Welcome to the Chronos Fusion Energy podcast.
I'm Priyanca Ford, the founder of Chronos Fusion Energy, and I'm thrilled to have you
with us for today's episode.
We're diving into the world of nuclear technology with a guest whose extensive career has made
him a leading figure in the industry.
Joining me is Martin Owens, our Chief Strategy Officer and Board Advisor at Chronos Fusion
Energy.
Martin has 35 years of experience in nuclear energy, from reactor development to project
management, and he brings a unique perspective to the table.
Martin's journey into nuclear energy has been anything but conventional.
After earning his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Old Dominion University
in 1984, he was on the path to becoming a test pilot before his career took a turn into
nuclear operations.
His first role in the industry was the BWXD Nuclear Operations Group, where he helped
develop reactors for the U.S. Navy.
This pivotal experience laid the groundwork for a successful career in advanced nuclear
technologies.
In addition to his work at Chronos Fusion Energy, Martin holds a key position at Los
Alamos National Laboratory as Senior Director of the Capital Project Execution Organization.
His role at Los Alamos involves overseeing complex projects and ensuring the successful
execution of capital initiatives.
This dual responsibility reflects his deep expertise and commitment to pushing the boundaries
of nuclear technologies.
Martin's career includes notable roles at Arriva and GE Hitachi.
At Arriva, he managed nuclear reactor and fuel development programs, earning a promotion
to project director.
At GE Hitachi, he served as EPC director, leading large-scale nuclear projects.
His academic background is complemented by an MBA in global management from Ashford University,
giving him a strategic outlook on the industry's challenges and opportunities.
Today, Martin plays a crucial role at Chronos Fusion Energy, guiding our strategic direction
as we work towards commercializing fusion energy and achieving energy independence.
In this episode, we'll explore Martin's career path, his insights into nuclear technology,
and his views on the future of fusion energy.
We'll discuss his work at Los Alamos, the challenges of nuclear regulation, and the
innovative approach we're taking at Chronos Fusion Energy.
Martin is the person I go to with the hard-to-solve, almost impossible problems, and he always
finds a way to make things happen.
Here's Martin Owens.
Thanks for doing this, Martin.
I'm happy to be here.
We usually start these off by asking, what got you into your field of specialty?
For you, it's nuclear energy, nuclear operations.
What drew you into it?
Well, to be honest, it was kind of happenstance for me.
I wasn't quite sure what kind of career I was going to go into.
Originally, I was really headed to be a pilot, wanted to be a best pilot.
And sort of I almost went in that direction, and I got into the Air Force and a lot of
different other kinds of things.
And kind of just all of a sudden sort of changed my mind, and I sort of started wondering what
I was going to do.
And so I had just gotten out of school.
And so I was like, had one thing that came up, and that was I needed to pay some bills.
Okay?
So I had to, you know, get a job.
And so I just happened to get a job.
And, you know, I got a couple offers and took a job in Lynchburg, Virginia, with a company
that at that time was called Babcock and Wilcox at the Naval Nuclear Fuel Division.
And I really never intended to get into nuclear.
I mean, I thought about maybe going into the nuclear Navy.
That seemed kind of attractive to me.
So I ended up sort of like in a role in nuclear, I didn't really expect to stay.
I thought this would be a good first job.
But as I got into it, I realized that this was really amazing technology, and we were
very, very, we were at the cusp of doing a lot of development and it was a very dynamic
program.
And so that really appealed to me.
And you know, I just really got into the business of building nuclear power plants for the Navy.
So that's how I ended up my start.
Wow.
The Navy has always been ahead of the game when it comes to nuclear energy.
Why is that?
Is that unlikely or is that just how it would have always been?
Well, I think, you know, many things in this world get driven by the Defense Department.
And especially new technology tends to, the applications of it, you know, tend to come
out in, you know, it's the same thing in aircraft, right?
So you have the Wright brothers who are, but they were bicycle mechanics, right?
But pretty soon people started thinking about, well, gee, can we use this for the military?
And so you had World War I and they started using aircraft and that's what I think drove
that industry.
Same thing with nuclear, you know, nuclear really started out in experimental land.
Of course, everybody knows about Oppenheimer and atomic weapons and the technology got
developed quite a bit there.
But then there was this application of could we use this for power?
Could we harness this?
And really that all started with the nuclear Navy and, you know, Admiral Rickover, who
had a vision of how it could be applied to submarines.
And he convinced a number of people, including getting the funding, to develop it for power.
And that really sort of cast the die, if you will, of the direction of nuclear power very
early on, very rapid development of it.
Wow.
Yeah, nuclear energy has an absolutely fascinating history.
Our DOE labs have done so much, especially Los Alamos.
So where, you were at Arriva for a long time.
What did you, what was Arriva about?
And how did, I'm just curious, how did Fission go from lab to commercial?
Was it the same as what Fusion is trying to do in that there are a couple of private companies
or?
I'm curious.
Yeah.
So the companies that were heavily involved in developing nuclear power for the Navy was
General Electric and Westinghouse.
And so, and because they were power companies, right, they had developed, they were already
into power, you know, and developing electricity.
So that's how they got involved.
And you know, really Eisenhower, President Eisenhower had the Atoms for Peace initiative.
He was sort of a visionary, I think, and that he wanted to really spread that nuclear energy
across the globe.
But these companies like General Electric, you know, they were the first ones to commercialize
nuclear power, you know.
Believe the first, the first plant that produced electricity was in California.
So it was a General Electric plant.
So that came out of their experience in the nuclear Navy because they had developed, that
Nolz-Toller Power Lab or CAPL up in Schenectady, New York there, they were behind designing
the reactors for the Navy.
And then they sort of just spawned that out to the commercial world.
And so that's how that, the commercial world got going.
We've been difficult actually to, if they didn't have that whole investment from the
government to really, you know, develop the technology and then they could apply it to
the commercial world.
So at this point, because GE is older than Fission Energy.
Is that a true statement?
Yeah.
So GE was an established company.
Right.
Okay.
Right.
You got to think Edison, right?
So you know, the roots of General Electric are back to Thomas Edison.
And Westinghouse is like, you know, George Westinghouse.
So they developed a lot of the electric motors, right?
We talk about things like alternating current motors and all these kinds of things.
And so, yes.
And so those companies really were relied upon to have the expertise and the engineering
background, but also the manufacturing base to be able to do those types of things.
Yeah.
That's a hard one to scale up.
You can save a decent decade if you work with an established company for that.
Yeah.
I think that makes sense.
How was Old Dominion University?
Where is that, by the way?
So that's in Norfolk, Virginia.
And yeah.
So I ended up at Old Dominion.
The interesting thing about Old Dominion is that it's in very close proximity to Langley.
And so there's a number of professors there involved in NASA and doing a lot of that kind
of work.
So you get the benefit of that.
And today, it's a very large university there.
When I went, it was still kind of large, but it was more of a university that had a lot
of people that commuted to it.
So I was one of the few, I think, that actually lived on campus.
But yeah, I enjoyed my time there.
It was some interesting professors.
Nice.
So mechanical, you did mechanical engineering there.
And that's before you got, you knew you weren't even going to get into fission.
That's right.
So at the time, I was thinking about going to the Air Force.
So I thought that mechanical engineering would be a really good background for that.
If you were to be getting to things like being a test pilot or things like that, you need
to understand the engineering of that.
And mechanical engineering has always been thought of as sort of the broad-based engineering
discipline that you can apply to a lot of different areas.
So you can, you don't get too pigeonholed.
You can apply that to a number of different industries.
Right.
So that's interesting.
You were in, you did for fission, this, when engineering was the biggest challenge for
fission, you worked on that.
And now for fusion, we're very much thinking that when people say, what is your biggest
challenge, I say engineering.
It's an engineering challenge.
So yeah, it's applicable.
How do you think about the timing of that?
I would just like to somehow draw that parallel between fission and fusion when it comes to
the physics, just being in the precipice of this birth of this new commercial technology
that's been developed in the lab for decades and decades and then...
Well, yeah, I think that's in all really cutting edge sort of applications of technology, the
real trick is how do you actually make something that works?
So in the lab, you can prove out the physics of things and you can prove out formulas and
how you explain things, but how you actually translate that into something that can work.
So on the fission side of things, the nuclear Navy, a tremendous amount of money and technology
and science behind that, but to actually develop, let's say, like materials that will work for
years under all kinds of really difficult conditions, whether it's heat, pressure, being
bombarded by fission, neutrons, and how do you actually make something that can actually
work is very, very difficult.
I mean, it's one thing to where you can get close to it and you can say, yeah, a little
bit more development here, we can actually work, but then to actually meet all the requirements
and deliver something, that's a specialty unto itself.
And so that was the leap of say, Rickover, with the Nautilus of actually being able to
broadcast underway under nuclear power.
And the same thing as infusion, it's no different in that.
I think the physics are understood, but it's now how do we develop the materials that will
withstand that?
How do we have the control systems?
That's going to be actually the hardest thing to accomplish.
So there's very close parallels of those things.
But in today's world, we have so much more at hand.
So we have so many more exotic materials.
We have so many more computer programs that can calculate things way faster than they
did in the 50s with slide rules and very slow processing types of applications.
So we should be faster.
We should be better.
And that's what I'm believing.
Yeah, I agree with you.
I think in terms of time scale, I think building a fusion energy generator in about 12 years,
starting in 12 years, we could be building one every four years to five years would be
the build time span, if not shorter.
But what is that with fission?
How many years does it take to build it and then get the regulatory licensing, so to speak?
We should really talk about that.
Yeah, in fission, the technology exists.
And the engineering has been really accomplished, all the basics.
It really becomes more of a regulatory challenge.
And really, it's really a little bit unfair because nuclear power has proven itself over
decades to be safe.
And the rigor that technology has produced safety systems and backup safety systems that
control that is there.
But the regulatory framework these days is very difficult.
I think it's maybe getting a little better because I think there are people realizing
in those regulatory bodies that they're really stifling the advancement of nuclear power.
And if you look across the world, other countries are going much faster.
If you go to China, they've got many plants under construction there and have developed
plants.
We in the United States have only two plants to show for that in recent history.
And that's at Vogel there in Georgia, which are under Westinghouse.
But that took well over a decade, $30 billion.
And many of those years were just trying to get the license to build it.
Whereas years ago, that wasn't the case.
But if you look at fission compared to fusion, the case for safety basis for fusion is much
more straightforward than fission because you can have an extended reaction, let's say
that you have to control it.
You have to have many backup systems to make sure that you don't have a situation where
you have a meltdown, which we all, that's a common term that people understand.
But in fusion, you don't have that fusion.
As you know, you have to maintain the fusion itself.
You have to put energy in to sustain a fusion reaction.
As soon as you let off the gas, it stops immediately.
So that is a much totally different way of licensing something.
And so really, in fusion, it's going to be more like accelerators or any source of radiation
that you have to shield.
And so as long as you can demonstrate that you have shielding in place while the fusion
reaction is going on, that's going to be the main driver, which is order of magnitude lower
in complexity and also being able to demonstrate that.
Right, I think we had some good news for fusion, I want to say, like mid last year, maybe it
was a year and a half ago that the Nuclear Energy Commission out here in the US would
regulate fusion very differently.
But then I recently found out that in California, even though they're very profusion, we are
very profusion.
We also have regulations for neutrons and how neutrons are produced and the safety regulations
for it is a high threshold to pass.
So we were having a lot of conversations between a neutronic energy being even more friendlier
on a regulatory, for a regulatory environment in the future than even a neutron.
How, this is kind of like a big what if question with a lot of variables, but I'd love to know
what you think about it.
A lot of countries out there are going to look at how the US is regulating fusion and
they're going to probably come up with their own laws and ways to do it.
What would be a good way?
There are bodies created by EDR and there's the Fusion Energy Association and there are
smart people working on this.
So this is not anything that's on your plate or my plate, but just based on your expertise,
what is the best case scenario?
International fusion.
You know, well, you know, on the fission side, the regulatory bodies do meet and they have
had a lot of words I would say about how they were going to use one country's regulations
in another country's.
But that's never, as far as I know, actually came to fruition.
People have sort of said the US is the gold standard.
I think that's probably US saying that.
Probably.
I have a biocell admit.
But I actually I don't think it's going to be such a high bar at all.
I mean, and I think if you look at things that are already exported products that are
technology that produce some kind of radiation that are used in other countries and are shielded,
you know, I think we've already you could probably find some examples there that already
are in place.
So you know, I don't I'm really I'm really optimistic that that that the regulatory piece
is going to be a small part of the fusion development.
It's going to be the engineering piece is the challenge.
So right.
Yeah, I just I think about that.
I just think about like the neutrons or if we or if Tritium were to be used in kind of
global expansion.
So if we were going to build like 10 generators that we want to put somewhere out there in
the desert somewhere that can power a railway or something like that, we wouldn't want it
to have Tritium in it.
That's up and running or like or like a lithium breeding wall that breeds more and more Tritium
in the system because now you've actually put something weaponizable even though it's
fusion.
So I just so I think that I think that there needs to be that distinction made in the regulatory
system at some point in the future.
I hope people are kind of paying attention to that.
Yes, I think that's a really good point.
Tritium is a something that's highly controlled by governments because of its use in the weapons
programs.
But it also though Tritium exists in like commercial nuclear fission power as a as part
of something they have to deal with.
And if you don't Tritium is very, very difficult to to contain because it's such a small such
a small atom, right?
So what you end up with is there are there are places where Tritium has gotten into the
ground.
And although it has a relatively shorter half life, it's still something you don't want,
of course, in your water.
And so there are plants in the US that have been shut down because of their concerns about
Tritium.
And so not having to deal with large quantities of Tritium is certainly a huge advantage.
It's also not only from a regulatory standpoint, but from a technical standpoint of having
to have all the controls in place, engineered and the cost of all of that as well and complications.
The ancillary systems that you need to build just because you're using Tritium is almost
is good motivation to do the extra engineering and go the a neutrality route.
Because even even with the fusion, it's not just your generator.
If you're using Tritium, you need to have a some sort of a Tritium processing unit attached
to your fusion energy generator.
And that's like a huge external unit that needs to be built.
I mean, we have ours.
We will we would have like our plasma heating system that would be a big external unit and
all of that.
So those ancillary systems are necessary, but for both fusion and fission, it's just
that I think there are a few of the fusion ones are almost easier to build than the yeah.
It's always good to keep it simple, right?
The KISS principle.
And so if we can minimize that, and I understand like an eater, if you look at that, they're
plant has an enormous amount of it devoted to have to handle in Tritium.
You know, it's not just a tiny little sidebar, right?
It's something that they have got a lot of investment in.
And of course, a new tronic reducing the number of neutrons is is huge, right?
Because neutrons can go a long ways unless you have a lot of shielding.
But it's also very it's it's it's also bombarding your materials that you have.
And so you have to engineer those materials that much more.
And you're going to have to think about the life span of those things.
See, same thing in, you know, you have to develop those materials for longevity.
So not having as many neutrons to deal with is going to make that a little bit simpler
task and make us make something more robust that can last longer without having to have
lots of frequent maintenance.
Right.
It brings the cost of it down overall.
And just, you know, like for the record, so to speak, like I've always been pro nuclear
energy.
Like I've you know, since I was a child, I've been told good things.
And I worked at Edison International and they owned the Santa No Fre nuclear power plant
where I live in Southern California.
And I think it got shut down a few years ago after after Fukushima.
And there was some political blowback or something.
And they all got shut down.
But I think we had a few others.
I think there was like El Diablo or something, nuclear power plant that got shut down, too.
But so I've always been pro nuclear because in the larger scheme of things, it's been
a safe way to generate enormous, enormous amounts of energy.
And I have friends who have founded companies in California where they have they use fusion
processes to create neutrons because neutrons have their own place in society and they do
different things.
I know this.
You're in Los Alamos.
Yeah, especially the applications.
But it doesn't have a great place when it comes to large scale, large scale fusion energy
commercialization.
You don't want to have it.
That's kind of just for the record.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
And I'm obviously my my career was spent largely in vision.
And so I'm a fan of nuclear power.
And it's not just because I was in it, but probably because I was so close to it, I realized
the advantages and that you have basically power density.
Right.
So you if you look at the amount of uranium that you need compared to, say, like coal
to produce that amount of energy, you're looking at, you know, tons of rail cars, right, compared
to of coal, compared to a tiny little vial of uranium.
So you have this incredible power density.
So you minimize so many things because of that, including waste.
And you know, you've probably seen the press about all the coal ash that has leaked into
rivers and destroyed all kinds of ecosystems.
And so that they have incredible large volumes of that.
So if you look at nuclear power, it's just so much more compact and same thing with fusion.
We're talking about amazing amounts of energy just in a small area.
You know, we're not talking about taking up, you know, millions, thousands of acres of
land for things like solar panels and so forth.
So that's the that's the real advantage of one of them anyway.
Yeah.
We were talking about recently, I think, with Carl, we were talking about Q factor and how
Q factor is calculated.
And like the bare bones way of looking at it is input versus output.
But you could just look at like the plasma Q factor or like your fusion energy Q factor
or the entire or for your entire system.
So it depends on the variables you use in that equation.
You can calculate it many different ways.
But the honest way to do it would be to do the entire system, so to speak, to look at
what goes into powering every single bit of the system and the output that comes out of
it.
And based on even like the most honest of calculations for Q factor, pound for pound
fusion gives you almost four X the amount of power that fission would would give, like
just based on the amount of deuterium and tritium you would use or something.
So yeah, it's we need amazing engineers.
That's what we need.
We need engineers.
Everything that I just said can only be solved by engineering.
Right, and you know, and as I said earlier, you know, we have the advantage today of not
just mechanical engineers, right.
But we're talking about computer scientists, too, who can really leverage things like AI
and move us even more forward.
I've always been amazed at when I worked in the neighbor actor program, and how well they
were able to design way back in the 60s with what the tools that they had back then.
Actually they but the thing was they could only do so many iterations as they optimized
the design, because those calculations would take a long time.
So they couldn't just say, you know, well, we'll just keep iterating until we reach an
even better situation.
They could maybe only run run the reactor to end, you know, three, four times or something
like this way back in the day.
But today, you know, with the computer models that you have, you don't have to spend so
much time doing actual, you know, physical testing.
But also you can run, you know, you can run scenario after scenario, and you can optimize
things to where, you know, if you look at where nuclear powers come in the Navy, you
know, years ago used to be, you know, a reactor, I don't know, might have a year or two, three
kind of life and you have to go replace it.
You know, and today in the nuclear Navy, you're talking about life the ship reactors, so that
they just they you you you weld them shut for 30 plus years and you're looking at, you
know, that kind of an advancement, right.
So that's that's that's come a long ways.
Usually, we have a huge head start because of where where all the tools and technology
that we have at our disposal.
Yeah.
Yeah, so the time scales overall would be faster, the development of the lab to commercial
time scales, all of that.
A lot of computing can be thrown at it.
Yeah, I was even I was talking to somebody about prototyping recently, and we talked
about using computing for prototyping and and just how much more can be accomplished
now.
It's really it's remarkable, really.
And with the and and I think everything that we see now, remarkable as it may be with the
advent of A.I. and the development of like self modeling and all of that, we are we're
almost at a place where I dream of putting in a use case scenario into our simulation
and have the A.I. use everything we've built to give us a perfect design for whatever use
case scenario we've asked it to do.
And we feel like if we can really build the A.I. and the machine learning in the best
ways, we can have a perfect buildable design within a week or two of engaging with a company.
So I'm kind of excited about that, because I feel like that that gives us so much of
a head start.
And I'm excited to see what what we can do in the next two years and what other companies
are going to do with A.I. and fusion energy.
It's a it's a great time to be in A.I. or fusion.
No, yeah, I agree.
You know, when you look at what are the most valuable things that companies have these
days, like as far as the technology of anything that you're developing, it really comes back
to what they have simulate the simulations that they have and the models that they've
built.
They hold that pretty close to their vest as far as being intellectual property, because
you know, they've got they can use those now to to design the next thing.
And it's not so much, you know, in old days, you had to sort of build parts and pieces,
go test them in the lab and then and then iterate from there.
Now, the probably the most important thing is understanding that data that you can put
into these models.
Right.
And you still have to have some data to put in the models and that once you have that,
now you're you're able to have all kinds of different permutations and get to a get to
a better starting place before you actually start building a product.
And that's where things start to get expensive when you're actually building things.
You don't want to build something and then find out it doesn't work and then have to
go back, redesign it and so forth.
Yeah.
You and I have talked a lot about how we are also not.
We also understand, like, you know, liquid fuel production and all of that and how everything
that we see around us is made out of some kind of petroleum.
So I'm I'm kind of excited for for working with that industry because it's it's not going
anywhere and it doesn't.
And all we can do is make it a little bit cleaner and and maybe remove 50 percent off
what people feel is problematic about that industry.
What do you what do you what do you think about that?
Is that something you want to talk about?
Sure.
You know, you know, I used to work on advanced reactors, fission reactors, but specifically
gas cooled reactors and with Triso fuel.
And I started in that industry back in the 90s developing Triso fuel.
And the the goal there is to be able to when it's much more intrinsically safer because
you have this fuel, which is actually the containment and for fission gases.
But it's a ceramic type fuel so you can run it at much, much higher temperatures.
And so you're not looking at melting metals and so forth.
You know, like a situation with water cooled reactors.
And so the output of that is, though, is that you can reach very high temperatures, you
know, way over 800 C and go up to 11 or 12 hundred C even hotter.
And then you start to run into some material issues.
But the positive there, which is very similar to what we're talking about in fusion, is
that when you start being able to have that kind of heat, that usable heat, industries
all over the map need that kind of level of heat.
And what they're getting it from mostly today is through like natural gas.
OK, and burning those kinds of fuels in order to be able to process these things.
But the petroleum industry itself, in order to refine the products that they, you know,
the crude oil that they are drilling, they have to use about around a third of that fuel
in order to process their fuel.
And so all the products that we have around us, really the average person, I don't understand
that their entire world around them is built from petroleum products.
All the plastics and, you know, cars, your lipstick, your computer screens and keyboards,
all these things are petroleum products, is your carpet, everything.
You know, you can look around your apartment, your house, your room, your car, wherever
you are, and you'll be hard pressed to not have something within arm's reach that isn't
based on petroleum products.
So if we can harness the energy from fusion, just the usable heat without even thinking
about electricity, we can make all of those products much more efficiently, but also you're
not throwing away one third of the fuel, the feedstock.
So you know, it's very attractive.
No, that specific one was a big selling point.
I spoke about this at COP28, and I know you gave me some talking points, and we discussed
this before I went out there, but that, when I told people about that specific thing, that
was a big intrigue.
Not only would it be cleaner, but there would be a big savings.
Yeah, there's a huge driver for that.
You know, one day I believe that petroleum will be actually be more valuable for the
product side of it, the petrochemical side of it versus just the fuel side of it.
You know, it's all conjecture of how much petroleum is available for the future.
We all know it's more difficult to harvest than in the past because we've fused up the,
you know, of course we've gone to the easiest sources first, and now we're going to have
to go to other places more remote to try and get that.
So it just makes sense to try and preserve that product as well as all the other industries
that need usable heat.
You know, the concrete industry, the cement industry uses a lot of heat.
There's a number of different industries that are buying right now natural gas in order
to power those kinds of things.
So it's a very exciting, applications are just abound if you can reach those kinds of
high heat, which not everybody can.
And actually, fusion energy is going to surpass almost anything, right?
Because you're talking about plasma, right?
You're talking about incredible temperatures.
So I think it's going to be the first most usable application of fusion power.
And then before we even start to think about electricity.
Yeah, I was reading an article in the Washington Journal this morning, and it said that we
would need about 20 to 25% increase in energy to just power AI over the next decade, like
a significant uptick, like a significant input into the grid.
Yes.
And you know, Google has or building a number of these data centers around the country.
And there's a number of them around Washington DC area, because of all the data there and
so forth.
When I was at GE, I was involved in the small modular reactor program, and those reactors
developed about 300 megawatts of electricity.
What is really interesting to me was learning that some of these data centers need 100 megawatts.
So it's almost like, you know, they need one third of a small modular reactor to power
them.
So they're incredibly hungry for power.
And as we know, data is just expanding even more, right?
It's going to be intense.
So the need for efficient ways to produce and to provide that power is nowhere in sight.
Yeah.
Modular generators are making, it's like a big buzzword in the fission industry now,
it seems.
So I know that fission has also vastly improved, and there are lots of investments going into
fission.
And so there are plans to build all these new types of fission reactors.
How does, does fusion still, can fusion still compete with those upgraded fission reactors?
How do you feel about that?
You know, I worked on neighbor reactors for about, like, just over 20 years.
And I really was not in tune with the commercial world when I was doing that, because that
was all classified.
We were behind razor wire.
I was focused on that.
I went through three generations of reactors while I was there.
I was really fortunate that when I first started there, what really got me hooked was we were
working on the Seawolf prototype, which in my estimation today is like the, it's the
baddest ass, small modular reactor on the planet.
And then I went on to work on the Virginia class, first Virginia class, and then what's
now the Gerald Ford carrier, which is the new carrier.
And so after all that, I sort of popped out and said, I'm going to try commercial.
It's got to be a lot easier.
Right.
That's what, and I go into the commercial world and I find out they hadn't built a
new fission reactor in the U.S. and since around 1980.
Okay.
And, and so the whole industry has just been absolutely stagnant.
And so as I got into that, I mean, I worked on getting a large reactor licensed here in
the U.S. and to be built like three or four different locations in the U.S.
First one was me at Calvert Cliffs, Maryland.
And we worked on that for six years just to try and get the licensing, right?
We spent almost a half a billion dollars just on that.
And it was nothing really totally new, had four different safety trends and so forth.
So what has happened is we've put even more money into all of these different systems.
And so these things start to become even more expensive.
And what you find is many of the utilities are not large enough to even afford one of
these reactors.
It meets their, it's beyond their capex.
And so if you look at Vogel, they spent $30 billion on, I believe anyway, on those, on
two 1100 megawatt reactors.
So you have utilities that are very, they're not, their appetite to spend lots of capital
money is not very high.
Many of them are traded on the stock market.
And so they're concerned about if they decide they're going to, they're going to invest
in something like this, their stock price may go down because the track record has not
been very good, right?
It's like it takes many, many years over budget.
And so the appetite there is, so that's where a really small modular reactor started becoming
the buzzword, as you said, because, well, instead of maybe 10, 12, $15 billion, maybe
it's one or $2 billion.
And maybe we could afford that.
So really the drive on small modular was more of a commercial affordability than anything
else.
There's been a lot of talk about, well, we'll drive the cost down because we'll be able
to build these in factories and we'll be able to sort of replicate these on and so forth.
However, nobody today has cracked that nut.
There's been a lot of talk about it, but you have to have a sizable number of orders to
get off the ground to do that and build your supply chain.
The Navy has done that.
But if you look at the commercial world, there's a lot of talk about it, but unfortunately
I don't see, even when I was at GE, we had, GE's had the wherewithal as far as the fuel
manufacturing, which is huge.
And so they have a real chance at it, I would say.
They still need a lot of orders in order to make that a reality.
And each of those would still run into the same regulatory stuff or is somehow, do any
of these make it easier to meet those regulatory standards we spoke about before?
Well, every site is going to have to be licensed.
So you have your site licensing and then you have the reactor itself that's licensed, the
technology.
So hopefully you only have to get the technology licensed once, but if you go into another
country like UK or, you know, you name it, right, you're going to have to go through
their regulatory body and get their license, which is expensive.
One thing people don't realize, and I didn't realize until I got into it, was that the
companies themselves have to pay for the review.
So when you submit a review to the NRC, at the time, this is a little while back, but
I believe it was around $275 an hour, you paid for a reviewer that largely were subcontractors.
And so they would, there's really no incentive for them to stop asking questions.
They can dream up more questions.
And so it went on and on and on and you're paying for it.
So you can imagine how frustrating that is to companies that, you know, they don't have
endless money and they're trying to get something licensed that as the time is going on, they're
not making things and they're not, you know, getting any bills paid.
So it's this huge outlay.
And that's why you saw a number of companies going bankrupt, a number of companies like
Westinghouse.
So I think if you look at that sort of ecosystem, you can see how Fusion has a much more attractive
opportunity because you're not going to be going through that kind of regulatory process.
And you can get to market much sooner.
It's more predictable.
Engineering is more predictable than the regulatory environment.
Yeah, that's a huge plus.
And you always have to worry, not worry, but the concern is, right, somebody's got to buy
this product.
Somebody has to have the money to that and is willing to invest in this.
And the utilities, as I described, are very reluctant to outlay that kind of money.
Right.
I find myself thinking in terms of if I were to build a hundred generators, what are the,
you know, what are the things that I'm going to need to contend with if I was going to
build a thousand generators?
Is that scalable?
And what are the things I would need to contend with?
And this is over the course of the next two decades or three decades, of course.
But like, if I were to build something at that scale, I would not want it to have anything
in it that is highly weaponizable or I wouldn't want it to have anything that has, you know,
something that has a half-life of a thousand years or 10,000 years.
Is that still the case with the modular reactor then?
I take those two things would still be.
Yeah.
You know, as you go through those regulatory meetings and so forth, you're always going
to get that question.
What are you going to do with the waste?
You know, the waste is really not as a, it can be blown up.
I shouldn't say that.
I didn't mean it that way.
But it can be characterized as a huge problem.
You know, all of the used fuel, the spent fuel right now in the U.S. is being stored
at the sites.
So there is no geologic repository in place right now.
Duca Mountain was attempted.
That probably will never come back.
So what you have is these concrete casks on site that has the fuel stored in it.
My belief is it's very safe, okay, that it's being stored there.
But you always have to the legacy of what are you going to do with this?
The U.S. invented all the technology to recycle that fuel, but Jimmy Carter put a moratorium
on that because he was concerned about diversion of plutonium and other things for that when
you separate those fuels in that process for recycling, which is really amazing because
you actually recover about 97 percent of all that and reuse it.
But you could divert, you know, some materials for, you know, weapon type applications.
So that's that was the concern.
But in fusion, we're not going to have those kinds of issues.
We may have some materials that might have gotten irradiated, but they're not themselves
producing these long lived radionuclides with half-lives of thousands and thousands of years
that you're going to have to deal with for eternity.
And so, you know, and also the fuel itself is in a much different form in procuring it.
So the level of effort to go into actually manufacture fission fuel, you've got to mine
uranium.
You have to go and refine that.
Then you have to, you know, there's lots of processing that's involved there.
And then, you know, so incredible investment and controls just in producing the fuel and
getting into a usable form.
Yeah.
I suppose that that's one challenge that we still share with the fission world is with
fusion of the availability of helium-3 and the availability of tritium or deuterium.
They all exist, but again, we need the, I think even that, we've obviously talked about,
we know of companies working on getting the helium, but again, huge engineering problem.
So since it all kind of comes down to engineering, we need engineers.
We need engineers, Martin, like not just for us, but like for all of the other things that
connect to all of this.
So how do we get more people to be engineers?
Like what is the advice for the younger generation here that are choosing what they would do?
Yeah.
I think there is a, I think there will always be people who are curious and want to understand
our universe, want to understand how things work.
And that's sort of the basis of engineering, right?
It's kind of that curiosity.
And once you have that, you'd like to go into a field, I think that is kind of going to
break through into things.
One thing I learned kind of early on though, is there's some people who like to know what
they're going to do every day and it's been worked out and they just sort of have to follow
a process.
And that's perfectly fine.
I mean, what I've learned was I'm glad there are people like that because I'm not like
that.
And we need people like that, but there are other engineers and other curious people that
want to discover things and are willing to sort of step out where everything isn't figured
out yet.
You know, you mentioned helium-3.
How are we going to get helium-3?
We could maybe harvest it from the moon.
Well, that sounds pretty exciting, right?
So it's not easy, but you know, what I've learned is anything that's been satisfying
in my life hasn't been easy.
It's taken a lot of work and it's taken a lot of collaboration and a lot of fun working
with people and discovering things.
So infusion, we know it works.
We absolutely know it works.
It's been done in laboratories.
You can look at the sun, okay.
We're getting energy from every day.
Okay.
So it works.
It's just how do we now engineer this to harness it?
And so you can almost be in almost any field and be involved in this.
You know, for material science, which I think is fantastic because materials are always
going to be the key to computer science, to mechanical, to plasma physics, to instrumentation,
to civil engineering, to space mining.
All these things we're talking about are going to be needed to come together to make this
a reality.
Yeah.
I'm excited about it.
When I spoke with this company about going to the moon and getting helium-3, they told
us about all of the other things that they would be getting from the moon.
And one of those things was a super fertilizer, apparently.
I don't know what this is.
But it's a fertilizer that's a super fertilizer.
And they said that it's almost just as valuable as helium-3.
So we want to go after it.
And it made me think of a story.
Do you know the guano story?
I think I'm saying it right.
I think it was about 200 years ago or something where they found that seagull manure was a
super fertilizer.
And there was this island that had 10 feet of it piled up in every square inch of this
island.
So they incentivized.
So by day, I mean the US government incentivized sea merchants to go to this island and bring
back this guano.
Do you know the story?
No.
I saw it on YouTube.
I don't know how true it is.
So if I find it, I'll send you the link.
And I'll link it to this podcast.
We know so little about our universe.
There's so many.
Anybody who thinks we've got it all figured out.
We know so little about our universe.
There's so many.
Anybody who thinks we've got it all figured out.
We may be, there may be somebody really smart out there that figures out how to make helium
free here on Earth, right?
That does exist naturally in very small quantities here.
But who knows, right?
I mean, there's the realm of possibilities.
But also we know very little about things like the moon.
We only have a few rocks that we brought back from very small areas of the moon.
That's our complete, our knowledge of what exists on the moon is from just a handful
of things, right?
There could be many more other discoveries there.
Same thing, you know, going, you know, Elon Musk wants to go to Mars and explore Mars.
All of these things are discoveries that could make huge leaps in our knowledge and what
we can, what's possible.
So you know, without, you know, doing these kinds of things like what we're doing in Kronos,
you're not going to discover many other things just as the NASA program, you know, had so
many spin-offs that we all talk about, right?
That the semiconductor industry, all these kinds of things that were way advanced because
we were listening to President John F. Kennedy's, you know, charge to say we're going to put
a man on the moon in this decade.
And this is where we are today.
I think that there are a lot of industries that where we've gotten just very lethargic
and we haven't advanced as fast as we should have in many areas.
And that's got to, we've got to, we've got to up our game, right?
And it's through companies, I think, like Kronos and others that are entrepreneurial
that, I think, you know, Priyanka, your vision, you are not a person that says, well, that
won't work because of XYZ.
You're like, hey, to infinity and beyond.
And so it's kind of like, even though we haven't got it all figured out, it's going to be this
journey on figuring all these things out, there's going to be so many other things that
are going to come out of these things.
Yeah, I'm excited about that.
Even all of the things that can be fused in a plasma field that can make new materials.
And I think for space travel, especially we humans, we as humans have so many aspirations
for, for Mars settlements and space travel.
Everything requires something small that can produce a large amount of energy.
Like none of those aspirations work without having that fundamentally.
It has to be lightweight.
It has to be portable.
It has to not blow up.
You know, it has to have things.
And I feel I'm very optimistic for the future.
Somebody's got to figure out this aging thing just so I can like kind of stick around for
the next like 80, 90 years or so and kind of check these things out.
Well, I've still got a long range plan.
So I don't, I'm not, I'm not limiting myself.
And I think energy, as you talked about, is the fundamental thing.
It's even more fundamental than food and water because all of those things can come from
energy.
And it's sort of the history of man has advanced because of energy.
I always think about like, you know, it used to be used to have to build a fire, right?
You had to have a fire.
You had to have energy to stay warm, to cook your food.
And this was the basic, you know, survival mechanism.
And it hasn't changed.
You know, we just become more sophisticated, but it's still a need.
It's the basis of all the other things that we need for life.
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah, I love that.
I love that actually.
Yeah, there's, yeah, we can make the food out if we have energy, we can make an oxygen
needed environment, we can power robots that can put an atmosphere or a dome or something
together to hold the oxygen in and we can have all that built before we even go there.
I think when I was a kid, I watched a cartoon about with the moon, where the moon was an
energy generator and we were like an interplanetary species.
And now in my adulthood, I'm like, oh my God, the moon really is a big gas station from
a fusion energy perspective.
So I get it.
It's kind of exciting times.
Yeah, really is a big, big energy station.
Anyway, so Martin, like closing this out, what can we, how can we close this out?
Well, I don't know.
I don't know if we can close it out.
We're going forward.
You know, it's like we have to, it's more like a launching pad really, you know.
And what I'm really excited about with Chronos is that we have people involved in it that
are really wanting to go to a whole new level of fusion.
You know, we have, you know, Carl Bob Wegel, and I think Carl said that he's a, he's a
pedal to the metal designer.
And you know, he wasn't satisfied with sort of a new tronic fusion that there is the more
perfect or at least better goal with an a new tronic fusion generator.
And that's what we're striving for.
And so that's the exciting thing about what we're all about.
And that, you know, we know it's, we're not, we're not going to over promise and things
are going to be done tomorrow.
We have to have a really realistic view of it, but we are, we're going to go for it.
Yeah, that's awesome.
Yeah, I'm excited about that too.
We have an awesome team.
We have an awesome generator.
It's going to be a great future.
Thank you so much for doing this.
Well, it was a lot of fun.
I enjoyed myself.