He was a child of the depression, remember-
The idea of poverty and want was very real to him
and he felt, and I think he was right,
that cheap energy was a key element toward improving standard of living,
you know, including nutrition and everything else that comes with it.
Roughly 1 billion people live like the US, and there's about six billion others
who wish they could. And they will,
as soon as they can afford it.
But, on the way, they're going to be able to just barely afford it.
Any energy is better than no energy.
And the cheapest right now is coal, and if you look at what's built, it is coal.
Coal dominates the market by 60-to-80% of all new stuff-
not just old stuff, but the new stuff! It's coal.
I don't want a world that has 10x as much coal.
ThorCon is a collection of people who are primarily retired and primarily comfortable.
And I really want to see the poor in the world get the benefits of having some energy.
I've gone over to India, worked in the orphanages, makes a big difference.
EIA is kinda hoping that maybe coal will dominate a little bit less in the future,
but I think honestly that's a hope.
It won't change unless we do something to change it.
The ramp rate, how much new electricity we need, is extremely severe.
In the last 15 years, China installed more new electricity
then is existing in all of the US now.
India's about to repeat that process.
So we need to build out the equivalent of the entire US electrical network every 10
years or so, and you know- Once India's done it's going to be Indonesia
and then going to move on someplace else.
And that pace is going to continue for 100 years.
So the demand, really, is to put out on the order of 100 gigawatts of power, every year.
100 gigawatts of new power, every year.
This is a huge, huge market.
The size of the whole oil industry today.
If you look around and say, what- What could possibly supply this kind of energy?
Nuclear is the answer.
The shipyards already put out that kind of quantity in large ships.
So they know how to do that.
We can do about 90% of the work in the shipyard.
This is an ultra-large crude carrier.
One of the world's largest ships was actually designed and built by the founder of our company.
If you look at the world, about 80% of the people live
within 500 miles of the ocean or a big river.
A perfectly reasonable distance to run a transmission line.
This is a 1 gigawatt nuclear island of a power plant, and not the turbines and generators
and the cooling towers and the stuff, but the nuclear island.
And it's small compared to the boat.
It's, like, 1/4 of the steel.
We're talking like 500 tonne pieces onto barges, take them to the site, and assemble them like
you're plugging together Lego blocks.
This boat cost $90 million.
So if I can build a 1 gigawatt power plant for anything remotely resembling how much
it cost us to build that ship, then we're doing much better than with current technology.
We got roughly 1/5th the amount of steel as a coal plant does.
For concrete, we've got about 1/3rd the concrete that the coal plant does.
Talk about roughly 6-cents a kilowatt-hour for coal,
and about 3-cents a kilowatt-hour for ThorCon.
Should-cost would be, set up manufacturing, how much does it cost putting in the materials,
the skills we have to put in, the labor we have to put in?
Did-cost is: And then what happened when you got in with all the regulations?
So, we're going to focus on what it should cost.
Regulations are going to come in country-by-country,
it's going to preclude us from certain countries until they come to their senses.
The reason that costs a little for that boat, compared to how big it is-
You've got a plate of steel on the bottom, you've got ribs going across here.
You got robot welders that are welding the ribs to the plate of steel.
And you've got one person they're running 5 or 6 different machine simultaneously.
We're building the power plants using the same basic technology.
Actually, in the same yards.
So our power plant basically is a boat dug into the ground, with double hull steel,
concrete poured between the steel.
Being able to build power plants at 100 gigawatts per year is very, very much viable.
Once we get away from the thick forgings of the reactor vessel
that you have with Light Water Reactors.
Every 4 years we exchange our cans, because we have a graphite moderated reactor,
so the graphite is going to get neutron damage.
We have to replace it.
And we do that by having sealed cans that we put on a "Can Ship" we call it-
a specially designed ship.
The Can Ship will haul those back to a can recycling center.
After we've been doing that for a decade or so we're going to have some spent fuel,
and that will go to a fuel recycling center.
We'll start out with just using simple fluorination and distillation to recover most of the salt.
That'll let us recover the salt and the uranium and the thorium.
I does not let us recover the transuranics.
[In the] Future, we would anticipate making this a secure site and being able to do the
transuranics extractions.
This is a 1 gigawatt power plant site.
You see the Can-Ship here.
This little red one is a can.
That's the 250 megawatt electric reactor.
And then this is a standard turbine generator.
We have no objection to Brayton Cycle, but we don't want to wait.
We don't want to do something that's even better, but 10 years later.
So our goal is driven by- What can you do now?
And get started- Get going, because- Anything nuclear, frankly, is better than coal.
So if we can make the cost, get in there and get in the market-
Then we can fuss about reducing waste in the future.
We're able to handle, fairly flexibly, what kind of fuel and salt in the same reactor.
We're currently planning on using NaBe.
Sodium-fluoride, beryllium-fluoride as our baseline salt, because we can buy it now.
FLiBe is a little harder to get by, and we don't want our schedule
to be dependent on when we can buy FLiBe.
So we've started with MSRE, and we made sacrifices in neutronics performance,
somewhat in economic performance, in order to keep the schedule short.
Roughly a decade we think we could be in volume production.
That kind of schedule seems kind of crazy to people used to the nuclear industry.
But I'd point out that Camp Century was built in 2 years.
The Nautilus was built in 6 and that was the very first one.
Had lots of extra challenges, being a submarine and all.
Hanford was built in 2 years.
It's by those standards, ours is a rather lax schedule.
We're doing this primarily out of wanting to see things improve.
It'd be nice to get some money out of it, but that's not the prime motivation by a longshot.
Go to India.
They're happy, but there's a lot about their life that could be quite a bit more comfortable.
Have water that's clean and running.
Have heat, or in case of India, air-conditioning when it's 120 degrees outside.
These aren't unreasonable things to hope for.
And- I don't have to be the one who decides.
You know, let's let them decide for themselves what they want.
I don't think me or
somebody else in the US should be making those decisions for them.