447. Nuclear Power Is Safer Than Wind and Solar | James Walker

This episode features Dr. Jordan B. Peterson's discussion with James Walker, a nuclear physicist and CEO of Nanonuclear, exploring the advantages of nuclear power over traditional renewable sources like wind and solar.

1. Microreactors offer a sustainable and efficient alternative to traditional energy sources, ideal for remote locations.
2. The episode discusses the technological innovations in nuclear power, emphasizing safety improvements over traditional reactors.
3. There is significant regulatory and infrastructural evolution needed to fully leverage the benefits of nuclear energy.
4. Public perception and government policy play critical roles in the adoption of nuclear technology.
5. The episode highlights the environmental and economic advantages of nuclear energy, debunking common myths about its safety.

1: Introduction to Nanonuclear

Dr. Peterson introduces James Walker, who explains the concept and benefits of microreactors. Their conversation sets the stage for a detailed discussion on nuclear power's potential. Jordan Peterson: "So tell us about the microreactors your company is developing." James Walker: "Microreactors are compact and can be easily transported, making them perfect for providing power in remote areas."

2: Technical Deep Dive

Walker outlines the technical specifications of microreactors, differentiating them from larger nuclear reactors and detailing their operational efficiencies. James Walker: "Microreactors are less than 20 megawatts. They're small enough to be transported to where they're most needed."

3: Safety and Efficiency

The focus shifts to the safety measures and environmental benefits of using nuclear power, particularly in how it compares to other renewable energies. James Walker: "These reactors are designed to be fail-safe, automatically shutting down in emergencies without external power."

4: Regulatory Challenges

Discussion on the regulatory landscape that could either hinder or help the deployment of nuclear technologies, especially microreactors. James Walker: "The current regulatory framework is not well suited for microreactors; it's more tailored to large-scale nuclear plants."

5: Future of Nuclear Power

The episode concludes with speculative insights into the future of energy, where nuclear power stands in terms of global energy politics, and the potential shifts in public policy. James Walker: "With proper support, nuclear power could lead a global shift towards sustainable and safe energy solutions."

1. Educate Yourself About Nuclear Energy: Learn about its safety, efficiency, and environmental impact.
2. Support Policy Change: Advocate for modernized regulations that accommodate new nuclear technologies.
3. Invest in Sustainable Technologies: Consider supporting or investing in companies that are innovating in safe nuclear technology.
4. Community Engagement: Participate in community discussions about energy sources and advocate for nuclear as a safe option.
5. Stay Informed: Follow developments in nuclear technology and policy to stay informed about potential impacts on your community and environment.

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with nuclear physicist and CEO of Nano Nuclear, James Walker. They discuss why nuclear power is continuously sidelined for less efficient, less safe forms of power, the change from civic — massive — reactors to truck-sized units, the refinement process of uranium, and the true environmental cost of mass poverty.
James Walker is a nuclear physicist and was the project lead and manager for constructing the new Rolls-Royce Nuclear Chemical Plant; he was the UK Subject Matter Expert for the UK Nuclear Material Recovery Capabilities and the technical project manager for constructing the UK reactor core manufacturing facilities. Walker’s professional engineering experience includes nuclear reactors, mines, submarines, chemical plants, factories, mine processing facilities, infrastructure, automotive machinery, and testing rigs. He has executive experience in several public companies, as well as acquiring and redeveloping the only fluorspar mine in the United States.

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Jordan Peterson
Hey, everybody. So I had a great discussion today with someone I've wanted to talk to the type of person I've wanted to talk to for a long time and turned out to be exactly the right person. James Walker. He's a nuclear physicist and CEO of a very interesting company called Nanonuclear. And Nano is making microreactors that are nuclear reactors that are portable, that can be moved around on the back of trucks.

And this is something I'm very interested in being interested in, the nexus in the relationship between energy, environment and the amelioration of poverty. And it seems to me that investigating the provision of low cost, resilient, widely distributable nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels is morally required. Partly because we know, we know this isn't some wild hypothesis that if you can make people who are absolutely poverty stricken relatively rich, they start to care about the environmental future. And so what that means is the fastest way to, to environmental sustainability is by the amelioration of poverty. And the best way to do that is to provide low cost energy.

And potentially the best way to do that is with nuclear energy. And so I think these guys are on the cutting edge. So I talked to James Walker, who has an extremely interesting technical and managerial background, military background as well, about just exactly what they're up to. That's all part and parcel of this, you know. Welcome aboard.

All right, Mister Walker, James, you're CEO of nanonuclear, and you've got a cool title, I think. Head of reactor development. That's a cool title. And I was looking at your bio and it's quite a lot of fun. So what have we got here?

Extensive experience in engineering and project maintenance, including mining, construction, manufacturing, design, infrastructure and safety management. So that's a lot of practical work. And so, you know, I'm very interested in talking to you today. And so thank you very much for agreeing to participate in this. I've been following nanonuclear on Twitter for quite a while, and I'll just give you some background.

So you know why I wanted to talk to you. I mean, I've thought for years that it's utterly insane that we're not pursuing nuclear energy, like at a rate that's as fast as we can possibly move. And I have a lot of questions about simplicity of design, and they're probably stupid questions, to be frank, but now I have the opportunity to ask them, and hopefully I won't be quite so stupid after I've done this conversation. So do you want to start by telling everybody what it is that you're up to with nanonuclear and why you think what you're doing is plausible. And plausible, helpful, and possibly revolutionary.

James Walker
I mean, Europe, in Canada, take mining sites, or a lot of the first Nation communities, they're in remote areas. All of these things are run on diesel power. And you can't substitute this out for anything else until micro reactors come on the scene. And then suddenly you've got a market. Thousands of mining sites, hundreds of remote communities, island communities, charging stations freely, vehicles.

You can essentially put these remote power systems in the middle of nowhere, and they would power your communities or businesses for 1520 years. And that's a wonderful business opportunity that's never really been present before. And that's why we pursued the micro reactor route. Okay, so let me get some terminology straight so I understand exactly what we're talking about here. So we have large scale nuclear reactors in Ontario, which, and they're planning to refurbish the Pickering site, which is a new decision, I think, that came out actually last week, and a good decision.

Jordan Peterson
Thank God we're not as dopey as California or Germany, let's say. Now, you talked about small modular reactors, and I've looked into the molten salt technology reactors and so forth, but you're differentiating that down further to microreactors. So do you want to distinguish for us, draw a distinction between a microreactor and a small modular reactor? And can you tell us the scale of power production in house equivalents? Let's say a standard reactor will power something like a small city, if I understand, if I've got my numbers aligned properly, a small modular reactor, I'm not sure about their power generating capacity and what exactly constitutes a microreactor.

So differentiate that for us. Absolutely. So let's start with the conventional civil power plant, because that's what everyone's familiar with, because we've been using those for decades. So those things are powering cities and beyond. So usually a significant portion of your national grid, and that's in gigawatts.

James Walker
But when you shrink down to an SMR, you're talking about something really between, say, 20, about 300. When you're getting up to about 300 mw, you're getting up to quite a large reactor. And so that's really the definitional, the definition we can place in an SMR. A microreactor really is anything between, well, anything less than 20 megabits at that point, you're dealing with very small reactors. Okay?

Yeah. And so that's where we are. And we're at the low end of that because we want a transportable micro reactor. Okay, so let me. Okay, let's zero in on the microreactors now for a moment and then we'll talk about the technology.

Jordan Peterson
Okay? So when I've been thinking about this, because I've been thinking about the relationship between energy and the environment for a long time, so when I've been thinking about this, a number of things struck me. The first is the absolute power density of nuclear fuel, which is unsurpassed by any standard except for fit fusion. And we're not at fusion levels yet, although I talked to someone about that recently and that'll be released quite soon. And so then I thought, well, we've obviously had something approximating microreactors that are reliable for a very long time because we've been using nuclear subs for what, how long now?

70 years is at least 70 years, right? I mean, so that's a long time. And they fit in a submarine, so they're not very big, and submarines move around, so they're obviously portable and the people on them don't derive from radiation poison, and they can stay underwater forever, and they're obviously extraordinarily reliable. So then I keep thinking, well, why the hell aren't they everywhere? And so let's talk about everywhere for a minute.

I mean, there's some real advantages to distributed systems. I would say you pointed to the fact that they could be used in isolated communities. But I'm also wondering, it's like, well, why not a network grid of microreactors as a substitute for these multi billion dollar massive reactors that can but don't very often fail cataclysmically? And so, I mean, is there as well as a market for these isolated places that you describe, is there the broader capacity of making a resilient networked power grid that gives countries sovereignty over their own power supply, but also has the advantages of like multiplicity of provision, which, you know, I mean, we have a distributed system for fossil fuel and there's some real utility in that because if part of it goes down, the rest of it doesn't. And so tell me your thoughts on those sorts of matters.

James Walker
Well, it's interesting you bring that up, because we were recently at a conference, in fact just last week, and a representative of the polish government approached us about exactly this. And they have a grid system where certain shutdowns mean that the whole grid gets lost. And so they've really come up with no real solution to this apart from microreactors, which they believe they could space these accordingly. So that in the event of a blackout in a certain area, the grid can be substituted with other power sources along the way. And this has a far more preferential solution than, say, a big grid system or even a diesel generated system, which is actually less consistent and requires the daily importation of diesel just to maintain.

Jordan Peterson
Right, right. Well, what these systems are they resilient to solar flares? Just out of curiosity, because this is also a concern. Right. Because solar flare is about a once in a century occurrence.

And the fact that a solar flare could take out our whole power grid seems to me a lot more pervasive and present a threat than this, like climate alarmism that we're short circuiting ourselves about. So I know that the distribution infrastructure still might be susceptible to, say, solar flare induced shocks. But what about the reactors themselves? Well, the good part about a reactor is that it's almost entirely mechanical. Obviously, you can make the argument that mechanics, the mechanics can be very controlled by the electrodes.

James Walker
But the truth of it is that the reason why microactors are very safe is that, say there was a big solar flare and knocked out the electrics and the mechanical systems all simultaneously failed. With a microreactor, you can't get the disaster or the core melt, which is the big problem with a big civil plant that you can. And the reason for that is that it can't generate enough heat, especially in our designs, to actually melt the reactors. So it passively goes. Right?

Jordan Peterson
Right. So just shuts down? Shuts itself down. And even then, say the react, the uranium just keeps getting hotter. That's fine.

James Walker
It just radiates heat out and it's not going to melt. It doesn't matter. Like the worst thing that can happen with a reactor is if. I don't know, it's a coolant leak, which leads to a core overheat, which leads to core melt, which can happen in big reactors. It's not going to kill anyone, but it's messy to clean up.

Jordan Peterson
Right, right. But in a micro reactor, it's just passively cool. So say you did get that solar flare. There's not a huge amount of electronics that are. It would be a fairly quick fix to go around and put these things back in order, but they would essentially just sit there until you came around to do that fix.

James Walker
So it's a big advantage. Okay, so that's another advantage on the resilient side. Okay, so now I want to delve, if you would, into other issues. So let's say, cost, availability, but I'd also like to ask some really stupid questions about the technology itself. So I've been, and correct me any place I'm wrong, and that might, there might be many places like that.

Jordan Peterson
I mean, so you refine nuclear fuel and it heats up of its own accord as a consequence of radioactive fusion. And so, and then in a big reactor, you use rods to dampen down the rate at which the fission reaction occurs so that it stays within acceptable bounds. So let me ask you really a basic, simple technical question. So I was thinking, well, what would be the simplest possible source of electricity that you could hypothetically design if you were using nuclear power? So I thought, well, why not embed pellets of enriched uranium or some other substance inside molten lead balls and calibrate the distribution of the uranium pellets so that the balls were basically red hot but no hotter, drop them in a bucket of water, capture the steam and run a generator.

Okay, so, like, why is that stupid? Because it seems, the lead seems to me to be something that's dense and would shield, I guess it would get radioactive over time. But so that's a very simple design. So tell me why that's a stupid design. I mean, effectively what you've done is design a basic reactor because, like, uranium gets hot, heats up water.

James Walker
Like the only thing that's missing from your design is the circulation of water. So what you would want to do is obviously move the hot water to a point. Right, but that's a simple. We have pumps, we could do that. Okay, so why aren't extraordinarily simple systems like, I mean, I know it's not simple to mine and refine the uranium, you know, but why aren't extraordinarily simple systems like that available even as heat sources for that matter?

Well, I'll give you a good example, actually. You know that. Do you remember the voyage spacecraft that NASA launched that I think they're on the periphery of the solar system at the moment, and essentially all that's powering those is plutonium. That's basically radiating heat. And that's it.

It's like the Jordan Peterson reactor, but it's radiating heat, and there's like a thermoelectric turbine on that just converts some of that heat into electricity. That's it. And that's the totality of it. So that's probably the most simple nuclear device, nuclear powered device you could get. But say with a lead lined uranium pellet like you've described, well, say you have a place for your fuel and you're putting all of the lead pellets in there that's going to, obviously, the lead is now occupying space that the fuel could be.

So you might need to have a bit of a larger reactor, and if you have a bit of a larger reactor, you need to put a bit more fuel in there, and then you can get that runaway effect. Unfortunately, the laws of physics keep pushing us in certain design decisions. So that's, I think, been the challenge, and why microreactors and smrs have never been done before is that material science is now catching up. So, for instance, you've actually described something very close to a solution that a lot of the big reactor companies are coming up with called trisofumel, which is uranium encased in certain layers of, like, lead. And so essentially you can't get the fuel melt, and they're essentially pellets that go into a fuel space.

Jordan Peterson
Okay, so that gives me some sense. I'd like to kind of understand the most basic possible model before things become elaborated. So, can we walk a bit through your technology? One of the things that struck me about your technology was its portability on the back of a truck. I mean, I can imagine 50,000 reasons why that might be extremely useful, but there's something that's kind of cool about it, too, that you can just trundle one of these things wherever it's needed for emergencies, for backup power, and for remote communities, which is obviously on mining sites and so forth, as you pointed out, which is a big deal in a place like Canada, and would also, as far as I can tell, would open up the possibility, especially in places like the Northwest Territories, for mining, where that's practically not feasible because you can't build the bloody hydroelectric lines, you know, across 2000 miles of tundra, to fire up a mine.

But with this provision of power, then, I was also thinking it'd be pretty damn useful, hypothetically, on the desalination front, too, because everybody's jumping up and down about not having enough water, which strikes me as, like, abysmally foolish given that 70% of the planet or something like that is covered by, you know, water some miles deep. So I don't think we're going to run out. So. So walk me through the, if you would, to the design of your reactors and help me also understand why they're not already everywhere. Can your savings weather another economic storm?

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James Walker
Okay, so with our reactors, as you mentioned, we wanted them to be portable. It was actually a business decision that speared that on because we thought, well if they can fit within an ISO container as an example, then you could transport them by truck or by train or by just put it on the back of a maritime vessel and you could ship these things anyway. You could even effectively helicopter in. Now when you do that you can straighten your design a little bit. So you've got to work within the confines of an ISO container.

So you kind of end up with almost a bath tip bath shaped design. But, so we have two technical teams, one drawn principally out of scientists and engineers out of University of Berkeley, California and the other out of University of Cambridge. But we gave them the same MO. So it needs to be transportable, it needs to fit with an ISO container, it needs to be modular and it needs to be able to passively cool like we talked about earlier. And they had different solutions.

So the US team, they realized that if they take the coolant out and you just have uranium conventional fuel rod and it radiates through a solid core, then you don't need pumps for coolant at all. And then the whole mechanical system shrinks right down. So it's basically one of the most basic designs you could probably make thermally conductor a solid core and then circulated air basically removes heat from the periphery of that core to a turbine. And that's pretty much. Oh really?

Jordan Peterson
Really? So you're not using, you're not using liquid at all, you're just using heated air. Unless you wanted to find air as the liquid. But that's effectively their solution. And I think it's quite brilliant.

James Walker
I'm bound to say that. But I do genuinely think that. And the University of Cambridge's solution was to take a basic fuel form, uranium dioxide fuel rod, and surround it with a solar salt, but introduce some heat into that system to create a natural circulation. And then as that circulates, the uranium keeps that momentum going. And so then you can take the pumps out, you can take the mechanical systems out and the system shrinks right down.

Jordan Peterson
Okay. And you said that was salt. That was salt based? That was salt based, yes. So it's like molten salt, right?

Right. But the salt isn't molten in that system. So how is it? Or is it molten or how is the heat transferred? So it is essentially liquid.

James Walker
So it'll start off with solid, but as you introduce heat, you create that natural circulation, and then the heat of the uranium maintains that natural circulation of salt, and that will remove heat from the fuel rods, that then you can remove heat to a turbine and so forth. Right. And so how is the turbine. How is the turbine spun with that system? With that system, it's a thermoelectric.

So we're not in the. We're not going to design these turbines. But I mean, if you think like a helicopter turbine or something like that, where you're burning high quality jet fuel to generate heat and that heat is essentially moving their turbine, they're very convinced. The good thing about turbines is they're quite similarly to each other. Right.

Jordan Peterson
Right. When they've been around for a long time. So that's a well established technology. Now, you also worked for Rolls Royce for a while, if I've got my facts straight. I did.

James Walker
So I was Ministry of defense. Actually, you mentioned submarines earlier. That's how I got my start in nuclear. I was involved in the construction of manufacturing facilities to produce reactor cores. But they seconded me to Rolls Royce, where I worked as a physicist in the design of the next generation of nuclear reactors for the next generation nuclear submarines.

Jordan Peterson
I see, I see. Okay, so that's a logical segue into the commercial market that you're attempting to conquer now. How long have you guys been in operation? So, actually, not very long. It was only really about 2020 when we wanted to really get the company going.

James Walker
And I was number two in the organization. And we came at it obviously from that background when we were talking about why nuclear, why microreactors but what was quite interesting is actually once we got into the industry, we realized that the US infrastructure, the nuclear infrastructure, had kind of atrophied a little bit. And it had done that because the US could source enriched material from Russia, weapons grade material, and then it could just down blend that material for whatever domestic need it wanted, whether that was military or civil power plants. And that allowed it, essentially, to not have to renew a lot of its systems. So when we entered the nuclear industry, it was kind of alarming that we thought we would have major impediments to actually launching a commercial company because of these infrastructure problems.

We thought, actually, this could be an opportunity. So we're looking to try and build our own fuel fabrication facility or our own deconversion facility or our own fuel transportation system. And hopefully, like, we could be part of this renaissance of nuclear. Right, right. Where are you located?

So, the head of the headquarters are in New York. So I'm actually here at the moment, but I'm actually. I live in Canada most of the time. So, I mean, where do you live in Canada? Vancouver.

Jordan Peterson
And have you. Have you had any contact, say, with the government people in Saskatchewan? Because, I mean, as you no doubt know, Saskatchewan has, like, uranium reserves that are, I think, unparalleled in the world and that don't really seem to be being utilized all that efficiently. And so, I mean, it's such insanity. As far as I can tell, we have this almost infinite power supply at our hands, and yet we've turned to solar and wind.

We're trying to cobble together battery storage, which, as far as I can tell, isn't working that well at the moment.

Well, so that was the other question I had, is, like, another question I had. Why aren't these already everywhere? You pointed to transformation and material technology and alluded to the fact that maybe we're just at the point where this has become economically viable and scalable. Are there, like, regulatory problems? Are there problems of public perception as well that constitute impediments?

James Walker
I would say nuclear has suffered from the worst pr and that it might be partly because governments have always been involved in the funding of these big installations and the government don't care about. But, like, if I was to say to somebody, you know, if you. Nuclear is the safest of all energy forms, like, even safer than if you look at deaths per gigawatt hour. Nuclear beats out wind and it beats out solar surprises, right? It's the safest already.

And that's not even considering that smrs and microactors are still safer than new, big civil power plants. Right, right. And, you know, things like Fukushima or three Mile island get bought up. But I have to point out that nobody died in those situations and that really, it's just a cleanup operation. I don't want to trivialize, but it's.

I think it. Human psychology is interesting. I think radiation might be more intimidating because it's a danger you can't see, and so you can't understand the magnitude of that danger. Consequently, it's not like a tiger in the room. You can see and you can assess, and that maybe has been an impediment.

Jordan Peterson
Okay, well, okay, so that's. Well, we can understand that. I mean, a huge part of the problem that any company has to solve is the marketing problem. That's often 85% of the problem, even if it's a complex technical problem. And so then what about government impediment or other like sociological impediment, specifically to your progress?

Where are you getting resistance, and where are you seeing, like, a well paved way forward? Well, the good part is that when we. We did see a lot of resistance, but resistance in the form of infrastructure not being in place. And just to take an example of another company, and they probably won't mind me saying this, is that Nuscale were the first company to license an smr. In fact, they're the only ones in the world to do that.

James Walker
But they became under fire because the cost of their megawatt generation was more than they thought it would. But to be fair to them, everything they had to do was first of its kind. And so it's like the first pharmaceutical drug cost millions, and the second one costs nothing. And so they got penalized for that. But if there was an infrastructure in place within the country to support everything they did and manufacture the fuel and parts they needed, it would have been an order of magnitude cheaper, for a start.

And logically, nuclear should be the cheapest form of energy. But you have all your capital costs upfront, which can really distort that picture in big projects. Like 70% of your overall costs might be financing costs related to that big upfront capital cost. Well, one of the things, it seems to me that from a PR perspective, a marketing perspective, that there's a wide open field of opportunity on one side of this equation that I don't think has been well capitalized upon. First of all, I think you can make us.

Jordan Peterson
You already made a case for green. What would you say for that? Nuclear power is a very green form of energy, at least in principle, especially when it's safely delivered in the form that you're delivering it. And you made a case for reliability and portability and all that. But there's another case that's just begging to be made even additionally on the environmental front.

And so the data is quite clear that if you get people around the world up to the point where they're producing about $5,000 in us dollars a year in GDP, they start to take a long term view of the future. They become environmentally aware, and that's because they're not scrabbling around in the dirt burning dung trying to figure out where the next meal is coming from and willing to burn up and eat everything around them so they don't starve. So it's clear that if you get people, we know that rich companies get rich countries get cleaner, that's what happens. And so obvious. And we also think at least that absolute privation and poverty is bad because do we really want starving people and stunted children and all the misery that goes along with that?

And so there's this opening, it seems to me, for people who are in a position to provide at scale, in expense of energy to say, look, we could feed the worlds poor because theres a direct relationship between energy and wealth. Like more direct than anything else. Energy equals wealth. And now we could make all the poor people in the world rich in a non zero sum manner. And as soon as we did that, theyd start to care about the environment.

So whats the problem with that? What do you think of that as a marketing campaign? Lets say. Well, you, you've outlined our marketing campaign because when we were building up the company and we were making some very big connections, one of them, we were talking to some african diplomats and they were mentioning to us, you know, one significant issue that Africa faces as a continent is that there's large sections of population that are completely removed from grid systems. And so that means diesel generators.

James Walker
But the problem there again is that you need a constant supply of diesel to be brought into those generators for interruption. So their supplies, it's missing. If you have a microreactor system, we touched on it earlier, like desalination plants, medical facilities, a micro reactor could be put there and you've got 15 years of power for a community. And then it's, and it's consistent too. And then you can have that $5,000 per capita wealth to create more long term strategic thinking.

And you know, I've been to Africa enough and seen these, these poor areas to know that like when you're scrambling around in the dirt, your considerations are very short term because they have to be, otherwise you're going to die. And so it's a situation that begets, you know, very damaging decisions for the larger community. Right, right. Well, that's the environmental cost of poverty. Like we scream in the west all the time about the environmental cost of wealth, but the environmental cost of poverty is way higher.

Jordan Peterson
Way higher. And this is something I can't figure out. I cannot figure out why the greens don't get this, because in principle they're on the left and the leftists in principle are on the side of the poor. But when it comes. But the thing is, take Germany as example.

James Walker
The green lobby got into essentially a position of power within that country and they're effectively left with. And they were very, they heavily campaigned against nuclear to push for other renewable solutions. So they pushed heavily into wind and solar. But the result of that was that the country no longer could power itself. They had to buy power from, from Poland, which was manufactured by coal, and.

Jordan Peterson
They had to power and lignite coal. Right. Not just coal, but the worst kind of coal. Yeah, I know, brilliant, brilliant. Which is incredibly polluting.

James Walker
And they also had to buy, ironically, energy from France, which was generated by nuclear power. Great. The costs of the German went up for their power and their carbon footprint went up. Right. Right.

Jordan Peterson
So we want to dwell on that for a minute. So the consequence of the green movement in Germany was that power, let's lay it out, power is five times more expensive than it should have been. The Germans became reliant on fossil fuels to a degree that they weren't before, including reliant on Putin, which turned out to be a very bad idea, let's point out. Plus, and Germany is now in the throes of deindustrialization. So the poor are going to get a hell of a lot poorer.

And you might say, well, that's all worthwhile because we're so much greener. But the truth of the matter is that Germany now has among the world's dirtiest energy per unit because of their idiotic policy. So they didn't just fail on the economic front entirely and make the poor poorer, they failed by their own standards because the bloody goal was to decrease pollution. And what they did instead was increase it per unit of energy and not just a little bit, a lot. And so this just bedevils me because I cannot put my finger on why it is that the leftists are simultaneously pro environment, pro poor people and anti nuclear.

It's like, sorry, guys, you don't get to have all three of them. You can have two. Yeah, I imagine there's a lot of posturing here and it's. Yeah, yeah. It's not just.

You might say that. All right. Well, yes, but, like, as an example, like, I was working in Utah once, and there was this. I was working in this small little town, and there was a massive coal power plant there. And I was like, oh, so this.

James Walker
This powers Utah. And they're like, oh, no. We. We send all of this power straight to California. I was like, why?

And they're like, well, they shut down a lot of their power plants, so they can claim that they've greened, essentially, but really they're still powering their teslas off coal that's being generated in Utah. And so it's the same kind of.

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Jordan Peterson
Well, you know, Californians in Utah and the inhabitants, what are utonians? I have no idea. What you call people from Utah? I have no idea. Anyways, you know that California and people from Utah, they don't breathe the same atmosphere.

It's like China and the United States, completely different air supply, as everyone knows. So. Yeah. Well, one of the reasons I like to talk to engineers is because they don't get to posture. Like, the thing that's cool about engineers is their stupid stuff either works or it doesn't.

And it's very unforgiving. And so, you know, and, and, uh, yeah, it's okay. The DEI people in this and the. The politically correct types, they're going to take all you engineers out, too. So you better get prepared.

James Walker
Well, as a black male, my days might be numbered, so. Yeah, plus you're an engineer, man. You've got a lot of things, you know, a lot of strikes against you, so. Okay. Okay.

Jordan Peterson
So we've made a case for these small, these microreactors. Now, I'd like to know, and you alluded to something quite interesting. You said that when you first started to contemplate doing this in the american environment, you realized that there was a lot of industrial and infrastructure pieces that needed to be in place that had been allowed to decay because the Americans had had a reliable supply of fissile material from the Soviet Union as a consequence of its collapse. And so a lot of things were left to disintegrate, let's say. But now you've realized that that's also another economic opportunity.

So it sounds to me like you guys are planning to build a, what would you say from the ground up enterprise that will allow for these microreactors to exist. So then I want to know where you are, how you came to that conclusion, where you are in that process. And then again, because I have a particular interest in Western Canada, I'm curious about, you know, how these ideas have been received in places like Saskatchewan. So I would say there's like three questions there. Yep, yep, yep.

James Walker
So how these things have been received. Like, let's start with that one. So, yeah, I think certain territories like Alberta become very friendly to the idea of powering a lot of their remote industries, even the oil sands operations with nuclear power. Right, right. And that's an incredibly energy intensive industry.

And so there has been support voiced for the. And there's like an invest Alberta program, which is looking actually to bring in smrs, but that's not ubiquitous across the whole country. Like, you don't, you wouldn't see the same receptiveness from, say, British Columbia, where I am currently. It's again, certain more industry friendly provinces would drift in that sort of area. And I think, obviously Toronto.

Well, the Ontario, the greater Torontario area, came to the conclusion that nuclear had already provided a substantial portion of the energy for the province, and they didn't want to substitute that for more fossil fuels, so they've gone back and invested. Canada actually has a pretty decent. I quite like the reactors they put together that can do reactors, and they also. They almost generated their entire independent industry because they opted for designs that weren't being widely used across the world. So Canada is actually in a very strong position to build out their own SMR industry if they invest properly now in doing that.

Otherwise they're going to suffer in the same way that the United States is suffering from getting going now. And another thing you mentioned is why we saw these problems. We saw big companies like take terrapower. It's a big SMR company and it's backed by Bill Gates. So there's no shortage of money for this thing to get going.

But they effectively could not find enough fuel to push into their reactors to complete the test. And we thought, that's very interesting. So what happened there? Well, they effectively had to shut down for two years. And that's the worst thing that can possibly happen because you just burn cash.

And so they probably going to burn through hundreds of millions of dollars. And so the advantage, you know, a wise man can learn from the mistakes of others. So hopefully we just saw that and we thought, well, we're not backed by Bill Gates, so we can't afford to make $100 million mistake like that or a billion dollar mistake like that. And so really, before we saw the US government realize that there was a significant problem which very closely mirrored the Ukraine war, when relationships began to become very strange and they began pushing a lot of funding opportunities out there to build back their infrastructure. And they're doing that now, but it's still come a bit late.

And so the advantage we had is we started doing that before these funding opportunities from the US government came out to build conversion facilities, deconversion facilities, fuel fabrication, enrichment facilities, because otherwise, if Russia cut off the states now and they're still. They are still through back channels dealing in supply of rich uranium because the US can't afford to go without it. But they don't want to have those channels open anymore and they want to cut ties, but they can't do it. And you mentioned earlier that Germany lost sovereignty over itself partially because it couldn't power itself. It was reliant on russian gas.

Jordan Peterson
Right. That's a situation no country really wants to be in. You want to be. Have sovereign energy? Absolutely.

James Walker
Otherwise, your diplomatic strength is completely gone. Yeah, well, you'd think that no country would want that. But when you watch the policies that they're pursuing, a sensible person would conclude that that's exactly what they want. And I do believe that posturing has a very large amount to do with that, because almost all of the green idiocy is narcissistic posturing. The pretense of doing good without doing any of the actual work.

Jordan Peterson
Okay, so walk me through where you. Okay, so explain to everybody who's watching and listening how you're involved. Right from the place where the uranium is still in the ore in the ground, like, what has to happen at each step along the way so that the fuel actually gets to one of your reactors. And how is your company situated to make that happen and where are you in that process? So, starting at the very basic uranium mining, you mentioned the Saskatchewan deposit.

James Walker
So you mine the uranium, but the ore is effectively not very useful for anything. But you subject that ore to a leaching process and you create a yellow cake, which is essentially more concentrated uranium that then would be shipped off for a conversion. Where we sit in that is that we've actually reached out to Central Asia, where almost the majority of the world's uranium is currently being mined. It doesn't have to come from that, but say there are big deposits in, like, Wyoming and Saskatchewan that are not producing uranium readily now in enough quantities to meet the demand. And so it is coming from abroad.

I believe those domestic deposits will be built up now that the uranium price is rising because, like cop 28 announces trip the necessity to triple nuclear energy by 2040 or whatever it is. So that is having an effect on the uranium price, which is encouraging mine development. But the problem with mining is that it can take five years from a greenfield deposit to get to a mine. And so you always have that lag. And if the lag, if during that lag, the uranium price drops.

And that could even hit that mine, even coming to commercial production. So there's a lot of risk associated with not having your own domestic facilities in place. So we have reached out to them. We do have an ability at the president's office within certain countries in Central Asia to source uranium directly if we should need it. And we've even talked with the largest uranium materials broker in the world to make sure that we have a supply of that, because no business wants to have the risk that you have all.

You build all these facilities and reactors and manufacturing facilities, but the raw material that fuels all this isn't there. So that there's that component to it, too. Well, do you worry that you're dealing with these, say, central asian? Again, it brings me back to the same thing. Well, if you could have a resource in Wyoming or let's say, in Saskatchewan, that seems to me to be a lot more geopolitically stable in any real sense than trying to source something halfway around the world in countries that are definitely not politically stable.

Jordan Peterson
And so why were you compelled to go seek out suppliers elsewhere? Well, it's the immediacy of supply. Like they are able to supply material now. And that is a major advantage over. We have a mine and it's at even feasibility level.

James Walker
You still need to put the mine works in place, processing plants in place, processing plant from uranium operation could be quarter of a billion dollars and take three years to build. And so we want to make sure that. Does it have to take three years to build? I mean, you know, because things do move a lot. They could move a lot faster now than they once did.

Jordan Peterson
And I'm, you know, I also wonder, are there improvements in technology that are in the pipelines that would make it possible to do it in like a year instead of three years if people actually decided they. I mean, Germany built new natural gas importing terminals in months when they needed to. So we can actually move pretty quick if we decided it was a good idea. Okay, so you said immediacy of supply. That's what drove you to Central Asia.

But it would be better, perhaps if there were domestic supplies that were at least in the pipelines. Let's say domestic supply from Saskatchewan or Wyoming would be a lot better. Of course they would. There's no geopolitical. Well, there's less geopolitical uncertainty.

James Walker
And, for instance, even in Central Asia, they do supply China and Russia still with the uranium that they need for their own programs, too. So you're competing against other countries which are potentially hostile to the states or Canada or places like that. And if they're looking to wage an economic war, we'll look for more exclusive contracts. And so you then are in a competing position for material you can't control. Right.

Jordan Peterson
Seems like a bad. Yeah, like, from a geopolitical perspective, that seems unwise, let's put it that way. So I can understand why you guys are doing it commercially, because, as you said, you can't afford the delay and. Fair enough. Okay, so now do you have a stable supply, fundamentally?

Can you get. Can you get moving with what you're doing? You can. So the. The good part about what we're doing now is we've ensured that we have broken enough good relations with certain countries that we can source the material if we wanted.

James Walker
We're not in the business of enrichment, but we could do things like conversion and get it into a uranium hexafluoride gas, which can go to a licensed enrichment company like Arano or Centrus, and they could enrich the material for us. So what's the relationship between the gas and the yellow cake? So what you want to do with yellow cake is once it's been concentrated by that leaching process, is that you, it's easier to enrich a gas than it is, say, yellow cake, which, which you could use a centrifugal system, but gas is certainly a lot easier to maneuver. And so if you would take the yellow cake and you would expose it to several chemical processes to turn it into uranium hexafluoride, and it's actually the enrichment companies will enrich uranium hexaflora to produce, well, whatever you want. So enriched.

Enriched, whatever level. The customer needs it. But at that point, it actually needs to be deconverted back to a solid. Oh, yeah. So our company actually wants to build out that infrastructure for the country, too.

So take that uranium hexafluoride, convert it to dioxide hydride. Sorry, uranium dioxide, uranium hydride, uranium metal, whatever the market will need. And so that's one element. And then fabrication facility to tailor it for the specific reactor. So essentially fashion it into dimensions, composition, mold it with zirconium, whatever they want, and then.

And then sell that. And the final part of what we want to do is build out a transportation company so we can actually transport that around North America, too. How would you transport it? So we've actually been spending about a year doing this, but we've got a patented technology now for a cask system that can transport the most amount of enriched material. So halu material.

So it's enriched up to almost 20% around North America. And we're just in the process of getting that license now with the regular. Going online without ExpressVPN is like leaving your kids with the nearest stranger while you go to the restroom. They're probably not a kidnapper, but why risk it? Every time you connect to an unencrypted network like a cafe, hotel or airport, your online data is not secure.

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And you can get an extra three months free expressvpn.com jordan today. Okay, so. Okay, so that's. Okay, so you've been working on solving the transportation problem. And so what are the problems associated with transport that you've had to solve, and how did you solve those?

James Walker
So, the fundamental problem with transport is that you cannot have uranium critically configured. And what I mean by that is, uranium is only actually really radioactive if you push it all together, which is the basis of a bomb, really. If you push it together, then it triggers itself more and it sets off a chain reaction, and the reactivity creates the heat. So, effectively, for road regulations, you have to store the material in a structured way to make sure it's not critical, but it doesn't end there. There's a lot of other regulations surrounding that.

So is it going to be hit by a plane or a missile, or is it going to fall underwater? Or is it going to fall? What are the heat conditions? Can it be cold? Can it be warm?

And you've got to make all of these safety scenarios. So, designing a transportation cask that fits within a truck that can move a lot of material by road is a bit of an engineering challenge. But I don't think it's that. That difficult. But it's certainly something that has not been in place previously, because for smrs and microreactors, the uranium is enriched slightly more.

And because it's enriched slightly more, you need a completely new cask system. And so that's where we thought, oh, we'll jump on that and build that out. And that way, when the industry does take off the SMR microactive, we'll have the transportation able to move fuel for all the ssrs. Okay, so, does that mean. I see.

Jordan Peterson
So, that means that your transportation system, in principle, is not only designed to service your microreactors, but to be expanded to service these slightly larger reactors, the smrs. Yeah, the good part. And that's the plan? Yeah, that's the plan. So we don't.

James Walker
I mean, we. We're not in the business where we want the other competitors to fail. If they win, we'll win, right? Yes, yes. Right.

Jordan Peterson
Absolutely. The right. Number of competitors isn't zero. No, exactly. And also we want them to succeed because they'll build out the infrastructure.

James Walker
They'll generate more money within the country for this industry and we'll be beneficiaries of that too. And they want to move fuel. We'll help them move fuel. They want to fuel. Fabricate fuel.

We'll fabricate it for them. Even if they outsell our reactors, it's fine. Right. So you can also be in it on, you can also be in on their success in that situation too. Okay.

Jordan Peterson
So that's cool. Okay. So you said you've got a supply, at least at the moment in central Asia, that gets reduced to, by leaching to yellow cake. The yellow cake is transformed into uranium hydro. What's the name of the gas?

Hexafluoride. Hexafluoride. Uranium hexafluoride that can be concentrated and then converted back into about 20%, you said. And so why 20%? And then what?

And you can transport it at 20% and you can do that safely and you could do that by rail, by ship, by car or by, by, by train. And so now you have the 20% enriched material. What do you do with that when you get it to where it's supposed to go? So it depends where it's going. So if it's going to.

James Walker
If it's the 20% enriched uranium hexafluoride that'll need to be converted into uranium dioxide hydride or whatever fuel form you want. So are you transporting the gas? We go, well, we don't want to. I don't want to speak preemptively. Okay.

Jordan Peterson
That. Well that's fine. Yeah. But actually, no, it's fine. We do want to branch, take our cask and modify it so it can move gas.

I see. Okay. Okay. The anticipation is that currently we are building out a deconversion plan to be able to convert that gas into other forms. And then when they're in other forms, it's easier to fabricate into the final uranium form that the customers might want.

Okay. Okay. Okay. And how, how far, how far along are you when you're thinking pessimistically in solving these? Because you've got a bunch of problems as you laid out.

You've got the supply problem which you seem to have solved. Now you've got the transportation problem, which is also a huge opportunity. So that's cool because that gives you multi dimensional access to the market. You've got the transportation problem and it sounds like that's twofold there's a technical element, there's a regulatory element. I suppose there's going to be a public relations element to that, too, but whatever.

Okay, so now you can move this stuff around. Now you've got these deconversion plants that are going to help you formulate the fuel you need to run your reactors, and then you have the problem of building the reactors and getting them to where they're supposed to go. So four streams of problems that have to move together somewhat simultaneously. How far along are you on each of those streams? So if it's a pessimistic timeline, I would say, I mean, we've been working at this for a fair amount of time.

James Walker
I would say that the first line of business that we anticipate being commercially ready to deploy would probably be the transportation, actually, because we have the patented technology. We've already approached the licensing company to a regulator to do the licensing for us. And we've actually brought in the former executives of. I don't want to say the name, but the largest transportation company in the world, which might give it away, but we've brought in some of the former executives from their organization to build out the company around the technology. And so I believe that might be the first commercially deployable business.

The timeline on that probably looks like finish the licensing, hopefully sometime next year, and then the build out of the manufacturing facility to produce the casks, as well as the. The infrastructure around the casks to fit into trucks and things like that. They will do that simultaneously. Probably finish that sometime about 2026. Hopefully in 2026, 2027, we would have a commercial vehicle ready to start moving material around North America.

That would be okay. So that's pretty fit. It's pretty fast. Okay. Well, yeah.

Jordan Peterson
And if you were, if you, if you were optimistic, what would you say? Oh, I would say, hopefully the licensing runs all smoothly while that's going on, we build out the manufacturing facilities, we have them finished next year, and then we're in a position to begin initially deploying vehicles that can move enriched material up to 20% around the country. So maybe I shave two years off that if I'm super optimistic. Okay. So that gives us a range.

Okay, so now, if you had the opportunity to work with a state or provincial legislature that was, like, helpful in every way they possibly could be, what would that look like? What would you need from them? Is there anything you need from, like, a particular local jurisdiction that would speed what you're doing along? I would say the big thing on that topic is that the regulatory process just for any reactor, micro reactor, SMR, or big civil power plant is probably at minimum four years. Oh, yeah.

That's just no good. That's terrible. The problem, I think, and they're probably going to see this podcast and be angry with me, but I think they're trying to apply a civil power plant regulatory framework to a micro reactor. Yeah. Different product, and it almost its own regulatory framework to be designed.

So you'd need a legislature that was willing to consider the fact that this isn't the same old industry. Yes. Yeah. It's a new product, it's a new industry, and it's essentially all new technologies. And if they were to design some sort of regulatory framework that just looked at, say, safety criteria for where these things could deploy, like met certain seismic conditions or temperature constraints or ranges, then the reactor would be approved for deploying anywhere, as long as it met this criteria.

James Walker
I think if they could really allow, for one, the deployment of these things absolutely everywhere, and it would really be a much faster process because they're also much more basic. I mean, it's come about because of advances in technology, but the technology itself, once it's built, is. It's more basic than the. Right. Right, right.

Jordan Peterson
Well, so do you have a jurisdiction with whom you're having productive discussions that is simultaneously capable of understanding that this is a new technological front that would be hypothetically willing? I mean, because the economic opportunities here are extreme, if it's done right. And so you'd think if you were optimistic, that there might be a legislature somewhere in the 50 states in the United States and the twelve places that this could happen in Canada that might be open to such an opportunity? I mean, are you having productive discussions with people who could conceivably clear away the regulatory hurdles? So we have obviously made contact with the Department of Energy in the states, and we've obviously broached this topic, that this is something that should be considered.

James Walker
It's not that they're unaware that this might be a good idea, too. It's just they also need funding to implement new legislation or get approvals from Congress or how it works in states. And there's good bipartisan support in the states for nuclear, but it still needs to go through the approval process where you get the Senate signing off. And they do need funding to put this new regulatory framework in. So when they give it to a regulator like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the NRC, it can design that new framework, and it needs to obviously employ people to do that.

Jordan Peterson
Well, what kind of funding is necessary to do that I'm trying to get a real handle on the impediments, you know, because the advantages are so stark and obvious, and we've done some pretty extraordinary things on the idiot wind and solar front, and in relatively short order, so you wouldn't think that this is impossible. So, like, what sort of funding is necessary if you're starting a new regulatory enterprise, essentially from scratch, designed around this new technology? I don't understand the necessity for this great expense and spending of time. No, I think really it could be done. If I'm honest, it could be done very, very quickly.

James Walker
I think the problem is that, say, like a department of energy, they run into needing more funding to create a smaller department to design a framework, and then they could be waiting on that funding for a long time as government debates it. But actually, if government were very in favor of it, I'm sure on both sides of the aisle there would be, or for just a small amount. Okay, so let me ask you another practical question. If I said, do you have a 20 page document that would outline an intelligible regulatory framework that you could hand to a legislator who was, you know, positively predisposed to you? Like, do you guys have that?

Jordan Peterson
Because, you know, one of the easiest ways to get people to say yes to anything is to make it extremely easy for them. Right. And to provide them with us. Exactly. Exactly.

Because if you're saying, well, you have to whip up a regulatory structure from scratch and you have to take all the political risk, they're going to say, yeah, five years from now, and we'll let other people do it, and it'll take forever. But if you can hand them a tailor made solution, essentially, I know that runs you into the problem of government industry collusion, but that's a secondary problem as far as I'm concerned, because this isn't collusion. It's joint effort to move forward something that would be of great benefit to people. And if it happens to be a benefit to your company, it's also going to be of benefit to many of the other companies that you described, too. So do you have a set of proposals at hand that you could supply to an interested legislative party?

James Walker
Yes. I mean, to be honest, that would take us a few weeks just to put together like a proper, okay, well, that's not long. A few weeks is long, you know, because I can imagine some people who might be interested in taking a look at something like that. Oh, well, look, if they were very interested, I'd be very interested in that conversation. And we, our scientists would be very happy to prepare a formal document that outlines a proposal for how these things could be like.

It would have to be a very high level thing, but I know you down. But essentially the criteria for approving the safety of these things for deployment en masse to different locations. And it is very different because like a big civil power plant, you have a site regulation process where they, it has to be site specific and you tailor your safety case for that specific site for you wouldn't do that. It would be a different process where there is a safety criteria that you need to meet. But as long as the site meets that safety criteria, the reactor can deploy that.

So it's fundamentally different.

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Jordan Peterson
Right, right, right. Well, this is exactly, it seems to me that this is exactly the sort of thing that has to be dealt with in the kind of detail that legislators would appreciate. So that that differentiation is not only made conceptually, but made in a manner that would be credible to like investigative news reporters and so forth and people who are skeptical about this. But I mean, I do know that technical problems are one thing, and obviously you guys are capable of solving them, but it's very, very easy for a whole industry to fall into a mess of red tape and never get out. And certainly that's happened on the nuclear side of things.

And so that's just not good. And it's, once I see, I realized I worked, I'm ashamed to admit this to some degree, but I worked on a panel years ago, ten years ago, something like that, which was one of the early UN documents, documents on sustainability. And I worked on that for about two years. And I learned a lot about how such things were made, how such sausage was made, let's put it that way. But I also learned a lot about the nexus between energy and environment.

And one of the things that really, and economics, one of the things that really struck me, and I never forgot it, was the fact that as soon as you make people rich, they start to care about the environment. And I thought, oh my God, that's such a wonderful thing to learn because it means that we could deal with the problem of absolute poverty and we could deal with environmental sustainability in the same way. Okay, what's key? It's clear what's key. It's easy, it's cheap energy, period.

And so, okay, so then the next question is, well, where are the available energy sources? And obviously one answer to that is with continued use of fossil fuel. But we see the geopolitical trouble that's laid in front of us because of that. And there are problems of pollution, although, especially with coal, although they're not as grotesque as they've been made out to be. But nuclear, you think nuclear?

I mean, I read. Tell me if this is true. I read that part of the reason that nuclear is safer than solar is because people fall off the roof all the time. Installing solar panels and falling is actually like the fifth leading cause of death. It's no joke, right?

James Walker
Falling is really hard on people, but it's true. Like, and also if you look at wind power too, there's a significant number of falls that are generated by the installation of these things and they need constant maintenance, which means there is a constant stream of people going up and down these things, which is, why would. I mention they're a stupid solution? Low energy density, like, they're not a good solution. And solar, I mean, one of the things I've really watched in the last five years, say, as these big solar and wind projects come on, especially in Alberta, because I've been watching the Alberta power situation.

Jordan Peterson
It's like the price of electricity goes to infinite on windless and sunless days. Okay, infinite is a bad price. That's a very bad price. And you can't have unreliable, you can't have an unreliable, reliable grid that doesn't work. So.

And I don't see a solution to that. I mean, tell me if I've got this wrong. So my understanding is that fundamental, the fundamental problem with a renewable grid is the phasic nature of the power. And because it's phasic you have to have backup. It's like, well, it can't be nuclear because it takes too long for them to get online, at least in their current form.

So you have to have natural gas and fossil fuel backup or coal. And if you have to have the backup, then why not just use the systems? Because you're not going to build two parallel systems. Who in the right germans would do that? That's insane.

James Walker
You know, one of the things I thought was funny when I first moved to Canada is that I was. I was actually living up in Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories for a few months. And it's an interesting place to live for a little while. But I was asked, someone mentioned that the whole city was powered on diesel. I said, that's crazy.

This is a city of, like, can't remember 40,000 people or something like that. It was fairly significant. And I was like, why? And they're like, oh, the dam is broken. I was like, can't they fix the dam?

I was like, well, they can't really, like, it's. It's blocked up and it's winter. It's difficult to get people up there. And so we're just running off diesel generators. As far as I know, it's still running off those diesel generators.

And I was there six or seven years ago. So think how much diesel. Well, there's nothing more permanent than a temporary fix, especially if the government has to be. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Jordan Peterson
And so. Right, right. Well, and yellowknife is isolated. And so the fact that all that diesel has to be brought in, all that means is that it's really, really expensive to live in Yellowknife. That's the outcome.

James Walker
Yeah, there was another. There was another province. I think it was in Yellowknife, too. They were talking to us about. It was a community of about 800 people, one of the first nation settlements up there.

And the outline of the diesel alone, if you ignore the logistics and manpower and the cost of generators, was $10 million alone. But just the diesel by itself were 800 people for a year. And I thought, well, that's crazy. That's an enormous expense for just 800 people. Right?

Jordan Peterson
Right. No, that's right. Well, there's many crazy things going on. And all that posturing that you described, combined with a tremendous technological ignorance of the most stellar sort, means that we are putting in place solutions that cause way more problems than they solve. This just isn't acceptable.

James Walker
It's not acceptable. And look, I never want to denigrate fossil fuels too much because I believe they definitely have a place and they've been of enormous asset to humanity. And people talk about zero, as in going to zero. Yeah, that's insane. That's completely insane.

Even if you were to stop all power by, what about textile industry or the downstream products of. Of the fossil fuel injury, plastics, you're never going to eliminate them completely. And so it's foolish. Not without eliminating a lot of people. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Jordan Peterson
And that seems to be the plan. Well, you can imagine a world where we used fossil fuels as chemical, as a basis for chemical production, like fertilizer, for example, because we're not going to substitute nuclear for fertilizer. Right. So. But yeah, there's no one solution for every aspect of humanity's very complex existence.

James Walker
But everything could have a very, very well fitted place. And to be honest, micro reactors are in a much better position to power remote communities like yellowknife than diesel. Whereas obviously nuclear is never going to replace fossil fuels for producing fertilizers. Right, right. Well, and we shouldn't be burning, arguably, we shouldn't be burning up our fossil fuels when we need it for chemical.

Jordan Peterson
For chemical stock. I mean, that seems to me. So why not? Okay, so let's be optimistic here for a minute. So let's imagine that you cleared the regulatory hurdles and now you've managed to transport your fissile material safely and you can start building these reactors.

Okay, now. And people clue in and we can start to build a resilient power grid as a consequence. Now you can start manufacturing at scale, right? In principle. So how uniform a product are you making at the microreactor level?

Like, is this something, this assembly line manufacture? And can you drive down the cost with volume? Yeah. So this is actually. It is that the economy of scale here is the real benefit.

James Walker
So if you're producing two or three of these a year, it's very expensive, but if you produce 100 of these, it actually gets very cheap. And the good thing about microreactors, which has not been possible before, is that it allows for very easy manufacturing because they're simple enough to do so. There's no reason why you can't have a production line that just 3d prints these things. And then the costs come down very quickly. And then you are cheaper than a diesel generator.

And once you are cheaper than diesel generator, and that will take a few years, to be fair. But once you do get to that point, there will be no real logical reason to use anything but micro activism. These remote locations, mining sites. Okay, well, let's go be. Okay, let's go.

Jordan Peterson
Let's expand beyond that. So now let's assume that you can use this printing technology that you described. And you said the scale, the economies of scale start to kick in. At how many reactors a year? I would say actually really about 15.

James Walker
And then that sort of points on the economic. It's actually very low. In fact, I think Idaho National Laboratory concluded that it was something like nine. I don't want to miss. Okay.

Jordan Peterson
Okay. So it's a very low. Okay, so let's. Okay, so let's expand our vision momentarily and say that you could produce a thousand of these things a year and that. And that they were distributed widely enough to start putting some back resilient backbone into the power supply and start to substitute for natural gas and for.

And for coal. Well, we can start with coal. Okay. So if everything went as well as could possibly be expected on this front, how far down do you think you could drive the price of energy, like, compared to what it is now? Well, I mean, that's very interesting because if the oil infrastructure was in place and you had domestic production of uranium and we upgraded our enrichment facilities, but domestically, which we currently don't have, and you are mass manufacturing these things, I'd hate to put a price on it.

James Walker
But there's no reason why you can't keep optimizing that system to keep making it incrementally cheaper. Right? Okay, so you're driving down the price. You're driving down it to be smRs. It's not our business.

But those guys, their costs will also fall commensurately with how ours are falling, too, because there's no reason why they can't mass manufacture those things to be major components of a major grid system. So it's a more robust system that's getting cheaper all the time. There's no reason why that couldn't have the beneficial effect. Well, that's ridiculously exciting, all of that. And so.

Jordan Peterson
Yeah. Well, seriously. Seriously. I mean, that's such an optimistic possibility. Okay, well, let's.

Let's. Okay. Let's be smart about this. Let's talk about downsides. Now, we talked about the fact that people are afraid of nuclear technology.

Now, in principle, that could be handled with a marketing strategy that wasn't based on lies, that provided accurate information about the fact that this was essentially a new technological approach and that could go in lockstep with the provision of the legislative material. You can imagine a parallel campaign. So that seems to me to be a solvable problem. Now, okay. Some terrorist hijacks one of your trucks.

How about that? So the assumption there is they're going to turn this into some sort of weapon or spill it or spill it. So let's think about how they would have to do that. So if they were to seize your microreactor or your SMR, the problem they have is that the uranium is not enriched to a weapons grade level, so they can't make it flow up. And it's also alloyed, so they'd have to build a multi billion dollar facility, chemical plant to recover the uranium and separate it from the alloy.

James Walker
And then. Okay, so that seems that. Okay, so that's just not a danger. What about stealing one of your trucks and threatening people publicly with, like, radiation? I know.

Jordan Peterson
Look, I already understand. I want to put this in context because it seems to me that anybody who hijacked a propane truck would be in a pretty good position to cause a lot of mayhem. So. And, you know, or derail a. Derail a train that is carrying fossil.

So we have plenty of risk like that already in the system. So where do you see where, if anywhere, do you see the kind of risk to the public that could be leveraged by someone crooked who wanted to cause trouble? Well, just to touch on that quickly, if they seized it, the problem they have, people use the examples of the things like dirty bombs, which is where you attach. But the problem with the reactor uranium is that it's not going to explode. Reactors can't blow up, for a start.

James Walker
They're not enriched to a suitable level enough. If you were to take the uranium out of it and strap it to a bomb, the most dangerous thing is the bomb that you've made, not the uranium around the bomb. Actually, if you blow up uranium, it becomes less dangerous because you've separated the material. So it's going to react less with itself and become. Right.

Jordan Peterson
So you could imagine that. You could imagine that as a public relations disaster, fundamentally, because you can imagine how that would be played up. But again, I don't think that puts you in a category that's any different than people who are moving fossil fuel from place to place, because that's more risky. That's at least as. No, it's more risky because it's much more explosive.

James Walker
It's much more explosive and it's dirtier, actually. Obviously, if you had a dirty bomb, you'd have to pick up the pieces of uranium. No one's going to get hurt. But, like, it's still. You'd need to maybe cordon off for a microaggress, maybe 100 meters either way.

But it's still not very bad. The BP oil spill. I think some of the effects of that are still being felt. So it's, it's, it's a lot, it's a lot cleaner cleanup operation. Right, right, right.

I think it's, it's tricky. I don't want to sound like it's all perfect, but, you know, what's a terrorist going to do with a microactive and heat his house? You know, it's, that's a good advertising campaign. Right? Yeah.

Heat your house. Right. Right. Right. All right.

Jordan Peterson
Well, okay. So now let's see. We've covered, we've covered timeline, we've, we've covered your process essentially. Okay. Maybe we could talk a little bit more about the microreactor technology per se.

What is it about the technology that makes it amenable to mass manufacture? And why does that drive the price down? And where are you in the manufacturing process? Okay, so the good part is that if you think about those big civil power plants, they're huge. They take up, I don't know, 30 city blocks.

James Walker
They're absolutely enormous. But there's an enormous quantity of mechanical components, pumps, all sorts of systems that go into that. And as it should be, that's fine. But as you shrink down to SMR and you shrink down to micro reactors, a lot of that goes away. And we actually in say one of our reactors have hardly any mechanical components at all.

And so then you can get to the point where you can 3d print these, which you couldn't do for more complicated mechanical systems where it's a bit more finicky. And that does allow for mass production of these things, whereas mass production for larger machinery that's more intricate becomes harder. You can obviously still 3d print components and piece them together, but there's still a lot more engineering work and human involvement that would be necessary to compete those, whereas a lot of that can be automated. I think as you get simpler and simpler. Did you know a baby's heart begins to be at just three weeks?

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Jordan Peterson
Well, so you've pointed to something very interesting there, which we've kind of brushed over, is that you basically said something approximating almost no moving parts. Okay? And that's not something that should be brushed over because that's quite remarkable because the fewer moving parts, the fewer things that can go wrong. So that's a big deal. But that's also simpler, more understandable.

It's more marketable too, because people can understand it. But also, as you pointed out, it's much more manufacturable. So to what degree have you reduced the moving part complexity? Like when you say there's virtually no moving parts, how many parts are there fundamentally? So I would say take our Zeus reactors as an example.

James Walker
That's a bit further along. There are moving parts, say control rods that are inserted into the core, and control rods are to moderate the reactivity. So they go in, they eat up neutrons, it becomes less reactive. And that's how you control power essentially as well. So that is a moving part.

And that does require a mechanical system, but it does need fewer safety mechanisms involved in a much larger reactor because a much larger reactor or an SMR will have the ability to overheat and have a core melt or coolant loss. And a core melt, which is then leads to the reactor being essentially destroyed and needing to be cleaned up, like you got in Fukushima, when that reactor is essentially melting, and then you just have to spray it with water. That really can't happen with a micro reactor because it can't overheat to a point where it will melt. And so you don't need London systems in place. Wasn't it a safety system that went wrong that caused the three Mile island trouble?

Jordan Peterson
I read that it was like a safety camera that broke off and got lodged in an exhaust pipe. Something which is horribly, dismally comical. Dismally comical, exactly. And this is the problem, is you still need sensors and things like that within a reactor. So you know how to operate.

James Walker
So you know, you can see, you can tell what's happening and then obviously modify the controls accordingly. So there are systems inside a reactor that could fall off in Three Mile island. Obviously something was dislodged and affected the flow and then created, effectively a runaway effect where the core melt. And then you did have a. Right, right.

But again, like Three Mile island, no one died in that kind of operation. But it's bad. It's bad pr, certainly. Yes, yes, yes. Well, and that's a problem.

Jordan Peterson
I mean, that's pollution in the public, in the space of public opinion, and that's not trivial. Okay, so let's recap here, just for a summary for everybody watching and listening, and then maybe as a closing to see if you have anything to add to it. So there's plenty of uranium. It's very, very dense fuel source. It needs to be mined and transformed into yellow cake.

And that has to be further refined into uranium. Oh, now I forgot the damn gas name again. Hexafluoride. Hexafluoride. Hexafluoride.

And then that can be. That can be refined further into the raw material for the. For the raw, for the. For the power source for your microreactors. Now, we talked about what a microreactor is.

It's. It's very easily transportable, doesn't require. Which also something we didn't talk about, which is extremely important. That also means that you don't have to produce the kinds of transmission lines to move the power from place to place, which are also hyper expensive and require a lot of maintenance. That's a huge advantage.

Okay, so you have these micro raptors, they're under 20. How many watts? 20 mw. Under 20 mw, right. And you've built them reliably enough so that they can be just transported on site as long as the site meets a variety of minimal preconditions.

And so this is going to be superb for isolated communities or mining enterprises, etcetera. But in principle, these could be networked together to provide a very resilient, reliable and increasingly low cost universal power grid, which would enable us to free up fossil fuels for use as chemical precursors, let's say. That's a wonderful summary. Absolutely. And there's no reason why some countries are examining, doing exactly that.

James Walker
Like I mentioned, Poland was already examining doing that just to make it grid more resilient, more robust and eventually cheaper. Right? So that would be the start. You could imagine these things littered around in some ways as backup for the current grid, right? So that, to increase its resiliency.

Jordan Peterson
But as they become cheaper and more reliable and more tested, even in the public market, then they just start replacing pieces of the grid. Yes, exactly. And there's no reason why a developed country can't slowly transition in that direction. It doesn't have to be immediate. It doesn't need to be trillion.

James Walker
Infrastructure spending shouldn't be immediate. Shouldn't be immediate because there's going to be problems that arise that you don't understand until you try to do it. So it should start locally and then. Well, absolutely. I mean, that's the problem with like net zero by 2030.

Jordan Peterson
It's like, no, how about we don't stampede off a cliff, like linked arm in arm? You know, maybe that's a bad idea. Like it? Like it certainly is. Okay, well, that's extremely cool, all of that.

And so now is there anything you want to tell people that we didn't get to on this side of the interview? The good thing, you covered a lot, and obviously your understanding is very quick on the nuclear industry as a whole, I would say, I mean, holistically speaking, I just think it's best to communicate that this is a, this could be extremely beneficial for mankind generally. And I could obviously talk about the company and everything like that. But I think ultimately, probably more important message is that this could enfranchise billions of people around the world, provide that energy. And I think you put it best when you said that if you give people access to energy, you lift them out of poverty and then they become more concerned with the environment.

James Walker
If you really care about the environment, you should try and lift people out of poverty. Right, exactly. That's a great closing note. That's right. If you really care about the environment as well as people, let's say, because maybe we could include them in the environment, then you do everything you can to lift them out of poverty and then with no holds barred, right?

Jordan Peterson
That's the number one moral imperative, right? I mean, even the climate, look, even the climate apocalypse mongers use the safety and well being of future generations as the rationale for their moralizing. So there's no way out of that conundrum. It's like, no, how about we help the people who are alive right now? How about we do that?

James Walker
And look, I have children of my own and I worry about them all the time. And I wonder what kind of world they're going to inherit. And I would like that world to be one where they had access to energy and poverty was far more scarce and not an impending risk. So I have a duty to the future to try and make it a little bit better. Resilient wealth, resilient wealth.

Jordan Peterson
That would be great. That's a wonderful phrase. Like, if we could build some sort of resilient wealth. And look, wealth is very energy dependent. And so.

Yeah, they're the same thing, man, for all intents and purposes, because energy is work and work is wealth. So, like, end of argument. Fundamentally, like, I think the fundamentals things to progress mankind, as long as it can feed itself and it can power itself, then we should have a relatively decent future that can incrementally keep improving, hopefully. Yes, that's the goal. That would exactly be the goal.

That's right. Incrementally improving in an intelligent manner that feeds on itself. Yes, exactly. It's a good definition of heaven as far as I'm concerned. All right.

So that.