054 Martin Hjelmeland, Postdoc Researcher at Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Martin Hjelmeland (00:00)
We didn’t say we didn’t need nuclear. We say this is a very interesting topic and we have technology and competence from the oil and gas industry and this is definitely something that we should investigate further without throwing it away.

Mark Hinaman (01:18)
Okay, welcome to another episode of the Fire2Fission podcast, where we talk about energy dense fuels and how they can better human lives. I’m joined today by Martin Hjelmeland He’s a postdoc researcher in Norway at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Martin, stoked to talk to you today, man. This is going to be a fun conversation. Yeah. Before we get into kind of your current work and how we got connected, let’s give the audience a little bit of perspective and hear a little bit about you.

Martin Hjelmeland (01:35)
Yeah, likewise.

Mark Hinaman (01:47)
What’s your background, man?

Martin Hjelmeland (01:51)
Okay, so I’m a 33 year old man living in Stavanger in Norway, which is called the oil capital of Norway, even though we’re trying to rebrand to energy capital. Before that, I grew up on the countryside in Norway. So if you’ve seen those beautiful pictures of the fjords in Norway, that’s basically where I grew up, working at the hydro…

company at summer job as well as the aluminum smelter factory as well. So after that I started going to college or studying at the University of Trondheim and Norwegian University of Science and Technology as you said where I studied energy and environmental engineering like every young kid wanted to save the world so that was the

best option I could find to do that. Did my masters and eventually a PhD within the field of hydropower scheduling. So Norway, 90 % of the electricity comes from hydropower. So it’s sort of a big thing over here. Yeah.

Mark Hinaman (03:04)
Yeah.

I’m jealous of you growing up in the countryside of Norway. Such gorgeous, phenomenal photos. Rugged landscape.

Martin Hjelmeland (03:16)
It is, it is. It was a small farm, so we had sheep and chickens and rabbits and it was fun growing up on the countryside.

Mark Hinaman (03:26)
Yeah. Were you, I’ll say, energy literate growing up, like before going to school? I mean, was it obvious that Norway was a big energy country? And,

Martin Hjelmeland (03:38)
Yeah, I would say, yeah. And it was also like working at the summer job at the Hyder Park company and next day driving to the aluminum smelter, utilizing that electricity to produce aluminum. You sort of working with the elements and seeing where stuff’s are made. And Norway is also large in oil and gas. And my father was working.

for within the oil and gas industry, supplying supply vessels to the oil and gas industry. So energy was always close in mind. But I have to say it’s perhaps within the last years more going into the nuclear field that I’ve gotten much more respect of the oil and gas industry that we have.

Before I was a young, naive man who wanted to save the world with renewables. And then things started to unravel. And you understand that, OK, 80 % of the world’s energy actually comes from fossil fuels. And it has given us this normal wealth and opportunity to develop society and civilization that has never been possible without it. So I would say.

I’m on a continuous learning process to within this energy sphere, I would say. Yeah.

Mark Hinaman (05:01)
Yeah, I think a lot of people that step into the space have a similar revelation along the way. They’re like, wow, this stuff’s really useful. The aluminum smelter that you worked at, how big was that? I mean, people talk about nuclear being useful for combined heat and power. Give us some perspective.

Martin Hjelmeland (05:20)
Yeah. how large. I would guess it was when it was in full operation, it consumed as much electricity as a large city in Norway of 150 ,000 people. And like the land it occupied was perhaps like two soccer fields. And you had.

two halls in the place that I was working and I think it was 200 ovens in each hall with an operating temperature at 950 degrees. So you walk inside these halls in the middle of the summer and sometimes it got so hot that we like had to shower mid -work just to, we were just like soaked. Yeah. So, yeah.

Mark Hinaman (06:09)
Just to cool off.

Wow, certainly an application that nuclear could come in and just use a heat source.

Martin Hjelmeland (06:18)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, because there were no utilization of that heat for any other purposes. So.

Mark Hinaman (06:28)
Talk to us about hydropower scheduling. What is hydropower scheduling?

Martin Hjelmeland (06:32)
Yeah. Yeah. So, it’s the, the process of like finding out when you should utilize your, your hydropower. So most simple case, you have one reservoir and you want one, hydropower plants and the reservoir you get rain inflow to the reservoir. you’re not exactly sure how much is going to rain, but you know that, okay. In May, typically there’s a.

ice snow smelting, it would get a lot of inflow to your reservoir. So you want to make sure that you’re fairly low in your reservoir by that so you can make room for all that water coming in. And also you would like to try to optimize the revenue of your plant. You would try to produce electricity at times when the electricity prices are high.

Because when the electricity prices are high, that’s when society has most demands for your research electricity. But since you don’t know how much info you’re going to get to the reservoir or what the future electricity prices are going to be, you do some optimization under uncertainty or stochastic optimization, trying to figure out when it is optimal for you to dispatch your hydropower. So just to…

Put some complexity into it. Say that you have from one week to the other, you might have a lot of inflow or you might have less inflow. So you have two outcomes. And if you trying to optimize for entire years, you have almost a power to the 52 different outcomes of inflow into your reservoir. So it’s a very complex and difficult problem to solve, but there are a lot of like these.

algorithms and tools that are used to solving this problem for when you should utilize your electricity. And I even had the, during my PhD, the pleasure or honor of going to Georgia Tech in Atlanta, where they have a large group or environment there, working on the stochastic optimization algorithm. So we went there, learned.

a lot of stuff and we applied that to some of the hydro power scheduling difficulties. Because one of the difficult thing is how you should value the water in your reservoir. Because the water is for free, it comes from nature, but you have this opportunity cost. So if you choose to produce today, you can get X amount of revenue. But if next week or the month after or next year,

Mark Hinaman (08:48)
End.

Martin Hjelmeland (09:11)
electricity prices will be much higher, you should save your water to produce in those time periods. So this basically the entire task of hydropower scheduling is to figure out what is the marginal cost or alternative cost of your water for you to decide when you should use it. So yeah.

Mark Hinaman (09:33)
Do you think that system is set up efficiently? And I’ll characterize it that way and describe, you know, in the States, a lot of people are installing energy storage systems with batteries. And, you know, the idea is you use them to back up the grid when you need them. But sometimes it doesn’t always back up the grid because people might do just that. They might wait if you only have

so many hours of storage, then you may not back up the grid exactly when the grid needs it, but rather let the price go up a little bit higher.

Martin Hjelmeland (10:07)
Yeah. Yeah. totally agree. And because there is a slight difference between what we now conceive of battery storage and the long -term duration hydropower storage, because we basically, we fill up our reservoirs in Norway in the, in the spring and summer. We save it for winter and then during the winter we deplete. So.

We see, for instance, that if you see the maximum and minimum limit of our hydropower reservoirs, we’re never touching the lower limit. So we don’t dare to empty our reservoirs completely because we are not sure how much is going to inflow to our reservoirs going to come in the next days. So we have this very strict way of operating them.

Because if we go empty and there is more demand for electricity, there is nothing left. So by utilizing this stochastic optimization, we can see that, OK, if there’s no more inflow to our reservoirs, we need to have at least a certain amount of water left in the reservoirs. That is typically when the electricity prices can become very high in the spring before the snows melt.

If you’re very low on a reservoirs, it doesn’t look like the snow smelt is going to come in the next week or two. We’ve seen electricity prices skyrocketed in the past. So yeah.

Mark Hinaman (11:41)
And I mean, you guys are very lucky with the amount of hydro that you have in Norway. It’s just a consequence or artifact of your landscape. So do you have a number for that or how much that is and our comparison for it?

Martin Hjelmeland (11:53)
Yeah, I think we would generate in a normal year around 135 terawatt hours of electricity. But the thing is it’s not a stable supply of inflow or rain. So some years it can be 30, 40 terawatt hours less, or in some years it can be 30, 40 terawatt hours more. So that’s also why.

we need to take consider of, okay, maybe this year it won’t be enough info to a reservoir. So we need to be able to make sure that we’re able to have enough electricity given that this will be a dry year where there is not much info to the reservoirs.

Mark Hinaman (12:35)
Okay, so 130 terawatt hours per year, but how much storage do you have at any given time?

Martin Hjelmeland (12:39)
Yeah, so the complete storage, it’s around 87 terawatt hours. So I think I’ve mentioned this before to someone else that if you want to have a 100 % renewable power system like we do here in Norway, you should just follow our recipe.

And our recipe is back. It works. It works, but it requires that you have an enormous amount of storage. So we have 87 there what hours of storage capacity and we yearly produce 135. So for all the renewable generation, we have 65 % of that backed up by long -term duration storage. So if you don’t have a high mountains and deep.

Mark Hinaman (13:03)
It works great.

Martin Hjelmeland (13:31)
the deep yords, it’s very hard to reconstruct that type of environment to get that type of, or amount of long -term duration storage. So yeah.

Mark Hinaman (13:44)
And I mean if we were to do this with batteries do you have a comparison for how much it would take or how many batteries it would take for an equivalent?

Martin Hjelmeland (13:55)
no. But the thing is with batteries, you also have a much higher capacity. So you can drain them much faster. Because the hydropower battery in Norway is a very slow battery. It takes a lot of time to fill up and it takes a long time to deplete. So if you were to substitute the amount of energy storage by batteries, you would also have much more…

flexibility in the installed capacity of how fast you can drain and power them up.

Mark Hinaman (14:27)
Okay, so, I mean, you studied hydropower, fascinating with energy, that is in oil and gas. Why nuclear? How’d you get introduced?

Martin Hjelmeland (14:39)
It was, as I said, I studied eight year at the university on energy and environmental engineering and never learned anything about nuclear. So I think, I think. Yeah.

Mark Hinaman (14:50)
Isn’t that weird? Right? Like I went to CU where he studied energy and the environment. And I mean, it was, we talked, we talked about it quite a bit, but it was always kind of at the top of the list and just, yeah, no, nuclear exists. But.

Martin Hjelmeland (14:58)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think this in the back mind, I had a friend approach me. He was working at the financial firm looking into some nuclear investments. And since I’ve gone to school for so many years and learned about energy, he was probably thinking that I knew a lot about nuclear. So, but I didn’t.

And then I was a bit frustrated that I didn’t know anything and I started reading. And, came over this YouTube channels by like Gordon McDowell, Ted talks by Michael Schellenberger. But I think, the lecture or the presentation that most gave me the thought that, my God, why, why aren’t we doing more of this? This was the.

a lecture by Geraldine Thomas. She was a professor at, I can’t remember, but a UK university. And she had this talk on radiation health risk from nuclear accidents, facts and fantasies, where she just put out all the facts that she could provide. And from that, it was just like, okay, humanity has done a huge mistake of being…

misinterpreted how dangerous nuclear energy actually is. And also considering that, I think she mentioned it somewhere else that before working on this Chernobyl tissue bank that she was head of, she was anti -nuclear. So when she started looking at their evidence herself, she was just like, okay, we have got it all wrong. So I think that just ignited the spark and…

reading the reports from Joint Research Council of European Commission on Nuclear and this UN report on sustainability from different energy technologies. And yeah, like the more I read, the more I’ve had issues with us not going any further, but I’ve also managed to get a bigger understanding of all the hurdles and issues that’s…

been there along the way that has resulted in the way that we’re here now. So, yeah.

Mark Hinaman (17:18)
Got it. Yeah, Geraldine Thomas’s work is phenomenal. If anyone’s unclear of it, like you mentioned briefly, she’s the head of the Chernobyl tissue bank, but right, that’s the project that they’ve actually got the samples from the liquidators or the people, the humans that were at Chernobyl. And they took tissue samples and tracked them across decades. And it’s one of the best data sets that we have to demonstrate exposure and radiation. So. So.

Have you stayed in academia or worked in consulting or yeah?

Martin Hjelmeland (17:46)
Well, yeah, so to go back after I finished my PhD, I started working at a hydropower company. I worked there for a couple of years, started as a consultant. And during my time as a consultant, I came across this nuclear adventure to say this, to frame it like that. And I was lucky that I…

had a boss that allowed me to go down to 50 % workload so that I could pursue any opportunities or just basically just spend more time on learning more about nuclear energy. During that time, I contacted my old professor at the university. He was my supervisor during my PhD. And initially, I was a bit skeptical about…

creating or starting a project related to nuclear energy because nuclear energy within academia has been very hard for some reason. But I think I was super lucky because his father was actually one of the guys working on a research reactor, constructing research reactors here in Norway. So he was…

Even though he was a bit skeptical, he was open and he had his history with nuclear energy. So after a couple of months, we got in contact again and we started on creating a postdoctoral project where we’re going to investigate. So we called the project the nuclear energy’s role in a renewable energy system. So.

I think it was important that we had the world renewables in there in order to sell it and get funding. Yeah, so yeah. No, but so that’s the project I’m working on now. And I’m not a, since I’m not a nuclear physicist or a nuclear engineer, my main qualities or competencies have been like,

Mark Hinaman (19:26)
Everyone’s got to market themselves, right? Yeah.

Martin Hjelmeland (19:44)
optimization and energy system modeling. So we’re…

Mark Hinaman (19:48)
Which is probably more relevant when you’re thinking about the energy system as a whole, deciding which generation resource you want to use, right?

Martin Hjelmeland (19:58)
Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. Because there’s been, within research, a couple of decades, there’s been conducted so much research on this 100 % renewable things. So how can we get as much renewable into the system as possible? So the thing we want to do with our project is to say, OK.

What if we lower the bar to low carbon technologies and investigate what role nuclear power can have within this system. We also come across like energy system modeling is I don’t want to be negative against my own group but it’s I think it’s…

It’s more like a soft science to be honest. It’s you just, you can do whatever you want basically. And, whatever you assumptions that you put in, you, you can get out what you want and you can simplify the problem. So you can have this copper plate theory that there is basically no grid in your system. Or you can do, you can combine the hydropower system, the Norway into one.

reservoir and one power station that is super flexible in the model which makes it a lot easier to incorporate renewable energies. So it’s quite the field to be in.

Mark Hinaman (21:27)
I like your, you have this characterization in our notes from a head time. It was, models are used for decision support, not as definitive solutions. I felt that was really good, yeah.

Martin Hjelmeland (21:41)
Yeah, yeah, because as I said, it’s completely impossible to model the physical system exactly. So there will always be some assumptions. Some model do these assumptions, some models do those assumptions. You need to be able to understand what those assumptions are and how they apply to the results that you’re going to interpret. But also the model is most likely minimizing the total system cost.

So if you’re minimizing the total system costs from a European perspective, that might not provide the best power system for the Nordics or in Portugal or whatever, because it has this overarching dictator in sort of way that just is able to build and construct wherever he wants in a least cost way. But there are the metrics that should be included when…

designing an energy system. Like how much of these resources do I have within my own borders? What is the value creation or technology needed for this source? And we’ve seen it in the past with the oil crisis in 74, how France just turned on this Messner plan and went all in on being

less dependent on foreign oil and gas resources.

Mark Hinaman (23:01)
So you love or you are falling in love with nuclear. You’ve studied it more and more. Maybe that’s a mischaracterization, but Norway doesn’t have any nuclear power, right? Give us some perspective on Norwegian’s nuclear history.

Martin Hjelmeland (23:15)
Yep.

No, that’s true. And currently there are no, we had some research reactors operating in Norway. Norway is actually the sixth country in the world that got a research reactor operating. So in the early days, we created the Institute for Nuclear Energy, it was called. So the idea was it was the

a labor party in Norway that wanted to reconstruct the country after the Second World War. And they saw nuclear energy as like a… This was something that would be the world in the future would be divided by those countries that harness nuclear energy and those who did not, do not. So it was a large push for nuclear energy back in the days. And this institute was founded in…

1948 and three years later they had built the first research reactors. So in these times where nuclear power plants constructions had taken a lot of time, they were able to do it much faster in the future, even though it was small scale research reactors.

Mark Hinaman (24:33)
Did you say it was 1948?

Martin Hjelmeland (24:36)
Yes, so the institute was founded in 1948 and the first reactor was operating in 1951.

Mark Hinaman (24:43)
Do you know what type of reactor it was and how big it was?

Martin Hjelmeland (24:46)
It was a heavy water reactor. So I think we went down similar paths as the Canadians with their can -do design, where we, yeah, by utilizing heavy water, we could use natural uranium in the reactors. And also,

I’m not sure if you’re familiar with this story, this war story in Norway, where the Germans were making heavy waters by utilizing our hydropower electricity during the war. Yeah. So, yeah. So I think that was also one of the reasons that heavy water was the path that was chosen back then. And…

Mark Hinaman (25:16)
That’s right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was aware of that. Back in the back of my brain somewhere, yeah.

Martin Hjelmeland (25:33)
So back in those days, it was very high optimism for nuclear in Norway. And a couple of years later in 1955, it was funding for a new larger 25 megawatt boiling water reactor in Halden in Norway. So that was also finished three years after.

and they even used it wasn’t used for electricity production but they used steam from that reactor for a paper factory so they also had some steam or heat utilization back in back in the days and

Mark Hinaman (26:12)
25 megawatt reactor built in three years in 1955 before computers, before, right? I just, I like to highlight those facts to compare to like what we are conceptualizing to do now, you know, like this is a micro reactor that can be built from scratch, essentially. Like this technology’s not that hard.

Martin Hjelmeland (26:15)
Yep.

Yep.

And the thing is, after the world, after the war, there weren’t much collaboration on nuclear energy between the different countries. So this was all 100 % made by Norwegian companies and Norwegian competence. So it wasn’t something like a large project like the Manhattan project or similar. This was a small country being able to do this.

But it should be said that for constructing the first reactor, they were funded five times as much as the entire R &D project in Norway. So it was a large project for… Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was… They even wanted to… There was a group of shipping companies that wanted to make nuclear -powered ships.

Mark Hinaman (27:13)
They had the resources, the money behind it. Yeah.

Martin Hjelmeland (27:27)
And it was, we were going to sell export power plants to the Middle East and Europe. And it was really the heydays of the atomic age back then. But,

Mark Hinaman (27:42)
So what happened? Why isn’t Norway a nuclear exporting country?

Martin Hjelmeland (27:47)
Well, you know, the 70s came to Norway as well. And around the world, the light water reactors started to dominate. So majority of the world went a bit different path. And we had built more hydropower in Norway than we thought was economically available.

But basically what we did, we did some hydropower investments back then that weren’t economically viable. But we did it anyway. And by doing that, we now years later are benefiting from such investments that was done in the past. But if you would have done the net present value calculations back then, it wouldn’t have made sense. And you also the, say what?

Mark Hinaman (28:33)
For hydropower? For hydropower? Interesting. You mean it wasn’t as economic as building nuclear power plants or as building natural gas power plants?

Martin Hjelmeland (28:37)
For hydropower, yeah. Yeah.

No, no, I think there were the regulator in Norway at that time. They had their own thermal divisions. They went to Sweden, to Germany, able to learn how to regulate a thermal power plant or a nuclear power plant. So there was a lot of activity going on within Norway, but it was never…

In the seventies, a parliament vote came that we’re not going to pursue nuclear energy. I’m not sure exactly how the process went, but basically they just lower the investment criteria for the eternal rate of return of the hydropower plants in order to just to construct them. So if the criteria was 5 %

They lowered it to 2 % in order to be viable. So yeah, that was it. And also in 69, we had an American company, Phillips Petroleum, digging a lot of holes outside of here. And they came across the EcoFisk field.

Mark Hinaman (29:43)
So no.

Martin Hjelmeland (29:57)
And that was the start of the oil and gas adventure in Norway. So a lot of the technology and industry was pivoting towards supplying to the coming oil and gas industry. So it was, we, basically we, we had more hydropower than we thought. And the oil and gas adventure started and that was the slowing down of nuclear research in.

Norway, but the Institute of Nuclear Energy, they changed name to Institute for Energy Technology and started working on hydrogen and solar and wind as well. So they diversified. But I think what is interesting to do to mention is that the nuclear technology that was, or incompetence that was created by building those nuclear research reactors here in Norway.

were highly utilized within the oil and gas industry that we came. So, because it was a bit concerned, it was a meeting between some American representatives and the Norwegian industry minister and his team, where the Americans were a bit concerned that what do you Norwegians know about oil and gas and how are you able to supply?

be a supplier for the oil and gas industry and then they could like straighten up in their chest and say that we have built nuclear reactors how difficult can it be to dig some holes in the ground so that’s sort of like yeah they had the the courage and believe in themselves that they could able to supply to this industry and certainly they’ve done that.

Mark Hinaman (31:42)
entertaining because the roles are kind of reversed now, right? Like, there’s maybe some more…

Martin Hjelmeland (31:47)
Yeah, that’s what we’re going to discuss in this ONS conference here in Norway this fall. We’re going to have been so lucky to have you come and sit on a panel where we’re going to discuss from oil and gas to nuclear. We’re going to discuss what type of technology and competence the oil and gas industry has to apply within the nuclear industry. So.

Mark Hinaman (31:57)
Yeah.

So you mentioned the ONS conference. What is that?

Martin Hjelmeland (32:18)
So it’s historically been an oil and gas conference. Large, I think they have over 1000 exhibitors. And last time there was 60 ,000 visitors for the conference. But now they’ve pivoted to include all energy resources. So there will be talks about…

wind power, solar power, nuclear energy as well. But historically, it’s been a meeting place for the oil and gas industry to come together and have a large exhibition here in Norway.

Mark Hinaman (32:53)
It’s not a small conference, right?

Martin Hjelmeland (32:56)
No, no, it’s okay. So the, the, the capital of, or the city of Stavanger, I think it’s a hundred thousand people living here and the conference has 60 ,000 people visiting. So it’s, it’s, the town is turned upside down when during this, this, this conference. Yeah. But, so that’s what we’re going to discuss there.

But just to show or tell a little about what the competence from the nuclear research in Norway was applied to the oil and gas industry, I have some examples I would like to share. So in order to get more oil and gas out from the wells, you can do water injection and CO2 injections into the well.

Mark Hinaman (33:33)
Yeah, yeah, far away.

Martin Hjelmeland (33:44)
understanding and knowing where to inject those water and CO2. It’s important to know how the reservoir flows in your reservoir. This is where the researcher from the Nuclear Energy Institute came up with the idea by injecting radioisotopes into the well and then being able to map how the streams or the flow into the reservoir. By doing this,

they were able to pinpoint what are good locations for injections into the well. So the echo -fisk, the field that I mentioned, it’s a huge field. I don’t recall how many barrels foiled, but after a couple of years of producing, it has reduced its production by half. And Phyllis Petrolum were a bit concerned about…

since there was 70 % of the resources left in the well. So that’s why they came on, used this tracer technology, found out where to inject and this field is still producing the day -to -day. So it’s been quite the remarkable feat to be able to do that. Yes, it’s insane. Yeah.

Mark Hinaman (34:54)
That’s a pretty good recovery factor. I mean, in shale wells in North America, like, you know, if we have a 6 % recovery factor, then people consider it kind of a home run. And that’s so what percentage of oil…

in place. You just said they had a 30 % already and they’re like we gotta get more out and now they’re still producing more.

Martin Hjelmeland (35:17)
Well, I would just say that I don’t know the number, but I would estimate from the graph I’ve seen around the production. So if they were 30 % back then, I would say that perhaps 30 % left in the well now or 10 in that range. And also the investments in oil and gas.

Mark Hinaman (35:38)
Yeah.

Martin Hjelmeland (35:45)
In the early days, there was a lot of, you needed the separation of your oil and gas and water and CO2 and you think coming up from the reservoir needed to be separated on shore. So you needed to construct these large oil and gas platforms with a lot of process engineering equipment on them and drag them on shore. But…

Since the researcher in Oro and research factors have been going on on boiling water reactors, it was very important to know how this multi -phase flow was this water and steam was operating within the reactor. So they built very good simulation software for simulating this multi -phase flow. And by utilizing this software within the oil and gas industry, they could enable them to

do the separation on land. So no need more need for these expensive oil and gas rigs. You can do more separation on land. This was also basically the foundation for the subsea industry in Norway that we had this software. So I think Slumbrushe or SLB, they eventually ended up buying this Olga software. I’m not sure if you’ve heard about it or no.

Mark Hinaman (37:02)
I haven’t, no. It’s new to me.

Martin Hjelmeland (37:05)
Yeah, apparently it has a 90 % market share and it’s been used all around the world and extremely. I think it was coined the best innovation in Norway a couple of years ago. So quite the defeat that we should be proud about. And also other stuff, you have corrosion technology.

that this institute provided to the oil and gas industry and this control room technology where you had this human machine interface going on. So for instance in the three mile accident it was I read that if the control room operators didn’t do anything it wouldn’t have been the problem that it was. So they were given

a lot of blinking red dots in their operating room and they didn’t know exactly what information was the most relevant. So after this accident, it was a lot of focus in Norway and around the world on how to give the operators the information that they need when they need it. So this has been a large research topic here in Norway about this human machine interface.

And this has been utilized now in oil and gas installations around the world as well. So yeah, a lot of good stuff has come out of those early nuclear research days. But as you mentioned, there’s still no commercial nuclear power plants operating in Norway, even though our neighbors in Sweden have a couple and they have plans to build a lot.

Mark Hinaman (38:43)
Yeah. So is that changing? And you mentioned that the sentiment in the seventies wasn’t super popular about nuclear, but what’s it like now in normal?

Martin Hjelmeland (38:57)
So I think the sentiment in the 70s what it was more the industry and

elite, to say it in a framing in that way, that wanted nuclear energy and saw the benefit of it. But the general public did not. But now I think we’ve seen a complete switch of that in Norway, where according to a recent poll, nuclear energy is more popular than hydropower in Norway. So that is quite something. And I think…

One of the reasons behind this is that we’ve had some wind power onshore developments in Norway in the last decade. But Norway is a quite dispersed country where people lives in every fjord and everywhere. So if you put up a wind turbine, there will be people living next by. And these people have been demonstrating and protesting. So I think.

Currently, there are no onshore wind power plants in Norway. And if you combine that, yeah.

Mark Hinaman (40:01)
i don’t know that that really i thought in the north there were some of that there’s not

Martin Hjelmeland (40:07)
Not onshore. They’re large offshore plants. But if you combine this opposition against onshore wind power with the high electricity prices that we’ve had the last couple of years, people have been looking for questions. Isn’t there an alternative? And I think…

Mark Hinaman (40:09)
Okay.

Martin Hjelmeland (40:30)
With all that sustainability reports coming out about nuclear energy and the environmental organization either toning down their negative talk about nuclear energy and also being, yeah, we’ve seen a complete shift. So now it’s ordinary people in Norway. Whenever I go to a social occasion and mention what I do, we talk about nuclear the rest of the day.

And so it’s been a complete turnover with 50, over 50 of the municipalities in Norway out of 357 now want to investigate whether nuclear energy is an option for their municipality. But we’re still struggling with the members of parliament or the high ranking politicians that are still

focusing on only wanting to build floating offshore wind or offshore wind. So we recently had a tender on that. So that’s the status. The ordinary people are much more in favor and the politicians in parliament are still skeptical, but we’ve seen someone turn around and…

Some political parties have turned around. So next year it’s election year and we’ll see if nuclear will become a large part of that election as they was in Sweden when they now recently switched the government there. So yeah.

Mark Hinaman (41:56)
Yeah. Yeah, it’s interesting. The feedback loop in politics can be very slow sometimes, and sometimes it can be very fast.

Martin Hjelmeland (42:06)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mark Hinaman (42:10)
this topic in particular, there’s a lot of hangover from the mythology of the past. But it changes, right? We’ve seen it change. So it can change in Norway.

Martin Hjelmeland (42:19)
Yeah. Yep.

Yeah, true. The thing is we even had in a couple years, 2007, it was a US geological survey that found vast amounts of thorium here in Norway. So we had this, it was called the thorium debate of 2008, where there were a lot of discussion about Norway going into nuclear energy by utilizing thorium. So there were even…

plants back then by industrial representatives that wanted to build two research reactors in the eastern part of Norway. That is now 15 terawatt hour of deficit of electric power. So if we like 16 years ago would have started construction of those two plants, it might be a complete change in the…

electricity deficit over there. But back then, the current oil and energy minister, it was ordered a report that was developed by a group of international researchers of how the opportunity for thorium was in Norway. And when this report was presented to the minister, she received it.

And without even opening it, she said nuclear energy will not be a thing in Norway as long as we have the current government. So yeah, yeah, I know, I know. And she got a lot of pushback because she said that renewables, wind and solar, would be more than enough.

Mark Hinaman (43:45)
What’s the point of the report? Why have reports if you’re not gonna read them, right?

Martin Hjelmeland (44:00)
And even a professor back then said that she was deceiving the public stating that there’s no need for nuclear as renewable is enough. So it’s been quite… And one of the ironic thing is that she is now currently the head of Renewables Norway, an interest organization for renewables in Norway. And they have done a lot of work.

in opposition against nuclear energy in Norway. So it’s strange. Yeah.

Mark Hinaman (44:35)
So, so strange.

What was the Ristead Energy?

Martin Hjelmeland (44:43)
Yeah, we stirred things up a bit in December. So me and a colleague, yeah, last December. So me and a colleague, Jonas Nøland, we, since we had the research project that we’re working on together, we were approached to create a chapter in a book about

Mark Hinaman (44:50)
Just last December, yeah, in 2023, right? Yeah.

Martin Hjelmeland (45:07)
the nuclear in Norway. So we created a book chapter or a report that was titled nuclear in Norway question mark, where we discussed like the benefits and saw how nuclear has been used to decommunization in the past, how overlapping technology and that we have a large oil and gas company, oil and gas sector that can utilize their

Competency technology and sort of just like trying to get some more facts and just start to create a debate about the question about the subject. And what came to be is that on the day that our report was published, Rys .energy also published a report that was titled Nuclear in Norway.

And that was commissioned by Renewables Norway, among others, to answer this question. And we heard rumors that two weeks before the presentation of this report that they had, the CEO of Ristad Energy, he has walked around parliament and telling politicians that…

Mark Hinaman (46:05)
Okay.

Martin Hjelmeland (46:25)
In two week times there will come a report that will be the nail in the coffin for nuclear Norway. So just relax. So we were a bit frustrated about that. So on the day of the report was to be presented, both ours and theirs, we were approached by a newspaper in Norway.

to get an interview about this. And we gave some comments about the report that they’ve used 4 % interest rate for offshore wind. They used 7 % for nuclear. They have a lot of self -citations and that their power system studies in the report was limited. What they were basically saying that when there’s not a wind or hydropower is not

what we left we can just import from our neighbors. So just the solution that everybody does is just everybody imports from their neighbors. And so what we said in the interview, we called it the commission work. They’re like bought and paid for. So we were a bit direct and up straight about our opinions about that work.

And we were not the only one. Another newspaper, they used ChatGPT to create a summary of the report that did not include the executive abstract or executive summary of the report. And that gave a completely different answer or…

answer to the report than what was listed in the executive summary. So the headline of one of the newspaper was, chat GPT shreds, rice studs, shred of nuclear. So it was quite funny actually that.

Mark Hinaman (48:15)
Yeah, you know, I’d been aware of Ristad for some time and they’re perceived as a pretty competent consulting group, right? I mean, they’re an energy research firm and I was just, while we’re chatting, I’m looking on the website and yeah, they’ve got, our expertise spans all components of the energy system and the different paths towards net zero.

Martin Hjelmeland (48:30)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mark Hinaman (48:41)
They’ve got oil and gas, power, solar, wind, hydrogen, geothermal, carbon batteries. So I’m pretty sure they’re missing. key. Like, you know, there’s one that’s producing 10 % of the world’s power that’s not listed there. You know, seems biased. They might be biased, right? They’ve got like their services, their expertise. They may not, this isn’t…

Martin Hjelmeland (48:50)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s true. Yeah, that’s true. And it’s, that was also one of, yeah. Yeah.

Mark Hinaman (49:10)
supposed to be just spreading rice that doesn’t look like they have nuclear listed on their list of services. So maybe they’re just worried that they didn’t have the expertise to provide any consulting services for it.

Martin Hjelmeland (49:15)
No.

This was also one of our critiques that if Renewables Norway and the other institution that’s ordered this report was interested in to get the facts about nuclear, they would have commissioned it to someone who actually are familiar with the technology. But there’s no doubt that RISDOT Energy has done a lot of good work.

basically, mainly within the oil and gas industry. But yeah, as you as well put pointed out, I’m also very skeptical about their knowledge about nuclear industry and yeah, some motives there as well. But so this was basically just the start of the story because…

A couple of days later, the rector at our university came out with a chronicle stating that she took absence from the language that we used in the report. And I felt, okay, maybe, okay, I’ve stepped a bit over and I agreed that I could have did another wording that would get the same message out there. But the day after,

I think it was around five chronicles in different newspapers in Norway came in in support and said that the rector then the new has stepped over the line. This was coming from even board members at the university and other high ranking professors around Norway, saying that this is can be seen as an attempt to limit the free academic of speech.

So that was quite touching. And I think it went a day or two after. It was revealed in another newspaper that a high ranking member of one of the institutions that ordered this report by Reistad have sent a message to our rector and said that…

I look forward to you publicly commenting this. Otherwise, we will have to call out the leadership.” So it was basically telling her that she had to go out and reprimand our behavior. And after that, all hell broke loose and it was starting to become all over the news.

Mark Hinaman (51:44)
you

You

So, sorry, so who called them out?

Martin Hjelmeland (51:58)
Who called out who?

Mark Hinaman (51:59)
Yeah, who said that? I look forward to your public comments.

Martin Hjelmeland (52:02)
so that was a high ranking member of one of the institutions that ordered this report from Ristyle Energy. So he was upset about the way that we characterized the report that he had ordered.

Mark Hinaman (52:18)
Gotcha.

Martin Hjelmeland (52:19)
Yeah, so, and so it was quite the experience living through that and I didn’t feel, I felt I didn’t do anything wrong. We were just, okay, I’ve put my wording in a bit off and, but.

Suddenly, like, I had a lot of friends calling and a lot of newspaper reports into journalists trying to be in contact. So it was a period where I didn’t, were as efficient in my work as I would have required myself to be. And even a reporter started digging.

if I was affiliated with any nuclear groups and where I’ve gotten funding to travel to conferences and etc. So it eventually became a bit stressful and quite the experience to have with you.

Mark Hinaman (53:20)
Yeah, absolutely. Just to kind of re -characterize it, this Ristad Energy report came out and said, you guys don’t need nuclear. You guys were like, no, we absolutely need nuclear. And some of your guys’ assumptions were wrong.

Martin Hjelmeland (53:33)
We said, yeah, yeah. We didn’t say we didn’t need nuclear. We say this is a very interesting topic and we have technology and competence from the oil and gas industry and this is definitely something that we should investigate further without throwing it away.

So we want to seek more knowledge, but yeah. So that was our stand and still is our stance.

And yes, to round up all over the news and a week or two later it was called in an extraordinary board member meeting at the university and where the rector decided to resign. And so that was the sort of like the end of that history.

Mark Hinaman (54:23)
Why did the director resign?

Martin Hjelmeland (54:25)
Because she had been like, it was perceived that she had done the bidding of the industry. So university is, should be an institution that is where there should be no, there should be no head of the university. Like researchers should have their own voice and able to participate in the public debate with their knowledge without there being someone on top.

deciding what and who should say what. So this academic freedom of speech is a very important thing for a democratic society where you want researchers to point out issues. So say for instance for other controversial issues like we have a lot of salmon farming in Norway and if

people in the industry there were to put pressures on researcher to don’t look into how this affects the nature and the sea. It could be very controversial. So we need researchers and people in general to be able to speak their mind without being afraid of getting a reprimand.

Mark Hinaman (55:43)
Okay, so what policy goals might exist in Norway? Where do you think this goes? How do you guys make the necessary changes to potentially build more nuclear?

Martin Hjelmeland (55:57)
Well, first of all, I think as we’ve been talking a bit about, we’ve had this renewables situation where we have been so narrowly focused on building renewables that we have lost way in what was the actual goal that we wanted to obtain. And I think the goal that we want to obtain is that we have…

reliable energy that is available when society and people needs it and that we are able to generate enough electricity for the developing countries that are in need for or want to industrialize and also that we are able to preserve our nature. So don’t

industrialize our nature that much and conserve that. But we have somehow, we’ve lost all of this and the main focus is just like build renewables, build renewables. So I think we should just take a step back and realize what is our actual goals. And maybe we could change the goals of building renewables to building low carbon electricity instead, where nuclear.

definitely can play a major role in that. Like we’ve seen large power systems that have been deeply decarbonized, it’s hydropower or nuclear. So reconsidering and thinking about that, I think it will be very important. But our politicians, they have decided on a solution and they have been

especially here in Norway with the offshore wind. They’ve been very focused on building that out. But I think, as my father said, the job of a politician should not be to dictate, it should be to facilitate. So facilitate that all solutions that are able to contribute to a goal should be able to do that. Because if you’re…

If you think you can predict what is going to happen in five, 10, 20 years ahead, you’re not very smart because that is impossible. No one is able to predict that and that’s why we should have all the options available to provide to that goal and have the people putting their own money and their own working hours should be able to provide the best solutions to provide to that goal.

Mark Hinaman (58:17)
you

Martin Hjelmeland (58:33)
Yeah, so that was just some some dabbling on that matter. I can also just mention that because another illustration of how I think we should consider our energy systems is that in a couple of years there’s been a lot of focus on this d

Mark Hinaman (58:35)
you

I like it, I think it’s fantastic. Cool. Yeah.

Martin Hjelmeland (58:53)
Decentralization. I think it has come largely from like the cryptocurrency world where decentralization is seen as the best things in sliced bread. But for modern and industrialized society, you actually rely on some centralized services and it’s better that there is some centralized services like schools, universities and hospitals.

and also our power grid, which is basically like a natural monopoly. And so I think we should also put some more efforts in trying to strengthen our centralized systems in order to be more robust against or more resilient going and going further. So we see, for instance, a lot of

Or just to take an analogy that myself and others, we like to do some gardening and create some food back at our own place. But when you’re not able to water them properly or the weather is bad for weeks to come, you’re not able to grow the crop that you want. It is very nice to be able to go to the store.

and buy the food that you need. But if everyone starts to produce their own food and everyone experiences the same weather and everyone is going to the store trying to buy the same food, it would be much more difficult for the store to plan and schedule for the demand. And also if you’ve centralized this rather than

everyone is having their own equipment to grow plants, it would be better to centralize material requirements perspective to centralize this and have this done in a more large scale way because food and electricity is something that modern society is so completely dependent on and we should make sure that we have a resilient system of both.

So it was probably a long tangent, but…

Mark Hinaman (1:00:58)
No, no, I love that analogy. I think it’s really helpful and it’s fun. It’s easy to conceptualize. So yeah, Martin, this has been great. Why don’t you give one more plug for the ONS conference? Where is it? What is it? If people want to be involved. I’m excited for it because it’s an excuse to go to Norway and see part of the landscape and do a little tour.

Martin Hjelmeland (1:01:04)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mark Hinaman (1:01:24)
get people excited about it.

Martin Hjelmeland (1:01:27)
Yeah, so first of all, as mentioned, it’s an energy conference in Stavanger in Norway. And I think it is the 26th to the 29th of August. Is that correct, Mark? Do you have it in your calendar?

Mark Hinaman (1:01:42)
Yes, I think so. Yeah, Monday to Wednesday or Thursday, like last week of August.

Martin Hjelmeland (1:01:44)
Yes, yes. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s a huge gathering here in Norway, where there will be discussions about nuclear energy and solar energy and wind energy and oil and gas. And I think even there’s been invited representatives from Canada, Sweden, and the UK and UMARC and others from the US are coming.

to talk about nuclear energy. And on the first day, the 26th, at 7 PM, we are hosting a panel session where we’re going to discuss the topic of going from oil and gas to nuclear, where we have you. We have two oil and gas companies here in Norway.

joining the panel and discussing about the technology that they have. And it would be a great experience, I think, to discuss and have some public discussion about this. And I think it could be something that is very interesting and useful for the oil and gas industry to view.

Maybe we can even have a pub, maybe you can even show it on your Fire2Fish and podcasts for your audience to view as well. Yeah. Yeah. So if you’re not coming, check out the Fire2Fish and podcast, late August.

Mark Hinaman (1:03:09)
Yeah, we’ll record it and then we can just post those on here. That’ll be great.

We shouldn’t have said that. Now, you know, you got to go in person, see in person if you really want to get it. Martin Yelmeland, I got the name right. The spelling is tricky for Americans, but man, I really appreciate this. It’s been wonderful. So we’ll have to do it again.

Martin Hjelmeland (1:03:25)
Okay. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, you got it.

Yeah, me too. Wonderful.

Mark Hinaman (1:03:42)
All right, thanks Martin.

Martin Hjelmeland (1:03:43)
Ah, thank you, too.

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