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Tribute Salon: Energy Density with David T. Phung
Recorded: June 26, 2025 Duration: 0:53:27Space Recording
Short Summary
The conversation delves into the evolving narratives around energy sources, particularly fossil fuels and nuclear energy, highlighting trends in partnerships and funding that are shaping the future of energy. As big tech companies increasingly invest in nuclear power, the industry is poised for significant growth, driven by innovative collaborations and a shift towards sustainable energy solutions.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Hey David, how's it going? Oh, I got to give you permission. Sorry. Hey, Daniel. How are y'all doing?
I am good.
Had a, well, not a little bit of a night because we had a very nice Tribute Lab dinner, or
Tribute Lab sponsored dinner.
Oh, nice.
David and I
attended.
Great.
Looking at slop.
Future of slop.
Yeah, I'm thankful for today. How about you?
I'm also
thankful for today.
Every day we're not destroyed.
Yes.
Culturally and physically.
Is that pre that we're speaking with no i'm the social media associate hi nice to meet you good to meet you i'm i'm really interested
in this topic that i know nothing about well david is definitely the guy to tell you about it.
Yeah, one of many people, but really exciting.
I know the space was originally scheduled for last week,
but a lot of current events has happened since then,
and I think this timing has aligned to be more interesting in general.
But I'm excited to share, and what what a hopeful exciting future with a lot of hard
work to do yeah yeah i think uh well we'll certainly we can we can uh talk about current
events but it would have been a little bit overshadowed uh by the other uh side of nuclear. I don't know, nuclear hysteria or whatever concerns,
concerns about nuclear power, nuclear development.
Yeah, I'm excited to answer any questions the audience may have.
To the best of my ability, as I'm learning a lot of things,
there's a lot of things from the Intel community I'm learning as well.
And from friends, I'm trying to get around the world,
their perspective, who are closer to the action.
But yeah, excited to have a conversation in general
to learn together.
Yeah, I think let's just wait probably another
like two minutes or so, maybe a little bit longer and
then we'll just get started oh yeah is there do you know kira is there uh do we have like the music
option do we have waiting waiting music we need to get some uh some slot music i feel like i guess
so except i was i did a little bit of polling on that matter um which i'm curious to
hear the audience's takes um but a source was like i actually prefer it when spaces don't have music
and then they just like turn on because it's like i'm listening to my own music i don't want to like
hear just like this randomness like that's that's true i guess i just feel like uh um if it's if it's that or
so if it's that or conversation of course conversation is better but silence uh is
just makes it seem like there's there's an error i think you just need to like prepare like a top
of the top of the spaces like rant or like have a bit that is true yeah there needs to be like the late night
opening uh bit um or some sort of uh variety show type of thing that we could start off with
yeah just repeat the word slop for five minutes yeah sure definitely could get also just sort of
like performance art vibe uh i'm gonna share it again and with a couple groups and hopefully there'll be a few more people will show up before we start but yeah
um Thank you. Thank you. Okay, well, let's start and we'll see if more people show up.
So thanks everybody who is here and thank you, David, for taking the time to chat with
us. And yeah, I guess this will be recorded.
So no, people can tune in later on and hear what we talk about.
I'll read David's his own intro, his own bio from his site,
because I think it's pretty effective at explaining
where he's coming from and his perspective on things. So
he says, I'm a builder, operator, and systems thinker working at the frontier where energy
architecture, telling stories, and intelligent machines converge. Energy is the fundamental
currency of all physical and social processes. Human progress tracks our ability to access larger,
more concentrated energy flows.
My mission is to unlock abundant energy and weave it into the fabric of cities,
industries, and off-planet settlements. When energy becomes cheap and dense,
the impossible becomes infrastructure. If you lower the cost of energy, you change everything
change everything from what we build to how we live reproduce and imagine the future um yeah well
from what we build to how we live, reproduce, and imagine the future.
i think it's pretty hard to argue argue against that i'm sure that some people would try but to
me that feels like a very um just sort of uh self evidently itself you know an obvious uh uh moral imperative for us to do um but i think that
it is clear that we uh because of ecological concerns or other cultural issues we we sort of
think of energy usage as i think intrinsically immoral in a way at this point or unsustainable.
And even though, of course, I think we appreciate modern amenities, there's a sense that it's
somehow sinful and that energy usage itself is somehow going against nature, which I personally, of course, disagree with,
and I'm sure you do too. But yeah, so I think we could just like start off there.
What, what is energy density? Why do you think it's such an important concept? And how can we
get people to start thinking of it as, as a good to, at best, a necessary evil or worse,
like an unnecessary evil. First and foremost, thank you, Daniel, for inviting and having me
and to TubeBoot Labs as well. This is a really exciting and relevant topic on multiple levels.
We could talk about the political, economic, and social impacts of this.
But to break it down to your question of energy density,
I also want to clarify that energy density does not equal to power density.
While we may know that the basic understanding of energy density
is how much that could be stored,
we're also encountering a lot of
technological feats right now, especially with all the AI generation slop, if you want to say.
I wonder how many times we'll say slop today. Power density is crucial to how fast you can use it.
So for instance, if you had an electric car or a heavy GPU-based PC for gaming, you see that fan running. Why is that fan running?
Because it's getting a lot of electrons. There's a lot of heat. The flow rate of energy is really
important as well. So that's where the word power density comes in as well. But energy density is
the amount of energy stored. So we can use it, whether it's to light our basic needs in homes, use our computer, be on this X Twitter space here to communicate via the internet where servers and clouds are spinning in rooms that are louder than we could bear at high decibels. Power quality is a new term and niche, very nerdy and scientific.
But global warming, global climate change,
wherever you want to frame it, why this mission.
But my mission and focus is that there are a lot of things we need to solve on the physics and engineering level.
And it'll be really a disservice to humanity
to not unlock the capabilities that we've been gifted
on Earth here. So my particular focus is nuclear fission energy, which has the highest energy
density that we know demand today, aside from fusion. But I'll wrap it up there that energy
density is important, but power density is crucial for the technological leaps that we want to do,
especially with AI. it yeah that's
yeah that's very interesting so there's energy density there's power density and there's power quality so is it fair to uh call like energy density and power density like an analogy of
of compute and bandwidth or something kind of like that um or memory and bandwidth, I guess, something over that. It's about power generated versus throughput, basically,
right?
Yeah.
If you just wanted to look at it as a math formula
or physics problem, there are different equations.
Energy density is joules per kilogram
or watts per hour per kilogram, and power density
is watts per kilogram so you would
think of power density more as your ice car your internal combustion energy uh engine it uses
hydrocarbons in a fuel like petroleum or oil it needs that type of density to create a reaction so
it gets all the pistons rolling so you can drive down the street to
get your groceries.
Or the heavy refinery process to cut up or produce your Amazon packages.
That requires power density at a different scale.
Or heating or bending metal, that is power density of watts per kilogram because there
is a dense material you need to bend, for instance like
metal, into a certain shape or form to fabricate your home, chair, or car.
Versus energy density is more about storing something where it's generated and it's more
consistent and predictive to residential energy or turning on a light. So energy density, crucial to store and turn on your light.
Power density, crucial for a heavy industrial or to move something like a jet plane or your car.
I see. Okay. So it's just like kind of like at different scales. And then what's power
quality then? Is that also about externalities and sustainability then with power quality?
Or is that just about something else entirely?
turning on power plants, turning off power plants,
getting renewable energies from solar or wind or coal
or natural gas.
It relates to more of what are the hungry base loads
that is taking energy.
So for instance, AI is really relevant.
Training models is really relevant in the nomenclature
right now as we have a lot of forefront companies
with foundational models like OpenAI, XAI, Anthropic, etc. racing to put thousands of
GPUs together. Power quality is about the notion of being able to turn on all at once
and turn off all that energy density and power density all at once to either
sync and do the compute so power quality is getting into talking about how does the three
phases of voltage and electric current flow and we don't have to dive into that but it's it's a matter of of being able to kind of how how do that computation how
how tunable and how uh how accessible at a kind of enough in a uh to only be able to access the
amount of energy that you need without too much or too little it's something like that or i'm sorry
i'm just searching for analogies one to understand it but two just so i think i'm gonna play play even dumber than i am just yeah to try to try to get
to get a definition here is it just sort of yeah like how how tunable the power is to the need or
how tunable the energy is towards the power demands yeah to be more precise so i'm i'm
creating analogies as well but i'll reason my first principles if you think
it this way we already talked about energy energy density and power density so for energy density
it's about what governs it it's endurance and range for power density it's performance and
acceleration for power quality it's about resilience and being able to manage the
base load so you don't break any circuits transformers or
destroy the whole grid itself because if you have so this is like a other spain what happened with
spain for instance was yeah bad power power quality i guess yeah spain was a combination
of power density and power quality and i'm writing and doing more research on it but they
we don't have to dive into the details of that, but basically
they were running an experiment, quote unquote, I'll use that word, that they wanted to shift
80% of their base load into renewable energies. And what is renewable energies? The two well-known
renewable energies are solar and wind. And those two type of sources and energies
should actually be classified to intermittent energy,
meaning that they only flow based on when the sun's available
and when wind is flowing,
meaning that they don't have the type of energy density
and capacity plus power density flowing constantly. So the mishaps and findings of what has been said,
to be intellectually honest, that they didn't have battery backups.
To break it down from a system standpoint,
Portugal relies on Spain's energy production,
and Spain is also interconnected and relies on France's energy production. Spain is also interconnected and relies on France's energy
production. When that experiment was happening with the energy company in Spain, they're
shifting their base load to renewable energies by 80%, reducing the coal plants, which is
constant flow rate of power density. There's something happening transformer blew up ricochet
effect and you know portugal is down spain is down for 18 hours then the french decided hey i'm cut
you off because i don't want my grid to be affected by you as well so there's a systems thinking
ripple effect second and third order consequences to it so I'll stop there as an explanation. Sure. But that's super
interesting. I mean, you mentioned, you only mentioned for a second that some tasks you kind
of need, you know, petroleum to achieve the power density needed. So obviously cars, there's electric
cars now, but traditionally that would be one of the places where you would need that versus a light bulb.
What do you think people misunderstand about fossil fuels?
I think they're, I mean, I understand why they're demonized at this point.
But yeah, I feel like they're kind of misunderstood.
And my understanding is that they're very, very, very energy dense and they're sort of miraculously so.
And my understanding is that they're very, very, very energy dense and they're sort of miraculously so.
And probably modernity, you know, wouldn't have been achievable without, you know, cheaply accessible petroleum, basically.
Like we would never have gotten to nuclear power if it weren't for that blessing, more or less.
Yeah. Could you rephrase the question as well? Or it was uh yeah i guess i've missed it mixed up
a question and a comment there but i'm just wondering yeah like what yeah what are your
thoughts about petroleum um i i i think we probably there's a consensus that they need
they need to be they need to be phased out at least uh for for most uses uh but yeah just
wondering how they relate to energy density and power density
and towards moving forward and yeah what are your thoughts there just in general uh also about
expanding uh expanding you know oil production in the meantime uh if it's if it's needed for
instance to to sort of get to the the leap to the next energy uh production point or yeah point i think the
misconception of uh thanks for clarifying there i think the misconception of oil and gas to be
specific i'm not a fan of coal to be blunt and straightforward it if you look at a city population of 500,000 people, that could be the city of
Sacramento or Kyoto, Japan, about 83 people die every year if you have solely just coal
plants. And on the spectrum for gas and oil, only a handful, let's say 12 people die on average due to the pollution or carbons
that are emitted.
And for nuclear on the spectrum, it's more of like 0.1, where if there's a radiation
leak, someone does die.
But if you look at that scale and magnitude, that coal, on average, 83 people could die versus
nuclear, that's why you head towards there.
To answer the misconception of oil, it's about energy density.
On average for gasoline or diesel per kilogram, you could get about 42 to 48 megajoules, or
that is about 1,000 watts of energy per kilogram there.
So it's about the type of application you could do.
And we wouldn't have the industrial revolution or transportation infrastructure from trains to planes and the cars we have today without the unlock of oil.
and the cars we have today without the unlock of oil.
If we actually look at the machines
that were pre-industrial revolutions,
we had animals transporting us
and various other animals doing our production for farming,
but the unlock of the fossil fuels
in correlation with machines
unlocked all the mass production in the scale
we have today.
And it's a transportable type of fuel or energy source.
We are able to store it, transport it, share it, distribute it around the world as well
versus biomass fuels, which is wood, charcoal, and dung, which polluted the planet
more and was not easily transported.
So do you think it's just like, there's the wrong stories being told, I guess is what
it feels like.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's definitely a stepping stone, but we shouldn't be fully reliant on it to produce our daily energy needs. world but for cars and the basic applications of producing energy that we need for our light bulbs
or computers we should shift to cleaner sources of energy that don't emit carbons for sure um
how does energy density um and the kardashev scale kind of relate as concepts um they seem
pretty interlinked to me. And my understanding of
Kardashev scale is just sort of humanity's collective ability to access the energy available,
all of the energy available at one scale of geography. So planet, solar system,
and then galaxy, and then I guess universe, or I'm not sure how much it scales.
So I'm wondering if that relates.
And also we can get into how some other associative topics later, but yeah, wondering how it relates is the main question.
want to be able to harness more energy from the sun and from our stars, we need a lot
of power density to push the rockets to get there and harness those types of energy as
well.
Daniel brought that framing well by Kardashev, the original author of the Kardashev scale
there.
I forget what year that was implemented.
I believe it was like the early 1920s when Nikolaus wrote that paper.
But yeah, first framework, harnessing from Earth,
which means also utilizing all of our sources here on Earth.
But we shouldn't be stuck at that scale.
And unlocking energy density is about being able to harness things efficiently on Earth as well.
And I think you have to think about it on multiple frameworks, that you want a civilization
that's thriving, that doesn't affect its health long term.
So I think the obvious choice is to opt for clean energy,
which I think the renewable and green movements had it correct,
but I don't think they solved the physics problem
and looked at baseload management and that math formula.
But I think what's exciting is that we need to unlock all of our potential here on Earth.
I think we're blessed with a planet with a lot of rare earth and materials.
And in a perfect society, we'll be all trading hand in hand, working together to build stuff
and sending things into space so we can mine asteroids and create batteries and giant solar
farms in space,
which is not ideal as well.
We don't want things of big shadows casting on Earth.
But if we tap into sources like nuclear thermal propulsion or electric propulsion,
we could travel far distances and harness different energies and unlock them.
So the more efficient we are at energy density here on Earth is a stepping stone to open the economies, to go to other systems,
to unlock scale two, which is really harnessing the sun
and what fusion is attempting to do.
Then eventually somehow the third scale, which is from the stars or dark matter.
Yes. Okay. Well, we can get, so how does nuclear,
how does the nuclear get us there? And I got, you talked,
you talked about fusion as being a goal, but how this is, I'm going to,
these are a couple of questions combined in one, but how, how,
how much are you betting on new on just on vision versus
fusion basically is is the question and uh do you think it's a stepping stone as well yeah
i've haven't dove as deep into fusion nuclear fusion which is about replicating the Sun here on Earth to say in
that reaction versus fission which is about splitting the atom which had multiple applications
in the 40s, 50s and 60s and thanks to Eisenhower and the atoms for peace movement that redirected
from the nuclear bomb, the atom bomb to nuclear power plants that we have here in America.
That was a technology that was unlocked here that started in Chicago by Enrico Fermi with the Chicago Pile during the Manhattan Project.
My bet long term is nuclear fission because there's something about the uncontrolled power of fusion that we haven't understood yet.
It's a problem of concrete and structures as well because you need to be able to build contraptions that can hold that energy in one place in a stable way.
And that requires loads of concrete that we don't
understand yet and fission today is technology that has been proven with boiling water
water reactors molten salt we have thorium now being experimented for the small modular reactors
which is another category from the big reactors we have today.
People are doing heat gas reactors or sodium heat-cooled piped reactors and various other versions as well. But my long-term and bet is on fission because it's a proven technology
and safer technology that we know of some implications that has occurred in the world, which scared the
world already, a la Chernobyl or certain leaks throughout the world. But long-term bet is
fission, and I hope we figure out fusion, but fission is long-term and the way.
Gary, you got to mute your mic. I hear you typing.
Sorry.
Yeah.
You mentioned the Eisenhower
Atoms for Peace program,
and that was what got...
That's sort of where we started exporting
nuclear technology to other countries
india being one of them my my at least i i've read this or heard this and i don't know how true it is
but we were sort of caught off guard by uh india's uh the ease at which india was able to weaponize
their uh atoms for peace reactors by enriching uranium and then eventually building
a bomb without kind of without our permission.
And that that moment was sort of what actually kind of put the halt on nuclear development
more than Chernobyl or Three Mile Island or any of these sorts of safety concerns.
The real safety concern was just like, well, it's actually much easier to make nukes than
we thought.
And so we have to kind of pretend that there's a much bigger safety concern than there is
and lock it down with regulation basically
and just sort of tie our hands to make it very, very hard
for any country internationally to start their own nuclear program.
Is that accurate?
I don't know if that's just conspiratorial or true.
Yeah, I'm not well versed of that timeline and what happened there. But I know internally, the Atomic Energy Commission, specifically in America, was trying to have an overall world control of who gets it, who doesn't. competing with Russia too after World War II, that getting started and going.
But I think our governments really underestimate how smart people are
and how information travels.
And we could talk about the conspiracies of espionage as well,
information espionage, which happens daily and is an occurrence right now
in our world where the internet is just moving every day.
But I'm not so familiar with the whole story of India there,
so I can't fully comment on there.
But I definitely know internally in America,
it was a lot of self-imposing restrictions for the industry itself to
prevent catastrophes or different occurrences of bad actors participating.
Do you, do you think, well,
just regardless of whether or not they, that, that time of history,
but do you think that those concerns are misplaced or do you think it because of human ingenuity, it is kind of just intrinsically easy to convert any type of, you know, peaceful atomic program into a weapon program if so desired?
weapon program if so desired yeah misplace or wrong pov or or stance or policy or not i think
you never want to cripple yourself in a whole system i think if we look at nuclear progress
and innovation in america from the leap of the 40s and 50s, we're able to build a plus 40 reactors within
a time span from the 40s and 60s.
And when the 70s came around, it was slowing down as a screeching halt where we were building
in the single digits.
So I think there's, I'm not a fan of the word balance, but I think there's a cause and effect formula you need to also put in play and look at all the considerations.
I think there are bad actors out there that want to – I'll back up there.
I'll back up there.
I think there are people who want to care about safety
and make sure we go to the check every box and make good progress
and we don't have leakages in Fukushima and the narratives in media
media doesn't help the general audience as well.
doesn't help the general audience as well.
I think we're lucky to be in America where we can express and push back on something
that we don't agree with.
But from the policy in Washington DC standpoint, it's definitely self-imposing rules and laws
that stopped us from creating. While there were builders still trying
to build policy and safety regulation, halted the industry. And definitely perverse incentives as
well. You have to think from that framework. It wasn't just policy. There was a lot of
introductions of other energy sources and competing incentives in there as well.
competing incentives in in there as well um this is a bit of an aside but is
i mean you said you talked about fukushima um how many people how many people died actually from
from fukushima as a result of of any type of radioactivity as opposed to you know from the
earthquake or other aspects do you know from sources that were directly connected to the plant zero
but from the disaster of um that took away all the water from the plant and created the meltdown
a couple people there so no no deaths directly tied to the plant
the plant as proven by sources there.
As the meltdown didn't leak into the population.
Same with Three Mile Island.
There was a small leak there.
Three Mile Island is a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.
There was a leak into the system there,
but multiple sources and counts say there are no direct deaths from the
leaks there as well so to this day the only current event that had actual deaths from it was chernobyl
related to nuclear fission and radiation exposure that's interesting i mean also okay from i mean
That's interesting. I mean, also, okay, from I mean, the only nuclear bomb research that we have, I guess, is from from Hiroshima and from Nagasaki, right? Right. grew up with like boomer parents that would always they would talk about how they learned to do duck
and cover and how um you know there was bomb shelters and stuff and drills when they were
growing up and they would always say it as oh they were lying to us uh it was an evidence of
they're actually not being it was like you know a pacification technique but i've read again in
the last few years that uh you can avoid a lot of uh at least the thermal radiation if you're just
like behind a door versus in front of like directly outside um and that there actually
there is a there is something to be said about duck and cover in these things. And just in general that it's not as this sort of like blanket apocalyptic instant death thing that we associate it with in general.
Is that true?
Yeah.
I think we have to think from this standpoint, radiation is actually all around us.
If you walk outside today,
if the sun is here,
or we just had the solstice a couple of days ago,
at least in the northern hemisphere of the Earth,
we have the biggest gas and star closest to us,
that's emitting radiation, which is the sun.
I think you actually get more radiation from a flight to
LA to Tokyo in 12 hours of like a dose of 0.05 versus a nuclear power plant. If you stood by it,
it'd be like 0.001. And if for scale, a chest x-ray is about 0.1 of radiation dose there. So
I think living within a 50 mile radius, which a lot of residents live in Diablo
Canyon, which is a nuclear power plant in San Luis Obispo, California, there's been no recorded
deaths so far, and that exposure is only 0.001 every year versus a plane flight which is almost double that in chest x-ray uh multiples of that
um yeah so okay to add some scale there in terms of radiation exposure yeah yeah okay well i think
that people just yeah i don't know they're they there i don't know what there's been such a
comprehensive uh project to make people afraid of this um partially probably for some good reason
but obviously a big part of it was just you know a geopolitical project uh one to you know reify
american power the the absolute supremacy because we have nukes and in general
um yeah that that it feels like it's a um yeah i don't know it's a it's a bit of red herring
or something yeah the zeitgeist and meme of the time uh specifically um when three mile island
happened uh there was a movie called the China Syndrome that came out in 1979,
the American thriller that was about nuclear meltdowns and that fear.
So it's in part media, in part storytelling, in part the Sierra Club and the Greenpeace
movement and a lot of activists rallying on top of that, plus policy halting it.
So that was like bias confirmation.
But I think media has an interesting way of really subverting the narrative real quick.
And of course, dropping two bombs on a country during a war doesn't help with that as well
when the word association isn't really clear.
And not everyone paid attention to Adams for peace and knew about nuclear energy.
It was really kept hush-hush until they had the commercial public power plants too.
But storytelling, it's a big part of it.
And the criticism of the space is that we need to hire the best marketing people ever to work in nuclear power.
But I really believe it's about
the physics and the people and the products that really proves it over time, which has proven it
over time. In Chicago alone, in Illinois alone, there's 11 nuclear reactors and people don't talk
about them really. They just provide 50% of the base loadad energy for Chicago. And that's not talked about every day, for instance.
One example.
So, yeah, let's maybe like shift it towards the current state of the industry.
I know you're very excited about the sort of startup space.
There's also, of course, all these incumbents that are already, you know, have a lot of
experience making reactors.
I'm just wondering if you can give a good general overview of the American industry
to start with, and I guess in the global industry, but let's just start with American.
Yeah.
I think it's a really exciting time right now.
And if you care about the mission, please join or reach out. We DOD to have a lot of grants to build reactors
on military bases and commercializing it as well.
Oklahoma has a partnership, I believe.
I forget if it's Amazon or Google, one of those big players there. You have TerraPower, which is backing a lot of data centers as
well on the public realm. Constellation Energy with Microsoft, connecting that to one of
the reactors at Three Mile Island. So reactivating those reactors as well. And the industry right
now is trying to really wake up and do the low
hanging fruit first, which is reactivate all the decommissioned or inactive reactors within
America. And I'll mainly speak to America and touch to other countries like South Korea and
China too, but I'll start with America. A lot of startups such as Radiant or Antares Industries
here in Los Angeles are tackling nuclear energy and space and Valor Atomics as well, which is
actually, they have an exciting product for their heat gas reactor because they don't only just
want to create energy, but they want to create hydrocarbon fuels as well,
synthetic fuels for jet engines and various other applications, which is exciting. A technology, I think, that's worthwhile to have a cleaner form of energy for our jet engines.
Valor is working on that?
Yeah, Valor Atomics.
Valor.
Valor.
So they're using reactors to do that?
They're using the energy
from reactors to create yeah is that you're saying yeah they're splitting um the atom in a certain
way then they're gonna split hydrocarbons and and create the fuel as well so there's a double
application to it on the energy side using the same reactors yeah So their heat gas reactor is going to create energy, but also by a byproduct
of that, be able to create hydrocarbons and synthetic fuels as well, which is a double
application, which a lot of thinking has gone into it. And that's the type of innovation that's
happening right now, which is really exciting beyond just providing energy. Sure. So you mentioned a few of them are partnered with data centers.
How much of the current resurgence of nuclear is directly due to big tech buying co-located nuclear power data centers or building them, rather?
Yeah, I would say if I would ratio it, 40% is driven by the government
initiatives and grants. So a lot of Department of Defense and Department of Energy in the United
States is forefunding a CapEx for these experimental small-moderate nuclear reactors
because the military wants to get off of a diesel supply chain system for austere
and different theaters and also create american resilience and energy here and 60 of it is driven
by big tech because we have the big players like open ai that is building the giant data centers in Abilene in partnership with Crusoe, the data center, which they're putting on site gas reactors, natural gas reactors there.
Same with the concept of XAI doing that in Memphis, Tennessee.
They actually put, I believe, four or five natural gas reactors just to power um the plants directly there but it's driven by the big players
right now and they're putting up the most capital to reactivate these nuclear power plants
or actually fund these projects to get going was there any type of um regulatory shift that's
made it easier for for them to do that because it feels like that was the holdup for so many years
was hard to get licensing.
Yeah.
What changed?
What changed was we had a technology of LLMs and GPTs
as a forcing function.
But I think last year, a lot of people slept on,
during the Biden administration, the Advance Act, which was actually a bipartisan act by both sides of
the aisles that was passing of easing regulatory policy, the understanding we need more nuclear
energy domestically to be more resilient in America and also ease the process with the NRC, the
Nuclear Regulatory Committee that oversees and conducts the inspections in the United
States for the process and licensing.
But we had that, and a couple months ago, we had the Trump administration do an executive order that was to fast track
and sunset some of the policies that were holding back the industry.
But it's multiple fronts and efforts.
And to be honest, the big tech approach to buying nuclear wasn't a restriction policy-wise
or a holdup.
It was a matter of timing and forcing functions of the demand of the industry
and trying to be green and keep with some of the initiatives
that Google may have by 2030 or 2040.
Do you think that the build out of uh extra extra capacity is going
to trickle down to normal consumers or is it really just going to get gobbled up and more by
increasing inference and training uh demand yeah that's that's a great question because most people aren't talking about this a lot.
The direct buys from big tech is to get the energy source directly. So Google could buy it to
power their data centers on Amazon or Microsoft. So they're doing this notion of micro gridding,
where the plant itself will output one gigawatt for all its data centers,
and they're buying energy directly now. They're no longer approaching the model of just buying
from your local or large utility entity within the area. They want to do direct to lower costs and not disrupt the existing grid.
So they're trying to solve two problems at once, cost and not disrupting existing homeowners and businesses that utilize energy within the area.
So unfortunately, no, that won't trickle down.
But that's the hope of building more nuclear, that we can commercialize it.
But the majority of the five-year, ten-year process we'll see first will be more private applications and defense applications for nuclear.
As commercial, we'll get cheaper and cheaper because it comes down to cost per kilowatt
um the dollar per kilowatt for nat gas you could get it down to 28 cents 30 cents for nuclear right
now it's still about 70 cents 80 cents and you need a scale to get that cost per kilowatt down
i'm so i'm sorry i uh i'm kind I got distracted because my wife just called me
and I think she's having some trouble with the car.
I need just one minute, one second.
Okay.
I'll be right back. Feel free to drop any questions you may have in the comments of the space here.
More than happy to share.
I think we'll have a section that Daniel will start to invite.
Any Q questions you may have on the topic or current events in the world, we'll be more
than happy to discuss here as we wait for Daniel to come back.
But Kira, did you have any questions for me in the meantime,
or interests or things we should touch on that relates to Tribute Labs or the topic? um nothing off the top of my head um other than like i'm not super confident on this. I just kind of saw a TikTok in passing.
Oh, I'm getting some kind of echo. But, um, antimony, like, does that have any factor in nuclear?
Yeah, antimony doesn't have a factor by nuclear, but it's crucial for certain production and manufacturing materials.
So it's more of like a solution in a raw material utilized to manufacture missiles and bullets and various other machinery applications.
But I'm actually deep diving into antimony right now,
but no direct correlation to nuclear.
Uranium would be the direct commodity correlated to nuclear,
because that is the source of rare earth
that we need to refine to make nuclear fuel.
Yes, as the conflict with Iran and their enriching.
Okay, that's coming together I think in my head.
Yeah, but antimony is a great topic for another space and to deep dive in. I think I know some friends that could dive into it deeper than myself, but it's a crucial rare earth to produce a lot of things we
need for medicines cosmetics various other defense applications
okay Okay. If anyone else has questions, I can briefly in the meantime as we wait for Daniel or there may be other questions, please request.
So Akira could invite you up.
Creating nuclear fuel is crucial for all the demand we have right now,
especially all the reactors that are coming online
and the push for small molecule reactors.
Right now there is no supply or minimal supply for nuclear fuel
that is domestically created in the West.
