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.
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.
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
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.