Decarbonizing the High Seas With Mikal Bøe
This is Fissionary, a show exploring how nuclear power is your world. I'm Mary Carpenter. And I'm Jordan Houghton. Let's jump in. Hey, Jordan.
Hey, Mary. And hello, Fissionaries. Thanks for being back with us.
Hey, Fissionaries. Welcome to the final episode of season three. I can't believe we're at the end of another season of Fissionary. I feel like we just wrapped season two, and here we are again. I know. It's been a great season, though. We talked about everything
from saving rhinos to floating nuclear reactors, which is what we're talking about today. Today's episode, we're talking to Mikal Bøe, who is the chairman and CEO of CORE POWER, which is a company focused on next gen reactor technologies for the maritime industry. And Mary, I have to tell you, this conversation was really interesting to me because I think I've only thought about shipping like three times in my life.
The first time was when Paris Hilton was dating all those shipping heirs, the Greek shipping heir. She went through that phase. And then there was one the ever given block, the Suez Canal. And that was like the multi
day, like how this is going to affect like global trade and shipping. And then when the cargo ship hit the key bridge in Baltimore. Beyond that, those are like the only times shipping was on my radar. And this is so interesting to me because when you actually listen to Mikal talking about the scale of shipping and the things that are delivered, you have this whole maritime network behind the scenes that is making our lives possible. And we feel like we just go on about our lives and we don't have to think about it because it just works and does what it's supposed to do.
I mean, I actually think about shipping probably more than the average person. I spend a lot of time in Savannah, Georgia, and there's the port of Savannah. Okay. So you can literally sit at a bar or restaurant on River Street and these gigantic ships will go past just right in front of you. And so you're literally having a cocktail watching this gigantic ship go by.
And the amount of containers on these container ships is it's it's amazing to see how big these ships are and how much they're moving. And just to think about the journey that whatever's in these container ships are making across the ocean, it's pretty wild to see. So it's it's really cool. And it's really, really interesting that CORE POWER is working to provide clean energy for these ships.
And, you know, they're not only working on decarbonization, but also affordability and timing of how long it takes for goods to travel across the world. So you guys are going to really like this episode. It's really interesting. Today, we're joined by Mikal Bøe, the chairman and CEO of CORE POWER, a company at the forefront of developing next generation nuclear reactor technologies for the maritime industry. With more than three decades of experience in shipping, finance and technology.
Mikal has held leadership roles across the globe and now leads efforts to revolutionize shipping and sustainable nuclear solutions. He also serves in key advisory roles, including Chair of the Maritime Applications and Nuclear Propulsion Working Group at the World Nuclear Transport Institute. Mikal, thanks so much for joining us today. We're really excited to have you on Fissionary. Thank you. I'm very happy to be
here. So I have to start out by asking you originally studied business administration and performance arts with a focus on saxophone. What led you to pivot toward a career in the maritime industry? That's a good question, and it's a long time ago. So, you know, Jordan, the you know, when you get a chance to get into one of the foremost music schools, you sort of sit there and think, shall I do it or shall I not do it? And it always comes down to will I regret having done it or will I regret not having done it? And the answer is pretty obvious. So you do it and you you have a go. And I realized that it wasn't for me, like so many musicians realize that this wasn't something that I was going to make a living out of. So I like,
like, like most Norwegians end up either in oil and gas or in shipping. And I ended up in shipping. So tell us a little bit about your career so far and what has been the most rewarding part? Well, it's hard to pick one thing because, you know, I think my career in these last 30 years have really been one where I've tried to I tried to learn as much as possible about everything that, you know, I was involved in and doing and and taking all of that together and starting a company six years ago. In fact, it's our sixth birthday today. So we just had a little birthday party in the office.
But putting that all together, you know, learning about finance, learning about ocean transportation in all forms and everything that comes with that and learning about risk management, learning about technology, learning about how you put things together and you take things about life defend them, I think created the foundations for being able to start CORE POWER to to really answer that biggest of questions that the shipping industry has had since I mean, since we went from sail to steam, you know, in the 1870s. And we've got to do that again. How do we do that in this big gap in the market? I started the company because I felt that all the things that I'd done in my career and all those things, all the low points and all the high points and all the things that I'd learned was really, you know, in totality something that would be sufficient to be able to start answering that big question, How are we going to go? How are we going to how are we going to change the way ocean transportation is powered? Happy birthday to CORE POWER. Yeah, Happy birthday.
That's very exciting. So nuclear powered ships have historically been associated with icebreakers and naval fleets. With CORE POWERs mission to decarbonize ocean transport, how do you see this technology transforming commercial shipping? Well, you know, Jordan, the essential part of the logic of setting out to build a maritime civil nuclear program as opposed to a naval nuclear program, is that the technologies, the reactor technologies, the advanced like water reactor that's used by the for the navy and as was used by all the nuclear navies. And of course, is what the the Russians are using on their icebreakers is what you're referring to is technology that we can't use. We can't use it in commercial shipping. And it's the reason we don't have nuclear ships in the water today and know people think it's something to do with safety or something to do with public perception or economics and these sort of things. But, you
know, it's actually about something very simple, and that is insurance. The fact is we can't take a mobile light water reactor into a port because we can't insure it. It cannot be commercially insured as a mobile unit and therefore, we can't use them on ships. And as a result, that technology, which works beautifully for navies and for icebreakers, the Russian icebreakers member trading only inside of Russian waters and a dispensation to do so. They don't come out of that.
And it is it is the fundamental thing. So we see this generation, so this next generation of reactor technology, some of which are able to meet those criteria for commercial insurance. And that's kind of why we're involved in developing those technologies is really what opens that up. So once we can get those to
market, get them licensed, get them permitted, get the regulatory regime in place, get the supply chain and the finance and the work force built in this program to start putting those out into commercial shipping. All of a sudden now you've got that first spark of a new era of global trade. And I think that's the big thing here. So there is an essential dicfference between the way we do things on the military side and the way things that we will do things on the civil side. But I'd also like to stress that it's incredibly important that these two things coexist and they coexist of naval nuclear propulsion maritime civil nuclear propulsion coexists with the common grounding in safety culture and the common ground. The in the kind of high
level of integrity that's required in order to make sure this is done right. It can't be just, you know, some random solution that is put out there. It has to be done right and it has to be done the right way. And I think that's really what the program is all about.
So I want to back up just for a second for our listeners and hope that you can explain what exactly we mean by nuclear powered ships. How does this work? So nuclear powered ships are effectively ships with a reactor on board where that reactor acts as the energy source. The fuel tank memberships today are they have an enormous amount of space on board for fuels, and that those fuels now tend to be, if you like, the stuff that's at the bottom of the barrel and after the oil refineries taking everything out. So it's sort of the sludge at the bottom of the barrel.
We are shipping industry is the waste management, the arm of the oil and gas industry. That's effectively what we are. And all of these fuel tanks then, you know, contain these you separate fuels because you don't want to co-mingle them. You separate fuels from different delivery places and then they're fed into a very large diesel engine, which then turns the crankshaft, turns the gearbox, turns a long shaft towards the propeller. And so it's very simple kinetic system.
Nuclear propulsion really has the reactor as the fuel tank. So we don't have fuel tanks on board the vessel anymore. It's a heat source which is then exchanged into a either directly through a steam generator, into a into a gearbox that turns the shaft, turns the propeller or becomes a nuclear electric system, which is really what we're favoring.
Because if we go the old fashioned way, which is the most efficient way, which is to take reactors, take the heat on the steam, turn the turbine, turn the gearbox, turn the shaft, turn propeller, the entire installation is a nuclear installations. So everything from the propeller tip all the way through to the core the reactors considered a nuclear installation, and I don't think that's the way to go for commercial shipping. We need to separate these two things. So we have to expect to
have the reactor inside, if you like one of the cross sections of the vessel ships are built almost like a slice of like a loaf of bread. Right? All these slices together and one or two of those slices would then be in nuclear grade nuclear island. And then we would exchange that heat for a turbo machinery sitting in the turbo in the power conversion section of the vessel, which would then generate electricity, which would be distributed out to various parts of the ship. And that gives us certain advantages. One is we can get away from this idea that we have to have, you know, a direct connection to a shaft drive which turns one single propeller.
And some of these ships are absolutely enormous. We can then go towards, you know, twin propellers. We can triple different configurations. So how we can power these ships, depending on what kind of ship styles. Creates efficiencies in ways that we just can't do with the technology we have today.
Are you seeing interest from customers? Absolutely. I mean, this is the most extraordinary thing I, Jordan, see. You know, when I started this company six years ago, I'd say there were two or three people that I met. I thought it was a good idea, but those are people I trusted. And I genuinely believe that, there's a survey that comes out every year that asks shipping industry executives, you know, what's the future look like? And this year, 21 percent said nuclear propulsion is the future and it'll be with us within ten years.
Last year it was nine percent. The year before that they hadn't even asked. And I think it masks an underlying because it depends who they ask. And masks an underlying trend. I think close to 50 percent of those that are long term investors in shipping. I remember it's a multigenerational industry have now moved from that.
You know, yeah, maybe nuclear is an option if nuclear, that kind of thing to okay, nuclear is the way to do this. My question is how do we do it? And so you move from if to how. And that's a massive seismic shift that we've seen this century. I mean, amongst our shareholders, we've got so we got shareholders in corp from which are all strategic industry shareholders and big shipping companies, big shipyards, shipping banks, trading houses, cargo. I mean it's really the industry behind it. And they collectively
control more than 5000 ships, which is by eight percent of the global fleet. So yeah, I think that speaks volumes to to my question, I think there is a massive amount of interest in customers and it's growing because they're starting to get engaged in that sort of conversion from if to how. What do you think has contributed to this shift and support? There's a couple of things. I mean, you know, not not least of all the work that we've done.
Last six years of of spending time with the industry individually and collectively in for, in, in offices, in boardrooms around the world, explaining how this works. And it's not an industry that understands nuclear very well. Its shipping doesn't speak nuclear. Conversely, nuclear, it doesn't really speak shipping on this. And we've acted as a kind of interpreter in this and being able to explain nuclear the shipping industry, but similarly being able to expand shipping industry transportation to the nuclear industry. And this there's a real
meeting of minds here. So I think there's a couple of things that so that the couple of things that have contributed. That's one of them. But it's also because international regulations of the United Nations through the International Maritime Organization, basically an end to the global shipping industry, that they've got to cut 70 percent of all airborne emissions by 2040.
But it's an unsurmountable challenge of scale. Just almost in, almost impossible to imagine how you would do something like that if you're starting to nibble at the edges of energy efficiency and fuel substitution, that kind of thing. You need a radically different way of thinking about it, because by 2050 we're supposed to be at net zero. And I think there's only one way to do that, and that's with a strong nuclear component. What do you think sets nuclear energy apart in terms of like the shift in support? What do you think sets nuclear apart compared with options like hydrogen or biofuels? It's an interesting way of looking at it, Jordan.
I mean, the laws of nature speak for themselves. And, you know, personally, I think the green, this green shift, this green agenda that we've that's washed over us over this last few years, it's got an awful lot of hope in it. You know, there's a there's a lot of wishful thinking.
There's a lot of expectation that shortcuts are going to be available to us, that this isn't going to be as hard as people think. You know, gradually over time, people realize that that's just not the case. I mean, this is difficult. You don't get to do these things the easy way. The key difference between I mean, if you if you think of a fuel source that we have in shipping today, which is that it's called an intermediate fuel oil. So it's a 380 cents stove sludge as a carcinogenic, like a foul smelling sludge that comes out of the bottom of the oil refiner and very good fuel for massive diesel engines. We get about 42 mega joule per kilo of energy in that.
If you then move towards synthetic fuels made from hydrogen has to be green hydrogen or otherwise, you know, with trebling or even quadrupling emissions for using hydrogen production through steam methane reforming for doing green hydrogen, electrolysis of water. Then we combine that with the captured carbon, which I think is a is an illusion or nitrogen to create ammonia, which has been been brought forward as a fuel with down to between 17 and 19 mega joules per kilo. So if you're going to get, you know, the kind of power that you need out of the diesel engine to to to move big ship across the Pacific Ocean, I mean, you're going to need to use close to two and a half times as much fuel.
So energy density really matters there, right? So if you compare just the standard uranium fuel to ammonia as a fuel, you're looking at a four million times the amount of energy per kilo per tonne that whichever way you'd like to look at it. And that just changes the way we think about energy effectiveness, the way we think about wastes, we think about the entire system around this. You know, in addition to ammonia, being a low energy fuel is also exceptionally toxic, right? I mean, it's liquid at -33°C.
And anything above that, it wants to be a gas. And in small quantities, that gas will will kill pretty much whatever it comes into contact with. So we've got to be very careful what we wish for here. In many ways, if the industry moved towards green hydrogen based fuels, I mean, that's the best thing that can happen for us because they become so ridiculously expensive that nuclear just becomes ridiculously cheap. And that's, you know, that's something we all want. Right? I'd love to hear more about what CORE POWER is working on.
Yeah. So like I said, in answer to one of the earlier questions, the overall thing that we're building is a program. So we're building our maritime civil nuclear program, and that program is focused in OECD So we think of our competition as being China, and we think of our competition as being Russia. We don't think our competition as being of the reactor companies. I think we coexist very well with, you know, serious reactor companies. So reactor then those out there.
It's the program that matters. That program has two outputs. The first output is a floating nuclear power plant, and the second is a is a nuclear powered ships, or maritime civil nuclear propulsion on one side and floating nuclear power on the other. The common engineering
between these two allows us to build these systems in shipyards. That's the big difference, I think, for the nuclear industry. When I was referencing earlier, you know, nuclear being interested in shipping, it's not so much necessarily just for propulsion. It's being able to use, you know, large scale shipyard manufacturing to deliver nuclear on time and on budget.
I mean, we've been looking at these announcements like everyone else has this year, all the big data companies, big AI companies coming in and wanting to wanted to get into nuclear, wanted to invest in nuclear, wanted to buy nuclear. And the big question is, how do they do that? How do they buy? How do you buy nuclear? And somebody's going to have to build your power station. Somebody is going to have to take that risk of first going to power station construction, civil construction, time overruns, cost overruns. I mean, it's just it's the bane of our life, thinking about how we do big construction. If we can move to a fully modular system, if we can move to 100 percent modularity and we can move to mass assembly and we can have repeat construction, I mean, the learning curve comes down rapidly, the innovation cycle speeds up, it accelerates very, very rapidly. And of course, as a result of that, you start to be able to substitute that economy of scale that we used to with the economy of numbers that you get through repeat construction. Of course, you know,
quality assurance comes as a benefit to this swap. The more you do it, the better you get at it, you know better the product etc, etc., etc.. So I think for floating nuclear power plants, the idea is that you could deliver, you know, a nuclear power plant to a customer at a guaranteed date. If somebody said, I'd like to buy one of these things. And we said, Well, you can have it on the 27th of February, 2032, that's the day they expect it to turn up. And the nice thing is, well, about 30 nuclear power plants, of course, that they've got some flexibility in where they're located.
They can be towed, decide they to be permanent installations in ports and terminals and island remote locations, etc., providing that energy security that's required in those places where the supply chain for energy is so tricky. I think on the other side is maritime civil nuclear propulsion. So that idea of nuclear powered ships is something that uses the very same principles. But now you're coupling that energy system to a propulsion system. So now the reactor is perpetually mobile, so you're not moving that around with the ship.
So and that's obviously always going to be a challenge when you think about the whole world. But if you think about specific trade routes and you think about terminal to terminal type of operations, which to be fair, a lot of the large commodity value chains, the industrial components and durable consumer goods value chains are mill crafts, right? These are standard trade routes. You know, you trade from Tokyo Bay to Long Beach, you trade from the Middle East to the United States. You trade through South
America to Europe, trade from Australia to Japan, South Korea, etc. And these are ships that just get up and down, across and back in the same boring thing all the time. You can't create these conditions for nuclear powered ships to really insert a whole new future for those value chains that changes the nature of how the ship fits into that value chain between the shipper on one and then the receiver on the other. And of course, ports and terminals play an important part. That's where that's where the rubber meets the road, right? So you got floating nuclear power plants helping non-nuclear ships take electricity from shore powering gantry cranes, loaders and discharge, all that kind of thing. Ports are quite energy intensive places. And then ships that can come
in and intermittently do that. If you're able to connect those power systems to a mini grid, for example, to the ports and ships providing much greater, you know, economic benefits to the value chain that it serves. Are there specific shipping sectors or regions where you think nuclear might gain traction first? I think we have to think of it that way. You know, as per the United Nations, there are 102,147 ships in the water today, but that's everything over 500 tons, which basically makes it a very large sector of small ships. If you think of shipping, international, deep sea shipping, it's about 65,000 ships that burn about 300 million tons of fuel oil. And about 7000
of those ships burn about 50 percent of that fuel. So if you now thinking segmenting, that's the first segmentation that you would perform would be size of ship and power requirement. So if you take the very largest ships, these are big supertankers, these are big, you know, massive ships and bulk carriers that carry iron ore and grain and that kind of thing. And then you've got the big container ships, even medium sized container ships. They require a lot of power and are predominantly engaged in these repeat trades.
They're not tramping, as we call it. They're not taxis and Ubers, they don't go everywhere, right? The smaller ships do that. These big ships trade between these specific points of contact.
And that's the sector we think is one that they comes in first. And if you segment that further and you look at which one of those trades is likely to be the first movers, you'd probably want to start somewhere, which is in a in a nice friendly area, and that could be, you know, transatlantic, for example. We haven't had pirates in the Atlantic since Jack Sparrow was, was that was the scourge, right? You'd probably want to try and get into some of those containers shipping the trans-pacific container shipping that are current rate takes from Tokyo Bay to Long Beach is north of 14 days. You could move that down to six and a half days if you're of the speed ships up and get them back to where they should be.
That changes the nature of the value chain to get in, you get get you much better just in time. Distribution gets you much better access to reliability of that supply chain that you rely on coming from other parts of the world. I think container shipping, dry bulk shipping to an extent, maybe tanker shipping. But you know, the irony of totally decarbonizing the supertanker is not lost on many people.
So we'll see. I think is probably starts in dry bulk and container shipping, but with the large vessels. I want to go back to something you just said for emphasis.
So we are talking about this largely in the frame of decarbonization. But you just mentioned speed. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Like is that another benefit to moving in this direction? You're able to cut shipping times because the ships can go faster.
It is, Jordan. And it's not as true in all segments as it is in others. So, you know, whether you have 300,000 tons of iron ore arrive on a Tuesday or a Friday or on a Sunday is not as important as if you've got containers full of industrial components and durable consumer goods that are being moved between markets. So speed and time is more important than other segments than they are in others. But what's actually happening, you have to you have to think about this relatively, right? So ships are built with an optimum speed and consumption profile, and the speed and consumption profile is usually the one that is the sort of optimum performance of that vessel.
What's happening in the global fleet today and it's been going on for decades is that the fleet is sailing at a very, very reduced speed across the ocean. So tankers and dry cargo vessels that are designed for 14 knots or sailing up 10, 11 knots, container ships designed for 26 knots to 17 knots. And they're doing the save fuel inside of these freight calculations that you do when you do cargo. So you schedule is easily 40 percent of the cost of moving a ship across the ocean. So going slower reduces that fuel consumption on Pacific Voyages. And as a result, that's often what the industry thing. So the industry
has slowed down. The additional benefits of that value cause is that now as you slow the fleet down, you you're effectively removing supply from the market and you're holding rates up because supply demand balance is in your favor. If you then go to nuclear, you don't have to do that. You don't have to slow down to save energy.
I mean, all the energy is there for you to use anyway, so you can start competing at higher speeds with ships that are slow. If you're going to go down the route of synthetic methanol or synthetic ammonia or biodiesel, the sheer cost of those fuels are going to be prohibitive in the speed calculation. Say you're going to have ships that are carrying less cargo because they need to carry more fuel. They're going to have to go slower because it's so expensive to burn those fuels. And you're effectively going to have to have an industry that then takes a few steps back in order to try to decarbonize.
I think the thing with nuclear is that, you know, you use on both sides of the equation mean decarbonization itself isn't really the aim. The aim is to be able to do that whilst remaining economically competitive. You know, if we can't afford to do, it's not going to do it. So we have to solve for both sides. The question we have
to solve for the environmental issues, we have to solve the economic side. And the economic side of it is really what drives it all. So nuclear does both.
It allows you to, you know, maintain that hyper competitiveness in the market whilst emitting nothing. And as a result, people are starting to realize and you asked before, is there interest in the shipping issue? Absolutely. I mean, this is the solution. We just got to get it right. So talking about affordability and decarbonization, can you go back to something you mentioned earlier? I'd love to hear a bit more about how floating reactors can provide clean power to islands and remote areas.
Yeah. So floating nuclear power plants constructed in the shipyard would come out of that shipyard just like anything else they construct, whether it's a ship or a barge or some sort of offshore platform, and you wouldn't tow that to a site. So an island take a Pacific island or a Caribbean island or a mediterranean island, you would then locate that floating power plant either on a depending on what the water conditions are around, its might, either on the long jetty, it was set on a on a jetty out into the ocean or you would have it connected directly to shore. It sort of depends a little bit on seismic activity in the area, what the weather is in that area, etc..
But you could effectively install a smaller so you're talking about something that's about 160 meters long, 35 meters wide, weighs about 20,000 tons. You could connect that on a terminal or in a jetty or in both in the small port somewhere, and would sit quite comfortably that you can create that on that island. It's you'd hardly notice. It's so small.
And that would just sit there as a permanent installation. Now, then, once that needs refueling, you know, as a as 100 percent modular system, right. Fitted onto a barge like structure. That barge is moved to a refueling station, to a home yard, if you like. It's not done in situ.
So then you would replace that with another floating nuclear power plant. So you have an identical model would turn up, you know, and then that would be swapped around some turnaround time in it, which proxy that refueling would be very short. And then you would take that floating nuclear power plant off to its home yard, be serviced, maintain the refuel, etc., and then locate and then brought to location in another place.
So you'd have this fleet optimization of nuclear power that you could tribute to the right place. It also gives you flexibility in how you scale this, right? So you started with, I don't know, say, 30 megawatts electric and you needed 60, or you can either double it or you can bring in a larger system as you go, but allows people to start buying nuclear directly and on time and on budget. So having that collaboration then with operators, nuclear operators, you know, utilities in the area, they can then say, okay, we can take these systems and we could deliver that to our industrial customers in our communities and we can do it in a way that, you know, doesn't create an enormous financial overhang risk for everyone. I think it's just what we're looking for.
What timelines are you looking at? Like, when do we expect to see these things up and running? That's always a very hard one to answer, Jordan. I mean, you see what I mean? And I think our focus is more on getting this right than doing it quickly. I think if a try to do it quickly, we try to promise that we can do something really quickly.
I mean, people are going to let down and disappointed. And some of these propulsion systems, the larger systems like that, we would expect to see demonstration of this in mid-thirties deployment. Scale deployment would then come after that. But I think it's it's important to recognize that the investor base that's pushing this forward or rather pulling this forward are quite patient.
They don't need a solution tomorrow. They need a solution for the next generation. Right? And that when you have a multi-generational shipping company or we have shareholders that have got four or 500 ships that are in the fourth generation of ownership. Right? It's a question of what are you handing to the next generation and how are you investing for that to happen? You know, taking a risk on not keeping up with modern times and solving the problems of tomorrow is something that they are acutely aware of. So I think it's the ability to demonstrate and show how this is then going to work, you know, properly, not just technologically, but in every possible way. And how do you train the workforce? How do you maintain the supply chain to be able to service, maintain and fix problems as they go along and have those facilities up and running? And you have the sort of no gaps, a regulatory framework in place that allows you finance and insurance and all these things, demonstrating that by mid 2030s I think is realistic.
And I think it's I think it's extremely powerful. I mean, that's going to unlock an awful lot of and for these member shipping is a 14 trillion dollars. Our industry means not short of money. What excites you the most about the future of nuclear powered ships and floating reactors? The most I'm so excited about all of it in America. It's exciting. I just get excited about it by the whole thing.
The most exciting thing about it, I honestly, I think it to facilitate the possibility of something truly unique happening in the future, something that, you know, changes the way we we move stuff around the world, right? Eighty to eight five percent of everything that's export to this move that sea it touches every single part of our life and it has to evolve. It's always evolved. I mean, it is one of the oldest professions in the world, right? It's always evolve and it will continue to evolve. And I think this is it.
This is the thing that's going to take to going to move it, move the needle and take us into a new era. I just the thought of that is exciting and and of being able to be part of that and setting up a company that, you know, draws on an investor base and a fantastic talent pool and partnerships and, you know, supportive governments and and agencies, etc., are fall off my chair twice again. If we have listeners who are hearing all of this and they're feeling a little bit nervous thinking about nuclear powered ships and floating power plants all over while we're going about our everyday life, what would you say to them to help instill confidence in the safety of these technologies? I would say I mean, I'd like to have a long conversation with every one of them to explain how this works. And, you know, and and to be fair, everyone I have spoken about this so far said, okay, okay, I get it.
It's not what I thought it was. I think, there's a couple of things that it's important for people to remember. And one of them is that this perception that nuclear is so dangerous, and that if something sank to the bottom of the ocean, that it would be some sort of disaster is an illusion, right? The oceans contain roughly four billion tons of uranium and has background radiation like everything else. They're enormous.
And the way that we design not just the system, but the safeguards, the security wrap around the safeguards and the safety around, but again, to these exceptionally high standards set by the NRC and potentially other, you know, grade one nuclear regulators combining that with the grade one maritime regulations and safety and security standards that are not that you're designing to. I mean, it's like air travel, you know. That sounds so ridiculous and dangerous to sit in a metal can doing, you know, 500 knots across the city. But it's one of the safest things that we have.
I think we have to get to a point where people realize that even in the very worst case scenario, this is orders of magnitude less impactful to the environment and to anything else than, you know, an accident involving an oil tanker or a chemical tanker or a fire on board a car carrier and all these sort of things. So I think we we need to get over this. We need we need to get out of our own way a little bit. And the way we think about, you know, how if something goes, something goes bad, there's something is wrong with it with the reactor system that it is somehow some sort of disaster.
I mean, most of these things are preventable and it's not disasters. And I have to imagine the benefits of clean powered shipping would be significant for the ocean and sea life. Yeah. I mean, you know, you know polluting the oceans out there and, you know, diesel powered ships, not just polluting the atmosphere and oceans, too.
So you've got to weigh up the benefits versus the perceived risk of what. I mean, nothing's perfect. You can't get away with something that doesn't produce any waste at all. You can't create something that's 100 percent safe in every condition, but you can mitigate for those risks.
And we can absolutely warrant that if one of these ships were to break up and sink and it would go down to the bottom of the ocean, that would not be an environmental incident. It would stay in its box. The reactor of the fuel would stay in the reactor, the reactor and stay in its box, and it would be there safe forever, I think. Okay. Last question. We're asking all of our guests. What was the last show you binge watched? Slow Horses.
That is that is one of my favorites. Love it. Slow Horses. It has that wonderful set of protagonists on the dog bravery. I think that I truly admire and I think, you know, the cast of actors was fantastic, that John le Carré type story in this. I actually love that one.
I wish they'd make more of those. It seems like the next season is actually filmed already, but they're just not going to release it until next year. I love that is one of my absolute favorite shows. I don't know if you come to London often, but you know, it's filmed there in this town, and it has a very as a very London feel to it, which is which is also quite nice. Right? It's a good one to add to the list. Well, thank you so much for joining us today.
This was such an interesting conversation. How can our listeners follow along with CORE POWER's journey? We have a website, corepower.energy. We have a fairly active LinkedIn profile for the company that posts things that are going on in the industry, and we try to sort of keep informed that way. We've set up a an NGO called a Nuclear Engine Maritime Organization, NEMO. We think it's very cool name. And that's now, you know, gaining NGO's status at the IGO's.
So anyone who really wants to be involved in this should get involved with NEMO. That's on the regulatory side. It's standards and licenses and all the other things that need to be the framework. But then as a company and our website is a good place to start and of course you can contact me at anytime. It's a lovely talking to
you guys. Thanks very much for having me on. Thank you. Thank you. That was a great episode. We're so appreciative that Mikal took that time with us.
I loved it. So many things to think about from this episode. Really interesting. Mary, if you have not watched Slow Horses, you need to add it to your list. It's a really great show. Yeah, I have not. And I'm always looking for new shows. See, this is what we're
trying to do with this this season. Maybe we'll keep doing it next season because I'm actually really enjoying it. It's great. So to our listeners, thank you for another amazing season. We couldn't do it without you.
We can't wait to come back for season four. Hope you learned a lot this season. I hope you had fun with us and hope you got some new show ideas. If you enjoyed the show, as always, we'd love to hear from you.
Send us a comment. Let us know who you'd like to hear from in season four. And support the podcast by subscribing on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen. Thanks, Fissionaries. See you next season.
2025-01-27 07:09
