learned to

1821
01:39:34,520 --> 01:39:36,399
put the plcunium back in the fuel rod and burn

1822
01:39:36,520 --> 01:39:38,479
that as well. In a molten salt reactor, you don't

1823
01:39:38,479 --> 01:39:40,920
need to take them out and reprocess them. You reprocess

1824
01:39:40,960 --> 01:39:43,119
them in line. This is the technology. It isn't mature,

1825
01:39:43,439 --> 01:39:44,760
but this is one of the things you'd learned to

1826
01:39:44,800 --> 01:39:46,359
do with the molten salt reactor. So the whole time

1827
01:39:46,399 --> 01:39:49,159
you're making electricity, you're also removing materials, and you're breaking

1828
01:39:49,239 --> 01:39:52,439
down the actinides, the radioactives until there's virtually none left.

1829
01:39:52,640 --> 01:39:55,840
And so the promise is we don't have all this

1830
01:39:56,000 --> 01:39:58,720
nuclear waste, that we have less nuclear waste, and we

1831
01:39:58,800 --> 01:40:01,960
have short life a few hundred years versus tens of

1832
01:40:02,039 --> 01:40:05,159
thousands of years, right, So I would see arguably we'd

1833
01:40:05,239 --> 01:40:06,800
end up as soon as we get a molten salt

1834
01:40:06,840 --> 01:40:08,960
reactor mature, we'll probably put it down beside our light

1835
01:40:09,039 --> 01:40:12,119
water reactors and take it's their old fuel and use

1836
01:40:12,199 --> 01:40:16,760
it up to make electricity and clean up they waste

1837
01:40:16,800 --> 01:40:17,920
from the light water reactors.

1838
01:40:18,079 --> 01:40:21,680
Speaker 2: Is there any chance of taking the spent rods out

1839
01:40:21,760 --> 01:40:24,239
of the ground wherever they are and using those in

1840
01:40:24,279 --> 01:40:25,319
a molten salt reactor.

1841
01:40:25,600 --> 01:40:28,920
Speaker 1: Probably, devatrication is not a trivial problem, and it's going

1842
01:40:28,960 --> 01:40:31,359
to be cheaper materials, but you know that's one of

1843
01:40:31,399 --> 01:40:31,920
the options.

1844
01:40:32,119 --> 01:40:34,479
Speaker 2: Well, also, most importantly, just to get rid of the

1845
01:40:34,920 --> 01:40:38,399
waste million year price tag on it or whatever it is.

1846
01:40:39,279 --> 01:40:41,720
Speaker 1: Let's move on to another reactor design that actually broke

1847
01:40:41,880 --> 01:40:44,720
ground in the US this year, and it is based

1848
01:40:44,800 --> 01:40:48,920
on a liquid sodium reactors. The company is Terror Power.

1849
01:40:49,000 --> 01:40:52,760
The reactor is called Natrium, Natrium being the Greek word

1850
01:40:52,880 --> 01:40:57,680
for sodium. That's why the atomic name is na. It's

1851
01:40:57,760 --> 01:41:02,359
for Natuah. Okay, Now, there's liquid sodium reactors around since

1852
01:41:02,439 --> 01:41:04,680
the beginning of the atomic age. The Russians run a

1853
01:41:04,720 --> 01:41:08,439
few of them. What are we doing here, Well, it's

1854
01:41:08,479 --> 01:41:10,760
a very different kind of reactor when you use water

1855
01:41:11,159 --> 01:41:15,960
with solid fuel. The water serves a few different purposes.

1856
01:41:16,079 --> 01:41:19,039
One is that it is the moderator. It slows the

1857
01:41:19,119 --> 01:41:22,079
neutrons down. Neutrons coming off of uranium are moving very

1858
01:41:22,520 --> 01:41:24,479
giving a fraction of the speed of light, and when

1859
01:41:24,479 --> 01:41:28,479
they're going that quick, they're hard to collide with, so

1860
01:41:28,840 --> 01:41:31,279
having them run through water it slows them down to

1861
01:41:31,359 --> 01:41:33,199
what they call thermal neutrons, so they have a higher

1862
01:41:33,239 --> 01:41:36,119
impact rate. Although the upside about being fastest when you

1863
01:41:36,239 --> 01:41:39,800
do hit things, you break them, and so more atoms

1864
01:41:39,920 --> 01:41:44,359
fission quicker. So the light rotter reactor fuel process. When

1865
01:41:44,520 --> 01:41:46,800
uranium two thirty eight is hit with a thermal neutron,

1866
01:41:47,199 --> 01:41:49,720
it keeps that neutron and it becomes a proton and

1867
01:41:49,800 --> 01:41:52,399
that's how you make plutonium, right, Okay, But if you

1868
01:41:52,520 --> 01:41:55,359
hit it with a fast neutron, you'll break it. You'll

1869
01:41:55,439 --> 01:41:57,680
pull it apart of thecom variant and krypton or something.

1870
01:41:57,760 --> 01:42:00,479
There's a bunch of different combinations it'll turn into. And

1871
01:42:00,600 --> 01:42:03,880
so the using fast neutrons in a reactor has been

1872
01:42:03,920 --> 01:42:06,520
a key thing for a long time. And sodium is

1873
01:42:06,600 --> 01:42:10,560
transparent to neutrons, so it's your ability to move heat

1874
01:42:10,600 --> 01:42:13,239
around with liquid sodium, but it doesn't stole the neutrons around.

1875
01:42:13,279 --> 01:42:16,239
So you have a very fast, running, very hot reactor

1876
01:42:16,840 --> 01:42:20,279
using liquid sodium. Again, they have been around for a

1877
01:42:20,319 --> 01:42:23,319
long time. The problem is it's liquid sodium. Yeah, And

1878
01:42:23,359 --> 01:42:25,960
the problem with liquid sodium is that it volatile. It

1879
01:42:26,199 --> 01:42:29,399
burns in the air and it explodes in water. Yeah okay,

1880
01:42:29,920 --> 01:42:32,000
and it's not transparent, so when you want to look

1881
01:42:32,039 --> 01:42:35,399
in the reactor, you can't see anything. And so the

1882
01:42:35,520 --> 01:42:37,800
process of actually cleaning out a reactor do maintenance on it,

1883
01:42:37,880 --> 01:42:39,319
you have to get every bit of sodium up. It's

1884
01:42:39,319 --> 01:42:41,840
not that easy to do. The fire problem is so

1885
01:42:41,960 --> 01:42:44,319
prevalent that in Russia, where they still operate a couple

1886
01:42:44,319 --> 01:42:46,319
of these sodium reactors, they just plan for the fires.

1887
01:42:46,560 --> 01:42:50,039
It just happens. Yeah, it's a thing, regular sodium fires.

1888
01:42:50,079 --> 01:42:51,800
Don't worry too much about that smoke. Don't breathe that

1889
01:42:51,840 --> 01:42:56,479
it's bad. Yeah, it's bad. Meantime, Natrium has gotten a license,

1890
01:42:56,520 --> 01:42:58,399
so they've broke around in twenty twenty four. The reactor

1891
01:42:58,439 --> 01:43:01,159
design is not approved, but the salt parts. So what

1892
01:43:01,199 --> 01:43:06,319
they've done is they've separated the design into the radioactive

1893
01:43:06,319 --> 01:43:09,640
parts the reactor parts, and they are going to use

1894
01:43:09,760 --> 01:43:13,800
that molten sodium that's gotten hot from the reaction to

1895
01:43:14,720 --> 01:43:17,640
heat up fluorine salts, which are then pumped to a

1896
01:43:17,800 --> 01:43:20,319
tank that it then has the separate area with all

1897
01:43:20,359 --> 01:43:23,000
the power generation and so forth. So they have a

1898
01:43:23,079 --> 01:43:25,520
license for that now. This is similar to what Copenhangan

1899
01:43:25,560 --> 01:43:30,319
Atomics doing with their non fissioning reactor design. These guys

1900
01:43:30,359 --> 01:43:34,079
are building all the non fission parts first. Because they're

1901
01:43:34,079 --> 01:43:36,640
actually going to store a lot of that molten salt,

1902
01:43:37,720 --> 01:43:40,800
it allows them to have surge power. So the initial

1903
01:43:40,840 --> 01:43:44,199
reactor design is only about three hundred and fifty megawatts,

1904
01:43:44,720 --> 01:43:46,279
but they should be able to bump up to five

1905
01:43:46,359 --> 01:43:48,239
hundred megawats for a few hours because they have enough

1906
01:43:48,399 --> 01:43:51,359
hot molten salt stored that they can run that use

1907
01:43:51,399 --> 01:43:54,399
that salt to flash steam more than the reactor can

1908
01:43:54,439 --> 01:43:56,479
actually generate, so you can you now have a sort

1909
01:43:56,479 --> 01:43:58,439
of power dynamic. This is an interesting thing to add

1910
01:43:58,520 --> 01:43:59,880
to almost any power source.

1911
01:44:00,119 --> 01:44:03,039
Speaker 2: Yeah, it seems complex, but it sure solves the problem

1912
01:44:03,399 --> 01:44:03,680
it does.

1913
01:44:03,800 --> 01:44:07,279
Speaker 1: It stabilizes power. It's recognizing that power is heat, right,

1914
01:44:07,399 --> 01:44:09,600
and so it's just if you're using these molten salts,

1915
01:44:09,600 --> 01:44:13,640
which you need to use anyway, you to build out

1916
01:44:13,720 --> 01:44:17,840
high temperature steam and possibly better generator designs because you

1917
01:44:17,880 --> 01:44:19,920
have so much heat. This opens the door to that.

1918
01:44:20,039 --> 01:44:26,479
This is how the newer Helio Stat power plant in Morocco,

1919
01:44:26,520 --> 01:44:29,640
which is just reflecting mirrors onto a post. Yeah right,

1920
01:44:29,800 --> 01:44:31,600
runs twenty four hours a day even when the sun's down,

1921
01:44:31,640 --> 01:44:33,920
because they heat up so much molten salt. The salt

1922
01:44:34,159 --> 01:44:37,760
keeps the generators running through the night. So admittedly nuclear

1923
01:44:37,800 --> 01:44:40,399
actors run twenty fours a day. That's their advantage. But

1924
01:44:40,560 --> 01:44:44,279
this actually gives you some surge ability anyway. They've actually

1925
01:44:45,760 --> 01:44:48,479
they've got enough money. Gates is kicked in over a billion.

1926
01:44:49,000 --> 01:44:52,680
The Department Energy skicked in some more. The site's been selected.

1927
01:44:52,720 --> 01:44:56,600
It's in Camera, which is in Wyoming, a place that

1928
01:44:56,760 --> 01:44:59,600
has a uranium mines is actually an old coal mine

1929
01:44:59,640 --> 01:45:02,039
site that they're using. So it already has the power

1930
01:45:02,119 --> 01:45:05,960
cables and stuff pulled in and it's already a space. Wow.

1931
01:45:06,600 --> 01:45:11,920
The challenge with used making liquid sodium reactors is you

1932
01:45:12,000 --> 01:45:15,479
need a different fuel. It's still uranium, but it's more

1933
01:45:15,680 --> 01:45:19,000
highly enriched. It's what they call halo HALO fuel for

1934
01:45:19,600 --> 01:45:23,079
high SA low enriched uranium, high enriched uranium, meaning stuff

1935
01:45:23,079 --> 01:45:28,680
you use in bombs, normal solid fuel reactors and light

1936
01:45:28,760 --> 01:45:33,159
water reactors. They the fuel rods about three percent enriched,

1937
01:45:33,239 --> 01:45:35,560
so it has three percent you two thirty five in

1938
01:45:35,600 --> 01:45:39,159
it along with mostly you two thirty eight pitch blend.

1939
01:45:39,199 --> 01:45:41,560
The raw uraniumy dig out of the ground is about

1940
01:45:41,600 --> 01:45:44,439
zero point seven percent thirty five need more to thirty

1941
01:45:44,479 --> 01:45:48,479
five because it's the fissionable product, right, It makes everything

1942
01:45:48,560 --> 01:45:51,560
else work, and so you enrich it to get it

1943
01:45:51,680 --> 01:45:54,800
up to three percent or up to five percent. Right,

1944
01:45:55,319 --> 01:45:59,319
And what's the percentage for a bomb, one hundred percent? Okay,

1945
01:46:00,079 --> 01:46:03,000
So the halou can go up to about nineteen percent.

1946
01:46:04,399 --> 01:46:08,000
And there's only so much enrichment capability in the world, right,

1947
01:46:08,039 --> 01:46:10,720
It's part of the challenge. And we talk about enrichment.

1948
01:46:10,720 --> 01:46:12,600
They talk about this thing called a separative work unit

1949
01:46:12,720 --> 01:46:18,279
or how much it takes, how much uranium? How much?

1950
01:46:19,800 --> 01:46:22,640
How many times can you take one hundred kilos uranium

1951
01:46:23,039 --> 01:46:26,479
and make ten kilos of enriched uranium from it? Okay?

1952
01:46:26,680 --> 01:46:28,399
That a work unit is that basically measure take a

1953
01:46:28,479 --> 01:46:30,720
hunred kilos making in ten kilos of five percent enrich

1954
01:46:30,760 --> 01:46:35,880
the stuff you use in nuclear reactors. The largest sites

1955
01:46:36,079 --> 01:46:40,960
would be from Russia. Rossotom makes about twenty seven million

1956
01:46:41,640 --> 01:46:46,159
swus China's got about ten million. Irana, which is a

1957
01:46:46,239 --> 01:46:49,079
conglomerate of the US, UK, Germany, France, Netherlands makes about

1958
01:46:49,079 --> 01:46:52,920
seven point five million. Rangco, which is also a conglomerate

1959
01:46:52,920 --> 01:46:56,359
of the UK US Germany is eighteen million, so the

1960
01:46:56,399 --> 01:47:00,720
West can make about twenty five million, SWU use Russia

1961
01:47:00,760 --> 01:47:03,319
to a twenty seven million China ten million. In fact,

1962
01:47:03,399 --> 01:47:05,600
when it comes to HALU, which is this highly enriched

1963
01:47:05,640 --> 01:47:09,479
they want to use for natrium, only rostotom makes it right.

1964
01:47:10,399 --> 01:47:13,000
So one of the challenges with them actually building the

1965
01:47:13,079 --> 01:47:16,359
reactor side of this thing is you're supposed to buy

1966
01:47:16,399 --> 01:47:19,359
fuel from Russia. Yeah, so they're kind of going to

1967
01:47:19,439 --> 01:47:23,680
need to mature HALU production in America if they're actually

1968
01:47:23,680 --> 01:47:24,960
going to make a go of this. But you know,

1969
01:47:25,079 --> 01:47:27,359
they've got the money, so they're going in with them. Sure.

1970
01:47:28,199 --> 01:47:31,560
One more other kind of reactor design being built in

1971
01:47:31,680 --> 01:47:35,479
the US is a company called x Energy in Texas

1972
01:47:36,039 --> 01:47:39,960
and they are building a pebble bed reactor. Pebble bed. Yeah,

1973
01:47:40,319 --> 01:47:43,359
we talked about these two case we did. So this

1974
01:47:44,199 --> 01:47:48,840
depends on a fuel called Triso. So here's the interesting

1975
01:47:48,920 --> 01:47:52,760
idea behind a Triso fuel. Instead of building a rod

1976
01:47:53,359 --> 01:47:57,000
coded in the zircanadum of enriched uranium. And when I

1977
01:47:57,039 --> 01:47:59,039
build those rods, I have to put them into assemblies

1978
01:47:59,079 --> 01:48:03,239
that then go inside of a pressurized tank with a

1979
01:48:03,279 --> 01:48:04,960
big structure around it and so forth, they got to

1980
01:48:05,000 --> 01:48:07,800
manage the radiation. Right, But the trisop fuel, I make

1981
01:48:07,960 --> 01:48:12,800
spheres that have granules uranium in them, but the moderator

1982
01:48:12,880 --> 01:48:16,199
graphite is embedded in the fuel and then it's coated

1983
01:48:16,239 --> 01:48:20,319
in silicon carbide, so it's essentially indestructible and on its own.

1984
01:48:20,359 --> 01:48:22,560
You could hold one of these in your hand, right,

1985
01:48:22,680 --> 01:48:24,159
you won't do anything. But if you get a bunch

1986
01:48:24,199 --> 01:48:27,840
of them together, they neutron start to paying between them,

1987
01:48:27,840 --> 01:48:29,960
and they heat up and they get really hot. And

1988
01:48:30,000 --> 01:48:31,920
when they get too hot, they start to expand and

1989
01:48:31,960 --> 01:48:34,239
they slow themselves down. The reaction slows down because they

1990
01:48:34,239 --> 01:48:39,520
get bigger, so they can't burn. They're structurally sound, they're

1991
01:48:39,520 --> 01:48:42,600
self contained. It's pretty cool, right, it's interesting. They're safe.

1992
01:48:43,079 --> 01:48:44,840
And so the idea would be you basically have a

1993
01:48:44,880 --> 01:48:47,079
high temperature hopper that you put a bunch of these in.

1994
01:48:47,319 --> 01:48:51,199
It gets really hot, You pump helium through that. It

1995
01:48:51,279 --> 01:48:54,880
superheats the helium. You pump that helium out, flash steam,

1996
01:48:55,079 --> 01:48:57,960
run a turbine, right, right, I remember this.

1997
01:48:58,199 --> 01:49:02,359
Speaker 2: Then the problem with helium is it's hard to manage them,

1998
01:49:02,520 --> 01:49:04,600
hard to contain and hard to manage.

1999
01:49:04,760 --> 01:49:10,520
Speaker 1: Now that's trivial and it's not mature. These spheres eventually age,

2000
01:49:10,840 --> 01:49:13,119
so you do need to get them out and rotate

2001
01:49:13,159 --> 01:49:15,399
them and put newines in, so they're sort of rotating

2002
01:49:15,439 --> 01:49:18,359
through there. Sometimes they jam. There was one case in

2003
01:49:18,439 --> 01:49:20,960
experimental pebble bed where the casement cracked and they got

2004
01:49:21,000 --> 01:49:24,640
wedged in there, and that's a problem. The fuel is

2005
01:49:24,760 --> 01:49:31,399
expensive to make and it's very hard to reprocess. Now

2006
01:49:31,560 --> 01:49:33,920
the reason X Energy is doing this project is actually

2007
01:49:33,960 --> 01:49:37,560
working closely with now Chemical because now has a big

2008
01:49:37,720 --> 01:49:40,560
industrial plant in Texas right beside where they're going to

2009
01:49:40,560 --> 01:49:43,159
build this reactor, and they want the heat for their

2010
01:49:43,199 --> 01:49:46,279
industrial process, so not just electricity being generated, but it's

2011
01:49:46,319 --> 01:49:49,600
a huge byproduct of a lot of heat. And right

2012
01:49:49,680 --> 01:49:53,000
now the Dow plant they have to burn natural gas

2013
01:49:53,119 --> 01:49:55,399
to make that heat. So having a reactor that you

2014
01:49:55,439 --> 01:49:57,399
can take both the heat and the energy off of

2015
01:49:57,600 --> 01:50:00,159
is interesting. So they're helping to fund a bunch of that.

2016
01:50:00,640 --> 01:50:04,840
But the Triso fuel needs to be matured. The fuel

2017
01:50:04,840 --> 01:50:08,079
production is being built in Oakridge, Tennessee, so that's back

2018
01:50:08,199 --> 01:50:09,279
the same location again.

2019
01:50:09,399 --> 01:50:11,840
Speaker 2: So after hearing about all these different types of reactors,

2020
01:50:12,560 --> 01:50:17,399
I fully remember coming to the same conclusion on all

2021
01:50:17,520 --> 01:50:21,920
of these nuclear talks that you've done. Yeah, Now, the

2022
01:50:22,079 --> 01:50:25,880
thorium salt reactor seems to be the favorite. The thorium

2023
01:50:25,960 --> 01:50:28,119
has all certain benefits supposed to be clear. Light water

2024
01:50:28,199 --> 01:50:32,000
reactors are the way to go because they're mature. Right,

2025
01:50:32,039 --> 01:50:34,479
there's sort of a known technology.

2026
01:50:35,079 --> 01:50:39,640
Speaker 1: If your goal is to decarbonized power generation by twenty

2027
01:50:39,640 --> 01:50:43,520
to fifty, knowing it takes at least five years, ten years,

2028
01:50:43,960 --> 01:50:46,119
maybe as much as ten years to build these reactors,

2029
01:50:46,680 --> 01:50:48,760
building what you know at scales, so you can actually

2030
01:50:48,760 --> 01:50:51,640
get them done on time. As the important party researching

2031
01:50:52,079 --> 01:50:56,479
is research. Reactors are a problem, right because you don't know,

2032
01:50:56,800 --> 01:50:58,000
you don't know when you're going to be done. You

2033
01:50:58,039 --> 01:51:00,880
don't know if it's going rite. Like at least you

2034
01:51:00,960 --> 01:51:04,159
look at those EIGHTP one thousands, they're certified for fifty years. Yeah, right,

2035
01:51:04,399 --> 01:51:06,000
Like you could get them done and know you have

2036
01:51:06,079 --> 01:51:09,399
power for quite some time. Right. The salt is worth

2037
01:51:09,520 --> 01:51:13,640
maturing because it can deal with the waste and it's efficient. Yeah,

2038
01:51:13,680 --> 01:51:16,520
So that's a research project separate from you dealing with

2039
01:51:16,640 --> 01:51:18,880
the I need the power and I need it now, right, Okay,

2040
01:51:19,720 --> 01:51:21,800
I meantime. Now you've got the Microsofts and the Amazons

2041
01:51:21,800 --> 01:51:23,680
and the Googles all wanted to build these data centers.

2042
01:51:23,720 --> 01:51:27,680
So Microsoft now licensed three mile Island reactor one. Yep,

2043
01:51:27,800 --> 01:51:30,920
hearn about that, right, And they're starting to fund more

2044
01:51:31,079 --> 01:51:34,319
SMR development because the small reactor would actually make sense

2045
01:51:34,479 --> 01:51:36,840
for data centers. Data centers don't want to giggle out

2046
01:51:36,840 --> 01:51:41,760
of power. They want a few megawatts, so so Dominion

2047
01:51:41,920 --> 01:51:43,800
smaller reactors would actually make sense for them.

2048
01:51:44,000 --> 01:51:47,439
Speaker 2: So Dominion that owns Millstone Nuclear power plant, which is

2049
01:51:47,560 --> 01:51:50,680
at the opposite end of my town on the water,

2050
01:51:52,119 --> 01:51:55,800
they well, a company wants to build a data center

2051
01:51:56,520 --> 01:52:00,840
adjacent to Millstone. I don't know what it is, but

2052
01:52:02,279 --> 01:52:06,399
but yeah, and so the local people, I think most

2053
01:52:06,479 --> 01:52:08,880
of them don't want it, of course.

2054
01:52:09,720 --> 01:52:12,760
Speaker 1: But I don't see that as a bad thing. DWE

2055
01:52:12,800 --> 01:52:16,720
centers an't particularly obnoxious, you know. They right now they

2056
01:52:17,000 --> 01:52:19,319
want to build more data centers and is power available? Right?

2057
01:52:19,479 --> 01:52:21,880
The next problem will be water available, because they use

2058
01:52:21,880 --> 01:52:23,920
a fair about of water to keep data centers cool.

2059
01:52:24,119 --> 01:52:28,840
So yeah, you know, Nimby is a thing. They do

2060
01:52:29,000 --> 01:52:31,920
provide jobs. Like there's there's a whole question around whether

2061
01:52:31,960 --> 01:52:34,159
this makes sense. You just got to press all the details.

2062
01:52:34,520 --> 01:52:36,600
Don't just say no, make sure you get the things

2063
01:52:36,680 --> 01:52:39,399
you need to make it make sense. Yeah, but you're right.

2064
01:52:40,039 --> 01:52:41,960
I've talked about a lot of different techniques. You know,

2065
01:52:42,239 --> 01:52:45,039
the sodium reactor has the advantage of being a good

2066
01:52:45,079 --> 01:52:48,359
fuel burner too, much like molten salt. It has more

2067
01:52:49,880 --> 01:52:52,319
it's been built more times than molten salt reactors have,

2068
01:52:53,159 --> 01:52:57,000
but also had had way more problems. But that's also

2069
01:52:57,119 --> 01:52:59,319
you know, it's just they've never found a real nobody's

2070
01:52:59,399 --> 01:53:01,159
run them for very long except the Russians who don't

2071
01:53:01,159 --> 01:53:05,800
care about the consequences. So, you know, fluorine salts. Because

2072
01:53:05,840 --> 01:53:07,680
of the ability of reprocess fuel and you're actually talking

2073
01:53:07,680 --> 01:53:09,800
about taking the waste products and using them, like turning

2074
01:53:09,800 --> 01:53:12,119
them into using the product. That's a lot of straight

2075
01:53:12,199 --> 01:53:16,119
to them, alt attractive to me. There's another tryso reactor

2076
01:53:16,319 --> 01:53:19,199
in development for the US military. It's a product. It's

2077
01:53:19,239 --> 01:53:22,840
called Project Pelee Pelea. I think it was a character

2078
01:53:22,920 --> 01:53:26,960
from Hawaiian mythology. It was like the god of the volcano. Yeah, yeah,

2079
01:53:27,239 --> 01:53:31,840
volcano god or something. Yeah. Yeah. They got it's the military,

2080
01:53:31,880 --> 01:53:33,359
So they got the funding. It's a half They got

2081
01:53:33,359 --> 01:53:36,680
a half a billion dollars to build out a reactor

2082
01:53:36,720 --> 01:53:41,039
that fits in four twenty foot containers, so shipable. One

2083
01:53:41,119 --> 01:53:43,000
of those containers would actually be the reactor. The rest

2084
01:53:43,119 --> 01:53:45,079
is like pumps and generations and all that sort of stuff,

2085
01:53:45,560 --> 01:53:48,880
using highly enriched fuel triso fuel, which the military is

2086
01:53:48,880 --> 01:53:52,079
allowed to do so rich to nineteen percent I presume

2087
01:53:52,119 --> 01:53:53,720
because it's the US military, they're going to figure how

2088
01:53:53,720 --> 01:53:56,199
to make that fuel themselves and not buy it from

2089
01:53:56,239 --> 01:53:59,479
the Russians. But it would be a high temperature gas reactor.

2090
01:54:00,560 --> 01:54:03,399
You think about we talked about this before, the amount

2091
01:54:03,399 --> 01:54:08,399
of money that the US spent in Afghanistan shipping fuel

2092
01:54:09,159 --> 01:54:13,039
from Pakistan and a continuous convoy of trucks to burn

2093
01:54:13,119 --> 01:54:16,720
in generators to operate their bases. Small reactors like this

2094
01:54:16,800 --> 01:54:19,239
would make a huge difference. I mean, so with space

2095
01:54:19,279 --> 01:54:20,920
based power, but that would be more than half a

2096
01:54:20,960 --> 01:54:25,880
billion dollops And so, I mean the upside to the

2097
01:54:26,079 --> 01:54:29,399
US bringing PLA too into existence is it will make

2098
01:54:29,439 --> 01:54:31,680
a market for triso fuel, which then opens the door

2099
01:54:31,760 --> 01:54:35,159
to more pebble by discussions as a reactor design. The

2100
01:54:35,199 --> 01:54:37,039
fuel already exists, that makes it a little bit easier

2101
01:54:37,039 --> 01:54:39,960
to deal with. That being said, you know, nineteen percent

2102
01:54:40,079 --> 01:54:43,920
enriched geranium is got a proliferation risk. It's fine if

2103
01:54:43,960 --> 01:54:45,359
the military control of it. I don't know if you

2104
01:54:45,359 --> 01:54:49,039
allow commercial entities to control that fuel, right where five

2105
01:54:49,079 --> 01:54:51,439
percent really doesn't have the same risks at all. Yeah,

2106
01:54:51,960 --> 01:54:55,199
all right, a little bit on fusion. You know, I

2107
01:54:55,239 --> 01:54:56,640
don't spend a lot of time on fusion these days

2108
01:54:56,640 --> 01:55:00,840
because I've really come to appreciate their research projects. They're

2109
01:55:01,039 --> 01:55:03,439
a long way away from being real. That being said,

2110
01:55:03,560 --> 01:55:06,800
my favorite fusion project of them all is Commonwealth Fusion. Okay,

2111
01:55:07,079 --> 01:55:12,840
that's the one that's the one in Mit that they're

2112
01:55:13,000 --> 01:55:16,039
trying to build a they're trying to build a Takamat

2113
01:55:16,199 --> 01:55:21,319
reactor based on reb Co semiconductors. So these are the

2114
01:55:21,399 --> 01:55:26,279
high temperature cooled liquiditrogen superconductors. They've got enough funding, Like

2115
01:55:26,680 --> 01:55:28,640
they went real quiet, and I said years ago when

2116
01:55:28,680 --> 01:55:30,199
they went real quiet, its because they got enough money.

2117
01:55:30,199 --> 01:55:32,039
They're just trying to build a thing. That's basically what's happened.

2118
01:55:32,079 --> 01:55:34,399
They've scaled up their factory. They've had eight hundred people

2119
01:55:34,399 --> 01:55:37,079
working on it. They react to their building. It's called Spark,

2120
01:55:37,600 --> 01:55:40,399
which is their test reactor. They're supposed to have first

2121
01:55:40,439 --> 01:55:44,119
plasma in twenty twenty six, so they're well, they're reactor

2122
01:55:44,159 --> 01:55:46,319
buildings in full assembly right now. There's been a little

2123
01:55:46,319 --> 01:55:48,479
bit of an update. They're pretty quiet, they don't need

2124
01:55:48,520 --> 01:55:51,880
to talk, but the destruction and I bring up because

2125
01:55:51,920 --> 01:55:53,920
this year they also announced the site of their full

2126
01:55:53,960 --> 01:55:58,159
scale reactor, the ARC Reactor, being in Virginia. Wow. So

2127
01:55:58,399 --> 01:56:00,680
I think it's a bit speculative. I don't like it

2128
01:56:00,800 --> 01:56:02,239
when they say, hey, we know we're going to build

2129
01:56:02,239 --> 01:56:04,199
a full scale reactor before you built the prototype, Like,

2130
01:56:04,279 --> 01:56:06,680
you don't. You're so confident it's going to work, you're

2131
01:56:06,720 --> 01:56:10,119
already picking sites. But I think that might be partially

2132
01:56:10,159 --> 01:56:10,880
a funding thing.

2133
01:56:11,159 --> 01:56:13,159
Speaker 2: So are the other ones, like Iter just dead in

2134
01:56:13,239 --> 01:56:13,560
the water.

2135
01:56:13,920 --> 01:56:16,560
Speaker 1: No, they're so iders going along. They've spent enough money

2136
01:56:16,600 --> 01:56:18,159
out they're going to finish it. But they've also admitted

2137
01:56:18,199 --> 01:56:21,119
that EIDER is just and you know, that's the NIOBM

2138
01:56:21,199 --> 01:56:23,600
ten superconductor, so it's only got so much field strength.

2139
01:56:23,680 --> 01:56:26,479
The REBCO has five times the field strength, which makes

2140
01:56:26,479 --> 01:56:29,439
it a lot more viasible and smaller. Yeah, they they're

2141
01:56:29,640 --> 01:56:32,359
hoping to get to a queue of one with Ider

2142
01:56:32,479 --> 01:56:34,680
or just about so get as much energy out as

2143
01:56:34,800 --> 01:56:37,039
energy in. But they've already described the fact that that's

2144
01:56:37,039 --> 01:56:39,000
as far as that's going to go. But it'll give

2145
01:56:39,039 --> 01:56:41,279
us the education to build the next one.

2146
01:56:41,840 --> 01:56:43,319
Speaker 2: Right, And how much money has itear?

2147
01:56:43,439 --> 01:56:49,880
Speaker 1: Costs? Sixty billion? Good god? Maybe more? And how many years? Twenty? Wow?

2148
01:56:50,439 --> 01:56:54,119
But again when you build a containment, when you build

2149
01:56:54,520 --> 01:56:57,680
the Tacomac in eight pieces in eight countries, like, what

2150
01:56:57,760 --> 01:56:59,800
did you think was going to happen? Right? This is

2151
01:56:59,800 --> 01:57:03,119
not about efficiency. This is about a mega project run

2152
01:57:03,239 --> 01:57:06,800
by governments with international treaties involved. So it's really hard

2153
01:57:06,880 --> 01:57:10,560
to I just think of other uses for sixty billion dollars.

2154
01:57:10,640 --> 01:57:13,880
I can think of many. Yeah, well that's that's at

2155
01:57:14,000 --> 01:57:18,760
least two or three commercial light water reactors and several

2156
01:57:18,800 --> 01:57:22,079
gigawatts of power that could be working in right now. Yeah,

2157
01:57:22,239 --> 01:57:23,880
you know, there's a lot of things that can be

2158
01:57:23,960 --> 01:57:26,199
done with that. So, I mean, I'm excited to see

2159
01:57:26,199 --> 01:57:28,960
if Commonwealth Fusion gets there. They're getting closer, like the

2160
01:57:30,119 --> 01:57:32,840
they are well funded, so they're not scrounging for money.

2161
01:57:32,840 --> 01:57:34,000
That's why I don't hear from so.

2162
01:57:34,199 --> 01:57:37,880
Speaker 2: Not this coming year, but maybe the year after that.

2163
01:57:38,000 --> 01:57:40,159
So in two years when you do the energy geek cut,

2164
01:57:40,199 --> 01:57:41,479
we might have more to talk about.

2165
01:57:41,640 --> 01:57:44,039
Speaker 1: Yeah, first light plaster. Now, there are a few other

2166
01:57:44,119 --> 01:57:46,439
fusion projects going out there, but as I poke at

2167
01:57:46,439 --> 01:57:48,399
each of them, it's like the same new stories from

2168
01:57:48,479 --> 01:57:51,479
last year some of them. And then they're maybe they're

2169
01:57:51,520 --> 01:57:54,079
raising money, but it's like five million dollars. That's enough

2170
01:57:54,119 --> 01:57:56,359
to keep people paid to put up pr at press releases,

2171
01:57:56,399 --> 01:57:58,960
not to build things. Yeah, when I see one hundred

2172
01:57:58,960 --> 01:58:00,800
million dollars going into it company, I was like, okay,

2173
01:58:00,840 --> 01:58:03,319
you can build things with that. So a lot of

2174
01:58:03,319 --> 01:58:05,800
these others are now really in stasis. They've got just

2175
01:58:05,960 --> 01:58:07,920
enough money to keep limping along trying to find a

2176
01:58:07,960 --> 01:58:12,279
bigger funder to go further. Okay, a few more questions.

2177
01:58:12,760 --> 01:58:15,399
J Michaud asked about the aid of the art and

2178
01:58:15,520 --> 01:58:20,439
residential lighting. Now, in some ways, I feel like LED lighting.

2179
01:58:20,560 --> 01:58:22,479
Everybody's got it now, it's in home depot. It's not

2180
01:58:22,520 --> 01:58:24,560
a big deal. It's normal put LED lights. And although

2181
01:58:24,560 --> 01:58:27,800
they're AC based LED, and as you know, and we

2182
01:58:27,840 --> 01:58:30,439
did a whole several shows on it, there's DC based LED,

2183
01:58:30,560 --> 01:58:34,479
which is much rarer and more efficient. It is more efficient,

2184
01:58:34,479 --> 01:58:37,319
it's about it's about thirty, you know, sixty percent more

2185
01:58:37,359 --> 01:58:40,800
efficient than AC based, but you have fewer products so

2186
01:58:40,880 --> 01:58:43,600
I found two stacks. Lumin Cash is the one I

2187
01:58:43,720 --> 01:58:45,520
used in Coquitlam back in the day and sold with

2188
01:58:45,680 --> 01:58:48,439
the house. And they have a new generation of their

2189
01:58:48,479 --> 01:58:50,079
product and I would use it again in a second.

2190
01:58:50,119 --> 01:58:52,319
When we tear this place apart and do upgrades, I

2191
01:58:52,439 --> 01:58:55,600
will put lumin Cash in. It's been nice. And there's

2192
01:58:55,600 --> 01:59:00,479
another company called clean Life with their ATX system spin

2193
01:59:00,720 --> 01:59:07,000
on native led DC lighting is solar because solar naturally

2194
01:59:07,079 --> 01:59:10,239
comes off at about forty eight bolts DC, and so

2195
01:59:10,880 --> 01:59:13,319
all both lumin Cash and clean Life now makes systems

2196
01:59:13,319 --> 01:59:15,920
where you can basically plug your solar directly into your

2197
01:59:15,960 --> 01:59:19,520
lighting system. So that's interesting. No battery storage, no conversion,

2198
01:59:20,119 --> 01:59:22,319
you're making DC power. You use it for your lights.

2199
01:59:22,840 --> 01:59:24,319
That's really interesting.

2200
01:59:24,479 --> 01:59:27,039
Speaker 2: So along with the AC cables in your house, if

2201
01:59:27,079 --> 01:59:29,520
you're building a new house, let's say, or you feel

2202
01:59:29,560 --> 01:59:32,960
like ripping your walls off, you could have just a

2203
01:59:33,039 --> 01:59:34,039
whole DC circuit.

2204
01:59:34,199 --> 01:59:37,359
Speaker 1: That's right, Yeah, and you know, can't really cause a fire.

2205
01:59:37,399 --> 01:59:40,760
The power levels too low. A lot less copper, so

2206
01:59:40,800 --> 01:59:43,159
it'll cost you less. You know, wiring's not cheap these days.

2207
01:59:43,239 --> 01:59:47,479
Copper costs money, so you know, the the net they

2208
01:59:47,560 --> 01:59:50,439
come up to about the same price, except the lights

2209
01:59:50,520 --> 01:59:54,680
never burn out, the dimming is super smooth. They run

2210
01:59:54,720 --> 01:59:58,119
on battery brilliantly because they're DC natives, so they don't

2211
01:59:58,119 --> 02:00:00,239
waste as near as much power. Don't eversion or thing.

2212
02:00:00,600 --> 02:00:02,840
They're just a really efficient way to make client cool.

2213
02:00:03,640 --> 02:00:07,000
Martina gram our friend and fellow RD always asks me

2214
02:00:07,119 --> 02:00:10,359
hard questions for the geek outs, and her question this

2215
02:00:10,439 --> 02:00:13,039
year is how what our energy consumption trends like for

2216
02:00:13,119 --> 02:00:17,880
country to country, so are we getting better? And the answer, Martina,

2217
02:00:18,000 --> 02:00:20,760
is that in the Western world, so US, Canada, EU,

2218
02:00:20,960 --> 02:00:24,560
Australia and New Zealand, you're seeing that power consumption per

2219
02:00:24,600 --> 02:00:27,199
capita going down, which is good because we have the

2220
02:00:27,319 --> 02:00:30,399
highest power consumption per capita in the world, but our

2221
02:00:30,479 --> 02:00:34,479
total consumption per person is decreasing. In the developing world,

2222
02:00:35,119 --> 02:00:38,800
it is still increasing. That's the nanatary nature of industrialization.

2223
02:00:39,560 --> 02:00:42,039
China has the most growth. They're still less than US

2224
02:00:42,359 --> 02:00:46,800
by half, but they are increasing. So when you say US,

2225
02:00:47,079 --> 02:00:51,439
China as one country is less than the whole West.

2226
02:00:52,319 --> 02:00:56,399
Their power consumption per capita is half the US is

2227
02:00:56,439 --> 02:01:00,159
power presumption or the US which is the highest. But

2228
02:01:00,319 --> 02:01:03,079
all you know, I don't think the spread between the US, Canada,

2229
02:01:03,439 --> 02:01:06,680
Europe is that large. It's there, but it's not.

2230
02:01:06,760 --> 02:01:09,239
Speaker 2: They are burning a lot of coal over there, however,

2231
02:01:09,399 --> 02:01:12,199
And our coal consumption has gone down, hasn't it.

2232
02:01:12,319 --> 02:01:14,279
Speaker 1: And when I say our, I mean cole consumption. China

2233
02:01:14,279 --> 02:01:17,920
has gone down too. Yeah, it's like everybody's decreasing coal

2234
02:01:18,920 --> 02:01:22,520
to a degree. Okay, last one, Yeah, from our friend

2235
02:01:22,840 --> 02:01:27,199
Laurent Laurent Vignon. So he asked me about the land

2236
02:01:27,520 --> 02:01:31,880
Man Rant land Man is so what is this? Okay?

2237
02:01:32,159 --> 02:01:35,119
Land Man is a television show and the character involved

2238
02:01:35,199 --> 02:01:37,159
was played by Billy Bob Thorne, and he went on

2239
02:01:37,239 --> 02:01:41,479
this huge rant about there's nothing clean about alternative energy, right,

2240
02:01:42,079 --> 02:01:44,439
you need all these trucks running diesel, and you need

2241
02:01:44,520 --> 02:01:47,199
lubricants and so forth, like there's nothing clean about it.

2242
02:01:48,079 --> 02:01:50,079
It's important to remember this is a television show. He

2243
02:01:50,199 --> 02:01:52,079
was playing a character, and none of my set was

2244
02:01:52,119 --> 02:01:56,239
actually true. You know. His argument was that it you know,

2245
02:01:56,840 --> 02:01:59,279
I'm sure you put up a wind turbine, but that

2246
02:01:59,439 --> 02:02:01,520
you used made more carbon putting that up than it's

2247
02:02:01,560 --> 02:02:05,039
ever going to save, which is patently untrue. The typical

2248
02:02:05,199 --> 02:02:08,520
carbon payback, even for all the concrete castings and everything

2249
02:02:08,680 --> 02:02:11,239
for a wind turbine is less than a year. The

2250
02:02:11,359 --> 02:02:13,880
larger the turbine, the faster the payback, the big big

2251
02:02:13,960 --> 02:02:18,520
ones three months so and then after that your net

2252
02:02:18,600 --> 02:02:22,000
negative on carbon production. And I'm not even accounting for

2253
02:02:22,199 --> 02:02:24,720
the amount of say, concrete, you would pour to build

2254
02:02:24,720 --> 02:02:25,920
a coal power plant. Right.

2255
02:02:26,479 --> 02:02:29,279
Speaker 2: But it is useful to have fiction like that because

2256
02:02:29,359 --> 02:02:32,039
it just helps us keep on our toes in terms

2257
02:02:32,079 --> 02:02:36,319
of you know what is greenwashing versus yes, you know real,

2258
02:02:37,199 --> 02:02:39,159
you know it. It forces us to do the science,

2259
02:02:39,359 --> 02:02:39,720
and it was.

2260
02:02:39,720 --> 02:02:42,000
Speaker 1: Good to have the real experts come out and show

2261
02:02:42,159 --> 02:02:46,239
the matheh, Right. But it also I think that Billy

2262
02:02:46,279 --> 02:02:49,479
Bob Thornton did a really good job of portraying your

2263
02:02:49,560 --> 02:02:56,000
classically misinformed worker who feels threatened by all these technologies. Right. Sure.

2264
02:02:56,600 --> 02:02:59,840
The fact that a certain group of the population jumped

2265
02:02:59,880 --> 02:03:03,359
on it as factuals that everybody should watch this, that's

2266
02:03:03,439 --> 02:03:07,720
the disturbing part. It was a television show. Television shows

2267
02:03:07,760 --> 02:03:12,800
aren't real. But it is worthwhile to do the math

2268
02:03:12,920 --> 02:03:15,600
for the payback in carbon. In fact, when is the

2269
02:03:15,760 --> 02:03:19,520
fastest payback almost always less than a year. A few months.

2270
02:03:19,920 --> 02:03:23,680
Commercial solar is one to two years, from a carbon

2271
02:03:23,720 --> 02:03:28,720
footprint perspective of payback, it does create a certain amount

2272
02:03:28,720 --> 02:03:30,119
of CO two to make those panels and to put

2273
02:03:30,159 --> 02:03:32,159
them up and to put them down on the ground

2274
02:03:32,640 --> 02:03:34,239
is commercial solar, but it does pay back.

2275
02:03:34,239 --> 02:03:36,439
Speaker 2: I hate to ask this, like right at the end

2276
02:03:36,520 --> 02:03:39,520
of the energy geekeout, but is there any hope for

2277
02:03:40,960 --> 02:03:44,520
replacing your classic jet fuel for flying?

2278
02:03:45,479 --> 02:03:50,039
Speaker 1: That's a tough one. You know, aircraft depend on losing

2279
02:03:50,159 --> 02:03:53,560
the mass of the fuel for their flight distances, and

2280
02:03:53,640 --> 02:03:55,880
when you carry batteries around, you don't lose any weight,

2281
02:03:56,680 --> 02:03:59,920
so it's not going to work for batteries. That being set,

2282
02:04:00,800 --> 02:04:04,439
we are making we are able to produce carbon neutral

2283
02:04:04,600 --> 02:04:07,079
jet fuel. Well that's interesting. So if I take carbon

2284
02:04:07,159 --> 02:04:09,199
that's already in the system, like take it out of

2285
02:04:09,239 --> 02:04:12,920
the atmosphere is carbon dioxide, or take it from algae

2286
02:04:13,039 --> 02:04:15,319
already in the system and make jet fuel from it,

2287
02:04:15,399 --> 02:04:18,039
I'm not adding new carbon to the system as opposed

2288
02:04:18,079 --> 02:04:21,640
to socking it from underground and refining into fuel adding

2289
02:04:21,720 --> 02:04:26,119
new to the system. The problem is that today those

2290
02:04:26,960 --> 02:04:32,199
zero carbon fuels are five times the price, right, and

2291
02:04:32,319 --> 02:04:37,479
so we're going to have long range jet flight because

2292
02:04:37,479 --> 02:04:40,840
we are starting to see electric and commuter ranges. We're

2293
02:04:40,840 --> 02:04:42,479
going to see long range jet flight. We're going to

2294
02:04:42,560 --> 02:04:45,079
have to raise the price and reduce the cost of

2295
02:04:45,119 --> 02:04:47,239
that fuel and meet it somewhere in the middle to

2296
02:04:47,680 --> 02:04:50,520
get to carbon neutral in that it's a great question,

2297
02:04:50,680 --> 02:04:52,680
and it's a it's a common one, but you know,

2298
02:04:53,239 --> 02:04:57,960
you've got to understand the payload fraction of a large

2299
02:04:58,039 --> 02:05:02,319
airliner in fuel, right, and airliners get more efficient as

2300
02:05:02,319 --> 02:05:03,920
to get the higher altube. But they're carrying so much

2301
02:05:03,920 --> 02:05:05,640
fuel when they start, they can only fly so high.

2302
02:05:06,039 --> 02:05:09,840
But today to increase efficiency, as they lose weight from

2303
02:05:09,880 --> 02:05:12,600
burning net fuel, they actually raise their health to increase

2304
02:05:12,640 --> 02:05:18,039
their efficiency. It's that significant, more than half of the

2305
02:05:18,119 --> 02:05:19,880
mass of an aircraft when it takes off on all

2306
02:05:19,960 --> 02:05:22,119
over reason I get that is fuel. Yeah. Is that

2307
02:05:22,239 --> 02:05:25,720
a show? You know? I feel it. You'd be two hours. Yeah,

2308
02:05:26,680 --> 02:05:29,319
feel better now that it's out of your brain. Yeah,

2309
02:05:29,760 --> 02:05:33,560
much better. Thank you, We all do as well. Thank

2310
02:05:33,600 --> 02:05:36,920
you for sharing, Richard. It's always a pleasure. Awesome. All right,

2311
02:05:37,000 --> 02:05:39,000
We'll see you next time on dot net Rocks.

2312
02:05:59,319 --> 02:06:01,880
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2313
02:06:02,159 --> 02:06:06,079
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2314
02:06:06,199 --> 02:06:10,199
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2315
02:06:10,520 --> 02:06:14,680
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2316
02:06:15,520 --> 02:06:17,560
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2317
02:06:17,880 --> 02:06:19,119
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2318
02:06:19,079 --> 02:06:24,319
Speaker 2: Com for RSS feeds, downloads, mobile apps, comments, and access

2319
02:06:24,359 --> 02:06:26,840
to the full archives going back to show number one,

2320
02:06:27,399 --> 02:06:30,560
recorded in September two thousand and two. And make sure

2321
02:06:30,600 --> 02:06:33,119
you check out our sponsors. They keep us in business.

2322
02:06:33,640 --> 02:06:36,079
Now go write some code, See you next time.

2323
02:06:37,039 --> 02:06:38,520
Speaker 1: You got javan

2324
02:06:40,920 --> 02:06:40,960
Speaker 2: And