 Hello, all right Thank you very much for coming out to this exciting event today. Do you even despite the weather? Before we get started, I'd like to invite Dr. Mong Chang the John A. Edwardson Dean of College of Engineering and the Roscoe H. George professor of electrical engineering to introduce the distinguished lecture series speaker today Good afternoon everyone Welcome to the Purdue College of Engineering distinguished lecture series this is a series that started at the beginning of 2018 and This is the third of the installation for this particular academic year The goal of the series is to invite some of the most leading and distinguished leaders in the world of engineering to come to Purdue as We aspire to attain the pinnacle of excellence at scale and today's topic is timely and Critically important to the United States and to many countries around the world and It's a topic where Purdue's school of nuclear engineering Has been and will continue to play a unique and crucial role So I am indeed very honored to introduce the distinguished lecture today to Purdue Director General Magwood has had a distinguished career with a unique background combining science and the arts from the Carnegie Mellon University and over the past due to decades a Director General Magwood has been a leader In the United States and around the globe In the areas of nuclear safety science and technology Without spending too much time eating into the actual lecture I would summarize some of the major accomplishments Knowing that I must be missing quite a few along the way 20 years ago Mr. Magwood became the director of the civilian side of DOE and Established the Idaho National Laboratory during his tenure there And later he became one of the five commissioners at the NRC nuclear regulatory commission of the United States And as of four years ago He became the director general of the paris-based NEA nuclear energy agency. This is a multi agency international collaboration center with representatives from 33 countries And in today's day and age it is particularly important to hear the voices from somebody such as William Magwood as we venture into the future of nuclear energy It is our distinct pleasure and honor to welcome you director general magwood. Thank you so much Well, thank you very much dean and it's a real pleasure to be back at Purdue This is my third visit to Purdue over the years. Every time I come here, I have a different job. So you don't recognize me My first visit as as you mentioned I was running the DOE nuclear engineering nuclear educate nuclear energy program Where I was it where I did that for more than a decade My second trip I was an NRC commissioner. That was probably six or seven years ago And now I'm here as director general of the nuclear energy agency. So I'm looking forward To a discussion with all of you today. It's great to see a fantastic turnout. It was either me or the cookies I'm suspecting it was probably more of the cookies, but Once you stop chewing the cookies, I'll make a few points and if you have any questions be happy to answer them First it's been a fantastic visit. We've only been here today But we covered a lot of ground. I went to see your research reactor critical facility in some of the laboratories Had very good and very engaging conversations with your professors. You have a very very Distinguished and expert faculty here. You should be very happy to have an opportunity to work with them And my job today is to give you an overview of some things that we're thinking about on the international framework And I'll start by giving you just a quick snapshot of the nuclear energy agency itself Because I suspect that many of you have not heard much about the NEA because the NEA Is an organization that has worked almost exclusively in the government sector over the year So we have a lot of government government collaboration But we have not historically done very much with academia or even really industry. So we're trying to change that now So the NEA is an organization that was created 60 years ago this year. So we're now 60 years old Life begins at 60 for a lot of people, but so we're 60 years old now And we started off as a european-based organization was created in the aftermath of the second world war Is part of the reconstruction of europe So back in those days european countries saw nuclear energy is the pathway to the future So they wanted to band together to develop nuclear technology and apply it Over the years the NEA became a global organization We now have 33 membered countries that include countries such as the united states, japan, korea Canada, mexico, argentina So many countries around the world and the thing that distinguishes the NEA from other national organizations is that most of our members Are countries that have deep experience with the use of nuclear technology Countries that have long experience with nuclear regulation nuclear research Countries that have operated nuclear power plants for many years. So that that is the core of our membership And what we do is we bring those countries together and they're experts together to try to solve Problems through policy analysis and research and development Excuse me Much of our work revolves around What we call stannie technical committees and i won't go through all these in any detail, but In essence we have these eight committees On upon which experts are designated by their membered countries and they're all government officials They come to the NEA to deliberate on complicated issues And each one of these committees and you can see they represent really the full breath of civilian nuclear technology nuclear safety Nuclear law and nuclear science nuclear technology is all captured by these committees But each one of these committees has a very complex substructure and i'd use nuclear science as an example as you can see in this chart nuclear science has Expert groups and working parties and everything related from ranging from Minor act night management to criticality work accident tolerant fuels So these are experts who come from academia from laboratories From industry to come together to try to solve specific issues and in some cases to conduct research and development All of the work of these these groups Gets compressed into reports that get issued by the NEA about 30 reports a year That are available free of charge online And i'll talk a little bit more about some of our reports as we go forward So any of the work that we do in any of these technical areas is available on our website free of charge So i invite you to um avail yourself of that We are also the home for a variety of other special projects Many of you probably have heard of the generation four international forum This is a collection of governments that have gotten together to develop next generation nuclear power technologies That's under our framework The multinational design evaluation program is leading regulators who are analyzing together jointly State of the art technology such as the ap 1000 the european pressurized water reactor vvv our technology from russia others The international framework for nuclear range of cooperation is a group of 66 countries That includes both highly developed countries such as you know, united states korea and france But also countries that aspire to develop nuclear technology in the future such as afghan countries countries in the middle east and countries from southeast asia And they work together to compare notes on interesting issues such as what to do about nuclear waste How to finance nuclear power plants how to build human capital? So these are all under our framework as well as 22 major joint research and development projects that are currently underway And these projects range from projects that can take place over the course of decades For example, we have a project that still is underway related to the use of the holden reactor in norway We're we're at least until recently we were doing a radiation of fuel samples and materials Um to projects that last only a few years and as examples of some of the shorter term projects I decided to point to two That are related to the fukushima daichi accident BSAF is a very interesting project. This is a project that applies scientific information from Tsukushima daichi and compares that information to Our severe accident codes. So there's many severe accident codes That have been developed in the united states and france and japan and other countries And we compare those results from those codes about the accident to what we what we actually experienced in japan To see if they agree the good news is they do agree they agree quite well And the codes agree pretty well among themselves another project sarif Takes samples from the water from fukushima daichi plants and does analysis to try to anticipate what the core debris inside the Reactors might be composed of all this of course will be helpful in understanding the nature of severe accidents and understanding how to clean up these facilities so The fukushima daichi accident obviously was something that had a big impact around the world and I thought I should spend a few minutes on that Over the years I've actually started to talk about fukushima daichi less because I think we've learned the lessons and we've moved forward But I think for this group is important to just take a few minutes to to review this because It is a very important incident But perhaps not quite the revolutionary incident that a lot of people think it was Soon after the accident the nuclear energy agency Pulled together experts from regulatory agencies around the world And we analyzed what was known and the first thing that these experts came to and these are experts representing all countries including Countries such as germany and italy that later decided not to build nuclear power plants or continue nuclear power plants The basic conclusion was that nuclear power plants in their in these countries are safe to operate There was nothing that we learned about the fukushima daichi accident Changed our minds about how nuclear plants were designed or constructed how they're regulated how they're operated It really wasn't a major aha that told us that we were doing something wrong But the nature of the nuclear business is to learn from experience And one of the experiences that we did take from this Is that we needed to do something to enable nuclear power plants to deal with extreme events Um because it's very clear that we can plan for Earthquakes we can plan for floods But what happens in the case that the once in 100,000 year event takes place next week What do we do about that? How do we recover from that? Also, and i'm going to spend some time on this subject The accident revealed that we have to take more seriously this whole issue of what we've been layer have Have now called the human aspects of nuclear safety and i'll spend some time on that So we've learned these big lessons you have to understand, you know, the natural hazards facing each plant You have to you have to be able to recognize extreme events can happen And that recovering from those events is as important as the initial design of the plant itself And that these human aspects have to be dealt with So over the last several years, we've analyzed what has gone on around the world since the accident And i'm very confident in saying the safety and really every country that we work with has been dramatically enhanced since 311 Not so much in terms of the the day-to-day operation that hasn't changed very much But the preparation for unusual events the preparation for disaster is much much stronger And i won't go through all these we don't heavily have time today But if you go around to visit any nuclear power plant in any eight countries and you will see Equipment procedures in place in case the unexpected happens to enable plants to recover from these unusual events Whether they be man-made events from terrorist attacks or Unusual events such as large earthquakes or floods and this is something that we captured in this report Which is again available to you online Now there are some things and as you heard from my background I spent a lot of time as an nrc commissioner And I was a commissioner when all this took place And I can tell you and I would love to spend some more time telling you talking more about the Fukushima Daiichi accident because It certainly was a pretty tense time at the nrc during this event When we were watching the information coming in trying to understand how to interpret what we were hearing and what we weren't hearing from japan But in the end our job became a matter of how to go forward Um and going forward meant that regulations had to change around the world And there's some very very important changes that have been had happened over the years that I wanted to highlight One is as as I noted is a greater focus on extreme events You know after after the accident regulators and operators around the world are now Preparing for these extreme events and these are things that really had been considered beyond design basis before But now not so much and so we have this new equipment. We have new procedures We have these you know in europe they even have these like these special strike teams that will go to a nuclear plant Just in case there's an accident to bring the equipment and experts to try to deal with an accident One consequence of all this however is that we're now regulating in effect severe accidents And this is a major sea change in regulation around the world um in the past Severe accidents were considered beyond considered beyond design basis and what that meant in effect was Industry did not have to worry about it Our job was to keep the severe accidents from happening We put all the regulations in place procedures in place to make sure the accidents never happened But if they did happen, it was beyond design basis We didn't expect to rate the industry to deal with it to do anything with it We now expect the industry to deal with severe accidents and this this creates a very uncertain ground for the industry going forward because The lines between design basis things are responsible for and beyond design basis things They were not responsible for is now completely blurred. So this is a very very important change And so now regular now regulars expect industry to mitigate severe accidents, which is the first time they've ever had to do that um Another thing and this is something that's perhaps not necessarily a bad thing Is that the expectations of the public have changed a lot since the accident in japan We see around the world the public is much more engaged when it comes to dealing with new decisions involving the deployment The extension of lives the placement of nuclear waste anything to do with nuclear the public seems to have a greater appetite for involvement I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing and i'll talk a little bit more about this in a minute But it does make things a bit more complicated It means that things do take a bit more time because you have to do the public education They have to do the public outreach to make sure that the public has enough information to make good decisions And as I mentioned earlier One of the most important things I think that we have pulled from this Is recognizing that the human aspects of nuclear safety may actually be as important to the future of nuclear safety As anything we do with plant equipment and procedures The technical aspects are extremely important. Don't get me wrong But I think that we have to put more effort in dealing with this human element I won't make a prediction that if there is another major nuclear accident That when we do the analysis it won't be because we failed in some Area of design or we didn't have the right fuel or we didn't have the right protective systems Or we didn't have the right regulation. It'll be because somebody somewhere didn't do their job And that's something that we have to protect against So we spent a lot of time at the NDA in the last few years on this and I won't go through all these reports in detail But each one of these reports Focuses mostly on on regulatory organizations and the safety culture that they have And the one of the more recent ones dealt with the safety culture of effective regulatory bodies And this was a good report that we put together After bringing experts together from different countries to compare the notes on what they thought about the safety culture Issue because when we went back and we looked at the japanese accident One of the things that became clearer was the regular at the time was called nisa Had a very flawed safety culture They were sac they were making decisions and sacrifice Sacrifice overall safety To make sure the industry moved forward quickly and effectively They were compromised because of the way they were structured because of the messages that were given within their organization And this is something that I think everyone in hindsight recognizes was a big mistake Because the regular had many opportunities to make decisions that could have prevented the access from happening But did not take action when it could have so we focused a lot on the need for regulatory organizations to have the right leadership To display the characteristic of safety culture for every individual To be responsible for safety and that's something that I think is important for all of you Those of you who are going to be working in nuclear fields To recognize that you have this personal responsibility for safety No matter what your job is no matter where you are in a vendor in a laboratory in a design organization You always have to remember that you you are responsible for safety if something goes wrong You don't want to be the person that's asking yourself the question the day after Is this because it's something that I should have done that I didn't do You want to make sure that you take personal responsibility and that you hold others around you responsible as well And this is something that's important in regulatory organizations, but also very important in operational organizations as well One area I wanted to highlight because this is actually quite interesting Is that in the process of doing this report one conclusion that came out was That it's very important the characteristics in national culture should not be viewed viewed as an impediment to safety But rather is characteristics and cultural strengths to be aware of and used and fostered in developing safety culture So this sound doesn't sound like a very controversial statement, but it actually was within nuclear circles internationally People don't like talking about this We forced them to talk about because we thought it was important And in essence what it says is that safety culture is not a completely universal concept Safety culture is a bit different if you're looking at it from an american perspective versus a French perspective versus a russian perspective versus a japanese perspective And it's not that the the basic principles of safety culture are different But how you communicate them and how you reinforce them those could be very different So how do we deal with this? Well, we put together something called the country specific safety culture form And I won't go through all the details of this But basically what we've done is we put together a framework where countries can run through exercises To analyze this issue of national culture and how it affects safety culture We've done it now once so far with sweden sweden volunteered for this and we found out all the flaws in swedish culture That lead to the province of safety culture is really a very fascinating exercise We had about 50 people both in rate from regulators and operators within sweden who participate in a day and a half exercise to analyze this And it went extremely well. We issued a report That is now available on our website won't go through all this detail But that's what the report looks like The next one is going to be held in finland this spring And we've been asked to hold similar workshops in about five other countries So we're now organizing ourselves to do this on a regular basis And my hope is eventually we'll have a library of reports like this So we can analyze this whole issue of safety culture in a very realistic way And and hopefully this will start to plug some of the holes in safety culture vulnerability that we have around the world Also, as I mentioned public engagement is becoming very important So we spend a lot of time on this as well And you know, I I'm highlighting these non-technical factors because I don't think to get enough attention in a lot of the venues that I think that people like you deal with because you're a very technical group your engineers or scientists And you never probably give much thought to things like culture and public communications But the future nuclear power probably depends a lot more on these issues than anything that will be happening in laboratories around the world over the next 10 years Because if the public doesn't think that regulators and operators are listening to what they're saying and understanding what their concerns are And responding to those concerns They won't allow the industry to go forward. So these these things are very important So we had an exercise it brought together about about 140 senior government officials from different areas These are people who were operations types. They were regulators. They were in charge of nuclear waste We brought them all together and we put them in a room together and we made them talk to each other for three days And they had these very productive roundtable discussions and they reached some conclusions And i'll just highlight these very quickly because I think they're really they're some interests One thing is that all situations are different. All countries are different all all all all all circumstances are different So there's no one size fits all approach. There's no magic solution to how to engage with the public But that officials in the industry have to just simply take the time to engage Don't just put information on a website and send it out and expect you've done your job You have to sit down talk to people. You have to answer their questions. You have to listen to their concerns We also found that Bringing younger people into these conversations is very important Because nuclear activities take so long to germinate and take so long to bring the conclusion That it makes a lot of sense to bring younger generations into the conversation because in cases like nuclear waste They'll be the only way that they're a whole adult life So it makes sense to bring them involved in these conversations But also recognize that bringing people into these conversations is not a voting process It's still a technical exercise that you're trying to inform the public about So it doesn't mean at the end of a session with the public everyone raises their hand. Who's in favor? It's not the way this works But it's important to hear all their concerns Um, so again, this face-to-face personal interaction is really key. These these various officials came to these conclusions Um, there's another report that's available on our website And and I think that the the bottom line that we walked away with was that it's important for officials To look at these necessities of interacting with the public is not a burden But an opportunity an opportunity to communicate their message and to get their points across and to help educate the public Because these the these discussions will continue over the course of long periods of time Now this is all very important because We believe that there's going to be a strong role for nuclear power in the future But we have to deal with these soft issues as we go forward Now obviously The development of the Paris Accord back in 2015 is something that has galvanized a lot of discussion about nuclear We have a lot of mechanisms on the international framework that deal with How to address climate change issues how to reduce co2 and One thing that's been very interesting is to recognize that as these conversations go on and you listen to these international bodies discuss climate change They have a strange tendency to not talk about energy very much, which is very strange to me But it does happen. We're trying to fix that but but it does go on But energy represents really 60 of the whole issue when it comes to co2 emissions So it's very important that we look at this from an energy standpoint and to grow from there Now this is a very interesting chart that distracts some recent history if you look at this chart you see that The us for example Which is I think the light blue line has been doing very well when it comes reducing co2 emissions Largely through switching from coal to natural gas Europe their emissions have been trending downwards as well Combination of factors including some deindustrialization The interesting ones are probably germany, which is kind of leveled off and the most recent data Which is not shown in this chart shows the german emissions starting to trend back up again And japan of course, which has this big spike. That's a red line Which is what what happened when all the japanese plants were shut down After fukushima daichi and they went to using lng And you see their emissions have spiked And they're now trying to figure out how in the world do they get their Their programs back on track Now the interesting country of course is at the bottom there, which is france And you know as france is way way below everyone else and among the major industrialized countries very very few can say this But france right now as of today is one country That meets cop 21 requirements when it comes to energy right now today And why is that because they use 78 percent of nuclear provides 78 percent of their electricity supply Now they don't seem to want to keep it that way They want to reduce the reliance on on nuclear and increase renewables, which means their emissions will go up But that's another conversation But this shows you how nuclear plays into this conversation Even a relatively modest number of nuclear power plants in an economy the size of of japan Or france has a major impact on this issue And I think that I when I look at this it's not just about climate change. It's really about air quality in general So I look at I look at this as an analog for what air quality looks like in countries overall As you can see from this in france is pretty good right now So one would think they'd want to keep it, but that's that's certainly a national conversation So we have a sister organization the international energy agency They do a lot of broad economic analysis and this is a chart they put together a few years ago This shows the answer to the question If we are to meet the COP 21 requirements and reduce CO2 emissions dramatically What does energy look like in 2050? And their answer was basically well, we need a lot of everything we need a lot of renewables We need carbon sequestration But we also need a major contribution globally from nuclear And nuclear is a big blue band in the middle there And that's equivalent to about two and a half times increased current nuclear capacity globally And so that's a pretty that's a pretty heroic increase over that period of time We're talking about the equivalent of something like 500 large nuclear power plants built around the world between now and In say 2040 or so It's hard to see how we do that at this point. It's certainly as possible We have built at that rate in the past, but we don't see the kind of Impedateness right now to make this a reality And and I think I want to focus a little bit on why I think it's going to be difficult to make that work Let me start with this. Is nuclear cost-competitive? Well, whenever we talk about the cost competitiveness of various energy technologies It's very common to to refer to the levelized costs of generating electricity And this chart shows that particularly if you include some costs of carbon Nuclear does very well and this is a report that we did a while back that focuses on How do you compare these various technologies in the case where there's about I think it's about a 30 dollar per ton Cost of carbon nuclear does very well nuclear is cheaper than Most renewables nuclear is cheaper than a lot of the fossil fuels very competitive looks like a very good story And if this is where if this was exactly how people make decisions It would make me feel a lot better But what we have discovered and just through practice This is not how people make decisions about what what to build they make decisions on what to build More on how much do things cost to construct? And this is one where we're not doing very well Now the funny thing about this chart is it actually understates recent experience on how much nuclear power plants have been costing This shows a cost of about six thousand dollars per install kilowatt Which is actually significantly below what we've seen in the last few projects But this was this was a this was a very um an average estimate and looked at the projects all around the world And you can see in this chart that nuclear is just this completely out of bounds spike This is not sustainable If we can't bring these costs down Then it's hard to see how nuclear could ever achieve the kind of deployment that we were showing in the earlier chart This is our big challenge. I think how do we deal with this? How do we get those costs down? How much of this is related to the technology itself? And how much of this is related to our ability to to build and deploy nuclear plants cost effectively This is something that we have to deal with and we'll talk a little bit about this again in a minute Now when I'm we're making these comparisons I also I have to hasten to point out that this is based on today's markets as they are structured But I am willing to say to you Today, well, I've got one more chart here first. This this speaks to Recent experience in the us about plant closures that I think you're familiar with this story We've lost a lot of plants already. There's a much many more on a chopping block And a lot will depend on the market a lot depends on how these plants are cost How much they cost to operate in the markets they they exist in and as you know in the united states in particular We have very very low energy prices because of natural gas and there's also an impact from subsidized renewables And this is driving baseload plants particularly nuclear plants out of market prices And this is a big problem But as I was as I was starting to say a minute ago A lot of this depends on what you think the market looks like and what we think and after looking at this not just in the us But in many other countries The markets in many countries are broken. They don't work And I'll give you a very tangible example. We have been looking at the case of Swiss hydroelectric facilities. They were built back in the 1950s fully depreciated facilities is simply General electricity. That's all they do all day. General electricity. They're losing money in Switzerland So if you have hydro if you have if you have depreciated hydro facilities losing money That should tell you something about your markets that your markets don't work your markets are broken So markets in a lot of the countries we work with are completely dysfunctional and there's lots of reasons for that but Part of it is that the markets don't reflect the true cost of generating electricity We often see these comparisons that look at the cost of generating electricity from say wind turbines Versus nuclear and nuclear always looks much much higher than that But the reality is that when you look at what those costs reflect They almost never reflect The the costs associated with transmission access the cost associated with storage the cost associated with backup energy supply The costs associated with the impact on the grid itself, which is not insignificant It's actually a very large impact These costs are never accounted for and then if you include a beyond that the external the externality costs associated with societal impacts environmental impacts That is probably what the true cost is now. I'm not saying necessarily that we should change all our markets to reflect all these costs But if you're making decisions about what to build in the future, why would you not include these costs in your calculation? It just simply makes sense to do it that way, but we are not doing that today We're starting to advocate that and people are starting to understand now That they have to take these costs into consideration. They make decisions. Otherwise, they're just making the wrong decisions But as of today, we're seeing nuclear plants going offline around the world because their costs are not being compared correctly with other resources So because of that and this is a scenario we did a while back Where we asked the question the first the first chart says basically If nuclear were allowed to expand If you had a carbon price was high enough to price fossil fuels out of the market And that's typically about 100 to 120 dollars per per ton of carbon If you had a carbon tax that big how well does nuclear do? Well, the nuclear is the red one So if nuclear is allowed to go on you see nuclear takes over the market. All right. Yay Okay, but what you find is to the degree that because of the cost of nuclear To the degree that renewables are available Renewables push nuclear out of the market just because of the the the capital cost of building nuclear power plants So this shows that even if you have a large carbon tax The cost of building plants becomes prohibitive and it dries nuclear out of the market I was participating in a discussion that was held just about a week ago in washington where industry experts were brought together And we had several utility executives who were in the room And we asked the question if there were a carbon tax, would you build nuclear power plants today? Every one of them said absolutely not and we said why they said it's because Building a nuclear power plant today under these circumstances is a bet the company proposition and we're not going to do it It's just that simple you have to have a lot more clarity on cost and schedule than we have been able to affect Now why can't we have better cost and schedule performance? We should be able to other countries have done it, you know, korea does a very good job The chinese are doing are doing well and at least inside china the russians have proven they can do it What is it they can do that we can't do and the simple answer is that we have stopped building plants And when you don't build plants on a regular basis, you're not very good at it And so we don't have the experienced project managers. We don't have the established supply chains and we have to rebuild that One of the sad things we were actually having this discussion a little bit this morning Is that after the experience of building the ap 1000s in south carolina where the project did fail and georgia where the project continues We've made a lot of good progress in re-establishing supply chains re-establishing the expertise But the question is when will we have the chance to build the next ap 1000 in order to take advantage of that? And that's that's that's a significant question So some observations Renewables are going to be deployed in significant numbers now. You can debate what magnitude of deployment that will be over the course of time This is something one could argue about some people think it'll be 30 or 40 percent Some people think it'll be 80 percent whatever you think there's going to be a lot of renewables And that's going to dramatically up alter how we handle electricity in our markets Natural gas prices or historic lows and it looks like from everything I have seen that we're expecting to see that continue for a long period of time So it's not going to change quickly. It might even be decades before we see prices crawl back up And as I mentioned a few minutes ago The lack of practice in countries like the us and european countries has really made it very difficult to build plants On the other hand according to your stat, which is obviously a european organization EU has increased CO2 emissions 1.8 percent as of 2017 Despite a 25 percent increase in wind and solar or wind power and six percent growth in solar So renewables are going up emissions are going up and also prices are going up So this seems like an opportunity for nuclear doesn't it? So while electric and also Renewables don't help much with another very important aspect of energy, which is which is process heat Today around the world the united states europe japan everywhere We rely very very heavily on coal and gas To provide process heat for industrial processes and no one has really been talking about that very much They should be talking about that because that's a very significant part of co2 emissions Nuclear can address this issue And there's a lot of countries who are talking about that today so In that context with the combination of this need to deal with with process heat the need to deal with the increased cost of Building plants nuclear has a real opportunity for the future But there's going to have to be some kind of adaptation and that's something that we are We're giving a lot of thought to So we have to improve the cost effectiveness and flexibility of nuclear We have to deal with the fact that the countries are going to expect these very high levels of safety But we have to control costs while doing that We have to deal with the continuing concerns that policy makers in different countries have with proliferation issues Which I often think get overblown, but they are there so you have to deal with them We have to deal with nuclear waste. Um, that's something that's this gift that keeps on giving In general, nuclear has a fit in whatever the future energy structure in the world is going to be Nuclear has to be cost effective. It has to be safe. It has to be flexible. There's no question about that So how do we get from here to there? well I want to I started thinking about Our current technologies and we have very good technology If you look at the light water reactor technologies on the market today with excellent technology ap 1000 Even the vvr technologies out of russia some of the newest plants that you see From from europe such as the epr very very good technologies very safe Cost effective we're working on and and despite the accident in japan nuclear has an excellent safety record You know, I I have no trouble going to really any country That has an advanced industrial infrastructure and saying Yes, you can use nuclear power as a basis of your future electricity supply Because it's safe. I have no problem saying that I have a lot of confidence in the safety of nuclear power And the fact that nuclear is the only reliable Dispatchable zero emission technology that exists today Means this should be on the table for consideration At the same time You know this bet the company reputation is is very very hard to deal with right now So we have to find a way to convince companies that they are not betting the company when they started nuclear project We also have to take seriously this this issue of the cost You know nuclear plants these these traditional nuclear plants They cost a lot to build they cost a lot to operate and it costs a lot to regulate It's just the nature of the technology for the most part We still have to deal with nuclear waste disposal as I mentioned And we have to deal with the public concerns of safety in many countries You know the us has not been a place where the safety issue has been as is hot as it is in some other places But if you go to countries that are near the near japan that were had experience Of watching the Fukushima Daiichi accident people really are afraid of nuclear power It's just that simple it's something you see when you talk to people And it's a very emotional thing with them. So you can't just talk them out of it So small-module reactors Certainly a step in the right direction A new deployment model a way of perhaps more cost-effectively building nuclear capacity with more flexibility The the ability of these small modular reactors to come in coming on and offline very quickly Makes them more flexible reduces the cost of operation The fact they can be manufactured In factory means the quality will be much higher Cost certainty is much higher schedule certainty is much higher So this is something we're quite excited about and safety is something that that doesn't get talked about quite as much And when you look at many of the designs and I won't have to hasten to say that not all smrs are the same And you should not speak of them as just a class. They're all very different But many of them are characterized by by very very large water inventories And those large water inventories make the past the safety characteristics of the systems very very compelling So these technologies have a lot of good things to say for themselves There's still some questions that have to be worked out by regulators Particularly one issue. They'll be very interesting. We'll be you know, can we have Basically a site boundary Epsi emergency planning zone that's going to be a big issue The NRC will be dealing with probably over the next year But also safety control room staffing things like that all have to be resolved But at the same time even with these technologies the costs are still higher than the market today can sustain And so we have to really do what we can to try to reduce those costs We've been working on generation four for almost 20 years now You know see started generation four national forum very first meeting I was just talking to Susie about this the very first meeting in generation four took place in january 2000 And so now it's it's it's now almost 20 years ago that we started this enterprise There's been a huge amount of research We just had a conference in paris on generation four international forum He had 250 papers presented from different parts of the world very exciting. Nothing has been demonstrated yet You know, so we so we talked about it. We're researching it. We're doing a lot of academic work We're doing a lot of laboratory work, but we haven't taken that step So why why are we taking so long to do this? And One thing is that there's these innovation headwinds It's really hard to do nuclear innovation these days, you know, one thing is infrastructure You know, it's it's very many of you know, we've lost a lot of infrastructure over the last 20 years Both in the united states around the world Um, really pleased that you know do is making really good progress on the universal test reactor something that's been Being discussed for a long time. But if you look at most of the infrastructure, we've lost a lot more than we've gained We've lost react. We've lost infrastructure in japan. We've lost infrastructure in europe We've lost infrastructure in the united states and in the 1990s We shut down so much infrastructure in the us that it's it's just almost hard to imagine what we lost And these are things that cost billions of dollars to replace. So it's hard to put it back once you lose it Um regulars and this is something we're having a very vibrant conversation about within the NEA How do you get regulars to be more friendly to new innovative technologies? The truth is regulars and now i'm a former regulator I'm willing to say this so I can say it regulars don't think it's their job to be innovative regulars think it's their job to protect safety And so it's hard to pull regulars into this conversation by innovation because they don't think it's their responsibility to be innovators They think it's their responsibility to make sure that whatever industry presents they analyze they look at it and make a judgment But the reality is that for innovation to be successful We have to get regulars to involve themselves as early as possible in the process So that the researchers can do the right can work on the right problems And so we're working on this now trying to get regulars into this conversation. It is not easy It finally is cost So we have a small module reactor design called new scale. I think all of you have probably heard about this is very exciting technology Um, i'm very proud of the fact that when I was running the DOE program We gave the first grant That made new scale that got new scale moving in the first place. This is back in I think 1999. Is that recall? I think it was 1999. Yes, he said he's that old That we get the first grant to um the to organ state university that ultimately became what is today new scale That's how long this is taken to do So this started in 1999. That's 20 years ago and they're still in the middle of the r & r c process And they've spent almost a billion dollars without building anything yet That's how long this takes. That's how much it costs. It is not something for the faint of heart um building new nuclear technologies is a very expensive undertaking and quite frankly unless you've got two Or three billion dollars burning a hole in your pocket. You probably shouldn't even start So that's how hard this is. So these are very important barriers to progress You know, if you want to develop a new wind technology You probably just need a few million dollars and you're off to the races. You can get it done In nuclear you have to make these big investments. You have to have this infrastructure and you have to have regulators to want to work with you So this gets to what I call the vision thing Now we just we just saw the passing of president George hw bush and this this phrase the vision thing in a completely different context is something that was Ascribed to him he had the misfortune of being the president that came after ronald reagan Who was a very visionary type of president? You know, but and and and president bush was much more of a pragmatic Day-to-day manager of the of the government think he did a very good job But he struggled whenever people said well, what's your vision? And he made this reference to say that's that vision thing again, right? Well, where we are today is we have this vision problem We lack vision and this chart is one that I actually first put together years ago when I was with the nrc And I noticed something kind of interesting. We have our or our friend from nasa here today. I promise her I can show her a chart. Uh, this is a picture of um glen seabork Who I think all the all the nuclear people are familiar with? Who at the time was the chairman of the atomic energy commission taken with james web? Who was then the administrator of nasa back in july 1961? And they had come together to sign an agreement to apply space to explore the solar system So here's these two top officials that came together For this signing ceremony talking about something that in all likelihood would never reach any fruition during our lifetimes But why do they do it because they had a vision? This is the thing that we have to stress today. We need to have a vision We don't have a vision for the future Then what we're then there's no context for anything that we're doing So I have this chart. I won't go through this in any detail But if you track the progress of both nasa anti atomic energy commission over the course of time, you see something really interesting Um, it both started in 1950s with not a whole lot, you know, the ac sort of inherited the madhattan project assets nasa had v2 rockets that they sort of consistently blew up on the launch pad Um, but over the succeeding 15 years. It's an amazing success story Both nasa and the ac created technologies that were just remarkable in the period of time The atomic energy commission essentially created nuclear or civilian nuclear technology during that period You know light war reactors fast reactors gas reactors space nuclear systems medical isotopes enrichment reprocessing Just about 15 years And then nasa, of course, you know put it put a man on the moon in 1969 amazing accomplishments considering where they started In the 1970s both started to plateau a bit for lots of different reasons costs issues political issues lots of different issues and today It's kind of depressing, you know both organizations have really Not shown a lot of progress over the last few years I have very little I can point to today of accomplishment in terms of of of new feats they've accomplished in terms of either exploring space or Or or expanding the use of of nuclear technology And I think a lot of this is described to the fact that we have lost our vision We aren't people who are looking over the horizon as much as we used to Now I've tried what I can do at the NEA to try to correct this We started a program called nuclear innovation 2050 And we pulled together experts from around our member countries and we asked this question So what do we need to do? If you believe that there's a future of nuclear technology, what is that future? What do what technologies do we need to have next 10 years next 20 years next 50 years? And how do we collaborate with each other to try to achieve that? And one result of that was a chart like this that where we highlighted after all the experts came together And they said these are the areas that we think require the most focus And again it won't go through all of these but they basically Are areas where the community has come together and said these are where the priorities ought to be We ought to focus on things like advanced manufacturing. We ought to focus on Nuclear process heat and cogeneration hybrid systems gen four Technologies advanced recycling they think we ought to focus on those areas So we selected one as a starting point and one we selected was it was accident tolerant fuels And so we're putting a big effort to try to bring people together with accident tolerant fuels So we have started to put together activities to bring together the industry government officials regulators laboratories research reactor facilities Bring them all together and say how do we move this forward much much more quickly than we've been able to do in the past Based on our previous experience It takes about 20 years to put a new nuclear fuel into operation from concept to to implementation We just can't spend 20 years talking about Technologies like this and we have to do it faster. So that's something we were doing and I brought a copy and Dr. Kim. I'm going to give you a copy of this Enjoy And and I have a few few other copies here. So maybe you can give these to some of your colleagues Thank you And so this is something that we have to spend more effort we have to establish a vision And you know, I'll be honest with you. We can't do this from an international organization Each country has to develop its own vision Um, I I'm really hopeful to see that there's some changes that have been taking place at DOD We over the last year or so this sort of show that we're beginning to formulate a vision and got new leadership coming in So we're going to see what's going to happen there But you look around the world and it's really not a pretty story We don't look over the horizon. We don't look at what what the world we're trying to create We were too busy looking at the short term So finally The question I often get asked. Well, you know, everybody's retiring. Who's going to do all this work Who's going to develop these technologies? Well, obviously, hopefully a lot of the people in this room will be there But when you look around many countries, there are not nearly now the us is pretty unique And you know, one of the things that we were able to do during my tenure at DOE Was we were able to encourage universities to maintain and expand their nuclear education programs It was back during the mid 90s and we reached a point believe it or not Where in the entire united states, there were 480 undergraduates in nuclear engineering Total total country 480 And we saw as a crisis. So we stepped up and I'm quite proud of what we're able to accomplish The last numbers I've heard we were north of 5000. So obviously something went right But in a lot of countries, this is not the case a lot of countries, you know, kids are not going into nuclear So we're what we're trying to do now is we're trying to encourage more More young people to get into nuclear engineering And a program that we have launched is called NEST Nuclear Education Skills and Technology Framework And in short order, what this is is this is a collection of multinational research projects that are done by university students In some cases you might have students from From Purdue working with students from university of Tokyo working with students from soul national university working with students From university of manchester all on a single research project being coordinated by an expert researcher in a laboratory somewhere Our hope is that this will revive the kind of excitement that people used to have on large research and development programs By showing that there's an international interest a chance for international relationships and coordination To do something big and complicated But also to do something practical these are not make work projects They're always going to be projects that have a very very practical aspect So we're getting this off the ground now We've got 11 countries have signed up to participate in this including countries that might surprise you like Germany and Italy For example, which which are moving away from nuclear power But nevertheless they all recognize they have to have subject matter experts that have this expertise in nuclear so Hopefully as time goes on we'll see a proposal from Purdue and we'll get you involved in that so some concluding thoughts and Yes, I think we'll have about five minutes left for questions Concludes just a wrap it all up That to meet an energy environment requirement is traditional light water reactors are likely to be needed for a long long time Today's light water reactors aren't going anywhere anytime soon. We're building Water reactors today and reactors that are being built today will be around for 60 or 80 years So light water reactor technology is around for the foreseeable future SMRs are an exciting new area They might solve some of the problems that we see But even SMRs has some challenges And so I think in the long term future we have to really get some thought to fission energy for the future What is the fission energy for 2050 for 2060? It might be light water, but it might be something else and I don't think we should be afraid of it I'm I'm willing to change you should be willing to change too because I think it's time to at least open our minds to the possibility That light water reactor technology Has served us well, but maybe the future looks a little bit different And if we don't make change if we don't adapt if we don't find better ways of doing business We may have seen the peak use of fission energy already And that would be a tragedy not just for the nuclear industry Not just for nuclear education programs But really for all of global society because I don't think we can meet our energy and environmental goals without nuclear I'm absolutely convinced of that. So if nuclear doesn't succeed We as a society won't succeed in what we want to do So if this is going to change Then the time the change is now We can't wait another 10 years. We can't wait another 20 years We have to start today We have to start now And I think that many of you in this room will probably be some of the people that help propel this forward and it take us Where we want to go So with that, thank you very much for your attention Take some questions If you if you have any questions Yeah, you highlighted the accomplishments of nasa and the aec in putting a man on the moon and building the first commercial nuclear power plant respectively Do you think that small private startups in the nuclear power industry can succeed without It's a significant aid from the government In nuclear yes in nuclear nuclear power No, and they can't succeed in space either because if you look at the progress that's happened with Elon musk's organization It's because nasa created an economic framework that made it possible didn't happen by itself They wouldn't have gone off and spent the money they spent if they didn't have this clarity as to how NASA was going to pay them to use those systems to move things into orbit And I think something similar could certainly happen. In fact, we've had this conversation something similar could happen with nuclear You couldn't have it. You can imagine a situation where Where the government agrees to buy nuclear power from advanced systems At a certain price to encourage people to build the systems I mean those are mech and there are mechanisms the government can take it doesn't have to simply be just throwing money at the situation That can have to create the economic framework to make it possible So the answer is no it can't be done without the government doing something somehow And that's not going to change anytime soon because even you know, I've I've I've been spending a lot of time talking with the Terror power people and you know, that's the bill gates funded reactor system And a lot of people think they went to work with the Chinese originally because of regulatory challenges That was certainly the popular wisdom But the truth is they were looking for someone who was going is it willing to spend two billion dollars to build the demonstration facility So money money money in this new area is essential You have to be able to spend large amounts of money to bring these systems of fruition But these Small companies are huge generators of of really bright ideas The question is how do you harness all that energy and bright ideas and bring it to practical Implementation and that's that's kind of where I think we are right now Thank you Yeah, we have time for additional questions There is any So you talked a little bit about all the different systems that they're working on right now Like looking into the future. How do you know which ones to invest in? That question comes up a lot because I think that governments in general and we have we've had some very Substantive conversations with some governments about this recently Governments, I think have lost some confidence that they know how to select Technologies, so their tendency is to try to develop a market-based approaches to encourage the markets to make those decisions Um, I'm a bit skeptical about that because it's the market the market needs a lot of help to function And so what is how do you create that environment to to both harness the market? Not wisdom, but at the same time have the government provide the resources and Again, that's something I think we're still trying to figure out However, one thing I would say and this is this is actually a real This is a real-time conversation we're having with senior officials in many in many governments One thing that we are talking about is look is working with private sector power companies and Getting working with them to solicit their perspective on what they think is going to be needed In the relative in the intermediate future. It's kind of hard to look at the long-term future But certainly if you look at the next 20 or 30 years Power companies have the best perspective on this So we're looking at the possibility of consulting with the power companies that try to set up the requirements Document and this is something we did in the past now the in the past If it actually wasn't done by the governments the power companies Maybe you remember this had a utility requirements document That the that the industry put together by itself to lay out what they thought was needed And that actually led to the development of technologies like the ap 1000 ultimately so I think the power companies might be the next step to look to try to figure out what is the right technology But ultimately we're going to have put a lot of ideas on the table and see which ones rise to the top Thank you. Thank you I saw a question over there somewhere so obviously energy security is a big issue in the future and I guess my question is you talked about different countries developing their own visions for Nuclear and I'm wondering how you see International cooperation playing into like the development of those visions perhaps to work together I love this question Well, that's kind of what we do, you know, we are trying to get that to happen It's not easy because really as you pointed out, you know Countries are kind of moving in different directions in different ways But at the end of the day when I sit and I talk with with with key people in different countries They will tell me we can't do this by ourselves. We don't have the money. We don't have the infrastructure We don't have the people. We just can't do this by ourselves. We need we need to work with the united states We need to work with japan. We need to work with others And so I think that there is a very strong compelling need for countries to do things together Because the cost the difficulty it does encourage some sharing of the risk But also and this is perhaps even more important If nuclear is going to be successful, it's got to have the next nuclear technologies have to have big markets We cannot have what we've done in the past Which is we go through lots of trouble. We spend billions of dollars developing a new technology And then we build three, you know, that's not that's not going to work in the future And you know, dr. Kim and I were just having this conversation the breakfast this morning that We have to be we have to see nuclear that looks a lot more like the airline industry And in the airline industry, you know, bowing may spend, you know, billions of dollars developing the 787 But that's because you know, they're going to they're going to make 800 of them and sell them around the world We have to get to that we have to get to where these technologies don't just get Deployed in the u.s. But really get deployed around the world on a standardized basis with an integrated supply chain And that's that's to me What the future should look like? And that's not an easy future to have because we're used to this sort of stick built Domestically based approach to nuclear that just isn't sustainable And very much anymore. And so I think we do have to have international cooperation And one of the really difficult aspects of this is if if if you're going to deploy the same nuclear technology around the world That means you have to deal with some kind of licensing approach to enable that to happen And we've got some answers to that that we're developing but it's not going to be easy It's going to require people to be a lot more flexible than they've been in the past I think it's possible I think you can be done without giving up sovereignty without having Others tell you that this is tech a safe technology. Just take it and trust us But there's there's ways of doing it, but people have to work together So exactly the right question you're asking both of you ask really great good questions very good questions Thank you so much, uh director magwood. Uh, I think uh, if you thought this was an exciting talk There is another talk coming up a discussion coming up and we talked about you know future And the vision and thank you so much for sharing your vision and your perspective toward the you know future of nuclear technology And uh, I think this sets a great stage for the next conversation that we're going to have We'll have a panel discussion in 10 minutes on the topic of nuclear energy 150 years from now in celebration of our, uh, you know 150th anniversary We'll talk about how nuclear energy Must and will be indispensable in Uh for the humanity to survive in the next 150 years and on and beyond so please There are some cookies remaining On the in the background. So please do not leave and let's continue our conversation And let's thank director magwood once again for this great conversation. Thank you very much And happy anniversary