043 DJ Hanson, COO of Flibe Energy

[00:00:00] DJ Hanson: I got into this whole thing because I was trying to debunk it. When I was at Smart Sheet, one of my engineers came into a meeting and was talking about these molten salt thorium reactors.

They’re amazing. They do all this stuff. They can’t melt down. They don’t make weapons. They don’t make waste. The cheap thorium is almost free. It’s amazing though. Unicorns are going to explode into the universe. It’s amazing. And I’m sitting there thinking, so it’s a scam. Like, it’s obvious, like, there’s no way it’s that awesome, and we’re not doing it, we’re not that dumb.

And so, he turns around and he sort of took one of my sayings that I often use, and he’s just like, “Nobody else is doing it,” is not a technical justification, DJ. I said, okay, you’re right, let’s go find the reason.

And I go deep dive and I’m going to debunk this and I’m going to win this argument with Scott Weimer because I don’t lose arguments. Well, it turns out reality doesn’t care what I want the answer to be, so I better get used to the answer that reality is going to give me. And in that case, the answer was, “Wait, this actually works.”

But what I discovered, interestingly enough, is there is a huge blind spot in the nuclear industry today. Every single reactor that you’re going to go look at, solid fuel. Fuel is solid. You don’t question it. I’ve got nuclear fuel. Yeah, of course my nuclear fuel is solid. Who would do anything else? It’s an almost unquestioned assumption in the entire pipeline.

[00:01:28] Intro: Just because the facts are A, if the narrative is B and everyone believes the narrative, then B is what matters. But it’s our job in our industry to speak up proudly, soberly. And to engage people that are in energy poverty, they need us. America cannot meet this threat alone. If there is a single country.

Of course the world cannot meet it without America. That is willing to. We’re gonna need you. The next generation to finish the need scientists to design new fuels. And focus on net public benefit. We need engineers to invent new technologies. Over absurd levels of radiation. Entrepreneurs to sell those technologies.

And we will march towards this. We need workers to operate a. Assembly lines that hum with high tech, zero carbon components. We have unlimited prosperity for all of you. We need diplomats and businessmen and women and Peace Corps volunteers to help developing nations skip past the dirty phase of development and transition to sustainable sources of energy.

In other words, we need you.

[00:02:33] Mark Hinaman: Okay. Welcome to another episode of the Fire2Fission Podcast, where we talk about energy dense fuels and how they can better human lives. Today we’re going to talk about a super energy dense fuel, a nuclear fuel, sometimes a little different from one that we’re typically used to talking about.

I guess today is DJ Hanson, chief operating officer of Flibe Energy. DJ, how you doing?

[00:02:53] DJ Hanson: I’m doing great. How are you doing today, Mark?

[00:02:56] Mark Hinaman: I’m very excited to chat with you. It’s going to be a great conversation. DJ, why don’t you give a 30 to 60 second background on your role at Flibe real quick, just so people are oriented about who you are, what you do there.

And then, I mean, chief operating officer is pretty obvious in my mind, but that role kind of can be different at different companies. So, and then after that, we’ll dive into your background and talk about how you got there before talking about what you do at Flibe.

[00:03:20] DJ Hanson: That sounds great. Yeah.

Chief Operations Officer for Flibe. It’s a company whose founder is a former NASA engineer. So Chief Operations Officer is a, the short version, everything that isn’t engineering sort of falls underneath my purview. So that’s anything from business development to, to sales cycles, to finance accounts payable.

I don’t do legal, so I’ll let the professionals handle that piece of it.

[00:03:47] Mark Hinaman: Key detail. Lucky you. Exactly. Awesome. Well, before Flibe, where were you at? Where, where’d you get your start?

[00:03:55] DJ Hanson: Oh yeah. So I did a short little stint of 11 years at amazon. com. You may have heard of them. That was back in the day. Yeah. Yeah. But when they were small and still hungry and scrappy, not the behemoth that they are today, and then I did six years at uh, then startup.

Now they’re a publicly traded company called Smartsheet and they went public, I took a couple of years off, enjoy some time with the family, and then decided to jump back in at Flibe and make some, make some good things happen.

[00:04:24] Mark Hinaman: Nice. Why, why Flibe? I’m, I imagine you were shopping around a little bit.

What, what drove you to identify them and pick them?

[00:04:33] DJ Hanson: In the end, it, Kirk Sorensen it’s really hard to go out and do something disruptive and change the world when you don’t have a visionary, someone that can really point to a, Point to a spot in the map and say, we’re going there. That’s where we’re headed.

Lads. Let’s all get on the boat and go. And he’s really has the vision for what the company needs to be, where it needs to go, where that technology needs to go and. The existing, I guess, apparatus, I think, in the, in the nuclear space just doesn’t have that will.

[00:05:08] Mark Hinaman: Bold statement out of the gates. I like it.

Okay. So who is Kirk Sorensen? I know who he is, so you can figure on YouTube, but for folks that have never heard from him or heard of him, who is he?

[00:05:17] DJ Hanson: If you’ve never heard of him, you’ll find him on YouTube as soon as you start looking about thorium molten salt reactors.

Sorensen is the, I call him the torchbearer of Dr. Weinberg’s original vision. He’s the one that rediscovered this sort of technology train that in, that was sitting in a closet in Oak Ridge in the early part of the millennium, was really the evangelist that started the whole movement going, understood deeply the history of what happened, when it happened, the whole sort of nuclear arc of going from a weapons program to an energy program, policy side of things.

He’s. He’s an amazing evangelist. He’s an amazing vision visionary. He’s a highly qualified engineer. And he’s the one that I think is going to be able to put together a technology package that we can go change the world with. He is a excellent speaker. He’s got great vision, great background. And he really does understand the depth of the technology and the whole, he has his eye on the whole ball, so to speak, in the, in the stack.

It’s a pretty big space. So you need to have someone that can zoom out and zoom in pretty rapidly to be able to cope with it.

[00:06:23] Mark Hinaman: Yeah, so he’s founder, president chief technical guy over at Flibe right. So, do you want to give for listeners kind of just a broad spectrum view of differences between a thorium molten salt reactor and what people might think of as traditional light water reactors or nuclear reactors in the U S.

[00:06:43] DJ Hanson: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, they have about as much in common with each other as a, you know, 1969 Mustang and a Tesla Model S really. They sometimes, a lot of the words are the same.

[00:06:55] Mark Hinaman: Both have wheels and they’ll take you places. But

[00:06:57] DJ Hanson: yeah, the underlying technology really, really different. The tagline I always come back to is, “Fission in a fluid is the secret.” And that’s really the key fundamental difference between a LFTR, which is the reactor. That’s our broad vision for the world and today’s reactors today. Today’s reactors are all solid fuel. The thing where the vision has happened. It’s basically frozen and inside this metal cladding. Ours is melted and in solution in a salt.

And that’s really the huge primary difference that enables it’s such an early phase decision in the technology. Path, but it has huge consequences everywhere we go. And that’s the biggest difference between the nuclear that you see today and the nuclear that we’re talking about. The nuclear that we’re talking about, it’s not having a constant argument with physics.

It’s working with physics. It’s secured by physics, it’s made safe by physics, and it’s so efficient relative to everything else that you see out there. Today’s nuclear reactors, they’re great, they work, they’re safe, they’re clean, but they are so underperforming relative to their potential. And it makes sense a little bit.

They’re not competing with something that is in their league. I mean, this is, you know, Max Scherzer playing with little leaguers. He doesn’t have to really try that hard, you know? Yeah.

[00:08:21] Mark Hinaman: I, I think a lot of members of the public, if you ask them to identify what nuclear fuel looks like, they wouldn’t even know that I mean, the uranium that is used in light water reactors is actually a solid, right?

[00:08:37] DJ Hanson: Like, yeah, the broad public perception of nuclear energy is the hyperbolic cooling towers and green glowy things from cartoons which, you know, like most things that have been dramatized, it makes sense that you got to get something that plays on screen. You got to get something that’s iconic, that’s evocative, but it’s not necessarily reflective of reality.

Yeah.

[00:08:59] Mark Hinaman: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So what, I mean, why go this route? Well, let’s ask, why did the industry adopt solid fuels and light water reactors and uranium as a fuel instead of thorium and liquid fuels?

[00:09:13] DJ Hanson: Well, it’s interesting. LFTR actually uses uranium as a fuel. It’s just, that’s not, if you say fuel is in the thing that is being consumed, that’s thorium.

But if you’re saying fuel is in the place where the fission, that’s uranium. So it was first. Along the line, the technology was about 10 year headstart, but if you ask my opinion on that, it was because it was originally built for wartime. The first nuclear reactor for power was for Nautilus, and it was a submarine that was designed to be a warship.

And the thing about warships is they tend to get into wars and that means they get shot at and there’s explosions and generally. You’re going to want a fuel that is going to be very robust, very safe. And if it sinks to the bottom of the ocean is not going to let out all of the fission products. So it makes a lot of sense in that design that you would go with something that is very strong, very resilient, but not necessarily very efficient because you don’t need high efficiency from a nuclear reactor to power a submarine forever. You need robustness and that’s what they got. They took that technology, developed it, made it available for commercial use. But fundamentally the decision around solid fuel, I don’t think was driven from anything other than we want this to go in a warship and we want it to be safe.

[00:10:36] Mark Hinaman: Got it. Conversely, liquid fuel wouldn’t, is not necessarily unsafe, right?

[00:10:42] DJ Hanson: No, liquid, if you take a liquid fuel and you decide you’re going to put it in a warship, that’s probably a bad idea. Just because warships have to deal with a operating envelope much different than what we’re talking about today.

But a liquid fuel is actually in a commercial application far, far, far safer because it’s mobile. You can do things with it that you just can’t do with a solid fuel. Primary safety thing for me is that it can flow and because it can flow and it can move, you can build a reactor such that the primary safety mechanism for your reactor is gravity.

And as a safety mechanism, that’s the one I can point to that I can say really does have a hundred percent uptime. If gravity is going to be Gravity is always on. Gravity is always on and it’s generally pointing the same direction. So you can make some pretty strong assumptions and you can make some pretty strong safety designs.

Utilizing that as your primary mechanism to get the, get the fuel, get all of those fission products into a place where they’re going to be safe by default.

[00:11:44] Mark Hinaman: Awesome. Real high level DJ, how’s, how’s this work? How does a molten salt reactor

[00:11:50] DJ Hanson: work?

Molten salt reactor, we said molten salt.

Most people look at table salt or whatever, and they’re Just, you know, crystal white crystals that they see, and they don’t really look at that and say, Oh, that’s frozen salt. It’s just cold enough that it’s solid. In the end, a molten salt is just something that we’ve gotten hot enough that it’s a liquid.

And when it’s a liquid, two really cool things happen. One, it stays a liquid for a really, really, really broad range of temperatures. Water will stay a liquid at standard pressure from You know, 32 degrees up to about, you know, 212 is where it starts boiling. Salts will stay liquid from anywhere from 400, 500 degrees when they melt all, you know, many thousand degrees and because of that higher temperature, you’re able to get much better efficiency out of the system when you’re trying to extract power from it.

Fundamentally, the higher you can get the temperature. At the inlet, and the lower you can get the temperature at the outlet, the better your overall thermal efficiency is going to be in any kind of power system. That’s just physics.

[00:12:56] Mark Hinaman: So, you’ve got hot liquid that then, or hot liquid salt that then you would transfer heat from that to a power fluid, like, I mean, you would get water hot then, and then spin a turbine or any other power fluid that you could spin a turbine with.

[00:13:09] DJ Hanson: Yeah, you could do water. You can make water hot water. The temperatures that we operate at are around 600 degrees Celsius. Water doesn’t like staying water at that temperature goes to steam and you don’t get really great efficiency out of steam at that temperature. You end up wanting to use sort of a different working fluid.

Our design is going to be leveraging supercritical CO2 in a closed loop. So, we expect we’ll have thermal efficiencies. Forty’s better. It’s a really, really good mechanism to be able to make sure that one, two things are true. You don’t end up with water in your system. Water is a oxygen does weird things in chemistry.

And the second thing is that that system, because it’s closed loop system, you can, you know, recycle it and keeps it going and outlet and pressures are high enough that you get really, really good, get way more bang for your buck. So to speak.

[00:13:59] Mark Hinaman: Got it. And how, how big are some of these systems going to be? I mean, you guys want to create power.

With these, I imagine, and power plants, but maybe even combined heat and power do you have an ideal target, first of a kind size?

[00:14:15] DJ Hanson: Yeah, somewhere in the neighborhood of a 20 megawatts electric or anywhere up to, you know, something with the, you know, e to the 2, so to speak, as in the, So order of magnitude, we could do 30, we could do 50.

It really ends up depending what the customer tells us they want, but we think that there’s a really good market space around a 20 megawatt electric up to about 30 megawatt electric. There’s a lot of applications that could leverage that space when we start going real big and we want to do, you know, utility level replacement kind of, you know, grid level stuff.

We, we’re going to about a gigawatt, a gigawatt thermal, unit, you know, somewhere in that range pulling out 300 megawatts electric as you go. And those units surprisingly not big because we’re not using water, we don’t have to worry about it flashing the same. We don’t have to worry about keeping it under pressure.

Really simplifies the system, keeps it small, keeps it compact. We could fit the whole thing readily in, you know, 10, 000 square foot, 20, 000 square foot of facility. And then, you You know, for the actual envelope itself, three, five acres. And at that point, we’re not even worried about room at five acres.

It’s just, we’ve got more space than we would need.

[00:15:31] Mark Hinaman: So your design can fit in as small as what some people qualify as the micro reactor space. I mean, 20 megawatts might be a little bit on the large sides of micro reactors, but then certainly in what people are conceptualizing for SMRs, right?

Up to 300 megawatts.

[00:15:47] DJ Hanson: Yeah, I mean, if we were really trying to solve for compactness, I, I don’t have any real difficulty believing that we would be able to get it in three, four shipping containers. That’s awesome. Yeah, it’s, it’s surprisingly compact when you, when you’ve got that sort of density in the.

fluid in the fuel. And then you have, you don’t have to argue with trying to figure out where all the coolants are going to be out to have a gigantic pile of active safety mechanisms. It’s surprisingly how small the largest real component of the overall system is going to be the off gas system that is going to be dealing with the xenon and the Krypton that’s going to be coming out of the fission products.

That’s really the largest volumetric term in the design. It really isn’t the reactor itself.

[00:16:36] Mark Hinaman: I see. And how many people do you envision, like, will it take to operate some of these systems or one of these plants?

[00:16:44] DJ Hanson: Well, how far down the road are you talking? 50 years, 40 years, there’s a lot different number than, you know, reactor number one.

In the end, these things are pretty passively operated. They’re walk away safe. One of the great things about again, fission in a fluid is the secret because it’s in a fluid. It has what the engineers call a negative power, negative temperature coefficient. And what that really means is that when I, Pull a lot of energy out of the system, the salt cools, it gets more dense, which means I get more fuel in the core, which means that more power happens, so it gets hotter, and then it gets less dense, and so there’s less fuel, and there’s less power.

If you stop pulling energy off of it, it’s going to get hot, and the fuel is going to expand again, and then it’s going to have less power, so the reactor really sort of naturally follows. Whatever load you decide to put on it, it’s extremely well behaved. And because you don’t have to tamp down all of this excess reactivity that you have in today’s light water reactors, you really don’t have to have this gigantic system of controls and checks and balances to keep the, keep the thing where you want it.

I could go into like the xenon transient, but I don’t know necessarily if that’s going to be a little deep. You want to go into the tech side of it. But in the end, because it’s liquid and we don’t have all of these problems from a solid fuel coming to us, huge amounts of the system designer just obviated because they’re just not necessary.

And it’s just so well behaved. If everyone in the world were to just disappear, the reactor would Get a little warm and then turn itself off and just wait for somebody to come back and decide that they need to turn it back on again operating it. We expect would be in 30 to 40 years. Couple folks just making sure that the lights are on and that it’s doing what it’s supposed to do and there to react if a red light turns on so I can push the right button.

I love it.

[00:18:45] Mark Hinaman: But that’s really cool. I imagine it would take a few more people at the onset at the onset.

[00:18:51] DJ Hanson: Yeah. So there’s. This whole thing is going to be a show me game. And when you’re making bold claims and you’re saying this thing is a hundred times better, a thousand times better than anything we’ve got right now.

One, the burden of proof is on us. We’re not going to talk people into deciding that this is what we need to do with everything in the world. We need to show them with one or two units. And with those one or two units, we need to be playing by the rules and making sure that even though it doesn’t make sense in our system, that we’re doing the things that nuclear reactors need to do as a overall class of energy power or I’m sorry, power generating systems and we’re going to have all of the safety mechanisms. We’re going to have all of the operative procedures. We’re going to have the people trained and operated to be there on site, watching it, knowing, reacting to things. They’re going to be trained in the scenarios that we’re going to be talking through the whole operational gamut.

So, yeah, it’s going to be Comparable to a nuclear reactor plant that you would see today, but I imagine quickly as we are able to demonstrate the way that it behaves, not just in paper and not just from history, but in real life today. Empirically repeatedly. I think that it becomes pretty easy to make the case that.

Maybe you don’t need to just have people sitting there doing nothing the whole time.

[00:20:15] Mark Hinaman: I agree. That’s a terrible job, right? Like I hate sitting around just doing nothing. It’s terrible. What, why F. L. I. B. E.? What, what is that, is that an acronym for something?

[00:20:25] DJ Hanson: Yeah, F. L. I. B. E. is actually the name of the salt that is going to be for LFTR.

It’s a lithium fluoride salt. That’s the other interesting thing about salt is what most people call salt is very different from what chemists consider salt. Really any salt is where you take the left side of the periodic table and you take the right side of the periodic table that aren’t the noble gases and you say, okay, those two put them together.

Pretty much any of those combinations is a salt. And the salt that we’ve got is a lithium fluoride salt. And that’s the L I and the F and then there’s a beryllium component, which is the B E.

[00:21:02] Mark Hinaman: Okay, and then, I mean, you’ve mentioned uh, going to demonstrate paper reactors, but that… the history piece these systems have actually been built before, right? It’s not like this is totally conceptual and has never been tested.

[00:21:17] DJ Hanson: That’s my favorite thing about the whole story is we’re not talking about something that’s just in theory or something that’s, you know, the physicists have come up with that.

We’re not dealing with something that. You know, it’s perpetually 30 years away from being demonstrated. We’re talking about a technology that was built, successfully operated, was taken through a huge range of operative and environmental parameters and the technologies demonstrated the material sciences solved. We’ve got huge swaths of data coming from the molten salt reactor experiment in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, that was running in the 60s for thousands of hours. Very, very successfully. We’ve got, interviews from the folks that were actually there running those reactors. And they talk about what they were doing and say, Oh, it’s just a dream.

It was almost boring. The thing was so well behaved. You, you couldn’t get it to misbehave. We’d try to get it to do something weird and we had to really kick it and kick it to get it to do something. And then it would just settle down and go back to doing what it was supposed to do. The reactor that we want to build and deploy out into the world, LFTR, that reactor is really just the modern iteration of the design they wanted to build next, which was the, the breeder reactor, the two fluid design that they wanted to build when their program got canceled.

Why was that program canceled? Now this is a microcosm of humanity. If I never saw it, there’s, I think three reasons that you can go back into the historical record and find pretty good documentation for pretty good support and they make some sense.

First is political. Nixon. Needed jobs in California. It didn’t need jobs in Tennessee and power pressurized water reactors were in California and molten salt reactors were in Tennessee. So I’m going to chase the jobs in California. That’s the simplest I think explanation. I also think it’s probably one that’s maybe a little bit furthest from actual reality.

I think that one gets overstated a little at times. The second one is, this reactor wasn’t real good at making weapons material. It was not Which

[00:23:32] Mark Hinaman: can’t be a benefit now, right? Like that’s –

[00:23:34] DJ Hanson: However, in 1960, that was not the best thing for a nuclear reactor. A nuclear reactor that could make weapons in the Cold War was far more desirable than a nuclear reactor that could just make power forever.

It wasn’t really understood how influential the energy economy was going to be in a post Cold War era. They just, they had their minds so fixated on the boogeyman they had built for themselves, that they just had to chase it, and they had to chase it, and they had to chase it. And molten salt reactors?

They’re not good for making weapons material. Then the third one, this one is the one that you have to sort of dig into the history, but the man that was responsible for this whole vision, Dr. Alvin Weinberg, man was a genius, brilliant visionary and molten salt reactor in the thorium fuel cycle is what he wanted to see happen for humanity.

That was the legacy that he wanted to leave. And they wanted, I say they, I mean the, the management at the Atomic Energy Commission at the time, wanted Dr. Weinberg’s brain thinking about their sodium reactors that they were using to make weapons material. And they, Canceled the molten salt reactor program to try to free up his brain to try to free up his resources to go work on this other thing.

But once they did that, he just didn’t have it in him anymore. He didn’t, he didn’t want to leave that as a legacy that I made as many nuclear weapons as possible. Legacy he wanted to leave for humanity was I added two zeros to the energy budget for the species.

[00:25:16] Mark Hinaman: That’s, I mean, tragic when that kind of stuff happens, right?

[00:25:20] DJ Hanson: Like I say, it’s, it’s a microcosm of the story of humanity, which is, it’s less about doing what is best and more about winning sometimes.

[00:25:32] Mark Hinaman: Can we circle back to the weapons or proliferation risk real quick? I’m just curious about this. I know it can be sensitive to talk about, but why is it harder with a system like this to make weapon material versus other types of reactors?

[00:25:47] DJ Hanson: Sure. Well, there’s, there’s three reasons in there. One of them is going to be tied to the thorium fuel cycle itself. One of them is going to be tied to sort of molten salt reactors, and it’s going to be tied a little bit to physics. So I’ll kind of treat those each separately.

One, the thorium fuel cycle:

there’s three fissile materials that exist. There’s uranium 235, that occurs in nature. And then there’s two that you have to synthesize. Plutonium 239 and uranium 233. And you can make nuclear weapons out of all three isotopes. It’s technically possible. The laws of physics will allow that to happen.

However, of those three, Uranium 233 is really the least suitable for weapons use. The point of a nuclear weapon is to store it. It is to have it and never use it so that it acts as a deterrent. And… Uranium 233 generally comes with a gamma emitter called Uranium 232. And if you want your weapon to be stored and usable for long periods of time, you generally don’t want to have to design that weapon so that it is constantly being pounded by high energy gamma rays. So, Uranium 233 you can make a weapon out of it, it’s just… Much more difficult. And if I can make Uranium 233, by definition I can make Plutonium 239, it’s very telling that every single state that has developed a weapons program has looked at all three fissile materials, and every single one of them has rejected Uranium 233 as a preferred weapons material, because it’s just not as good.

[00:27:25] Mark Hinaman: But that’s the material that’s used in the thorium fuel cycle, right?

[00:27:29] DJ Hanson: That is the material that’s used in the thorium fuel cycle, and it has a special property that makes it amazing for the thorium fuel cycle, which is uranium 233 is the only fuel that in a thermal spectrum reactor, I can explain that a little later, but that in a thermal spectrum reactor can, after a year of operation, you can have more of the uranium 233 than you started with.

You can create more of the fuel. By consuming thorium.

[00:27:59] Mark Hinaman: Which hence the term breeder, right? You’re breeding more of the

[00:28:05] DJ Hanson: second component in that which was the molten salt When you’re dealing with a molten salt one thing that you can do is the whole thing’s a closed system because the fuel is liquid Chemistry happens in a liquid state it happens in a liquid state or happens in a gaseous state The reason is because in a liquid in a gaseous state you can mix everything up and get the reactions to happen like you need them to and so With the fuel already in a liquid state, you can do all the chemistry you would need to do inside the reactor itself.

You don’t need to take it out, melt it down, refabricate it to chemistry, then refabricate it, recloud it, and put it back in the reactor.

[00:28:45] Mark Hinaman: So the whole conversion and enrichment industry wouldn’t exist, right? Or is kind of irrelevant for…

[00:28:53] DJ Hanson: Obviated. Yeah, it ends up, you don’t need to keep pulling things out of the ground and then going and enriching it.

You don’t need to take your fuel out of your fuel rod and then reprocess it. You don’t need to do any of that. It just all happens inside the reactor when it’s all happening inside the reactor. You don’t have the opportunity for somebody to siphon off any of it. You don’t have the opportunity in the supply chain for somebody to go and say like, Oh, we shipped a hundred fuel rods and we got a hundred fuel rods.

When actually there were 90 fuel rods and 10 empty things. You just don’t have that risk term there. When you can do everything inside the reactor where the security mechanism is. If you go touch it, you’re dead because you’re inside of a nuclear reactor. It’s a pretty good security mechanism. So a molten salt reactor, because it all happens inside, you can’t hide the supply chain.

You can’t siphon things out because the whole thing’s a closed system. It’s a sealed system that you can’t go muck about with without being very obvious that you are cracking the lid on it.

Third one. It’s a thermal spectrum reactor. It’s not a fast spectrum reactor. Now, thermal versus fast, fast spectrum, I said that a couple times.

When you have a neutron, that neutron is going with some amount of speed. And the more speed it has, you say the more energy it has. It’s faster. It’s a fast neutron. The more energy that neutron has, if it does interact with something, it’s going to do a lot more. Good analogy is like if you’ve ever been at a pool table and you do a break.

I can hit that cue ball really hard. There’s a lot of stuff that’s going to happen on the table. If I hit it, not quite as hard because maybe I’m not great at pool. Not from personal experience, I would say, but miscue something. You just barely tap it only a little bit of stuff. It’s going to happen on that table.

In a fast spectrum reactor, because that neutron is so energetic, you can get a huge amount of extra neutrons coming out of a fission reaction. And that huge amount of extra neutrons you can use to breed additional fuel, to create additional fuel. In a thermal spectrum reactor, you don’t have nearly that neutron budget.

Just to give you an idea on average in a fast spectrum reactor, you can expect a fission reaction to produce anywhere from three to seven, potentially, neutrons per interaction in a thermospectrum reactor, somewhere between one and two. If you can get slightly more than two, you’re doing great.

And in order to have a breeder, you have to have better than two. Because I need one neutron to make more fission happen, and then I need another neutron to go replace the fuel that I just fissioned. And then I need some extra to go make additional fuel. And that really is why a thermal spectrum reactor is just really not suitable for a weapons program because the doubling time is too low.

You can’t produce the material as quickly as you could in a fast spectrum reactor.

[00:31:54] Mark Hinaman: I see. But that’s, that’s pretty deep which I love. I find it fascinating. If folks want to learn more than they can certainly go do it, do lots of reading. Was the EBR2, or Experimental Breeder Reactors, Molten Salt?

[00:32:09] DJ Hanson: They were, they were liquid metal, so, I mean, they were sodium cooled they’re somewhat analogous. I mean, those fast sodium reactors really were about breeding, and the thing about fast spectrum versus thermal spectrum is that when I’ve got a fast neutron… It really doesn’t like interacting with atoms.

You need to put a whole bunch of atoms in front of it before it’s going to hit one of them. And you need a really, really big fuel inventory in order to make fission happen. Sometimes 10, sometimes a hundred times more atoms to get the same amount of fission to happen just because you need to put so much more in the way so that one of them can get lucky and actually catch it in a thermal spectrum reactor because that neutron is slowed down enough, sort of like.

The world zooms in a little bit and you can see and it can, Oh, there’s something over there. Maybe I want to go play with him and you just really don’t need the same amount of fuel. And that’s why if you’re trying to create as much nuclear fuel as you possibly can, you want to get to a fast spectrum.

You want as many neutrons as you can get for the amount of fuel that I have to start with. But if you want to generate energy, you don’t want fast because a fast spectrum reactor, if I’ve got, let’s say 10, 000 kilograms of fuel, I can make Maybe 10 reactors for that same 10, 000 kilograms of fuel. I could make 100, maybe 500 thermal spectrum reactors producing per reactor the same amount of energy. So if you want to increase your nuclear arsenal, you want a fast spectrum reactor. You want as many neutrons as you can get your hands on. If you want to produce energy, you want a thermal spectrum reactor because you want to be able to, for the fuel that I’ve got, get as much energy every day out of it as I possibly can.

[00:33:59] Mark Hinaman: So your guys reactor design, the lithium fluoride or let’s see, TR, is the T for thorium or thermal reactor? Thorium reactor. Thorium reactor, okay.

[00:34:12] DJ Hanson: That guy, yeah, he’s a thermal reactor, so it’s moderated, which means that we have something that slows the neutrons down, bounces them around, and that’s graphite in our system.

In a pressurized water reactor, that’s also a thermal spectrum reactor the moderator in that case is water, and the hydrogen in that water does a really good job of slowing those neutrons down. The carbon and graphite in our system does a really good job of slowing those neutrons down. And when you can slow those neutrons down, they can stop, smell the roses.

Play with atoms that it happened to be next to the roses. You can make nuclear interactions occur.

[00:34:52] Mark Hinaman: So what DJ? Why hasn’t this been tried more or I do is does this technology exist in other countries and it’s just not Being chased in the u. s. Give give me some perspective on that

[00:35:05] DJ Hanson: That’s a great question. I got into this whole thing because I was trying to debunk it when I was at smart sheet. One of my engineers came into a meeting and was talking about these molten salt thorium reactors.

They’re amazing. They do all this stuff. They can’t melt down. They don’t make weapons. They don’t make waste. The cheap thorium is almost free. It’s amazing though. Unicorns are going to explode into the universe. It’s amazing. And I’m sitting there thinking, so it’s a scam. Like, it’s obvious, like, there’s no way it’s that awesome, and we’re not doing it, we’re not that dumb.

And so, he turns around and he sort of took one of my sayings that I often use, and he’s just like, nobody else is doing it, is not a technical justification, DJ. I said, okay, you’re right, let’s go find the reason. Underneath the hood, I’ve got a background academically, and math and physics, so I wasn’t going to sit back and think, well, I have to wait for someone, I’m going to do it myself.

And I go deep dive and I’m going to debunk this and I’m going to win this argument with Scott Weimer because I don’t lose arguments. Well, it turns out reality doesn’t care what I want the answer to be, so I better get used to the answer that reality is going to give me. And in that case, the answer was, wait, this actually works.

But what I discovered, interestingly enough, is there is a huge blind spot in the nuclear industry today. Every single reactor that you’re going to go look at, solid fuel. Fuel is solid. You don’t question it. I’ve got nuclear fuel. Yeah, of course my nuclear fuel is solid. Who would do anything else? It’s an almost unquestioned assumption in the entire pipeline.

Everybody that learns how to learn nuclear, they’re coming through either the naval program or they’re coming through a PhD program. But in the end, fundamentally, all of the nuclear engineering courses, all of the practical experience that people are getting, they’re coming through. Fuel solid, fuel solid, fuel solid.

So if I’m going to send them, and I’m a businessman, and I don’t know necessarily nuclear, but I want to go help nuclear, I’m going to find experts. And so where am I to find experts? I’m going to find experts in the nuclear industry. And all those experts in the nuclear industry, fuel solid, of course, fuel solid.

And when you’d never question that original, almost. almost dogmatic assumption about fuel being solid. It’s amazing how much that one decision affects the entirety of your technology plan from coolant choice, to moderator choice, to safety choice, to the way that it, the way you have to deal with the xenon transient, the over excess reactivity you need to have, all that stuff comes from, falls out of as a natural consequence.

Unquestioned design decision. Of course, fuel is solid. It wouldn’t, why would it ever be anything else? And that is, I think, why this idea has had difficulty finding traction because when somebody outside of the system that can’t go do the physics on their own, either because they don’t have time or they don’t have the desire, they’ve got to go find an expert.

They’ve got to find somebody that is credible to be able to validate the assertion or not. And, I did this myself, and when I was speaking to qualified, you know, one was a doctor, one had 20 years operative experience in a reactor, one was somebody that designed reactors that had been running, all three of them couldn’t give me any kind of good answer about, well, What about a liquid fuel?

Like, well, you just don’t do that. Nobody does that. There’s no, there’s no technology for it. There’s no industry for it. There’s no, I’m like, well, of course there’s no, cause no one’s done it yet. But as soon as someone does do it, it’s going to make sense. We’re seeing a very similar kind of transaction happen inside of the automotive space right now.

There’s the underlying physics of an electric vehicle. I’ve been around since before, before I started making models, just pre combustion engine combustion engine. Exactly. But you’re not going to get an industry that the whole economic advantage they have is the development of internal combustion engines and drive trains.

To suddenly turn around and undercut their position. You need someone that’s a disruptor and you need someone that’s a disruptor that’s not going to try to compromise and play with the automotive industries. I guess you would say conventions. You need somebody that’s going to go and say, let’s do what makes the most sense for an electric vehicle.

Let’s not try to make a combustion engine do electric things. Let’s make an electric vehicle. Let’s not compromise on it. That’s what Tesla did. And they’ve been hugely successful, and now that they sort of became, they got that show me game out of the way, they were able to demonstrate, hey, this, you can make great cars out of these.

I have a Tesla. I have a Tesla, not because I think it has great environmental characteristics. I have a Tesla because that thing makes torque like nobody’s business. And I love torque and going fast. I wasn’t concerned with the environmental question. I was concerned, does it go fast? And boy, does it go fast.

And when you can show people that. All of a sudden, it changes the game. Yeah. Ornamentally.

[00:40:34] Mark Hinaman: I love that analogy of, well, nobody’s done it before, and there’s a blindness to the dogmatic groupthink that exists. I’ll pick on the oil and gas industry, because people that listen to this podcast know that I that’s my background, my career, but horizontal wells in shales, everyone knew that the shale had a bunch of oil in it.

And people said, well, yeah, maybe you could get that out somehow someday. And everyone else just sat on top of it. And there’s been millions, hundreds of millions of barrels of oil that have been produced in the U S actually probably over billions that. People just looked over and looked past because they said, Oh, nobody, you can’t get away a lot of shale, right?

And so I see that parallel in the nuclear industry and I couldn’t agree with you more that there are there is some dogmatic thinking that Well, we just don’t do it that way which I think is ideal for new entrepreneurs and new companies and entrants like yourself and you guys to come in and say What if we, what if we did, what if we did do it that way?

[00:41:40] DJ Hanson: Exactly, exactly. The thing that my team always said, that I instilled in them, is something I brought with me from Amazon. And it’s this idea that if you want to do something, either, that sounds insane, and that nobody else is doing, You can’t say, well, nobody else is doing that. So that’s why we’re not going to do it.

That’s not a technical justification. In the same way, you can’t just say, well, why are we doing this thing? Well, that’s what everybody does. That’s just best practices. So that’s what you do. And I sort of codified it. I took a took inspiration from Ed Dykstra, one of the giants in the software field.

And he had a statement that was go to considered harmful, and I sort of rephrased it and said, best practices considered harmful. And it’s not saying that best practices are bad. It’s saying doing things because it’s a best practice is bad. Because in the end, if it’s a best practice, it probably has, it’s probably a good idea.

You can probably defend doing that thing on the merits of the thing. You don’t need to rely on somebody else. You need to outsource your cognition to somebody else to say, well, what’s the best thing for me to do? Well, that great. Why? Well, because that’s the best thing that’s circular reasoning doesn’t work.

And in the same space, I think it’s really easy to sort of come down, have an established playbook, know what to do. Hey, we can, these are the things we can do, but it takes risk. It introduces cost. To really go in and think and justify everything on the merits instead of just saying, well, let’s just do the best practice.

Best practices are great. And it’s like, no, no, no. Often the practices are awesome and yes, you want to do them, but if you’re doing them just because they’re best practices, all you’re doing is telling me you don’t like to think.

[00:43:25] Mark Hinaman: Yeah, fascinating. So I think this aversion to the technology is prevalent, not just in utilities or incumbents in the industry, but also in some areas of government.

I mean, I’ve been on Webex calls that were they’re talking about advanced reactors and with the Department of Energy. And, you know, they say thorium is not an option here. We don’t want to hear about thorium or any molten salt reactors. I mean, Oh, is, does this kind of I’ll say aversion to the technology infiltrate DOE also.

And if so, why?

[00:44:00] DJ Hanson: Well, nobody’s the villain in their own story. And I don’t think that DOE is waking up every morning saying, how can I make sure thorium doesn’t happen? We don’t want thorium, thorium. No, no, no. We just want to win. I don’t, I don’t think any of that’s happening. I think it comes again, down to the, the underlying fundamental belief about solid fuel.

If I have, if fuel is solid, then it makes sense that you would be somewhat averse and concerned about chemistry and the word they use for it is reprocessing where I’ve got a solid fuel and a bunch of stuff happens and then if I keep using the fuel, it’s going to crack and break and it’s not going to, bad things are going to, the bad thing will be, so we don’t want the bad thing to be.

So once the fuel gets about half a percent or a half, one and a half percent or 3 percent through its total potential. It’s like I gotta stop using it. I got the solid fuel rod. Okay. Shall we chemistry and the only way that you can get more value out of that is if you break it down, melt it, do a bunch of chemistry, reprocess the fuel and.

When you do that, you’re introducing, really, you really are introducing a lot of risk. You’re moving that stuff around to another, to a chemical processing facility. You got to take it to the reprocess facility. You got to pull it out. You got to do all the chemistry. You got to take it into all these different forms.

You have to have accountability for all of that material. I’m not going to undersell one thing. Fissile material is a material of consequences. There are consequences when you’re dealing with the uranium. There are consequences when you are dealing with the plutonium. This isn’t trivial stuff. You need to respect it.

And if you’re going to be moving it around, doing all this chemistry, it does make sense that from the DOE’s perspective, that there would be somewhere on the wall written, thou shalt not chemistry. Because in a solid fuel world, chemistry is a little dangerous because you have all of that supply chain risk, you have all of this different systems, you have to keep doing all these transition states, you’ve got to go from an oxide to a fluoride so you can do the…

[00:46:08] Mark Hinaman: Well, but the, the, the risks are number one, proliferation risk of the fizzle material to be fall into bad actor hands, right? Yep. And then number two, exposure to any of the fission products that are radioactive and they have, they’re, they’re radioactive at levels that if unshielded and if they get exposed to people, then they can hurt people.

I think the. Real realistic risk of how dangerous fission products from nuclear reactors is far, far overblown. We are hyper way, way too productive, protective of it, but that’s perhaps a conversation for the next podcast. But those, those are the two risks that yeah, they’re trying to protect against.

And if you move this stuff around, then it can be then you introduce those risks, right?

[00:46:53] DJ Hanson: Yeah, it does make sense. And the thorium, the thorium fuel cycle you could do in a solid fuel reactor just wouldn’t be as, it would be. frustrating because the whole value of the thorium fuel cycle, the thing that makes the thorium fuel cycle awesome is the fact that you can close it off.

But in order to close it off, thou shalt chemistry. You have to do chemistry when you’re doing the thorium fuel cycle.

[00:47:20] Mark Hinaman: I’m gonna I’m gonna steal it. Thou shalt chemistry.

[00:47:24] DJ Hanson: And If in a, that you’re going to introducing all that risk, it’s a problem in a molten salt reactor, thorium fuel cycle, the two terms almost end up synonymous because they go together.

So well, and if you can do all that chemistry in liquid state in the reactor, where it already exists, where it’s already protected, hermetically sealed, the whole thing is happening in solid state. There’s no need to, you don’t have, it can’t go anywhere, can’t leave the reactor. All the chemistry can happen the way it’s supposed reactor.

Is a term we stole from chemistry.

[00:48:00] Mark Hinaman: It’s where we are happening in these things, right?

[00:48:02] DJ Hanson: Like, like a chemistry happens in a reactor, that’s the point. And so keep it inside the reactor, but in order to do that, your fuel has to be liquid fission in a fluid is the secret. So I don’t think DOE’s posture or position is disingenuous.

I don’t even think that it doesn’t, I don’t even think that it’s one I disagree with if fuel is solid. But as soon as you can break that one underlying assumption and get to a liquid fuel, oh man, can you do some fun things.

[00:48:33] Mark Hinaman: Are there any downsides to this? Like, I mean, if the fuel’s liquid, can it evaporate?

Can the radionuclides or the fission products evaporate? I guess that’s the xenon system that you were talking about. Earlier, like how do you handle any vapors that come off? And I mean, I’ll just background this to make sure that I’m understanding it correctly. Yeah. When you fission stuff, new elements are formed, literally new atoms.

And some of those can be in a gaseous state and they can come out of your liquid fuel in a gaseous state. And so you have to have a Engineered mechanical system that captures them, which I mean, from the oil and gas space, we understand how to do that extremely well, right? We, we capture vapors on tanks all the time.

[00:49:14] DJ Hanson: Oh, yeah. So it’s not hard. Yeah. You open the door and I walk through it. Xenon transient is

[00:49:22] Mark Hinaman: a thing that is Xenon 135. You said it was too deep, but I like it. Let’s, let’s dive down. Let’s go into it.

[00:49:27] DJ Hanson: Xenon 135 Xenon 135. Is the Johnny Bench of neutron interactions that thing goes and finds every neutron it can find and it just eats them up.

It just consumes neutrons like nobody’s

[00:49:38] Mark Hinaman: business. I guess I know what yeah, I know it’s Xenon on 35 is, but I don’t know what Johnny Bench is.

[00:49:43] DJ Hanson: So I’m sorry. I’m throwing my age. Johnny Bench is an old catcher. So he was a really good catcher. Nothing got by him. He was fantastic in great range. Maybe I should say Mike Piazza. Maybe that’s more modern.

Because it eats all of those neutrons. So aggressively neutrons you need for the rest of your vision to happen. If you don’t have enough neutrons, you don’t have a reactor that’s sustaining. So you have to deal with it. The way that today’s reactors deal with it is they basically have a thousand horsepower that.

The new Xenon is a big e brake on so they get a hundred horsepower out of it. They have all this excess reactivity, like a dog on a leash that really wants to run and the Xenon is just holding it back. And you need to make the dog strong enough that it can pull the Xenon along. In our reactor, it just bubbles out.

And because it just bubbles out of the liquid, it’s still in the reactor and you manage the off gas in the reactor and you capture it in the reactor and you sequester it in carbon in the reactor, but it’s not in the core. It’s not eating your neutrons. And then you don’t have to have all this excess reactivity.

You don’t need that. You then need to tamp down with all these active control rods and all these active systems to keep it from running away. I don’t have a thousand horsepower engine waiting to break torque on the, on the wheels. I just have a car that’s behaving and does what it’s supposed to do with traction control.

It just, I put the accelerator down, it just goes.

[00:51:08] Mark Hinaman: I guess this is a good opportunity. Am I correct? People say, what about Chernobyl? And God bless HBO and their series, right? When they’re in the courtroom in the fifth episode. And they’re talking about the xenon poisoning and how that was problematic. And it looked like the reactor was shutting down, but really the xenon was poisoning it and then reactivity shot up and spiked.

Your guys design, theoretically That should be impossible.

[00:51:34] DJ Hanson: It is impossible. Chernobyl, you look at it, it behaved the way it was designed to behave initially. And pretty much every like nuclear incident that you want to point to the system, fission pretty well stops pretty quickly. What you end up with is all these decay products that are still producing heat and they need to be managed.

But the thing that really made Chernobyl a problem wasn’t nuclear, wasn’t nuclear at all. It was the energy came from nuclear. The actual explosion was hydrogen and the hydrogen came from the water that was in the system, you get to the right stoichiometric mix, and then I got a bunch of oxygen, a bunch of hydrogen.

I can make a big boom and you’re storing up this energy over this long period of time and then releasing it all at once and that exceeded the strength of the containment vessel and pop you go. And we have an international incident. Gentlemen, our reactor can’t do that. The salt has such a great thermal range.

It can absorb so much energy. It just. Will stay liquid before it’ll be the last thing that even thinks about talking about a transition It’s just the energy budget just isn’t there and because when you it’s liquid it can flow you can take it to a Situation where all of that decay heat all of that energy.

That’s it sort of there can just be like passively dealt with In solid state, without any moving parts, just sitting there happily waiting for someone to come, turn it back on again, turn the heaters on, melt it, get it pumped back up into the reactor where it can start doing its job again. The fundamental passive safety of a liquid fueled molten salt reactor is unmatched.

And it’s why we get so excited about it. It’s why Kirk is running around telling everyone for years, this is the best thing ever. Why aren’t we doing this? Why aren’t we doing this? If someone could come to me and tell me why this doesn’t make sense, I would be the happiest man alive because I got to learn a new thing and it’s going to save me a lot of time in my life.

I haven’t found that person yet.

[00:53:46] Mark Hinaman: So but you guys are doing it, right? But circling back to Flibe by, I mean, we spent a bunch of time going into the physics and talking about why which is really helpful and we’re, we’re coming up on our time now. So if you got to run DJ feel free all the time in the world.

So cool. Me too. Well, at least for another hour. So, but I don’t think. You can ask

[00:54:06] DJ Hanson: my wife, you put a quarter in me and I will talk about this until the sun comes up. She was not pleased when at 5 a. m. I woke her up after my final sort of deep dive on this and I’m like, I just think this is the answer now and I was like, I think this is the thing.

I woke up at five o’clock in the morning and after I’ve been up all night, I think thorium is the answer. And she’s like, That’s lovely, dear. I’m sleeping. So I’ll go on this forever. I

[00:54:36] Mark Hinaman: love it. Okay. Well, let’s circle back to Flibe. Where, where are you guys at in the process? Give us a little bit more color into kind of the company and the strategy and what you guys are working on projects.

I mean, we talked a lot about the technology, but yeah, you got to actually go and try and build it now.

[00:54:53] DJ Hanson: Right. So yeah, LFTRs, the thing we want to do, I want to build 50, 000 LFTRs, which is like, 30 terawatts of capacity. I want to do that before I die, but in order to do that, it’s going to take, it sounds awesome.

Let’s go. You want to come down with us? Let’s get going on in order to do that. We’re going to need a whole bunch of uranium two 33. It’s the super fuel. It’s the thing that catalyzes the whole thing. You can’t do it with you. Two 35. You can’t do it with plutonium 30 to 39. You can only do it with uranium.

Two 33 does not exist in nature. Have to synthesize. Gotta make a supply. That’s our project today is making a supply of uranium 233. And the way we’re going to make that supply of uranium 233 is with the reactor. That’s our current project, which is LaFleur, which I love the name by the way, which is exactly the lithium fluoride, low enriched uranium reactor.

And what that reactor is designed to do is it is designed to consume fissile uranium from, from natural sources. It’s enriched to. Common commercial standards today, the stuff that’s going into PWRs today, that level of enrichment. And to take the fission that’s happening there, and it can’t make one to one or one to just a little more than one.

It can make about 60 percent ish. But if I can get a bunch of LEU and I can convert 60 percent of it to super fuel, then I have a good thing. That’s the project that we’re going to be working on today. The fundamental technology ends up being the same. The fundamental operative characteristics of the reactor really end up being the same.

I have fission happening. I have all that fission stuff I need to deal with. I need to know the chemistry. I’ve got an off gas system I’ve got to deal with. I’ve got a power conversion system I’ve got to deal with. The only difference between lifter and the floor in the end is what’s in the salt. So fundamentally it’s the same reactor, but one is going to be able to run off of stuff I can buy today, and the other is going to run off of stuff that I need to make in this thing that I can buy today.

That’s our current project. That’s what we’re going to do. The pilot reactor with we expect that reactor is going to be going into construction before the end of next year. And we’ll targeting operation in twenty nine or thirty or to get that done. And we expect that we’re going to build more than one of those guys and we’re going to end up building as many as we can.

Getting a uranium two 33 supply and then turning around and pretty much taking those boxes we built, draining the salt, putting a new salt in that’s lifter. And now the floor is a lifter and off we go to the races. That’s the, that’s the vision. That’s the current project. And that’s the thing that we’re going to be going to metal on pretty soon here.

[00:57:46] Mark Hinaman: That’s, that’s great. I’ll say it back to make sure I understand. There’s currently no domestic or even perhaps international supply of uranium two 33. In order to synthesize uranium 2 33. I mean, it starts with thorium, right? But, mm-hmm. To get to uranium 2 33, you smack it with a neutron and voila.

’cause thorium is 2 32, right? Yep. So thorium

[00:58:08] DJ Hanson: 2 32 hit it with a neutron.

[00:58:10] Mark Hinaman: You add a neutron to the, and then once you’ve got that material, then you can use it to create more fission products, more neutrons, but then make more uranium 233. So you guys are essentially creating a chemical plant to make a fuel source and energy dense fuel.

Right? What are we talking about on this podcast? You’ll then bank and collect. But then over time, That’ll be your fuel source that you can take and put in other reactors. Am I thinking about that correctly?

[00:58:38] DJ Hanson: Exactly. You got 100 percent right.

[00:58:40] Mark Hinaman: The machinery and the systems that you’ll build for this fuel processing or fuel, really kind of fuel construction or fabrication will be Just like you said, identical and applicable to the power systems that you guys think you’ll eventually want to build and use to generate electricity.

[00:59:00] DJ Hanson: Yep. They’re all one. Basically, it’s effectively the same box. Chemistry is the same. The fundamental nucleus, it’s uranium and it’s uranium. It’s just a different isotopic number. When you talk of fuel, it’s sometimes interesting because it’s like, well, do you mean the thing that the box eats? Or do you mean the thing that does the fission that generates the energy?

So the uranium 233 it’s perfectly acceptable to call it a fuel. You’re a hundred percent right, but it’s not what the box eats. It doesn’t consume it as it goes. The thing it consumes is thorium. And this gets to my favorite unit of measurement I’ve come to our lifter design that one that’s going to do the utility generation.

That’s sort of the gigawatt class. Reactor in order to produce one year of operation, it will consume one cubic me of thorium metal. So take a cube of thorium metal. That’s my height about six foot and Cut it up into number two schedule rods and put that schedule two rod into the salt and that dissolves and that When that rod dissolves you take another one and stick it in and it dissolves like almost like a hot glue gun But a little bit more juice underneath it and that’s the fuel that the thing eats But underneath it, the catalyst, the piece that makes the whole thing go is that you’re in M233.

But you gotta have it initially to get the thing started.

[01:00:16] Mark Hinaman: Yeah. Fascinating. Do you, do you, do you guys have a certain area? I mean, you’re, you guys are based in Alabama, right?

[01:00:24] DJ Hanson: So. Yep. Huntsville, Alabama. Home of NASA and a lot of smart people with PhDs.

[01:00:31] Mark Hinaman: Are you guys thinking about building these first systems there or elsewhere?

[01:00:35] DJ Hanson: I mean, we can build this thing pretty much wherever because it’s a molten salt. We don’t need access to a water supply to be safe. We can build them pretty much anywhere that gravity points down, which is pretty broad space.

So, anywhere that I have permission to build these things, we’ll be able to build them.

[01:00:51] Mark Hinaman: If a community wanted to build them by 2030, because say a coal plant was shutting down, is that feasible or is that too fast?

[01:01:01] DJ Hanson: If they got the money, it’s feasible. Yeah. Yeah. You give me, what, to get through it the whole time, spin up an extra piece 600 million?

I can do it for 600 million. For

[01:01:14] Mark Hinaman: 300 megawatts?

[01:01:15] DJ Hanson: 300 megawatts. Electric?

Ba da da da da da. 300. Million times three and a megawatts, two and a half billion. I got you.

[01:01:36] Mark Hinaman: Perfect. Yeah. I’ll call my friends and family.

[01:01:40] DJ Hanson: Well, get together past tick, you know, send the hat around, collect it up, call me, do a contract. We’ll get that thing built for you.

[01:01:48] Mark Hinaman: I’m being a little facetious, but but actually yeah, no, I, I, all it takes is money, right?

[01:01:54] DJ Hanson: My whole business strategy from the time that I’ve been at Amazon has been, don’t ever tell your boss, no, just tell him how much it’ll cost.

[01:02:06] Mark Hinaman: Okay. Are there opportunities beyond just heat and power? I think on your guys website, you’ve got something about isotopes, but I don’t know if you want to touch on that.

[01:02:14] DJ Hanson: Yeah, there’s actually opportunities before heat and power, but the problem with all of those opportunities, you end up saturating those markets.

I can’t go make a you know, a hundred billion dollar company. Out of selling into a 3 billion market, the only energy you’ve been in energy, you know, how cutthroat it is. Yeah, but boy, can you sell it? Always a customer. The next customer, they’ll always buy it. They may not want to pay as much as you want to sell it for, but they’ll buy it.

And fundamentally, that’s the reason that we get to energy is because we just are not going to run out of customers every other place where we would go or be able to extract economic value from nuclear reactions, because we can do so much more by way of efficiency than anyone else, we end up saturating all those markets almost immediately because we have just such an excessive production capacity relative to current trends, relative current ways of doing it.

So. The, those opportunities, they’ll come, they’ll fill up, but then what we really want to do is go make energy.

[01:03:21] Mark Hinaman: Gotcha. For this first fuel fabrication piece, is, is that going to take a lot of people? I mean, when you’re going to build these systems, is that a lot of jobs at some of those plants? Or is that kind of a small skeleton

[01:03:35] DJ Hanson: crew?

It ends up depending a little bit on how we do it, who wants to partner with us. There’s a few different kind of economic considerations along how it goes. But it’s not going to happen without someone being there to push the buttons and do the work. In the end, you have to do what needs to be done.

And somebody has to do it, and it’s not just going to fall out of the sky for you. So there’s definitely jobs, whether or not it’s, you know, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands. I mean, in the end

It depends a little bit on who wants to partner and how they want to do it. I’m pretty game to do whatever makes sense in the most part. I don’t tend to get too attached to the way I think it might need to happen or the way I think it could happen. If the dude signing the checks decides that he wants to do it this way or that way.

Ethical? Cool. Let’s go. Nobody’s dying? Great. Let’s do it. Gotcha.

[01:04:33] Mark Hinaman: Okay. Well, how let’s see, we’ll, we’ll jump to some of the questions that we asked us for, I guess. So, I’m trying to think of how to personalize this question for, for you guys. Cause it sounds like you’ve got a strategy picked out. Then all it would take is just money, right. To accelerate it, but how could, how could we money and permission? I see. So, well, maybe that’s a good question. Do you guys view the NRC as a big challenge or are you engaged with them?

What’s how are you thinking about

[01:04:59] DJ Hanson: that?

Again, like nobody’s the villain in their own story. The NRC, they’re not bad guys and you know, someone that you need to antagonize. Their job is to keep the public safe and when you’re asking the NRC for a license to operate a reactor for 60 years, all of a sudden they’re going to have to do a lot more math than if you’re asking the NRC to license a reactor that’s going to operate for six years.

So, I, I don’t anticipate that the NRC is going to be problematic, they’re not going to be problematic, but they are going to be a process that you need to respect and you need to go through and you need to follow, you need to satisfy them that their job is not to stop nuclear reactors. Their job is to make sure that the public does not pay for somebody else’s enthusiasm.

Now, I’ve got enthusiasm, so I’m fine with the NRC saying, well, hold on there, chief. Slow down a little bit. Prove to me that, like, you’ve got. You’ve got 20, 20 in a dream right now. And I love what you, I love the vision kid, but show me the math. I got no problem, you know, showing my math to the teacher, but we’re going to, you know, they’re going to partner with them.

We’re going to do the job with them. I don’t think that they’re going to be in the way, but it is a process. It’s going to have to happen and it’s not going to be free. I would love if we didn’t have to pay for our own oversight regulation, but you know, I don’t always get what I want. So I’ll write the check.

[01:06:25] Mark Hinaman: DJ, that’s one of the most mature answers I’ve heard to that question. So well, well

[01:06:30] DJ Hanson: done.

You should have told my mom,

[01:06:34] Mark Hinaman: That people want to help her get involved. How how, how can I help you guys?

[01:06:39] DJ Hanson: This is an interesting answer. Like it’s, if. The thing that really we need is a little bit of cooperation from representatives in the federal government, and I don’t need people to sort of call their rep and make sure that their rep is going to be our champion and go make sure this happens.

The thing that we need. Because we need people to call their rep and make sure that their rep perceives that there’s going to be a cost to them if they’re in the way. We’ve got people ready to champion this, to go make good, sensible reforms about how we regulate nuclear. Those, those, we’ve got those people in place.

We’ve got the strategy in place. But when that guy stands up and he says, I’d like to do a thing, all of a sudden every other politician says, Oh, he wants a thing. I can get something out of it. If I can stand in the way. And the only thing that stops that in DC, the only thing that stops people saying.

Well, you want to get by me, you’ve got to give me something I want. The only thing that stops that is if those representatives perceive that there is a cost to being in the way. Because being in the way normally is free. But if you can call your representative, and you don’t have to tell your representative off, you don’t have to get aggressive, you just need to say, I care about nuclear energy, and if you are in the way.

Of nuclear energy happening I am not going to be happy and anyone that comes along that isn’t in the way is going to get my vote not you So get in the way Which isn’t go run out and do all the things They don’t want to go do that. They got their own stuff They want to do I understand that but boy when they see that opportunity get in the way what I want them thinking isn’t Oh, what can I get for this?

It’s there’s going to be a cost. Call your reps, let them know you care, and let them know that you care that they aren’t on a barrier to change.

[01:08:35] Mark Hinaman: I like that. Okay well, DJ, leave us with your most positive view of the future. I know you said you want 30. Terawatts of Flibebre reactors all over the world but in call it 5, 10, 20 years what, what’s it going to look like?

Could we have Flibebre reactors in Colorado? I mean, I said in Colorado, could we build a couple out here?

[01:08:57] DJ Hanson: Yeah, absolutely. I don’t see any reason why not. Let’s go do it. 20 years, 10 years. I think we start to have optimism in 20 years. We should be showing. Instead of telling and when we’re showing all of a sudden you can get people to see the vision you can induce optimism and hope and that catches fire 20 years boy, I can’t wait for 20 years.

We’re going to live in what I call it the post peak world. Where in the 70s we had peak oil, and then we had peak water, then we had peak whatever, now we’ve got peak guilt. I don’t know whatever we got, peak whatever right now, but everything is peaking, and then it’s all on a decline. Exactly, it’s downward.

We triple the world’s energy budget. There’s no peak whatever anymore. You’d be amazed the, the sets of problems that you can solve with the judicious application of a gigawatt of energy. Energy solves it all. It wipes all the problems away. And in the end, if we can decrease cost and increase availability and not have bad trade offs with the environment.

We are going to have optimism. I love thinking about 50 years in the future, 50 years in the future. I want to get there now because we’re not going to have the kinds of scarcity. We’re not going to have the kinds of trade offs. We’re not going to have guilt over consumption because consumption is not going to come with ruining something else around us.

Consumption is just going to come with producing economic activity for your neighbor so that they have a job, so that they can consume the things that you produce. I have all kinds of optimism for the future. I get excited about it because if you can make energy not a scarcity anymore, you can make a society.

When Kirk Sorensen said it, and I love it, when we learned to harness the chemical potential of carbon, we learned to be civilized to each other. Within a hundred years, slavery disappears everywhere that carbon starts getting burned. If we can do the same thing, what sorts of problems in our society will we make disappear because we can learn to be civilized to each other because we can harness an additional two orders of magnitude?

Of an energy source. I’m so excited for it.

[01:11:12] Mark Hinaman: And a fantastic place to stop. DJ Hanson. Thanks so much. What a, what a fantastic note to leave us on.

[01:11:20] DJ Hanson: It was my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

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