045 Bob Hargraves, Co Founder at ThorCon International

[00:00:00] Bob Hargraves: Now his goal, and it’s our goal now, is simply to get the cost low. Nuclear power is going to succeed economically, and that means we have to pay attention to cost.

[00:00:13] 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 in this dialogue. Those two and a half billion 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 job. Overhaul nuclear radiation. We 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.

[00:01:17] 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. My name is Mark Hinaman. And today I’m joined by Bob Hargraves co founder at Thorcon international.

[00:01:30] Bob Hargraves: It’s great to meet you I’ve heard.

[00:01:36] Mark Hinaman: You speak on several podcasts, you’re prolific on LinkedIn and posting about the nuclear industry and advocating for it. So I’m really excited for this discussion. I think it’s gonna be excellent. Bob, before we get started, why don’t you just give kind of a, I mean, you’ve, you’ve had a long background, but why don’t you give kind of a brief 30 to 60 second self intro tell the audience who you are and give them color for for this discussion.

[00:01:59] Bob Hargraves: Sure. I started my education at Dartmouth college, right? I started to be an engineer, but I liked math and physics better. I couldn’t figure out which I liked better, so I majored in both. Then I went to grad school with Brown in physics. I studied high energy particle physics, so I have a little bit of nuclear background.

After that, I got recruited back to Dartmouth and worked on timescaling and new computing. I introduced computer science to Dartmouth College and so on. Then life went on and I went to, found the software company we, we were one of the first outfits to license software at the amazing price way back then of 7, 500 a month for a time saving system software.

So we made a bunch of money for the college who owned the company, and then I ended up being an insurance company executive for a little while and then became a consultant with Arthur D. Little. And of course, in consulting and in IT the people who buy a lot of services turn out to be the energy industry.

So, I did a lot of work around the world with oil and gas companies. Then after that, I got involved in a medical device company, Boston Scientific which was exciting and fun. And eventually retired and got the bug of my physics background alive again. And I said to myself, what’s going on with energy?

Why are we paying all this money to the folks in the south, in the Mideast? And got involved in nuclear power. So this is a two decade retirement project I’ve been working on.

[00:03:41] Mark Hinaman: Excellent. Selling it services to oil and gas industry. I imagine it was that in the eighties, nineties, but what

[00:03:48] Bob Hargraves: time frame?

Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. Right. We went to places like Venezuela, Brazil, and of course, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Yeah,

[00:03:58] Mark Hinaman: that’s great. I, my dad has told me stories about that era and it was very analog. So what were some of the IT tech technologies that you guys were peddling then?

[00:04:10] Bob Hargraves: Yeah, yeah, no, I do remember being asked to be a consultant on a project.

Someone had to convert teletypewriters to Arabic, and I foolishly said, no, teach all the Arabs to use English letters. That was a mistaken piece of advice. Yeah,

[00:04:31] Mark Hinaman: that’s funny. My, my dad has stories about my mom. They, they worked together and they ran a business together, but she would be up till the wee hours of the morning typing up proposals on typewriter.

You know, that they’d take into a bank meeting or a customer meeting the next day and yeah, it was different, different world. So, well, Bob, when you got interested into nuclear tell me about that discovery process.

[00:04:56] Bob Hargraves: The discovery process was the idea that we shouldn’t spend so much money in the Mideast, uh, frankly, and I started looking around, and I got very entranced with the Pebble Bed Reactor, and Andy Kadex worked at MIT.

Andy was the guy who had run one of the very first power plants in New England, Connecticut Yankee, and he was a teacher at MIT who was working on that type of a project. So I put together a blog called Pebble Bed Reactor. My theory is if you don’t know something, teach it or post it or whatever. And so I, that was a series that lasted for a couple of years.

And I was. Hang on it, because of the intrinsic safety of the fact that these little pebbles contain little grains of this little material that are, are themselves contained in little spheres that contain all the fission products. So you don’t have the worries that you have a whole ranch of radioactive materials in any kind of an accident.

So I like that idea. It is a little expensive to try to compete with oil. So, we got. Sort of interested in other technologies, and just from looking around I noticed molten salt reactors. And the guy who was a big proponent of that was Kirk Sorensen, who now was the guy who runs Flibe Energy. Kirk’s background was NASA, and he got involved in how one might put a power plant on the moon, and then he got involved in finding out about the work that had done at NASA.

Oak Ridge. And he managed to get a grant to get all those documents for the project stand and put on the Internet for everyone to look at. So we got, I got very interested in that, wrote a little book on it called Thorium, Energy Cheaper Than Coal and began to meet people One, the people I met was Jack Devaney and Jack had an astounding idea to me at the time, and that was to. use ships to become power plants and Jack had put his money where his mouth was in the sense that he had designed and built and raised money for the world’s largest double hulled supertanker that transited oil back and forth from the Mideast to the U. S. and other places. And in doing that, he had used his education. And he contacted MIT, where he was, to develop a system of design that was very complete and very consistent. He was an expert in using all the tools, and so he managed to sketch out how one would do that with molten salt reactions. Thorcon.

Now his goal, and it’s our goal now, is simply to get the cost low. Nuclear power is going to succeed economically, and that means we have to pay attention to cost. When I read the news about nuclear power day after day after month, I see little attention to cost other than saying they’re blown, blowing out of sight.

The emphasis on new nuclear power seems to be Smaller, modular, factory produced. That’s all good but safer? Come on, how could it possibly be safer? No one’s into it, but you can plan for it. So, we need an emphasis on cost. We want the cost per kilowatt hour to come down. If we expect nuclear power to succeed in providing clean energy to the, to the world.

So, that’s kind of the objective of the company that, that Jack Initiated ThorCon Power, energy cheaper than coal, factory produced, scale, so that we can Fulfill the goal, not just of building a molten salt power plant, But a whole system that’s in place that has the capability Provide part of the world at scale.

[00:09:47] Mark Hinaman: Yeah, that’s, that’s wonderful. So I love that Jack’s background is in the oil and gas industry also, right? I mean, I empathize strongly with them and that was probably helpful for you to come to them and be like, Oh, I’ve worked in energy and oil and gas. And it’s just fun when people get it and have that background and then come to, come to nuclear.

How, how did you get connected with him originally and what was your guys relationship that you decided to join him?

[00:10:14] Bob Hargraves: It was a mistake. Somehow or other, it was a piece of documentation he’d written that somehow escaped through one of his friends and I found it. I said, my God, look, this guy has the answers.

He knows that your power plants are built the same as pipes and pumps and valves and so on. And it’s the same technology. So, I broadcast that with the guys. Jack found out about it. He said, Oh, my God, secrets out. So his deal was, you know, he recruited all of us to basically work with him, and that’s what happened instead.

[00:10:54] Mark Hinaman: I see. I like that. sO before we talk a little bit more about. It’s mad because let’s, let’s focus on Thorcon for a little bit. I mean, you, you mentioned it’s a company that’s focused on molten salt reactors, building power plants with ships that are these going to be mobile? How big are they?

What’s the power rating target? The give us some color.

[00:11:17] Bob Hargraves: Sure. First, the plant is built on a ship that’s perhaps 165 meters long. The width is approximately 65 meters because that’s the size of the docks that the ship building companies use to build.

We also want this plant to be unique. So we want the economies of scale, it can be achieved. So that’s kind of the background for setting the size of the power plant, which is basically two 557 megawatt thermal reactors on board the vessel and one steam turbine generator that can output 500 megawatts electric.

So that’s kind of the The sizing, and with that size, we are able to get the cost for the power plant, the capital costs down to something like 1. 2 dollars per watt of generating capacity. And the goal we still have in our design is still achievable, even with the inflation is about 3 cents per kilowatt hour for the electricity that’s generated.

All costs taken into account coming from the ship. Now, on top of that, you have to add transmission and regulation and marketing and all the other sorts of things. So, perhaps that cost gets doubled by the time it gets to the consumer. That’s

[00:12:56] Mark Hinaman: really good. A buck 20 for overnight capital cost is excellent.

Yeah, right. I just did this calculation and looked back at it. Peach Bottom, which was one of the least expensive nuclear power plants built in the U. S., was a buck 20 in 2008 dollars or a buck 80 in 2023 dollars. So you’re right, right in range with some of the cheapest power that the U. S. has ever built.

[00:13:20] Bob Hargraves: And one of the reasons for that is the shipyards. I mean, the shipyards have been brutally completed in South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and so on. And they, if you’ve ever seen some of the videos of how they build those ships, they’re very impressive. They have large machines that roll the steel and form it and weld it and on and on.

And so the, the design of the power plant has been set to make use of that technology so that they can be built by inexpensive ship builders. Yard technology.

[00:14:01] Mark Hinaman: Absolutely. Now, you guys have this design on your website, you have some excellent documentation for vendors and suppliers. And I mean, it’s obvious that you put a lot of thought and effort into this.

[00:14:17] Bob Hargraves: Yeah, the website has perspective and early design. Perhaps a couple of years old.

[00:14:22] Mark Hinaman: But, It’s not the latest and greatest, eh?

[00:14:25] Bob Hargraves: Yeah, what happens is, of course, now we need to have more engineering, more work, and so on. We need more investment. And so the investors want to know that there’s a proprietary basis that will mean that they can earn their money back and more besides.

So, There’s a lot of material it’s proprietary to us as the design is advanced. We can’t really post it. Some of the new ideas we put there. But again, the process in every decision is, you know, what’s the effect on cost? What’s the effect on productivity, production, the producibility, I should say, and so on.

And there’s some clever ideas in the new design. 1 of the things that’s there is we have decided to put the nuclear module into a separate hall. So that we’ll probably be releasing that some of that’s probably on our news sites from time to time, but we want to be able to take just that part of this power plant.

To a maintenance facility, and leave the very expensive steam turbine generator in in place. Yeah, there are changes like that that have happened. So, the, the website is a good place to begin your education and how 1 might put this sort of thing together, but the real details are are not published widely.

Got it.

[00:15:55] Mark Hinaman: Got to get in touch with you guys to get behind that curtain. So wait. So, Bob, give us. Some perspective on where you are in this process. Do one of these plants exist yet? Have you guys built a prototype? Are you looking for customers? Help me understand how you’re going to make this come to fruition.

[00:16:15] Bob Hargraves: Right. First of all, we have a lot of clever engineers and they’re not in the nuclear industry. So we’ve linked up with a company that is in the nuclear industry, and Presarios Agrupados is a Spanish company that has done the engineering documentation and so on for many power plants, many nuclear power plants in.

Europe. so They have that kind of experience in putting together the documentation the regulators want. And they’re also a sounding board for us, who are people who are good engineers and have education background and consulting in nuclear power plants, but they are a check. So we make a presentation to

And they say, Oh, well, what about because they’ve been in the same position with regulators in the past. So that’s working. Well, we also have a plant. That’s going to be code across the scene. So we have a relationship with Bureau Veritas, which is an outfit that helps ship manufacturers get the various accreditations that are needed to bring ships into port and so on.

So, that’s helping us, and we’re trying to split the plant as you see, to try to keep the regulator from having to look at every detail and things that. Aren’t very important to nuclear safety. So, for example, in our design, the whole steam power plant is not critical to the safety of the nuclear module.

So, we’re going to try to get Bureau Veritas to be the people who attest to the safety and seaworthiness and so on of that part of the plant and limit the regulators Concerns to nuclear power and the chance of harm from radiation. Got it.

[00:18:23] Mark Hinaman: Being a ship, you can deploy these things anywhere.

I, I think you’ve targeted Indonesia. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but are you guys still focused on that area of the world? And what’s the status there? Well,

[00:18:38] Bob Hargraves: no, yes, we are. I mean, the original design was to be built on land using the same construction techniques that we would use to import big sections of the plant.

Okay. From the shipyard, but that evolved finally to actually having the whole plan built by the shipyard. So, the idea we had was not, was to build a plant and it’s on a ship, but only for transportation to the site. We finally decided that there were more things to constrain us if we wanted to have a floating power plant. For example, the regulator doesn’t have any, any rules for that.

So, we take the whole power plant to the site. And we ballast it down to the seabed. So it becomes a land based plant with its feet in the water, so to speak. And therefore all the regulatory rules that apply to land based plants apply to us, and so we don’t have that new ground to plow over. Also…

You know, we have little details, like how do you make the electrical connections to a power plant that’s bombing up and down and so on. We’re trying to reduce the number of new technologies we want in the power plant, just to make the chance less. So that’s what’s happened. We need about 5 to 10 meters of.

The sea depth in order to bring the plant into place, we prepare the ground underneath the sea with sand and so on so that we have the proper relationship between the plant and the ground in the case of earthquakes. So that’s part of our seismic isolation. The as I said before, that’s not going to stay there forever.

We’ve decided that we want to be able to totally the nuclear module away to a maintenance facility. So, that’s going to happen every 8 years or so to do that sort of thing. We could relocate the plant by de ballasting all the water that’s in the double hull and float it off somewhere, but that’s not the idea.

The idea of floating power plants is simply in our case. To transport it from the manufacturer to the seaside site now, seaside, of course, is another big advantage and that is cooling water. We got a lot of it out there and it keeps helps us keep the cost down. Yeah, wait,

[00:21:34] Mark Hinaman: what’s the timeline to deployment?

Do you guys have that mapped out? Do you have a prototype that you’ve put together, or?

[00:21:42] Bob Hargraves: Well, like in all engineering projects, there’s the business side, and those people are, have a schedule, it’s written, and here are the goals, and so on, and here are the milestones, and there’s the engineering side. Who have to try to meet those and so on.

So there’s always that kind of conflict. But now we’re looking at being in testing mode on Galapagos Island, Indonesia in 2028. And let me tell you a little bit of how we got there. I. We took that initial design to the NRC and to the Department of Energy and did the presentations and the draft had the idea originally that we could do that in Hanford, which is a site in Washington State.

Where the plutonium reactors were built to provide that fissile material for bombs for World War II and thereafter. And it’s been always a controversial site because it’s military, really. And because people complain about the leftover materials that are radioactive from the old plutonium power plants.

Now, it turned out that, among other things, there’s a whole set of perfectly workable, never used cooling towers right there. And so we had proposed trying to build the plant there, but we were asking to build under the same licensing rules that all the other plants in the United States had been built.

But the NRCS changed all the rules since then. And they said, no, you have to use the same rules for new power plants. And so we, we did our, our, our duty and telling government what we’re going to do but we couldn’t do it there because at the very time we did it, the the general was it called the GAO government accountability office did a study of what it would cost to build a new technology power plant.

And they came out with a report about the time we were there that said it was one to 2 billion before the NRC would rule. So you can’t imagine going to an investor and saying, please, can I have a billion dollars? And by the way, it all depends on the whim of the NRC.

[00:24:04] Mark Hinaman: So, let’s let’s dive into that a little bit. I’m really curious about this. So government accountability office, this is a government agency that analyzes other government agencies and make sure is that they’re. Operating efficiently and under their purview and their rules. Am I correct? And understanding that?

Yeah. And so they came, they studied the NRC and they said, it’s going to cost a billion dollars to license a new nuclear power plant in the

[00:24:33] Bob Hargraves: US to get. Right? Exactly. So then we get, when was that Bob? Oh, that’s all at least 10 years ago. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:24:43] Mark Hinaman: And so I think new scale then proved that,

[00:24:47] Bob Hargraves: right? Well, you’re right.

Yeah. .

[00:24:49] Mark Hinaman: Yeah. Because how much, I mean, you look at their investor or their, any of their reports and they’ve, they’ve spent a billion dollars getting a design certification

[00:24:57] Bob Hargraves: and, and yeah. New scale is the same technology. It’s pressurized water in a reactor, new tech, right? Yeah. With a half a, with a fuel rod length, that’s half as much.

It’s improved the design to be more for sure. So it’s better. Why is it so? Hey,

[00:25:16] Mark Hinaman: so is that report public? Can we go back and look at the government accountability office?

[00:25:21] Bob Hargraves: Yeah, probably. And 1 of the presentations I’ve done in the website. Yeah, so, oh, man, certainly there. I

[00:25:30] Mark Hinaman: want to stay on this topic just real quick, Bob, but do you do you see that changing in the next.

510 years. 2 years,

[00:25:37] Bob Hargraves: 5 years, the only way that will change is with a kind of a revolutionary approach to regulations in the US. I mean, incremental changes to the NRC are not going to be effective.

[00:25:48] Mark Hinaman: So, there needs to be enough pressure on Congress to make big changes to the NRC so that it doesn’t cost a billion dollars to license

[00:25:57] Bob Hargraves: these

[00:25:58] Mark Hinaman: systems.

Right, which is radically unnecessary. Like you said, the. There’s never been an accident that’s hurt somebody in the US like these. Yeah. Anyway,

[00:26:07] Bob Hargraves: I get off sub time. The other, the N rrc. Now the Navy thinks the nrc. Okay. Yeah. And one of the articles I wrote a little while ago was suggesting that the chemical industry auto escape the nrc, the oil and gas and chemical industries.

Run very hazardous plants all the time really safely and now for example It’s just that we’re gonna put a nuclear power plant in ours to generate heat and so on cheaper And my point is well these guys know how to handle hazardous things Let them do it. Yeah. Why have the NRC involved at all? I diverge.

I, I digress.

Yeah,

[00:26:49] Mark Hinaman: make sure that the material is not stolen, but yeah, okay, so we’ll escape the NRC by going to Indonesia, right?

[00:26:54] Bob Hargraves: We, that’s another point, of course, and that’s our objective. So when we got turned down in the U. S., we started looking for other countries. And we had a six month campaign about trying to find a country that wants us.

He went to lots of countries, you know, Bulgaria, Jordan, UK, you name it and trying to find the right match of openness. And Dave Devaney finally found Indonesia. And Indonesia is the fourth largest country in the world by population, and perhaps has, I don’t know the exact number, but a tiny fraction of the GDP per capita of the U.

S. It’s probably you know, an eighth of it or something of that nature. They want more energy. They want more power. Like every nation they have resources they’d like to excavate them. So for example, they would like rather than sending coal away and Sending iron ore away and so on, to use those natural resources to make products, steel strip or aluminum or whatever, and they need energy in order to do that, and they know that, they know they’re all, they’re all smart people, of course, so, so they’ve been sort of open minded with us all along now, and we’ve been working hard with them for half a decade, Uh, most recently, about a year ago, the governor of one of the provinces sometimes called Babel, B A B E L wanted the project in his province, and so he suggested we use an island that we visited, called Galassa Island, and it’s uninhabited and our idea is that if we do this on an Uninhabited island to begin with we will be certain that there won’t be any hazardous results from the state.

And also we’re kind of out of the mainstream of all the protesters who are going to be around. And so on.

[00:29:03] Mark Hinaman: So make sure all the stakeholders are involved. We got all the birds on board. Sounds great.

[00:29:09] Bob Hargraves: Now we’ve had, you know, so. We’ve had PLN, the power company, go to the island and they’ve done surveys of the subsoils underneath where we’re going to put the hull.

They figured out how to bring the power in an undersea cable. Design that and so on. So they’re involved the regulator went not to the island. There’s nobody there, but to one of the cities nearby on in the province and had an open discussion with the people there about how ThorCon would affect them and so and so that that’s progressing like any government. There are a lot of agencies involved and the regulator is just 1 of them. And we’re, we have relationships going with all of them. So, we have an office there with a manager and a couple of dozen people who are interested in handling all the relationships with the government and the people and so on.

Public relations working pretty well so far. That’s great. So that’s how it came to Indonesia.

[00:30:26] Mark Hinaman: How many countries did you guys look at around the world? Oh, I would

[00:30:30] Bob Hargraves: say a dozen. Yeah. Yeah,

[00:30:33] Mark Hinaman: at least right. I mean, did you visit all of them? What was your vetting process? Like, if you don’t

[00:30:37] Bob Hargraves: mind sharing? Well, what’s the thing?

I mean, regulatory hurdles is 1 vetting. Another is the openness, the stability, the democracy of the government. Yeah, another is, of course, the demand if

[00:30:52] Mark Hinaman: there’s going to be a revolution, are they going to nationalize your technology

[00:30:55] Bob Hargraves: or all that sort of thing? Exactly. Right. So, yeah, it is. You know, we have to raise more money in order to meet that schedule of having that plant under test on Galapagos Island in 2028.

[00:31:19] Mark Hinaman: Okay. So back to fundraising piece now, so you’re back to fundraising now, right? Yeah. Right.

[00:31:25] Bob Hargraves: Well, we had, oh, I don’t know, a handful of investors to start off with. And these investors are people who say, well, you know, we ought to help these guys out. And one of the investors is one that invested in Jack’s project in the first place.

So, but these are small investments made by people who are concerned about the plight of the world and CO2 emissions and all that sort of thing. And the most recent one is the one who’s our principal investor, Chris Anderson. And he’s been carrying the company through the last over a year now Chris is the guy who founded the TED talks, uh, and feels that our idea is the same as Musk’s idea in the sense that we’re building a factory to produce the product.

so That’s kind of it. I was impressed with Musk in the sense that. He merges manufacturing with design. I mean, so he moves his engineering desk to be alongside the production line. So the engineers see what’s going on all the time. And you know, when you’re building a new thing. The, the NRC and everyone else and ISO 9000 would say, well, we write down all the design requirements and then you follow and you document every step of the way until you have the finished product.

It meets the design you did for four years ago. Well, when you’re developing a new product, it doesn’t work so easily that way because as the design evolves, there’s a material problem or a sourcing problem or, you know, it goes on and on. So, there is a lot of. Interaction that happens as that design progresses, but now we, we have the design in a state where we would call it a preliminary design.

You know, we know the pipe sizes. We know the materials all that sort of thing, but, you know, the, the hangers that the pipes are hanging on those aren’t designed yet. Okay, so we’re going to involve outfits like EA to finish off that kind of design, uh, and as you approach the, the shipyard the shipyard is going to say, well, we don’t want to, there’s a question, who wants to do the final design of the, it’s going to really affect the manufacturing and that has to be negotiated still.

Dave Dematting was just over in South Korea talking to one of the, well, Hanla Austin which is the new name for DSME. Yeah, so now we’re good.

[00:34:07] Mark Hinaman: Yeah, sorry. Didn’t mean to cut you off. But I mean, searching for investment is sometimes it can be easier to raise smaller amounts of money than larger amounts of money.

And I’ll preface this question with email Jack, actually, and said, hey, we’re really interested in these micro reactors and this kind of idea. What do you think about them? And, background for the guests. Jack has run a blog called the Gordian Knot and the Gordian Knot is kind of how do we, it’s this longstanding idea of how do we solve climate change and not impact the planet and still provide energy for, for everyone, or that’s kind of the premise.

I don’t want to put words in your mouth or in his mouth, but emailed me back. I was like, Hey, we like micro reactors. And he emailed me back and he goes, we’re not going to solve the Gordian Knot with toys. We want big reactors

[00:34:56] Bob Hargraves: now but that’s true market for those small, you know, small remote religions in the north, something of that nature.

But again, we tried to get the cost per kilowatt hour down as low as possible. And that’s kind of means scaling up. So that’s the point. Remark. Let me talk about SMR shift for a minute. I just came to this realization a while ago that these small modular reactors that are involved are really just water based reactors.

They transfer heat from fuel rods to eventually a steam turbine with water. And to keep that water from boiling, they pressurize it. We had a boiling water reactor from They double the pressure in order to make a pressurized water reactor for pressing out, but there’s no limit to how much you can pressurize it.

And have an assistance system, and that limits the heat transfer. So a lot of these new reactors are just the same technology. The the new scale, the whole tech, the Westinghouse G claims, and, and they’re advertising it, the new design as, it’s the same as the at 1000 same pumps, maybe fewer of them. And so, and that’s a good.

Good idea. I mean, they’ve been through the regulatory warrior and they checked them all out. I don’t know. So, but it’s how is that going to really lower the cost? Yeah, so that’s so we, we got involved in new technology. I told you, I got interested in the pebble red reactors, a high temperature gas reactor.

And now we’re interested, I am in the molten salt reactor because we believe that that technology can be less expensive because it doesn’t have all these fuel rods problems. I mean, the, the, the technology of a fuel rod poet is It’s pretty intense. I mean, what is it, 1500 centigrade in the middle of the pellet and the boiling water is what, three, 400 degrees centigrade.

You got to have that transition in a centimeter or so. The

[00:37:19] Mark Hinaman: materials are unbelievable, right?

[00:37:23] Bob Hargraves: So anyway,

[00:37:25] Mark Hinaman: so with this 2028 timeframe I guess what I was getting at with the anecdote about Jack saying we need big reactors that, but that could increase the capital cost of the first one. Is there any, have you guys given any thought to building a smaller prototype first, or are you kind of taking the Rick over approach where he said, Nope, we’re building a submarine.

It’s going to be full size and we’re going to run it underwater the first time that we turned it on.

[00:37:51] Bob Hargraves: Well, Rickover was advanced at them, and when he did that, there was no example of such an energy powered by nuclear. In our case, there is an example, two actually, down at Oak Ridge, the aircraft reactor experiment and the molten salt reactor experiment, both of those operating.

And it’s amazing how much Good documentation exists from that last experiment forever going back and saying, well, what did they do in this case when we come across a problem? So, in a sense, that small reactor has already been developed. Now, just from being in the meetings and so on, I can’t see. If we had made their actor half the size of what we’re making now, I can’t see any change in cost.

I mean, the cost of the people is all the same. And the other problem I’ve noticed in my introduction to engineering is that none of this stuff scales. Fluid dynamics is different in a one inch pipe than a half inch pipe. That’s true. Yeah, it is true.

[00:39:06] Mark Hinaman: You know, that is a good example. I mean, it goes both ways, but the Fort St.

Vrain plant in Colorado. Was designed by combustion engineering and they had built a prototype that was about, I forget, it was like half the size or a quarter of the size and they said, this works great. Right. And, and then they just scaled it up. And then when they did scale it up, they had more leaks.

The helium didn’t circulate the same way. You’re exactly right. There were some, there was nuance to the size of the design that building at the right size. The first time

[00:39:35] Bob Hargraves: would have been helpful. Right. And remember, our objective is not to build 1 plant, but to build the factory and have a design that provides safe, clean power to the world.

And we, if we succeed, we can have an outfit, a strip yard build, perhaps 10 to 20 gigawatts of power plants a year. Yeah, right now we’re competing with of course the oil industry because the oil industry wants to build tankers and LNG tankers now, of course. And so the shipyards have to balance the demand from a startup like Thorcon with proven but variable demand for.

LNG tankers, oil tankers and so on. So, yeah, they would like to have a different kind of customer themselves. That’s our thing with them.

[00:40:37] Mark Hinaman: Bob, what’s the number? I mean, it sounds like you guys are looking for more investment now. I would ask, what’s the number 1 thing that you guys need? Is that an investment partner, a team or more customers?

Or you’ve got sounds like you’ve got a lot of the engineering and design thought out.

[00:40:52] Bob Hargraves: Oh, well, it’s a lot out and and be tested. In a lot of cases, we have a lot of component tests going on. A lot of this stuff is outsourced to various labs around the world. So it isn’t just the design that we’re, we have lots of parts in manufacturing are being tested all the time.

[00:41:11] Mark Hinaman: What do you guys need most right now?

[00:41:12] Bob Hargraves: Honestly, it’s frankly a good, firm, reliable investor. I mean, Chris Anderson, who did the TED Talks, It’s a great partner but he, he doesn’t want to spend his whole fortune. He’s only done TED talks, you know, he doesn’t own a bunch of railroads.

So he’s in the process of trying to convince others as we all are. And I got some LinkedIn posts. It’s to attract attention to what we are doing.

[00:41:49] Mark Hinaman: Well, I think you’re making a lot of excellent points and advocacy work for the industry and, you know, I view it as a full court press. Meaning we Collectively need to encourage this technology and normalize the adoption of it and the utilization of it.

And I think you guys are doing a wonderful job on LinkedIn and in another outlets to do that. So let’s, let’s pivot to that. What, what let’s talk a little bit about the Gordian knot your posts on LinkedIn. You know, you repost a lot of what Jack writes. He’s got a sub stack.

[00:42:25] Bob Hargraves: Right. The problem is, although we have some good ideas, the question is, who knows about them?

And all of us guys in the pro nuclear community speak to each other. I’ve gotten four or five articles in the Wall Street Journal. But the New York Times, for example, never even replies when I send them a draft of an article. So, the media controls the message that the public understands. And they understand, oh, for example, any time I talk about what I do, I’m always asked, what about the waste?

Right? And, you know, so the public is convinced.

So how do we get that message out to a wider audience is the question. Now, honestly, I think if we can get that power plant up and running in Indonesia and publish the prices, that that will disturb a lot of people in the world. And they’ll say, Oh, I wonder why we’re not doing that. Okay, so that’s, that’s the primary thing.

Jack has delegated operated a company to Dave Devaney, his brother, and Lars Jorgensen, the guy who runs all the engineering here in the U. S. The So, he’s now on a campaign that you have seen, the, the, the Substack posts, to basically try to present the silliness of our regulatory blockade that prevents nuclear power.

But again who’s going to… I’m also involved with a group called Scientists for Accurate Radiation Information, which is a group mostly of oncologists and docs and radiologists and health physicists and so on, who deal with radiation as a career. In hospitals and so on, um, and they too are trying to get the science applied to the regulations.

But it’s sort of frustrating because things like the, well, LNT is a model for the harm to health from radiations and storms called linear no threshold. And what it means simply is that if you double the dose. You double the harm, or if you have the dose, you halve it. But that’s been interpreted as saying, well, there’s no safe dose.

You’re always on the risk of getting a deadly cancer. That is a tenet of EPA. By that, I mean a policy. And they judge any scientific paper in the context of a disease. of the policies they have set, and the policy for cancer is anything that can cause cancer is regulated as LNT. Now, you mentioned Jack’s idea about what’s called the sigmoidal curve. That is, there’s a kind of an S curve, in a sense, the dose response.

In fact, there’s a journal called Dose Response in the medical industry that says how much of a dose Is the proper dose to cure this particular problem and throughout biology we in medicine have always said that the dose response relationship is an F curve and that’s, that’s Jack’s idea is to say, well, why isn’t that true for radiation?

Well, it turns out it is true for radiation. And that is a, Problem because the EPA’s policy is that it isn’t so yeah, the so we’re trying to get that now a number of people have tried to get some of the research papers that Founded these ideas withdrawn we’ve had frustrations in doing that, but you’ve probably noticed in the news, there’s a lot of now new evidence about faking it in publication.

So, the world may be more open to realizing that some of these scientists, like Mueller 80 years ago, actually ignored the data that was controversial through his ideas so that he could get the Nobel Prize. Yeah. And so there’s a lot of that. I mean, work that’s going on. I had a friend of mine say, what is the one thing a Nobel Prize winner wants most of all?

And the answer was another one.

Anyway, that’s good competition and self promotion. It’s important in lots of things to get ahead to get the science. Done in your lab is one thing, but to get it published in the popular press is another. You need to be able to popularize your ideas in order to have them be effective. And we haven’t done that well enough in the nuclear industry.

The whole industry is always on a back foot saying, well, it’s safer. No radiation will hurt you. No, it won’t. We’re not promoting what’s going on. So let me just, for example, give you a couple of ideas about what I call new nuclear. By new nuclear, I mean the new technologies that aren’t water based, such as molten salt reactors, such as high temperature gas cooled graphite, uh, pebble reactors, and so on.

bEcause there are higher temperatures, they’re more efficient. One of the benefits of ThorCon is that 50 percent more of that heat energy from fission Becomes electricity for the same fuel, we can generate 150 percent of the electricity we generate with a pressurized water park. That’s 1 advantage that we don’t push hard enough.

Another advantage is. Cooling water, the rejected heat in a turbine. With high temperature heat, we basically can cut the cooling requirements of a power plant by half, literally, per kilowatt hour of electricity usage. So that’s a very important advantage. Now, we’ve always been saying, well, about a third of the emissions of CO2 in the world are from power plants.

If we replace them with nuclear power, we’d get rid of a third of them. And that’s good. And we’ve talked about, and I’ve written a book called Electrifying Our World. Which says, what about transportation, rocks and so on. And I was big on batteries, electric vehicles and so on. But electric vehicles aren’t the savior we thought they might be.

They kind of ruined the landscape by requiring, you know, the tons of materials to be excavated for every battery that’s built on and on. So it’s not an easy solution. But I got interested in new fuels, and I wrote these articles on nuclear gasoline and nuclear diesel and so on. The point here being that the high temperature of the new technology, the new nuclear, enables other technologies, such as the copper chlorine cycle that makes hydrogen out of water.

And it can do it much more efficiently than you can with electrolysis. Thank you. So there’s a opportunity there to begin to use the high heat potential that we’re not doing. So, with high heat in order to make gasoline or diesel fuel, we need hydrogen and we need carbon. Now, strangely enough, it’s hard to find carbon that you don’t dig out of the ground.

Okay, if we dig it out of the ground and burn it, it adds to the CO2 in the atmosphere. It’s real cheap, though. It’s so cheap. I know. I know. So, the natural gas, 2 or 3 an MMBTU, right? It’s pretty cheap. Yeah. But, if we want to make a fin fuel that is climate neutral people have been, for some reason, focused on direct air capture.

And somehow or other, thinking that we’ll solve the whole climate problem by burying all this stuff back in the ground. And anybody who does the math, anybody who’s been in high school should be able to figure that that’s not feasible. But. The other thing that I noticed is that the seawater density of CO2 is over 100 times that over the air, and if you’re going to cool the power plant with seawater anyhow, why don’t you look in the seawater for things like CO2?

And chemists are advancing. Ever since Ola… Did the methadone economy and things like that. It’s been great advances in fuel chemistry. And it’s conceivably possible to get that CO2 out of the water at an economical cost and build a kind of a refinery that merges carbon and hydrogen to make these various molecules for, for gasoline.

Yeah. So it’s possible. Or we could have net zero fuels. That we burn in the exact same engines we use today. Yeah, that would be a third of the CO2 emissions. I

[00:52:17] Mark Hinaman: loved your op ed. I mean, you published it in grid brief, right? I’m at penny published it and then you post on LinkedIn. But yeah, it was this op ed about synthetic fuels and.

Articulating just this idea that you summarized very succinctly use the heat from nuclear power, grab hydrogen from water, grab CO2 from a higher dense source, not necessarily air capture. And this is an idea that I don’t think it’s talked about very often. A lot of people don’t know this. They talk about sequestering CO2 in the subsurface, but CO2 gets sequestered naturally in the seawater and in deep sea.

Right. Like, I’ve got a friend that is very aware of this and he’s like, we’re just, let’s just pump it into the ocean. And then it’s sequestered naturally there. And it’s a great storage tank for it. And then you can go back and grab it whenever you want.

[00:53:00] Bob Hargraves: Maybe that’s the point too. Yeah. Right. Right. I guess the point being that.

It gets pressurized, becomes a liquid and really deep in the ocean. It just can sit there in a kind of a pool. But that work has been initiated by Heather Willer at the National Naval Research Lab about 10 years ago. She started a group that did that. She hasn’t yet been convincing the Navy enough to put the.

Frankly, the billions of dollars into it that would be needed to actually pull off the front of building refineries are finally costs like 5 billion. They’re expensive. Yeah. So, It sounds like

[00:53:43] Mark Hinaman: you you’ve seen. This phenomenon of an echo chamber in the nuclear industry. We just talked to ourselves. I’m curious if you, have you guys considered going and talking to other members of the energy community? Are you, have you guys engaged with folks in the oil and gas industry or in the coal industry?

[00:54:00] Bob Hargraves: It’s kind of frustrating, isn’t it? I mean, I’ve, I’ve invited myself to the Sierra club, but never allowed to speak, you know?

[00:54:06] Mark Hinaman: That’s a different story. I don’t want to talk about those people. I’ve got strong

[00:54:09] Bob Hargraves: feelings. All right. But, um, I think it’s, I don’t know how to get invited to broader forums to present this story.

Now, Chris Anderson would probably be jumping up and down because the TED talks are such things, right? Yeah. Maybe we could do more of those kinds of things. Well, I’ve

[00:54:34] Mark Hinaman: got some ideas. I’ll plug you in once we stop recording. So,

[00:54:38] Bob Hargraves: okay.

[00:54:39] Mark Hinaman: Okay. So, in your perspective. Has public opinion been shifting over the past decades?

Has the work that you’ve been doing been effective? Are you seeing momentum?

[00:54:52] Bob Hargraves: Well, if you look at the polls that are published, people are a little more open minded. About it, and I think as they see the rising cost of electricity and the negative articles about offshore wind and how expensive that is, they’re going to become more open minded.

But I don’t think we’re. We’re there at all. And Jack’s point is that what happens in the next event? What happens the next time we have a power plant explosion or whatever it is people are going to be upset. Oh, my God, is it going to be radiation? And even now, you see articles every Fukushima water releases, and they get a lot of press because it makes news the fact that it’s so far from being harmful is Is negated by reporters who really have no idea and they have the concept of balanced in reporting.

So they asked the anti nukes and they asked you or somebody who kind of knows what’s going on and they say, well, we presented both sides of the story, but. The thing that attracts people’s attention is, oh, my God, what’s going to happen to my kids, right? You know, so it’s a hard situation to overcome.

[00:56:16] Mark Hinaman: Well, I, I think we’re making progress.

Yeah, maybe that’s just the opposite of me.

[00:56:24] Bob Hargraves: Again, our objective with with Thorcon is Indonesia, if we can demonstrate a plant and then 2 plants and 4 plants generate electricity and having an impact on. The economy of the country, that will mean competition with the U. S. and the E. U. Okay? And people will then say, wait a minute, what’s going on here?

That’s going to be a decade or two away. Well,

[00:56:51] Mark Hinaman: I hope we can get there faster.

[00:56:53] Bob Hargraves: Me too.

[00:56:55] Mark Hinaman: What would you say is the most impactful step that we can take to get there faster?

[00:57:00] Bob Hargraves: Better education. yoU know, when I look at people, for example, in the climate science world and all the articles, so many of the ideas can be easily dismissed with a pencil and paper. One of the things we should do before we tackle climate science is to Educate people in basic math, basic physics, basic chemistry.

[00:57:23] Mark Hinaman: Man, the Inflation Reduction Act would have been written so differently. Yeah. If that weren’t the

[00:57:28] Bob Hargraves: case. Right, right. Because, you know, I talked to a politician once and he said, you know, you come in here with all those slides. They look great. I, I’m convinced. But then I have the other guys come in and they have a nice presentation too.

I’m not, I don’t know how to choose, uh, so, and I’m sympathetic to that idea, and, you know, what it, what it comes down to is you have to make choices yourself. Humans have to learn how to do, what is it, what’s the right word I use Well, to make your own decision, when it comes down to it, you really can’t trust some politicians that are on your side or trust that scientist.

You have to have enough Foundation and basic analysis.

[00:58:20] Mark Hinaman: Independent critical thinking. Critical thinking. To be

[00:58:23] Bob Hargraves: autonomous. Yeah. Well, why did that guy say that? Not, not what did he say? Why did he say it? And does it jive with all the other stories I’ve heard? Right. And why are all those people doing the same, the same thing?

You know, we have this situation where, It’s so easy to do a correlation when you see data about nuclear power plants and cancer in children, that people publish articles and say, See, cancer is caused by nuclear power plants. One of the latest ones we saw was in Europe, they said cancer in children was caused by power plants.

And it turns out they had 12 cases of cancer and 17 power plants in the, in the data set. And the, the power plants were all located in industrial zones that had chemical industries and every other darn thing. There was. It’s easy to say correlation and link, and suddenly the reporters are on it to make a story because they got to get paid too.

So, you need critical thinking, and it isn’t just if you’re a chemist or a physicist. You know, if you’re an economist, or an accountant anybody who says Add up the numbers and look, look in the tank and see if there’s any corn oil there. Yeah. Yeah. So

[00:59:49] Mark Hinaman: this has been great. I’ve really appreciated this conversation.

Why don’t you leave us with the most positive vision of the future? What’s what’s the world going to look like once you guys get one of your reactors up and running and then you get two of them up and running and then you get 10 of them up and running. Well,

[01:00:03] Bob Hargraves: the most positive view of the world.

We stopped sort of ruining it by mining so much, uh, and the other thing is that people are concerned about is population. Remember, we’re talking to a market in South East Asia, which is enormously bigger than the EU and the US and so on. And one of the concerns is that that’s all Got to grow. And how are we going to grow it?

We’re going to be generating CO2

and are, the more satisfied they are with two or fewer children. In fact, if you read our world in data, we have long ago passed styles. That is, world childbirth has ceased. They’re going down. Our world population will never exceed 10 billion. We already, even in India, have fewer births, fewer than two births per woman, even in India now, as India becomes more prosperous.

So, we might find ourselves in a situation where we have heat energy from nuclear power for electricity from synthetic fuels and so on, in a population which is not exploding, as a lot of people fear. But… Is repeating to a level of comfort and environmental equivalency that is satisfactory for a few more.

Yeah,

[01:01:40] Mark Hinaman: that’s wonderful. I love that vision. So, Bob, this has been wonderful. Thanks so much for the time.

[01:01:46] Bob Hargraves: Thank you, Mark.

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