 And that discussion, dear ladies and gentlemen, does bring to an end this first session, first technical session of our forum, and we want to move on seamlessly to our last session for today. That's our second session, and I know it's been a long and intensive day, so I'm very grateful to everybody for staying with us and also in the online audience as well, but you don't wanna miss this session. It's very short, but it's on the very important topic of deep decarbonization particularly as regards industries' needs for power. So let us move on with our session two, entitled Raising the Bar, and we wanna raise the bar because as we heard at the very outset of our opening session this morning, we must dramatically accelerate climate action if we're serious about achieving net zero CO2 emissions by 2050, and that presents a very serious abatement challenge particularly for energy-intensive industrial sectors such as manufacturing, transport, heating and cooling of buildings, all of them major contributors to world CO2 emissions at the moment and all of them heavily reliant on fossil fuels. So countries need to reconcile their economic aspirations for growth and industrial development with their climate goals and to do so, many will see very strong arguments for boosting the share of nuclear power. For this session, we will first hear four pre-recorded presentations and then we'll go into the Q&A panel, so as I said, it's a short but very important session and please do share your questions with our speakers, either get ready, those of you who are live in the room with us or share them via the chat function on the IAEA app. Nuclear energy's potential industrial applications extend far beyond electricity generation and we've heard a few mentions of other applications already today. Our first presentation will now explore the use of SMRs for district heat and resource extraction as well as for cogeneration of hydrogen, something that of course Boris Schucht talked about in his presentation in the opening session. We are pleased that Dr. Jeffrey Griffin, who is the Vice President of Science and Technology for the Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, joins us by video. Hello, my name is Jeff Griffin and I'm the Vice President for R&D at the Canadian Nuclear Laboratories. I'm very happy to have this opportunity to make this presentation at this forum. I wish we could all meet in person, but clearly we've got to deal with the current world circumstances. To give you context for my presentation, I want to note at the outset that CNL, Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, is the premier national nuclear laboratory in Canada. As such, our portfolio of work and interest spans across all areas nuclear as illustrated on this slide. But as you can see, a very central and key element of our mission is focused on clean energy. And I'm going to discuss some of our areas of interest in work in the next few slides. For Canada, clean growth and climate change are national priorities with ambitious and defined goals. Our approach is a holistic one that couples nuclear with renewable energy and specific applications. These priorities in this approach yield opportunities for nuclear energy, including energy independence for off-grid communities that currently are primarily reliant on diesel, clean energy sources for mining, resource extraction and manufacturing, potential new approaches for power and transportation and industry and storing energy, such as production of hydrogen, and the potential for co-generation of hybrid energy, in hybrid energy systems to enable renewables to intermittently be incorporated. A central piece of our effort to pursue these opportunities is with SMRs, small modular reactors. As we go forward with SMRs, we all realize that we have to bring our stakeholders along with us. We must strive to build confidence in our neighbors and our communities that host these SMRs, the financial supporters, the political and regional stakeholders. And to do that, we must be able to articulate, explain and demonstrate the technologies. The days of people trusting scientists just because we say so are long gone. Demonstration of technologies builds confidence in the technology, provides more assurance to the key stakeholders and reduces uncertainties and risks that affect the cost of financing, affect the timing of construction and the time for commissioning. So demonstration is necessary, a key component of any of our planning. So as we start to look more closely at potential applications of nuclear energy in this way beyond power generation, we consider SMRs as the next generation of nuclear technology offering unique flexibility so that our traditional ways of considering nuclear power for only for electrical generation becomes only part of the equation. We can now consider that we can couple nuclear power to other systems and other energy sources for intermediate energy supply and able to store energy for later use. We can use nuclear power for hydrogen generation for transportation. We can use nuclear power to provide heat for communities and energy or heat for resource extraction and for industry, including in this are new processes and more efficient processes for hydrogen production, something that CNL is actively working on right now. If we extend this concept and illustrate it, we might envision something like what you see on this slide. Nuclear power at the center but coupled to other energy sources and continually balancing the integration which will require smart grid and predictive modeling of all energy sources with the diverse and variable needs of a community that might change over days, months, years or seasons, but you can adapt to that with this sort of system. Challenges exist, of course, there are technical challenges, but there's a lot of great work that's being done worldwide on this. And then there are policy and financial challenges at several levels of government. How do we get the licensing right? How do we get the market set up to effectively regulate such grids? How do we incentivize sustainability? How do we incentivize investment in necessary capital assets? How do we manage ongoing operation and maintenance? Canada and CNL are pursuing this with an SMR at the heart of it. An idea is to help place the SMR and demo the SMR and use it in conjunction with hydrogen and renewable energy sources to work with different applications and to demonstrate such issues as licensing. The idea is to demonstrate this so that we can work with communities and other stakeholders to see what works to get them comfortable with the approach, build confidence, and demonstrate the full value proposition. Approaches like this are very, very important because we believe they are essential for ultimate success in this. In summary, the SMR value proposition that stands far beyond electrical generation. SMRs can be coupled to other energy sources. They can be used for cogeneration of hydrogen for transport. They can be used to generate heat and power for resource extraction. Many, many possible applications that go beyond the simple energy production. The important thing is to recognize that nuclear energy offers a powerful, flexible solution to the challenge of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero. Thank you. And we'll have an opportunity a little bit later on to ask questions, not to Mr. Griffith but to one of his colleagues, equally knowledgeable. We now will stay with the role of nuclear power in transport and drill deeper on his contribution to what our next speaker calls the coming hydrogen economy. Kazuhiko Kunitomi is the Deputy Director General of Fast Reactor and Advanced Reactor Research and Development at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency and he joins us by video. My name is Kazuhiko Kunitomi in Japan Atomic Energy Agency. Today I'm going to talk about the coming hydrogen economy, the key role of nuclear energy. This slide shows research and development for HDGR and nuclear hydrogen. Many countries such as Japan, China, Poland, UK, US, Canada, Indonesia, Korea and Kazakhstan have been developing the HDGR featured with inherent safety and providing high temperature heat for hydrogen production. Hydrogen production by HDGR is expected to be a promising clean energy source in 2040s. In Japan, JAEA constructed HDGR with the outlet temperature of 950 degrees C and the thermal power of 30 megawatts and successfully completed 950 degrees C operation. In parallel, JAEA has been developing hydrogen production technology by some chemical water splitting called iodine sulphur process. Long-term reduction goal of greenhouse gas emission is 80% by fiscal year 2050 compared to fiscal year 2013. However, GHD reduction in fiscal year 2018 is just 12% compared to fiscal year 2013. That means additional reduction of 68% by 2050 is necessary. The pie chart at the right side shows the breakdown of greenhouse gas emission in 2018. GHD is released from power generation transport, steel making, chemistry and so forth. In order to achieve the reduction goal, nuclear energy shall be useful not only power generation but also the other field such as steel making, especially hydrogen produced by HDGR is of prime importance to reduce GHG from the fields of steel making and transport. This slide shows the status of HDGR and IS process development in Japan. As I mentioned earlier, JAEA had constructed HDGR. The reactor summer power is 30 megawatt and the outlet temperature is 950 degrees C. Most of the components of HDGR are installed underground shown in the figure. After Fukushima Daiichi reactor accident, safety review by Nuclear Regulation Authority has been conducted based on the newly established safety standard. NRA has confirmed that no fuel damage will work even in the worst accidents such as guillotine break of the primary pipe plus multiple losses of reactor shutdown functions. On June 3rd this year, JAEA got official approval of the restart of HDGR by NRA. JAEA will restart the HDGR next year. The figure at right side shows a basic process of the IS process. Hydrogen iodine decomposition process needs a heat of 400 degrees C and produce hydrogen. Sulfuric acid decomposition process needs the heat of 900 degrees C and produce oxygen. After hydrogen and oxygen are extracted from the system, iodine formed from HCI decomposition process sulphic deoxide formed from the sulphic acid decomposition and water input from outside are collected into a chemical reactor. Then this exothermic reaction forms HCI and sulphic acid again in the reactor. So iodine and sulphur circulate in the process. That means hydrogen is produced without emitting GHG and harmful waste. IS process is an ultimate clean hydrogen production system. There are three specific HDGR system concepts. First one is an HDGR gas turbine system for power generation without the temperature of 850 degrees C. The efficiency of electricity generation is about 45% which is more than 10% higher than that of light water reactor. It can be deployed in late 2030s. Second one is an HDGR hydrogen production system with the amplitude temperature of 950 degrees C. This system can provide 85,000 cubic meter per hour of hydrogen and can be deployed in 2040s. Last one is the HDGR cogeneration system for hydrogen production, power generation and provision of low temperature heat. Heat utilization rate of the system is about 80%. It will be deployed in 2040s. Both HDGR hydrogen production system and the HDGR cogeneration system can produce a large amount of hydrogen with high efficiency. Shown here is the economical evaluation on hydrogen produced by HDGR. The capital cost of the IS system is evaluated under the condition that the number of the components used in IS system is almost double of the equivalent scale NAFSA reforming plant. The other conditions such as hydrogen production efficiency and plant availability are determined 30% and 80% based on several design studies by JAA. The cost of heat from HDGR is evaluated by design study conducted together with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. As the pie chart shows, the hydrogen production cost is approximately 24.2 cents per cubic meter. This evaluate revealed that the most dominant factor is the cost of heat from the reactor. The hydrogen cost of 24.2 cents cubic meter is higher than the target cost required by steel making industries. However, the HDGR cogeneration system can provide electricity and low temperature heat. In case electricity is sold to the local community, the hydrogen cost can be reduced to 11.8 cents per cubic meters. For some more, in case the low temperature heat is sold to the local community, the cost can be reduced to be nearly equal zero. Summary of my presentation, HDGR is expected to be a promising nuclear hydrogen production system in 2040s. JAA got official approval of listed of HDTR from Nuclear Regulation Authority. The hydrogen cost of HDGR cogeneration system will be competitive by selling electricity and heat to the local district. Thank you very much for your attention. And again, he will be joining us in just some minutes for our dialogue. Let's look at another industry now where nuclear power offers some significant advantages. As you know, ladies and gentlemen, climate change does present many regions of the world with the risk of chronic water shortages straining both human health and economics. Desalination is an option for many countries, but desalination plants until now have been heavily dependent upon fossil fuels. Here too, nuclear power holds significant promise as we hear in a presentation by Yusef Shatila. He is senior consultant to the United Arab Emirates and was the founding dean of academic programs as well as professor of nuclear and mechanical engineering at the Mazdar Institute of Science and Technology. Hello, my name is Yusef Shatila, and I will be talking today about the nuclear power role in reducing emissions in seawater desalination. First, I'm gonna talk a little bit about what seawater desalination is, basically the definition and how it works. And then discuss if seawater desalination is an emission problem and my proposed solution for it, which is basically nuclear desalination. And then how do I take this step further to use nuclear power to play a more involved role in the decarbonization of the world economy? First, seawater desalination is the removal of salt and minerals from seawater to acceptable levels, and these levels could be acceptable for drinking, for industrial use, or whatever the intended use for the freshwater. And then it is divided or categorized, depending on the source of energy that is used, whether it's thermal in a form of heat or electric through membrane desalination. And so the most common two types is the thermal and electrical membrane and each of which is actually takes half of the market for desalination in the world. Thermal, which is heat, usually consumes heat in the range of, power in the range of 10 to 15 kilowatt hour electric per cubic meter. And the most common types are multi-stage flashing or multi-effect distillation. And electric through the reverse of osmosis use a little bit less amount of energy. It is about five kilowatt electric hour per metric ton, per cubic meter. Now I'm gonna take one type of each to explain how it works for the thermal or through the heat, the multi-stage flashing goes, actually happens like this. You actually feed seawater into a boiler, which is basically a pot that you boil the or heat the seawater in. Then you push it through stages where the pressure drops from one stage to the other. When the pressure drops, the seawater boils, steam goes up, condensates, goes, and then from when you do this through stages and you collect fresh water. And then what is left behind is basically the salt in the seawater, which remains in the feed seawater, go from stage to the other, where the salt content increases and then eventually take it out as a brine. So this is the heat type of desalination. And this type is actually multi-stage flashing. The other type is electrical, it goes the same concept but I guess a different process in the removal of the salt. So again, you push the freshwater through heat high-pressure pump. And this high-pressure pump actually pushes the water through a membrane, like a barrier, where the barrier allows the water only to go through and retains the salt behind. So here we have the salt, here we have the freshwater. The freshwater is allowed to go through to be collected as a product. And then the salt plus the additional seawaters coming in is taken out as a brine. Now, the amount of desalination that is taking place around the world is about 100 million cubic meter per day and is produced by about 20,000 desalination plants. And these are June 2018 numbers coming from IDA. And almost all of this water is produced through the burning of fossil fuel. So IDA is the IDA, we have an emission problem because when you burn fossil fuel, you produce greenhouse gases. And then, so what is the size of the problem? This amounts to about 252 million metric tons of CO2 released per year. Now, if you replace the fossil fuel by another alternative or renewable or clean energy like nuclear power, for example, and then you can actually call it nuclear desalination, this amounts to the removal of 55 million cars of the street. That's significant. Now, so nuclear power can help decarbonization in the form of seawater desalination. And these are the world nuclear experience around the globe. In the first column, you have the name of the plant, then the second location next to the power of the reactor and then the water capacity. From the water capacity column, you see these are small, capacity are small plants, except for the one in Kazakhstan. So in short, this slide shows us that nuclear desalination is not really popular around the globe for different reasons. Now, I'm a firm believer that nuclear power in general, and in specific for this case, it can actually make contribution to the green world economy. And here is, I guess, my pitch is I want to use nuclear power to do more than just nuclear desalination. So here, I created an oasis that is the centerpiece of which is a small module reactor, very high temperature reactor that produces both electricity and heat. Part of this electricity and heat can be used on the left-hand side for the nuclear desalination plant, where you use the heat for multi-stage flashing and the electricity for the interface or osmosis to in a hybrid setting to produce water. On the right-hand side, again, you use another part of the electricity and heat of the nuclear power plant to produce hydrogen that acts as the fuel for the next generation transportation fleet. So produce hydrogen through the electrolysis of high temperature steam. And the remaining electricity can be used to feed the grid. So through this, I guess, concept, we created an oasis, a self-sustainable oasis in which a reactor can produce this electricity and heat to produce water, hydrogen, and then feed the grid for the community around it. Some numbers, so the small module reactor will produce 300 megawatt electric, third of which will go to the grid. The hydrogen production plant will be using 146 megawatt electric to produce about 280,000 to feed 280,000 light vehicles as using the hydrogen as a fuel for transportation. And the remaining, which is about 76 megawatt electric, will be used for a desalination plant to produce 182,000 metric ton cubic meter per day of fresh water through the hybrid desalination of my multi-stage flashing and reverse osmosis. In conclusion, I do believe that nuclear can play a very big role in decarbonization of our economy. And I quote Bill Gates when he said, nuclear is ideal for dealing with climate change because it's the only carbon-free scalable energy sources available 24 hours a day. Thank you for your attention. I will be more than happy to entertain your questions. And many thanks to him as well. And we'll come back to him in just a moment. But our final presentation for today returns to that nuclear renewable partnership that many of our speakers have been talking about. Ensuring effective integration of the two is a key step toward decarbonizing industry as we hear now from Dr. Shannon Bragg-Sitton. She is the lead in integrated energy systems at the Idaho National Laboratory in the US. Good afternoon and thank you for the opportunity to join you here at the Scientific Forum. I'm excited to share with you some perspectives on how we might achieve a clean energy economy, specifically through the integration of nuclear and renewable energy sources in order to support multiple energy users. When we think about designing our future energy systems or even how we utilize our current energy systems, we need to first back up and understand the goals that we are trying to achieve. I think most of us can agree that we want those systems to be clean, non-emitting, but also to be reliable and resilient while remaining affordable and sustainable. We then need to ask, what are the energy use needs? Is it purely a need for electricity or do we also have thermal energy demands that must be met? Only then can we begin to truly assess the role that each energy source can best fill in a particular location. This brings us to the topic of integrated or hybrid energy systems in which we look collectively across the energy generation resources that we have available to better understand and characterize how we can meet the varying energy demands both efficiently and effectively. I work for Idaho National Laboratory, which is the US Nuclear Energy Lab. So I do tend to comment this from a perspective of nuclear energy utilization and try to understand how this workhorse that has provided electricity as base load supply 24 hours a day, seven days a week in so many scenarios can be more flexible and work directly alongside renewable generation technologies such as wind, solar and hydro, as well as fossil technologies that include carbon capture and sequestration to reliably and flexibly meet the demand on the electric grid, but also in industry, in chemical plants and the production of hydrogen and supporting transportation needs as well as supporting basic needs for having clean water. Integrated energy systems offer us a key opportunity for further enhancing the flexibility of our generators. Typically we think about operational flexibility in which generators vary their power output in response to varying grid demand. Nuclear systems have been doing this for decades when needed in many different communities. Through the introduction of integrated systems, we can begin to see how nuclear technologies can be an even more flexible resource as they work alongside renewables. For example, we introduced the concept of product flexibility in which excess energy that isn't needed to support electricity demand on the grid can be diverted to the production of many diverse products such as clean water, hydrogen, support for district heating, synthetic fuels and many more. This excess energy can also be stored for later use in thermal storage technologies, chemical storage or electrical energy storage connected to the grid. Nuclear systems are also moving more toward deployment flexibility. Our current fleet systems are generally large scale on the order of a gigawatt of electricity production. Many advanced reactor developers are working on smaller scale systems such as small modular reactors that operated up to 300 megawatts electric or even micro reactors that offer opportunities at the hundreds of kilowatts to a few megawatts of electricity such that these nuclear plants can be right sized to meet the energy needs of any community whether a large municipality or remote community or industrial application as they work alongside distributed generation technologies. At this point, I'd like to offer a couple of examples as to what these integrated systems might truly look like. In this case, the example you see would utilize multiple generator technologies collectively to meet electrical demand on the grid but also to support the production of hydrogen. Hydrogen is a product of significant interest because it's highly versatile. It can be stored for later use. It can also be transported to multiple end users that hydrogen can be utilized for production of electricity to meet peak demands. It can also be transported to chemical plants and steel refining facilities as a feedstock for those processes. Hydrogen can also help us to decarbonize the transportation sector through the use of fuel cell vehicles or that hydrogen can be combined with captured CO2 to produce sin fuels that burn more cleanly than traditional transportation fuels. These systems are now being brought to reality. We've conducted a number of dynamic analyses to look at the technical and economic feasibility of these systems and through collaboration with industry, we are beginning to move to demonstration projects. Within the next one to two years, we will see demonstration of production of hydrogen on site at current fleet plants in the US hosted by Exxon Corporation in the Midwest and also hosted by Energy Harbor at the Davis-Bessie Nuclear Plant. These current fleet demonstrations will provide a strong foundation for advanced reactor demonstrations of these multi-input, multi-output energy parks. A nuclear-driven energy complex in the US Midwest might look something like what you see here in which we leverage an existing lightwater reactor plant working alongside renewable resources in the region to produce electricity but also to provide clean, green hydrogen to support a clean transportation fleet, to support nearby chemical and fuel synthesis facilities as well as other nearby industrial facilities such as refineries, fertilizer plants and steel plants. Unless you think we're completely focused on hydrogen alone, I want to provide a second example as to how we can use these integrated generator resources to produce consumer products. In this example, you see an alternative use of carbon-based resources such as coal and biomass in processes that are driven by clean energy from nuclear technologies and by fossil energy with carbon capture as well as renewable technologies to drive these intermediate processes necessary to produce products such as fuels, chemicals and carbon fibers. So finally, I want to leave you with a question on how you envision meeting clean energy demands. I think it is up to us to be more creative and innovative on how we utilize all these resources collectively to achieve a cleaner, more sustainable, reliable energy future. Thank you. And that was our last presentation in this session. So we will now go to our Q&A and we don't have Canadian Nuclear Laboratories Jeffrey Griffin with us, but we do have his colleague Christina van Drunen, she's Director of Science and Technology Strategy and Collaboration also at the Canadian Nuclear Laboratories. And we're joined as well then by our three other speakers from the session. And I'd like to first ask those of you again in the room who has a question for one of our speakers. I'm just going to first see if we have anyone who hasn't posed a question yet and if we don't, then I'll come right back to you. Anybody else in the room have a question for one of our speakers? Okay, no other hands going up, then I'll go to the gentleman from Switzerland. Werner Burkhardt, Switzerland. I'm always falling on the last speaker, but you want to produce hydrogen from, it seems, a conventional nuclear power plant. We heard before from our Japanese colleague, he needs 950 degrees Celsius. At which temperature are you producing hydrogen and what's the yield? What's the efficiency of your process? Yes, thank you for that question. An excellent question. Okay, the microphones in the room make it very difficult to speak. That's a great point. And there are many different processes to produce hydrogen. My colleague in Japan spoke of the SI process or IS process, excuse me, which does operate at these very high temperatures. Initial demonstrations at current fleet nuclear plants will utilize a low-temperature electrolysis process, so water splitting using PEM electrolysis cells. And these operate purely by electrical integration. The production efficiency is around 22%, fairly low, but this provides us with the entry point regarding hydrogen production on site at a nuclear facility. In the next stage, we are evaluating integration with high-temperature electrolysis, even with light-water reactors. Now, high-temperature electrolysis operates at around 800 C, so we are incorporating heat augmentation techniques to boost the temperature of the thermal energy component to the necessary temperature to achieve steam electrolysis. This moves the efficiencies up to about 35%. And as I mentioned in my presentation, well, these are not necessarily the end goals and the most efficient processes for hydrogen production. They provide a very good foundation. And in many markets, we find that these approaches can be competitive to steam methane reforming, which is the traditional approach. They will also provide us with that pathway toward advanced reactor demonstration of hydrogen production that gets to these higher-temperature applications and higher-temperature hydrogen production processes, whether that be electrolysis or thermochemical processes. Thank you very much. Do I have other questions in the room from our in-person audience? Go ahead. Thank you very much. My question is for Dr. Shannon. Well, it is well understood that nuclear can pose a lot of options with cogeneration and non-power applications. My question is that when we are talking with the renewable industry, can you elaborate the challenges while talking with the existing renewable market that US, for example, in your case experiences, how to integrate in such capacities? Thank you. So thank you for the question. We certainly have some different cultures when we look at the integration of the renewable generation technologies and the nuclear technologies. And we've worked for several years to develop those relationships and the communications with this other generation field. And we've begun to understand that each of these assets has pros and cons. And we are approaching this very carefully to understand how we best utilize the assets of each of these generation technologies. So these initial implementations will be more of a coordinated or loosely coupled configuration where we're working with nearby renewable generators within that same grid balancing area and understanding the production of electricity and how we can support these alternative approaches. But we are also moving toward more tightly integrated facilities where we do directly connect within an energy park scenario, these diverse generators, understanding that we may have a hierarchy of control where electricity demand is first met by the renewable generation technologies when it's available. We may also have coupled electrical storage to manage some of that, but also then utilizing the thermal resources to directly support some of these alternative applications or to go to thermal energy storage for later support to different applications. So it's about building these relationships and building a communication path such that we can truly begin to tackle the technical challenges of physical integration and control systems associated with these energy parks. It's not been an easy process, but we've made a lot of progress and I see a lot of opportunities in the future. Thank you very much. Other questions here from our, yes, please. Hi, I'm Lizworth from Singapore. My question is to the first speaker. I understand that CNL has set a goal to demonstrate the commercial viability of SMRs by 2026. I'd like to know how the project is going and if the current situation has slowed the progress of this project. Thank you. So that would be to Christina van Drunen and welcome to you. Thank you, yes. I'm happy to answer the question. Just to confirm by the current situation, you mean the pandemic or is there something else you're referring to? Thank you. So certainly we set the very ambitious objective of demonstrating the commercial viability of SMRs by 2026. It's a very important part of our long-term strategy and certainly we've made very good progress over the last several years. The most exciting thing that happened in 2019 was that you may have heard that Global First Power, which is a joint consortium of USNC but also Ontario Power Generation, one of the nuclear utilities that's in the province of Ontario, have a joint project that has applied with our Canadian nuclear regulator to site a reactor at our talkover site. And that's one of the, it is the first in Canada so it's very exciting for us. And so I can confirm that while there are certainly challenges associated with how we work together and collaborate as we kind of move forward, we've had to adjust the way that we work. Certainly that project is well underway in advancing and track. Thank you very much. Other questions here in the room? Live audience? Okay, not seeing any other hands going up at the moment. Jeff, how about the online audience? Yeah, we have a few questions coming in over the app. There's a few on hydrogen and a few on desalination so why don't we stay with hydrogen and then move to desalination? I'll couple the two questions on hydrogen. The first is, what's the advantage of producing hydrogen from nuclear power plants as opposed to doing it with renewable energy sources? And then there's a specific question for our panelists from Japan asking about the deployment of the Japanese HTGR with Brayton Cycle. This question is asking that last year during the IAEA GC General Conference it was mentioned that it could be commercially viable but not before 2040. What is the actual deployment timeframe for this technology and what is the expected cost? Thank you very much. Then let's start with Kazuhiko Kunitomi on that last question and maybe you also want to talk a little bit about hydrogen and comparative advantages of producing it with nuclear as opposed to renewables and then we can get other panelists take on that latter point as well. For the HTGR gas service system I think that it will be deployed in 2030s but we need about 10 to 15 years to complete the development of IS process. That means that the HTGR with IS system will be deployed in 2040s. And I think the advantage of the HTGR hydrogen system is that the nuclear system such as HTGR can produce a large amount of hydrogen. So for example, steel making industries they need a large amount of hydrogen. The nuclear energy only provide the hydrogen to those industries. I think that is the advantage of the nuclear system. Which other of our speakers would like to weigh in on that hydrogen comparative advantage issue? Go ahead, Shannon, I see and Christina also. So we'll take Shannon first and then Christina. And I thank you so much and absolutely I agree with Dr. Kunutomi with regard to scale of production. Nuclear generation can certainly support a growing demand for production of clean or green hydrogen. We also can go back to the efficiency that I talked about in answer to another question. When we look at low temperature or water electrolysis driven by electricity we're on a very low efficiency relative to what can be accomplished when we move to high temperatures that require thermal energy integration that can't be as easily supported by renewable energy technologies. There is a role for renewable production of hydrogen but there is also a significant role and a significant advantage to move to these thermally driven production methods that get to this much higher efficiency and can then drive down the cost of that hydrogen such that it is truly competitive with steam methane reforming even when we have this historically low cost of natural gas. Thank you. And Christina. Thank you. So it's certainly a very important question. I think there's a couple of things that we need to keep in mind that in particular I've been relevant parts of the conversation in Canada. One part is that our hydrogen economy is only as green and low carbon as the means we use to produce it which Dr. Sittin for example has gone through very well. The other part of it is that in a lot of the instances where we are looking at least within Canada but also when you're looking globally around resource extraction you're looking in places that are not on the grid that don't have access necessarily to hydroelectric power or something like that. And so in those locations where it's so remote if you can find a small modular reactor for example that's deployable either because it's floating or because it is a 2.5 megawatt or something like that then it can meet the needs of resource extraction electricity but also generate hydrogen that can be used for transportation in the area for example. So it actually opens up a lot more diverse options as well. Thank you very much. Shall we go to the desalination question also? Certainly and there are a few here. I'll put a couple together and start off, somebody's asking. It's been around, nuclear desalination has been around for about 20 years with little success. Do you agree that reverse osmosis is the most efficient and cost effective method for desalination and hence electricity prices are the driving factor. And I'll combine that with a question that we have also from Mr. Shatila asking about the UAE's new nuclear power plant at Baraka. And the question is why hasn't the UAE coupled desalination facility with the new reactors instead of continuing to use fossil fuels and aluminum smelters? Great, thank you very much. So please, Yusuf Shatila. Thank you very much for the question. I think the first one is I guess reverse osmosis has been proven to be I guess the horse in desalination and I agree with that. Therefore the price of water will be dictated by the price of electricity and I do agree with that. Now the question which is probably more trickier is the acceptance well has been in the nuclear dissonance has been around for some time, but it is not popular. And I think goes back to the popularity of nuclear energy itself. So once you do have nuclear power, I guess in case of electricity or even heat, then you can actually tend to use it. But in most of the cases you do not, the acceptance of nuclear desalination comes on the basis of acceptance of nuclear power. I guess the second question, you say, why is UAE considering nuclear desalination for the future? I think there are studies right now to include that. And I guess the nuclear power program in the UAE has been very ramping up very quickly and actually has been probably five to six years since the breaking ground. And now we're about to produce electricity with the unit number one. So this is very, very fast progress. And I guess the concern was making these four nuclear power plants up and running as fast as we can, as safe as we can, at the same time, making sure that the energy requirements and demands of the country is met. Of course, one of which is desalination, but I think that will become in phase two of how to effectively use nuclear power in more than just electricity production. And by the way, I'm not speaking on behalf of the government. I do not work for the government, but this is basically my opinion. Thank you very much for that. Let me just look to Jeff to see if we have additional questions. There are a couple of questions still for Mr. Shatila. Great, go ahead. One is asking whether a prototype of his nuclear oasis has already been constructed and how economically viable is this process? And then somewhat related, a student in the Netherlands is asking whether the UAE has any plans or perspectives on deploying, eventually deploying SMRs. And if so, is there any publicly available information on that? So the prototype of the oasis is just, I guess, a study at this point. Is the government interested in pursuing that? I do not know. As I said, I do not speak on behalf of the government, but I think it will be a very interesting point for an R&D perspective because UAE is also ramping up its R&D activities and one of which is SMRs. I don't remember the second question. Could you please repeat the second? What was the second question? In fact, it was whether the UAE is considering deploying SMRs in the future and if there's information about that publicly available. Again, it's still R&D space. I don't think there would be any public information about SMRs deployment or even maybe development, but not really deployment. This is too early, I guess. And perhaps I'll also tack on a question to you, Yusuf Shatila, and then take it as a bridge to some of the other panelists as well. So the question to you would be this, that also countries in the region, such as Saudi Arabia, have been talking about the possible use of nuclear power for desalination. You mentioned public acceptance or lack of acceptance on nuclear power. Could applications, other applications like desalination actually prove to become a driver of broader interest in nuclear power in the region, also among countries that perhaps haven't been introducing it so far? In the Middle East, I think if you have one solution, one energy source that solves a lot of problems, specifically seawater desalination, which is primary source of drinking water in the GCC area, that would be a huge plus and a huge win for that energy source. So if nuclear power can address that, that would be very important. And I guess if I go back to, I guess Shannon's presentation and others, when we talk about nuclear power could actually produce electricity or power in a baseload fashion, and what happens if we have intermittent sources and then it goes up and down? So actually, and then the argument was to actually store energy, not in the form of maybe batteries or heat, but actually in form of water or hydrogen, and in this case, where the aquifers in the GCC area are emptying up because of usage, now we can actually start refilling it by desalinated water that was used by excessive electricity where nuclear renewable energy were in abundance and therefore nuclear energy could actually be diverted to produce water and then store it when it is needed. I think that would be probably a more effective way of using a nuclear power in its most efficient form, which is a baseload. Thank you very much. And let me put a question to Christina van Drunen, which perhaps also might be of interest to hear Shannon's point of view on this as well. And it's this, whether getting to net zero with nuclear is rather a technological, a political, or largely a financial challenge. And depending on what you say, what do you think is the crucial next step to overcome that challenge? So we could actually debate this one all day. It's an excellent question. And to a certain extent to say it truly is all of the above. So, and because they go hand in hand, you can't pull them apart. Certainly as we drive technological changes, as we drive increased improvements, there's a level of cost that comes with that that may have long-term levelized cost of energy impacts, but in the shorter term, it certainly could affect the finances. And if you can master the technology and increase the confidence there, then certainly when you get into something like financial, driving down your cost of capital can have significant, again, impacts in the longer term. At the same time, all of it truly does depend on the policy in place and whether we are truly setting up the market so that it's going to reward the behaviors that will benefit us nationally and globally in the long term so that it becomes truly sustainable. So although my background would tend to have me lean towards technical and I believe that quite often that's where as a nuclear industry, we tend to treat the problem. Often I think it's actually the policy side and the market side and how we set that up for success that will drive all the other behaviors. And I'll pass on the same question to Shannon Bragg-Zitten, if you would. Well, I'm not sure I have too much to add. Christina did a great job tackling that question and I agree it is an excellent question that we do come upon quite often. The technical challenges, I think are something we can certainly overcome. We have a lot of good engineers and scientists working on this and I think we can overcome that. In fact, we are overcoming some of the technical challenges but the financial and the political aspects are significant. When we think about where we are deploying these, that will vary, that will change. We have different energy markets and markets treat different resources differently and as Christina mentioned, they don't always value the behaviors that we really seek. Those markets often look at the price of electricity and don't consider these thermal products and these thermal energy avenues and how they treat those generators on the grid. So we need to look at that market structure to understand are they valuing what we value and will they lead us to the right solutions on our energy portfolios in the future? With regard to financial aspects, absolutely. We need to drive down the costs of some of these new technologies. We can look to many different reports that show least cost portfolios or deep decarbonization including nuclear and the value and the percentage of nuclear in those scenarios increases as the cost of nuclear decreases. So as we introduce new technologies, we do need to keep an eye to the cost associated and as we drive down those costs, we will see that the challenges associated will be much smaller and easier to overcome to achieve that energy future we're all looking for. Thank you, thank you very much. Let me just go back to Jeff one more time because I hear you typing away. Is that because you have more questions coming in or is it? No, it's just because our speakers are so fascinating and I'm taking notes. Thank you very much. I hope our speakers heard that. He's avidly following the discussion. Then before I ask for a warm round of applause, let me just say that this has been a very, very good bridge to some of the first things we're going to talk about tomorrow which is what kind of models allow us to do this sort of systemic evaluation of costs and benefits of nuclear and other sources in an increasingly complex energy mix. So a very, very good bridge to take us from this first day of the scientific forum into this second day. Let us now please give our speakers in this second session a very warm round of applause. And ladies and gentlemen, that does bring day one to a close but there's much to look forward to. So please join us either live here in the room and thank you to all of you for being with us through this long and very intensive day today or also on our live stream, of course, we will be very eager to have you with us once again on day two starting at 9.30 in the morning, Vienna time for session three on a topic of enormous importance for boosting nuclear's role and public acceptance of it, namely innovations in managing the nuclear life cycle all across the life cycle of nuclear power. So many thanks to all. Please enjoy your evening and we look forward to seeing you back here tomorrow. And thanks also to my co-moderator Jeff for the great support.