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pilot reactor; finding the several billion, finding the regulator, the location that will actually build the first one of
these. Once you get the first one built, if it works as advertised, then it's just clear as day, because the economics,
the energy density, are so different than nuclear as we know it.
CA: And so, to understand it right, this involves building deep into the ground almost like a vertical kind
of column of nuclear fuel, of this sort of spent uranium, and then the process starts at the top and kind of works
down?
BG: That's right. Today, you're always refueling the reactor, so you have lots of people and lots of
controls that can go wrong: that thing where you're opening it up and moving things in and out, that's not good.
So, if you have very cheap fuel that you can put 60 years in -- just think of it as a log -- put it down and not have
those same complexities. And it just sits there and burns for the 60 years, and then it's done.
CA: It's a nuclear power plant that is its own waste disposal solution.
BG: Yeah. Well, what happens with the waste, you can let it sit there -- there's a lot less waste under this
approach -- then you can actually take that, and put it into another one and burn that. And we start off actually by
taking the waste that exists today, that's sitting in these cooling pools or dry casking by reactors -- that's our fuel
to begin with. So, the thing that's been a problem from those reactors is actually what gets fed into ours, and
you're reducing the volume of the waste quite dramatically as you're going through this process.
CA: I mean, you're talking to different people around the world about the possibilities here. Where is
there most interest in actually doing something with this?
BG: Well, we haven't picked a particular place, and there's all these interesting disclosure rules about
anything that's called "nuclear," so we've got a lot of interest, that people from the company have been in Russia,
India, China -- I've been back seeing the secretary of energy here, talking about how this fits into the energy
agenda. So I'm optimistic. You know, the French and Japanese have done some work. This is a variant on
something that has been done. It's an important advance, but it's like a fast reactor, and a lot of countries have
built them, so anybody who's done a fast reactor is a candidate to be where the first one gets built.
CA: So, in your mind, timescale and likelihood of actually taking something like this live?
BG: Well, we need -- for one of these high-scale, electro-generation things that's very cheap, we have 20
years to invent and then 20 years to deploy. That's sort of the deadline that the environmental models have
shown us that we have to meet. And, you know, TerraPower, if things go well -- which is wishing for a lot --
could easily meet that. And there are, fortunately now, dozens of companies -- we need it to be hundreds -- who,
likewise, if their science goes well, if the funding for their pilot plants goes well, that they can compete for this.
And it's best if multiple succeed, because then you could use a mix of these things. We certainly need one to
succeed.
CA: In terms of big-scale possible game changes, is this the biggest that you're aware of out there?
BG: An energy breakthrough is the most important thing. It would have been, even without the
environmental constraint, but the environmental constraint just makes it so much greater. In the nuclear space,
there are other innovators. You know, we don't know their work as well as we know this one, but the modular
people, that's a different approach. There's a liquid-type reactor, which seems a little hard, but maybe they say
that about us. And so, there are different ones, but the beauty of this is a molecule of uranium has a million times
as much energy as a molecule of, say, coal, and so -- if you can deal with the negatives, which are essentially the
radiation -- the footprint and cost, the potential, in terms of effect on land and various things, is almost in a class
of its own.
CA: If this doesn't work, then what? Do we have to start taking emergency measures to try and keep the
temperature of the earth stable?
BG: If you get into that situation, it's like if you've been over-eating, and you're about to have a heart
attack: Then where do you go? You may need heart surgery or something. There is a line of research on what's
called geoengineering, which are various techniques that would delay the heating to buy us 20 or 30 years to get
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