 Thanks, Mark, and thanks for hanging around until late in the afternoon to talk to a few nuclear issues. I think you had Bill Perry and George Schultz earlier, did you not? I'm sure that was remarkable in itself. They talk about the dark side of nuclear, I guess, in a way, and they did not, actually. Okay, good. Good. Well, that's my role and my lot here today. As Mark mentioned, I get into nuclear through kind of a convoluted path. In order to command a nuclear aircraft carrier, you have to be two things. You have to be an aviator and you have to be a nuclear engineer. And since those two things do not occur naturally in nature, what the Navy did was find someone with a technical background. I had a couple of master's degrees in aerospace engineering. They sent me to nuclear power school for two years, and when I came out I was fortunate enough to command a nuclear aircraft carrier. That gave me my entree, if you will, into nuclear power. And when I left the Navy, as Mark mentioned, I ran the self-regulatory entity for the commercial nuclear industry in the United States called the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, formed within months after the Mishap at Three Mile Island. It doesn't do advocacy. It does safety oversight. If we're going to have these things, they're going to be run as safe as well as they can possibly be run. I also represented the U.S. in the World Association of Nuclear Operators, which is an organization that oversees the international peace. And I was in Japan after Fukushima. I was in Russia, in Murmansk, looking at their nuclear icebreakers. I spent a lot of time traveling the world looking at various nuances of nuclear power, including into the Emirates and looking at their project under construction over there. So that's kind of my nuclear background, if you will. And with that, I'd like to move into a little bit of history. I only know two nuclear jokes. This is one of those. Those of you that get it laugh, and if you don't, well, I'll explain it to you afterwards. I would like to talk a little bit about history, though, because I think without the context for that, you don't really quite understand where we are in our dialogue about nuclear and what the options are going forward. In the upper left, you see the first atomic reactor, the first nuclear reactor built by Enrico Fermi in a squash court under the stadium at the University of Chicago. OSHA would not let you do that today. I am reasonably assured. Even though Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann at first split the atom in 1938, it had not been sustained reaction generated until December 2 of 1942, at which point Fermi was successful in doing that. And he sent a coded message. This was part of the Manhattan Project saying the Italian explorer has landed in the new world. And the question from the other end, so how are the natives? And he wrote back very friendly. So that was a signal that it was successful. It led to the uncontrolled release of energy that was reflected in first the Trinity test and then the two devices that were used at the end of World War II. But the real focus began when people started to explore how can we use this energy for other purposes? And that's where Admiral Hyman-Rickover came along with the Navy nuclear program. We talk a lot about subsidies today and what's the role of government. But in a real sense, the commercial nuclear enterprise, not just in the US but throughout the world, was built on the back of that experience. The effort to build a nuclear power plant for a nuclear submarine. Interestingly enough, we laid the keel on that submarine in June of 1952 and it was launched 18 months later in 1954. We can't write the specification for a submarine in 18 months now. It just goes to show you how things have changed. Recognizing the power of the atom, as you may be aware, Dwight Eisenhower gave a speech on the floor of the United Nations in 1953 talking about the atoms for peace and the possibility of stripping the military patina off this power source and using it literally for the good of all mankind. He actually went so far as to propose a way in which all nuclear weapons could be kept under international control. Obviously the Russians and other factors intervened and that's not the way things played out. But we began an effort to explore what's in the realm of the possible for the betterment of mankind. In the lower right you see an artist's concept of a nuclear rocket. Actually, a non-flight-worthy version of this was actually tested where they blew liquid hydrogen over fuel plates and a reactor in the adiabatic expansion of that through a nozzle-generated thrust. It's actually remarkably efficient, specific impulse-wise because you only have the oxidizer. You don't have a fuel anymore. In fact, it had other problems though. The oscillation and vibration started spitting parts of the nuclear reactor out through the nozzle and that really wasn't what they had intended. Original thoughts were really going to use it as the second and third stage of the Saturn V moon rocket. But they decided that the folks in South Florida might not approve. But according to press reports the Russians are going to test a version of this next year so don't give up. This is an artist's concept of the WS-125 which is a nuclear-powered airplane that was proposed in the 50s. This happens to be the Lockheed Martin design. There was another one that Convair had proposed. Again, the thought was great. You've got airplanes that can stay airborne forever and you remember during the Cold War we had airplanes that were on constant alert and the idea that these things would go up in orbit and not have to be refueled was a concept that unfortunately when they put the reactor in, a B-36 shielded it all and took it off. It had no room for any payload so that too didn't quite work out. Anybody know this? It's a 1958 Ford Nucleon, a concept for a nuclear-powered automobile that Ford had produced. That is not a continental kit on the back. That is the nuclear reactor that would be replaced at your local gas station about every 10,000 miles and a one-third scale model of this still exists at the Ford Dearborn Museum in Michigan. Obviously a working model was never produced. One of the things that did work however was what you see in the lower left. This was the concept that moved the concept of naval nuclear propulsion into the generation of electricity and at one point there was many as 237 nuclear plants ordered in this country. This was going to be the game changer if you will. We don't understand today and you're not nearly old enough to appreciate how important this was and how things that were atomic and nuclear, this was the dot-com of its time. I mean this was going to change life. They were going to produce electricity, literally the quotation was too cheap to meter. In other words, you were going to do it like your cable company. You were going to pay a monthly fee and you could take as much electricity as you wanted because it was going to be so low cost. That too didn't quite play out. It was complicated by the events that we're all familiar with and in 1979 at the Three Mile Island accident where one of two operating nuclear plants melted down. Even though the radiation release was minor, about one sixth of what you get in the chest x-ray, according to quantification from the Kemeny Commission, the fact of the matter is the public lost confidence in this. The bloom was off the rose. The miracle that was supposed to be good for everybody had proven not to be and as a result, 97 nuclear plants were canceled in this country. You can take a tour across the United States visiting the shell of partially completed nuclear plants still today. About four years ago, the folks at TVA actually completed a reactor that had been abandoned and started it up and because the opportunity presented itself. But clearly, the industry had to do something to recreate and regenerate confidence in it. One of the things they did was found the organization which I was privileged to lead for about seven years, the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations. The gentleman on the left is Bill Lee who was then the Chief Operating Officer and later the Chairman and President of Duke Power. The guy on the right is Dennis Wilkinson. Doesn't mean anything to you but he's a retired three star admiral, was Rick Over's protege, was the first commanding officer of that submarine I showed you in the first slide, the USS Nautilus and obviously a pro-typical nuclear expert. Again, this is what info was all about. It was to deal with the questions of industry safety and integrity, the fear of the unknown, the loss of public trust was prohibited by law and by premise and concept for being an advocate. If you're going to inspect these plants five weeks every two years on site, intrusive, no nonsense, no holds bar, shut them down if they don't operate well kind of thing, then you can't be an advocate. Really, that's the challenge the old Atomic Energy Commission faced in its early days. It was supposed to regulate and oversee safety at the same time it was going to do advocacy. In some sense that's what the Japanese are wrestling with is they try and restructure their regulatory process. So info does not replace our own Nuclear Regulatory Commission but it's complimentary in that regard and has had some reasonable success. In 1979, when TMI occurred, the average time, the capacity factor, for those of you that know electricity and grid and generation of the nuclear fleet in the United States was 63%. In other words, of the possible time you could be online generating electricity. They were only online 63% of the time. Last year they were online 92% of the time and the rest of the time they were down for routine maintenance. So it kind of shows you the dramatic changes in reliability and safety associated with that. In 1979, the average nuclear reactor, commercial nuclear reactor in the United States scram did an emergency shutdown, not the catastrophic kind of thing, but hey, something's not right, we're gonna shut it down and then fix it and then start up. The average nuclear reactor scrams seven times a year. The average scram rate for a nuclear reactor in the United States today is zero, the median of those. And so it just does not happen in the way that it used to, again, attribute to the reliability and improved training and the like. And again, there are some other issues that if you're interested in we can talk about later that why does self-regulation really work? How can this be? How can you regulate yourself? How can the industry fund this entity and also be responsive and reflective of its demands and its expectations and it's an interesting concept? But the outcome is very, very different. What you see there in the upper left is three mile island today. Okay, that's plant number one there that's steaming and plant number two, the one that was forever shut down there on the left. It's the people that made it happen. The capacity factor is what I described to you, 92%, and that's the number of nuclear reactors in the United States and it's declining. Not because of safety concerns but because they can't compete in merchant environments with natural gas at $2 a firm. What are the implications of that going forward in terms of emissions and the like when we start dealing with as Silla talked about so well, the infusion of renewables in there and you're gonna have to have something to provide baseload generation when those aren't available or the storage is not sufficient. How do you think about that going forward and that's what I'll talk about later in the talk. As a parenthetic insertion, I was asked to testify in front of the President's Commission on the Gulf Oil Spill as they explored whether to demand a self-regulatory model be imposed on the oil and gas industry. I went and talked about the things, some of which I've shared with you, why INPO worked and the like. This was the conclusion in their report. Regrettably, that has not been acted upon in the oil and gas industry. Still does not have an independent self-regulatory entity. There have been some mishaps along the way. You're familiar with the Chernobyl accident. A RBMK-1000, a graphite block, automatic control, graphite-moderated reactor of an old design, unstable, had a positive void coefficient. That may not mean much to you non-nuclear engineers, but it means that it's gotta be continually controlled, otherwise it will go divergent. And in fact, that's what happened when they decided to exercise an unapproved test without, by disabling all the safety devices. And so what happened was not a nuclear explosion, it was in fact a steam explosion, but it broke the reactor apart with results that we all know, 31 immediate victims and 140 shortly thereafter, the first responders, and evacuated a 30 kilometer circle around that reactor in a sarcophagus where it exists today. An interesting thing, you may have seen some of the documentaries on what's happened within that radius of the plant. It's kind of interesting, not exactly what people anticipated. Fukushima Daiichi had a bit of a different situation. An old generation one, generation two reactor plants, there were six of them on this site, right on the water when they got the unexpected earthquake. Things shut down automatically as they were supposed to. What they were not prepared for was the magnitude of the tsunami. They built a seawall that was 15 feet high, the tsunami was 46 feet high. Obviously that didn't work, but also some problems with design, the reactor switch gears, the electric distribution was below grade level, which means they became swimming pools. Electricity doesn't like that very well. The tsunami swept away the fuel for the emergency diesel generators. They too were knocked out. The irony is that inciting this to reduce the pump head from the seawater for cooling, they had actually ground down the cliff by 100 feet to make it nearly sea level. If the plant had been in place where it was originally built on the original cliff, we wouldn't have had the outcome we did there. But obviously there were no radiation fatalities. There were two gentlemen that were being between the earthquake and the tsunami doing an inspection in one of the basements and then unfortunately were inundated by the tsunami and then someone else who was operating a crane was crushed when the tsunami destroyed the crane, but no radiation casualties. That has had a great effect here in the United States on the optics associated with nuclear energy. There is no doubt, but even more so in selective countries around the world. Germany for example is elected to begin to close down its nuclear program even though they ran one of the best and safest in the world, but in other places around the world it's booming. No pun intended. There's lots of growth out there. There's 63 nuclear reactors under construction around the world. There are exploration studies ongoing in countries like Turkey and Jordan and other places. Even Vietnam is exploring whether nuclear power might be adequate for them. 45 countries in all are expressing interest. There are real challenges with that. How does the regulatory process work? What's the oversight look like? How do they understand the seriousness of this industry? If you build and start up a nuclear reactor as a nation you are in that business for 100 years. For 100 years in order to deal with the waste and the fuel and the residual radiation should you decide to back out of it the next day that's how long you're gonna be dealing with this. So it's a commitment that people need to understand and as you might imagine it needs to be done well. Lots of people are beginning to think about nuclear differently though. And again I'm not here to sell you anything but someone you just saw, Steve Chu, had this to say about it. And there really is a wonder if the climate math can work given the uncertainties we have and the technologies and the like without nuclear. The idea of nuclear goes away and you replace it with natural gas you're replacing something that's effectively zero carbon emissions with something that has 50% that of coal. Steve Chu has some very strong opinions on that. You can see what Ernie Moniz has to say about it. Even NASA has come out with a formal study saying coal and gas are far more harmful than nuclear power writ large. We put in this country two and a half billion that's with a B metric tons of stuff in the air burning fossil fuels every year to generate electricity. No matter what your views are on climate change, global warming and the like that's just not healthy. And so how do you deal with that effectively going forward to something that people are gonna wrestle with? Richard Lester who's chairman of the Nuclear Engineering Department at MIT has said that and James Hansen obviously believes that by pushing towards an all renewable portfolio you are going to force the folks to move to a natural gas and fossil backup and that that ultimately is gonna result in more degradation of the environment, not less. There are new nuclear technologies on the cusp. You've seen some of the reports here locally. There are about 19 startups of various stripes that are exploring different nuclear technologies. When you think about it, nuclear has not had a lot of research and development applied to new concepts since its inception. I talk about all the things that Admiral Rickover did that were good creating this and ensuring a culture of safety in the Navy. In the Navy we used to call him the kindly old gentleman. Well he was one of those things, he was old. But the fact of the matter is it is perhaps the true that by pushing the light water reactor technology even though all of these technologies that you see here with the exception of fusion were demonstrated in the 50s and 60s, none of them were further explored or even exploited and considered as alternatives in the commercial sector. What's in the realm of the possible now with all of the solid state devices, the approaches to safety, the awareness that we have and the sensitivities, is it too early to take this off the table is a fair question. And as you saw earlier, some really thoughtful people, Nobel laureates, a number of them, are asking we ought to give this another chance. We ought to take a look at this because we think we can't get to where we need to go without it. These are some of the benefits they tout and they deal with all of the historic nuclear concerns and I'll talk about that very candidly here in a moment as well. The primary one is cost. Small modular reactors and other options have the potential to come down that learning curve to do things incrementally and build things that can be produced much more quickly and reduce the financing costs and get back to closer to what they call the overnight costs in the utility industry or what it would really cost to build a thing if you could buy and build it today. The cost effectively doubles over the 10 year life of a construction of a nuclear power plant because of the cost of financing and the like. All of these things have to be a part of it. You heard Silla talk about the need for load following and the flexibility associated with that. All of those things are possible in new versions of nuclear according to a number of the proponents and are being researched and considered. So what does the future look like? Don't know. The jury's still out. Even the co-founder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, has come out in favor of this. We've got waste issues we need to be able to deal with. You see a picture there on the left of Yucca Mountain that's an above ground storage area hypothesized on the right that New Mexico was already volunteered to build with dry cast storage and the like. And so there are options out there for dealing with these kinds of things but we are gonna have to in the final analysis for nuclear address the safety issues. The environmental realities, the economics, the public acceptance issue. There is a fear out there of the unknown. The irony is people are willing to accept other risks. You know, the risks that I talk about with the billions of metric tons that we put into the air, the risks associated with coal mining in 2015 was the safest year in U.S. coal mining history. Only 14 people died, okay? And a number of people that have been killed in nuclear plants and the nuclear accidents in the U.S. of course, zero. Now that's a different context and it's risk that you accept versus risk that you think are being pushed on you by government. There's a sociological dimension to this that would have to be effectively addressed. And then finally it needs a national policy and a solution to the spent fuel reprocessing issues or storage issues. You ask how do other nations do it? A number of nations reprocess. The irony is when we take spent fuel out of a commercial nuclear reactor after three burn cycles is how long it's in there. 95% of the energy is still in it. It's just been poisoned by the actinides and no longer is suitable for nuclear fission. So five other countries around the world reprocess they take out the 5% of poison and bring the 95% that's reusable back. So it's not quite a perpetual motion machine but it has the potential to do that. The U.S. has a matter of policy since Jimmy Carter has elected not to reprocess and has not reversed that but this is a graphic depiction of the fact that 95% of what we call spent fuel is reusable or recyclable in today's parlance. James Lovelock, noted environmentalist and creator of the Gaia hypothesis has said this but there are some long-term issues that have been plaguing that the nuclear industry needs to pay attention to. We talked a lot and a focus for decades on prevention of any mishaps. Well, you also need to deal with the response side of it and Fukushima reminded us of that and it's completely changed the way the U.S. industry approaches that, the facilities, the deployable units, the immediate response, all of the things that the Japanese struggled with a bit, the U.S. and the world are now much more attuned to. New relationships amongst those who oversee the safety of these entities is important. The government's role, the private sector's role, the utilities role and certainly even nonprofit role, the international dimensions, huge dimensions here. I mean, there's 440 nuclear power plants operating, nuclear reactors operating around the world. We're only a fraction of that. We're less than 100 now and declining. So how are those being done and how well are they being built safely operated and effectively overseen and shut down when the need arises? There's a real challenge with all of this but there's a real opportunity as well depending on how you think about it. Stewart Brand of the Whole Earth Catalog he's on record of supporting nuclear. What you see in the upper left are versions of the small modular reactor I spoke to earlier where they're much smaller, maybe 200 megawatt designs. You can buy them one, two or a six pack if you will, link them all together. You can build them in the U.S. We can't build any of the large nuclear power plant reactor, the vessels or steam generators in the U.S. anymore. We've lost the steel processing capability. We have to buy those from Japan or China or France if we're going to do it. These are options that they're self-contained, they're passive, they shut themselves down if there's a problem. These are some of the designs that are being proposed and in the lower right finally you see the Lockheed Martin design for a fusion reactor. The old physics joke for you physicists folks is that fusion is 20 years away and it has been for the last 50 years and but you know, in the interest of old disclosure I'm on the board of Lockheed Martin and I've been down to the skunk works and talked to the engineer who's overseeing this and he really believes this time we've got some potential and that this could go forward but think about what that might do in terms of nuclear problems. This thing, if you lose power or there's a problem you shut it down, it's over, it disappears completely. I mean the thing shuts itself down, there is no residual heat or anything that has to be dealt with and we've been the beneficiaries of this type of nuclear power for centuries. When I was at INPO, I had a guy that worked for me, you've probably got friends that do the same thing. It always had a little bone mark, a little saying under his signature on his email and he says, we've been using nuclear energy for the desalination of seawater for centuries. It's called rain and the fact of the matter isn't the point he was making that the sun itself is a fusion vehicle and the like and offers the great ability to do that in the benefit of all mankind. So again, not telling you what the answers are, that's why the question mark is after not but where are we? And what do we see as the future? When we're looking at all of the opportunities here to redesign an electric grid, the proponents of nuclear and rethinking nuclear are saying, hey wait a minute, why would we want to go to something that's 50% coal when we could go to something that's zero? Why not instead of renewables, gas and nuclear, why not renewables and nuclear in an appropriate way with new designs that are much safer and the like and there's a lot of research in the valley and elsewhere with thoughtful people just like you that are out there exploring what's in the realm of the possible rather than accepting the answers that perhaps were crafted on data that may be decades old. And so that's my message here today. Thank you for your attention and I'd be delighted to take any questions. Yes, sir. Well, it's a great point and there are several pieces to it. First off, there's a regulatory requirement. There's a, as you might want appropriately, how much safety and oversight is required. The average nuclear power plant in the United States of mid-size, a single reactor unit, has about 700 people that work there. You know how many people work at the average gas-fired plant? It's probably 35 or 40. So there's human costs associated with this. These are very highly skilled and trained people. Now the good news is that in the case of current existing nuclear all those costs have been written off. They're fully depreciated. The cost of fuel in the nuclear fuel cycle is only probably 20% of the operating cost. In a natural gas plant, it's 80% of the cost. And the cost of uranium is declining. So some of the costs for nuclear are going down. But when you're in the merchant marketplace and the reason I emphasize merchant, maybe some of you understand the markets that are out there. It was an insight to me when I first got into the private sector. If you're in a regulated utility, you can pass the appropriate costs with the approval of the Public Utility Commission onto your ratepayers. If the Public Utilities Commission overseeing the best interests of the people believes it's an appropriate thing to do. If you're in a merchant environment, as Exelon and others are in the Northeast, you're in the marketplace. And it doesn't matter. What matters is the cost at the bus bar, the cost per megawatt hour. And you cannot compete with $2 of therm gas. I mean, you just cannot. So there are infrastructure costs that are there. There are security costs there. When the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is a very good organization, it was created about five years before Three Mile Island to kind of get the overseers away from the advocates and it will. But all of its funding or the bulk of its funding comes from the utilities. It doesn't get any, it gets very little federal funds. So if you want to license a new nuclear power plant, for example, you have to pay millions to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the privilege of having them review your license application and let you do it. So there are lots of hidden costs, if you will, that go to nuclear. And I'm not gonna get into the subsidy kind of arguments, but if George was here, Schultz, I'd ask him his views on what he calls a revenue-neutral carbon tax, because he believes that we have to level the playing field and let everybody play on the same sheet of news, not with yelling past each other, but looking honestly about what does it cost and what carbon footprint do you have. And he believes that in that situation, nuclear would do well. And a lot of the analysis shows that once you get rid of some of the subsidies that flow to those that are needing it or getting it in the stay in age. So there's a lot of issues. It's a fairly complex problem, but a lot of it's just the oversight and the regulatory process and the administration that it takes to make sure that these things are done well and safely. But there are initiatives to drive costs down in nuclear, and that's what some of these new designs and new technologies can bring if the regulator allows it. Yes, ma'am. No, I'm trying not to pick winners and losers, but, and I breezed past it in the interest of time, but there are some that are just fascinating. I mean, there's molten salt designs, for example, that are much lower waste than like, there's a traveling wave version that Bill Gates is interested in that actually consumes its own waste when you think about it. I mean, so, yes, it creates waste, but then it burns that. And so there's things out there that in the realm of physics are theoretically possible, but that have not been funded to the point where they've created full-scale models and test units, but that's what's in the cusp. If we can find a way to deal with the first of a kind costs and whose role is it to invest in that? Is it the government's role? I mentioned how indirectly the government subsidized all of this through the Navy Nuclear Program. Is it the role now? You should have asked Steve Chu when he was here. I asked him that when he was, after he came back to campus when he was Secretary of Energy, he said, well, if I were king, this is what I would do. And I said, Steve, you were king. You know, no, that's not fair. He was just the chair of the department, but the head of the department, the secretary, but my point is, how do we think about this as a nation? What do we wanna do going forward? And how do we think about the realities and the needs of electricity? Not for us. I mean, we worry about finding a socket to recharge our iPhones and all the rest. Do you know that nearly 25% of the world does not have access to electricity today? Zero. I mean, this is, you talk about poverty and inequality. How do we deal with this poverty of energy and how it impacts people's lives around the world? There's an opportunity here if we think about it in a holistic way. So I've got the big zero here, the big goose egg. I hope that's not my score. I mean, you're not the East German judge, are you? All right, no, they don't exist anymore. Okay, all right. All right, thank you all very much.