# The Future of Energy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0MQ8eHxt_g *Recorded: 2022* Dr. Matthew Memmott presents molten salt reactor technology as the future of distributed, clean energy. He explains how nuclear power—despite its cultural baggage from weapons and accidents—provides unparalleled energy density and reliability, noting that a single uranium pellet equals 1,800 pounds of coal. Memmott champions thorium-based molten salt reactors, a proven 1960s technology that cannot melt down, produces no weapons-grade material, and generates valuable medical isotopes like molybdenum-99. His vision: truck-sized reactors serving 1,000 homes each, enabling truly decentralized power infrastructure to support the distributed systems and blockchain technologies discussed at the conference. ## Transcript WEBVTT 00:00:09.040 --> 00:00:52.680 Dr. Matthew Memmott is a director and senior technical advisor for Alpha Tech Research, a technology startup developing an advanced micro molten salt reactor providing twelve megawatts of inherently safe nuclear energy, along with valuable medical isotopes as a byproduct of its operation. Currently a professor in the chemical engineering department at Brigham Young University, Dr. Mimot received a bachelor’s in chemical engineering from BYU in 2005 and a master’s and PhD in nuclear science and engineering from MIT. His research focuses on advanced nuclear reactor design, nuclear safety, and system modeling. Matthew. 00:01:01.540 --> 00:01:22.860 It’s great to be here with you guys today. Thanks for sharing your time and thought. You can tell from the title, this is an audacious claim that I would say this is the future of energy. But I want to take a minute to try and convince you of that and to To show the parallels between what we’ve been talking about with distributed systems and blockchain versus what we have the potential to do right now in the energy realm. 00:01:23.020 --> 00:01:59.979 Now, before we get started, I can tell from the speakers and the questions and just the conversations I’ve had that you guys are very intelligent, independent thinkers, and I want to do a thought experiment. So, what I want to do, and this is going to involve your participation, but don’t worry, it’s no more than raising your hand. So, it should be easy. I’m going to say a word. And I want you to carefully consider the first thought or impression or image that comes to your mind when I say that word. And then I’m going to go through and try and see what kind of things we thought of. Okay, are you ready? The word is nuclear. 00:02:03.500 --> 00:02:50.260 How many thought of that by raise of hands? Okay. How about that? Nobody, that’s too bad. You’re clearly not college students. All of my students raise their hand right there. How about this? Yucca Mountain slash waste. Okay? How about this guy? So, what did you guys think of? Anybody think of this? Like I said, very intelligent crowd. This is the first time I’ve had more majority of people raising their hand for this image. How about this? Awesome. How about these? That’s about par for the course. 00:02:50.900 --> 00:04:06.360 Why do I do this thought experiment? Because it turns out that nuclear energy has a really bad reputation. And it’s not undeservedly so. When you look at how it was introduced, unfortunately, it was introduced to the public by leveling two cities, and that was a horrible experience. Not only that, when you look at what’s happening right now politically with Ukraine and Russia, the constant threat of nuclear assault is a real thing. Not only that, when you look at our society and our culture, nuclear is constantly the source of movies, albeit also superheroes if you consider Hulk a superhero. And also people are really worried about radiation. Radiation is not well understood. It’s often called the silent killer. Because people know it can harm them, but they know almost nothing about it. And nuclear physics, to describe that radiation and to describe the energy. Is difficult to convey and difficult to understand. As a result, nuclear has this nasty cultural association that makes it difficult for people to really understand. the basics, the nuances, and the challenges or benefits associated with nuclear power. Spoiler alert, when I talk about the future of energy, this is where I’m going, if you couldn’t tell already. Okay? 00:04:06.680 --> 00:05:09.500 Why do we talk nuclear? And why is nuclear beneficial? For one, it is a massive, massive amount of energy with very small amounts of material. To give you an idea, when we talk about energy, we talk about harnessing photons or sunlight. With solar, we talk about harnessing wind, the energy and the temperature from those atoms that are in the air. Or we talk about burning fossil fuels. It turns out the most power dense next to nuclear is burning coal. If we burn coal and compare that to nuclear, the amount of energy we get from the same amount of nuclear is about 10 million times more. What does this mean in practice? Well, if we take this tiny little pellet, about the size of the tip of your pinky of uranium dioxide, this would provide the same amount of energy as three and a half barrels of oil. About 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas, 1,800 pounds of coal. And it’s incredibly reliable. Incredibly reliable. 00:05:09.820 --> 00:06:04.080 In fact, about, oh, it’s been eight years now. About eight years ago, we invited the governor of New Hampshire to come and speak at BYU. And he spoke about the situation a couple years earlier where they had a massive, massive cold snap in New England. Where people were dying because they could not keep their homes warm. The temperatures were in sub-zero range for months at a time. They had feet and feet of snow. And he said, Were it up to solar and wind, we would have no power. Even if it were up to natural gas and diesel, because infrastructure was inaccessible, we would have no power. The only thing that kept people alive in New England Was the fact that New Hampshire had these two power plants that were generating consistent, reliable energy no matter what? Because you don’t need a constant stream of trucks and people going in to provide the fuel. That’s a really big benefit. 00:06:04.400 --> 00:06:36.120 But probably the most impressive, if any of you guys have been from the mountain skiing to the valley of Salt Lake in the wintertime, what do you see? You have this inversion of smog and gross that you pass down into. It goes from the beautiful sun to what we often see in Salt Lake in the wintertime. One of the most amazing things about nuclear is there are no gaseous emissions at all. None. Zero. There is not a single bit of smog pollution that goes into the environment from running nuclear power. 00:06:36.440 --> 00:07:51.660 There’s another aspect a lot of people don’t recognize and realize. Some of the most critical life saving Technologies in medicine that we have are only possible because of nuclear technology. For example, Set aside X-rays, which are nuclear in nature, let’s talk about something called molybdenum-99. It is a medical isotope that you only get from splitting uranium. And it actually lets doctors take an inside-out picture of a person. So if you were to have a heart attack, let’s say, hopefully not, but just hypothetically speaking. You were to have a heart attack, and you were to go on the ambulance. In the ambulance, they would inject you with a saline solution that’s derived from this molybdenum-99. And when you got to the hospital, they would use x-ray screens or imaging systems to actually get a very detailed picture of your cardiovascular system, your brain. your lymph nodes, a variety of different things that they could look at. If in the case of the heart attack, they’d likely be looking at your pulmonary systems to see if there was blockages or other Issues. We do this 20 million times a year in the US, and yet this isotope only comes from nuclear technology. We don’t even make it in the US, in fact. We have to import it. from other countries. 00:07:51.740 --> 00:08:37.620 We get it from the Netherlands and from used to be Canada, but since that reactor has gone offline because it’s so old. And really We’re looking at needing a new source. In fact, in 2007, we ran out of this Molly 99 because the Canadian and the Netherlands reactor shut down for extended periods of time for maintenance that was unexpected. And we had no Molly 99. It was such a shortage that Congress mandated that we find a new domestic source by 2019. Here it is 22, we still have 2022, we still have not done that yet. The challenge is, these isotopes will decay over time after about seven days. We cannot stockpile them like we like to in the US for every other source of commodity. And so we’re kind of stuck importing them continuously. 00:08:37.780 --> 00:08:54.860 Why do I bring this up? Because nuclear, although it has the bad rep, is actually an integral and essential part of our modern society. It allows us to have good baseload energy. It provides medicines. But it’s not all roses, unicorns, and flowers, as we all know. 00:08:55.180 --> 00:09:34.720 There are challenges to nuclear. Number one being the waste. You have stuff left over from that reaction that we don’t really agree on what to do with. We also have the challenge of potential safety issues. We’ve all seen the pictures from Fukushima. We’ve all heard the stories about large radiation plumes going across Europe or coming to California. This is a worry. Weapons, as I mentioned before, the situation with Ukraine has been heightened considerably with Putin Putin, however you say his name. Indicating that he’s interested in using his nuclear arsenal, and that gives everybody well-deserved anxiety. And finally, economics comes into play, fair or not. 00:09:35.360 --> 00:09:58.920 By the way, I hope this works. It might not. Have you guys ever seen a nuclear reaction in real life? Let’s see if this works. This is a recording. Of a actual nuclear reactor operating. Just so you can put an image to the words. Is it just a countdown? 00:10:07.200 --> 00:10:32.300 My first thought is George Lucas knew what he was doing, right? Doesn’t that look like the back of the Millennium Falcon? See that blue glow? That comes from the nuclear reaction, turns out. Lots of energy, lots of energy is produced. This camera is above maybe about 30 feet of water. Turns out water is a perfect shield for radiation. You can stand on the other side of a reactor about 10 feet of water between you, and you will get no dose. It’s pretty incredible. 00:10:33.820 --> 00:10:41.980 So what does this mean? Where am I getting at? We have nuclear that’s so essential, but it also is problematic. 00:10:42.000 --> 00:11:13.139 Let me give you a quick history of nuclear. Turns out, back in the day, in the 60s, we had two different options for nuclear power. We had Admiral Rickover, who was pioneering light water reactors that required a lot of pressure, a lot of water that he used on his submarines. He was petitioning that we put these on land. Turns out those reactors were very, very, very good at making plutonium, which meant it was very good at making weapons, and that was very appealing to the U. S. government. 00:11:13.160 --> 00:12:12.320 There was another individual that we don’t often hear about, however. His name was Alvin Weinberg. He was a scientist at the Oak Ridge National Lab, and he had a different idea. Instead of getting this uranium and cramming it into pellets and then Wrapping it in containers, and then another layer of protection, and then another layer of protection. He proposed that we take thorium, which is a similarly usable fuel for nuclear, and we dissolve it into a salt. And what that meant is instead of needing all kinds of these mechanical layers to hold that in, the salt chemically binds not just the thorium, but also the dangerous radioactive byproducts and prevents them from leaving. It traps it all in, chemically. And chemistry, unlike our mechanical barriers, is not likely to fail. And he proposed this, and it basically got to a point in the 60s where the US said we can only fund one of these two paths. We cannot afford to do both. Rick Ober was persuasive and he promised the bomb, and therefore we chose light water reactors and move forward with this. 00:12:12.640 --> 00:13:03.760 The problem is, salt reactors have some amazing, amazing benefits. When you look at nuclear waste, there’s really just three parts. One is the leftover fuel. One is All the leftover split pieces of uranium, they call them the fission products. And then one is the plutonium and the americium and the curium, and that’s the stuff that lasts 300,000 years that we don’t know what to do with. Well, it turns out with these salt reactors, because we dissolve the fuel in the salt, we can pull each of those pieces out one at a time, separate them into something valuable, and sell them. For example, Molly 99, which is roughly $30 million per gram. So, it’s incredible value to this nuclear waste. We just can’t get it apart in the typical reactors because it’s trapped inside these fuel pins. And we’d have to chop them up, dissolve them, pull all the pieces out in the salt. We can do that directly. 00:13:03.339 --> 00:13:23.120 Not only that, it is impossible for a salt reactor to melt down. For part of the reason, because it’s already liquid. There is no melting of a liquid, it is melted. But also, there are other physics involved that make it so a Fukushima-type event or a Chernobyl-type event is impossible. Incredible technology. that people are now starting to look at again because of the benefits. 00:13:23.200 --> 00:14:30.680 Now, because of these light water reactors that we have, we have 96 in the U. S. that make 20% of our power, we’ve had to figure out a different way to work with them. And so we have really rich and smart people like Bill Gates who proposed building what we call fast reactors. And in fact, he’s proposed building one called the Naturum Reactor in Wyoming. You might have heard about that project where it’s a large-scale reactor, centralized power like what we currently have, where you distribute this electricity to a huge grid that goes across the entire western United States and everybody shares it. And then when we have shortages of power, places like California who don’t produce their own end up left out and we have rolling brownouts or blackouts. But what this reactor does is it’s really good at getting rid of most of the Waste. But it’s still this huge centralized power system that makes it so the decentralized systems that we’re talking about, the distributed blockchain options, are not really viable. Because of the fact that you still are powering everything with this centralized, huge facility. Not only that, we still have to worry about safety and waste when it comes to these new advanced reactors. 00:14:30.760 --> 00:15:18.259 On the flip side, When we look about the analogy distributed systems, we have here the power plant, and the power plant sends power to the grid, which is huge and complicated. We need hundreds of people managing this grid, balancing Energy production across a whole region from solar to coal to natural gas to nuclear to try and make it so everybody has power when they want it. And again, as I mentioned If you end up knocking out the power or knocking out the systems on the other end, like the web, then you have no systems. People have said, well, let’s decentralize and have Web 3. 0 and distributed systems so we don’t have to worry about one centralized location providing all of our information. The problem is if you knock out that one power plant, you still lose all of your capacity for having any kind of Information or distributed systems. 00:15:18.500 --> 00:15:55.720 So really, the solution is to distribute everything, to have small, decentralized power. Not only that, this allows for a more economic solution. When you look at new nuclear plants, part of the reason why people are really hesitant when we look at the light water reactors An AP1000, which is the most recently licensed and built reactor in the U. S. , they’re building them right now in South Carolina, was $30 billion to build Built. There are so few entities in the country that have the capital to be able to build that, and it leads to the situation that we heard talked about this morning, where we have centralized authorities doing these kinds of things. Of things. 00:15:56.040 --> 00:16:25.100 On the flip side, what we have been working really hard to do is to become the Model T of nuclear reactor kind And that means no longer doing light water reactor technology. Rather, using these molten salt thorium reactors that don’t make waste. that can’t melt down and that we can actually make much more economical by having small distributed power. What you see here in the top left is actually the entire system. That is an entire power plant that fits in a truck bed and that services a thousand homes. 00:16:26.160 --> 00:16:39.839 So you can take one of these incredibly small footprint truck beds and you can actually place them directly where you need the power and have a truly, for the first time, decentralized, reliable high power network. In fact, they’re very modular. 00:16:39.920 --> 00:17:31.200 If you wanted to power a city like New York, you could stack 100 of these together. Perhaps some of the other great benefits, these salt reactors operate at such a high temperature that by the time you’re done making electricity, The salt is still hot enough that you can use the leftover to be able to pump and desalinate water, to send heat out to other industries. And to provide district heating for everybody nearby. So, in theory, you could take one of these reactors, you could park it under a park in a brand new city development of about four or five blocks square. And you would be able to provide that city electricity, power, water, heating, and any industrial resources you need at about half the cost of natural gas today. It’s just absolutely mind-boggling how well these things can work. 00:17:31.520 --> 00:17:38.400 So, why don’t we have them yet? Really, it comes down to the regulation. One last thing I wanted to bring up really quickly before we finish. 00:17:38.519 --> 00:18:22.900 And that is a new technology for cancer treatment. Sloan Kettering, about 20 years ago, developed a technology they call targeted alpha therapy, where you take somebody’s antibody and you tune it to travel to A cancer cell. The problem is, our antibodies are not capable of destroying cancer cells. So, what they did is they attached a radioisotope, meaning an isotope that, after about 45 minutes, would give off an alpha particle. A bowling ball, and that would be enough to destroy just the nearby cancer cells. This was so effective in their initial studies. That the success rate was 90% plus. People who were on death’s door with three treatments were in complete remission of their cancer. That’s amazing. 00:18:23.220 --> 00:18:51.220 Why don’t we do this today? Turns out that perfect isotope we needed is only made with thorium. And the way they got theirs was the thorium reactor that Alvin Weinberg ran back in the 1960s. So, this technology really does represent, in my opinion, the future of energy, but has side benefits that are wide-reaching. For example, providing the materials For doctors and cancer treaters to be able to really have the most effective treatment for cancer we’ve ever seen. 00:18:51.540 --> 00:19:39.460 So, summary? We need distributed power systems if we want to have distributed information and if we want to have the blockchain type societies that we’re talking about. Nuclear power has incredible potential, but also some challenges. But when we talk about molten salt reactors, that technology has already been proven, and it doesn’t make weapons, it doesn’t make waste, and it can’t melt down. And so companies like Alphatec and maybe half a dozen others in the US are trying to commercialize this technology. What’s the barrier? The regulation barrier is high. We’re trying to prove every part of this will work in every possible situation, and that takes time. But when we do that, in my opinion, molten salt reactor technology represents reliable, clean energy that can be the future of energy that will support the systems that we’re talking about. Here. Thank you.