>>Taylor Wilson: So I want to talk a little bit about redeeming the atom because we have
been trying to harness its power for about seven decades now, and we're not quite there
yet.
And I think the future of our civilization depends on being able to harness the power
and perfect our ability to unleash its power.
So I'll actually go back and talk about a little bit of what I have done and then talk
about what I'm going to do.
So I got into nuclear science when I was about 10 years old.
Before that I was interested in space, and I wanted to build rockets and be an astronaut.
And I don't know what it was but something triggered that interest, something I read.
And I think it is something about the intrinsic power, the energy density associated with
the strong nuclear force that drew me to it.
I realized that this had the potential to radically change the world if it was utilized
properly.
And so I started out, I decided I wanted to build a fusion reactor.
And I became the youngest person when I -- when I was 14, I became the youngest person to
produce nuclear fusion with a little device that you can see behind me.
This image right here, which was taken by GoPro actually, which is actually fairly radiation
hard, so that's good.
What it is, is inertial electrostatic confinement.
So all I'm doing here is essentially replicating the gravity in large amounts of material that
you find in a star with essentially electricity so you charge it up to -- that inner grid
inside there, up to a very high negatively charged voltage and you can get a potential
well that forms for positively charged ions.
In this case, it is deuterium.
Now, deuterium is the second isotope of hydrogen.
Has a proton and a neutron in its nucleus.
And what you're seeing behind you is -- behind me is actually almost a mini star.
It is not self-sustaining.
It doesn't produce more power out than you put in.
But hydrogen atoms are being fused into helium atoms.
And out of that reaction comes neutrons.
Now neutrons are very important in nuclear physics.
And from that reactor, I developed a bunch of different technologies.
The first big one that I ended up winning the Intel International Science and Engineering
Fair for was a detection system for nuclear material.
So I do a lot of work and have done a lot of work in nuclear non-proliferation counterterrorism.
And one of the huge problems that we face is that with a relatively small amount of
material, you can make a weapon that can cause a tremendous amount of damage.
You can think of the attacks of 9/11 that killed thousands of people would be magnified
by orders of magnitude if there had been a nuclear weapon used in that similar area.
And so this is a huge problem.
Luckily, radioactive things, nuclear materials are radioactive.
They give off certain radiation, and we can detect that radiation.
The problem is the detectors we have right now for detecting something like weapons-grade
plutonium use this really rare isotope called Helium-3, which we happen to have a lot of
on the moon, but down on Earth we can only find it in the pits of old nuclear weapons
where we suck it out from the decay of tritium, and so these detection systems, if they work,
are way too expensive and can't be kind of mass produced like we need to create a net
for nuclear terrorism.
And so I developed a detector that essentially replaces the Helium-3 with water, which is
the most ubiquitous, inexpensive substance on planet Earth.
At least that's the active detection medium.
There's a few special tricks and a few special ingredients in there.
But now you can, for orders of magnitude less, build actually detectors that are more sensitive
than the preexisting systems.
So that's one of the things I did.
I also just decided that I wanted to develop a technology to produce medical isotopes very
inexpensively because nuclear medicine is one of the best tools we have right now for
treating and diagnosing disease.
PET scans are primarily where this is focused, which is the best way to image cancer.
It's actually molecular imaging.
Instead of just seeing what's there, you can actually see what's going on.
You can track biomarkers, biologically relevant molecules.
The problem is these isotopes are very short-lived.
You can't inject something in the body that's radioactive for very long.
And because of that, you can't stockpile them.
So instead of these, about an $8 million device, that are currently used to produce these isotopes,
I developed a system that costs less than a hundred thousand dollars, wheels into the
hospital room, and produces isotopes in similar quantities on-site in the hospital.
So I was really excited about that, and -- [ Laughter ]
>>Taylor Wilson: -- right about now is when I'm thinking I'm going to graduate high school.
This was about a year or two ago.
And I decided, well, I'm going to graduate high school soon, and I'd been teaching some
graduate students and things about my sophomore year of high school, so I thought, well, do
I go, you know, to university and continue kind of the academic research I'd been doing?
I was given a lab at the University of Nevada, Reno Physics Department to do all this research
in during high school.
And I decided no.
You know, I could license the technology I developed to a big company, big defense contractor,
HealthCo company, but I decided when I graduated high school I wanted to start up a company
to commercialize the technology I'd developed and that's what I'm doing now.
But I want to segue into one other thing because I think it is the most important thing I've
done with my career.
,Because energy is -- [ Laughter ]
>>Taylor Wilson: -- energy is the most important thing we have.
All progress, all economic indicators, anything that we can do requires a source of energy.
And a lot of the big problems we talk about, like clean water and health care and poverty,
at their base have to have a clean, reliable, and cheap source of energy.
And that's something that we don't have right now.
That's a huge problem.
We have energy sources that kill our planet, we have energy sources that are too expensive,
and we have energy sources that are finite.
And so the one big technology that I have designed is this -- this molten salt -- it's
a molten salt reactor that I've developed that essentially is proliferation- and accidental-resistant.
It's buried in the ground and runs for 30 years and it's about half the price of current
nuclear power.
But most importantly, as opposed to most what they call Generation IV or Generation IV-plus
nuclear technologies, it's not two decades away like anyone else who is developing these
new nuclear technologies is kind of touting.
This technology, conservatively, could reach market in about five years.
And this has to do with a lot of factors, but most importantly, it has to do with the
fact that there's no real physics problem to overcome and there's really no real materials
problem to overcome.
So essentially you can think of how these work as they're basically a vat or a pot of
these molten salts, so they're halide salts and they have the fuel dissolved in them so
your coolant and your fuel is mixed together, and you essentially extract heat from the
top of this vessel.
You have an active region in the reactor where the nuclear reactions are actually taking
place, and because of the thermal expansion of coefficient of the salt, you actually get
natural circulation through the core.
So as the salt heats up, it gets less dense, it goes to the top, you remove heat, goes
back through the core, gets heated up, and you get the circulation effect.
And these things can't melt down.
But most importantly, there's no inclination in any of -- any possible scenario for the
radioactive material to leave the core.
It's not under a thousand PSI of pressure like the light water reactor that we have
right now, like the reactors at Fukushima.
There's no chemical reactivity, no potential to generate hydrogen which can form explosive
mixtures with oxygen.
And so there's no potential for the radioactivity in the core to leave the core.
And they can be sealed up and they run for 30 years so the proliferation threat goes
away, even though there is no technically weapons-grade material in the core.
And these can be delivered anywhere in the world.
They're manufactured on an assembly line and delivered anywhere in the world to produce
power.
Now, it's modular.
It rolls off the assembly line and it's only in the range of 2 to 100 megawatts.
Now, this is different than some other reactor technology that is larger, but 50 megawatts
is the distributed power version, so we're really moving towards the distributed power
mode of generation anyway because of efficiency losses in the grid and renewables.
So that's -- 50 megawatts is your standard, you know, large town/small city's worth of
power, plus the industry load on there.
There's a hundred-megawatt utility version, and there's actually an 8-megawatt version
-- this is electric, 8-megawatt electric -- for certain special applications, so remote villages
and perhaps one of the things I'm most excited about, which is spacecraft, because if we're
going to go any past Mars, we run out of solar, and if we want to go to Mars and get there
in any short amount of time, we really need nuclear energy.
And I tell people that all the sources of energy we have right now, whether it's the
food that you're eating, whether it's the fossil fuels you're putting in your car, that's
essentially like a battery.
That is storing energy that you can then transfer to a different form of energy by burning it,
combusting it, metabolizing it.
Because all the original energy that we have came from a nuclear reaction.
It came from a nuclear reaction, a fusion reaction, in a star.
Not only that, but most of the elements that make us up came from that star also.
And so I think by perfecting nuclear energy, which I think right now means fission, I think
a couple decades out means fusion, we'll be able to solve a lot of the problems that we're
faced with now.
So appreciate your time.
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]