The AI Paradigm Shift Requires A Lot Of Energy — Could Nuclear Be The Answer? - video Dailymotion

Forbes

The AI paradigm shift requires a lot of energy, and nuclear could be the answer to power that demand. Cameron Porter, Co-Lead Investor, Transmutex, joins Forbes Talks to discuss Transmutex's technology, the United States' position when it comes to nuclear, and the future of both AI and nuclear.   Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1  Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:  https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript  Stay Connected Forbes newsletters: https://newsletters.editorial.forbes.com Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes More From Forbes:  http://forbes.com  Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success.

Transcript

00:00Hi, everybody. I'm Brittany Lewis, a breaking news reporter here at Forbes. Joining me now

00:06is Cameron Porter, co-lead investor of Transmutex. Cameron, thanks for coming on in.

00:11Thank you for having me here, Brittany.

00:12I'm excited for the conversation today because really within the past few years,

00:16we've seen this paradigm shift as the world continues to embrace AI. However,

00:21powering the AI revolution does require a lot of energy, and that's where Transmutex does come in.

00:27So explain what Transmutex does and how this contributes to the conversation.

00:31Thank you again for having me here, Brittany, to talk about this, I think, very important issue,

00:35especially with the elections coming up, because AI is critical not only for enterprise applications,

00:40but also military applications. It's really a question of national security.

00:44And if we want to have the AI deployments that we're looking for, we need energy,

00:47and we need energy that we can produce domestically here in the US and very reliably at

00:51scale. And really the only way to do that is with nuclear. But we've seen nuclear deployments try

00:56to scale in the past, and those were held back for a variety of reasons, including safety and

01:00waste. And really what we at Transmutex and as investors in that company are looking to do is

01:04develop a system that addresses those core problems. And the way we do that is by using

01:09an advanced particle accelerator technology that's really unique to Transmutex.

01:13So you brought up national security. So let's dive right into that bucket first. As we know,

01:18energy and national security are deeply connected. We saw this most recently play out in the Russia-Ukraine

01:23war. So talk about where the United States is specifically in the race for nuclear energy.

01:30Look, the US was the leader. We developed nuclear energy as a part of the Manhattan Project.

01:35Now, the challenge has been is that we've scaled back our investment in those programs. Countries

01:39like China today, both on the fission and fusion side, are investing more dollars in the US.

01:44Russia also has particularly aggressive programs with their company called Rosatom

01:48for deploying reactors globally in comfort trees like Egypt, Bangladesh, Turkey. And it's really a

01:53part of their foreign policy. How do you gain influence? You deploy reactors, you control energy

01:56systems, so on and so forth. And then to the US's credit and to the IAEA and other international

02:01organizations, we've been making sure to help prevent proliferation. So deploying nuclear

02:06systems that can be used to make bombs. But this is kind of a cat and mouse game is if we don't help

02:10get nuclear to countries that need it, the energy that they need, then all of a sudden you're

02:14allowing an opportunity for countries like Russia and China to control those systems.

02:18And so a system like TransMutex is uniquely positioned to give the West an opportunity to

02:23counter these pressures. Because TransMutex's system uses a particle accelerator, it's non-proliferant,

02:28which means it can't be used to make bomb-making material. And therefore, you can deploy these

02:32systems in more countries across the global South, as well as use them in the US and other domestic

02:36Western markets. So essentially, break this down in simple terms, TransMutex does recycle nuclear

02:44waste and then reuses that as nuclear energy. Yeah, this is one of the unique things that is

02:48enabled by having a particle accelerator that powers a nuclear reactor. Instead of just being

02:53reliant on enriched in uranium, which the US bought a lot from Russia in the past and still

02:58does today, despite recent legislation. TransMutex's system allows you to use a variety of different

03:04fuels, including existing nuclear waste. And so when you put that waste into the system,

03:08it's transmuted, hence TransMutex, which means it's burnt and destroyed. And what comes out

03:13is energy and actually fuel that can be used in existing nuclear reactors. So all of a sudden,

03:18not only you're destroying your waste stockpiles, which are one of the most costly things to store,

03:22we had a $100 billion project in the US to store existing waste that got shut down under Obama

03:27after spending $15 billion. And so TransMutex's system is kind of the natural complement to a

03:32nuclear fuel cycle. We destroy the waste, we produce energy and provide fuel that isn't

03:37enriched uranium that needs to come from Russia. You just said a few hefty price tags with the

03:42B word billion. And one of the biggest complaints from critics when it comes to nuclear energy or

03:48clean energy is this is, yes, great for the environment, but it also comes at a really

03:54heavy price tag. What do you say to that? I think you have to remember the timescales that

03:58you're investing on, especially when it comes to nuclear. These plants are certified to operate

04:02for 40 years with their first license, and many of them operate for up to 80 years. So even though

04:06you may be talking about a $2 billion, $5 billion, $10 billion facility, these things are providing

04:11gigawatts of energy for decades. And that's very unique. Once you make those investments,

04:16you have countries, economies, cities benefiting for a very, very long time. And this is really

04:21one of the strengths of nuclear. If we look at solar fields, like those may last for 20 years,

04:26and then you're talking about massive, massive fields of material that need to be replaced,

04:30reused, recycled, so on and so forth. And so I think when you're looking at these high price

04:34tags, you have to remember you're buying energy security for a very long time. I want to talk

04:39about the political implications here. First, I know that you had a conversation with Congressman

04:44Bill Foster last month. How did that go? And give us a pulse check here. Where is the United States

04:51when it comes to nuclear? The United States and congressmen like Bill Foster are taking a lead

04:58here. In a sense, if you look back even to COP 28, the U.S. led a commitment from the world

05:04to 3x nuclear by 2050. And that's a big commitment. But if we say like, how are we

05:11going to actually get there? All of a sudden, we're going to run into the same issues that

05:15we've ran into the past if we're relying on the same technologies we built with nuclear with before.

05:20And this is what people like Congressman Foster are looking at. How do you evaluate the next

05:24generation of advanced reactors based on what type of properties and opportunities they can

05:29provide to the market? Namely, how do we deal with waste? How do we source new types of fuel?

05:33And how do we develop systems that are safer so that we never have issues like Three Mile Island

05:37or Chernobyl? And that's really what the next generation of nuclear technologies can

05:42provide. And that's why the NRC, the regulatory body for nuclear in the U.S., is now looking to

05:47amend how it actually licenses these systems so that we can bring them to market more quickly.

05:52That's an interesting point. How do you make this safer? And how do you sell this to a state,

05:56especially in the United States, who wants a nuclear site, a nuclear facility in their backyard

06:03because you immediately think of images like Chernobyl? So what's the sell here? Yeah, so this

06:09is one of the major selling points of TransMutex, even relative to other advanced reactor systems.

06:14You'll probably hear this term critical system a lot if you start digging into nuclear, which just

06:18means is that you have a fuel that is critical. It's producing neutrons and kind of having this

06:23chain reaction that, if you don't manage it, can go out of control and lead to a meltdown. That's

06:29like Chernobyl. Now, we have lots of systems that make those safe today, which creates a relatively

06:33low risk. But the best thing you could do is, how could you make a nuclear system that's subcritical,

06:38doesn't have that property? And the way you do it is actually by using a particle accelerator,

06:42which is really the core proprietary technology for TransMutex. Because the particle accelerator

06:48drives the reaction, instead of enriched uranium fuel, that means that if you turn that particle

06:53accelerator off, the reaction stops immediately. This means it's incredibly safe. And so if you're

06:59looking to cite a system by a city, or an industrial facility, or valuable data center,

07:03you want a subcritical system. And that's really where we see the benefits of TransMutex and

07:07hopefully have a system that can be licensed more quickly than other reactors because of those safety

07:12standards. And TransMutex is a Swiss technology. So what's the timeline of this type of technology

07:18coming into the United States? Yeah, so we're hoping to develop a first-of-a-kind system,

07:22so our first full-scale deployment in the early 2030s. We would love the U.S. to be the first

07:27market for it. Now there's other countries that are really vying for it. And the reason we're

07:31based in Switzerland is that many people have probably heard of CERN, which is the Center for

07:35Nuclear Research in Europe. They really have the largest number of particle physicists because

07:40that's where the world's largest particle accelerator is. And there's other national

07:43or federal-level research labs that focus on particle physics there. And so they have that

07:48really asset of talent and technology that they're developing there and then hoping to deploy

07:51globally, including in the U.S. I do want to circle back to the very beginning of our conversation

07:57about A.I. When you're looking at A.I. expanding and growing, the data centers do need just a

08:03massive amount of energy. Can A.I. grow without nuclear energy? I think it can grow without

08:10nuclear energy, but it's going to be even more costly. If you look at, say, solar or wind,

08:15right, like those might be the clean alternatives where if we say we're going to keep to our net

08:18zero commitments, we're going to use solar and wind to power these things. But solar and wind

08:23have the issue in that they're intermittent, right? They don't run 24-7. And so you need

08:27lots of redundancy or lots of battery deployments. That means you need massive solar fields to get

08:31that 99.999% uptime that's required of data centers. And so unless you have either nuclear,

08:37which is great baseload power, or natural gas, or some alternative like that, nuclear is really

08:43the only clean energy option, I think, that can get us here in a cost-effective way. And it's a

08:47thing that scales quickly. I think people kind of have this sense for some reason that nuclear is

08:52slow. If we look at the United Arab Emirates, this is like one of the sunniest places in the

08:56world. They have all the capital they need to deploy either solar or nuclear. And as of today,

09:01not only do they have twice as much nuclear deployed, they're investing more in nuclear

09:05than solar. And they're putting up another reactor facility. And they're looking to deploy

09:09a lot of AI. They're working with Microsoft, OpenAI, so on and so forth. You brought up the

09:14price tag. Again, it's a lot of money at first, but are you saying up front, it's billions, but

09:19then it's worth the amount of money? Yeah, I think because you're amortizing that cost over

09:25decades. And this is really where I think government plays a part in this, is that

09:29private markets find it difficult to underwrite assets for that long period of time. So you really

09:33need government backstops to just make sure that these things are worthwhile investments. And in

09:37case there's cost overruns, which if you look at countries like China, they're building reactors

09:41in five years without these overruns. In the US, we're just at the beginning of rebuilding this

09:45muscle. If we looked at what happened in Georgia with the first couple new reactors that just went

09:49online, they were delayed. They were over budget. But now we have people that are trained in

09:53building these systems. They're only going to get better as long as we build similar ones.

09:56And I think that's where the investment starts to pay off, is as we rebuild this muscle in the US,

10:01we're going to start to build reactors faster, cheaper, and that's going to incentivize even

10:04more private investment and drive costs down. Historically, as we've been discussing,

10:09nuclear energy progress in the United States has been slow. So how long will it take to rebuild

10:16this muscle, as you're saying? I think that we're talking about an investment, at least on the

10:20fission side, over the next 10 years. Really what's happening today is that we have large companies

10:25that are building well-known reactor systems, like the AP1000. That's what went into Georgia.

10:30And then we have a whole cadre of incredible nuclear startups, both in the US and in Europe,

10:35like Transmutex. Those companies are developing and licensing these new advanced reactor technologies

10:40that may come to market in three to five years through those licensing process. And then we're

10:46looking at five-year to seven-year build times. So really, that's the window where we're going to

10:49see this next generation of reactors really come to market and start to influence prices and the

10:54ability to deploy global data centers at scale. This conversation is coming at a really interesting

10:59time. We're less than four months away from a presidential election, and it's an unprecedented

11:04presidential election in the sense of we've seen Donald Trump's four years, we've seen President

11:09Biden's four years. When you're comparing the two, whose energy policies do you think most likely

11:15will advance nuclear energy? Look, I think Biden has done a good job under his administration of

11:22realizing that nuclear is a part of clean energy. This wasn't the case four years ago. And that's

11:28why the commitments at COP28 were important. Now, have those commitments gone far enough in terms of

11:32how do you actually clear out regulatory challenges that have prevented new advanced reactor systems

11:37from coming to market? Maybe not. And I think when you look at Trump as a presidential candidate,

11:43definitely something he's run on in the past is getting rid of regulatory burdens. And nuclear is

11:48a market where we need to rethink those things. We need to make sure that we're cautious, though,

11:52because safety is critical when it comes to nuclear, more so than any other industry.

11:56I think that if I were optimistic is that I think with a Trump or Biden administration coming to

12:02power in the next election is that both will view nuclear as a national security asset,

12:06not only locally in terms of how you power data centers, but also how you deploy these systems

12:11globally to ensure that the U.S. has influence in countries across the global South, which are

12:15now looking at nuclear today. What do you think is missing from the conversation then when it

12:20comes to nuclear? Any misconceptions out there that you want to clear up? Yeah, I think the

12:26biggest misconception with nuclear is that something we've touched on a number of times

12:30is whether the juice is worth the squeeze, whether the price is really worth paying up front. And I

12:34think the answer is definitively yes. And the case study I would point to here is France versus

12:39Germany. We essentially saw an energy crisis play out in Europe when Russia went to war with Ukraine

12:44and we had the natural gas pipelines cut. These two countries had totally different responses.

12:49Germany, who was praised by many countries as being a leader in clean energy because of their

12:53investments in wind and solar, was really the person or the country that people were really

12:58looking as the most forward-looking nation in energy. Now, what happened is when that natural

13:02gas got cut, what they brought online was coal. They have about the dirtiest grid in Europe. They

13:07had a spike in energy prices that have undercut their entire industrial output. They're still

13:11below pre-COVID levels of industrial output and are the only country in Europe like that.

13:15France, on the other hand, where 70 percent of their baseload power comes from nuclear,

13:19has maintained relatively steady prices. And that really is the key here, is that how does the US

13:24start to build a resilient grid with nuclear? And I think that's by making these large capital

13:29investments today, making sure there's public support that's helping induce private investment,

13:33which, to be quite frank, is why investors like me, Albert Wenger at Union Square Ventures,

13:38Kevin Ryan at Alicorp, one of the founding executives of Google X,

13:41are backing companies like Transmutex, because we think this is happening.

13:45That brings up a really interesting point. I guess something I want to get at is,

13:49is this going to cost the everyday American once nuclear does become more prolific? Because as of

13:55now, the White House said back in May, there's about 19 percent of nuclear being used right now

14:01when it comes to total energy. Yeah, I think that over time, it's going to save the American

14:06consumer money. The reason is, is that if you look at the levelized cost of electricity,

14:11once you have one of these plants in up and running, they can be below the cost of a coal plant.

14:15Now, you have to get past those upfront costs, and that's a real investment. But it pays

14:20dividends over the long run in the sense that you have guaranteed power. These reactors operate

14:2524-7. They're incredibly reliable. If you start to overinvest in renewables, wind and solar,

14:31you start to need to have backup systems. When the wind isn't blowing, you need natural gas to

14:35come online. And all of a sudden, you're managing a grid with lots of fluctuations. And so the

14:39really easy way to have a grid that's stable and easy to manage is having reliable power.

14:44And that's where nuclear is going to thrive. And if we can start to solve some of the key problems

14:48that made nuclear costly in the past at a system scale, namely nuclear waste, I think that this is

14:54something that people don't realize is that the U.S. government is paying around $500 million

14:58per year to nuclear facility operators in order to keep their waste on site because we haven't

15:04been able to build a centralized storage facility. And so if we can invest in systems like transmutex

15:09that all of a sudden turn these costs into assets, aka more energy and more fuel,

15:14we can start to make nuclear an even more attractive technology than it is today.

15:17And that's really the opportunity. The theme, Cameron, in the conversation has been that

15:21progress in nuclear has been slow in the United States. So what is next for transmutex?

15:27We're talking to a variety of governments about where we want to deploy the first system.

15:31That'll really be a hallmark system that will then give other countries around the world the

15:36opportunity to evaluate it. We're going to be raising up to $500 million over the next

15:41several years in order to test and license that. And I think what's exciting is that we're hoping

15:46to put it in a position where it can be brought to the U.S. market in order to address the major

15:51concerns we've talked about here, fuel security, waste management, and ultimately providing

15:55reliable power to things like A.I. and other industries. I am curious, does transmutex have

16:00the monopoly when it comes to recycling nuclear waste, or is there other competition out there?

16:06There's other systems. I think Sam Altman has a system called Oklo, and these are generally fast

16:11reactor systems that can also use waste as fuel. Now, the real challenge is that it's a question

16:18of how much waste can you actually burn effectively. And this is really where having a system

16:22like transmutex that uses a particle accelerator thrives. Because you have a particle accelerator

16:27and you operate the system subcritically, so with a larger safety margin, it means you can use a lot

16:31more alternative fuel, meaning a lot more waste. So we can burn at a higher efficiency really than

16:36any other system, and that's what makes it incredibly unique. Cameron Porter, I appreciate

16:40you coming in today. Thank you so much for the conversation. Thank you for the time, Brittany.

16:43It was exceptional.

16:52Thank you.

The AI Paradigm Shift Requires A Lot Of Energy — Could Nuclear Be The Answer?

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