 I decided to title today's presentation, Nuclear Energy and New Beginning. The question mark is, I would say, mandatory, certainly an interesting and uncertain time for energy in general and nuclear in particular. We'll talk about the future of nuclear within the context of a world that seeks to decarbonize its energy system, and in particular, the power grid. So in doing so, I will leverage the findings from a study that I led together with other faculty and students at MIT. The study was titled, The Future of Nuclear Energy in a Carbon Constraint World. You see the cover here. You can download the report at the MIT site freely, of course. And I will use some of the findings and key messages from that study in today's presentation. I also have the back end of today's presentation, which is a little bit beyond what we did a couple of years ago, but the key messages are listed here. And basically, I'm going to argue that if deployed efficiently, particularly from a cost point of view, nuclear can prevent electricity cost escalations in a deeply decarbonized grid. However, the cost of new nuclear construction projects, particularly in the West, I would say exclusively in the Western Europe and the US, has been too high. And so in these regions, new nuclear is not competitive as of now. And good news, there are ways to reduce the cost of new nuclear. We spent a great deal of time in our study trying to really understand where the cost of a new nuclear power plant is and ways to reduce it. These are fairly powerful, compelling messages for the nuclear industry, but success will not be achieved unless there is also a role played by government, particularly in the field for all low carbon energy technologies, nuclear, solar, wind, other renewables, as well as, frankly, fossil fuels if carbon capture and sequestration becomes technically and economically viable. So let me start with a little bit of the big picture on energy. You might have seen plots like this. This is the Human Development Index. It's an aggregate measure of standards of living, life expectancy, access to health care and education. And it's plotted here as a function of the electricity used per capita. Each dot on this plot represents a country. The size of the dot is meant to be proportional to the size of the population of that country. So the first observation is that there appears to be a very strong correlation between the access to electricity and the Human Development Index. Anything below 0.8 in terms of HTI when developing this is considered somewhat underdeveloped. So you can see just synoptically at the lens that roughly half or probably more of the world is yet to climb this curve. To be more quantitative, the International Energy Agency projections for global electricity consumption over the next 20 years are for a growth of 45%. Most of that growth will concentrate in known OECD countries, so in developing countries, but a good 40% or thereabout would be in established industrial countries. And mostly the need for new electricity in industrialized country comes from the desire to electrify sectors that traditionally had not been electrified. Now, we are probably going to see a massive economic downturn due to the COVID-19 crisis. And so these numbers might have to be modified downward. However, I think a long-term trend is one that calls for an increase overall in electricity and energy generation in general. Now, the key dilemma that we face as mankind is how do we increase energy generation and at the same time limit global warming? We know that when we burn fossil fuels, we emit CO2 into the atmosphere. That's the cause of climate change. And it's a phenomenon that we want to avoid. The plot shown here is the worldwide primary energy consumption. This is not just electricity. It's energy that we use in every and all sectors of the economy. So transportation is included, buildings, industry, of course, the electric grid, and so on. And you can see that over the past three decades or four decades, actually, the primary energy consumption picture globally has been dominated by fossil fuels. So carbon emitting technologies, such as natural gas, oil, and coal account for about 80% plus of our energy consumption. And low carbon, such as nuclear, hydroelectric, and other renewables, solar, and wind, it's less than 20%. I like this plot. It's simple, but it tells a big story. And one is the magnitude of the challenge that we're facing in decarbonizing our economies is massive, because basically those three slivers that you can barely see at the top have to become as big as the whole. And number two is that, unfortunately, if you look at the trend, the CO2 emissions actually are not decreasing in spite of all the good intentions and all the policies that have been put in place, but are actually rising. So a sad observation is that we're not winning at the moment. Now, what is the current role of nuclear in this picture? Nuclear is primarily almost exclusively now used for electricity generation. So on a large interconnected grid, which could be either country-based or regional, like in Europe. And in several important regions of the world, such as the US and Europe, it's currently the largest source of emission-free electricity by far. What this plot shows here, what this graph shows here, is the relative share of carbon-free electricity in different regions of the world. So this data obviously do not account for oil, natural gas, and coal, particularly natural gas and coal. Of course, we use for electricity generation, but this is only carbon-free. So what this accounts for is nuclear, hydro, solar, and wind, and other renewables that don't emit CO2. So worldwide, about half of the carbon-free electricity comes from a hydro, about a third from nuclear, and then from other renewables. In the US, it's over 50% nuclear. In the European Union, it's about 50%. Nuclear in places like the Republic of Korea, the data are there because they gave a similar presentation a few months back in Seoul. It is even more lopsided towards nuclear. In the US, places like China, where the share of carbon, where the carbon-free electricity generation is dominated by hydro. The point I'm making here is that nuclear is already an important part of the carbon-free energy infrastructure in many regions of the world. The trends, going forward, are pretty clear. And they are different in different regions. The share of nuclear is in terms of carbon-free electricity is growing in places like China, India, Russia, and the Middle East. It is, however, declining in places like Western Europe, Japan, and the US. Because nuclear is already playing such an important role on many grids, we argue that the first priority is actually not shut down these existing nuclear power plants. Every time one such plant, gigawatt scale, goes down, it typically wipes out many years equivalent of progress made with the installation of renewable. So the name of the game here is not either nuclear or renewable. This is actually end-to-end. We want all low-carbon energy technologies that we can get our hands on. The example that is shown here is the example of Spain. What we did for Spain is a study that looks at the replacement costs for their current fleet of nuclear power plants. Spain has seven reactors, about seven gigawatt, of nuclear capacity. And the license for these reactors is set to expire over this decade in the 2020s. So the important dilemma or decision face in the Spanish government, the Spanish utilities, whether to make an investment and extend the license of this reactor for, say, another 15, 20 years. And it's usually technically possible. It doesn't tell a certain investment. Or shutting them down and replacing them with, in the case of Spain, since they don't want to increase the emissions of CO2, replacing them with a mix of renewables and batteries. And so what we did as part of our study, we looked at the relative cost of these different scenarios. So the scenario in green there, we call it N7, that's all seven reactors in Spain have their license extended. Like I said, there is a cost associated with this. It's not free because certain components have to be either replaced, upgraded, as well as there is a cost associated with the license review. And so the increment unit cost in terms of euros per megawatt hour for that particular scenario is of the order of about 30, 35 euros per megawatt hour. Now you need to compare that to the other scenario shown here in which all the nuclear reactors are shut down, they're replaced with renewables and batteries to keep the same amount of emissions. There are four scenarios here that we looked at, one in which all the capacity is taken by solar, another 100% wind, and one with 25, 75% solar and wind, and the other one 75, 25% solar and wind. And the results are shown in this tool, the important results are shown in these two rows. And so the increment unit cost for all the other scenarios where you shut down the nuclear plants and replace them with renewables and batteries, the best you can do is with a mix of 75% wind, 25% solar, and it's about twice as expensive as extending the license of the existing reactor. So in a place like Spain, the prudent and reasonable investment would be to extend the life of the seven reactors. Like I said, however, a couple of minutes ago, the right decision would be to invest in the extension of the license of the same reactors and also add additional renewable low carbon capacity and then not either or. Then we looked at the following question. Do we need nuclear to deeply decarbonize the power sector? The emphasis here is on the word deeply. If one starts with a grid that is dominated by coal generation, it is actually fairly straightforward to achieve some decarbonization of that grid. If you switch from coal to natural gas, the emissions tend to come down a little bit. If you bring a little bit of renewable capacity, the emissions come down a little bit more. However, in all the IPCC and other climate change scenarios, the power grid, the electric grid has to be deeply decarbonized. That's sort of the lynchpin of the decarbonization strategy that starts with the power grid and then moves on to other sectors of the economy. And so the kind of decarbonization that people are entertaining is of the order of 90%, not 20%, not 25% or thereabouts. So it's a deep decarbonization. And it's in that context that we looked at the potential role of nuclear going forward. So let me just give you the punchline of the analysis that we did there. We found a fairly compelling economic argument that is excluding nuclear energy can drive up the average cost of electricity in low-carbon scenarios. That plot that you see there on the left is a little bit complicated. So let me, before you look at it, let me just explain what's the analysis behind it. So at MIT, we have developed and validated tools called GenX, which it's essentially a simulation of optimal generation mix in a power market. You take a region of the world that you're interested in, the one that I'm gonna show here is one of the most popular areas in China around Beijing with seven or eight others between the US, between Europe and another capital in Asia. For that region, the model requires the hourly electricity demand. So how much electricity is required in that market at that particular hour of the day, that particular day of the month, that month of the year. So 8,760 entries. Similarly, it requires the hourly weather patterns. How much solar and wind could you get at that particular time of the day? It requires the capital operation and maintenance fuel costs for all the power plants that are allowed to play in the generation mix, including backup and storage, which are required to meet demand if you have intermittent generation. And then lastly, ramp up rates, which means how quickly can a power plant adjust its power output to basically follow the load as needed at that particular hour of the day. So it takes all these input. The central assumption is that the demand in that market is met at every hour. It must be met at every hour. And the code essentially spits out an optimal generation mix. By optimal, we mean a generation mix on that, on that grid that minimizes the average generation cost. So the figure of merit is what you see on the y-axis of this plot. It's average generation cost. It's dollars per megawatt hour. Don't think about it as a levelized cost of electricity. Think about it as a system cost. So it's a total cost of generating electricity divided by the total amount of electricity generated over a year in that market. So we can run that code for different scenarios. The scenarios are shown here in blue, orange, and gray. Scenario, for example, could exclude nuclear from completely or it could include nuclear at a nominal cost or could include nuclear at a lower cost. And we can run those different scenarios for different decarbonization targets. So the last variable that you should pay attention to in this plot is the CO2 emissions on the x-axis. Currently, worldwide, we are at about 500 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour. And the target for deep decarbonization is to go below basically 50 grams per kilowatt hour. So a factor of 10 down. So now look at the results. In this particular region of China, and the results look different for different regions, but this is fairly representative. This region has a expensive natural gas and fairly unfavorable renewables because it's higher latitude, not a lot of sunshine, not a lot of wind in that region. On a grid like this one, even at a moderate decarbonization target, say 100 grams of kilowatt hour, 50 grams per kilowatt hour, excluding nuclear essentially doubles the cost of the average cost of electricity. And as you drive down your decarbonization cost, the decarbonization target, the average cost of electricity in that market goes up even more. Now you may wonder why is that the case and that's shown on the plot on the right. What is shown here is the install capacity of the different power technology on this grid. It's the same region as Tianjin, Beijing, Tangshan. And all these scenarios are the scenarios excluding nuclear. So basically those bars on the right are correspond to the blue bars on the left. However, what's plotted here is not the average generation of cost, but it's total install capacity in megawatts. And what you can see is that when you exclude nuclear, like in all these scenarios, as you're trying to decarbonize your grid, you're gonna have to overbuild a very, very large capacity of the renewable energy sources such as solar and wind and also very important, the battery storage or some kind of energy storage that can accommodate the intermittency in generation of those renewable energy sources. And so it's really the overbuilt of these technologies or all these systems that have to go on the grid to meet demand in the absence of a carbon-free dispatchable or controllable energy source such as nuclear that really drive up the cost of, the average cost of generation in those markets. So that's what the analysis shows. However, I would say sadly in many regions of the world, the grid is becoming more complicated, overbuilt and expensive. And unfortunately, with not much to show for it is the emissions are all marginally being reduced. The generators and the end users are typically geographically separated and becoming more and more geographically separated and require massive transmission infrastructures. The map that you see on the left is a project that is being considered maybe even approved and checked in China for a very large wind farm in the western province of China. Of course, most of the users are on the eastern part of China. So this will require a very large transmission infrastructure and they're thinking about whole-try voltage direct current transmission infrastructures. Similarly in the U.S., we have plans in the Northeast for using Quebec Hydro, Canadian Hydro for places like Massachusetts, Connecticut and upstate New York. These also will require transmission infrastructure and as well I would point out that it's ultimately a zero-sum game if you take carbon-free electricity from the Canadian grid. The Canadian grid will become less green automatically and then you'll have some other projects along the coast for offshore wind that also will require a lot of infrastructure. The system is becoming also more, not just larger, but also more interconnected. This makes it more vulnerable to external perturbations. This could be extreme weather events like tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes or malicious attacks, terrorist attacks and so on. In a grid that does not have carbon-free dispatchable energy sources such as nuclear, you end up having a lot of capital-intensive equipment that ends up having low utilization factor because of the variability in demand and intermince. These are things like backup generators that typically run on natural gas or storage in the form of batteries or heat storage in the form of large tanks of liquid salt and then the solar and wind overcapacity that we talked about. The market and these grids tend to be muddied with subsidies. There are subsidies for renewables. There are now subsidies also for nuclear and also on a counter-cost, the social cost of carbon. And really the bottom line is that in a couple of examples of places that have gone all in on just renewables, try to get to just renewables and shutting down nuclear power plants like during California, in spite of the massive investments, there has not been a very significant increase in emissions. So I would argue that that approach is actually not working. More to this point, I'm showing in this plot or on this slide, I studied that was performing in Europe a couple of years ago. And they wanted to look at the correlation between a high share of solar and wind renewable generation and the carbon footprint in the different grids, electric grids in Europe. So the first plot up there is the share of non-hydro renewables. So that basically means solar and wind in the different countries in Europe. And the average over that period of time, which was one year, 2016, 2017 was about 20%. There were six countries above that 20%. Denmark, Ireland, Germany, Portugal, Spain and Finland. Those are by definition the countries that have invested in non-hydro renewables the most. What the study goes on to do is to look at the carbon footprint of the power sector in these different countries. So again, here the figure of merit is grams of CO2 emitted per unit electricity generated. So grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour. Of course, the low number here is good, the high number is bad. And the six countries that have the lowest carbon footprint in Europe over that period of time were Norway, Sweden, France, Switzerland, Finland and Belgium. There is not a lot of correlation you can see between the top plot and the bottom plot. What actually these six countries and others have in common at the bottom is that they have a large share of either nuclear or hydro or both. Once again, I want to be clear. This is not to say the renewables are not useful. They're very useful, but just renewables alone, at least so far there is no evidence that decarbonization can be achieved that way. Whereas there is very, very strong evidence you pick places like Sweden and France. They're basically already at the target that we would like to see the power grid everywhere to be less, well less than lower than 100 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour. And they did that with a mix of nuclear and hydro in some cases just hydro like Norway in some cases mostly almost 100% nuclear like France. So this has led us to the conclusion that well, not only we need to ensure that the existing fleet of nuclear reactors should be extended or should be continued to operate but probably we also need to build your nuclear power plants to be successful at decarbonizing the grid. And here comes the question of cost. So why are new nuclear power plants so expensive and difficult to build? The evidence in the West is that they have been very expensive and difficult to build. However, there is plenty of evidence that in other countries, in particular in Asia and in the Middle East, the overnight construction cost which is a measure of the cost of building the plant. So it's dollars per kilowatt has been much, much lower therefore better. All right, so what you can see from this plot is again the overnight construction cost dollars per kilowatt for a series of either recently completed proposed or under construction nuclear power plants. And there are essentially two groups, the Asians and the U.S. and you're plenty called in the West about a factor of two difference between these two groups. The first reaction for those of you who are not sort of have not followed these trajectories. Well, maybe we're building different reactors we're building different technologies but in fact, that's not the case at all in all these projects, the technology that has been built is a large scale, gigawatt scale, live water reactors. In some instances, it's almost the exact same design. For example, the AP1000 has been built in China and it's still under construction in the U.S. the EPR has been built in China and it's still under construction in the UK and in France and Finland. So it's not technology base it's not that they're building better reactors is that they are better at building nuclear reactors. And so we spent a great deal of time interviewing construction managers for these projects everywhere in Asia and in Europe and here in the United States and see even through the literature and we sort of distill it down to the points that are shown at the bottom of this slide. The first point is almost comical. In Asia, they do not start a construction project for a new nuclear power plant until at least 90% of the detailed design is completed that seems to make a lot of sense. In the U.S. and Europe, these projects that have gone disastrously wrong in terms of cost and schedule have all started with less than 50% of the design completed. You may wonder why we looked into the reasons there were reasons associated with commercial pressure there were reasons in the U.S. associated with an expiration date for some loan guarantees these are some A that was provided by the U.S. government that had an expiration date the companies rushed to build because they wanted to qualify for those loan guarantees. But it's unforgivable frankly to start a complex construction project without completing a detailed design first. That's a big difference. The second difference is it's in the supply chain and triple S means nuclear steam supply systems. It's basically the nuclear reactor itself. In Asia, companies have been building nuclear power plants continuously over the past 20, 30 years. In the U.S. there has been an annihatus, a gap of about 20 plus years in Europe similar in most countries. And quite frankly, we've seen that the supply chain in Asia is a lot more mature. The labor workforce is much more skill whereas in the U.S. and Western Europe we have we use the word atrophy and atrophy supply chain and inexperienced workforce. That's pretty inevitable if there is not a continuous program for construction on nuclear power plants. Another big difference is that companies in Asia tend to be a little bit more vertically integrated. And so the design team from the very beginning includes also fabricators and constructors. This is important to ensure that whatever design is developed is actually constructible. We have some examples of that not being the case in the U.S. and Europe. Some components were designing a vacuum so to speak. Certain dimensional tolerances were over specified or interferences between components. And once the blueprints were given to the constructors and to the fabricators, they found that it was not possible to build them to specs. And so there was an iterative process which took a lot of time and of course cost a lot of money. There are other differences associated with the way in which the primary contracts for the projects are set up and also some differences in flexibility of the regulator. But the first three points we felt that explained the big difference in the success or failure of these different projects. There are some aggravating factors. Nuclear power plants are built by the construction sector. What is shown in this plot is the productivity expressing cross-plastic added per hour work over a period of time of about 60 years for different sectors of the U.S. economy. And you can see that certain sectors such as agriculture and manufacturing have seen an increase in productivity that has been really, really spectacular over the decades. But the construction sector which is shown here with the orange curve has actually seen a decline in productivity from the mid-60s until today. So the question here is would you rather have a, your product being built by the construction sector or fabricated by the manufacturing sector? And I think this plot says it all, definitely better to have it built or to have it fabricated in factories and shipyards. These are high productivity environments. Construction sites are a low productivity environment that adds to the misery. The other difference which is significant is of course the difference in wages and labor rates for construction and engineering positions much higher in the U.S. than China and Korea. This is a good thing we pay workers, construction workers more in the U.S. than China and Korea. And that's not gonna change. But when you roll up the differences in construction engineering wages and for all the different roles that are performed at a construction site, assuming that two teams, one or three teams, one in the U.S., one in China, one in Korea are building the exact same plan. You roll up all these differences and we estimate that the effect of construction labor on the overnight construction cost for China is about $900 less per kilowatt. We respect the U.S. and for Korea is about $400 less per kilowatt. We respect the U.S. So these are significant differences. They don't explain the factor of two that I've shown you in the previous slide. And so the reasons that I gave you earlier are in our opinion, the sort of first order effects. These are aggravating factors, second order effects. Okay, so where is the cost of a new nuclear power plant? We got data for three different designs. The AP1000 is an American design. The APR 1400 is a Korean design. The APR is a European design. And the data that we have and the breakdown of the cost of the plant are very consistent are basically consistent. They tell the same story. So you see these pie charts here. The first surprise we had was that the direct cost of the equipment in what we call the nuclear island and turbine island, which is basically the reactor and the power conversion cycle that turns heat into electricity account for at most a quarter of the total cost. This was both intriguing and a little bit shocking, particularly for people like me, nuclear engineers, we spent most of our career trying to design new reactors that would have a wonderfully lower cost. And it turns out that it almost doesn't matter where you're designing the direct costs associated with equipment is only a small fraction of your total cost. The biggest slice that you see in this pie chart is what we decided to call YAR cooling and installation, which is not a maybe an orthodox way to look at it, but what it really entails is the labor associated with preparing the site, installing all the different components. So again, not the direct cost of the components, but the installation costs, including the civil works. And so all the reinforced concrete, such as cooling towers or cooling canals associated with the plant are included in that chart in that slice or that fraction. The other two contributors that you see there are EPC, that's basically the engineering cost. So all the cost and work that goes up front into designing and licensing the plant. And then lastly, the owner's cost, which is things like insurance, the cost of the land and things of that type. What's excluded from this chart is the interest during construction, the financing of the plant, which would be also a big piece of this. But these analysis basically showed us that the total cost of building a plant is actually dominated by what we call indirect costs. So civil works, site preparation and installation, and then scheduling discount rate, determining the financing cost. The implication of this is that what you probably need in terms of innovations to reduce the cost of your nuclear power plants is things like standardization on multi-unit sites. It almost doesn't matter what you're building there, but you wanna build multiple units at the same site and they have to be identical because that reduces the engineering cost. It also maximizes learning for the workforce at that site. There is strong evidence from multi-unit sites that are being built now. For example, in the Emirates, at the Baraka site, that in that case it's four units, two, three and four have declining number of workers and therefore associated costs and time in performing identical tasks. And so there is clearly learning curve there that the industry should take advantage of. A big chunk of cost in new nuclear is associated with concrete. And there are some technologies called the dense concrete solutions that allow you to reduce the number of steps, for example, to erect a reinforced concrete structure by eliminating or reducing the amount of rebar or by eliminating or reducing the need for formwork and things of that type. And so we looked into those technologies, they've been actually adopted by other industries including construction of bridges, tunnels and other civil infrastructure. Mostly here the challenge is to accept those technologies for codes of nuclear construction. Modular construction techniques and factor of ship refurbication has also been transformational for some industries, reduction of cost and schedule of the order of 20 to 50%. For example, chemical plants or even nuclear submarines have seen dramatic reduction in cost and schedule associated with modularization of their construction process. Modularization refers to the fact that instead of bringing raw materials and individual components of the site and then build the plant of the site, you pre-assemble large systems, you bring them to the site in one piece and then connect them rather than fabricate the bespoke. So the philosophy here should be going forward. Shift labor from site to factories because as I said, construction sites tend to be low productivity environments that should reduce the installation costs, standardized design that should reduce the licensing and engineering costs, maximize learning and shorten the construction schedule which is also very, very important that reduces the interest during construction. As I mentioned a minute ago, this approach has not been proven, this is still a question mark for the nuclear industry. There is some evidence in Japan prior to the accident in 2011, they were building a series of advanced boiling water reactors with a lot of modularization. There is some evidence from there that experience that this could have a big impact on nuclear but otherwise most of the evidence for the positive impact of these changes comes from other industries. I mentioned chemical plants, nuclear submarines and other things. The last part of my presentation I'm gonna focus on advanced reactor technologies. I just told you a second ago that a lot of the cost is not in the direct cost of the equipment for the reactor. Nonetheless, in our opinion, the reason need for moving past the existing reactor technologies for the reasons that I'm about to explain. So as part of the study, we looked at or we compared the nuclear industry to other important industries in the US and worldwide. We compared to plants of shoreline, gas chemical plants, satellites, jet engines, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, consumer robotics. As you can see here, fairly diverse, not just energy. All sorts of different industries. And we tried to categorize these industries or place them or group them according to four categories. The first is the size, the physical size of the system that is at the heart of that particular industry. So for nuclear industry, it is a traditionally a large scale nuclear power plant. It's not unique. Chemical plants tend to be large, coal plants tend to be large. At the other end of the spectrum, you might have automobiles, those are small jet engines, those are small pharmaceuticals, very, very small consumer robotics, small. The second group is that system built at a construction site or it's fabricated in a high productivity environment such as a factory. Again, traditionally for nuclear, it's construction site, not unique, but at the other end of the spectrum, you have automobiles, jet engines, pharmaceuticals, they're all built in high productivity environment. Number three is the licensing of a new product in that industry. Does that require the demonstration of a complex safety case? For nuclear, certainly that's the case. Not unique, jet engines, automobiles, pharmaceuticals, they all undergo very lengthy safety-based licensing processes. And lastly is the product produced by these machines, a high return product or it's a commodity. Now for nuclear, traditionally it's being electrons on an interconnected grid. Once the electrons are on the grid, they become a commodity. Nobody cares where those electrons are coming from. Again, not unique in that sense called plants are playing on the same grid, but you have some industries like automobiles, pharmaceuticals, consumer robotics where their product commands a higher value because it's not a commodity. So the point here is that nuclear is not unique in any of these attributes, but it's the only industry that so far has exhibited all the negative attributes across the four categories. So I call these the perfect storm of unfortunate attributes. The implication of this has been that innovation. In this case, I'm talking specifically about a new reactor, new nuclear reactor technology has taken order of 20 years and has cost order of 10 billions to bring it to market. Now, if you go to Wall Street or any other investor and say, I want $10 billion or they're about, and in 20 years, maybe I'll give you a return, you're gonna be laughed out of the room. So that model or that paradigm, as I call it, has to shift and it has to shift 180 degrees. So first of all, the new machines have to be smaller physically and they have to be serially manufactured. They have to have an accelerated testing and licensing. And number three, preferably they should produce a value that, excuse me, a product that commands a higher return, a higher added value that is not a commodity. So keep in mind these three attributes. I want them smaller, ceiling manufactured, cellular testing and license and higher added value. I'm gonna walk you through. We think that this is possible. First, smaller systems. I think the industry gets it. There is a lot of attention now on small modular reactors. The example shown here, it's just a schematic drawing, is from the General Electric PWRX 300. These tend to be scaled down, very simplified versions of state-of-the-art light water reactors. So the materials, the components, they still look a lot like large-scale light water reactors, but they are smaller and they tend to have some interesting safety and reliability features that I will explain in a minute. The second class of smaller systems is high-temperature gas school reactors. Again, here the power rating is less than 300 megawatt. This power rating, by nuclear standards, is small. Typical light water reactor traditional would be of the order of 1,000 megawatt. So these tend to be much smaller. The second technology at temperature gas school reactors is a completely different beast. The coolant is no longer water. It is helium, it's a gas. It can operate at high temperature. It has a graphite moderator. It has a very robust fuel form, ceramic form. It operates at 650-700 degrees C. What makes this system particularly interesting is the high temperature which it operates, which gives both a higher efficiency of conversion of heat to electricity according to the laws of thermodynamics, but also it allows to supply heat directly to certain industrial processes that require heat at those temperatures, something that light water reactors, traditional reactors cannot do because they operate at much lower temperature. And then the third class of smaller systems, what I call nuclear batteries, you might have heard them referred to as microreactors. And here, the idea is to have a system that is entirely fabricated in a factory because of the physical sizes of the order of, as you can see here from the scale from a human being, it's of the order of like a shipping, the standard shipping container. It would have a core design that is completely different because they use a block core with some heat pipes that are no moving parts, self-regulating, they have a much smaller power conversion unit. And the idea is to have sort of a plug and play battery. You bring it fully fueled to a site, you use it, you couple it to whatever application you're interested in, it can provide both heat and electricity. It runs without any need for a fueling for say three to five years and then it's sent back to a centralized facility for a fueling. In the first two cases, the scope of civil structures, these are still site-based systems is still high, about 50% of total capital cost. So there has to be a deliberate effort to reduce the cost of the civil structures for this system still. For the nuclear battery is completely different piece because they are truly now built in a factory with very minimal site preparation. What all these systems also bring to the table is very interesting is a unique safety profile. This is enabled by what we call combination of inheritance features and engineer systems. The inherent safety attributes of these systems is that you have in some instances coolant that cannot boil off. So you can't lose your coolant, which is good. Nuclear safety is mostly about maintaining coolant of your reactor core. You also have strong fission production, excuse me, fission product retention in the fuel, I already mentioned the HTGR fuel ceramic with multiple layers that can take very high temperature without releasing any reactivity. They tend to have cores with a high thermal capacity. That's good. It makes them more tolerant to deviations from normal conditions with no big excursions in temperatures. And they have also intrinsic nuclear coefficients or reactivity coefficients that basically keep them stable under all situations. You combine those inherent safety attributes with what we call passive safety systems. These are now engineer systems that remove the heat or they shut down the reactor. And basically you obtain nuclear power plants with the following characteristics. They don't need any AC power for emergency response. So you don't need pumps. You don't need diesel generators to drive those safety systems. They can cope with abnormal situations for very long periods of time without having problems. They essentially are some people referring to walk away safe systems. The operator does not have to intervene. The system takes care of itself. And last but not least, they may be able to limit the so-called emergency planning zone to the side boundary. So that even under the worst case scenario, there would be no need for local residents to evacuate the way that it happened. For example, Fukushima. The front runner of the systems is NUSCAL, which is currently being reviewed by the U.S. NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the regulatory agency. And that design certification of their review is actually going very well. And the NRC certainly seems to value the new safety attributes in a way that we expect. The importance of this unique safety profile is not just in enhancing the inherent robustness of the system, but it also can enable accelerated licensing and testing. So the attributes that I've just discussed a second ago, for example, I've enabled the demonstration, design fabrication and testing of a nuclear battery, less than one megabyte by NASA and Los Alamos, for space applications in less than three years and for a total cost of less than $20 million. Now, those are numbers that you appreciate from three slides ago. Our orders are smaller than what we see in the past. Now, this was a small reactor, but that's the point. This is a small reactor with a superior safety profile and it requires a lot less capital investment upfront to demonstrate. And that's, I think, exactly where the industry should go. So it can save a decade and an early billion dollars and that makes a big difference. Lastly, the higher added value can come from a strong policy. I recognize that only meeting nature and other good properties, economic impact, contribution to energy security of nuclear electricity on the grid. I think the nuclear industry should continue to push for that both at the federal and state level. However, very often that's beyond their control and anyone's control, that's politics and policy. And so the other way in which you can add value to your product is to capture new markets. Who is to say that nuclear is only to sell electricity on an interconnected grid? There are all sorts of other energy products that nuclear can contribute to and reduce the carbon footprint in those sectors. So I hope I'm still doing okay, time-wise. I'm gonna need maybe five minutes. Sarah, am I okay, John? Five more minutes. I think we've reached the end of our official time, but the beautiful thing about a remote seminar is people can always slip away if they have other obligations. I think we can go for an extra five. If not, I promise it won't be more than five minutes. So these business of capturing new markets, what I really mean is you should, we should start to think beyond the grid. The first recognition is that the emissions are, the carbon emissions are associated with a lot of different sectors of the economy and all the attention is being placed on electricity. And that's about a quarter of the total. If you are serious about decarbonizing the economy, you gotta decarbonize industry, you gotta decarbonize transportation, you gotta decarbonize buildings and even agriculture. So how do we tackle these sectors which have been traditionally so difficult to decarbonize? Well, let's start with industry. Factories often need heat, they don't need electricity. In a low carbon world, nuclear heat is the lowest cost dispatchable source for industry. What is shown here is levelized cost of heat now. So dollars per megawatt hour, the megawatt hour there is not an electric megawatt hour, but it's a thermal megawatt hour. And you have the different options. You have solar PV in a couple of different forms. You have solar thermal tower, you have wind. In all these cases, you would basically turn electricity into heat resistively. In the case of nuclear, it's a heat source. So you generate heat to begin with. You also have natural gas in a carbon constrained world, you can't use natural gas unless you capture and sequester the CO2. So when you look at the cost of the different levelized cost of electricity, you see that nuclear becomes very competitive. And of course it's dispatchable, which means you can control the delivery heat to the factories, they get the heat when they need it. And that's a big, big advantage. So we think that there is a market there. We look more specifically in the US of what factories could capitol to a nuclear heat source now. We'll basically pick the EPA database for US sites meeting at least 25,000 tons of CO2 per year or more. We assume that those sites, that we only looked at the sites that needed at least 150 megawatt of heat. We assume that nuclear heat can be delivered at a maximum of 650 degrees C. That's with the high-temperature gas reactor. And it turns out that things like the production of ammonia, vinyl chloride, salt, ash, nylon, styrene and so on would be very, very good targets for a nuclear heat. So when you roll all these up, the capacity that would be required, it's about 150 gigawatt of heat of nuclear heat. And that would displace about 240 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent per year. It's about 7% of the total annual US greenhouse gas emissions. So a big market in absolute terms relative to the total heat market is still small. In the transportation sector, you either electrify or go with hydrogen. In either case, you need a primary energy source. So these numbers are upper end or upper estimates and for different countries in the US, if you were to electrify the full transportation sector, making assumptions that are listed at the bottom of the slides and I assume the slides will be available to everybody who is online. So you can then check the numbers on your own. But basically we estimate that it will require about 300 gigawatt of new electricity to electrify transportation sector. If you try to decarbonize transportation sector with hydrogen instead of electrification, it will require even more energy. And so obviously not all that energy will come from nuclear, but if a good chunk of it comes from nuclear, then it would be carbon free and it would be a big opportunity for nuclear. I'm gonna close with this quote, which is important comes from someone very used to think about the national security implication of energy and climate change. Is a retire emerald from the Royal Australian Navy. I think it's cost for optimism. The challenge is enormous, but doomsday future is not inevitable. Of course, the path forward requires great government leadership and business and communities to come together and work together. And the same applies also to the current crisis over there. So this is the team, good team of faculty at the bottom are wonderful graduate and undergraduate students that did all the work and they usually don't get any credit. I wanna make sure they're recognized here. And then finally we had of course some sponsors. This was a two year effort and we have a lot of people involved and we received support from a variety of foundations and a couple of companies. So with that, I'm gonna stop and I'm very happy to take any questions that you might have. Okay, we've been collecting some questions. You should submit them through the Q&A portal. First of all, I wanna clarify, we did this part of the, we do this part of the class as a Zoom webinar. So that's why you can't see everybody's picture, which is a good thing because we had over 230 people participating at various points in time. When Tran runs the, there's about 45 registered students. When Tran runs the post presentation, small student groups, she will be using what's called Zoom meeting, which many of us are much more useful dealing with. So let me consolidate a few questions. I know in your MIT report, you talked about four things, cost, safety, waste management and disposable and proliferation. You actually did a pretty deep dive in the first part of your report on cost and then worked in safety at the end with the advanced reactor technologies. But what about waste management, including recycling of nuclear fuels and disposal? And what about the proliferation threat? Good, so those are obviously classic challenges for nuclear. In fact, in the study, we did not tackle them because we reviewed recent studies, including one performed by MIT a few years prior to ours. And we didn't feel that we had much to add there. But let me give sort of a brief answer because of course we do have an opinion, it just didn't differ from earlier studies. So the first thing to understand about spent nuclear fuel, which is what people come and refer to as nuclear waste, is that the volumes are very, very small. If you think about a person using only nuclear electricity throughout his or her life, the amount of spent nuclear fuel, these high level waste that would have to be disposed hydrologically and so on, is less than a cup of coffee. So that's for one person. Now, of course, there are many people around the world. So if you start using it extensively, the volumes add up, but they don't add up too much. Let me give you another example. If the city of Boston, which is about three quarter of a million people, were to use only nuclear energy for 80 years, it would accumulate a number of dry cast, which is a cylindrical container made of steel and concrete, in which we house the spent nuclear fuel assemblies that would fit over a quarter of a football field. So that would be the amount of, we space in between, by the way. So that would be the amount of material that you have to deal with. Now, it is toxic material. It is not particularly mobile or volatile. And so it wants, it doesn't wanna go around, it stays where it is. Currently, the policy in the US and the practice has been that you put the fuel into the spent fuel pools. So this wet storage for a few years, once it's cold enough, you transfer it to a dry cask. And then these dry casks are currently sitting at the Nuka power plants in the US. They're out there, I call this the parking lot. They're basically in plain air. They're cold, they're cooled by air. There is no need for forced circulation. They're well shielded. So you can go walk up to these dry casks and touch them and there is no significant radiation dose. So it's a safe and relatively cheap solution. However, ultimately, you wanna have all this material move to a centralized facility. Whether that centralized facility is a surface facility or it's an excavated facility underground. The jury is still out there. The problem historically with waste has been a political nature. The technologies exist, science is well known. The problem is always been the process that leads to the identification and licensing and then opening of a disposal facility. And you have on the one end, countries that are gonna write, like the Scandinavian countries, Finland is very close to opening their nuclear waste repository, Sweden also pretty close, maybe France will follow. And then at the other end of the spectrum, you have countries in which that process has been completely dysfunctional, like the United States. So now we're stuck with all these material that is at the nuclear power plants. It doesn't keep me up at night because like I said, it's very benign and stable and it doesn't cost too much, but ultimately we'll have to be consolidated and put some. We had a group of questions on molten salt reactors, including a shout out to presidential candidate, Andrew Yang, who advocates building thorium powered molten salt reactors. On molten salt reactors, and then you also throw in thorium. Maybe let me start with thorium. I don't think we need thorium. The traditionally the search for alternatives to uranium, which is the fuel that we use in nuclear power plants has been driven by the fear that at one point we're gonna run out of uranium. That fear might have been justified seven years ago when it wasn't clear how much uranium we had. But now that we know how much uranium there is, both in the earth crust as well as frankly, even in seawater in trace levels, but it can be extracted. I think that fear has been put to rest. So there is no shortage of uranium. Even if we were to go up a factor of a hundred in terms of nuclear capacity from where we are now, we would be able to continue to use uranium and not run out for millennia. So this is not an issue. I think there is not a very strong incentive in that sense. Some people feel that a thorium-based fuel cycle might give you some benefits in terms of nonproliferation. That too is questionable. A nuclear reactor because of the physics of the core requires a fissile material that drives the fission reactor and the fission reaction, excuse me. Thorium is not a fissile material. So even a thorium reactor would require enriched uranium to drive the core or to drive the reaction. And so in the end, I don't think there is a strong argument in favor of thorium. There are some countries that for energy security reasons have favored or are inclined to think that thorium might make sense. The example that comes to mind is India. For several decades, they have been an outcast of the nuclear community because of the tests that they did back in the 70s on nuclear weapons. And they had the fear that they would not be able to acquire uranium from the international market. And so they focus on thorium for that reason. For molten soil reactors, very interesting technology. We of course reviewed it, like we reviewed all the advanced technologies in our study. You saw that I didn't put it on that slide where we had the advanced reactors. I didn't put it there. And also in the report, we make the point that while the features of molten soil reactors are attractive, the technology is not ready, quite frankly. There are still some technical questions associated with access of the system, compatibility between the molten salt and the structural materials, particularly in a radiation environment that have to be addressed and resolved before we can say that that technology is viable and available in the near term. So that is not to say it will not become available, but it's certainly not available within this decade. And we were trying to focus on solutions that would be available soon because the climate change problem requires solutions that can be deployed in the near term. One final question I think you probably get asked a lot is what do you say to those who believe you can get to 100% decarbonization of the electric sector through wind, sun, and water only by 2050 or so. Is it a timing problem or... So I know you started with this. Yeah, so I think I gave a few arguments that we think are convincing, but let me give maybe a more, even a more general answer to that. I think the risk of failing to solve climate change is very, very high and we cannot afford that. In other words, the consequences of failing are very, very high. So putting all our eggs in one basket, particularly a basket or a path that is not fully proven is not a good risk management approach. So I've been pounding on this from the beginning of this presentation. I do it all the time. These are not alternatives. I think actually what our analysis shows is that the lowest cost scenario, the most practical, the most likely scenarios for decarbonization include both renewables, hydro, whatever you already have, or whatever you can deploy additionally, solar and wind, absolutely. They make perfect sense. In certain areas make perfect sense. But you also, if you have a low carbon dispatchable energy source in your mix, that helps tremendously. And assuming the nuclear industry can bring down the cost of your nuclear power plants, it would be foolish not to take advantage of that.