What Peter Thiel got Right/Wrong on Rogan

With regard to nuclear energy, China, and nuclear weapons proliferation risks

I’ve been inundated in recent days with tweets and emails calling my attention to the comments Peter Thiel recently made about nuclear energy in an interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Several of you asked me to weigh in on that interview around the 45-minute mark. I’ve only met Peter Thiel once, in 2007, and was generally impressed with him. But his statements on JRE leave room for some gentle critique.

Overview

Peter is a super smart guy, with many diverse areas of knowledge and expertise in technology-oriented fields. But several of his statements in this interview were misinformed, both with regard to his understanding of nuclear energy history, and also with regard to the veracity of some of his perceptions about weapons proliferation, which he calls ‘dual use’.

I don’t mean to criticize Peter. He’s a good guy, and his misconceptions are entirely understandable. I shared many of them myself earlier in my journey of nuclear self-education. That said, quite a few of you asked me to opine on what was discussed, hence this post.

I’ll organize this in terms of the worthwhile topics that were discussed by both participants, because frankly some of Joe Rogan’s comments were just as insightful as Peter Thiel’s.

Is it possible for rest-of-world to ever enjoy USA’s standard of living?

The most important part of the nuclear discussion was at the very beginning, but it was unfortunately abandoned after Peter answered incorrectly. Peter first correctly observed, “The world consumes about 100mm bbl/day of crude oil, but for the entire world to enjoy the U.S. standard of living would require the equivalent of about 300-400mm bbl”. His stats are about right, but his ‘no’ answer when Joe asked whether nuclear could make up that gap was dead wrong. And that’s the real story of the century that nobody is even talking about!

To set the record straight, Peter is correct that it’s impossible to extend the U.S. standard of living to the rest of the world using any fossil fuel-based strategy. We simply don’t have enough hydrocarbon molecules to go around, end of story. He’s also correct that under the current international nuclear energy regulation regime, it would not be practical to make up the gap using conventional nuclear energy technology, meaning uranium-fueled, water-cooled large-scale conventional nuclear reactors.

Later in the interview, Peter correctly alludes “Actually, I think we do have newer, better designs for some of these things…” (presumably, referring to Generation IV reactor technologies). He was on the right track there - technology developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the 1960s could be updated with a few 2020s enhancements and we’d have all the technology we’d need to extend the U.S. standard of living (and energy abundance) to the entire planet. But Peter is correct that this isn’t possible under current government regulations. The real problem is not nuclear energy technology or even weapons proliferation, but rather, government standing in the way of progress by failing to update outdated regulations.

Where Peter is mistaken is his “dual use” argument that supposedly there’s an immutable link between nuclear energy and weapons proliferation. There’s some basis to parts of that argument, but for the most part, Peter has it exactly backwards. The advanced nuclear technologies best suited to minimizing proliferation risk are the same ones governments won’t allow to be commercialized!

What Peter doesn’t seem to realize is that the U.S. oil & gas industry played a big role in killing nuclear energy in the 1970s, and their favorite trick was to exploit the technological incompetence of politicians by distorting weapons proliferation and spent fuel waste management issues completely out of context and proportion. Many of Peter’s perceptions are reflections of fictional propaganda about proliferation risks invented by the 1970s anti-nuclear movement. That Peter confuses this propaganda with fact is completely understandable. I did too, until quite recently.

For the record, I have a full business plan for how to make nuclear energy cost LESS than energy from fossil fuels, and share it with the entire planet, fulfilling the promise Peter said was impossible: Giving the rest of the world USA’s standard of living. And by the way, that same plan completely eliminates all spent nuclear fuel waste from existence on planet Earth by 2044, and replaces all the energy presently derived from fossil fuels with safe, clean nuclear energy by 2050. That’s not 3x nuclear by 2050, but rather, 24x nuclear by 2050. And for only a little more investment than the $4.6tn we’ve already spent on Wind and Solar.

But to be clear, my plan is neither investable nor or even viable at this time, because government is standing in the way of progress. Until we dispel the widely accepted propaganda that has Peter slightly confused in this interview, governments won’t allow my plan to move forward because they don’t understand how badly ill-conceived their own proliferation and waste management policies truly are.

The Density argument was spot-on but shallow

Peter astutely explained what’s known as the energy density argument, meaning that as you move from wood to coal to oil & gas and eventually to uranium, everything gets better and more efficient as you move to more energy-dense fuels. But Peter left off at “so therefore, uranium is good”, without further elaboration, context, or discussion of other nuclear fuels. His comments were accurate on this subject, but they left a lot out, so let me try and pick up now where he left off.

Peter correctly explained why denser fuels are better, so I won’t bother repeating that part. Let’s focus on the nuclear fuels that exist in nature or which we can manufacture. How much of these fuels do we have left to fuel humanity once we wake up to the obvious fact that nuclear energy is the only sane solution to baseload power demand, and how smart or stupid are we as a society in how we use and manage these fuels today? Spoiler: We couldn’t suck at this much worse than we already do, and it’s shocking when you really get your head around how bad current policy really is.

There are only three viable fissile radioisotopes

To fuel a nuclear reactor, you need a fissile fuel source. Don’t worry about the nuclear physics details—for our purposes what fissile means isn’t even important. Just trust me that you can’t run a nuclear reactor without fuel that is fissile. A theoretical physicist might tell you there are many different fissile isotopes, but only one exists in nature in useful quantities, and we’ve only figured out how to manufacture two others. So there are only three viable nuclear reactor fuels in existence:

Uranium-235 is the only fissile isotope known to exist in nature in sufficient quantities that it can be mined and used to fuel nuclear reactors. U-235 is also the only nuclear fuel in widespread use today, which is really sad, because it’s super rare and we shouldn’t be squandering what little we have the way we do. Here’s the rub: When natural uranium is mined out of the ground, only 0.7% of it is U-235, the kind of uranium that can sustain a nuclear chain reaction.

The remaining 99.3% is called U-238, and for reasons that will become clear very shortly, it’s super valuable stuff that we should not let go to waste. But our waste management policies couldn’t be much more stupid than they are. Not only do we waste U-238 in the sense of not putting it to good use, but we literally transform it from really valuable stuff into what the public knows as “nuclear waste”—the toxic stuff that stays radioactive for as long as a hundred thousand of years!

And by the way, the ‘hundred thousand years’ bit is another exaggeration from the anti-nuclear propaganda crowd. Some of the actinides it contains can stay radioactive for that long, but its real and genuine toxicity to humans is done and over with in less than a thousand years. That’s still a very long time, but it’s just one more example of how exaggerated the anti-nuclear propaganda truly is.

There’s also a lot of nice, clean U-238 left over from the enrichment process used to make reactor fuel. This is called depleted uranium because much of the most precious U-235 has already been extracted. We should save depleted uranium for use in making more advanced reactor fuels, but instead we make bullets out of it to get rid of it, because it’s heavier than lead and good at piercing armor plates on tanks.

Almost all civilian nuclear power reactors are fueled by a blend of 3% to 5% U-235 and 95% to 97% U-238. After a few years in the reactor, much of the U-235 gets used up, and the U-238 becomes so radioactive that unnecessarily strict regulations demand that it needs to be stored for as long as 100,000 years. So we don’t just waste our U-238 in the sense of not using it. Our power reactors literally transform U-238 from super valuable stuff that could power humanity for the next million years into dangerous stuff that stays radioactive for up to 100,000 years! It’s hard to imagine a dumber strategy, but it actually exists for what were very good reasons back at the time the policies were adopted. The details are too involved to get into here in sufficient detail to really do justice to the subject.

Plutonium-239 is the next fissile reactor fuel candidate. It makes a great reactor fuel that works really well. But the name alone probably already has you guessing why it’s so controversial. Pu-239 is also the most favored fissile isotope for making nuclear weapons. And frankly, that causes most people to freak out and stop thinking clearly.

There are good ways to address the “dual use” arguments Peter made in the interview with Joe Rogan, and we could solve these proliferation risks using modern technology. But public fear over anything that even sounds like it’s related to a nuclear weapon is so high that it’s hard to have an intelligent discussion of the topic in private conversation, never mind in public debate where activists intentionally distort the facts out of context to advance their agendas.

Pu-239 doesn’t occur in nature. So where does it come from? We can make it from U-238, the non-fissile isotope of Uranium that we waste in the most literal sense of that word - today’s reactors transform it into spent nuclear fuel waste that stays radioactive for up to 100,000 years. We manufacture Plutonium using a process called breeding, which requires a nuclear chain reaction. That process transforms U-238 into Pu-239. The U-238 wasn’t fissile, but the Pu-239 is.

To wrap up on Plutonium, it’s not as scary as people think, and the proliferation risks could be managed with intelligent policy. But there is still a very real proliferation risk here, and it’s the entire basis of the “dual use” problems Peter alludes to in this podcast with Joe Rogan. Peter has a valid point, and while there are mitigations available, the risks Peter alludes to are very real.

But there’s one more “unsung hero” fissile nuclear reactor fuel isotope that almost nobody ever talks about, and it’s it’s by far the most important one to understand. What a pity it’s never been discussed in any public forum with anything close to Joe Rogan’s reach! That “hero isotope” is (drum roll)…

Uranium-233 is by far the most exciting of the bunch, and it’s also at the center of my own plan for how to replace every single watt of energy we now derive from fossil fuels with safe, clean, proliferation-proof nuclear energy by 2050. Before I even get to the really important parts of why U-233 is the best nuclear reactor fuel in existence (despite that we’ve never actually used it to fuel a reactor outside a laboratory environment), let’s first focus on the part Peter is confused about: weapons proliferation.

U-233 was briefly considered by the Manhattan Project. Their overall strategy was parallel development of any viable bomb-making technology that anyone could think of. That’s why they built both a U-235 powered bomb that was used on Hiroshima and a separate Pu-239 powered bomb of a completely different design that was used on Nagasaki. The film Oppenheimer does a great job of telling that story.

U-233 is never mentioned in the film because it was quickly ruled out as impractical to make a bomb from. To be clear, making a bomb from U-233 is not impossible, but it’s so much more difficult than making a U-235 bomb that even the Manhattan project scientists decided it was beyond their reach and not worth the time and effort to try.

Do you see how this relates to Peter’s confusion about weapons proliferation (what he calls ‘dual use’)? Peter is correct that nuclear reactors that work by breeding U-238 into Pu-239 could be re-purposed to make Plutonium for bomb-making unless adequate safeguards are in place. There really are good ways to put those safeguards in place, and Peter appears to be unaware of them. But he’s right that there’s an inherent risk to breeding U-238 into Plutonium unless we’re really careful about how that’s done.

So where does this miracle isotope called Uranium-233 come from? Can we get it from uranium mines? Nope. U-233 doesn’t occur in nature. It can be manufactured from another element called Thorium, which is #90 on the periodic table. (Uranium is 92). The gist of it is that a Thorium-fueled nuclear reactor works from an initial fuel load of either U-235 or Pu-239, called a kick-starter fuel. That gets the nuclear chain reaction started. Then the excess neutrons coming out of that chain reaction are absorbed by a blanket of Thorium encircling the reactor core. A process called breeding turns the Thorium into another element called Protactinium and that eventually turns into U-233, which is used to fuel the reactor indefinitely. So after the initial load of U-235 or Pu-239, the reactor can run forever on Thorium alone.

Thorium doesn’t have to be enriched like Uranium, so it’s much cheaper to produce as reactor fuel. It’s 4x more plentiful in Earth’s crust than Uranium, and it doesn’t pose anything remotely close to the weapons proliferation risks of enriching natural uranium or breeding U-238 into Plutonium. In other words, it fully solves most of Peter’s fears about “dual use” of nuclear technology.

And the story gets even better when we bring in a subject Peter and Joe didn’t even address: management and disposal of spent nuclear fuel waste. There are more than a quarter million tons of that stuff in storage world-wide, and it can stay radio-active for as long as 100,000 years. But guess what? We already have the technology to recycle it, and then use the longest-half life actinides it contains as kick-starter fuel for Thorium reactors.

That’s right—we could literally eliminate all 250k metric tons of high-level nuclear fuel waste from existence, and the worst parts of that waste could be burnt up to kick-start most of the Thorium reactors we need to fully solve energy transition and climate change for the entire planet. Please let that sink in—it’s really important. We could kill two birds with one stone and eliminate all nuclear waste from existence on planet Earth while simultaneously fueling a Thorium-based global energy transition. Except that’s illegal because of outdated policies that date back to 1946, and which in my not-so-humble opinion, our governments have failed to keep in alignment with current needs of society.

Where does the U.S. government stand on U-233? Because it doesn’t exist in nature and can only be manufactured from Thorium in a nuclear breeder reactor, U-233 is super-rare. The United States is the only government that has any appreciable inventory of the stuff—more than a full metric ton in storage now. We should treat that U-233 as a national treasure because having it will be essential to continuing research on the coming Thorium clean energy revolution!

So what’s the DOE’s plan for the U-233 (more than 1 metric ton) they now possess? They want to spend about a half a billion of your tax dollars to “down-blend” it into worthless rubble, and then dump it in the Nevada dessert to get rid of it! Seriously—that’s their plan. Your tax dollars at work…

The biggest problem with Thorium is that there’s so much misinformation and urban legend on the Internet about Thorium that almost nobody really understands it. I have to confess that even my own Energy Transition Crisis docuseries is chock full of mis-statements about Thorium and U-233, because I made the mistake of thinking that five separate YouTube videos all saying the exact same thing meant it was probably true. I may have to re-do the entire nuclear episode series just to correct all of my own mistakes about Thorium and the history of the thermal spectrum molten-salt thorium reactor. Early on in my own journey of self-education on advanced nuclear technology, I believed too much of what I saw on YouTube without doing my homework and vetting those claims. I promise that I’m learning from those mistakes.

Cutting to the chase: What matters most is economics, not density!

Peter’s focus was on the density argument, but the far more important reason to care about U-233 and the Thorium used to manufacture it is the relative economics compared to fuels sourced from natural uranium. The single most important goal of Energy Policy should be to reduce the cost of clean energy to well BELOW the present cost of energy from fossil fuels. Nothing—including climate change—is more important than that, so that’s what we should focus on. But almost nobody does!

The world presently derives about 137,000 TWh(t) of energy from burning fossil fuels (see chart above, linked here). What would the FUEL COST be to get all the energy we presently get from fossil fuels from nuclear energy? Here are the answers, starting with what we do today (burn fossil fuels), then what it would cost if we used the Uranium-fueled nuclear technology Peter and Joe discussed on the podcast, and then finally, if we followed my own plan for energy transition, and got that energy from U-233 bred from Thorium instead. Ready for the answers?

Fuel cost to produce 137k TWh(t) by Fuel Source:

Fossil Fuels: $6.25 trillion dollars
Uranium*: $1.61 trillion dollars (74.2% savings below cost of fossil fuels)
Thorium**: $312 million dollars (99.996% savings below cost of fossil fuels)

For any readers not used to making that conversion from millions to trillions, it’s a really big difference. A trillion is literally a million million.

*I used a Uranium price of $400/lb, fully 4x higher than present market price, to calculate the $1.61tn figure. The reason is that it takes many years to bring a new uranium mine online, and there’s no way we could ever ramp up production fast enough to maintain current market prices. If anything, this figure is on the low side if we were really talking about the 24x increase in nuclear energy needed to replace fossil fuels entirely. Thorium is a completely different story. It’s a by-product of rare earth mining, and tailings ponds around the world are already full of high concentrations of Thorium ripe for the taking.

**The cost of the Thorium is only $312mm. If we get the kick-starter fuel from reprocessing spent nuclear fuel waste, its cost is limited to the reprocessing cost. If we have to kick-start the thorium reactors with low-enriched uranium (at current market prices), then the first few years operation of the Thorium reactors will have a higher fuel cost of around $124bn for both the thorium and the low-enriched uranium kick-starter fuel.

I’ll even put my money where my mouth is:

If I can somehow persuade governments to be part of the energy transition solution rather than the core of the problem, and implement my own plan to re-power the world with Thorium-fueled nuclear energy, I will easily become a billionaire in the process. So right, here, right now, I’m making a personal pledge to the human race: If I’m successful in this mission, I pledge to do what Australians call shouting up a round.

What do I mean by that? If I can get governments to cooperate and implement my plan to repower the world with Thorium, I pledge to “pick up one year’s worth of the energy bill” as my way of paying back humanity for my own success. Whose energy bill am I offering to pay for personally a full year, you ask? The entire planet’s. It would only cost me $312 million bucks to make good on that promise, and I’ll be able to afford it. So planet earth, the first year’s fuel cost is “on me” when my energy transition plan is realized. I encourage others who will become billionaires in Energy Transition to make the same pledge. There will be enough of us that our donations could power humanity for decades. Peter could easily afford to pick up a full decade’s worth of the entire planet’s Thorium bill himself.

Peter’s Dual Use Arguments vs. what Really Stopped Nuclear Energy in the 1970s

There’s some truth to what Peter said about weapons proliferation risk being the reason nuclear energy was killed in the 1970s. But I think he has the context and perspective wrong. In reality, what happened was that entrenched oil & gas interests funded misguided environmentalists to “eliminate oil’s only plausible competitor”. They used weapons proliferation and spent nuclear fuel waste arguments exaggerated out of context to achieve that goal.

Peter was mistaken when he said that it was exported U.S. nuclear energy technology that allowed India to “get the bomb”. What really happened was that India saw the opportunity to re-purpose a Canadian civilian research reactor based on a heavy water moderator, a design similar to today’s CANDU civilian power reactor that doesn’t require enriched uranium. India effectively turned that research reactor into a makeshift weapons-grade plutonium production reactor. This technique is known as roasting, and it’s now well-known. There is absolutely no sane argument for limiting use of civilian reactor technology today because of this well-known risk, and I’ll explain why shortly.

Weapons proliferation and waste management are closely related, and the topic is so nuanced that I can’t do justice to it in the space available here. Suffice it to say that Peter is not imagining things and there are real risks that need to be managed, but they don’t constitute a sane reason for not choosing nuclear energy as the primary strategy for energy transition. What Peter is right about is that these are the primary topics fear-mongers used in the 1970s to get nuclear power shut down almost completely.

Ironically, research done at the Oak Ridge national laboratory in the 1960s could mitigate most of those proliferation risks, and the thermal spectrum molten-salt thorium breeder reactor should take center stage in our nuclear strategy going forward. But all that research was discarded and almost forgotten by the early 1970s. These are almost certainly the technologies that Peter was referring to when he briefly alluded that “I think we actually have better designs that haven’t been used”.

But Peter has it backwards when he says the reason we don’t use those advanced designs today is proliferation (he calls it dual use). The truth is those designs were very well suited to solving all the worst proliferation challenges, and that’s probably the real reason they were taken out by the well-heeled oil & gas interests who shut down nuclear energy in the 1970s. They wanted to get rid of the best designs that posed the greatest competitive risk to oil & gas. And they succeeded. The direct result of their ‘success’ is the deteriorating standard of living we’ve faced in the West for the entirety of the 21st century to date. Think about that. The reason we have so many people living in tents on sidewalks in our cities today is because of the 1970s take-down of the nuclear power industry. Sadly, there will never be accountability.

A few companies like Copenhagen Atomics are working hard to resurrect the best designs from Oak Ridge, but it’s slow going because government regulators are a whole lot more confused than Peter is about these matters, and they have no clue what they’re doing relative to nuclear proliferation policy. They just stay the course in rigid adherence to 1946 anti-proliferation policies, with no reviews to check whether they still align with society’s needs.

Proliferation Risks are real, but not what Peter thinks

I’m probably coming across as dismissive of the very real risks of weapons proliferation, meaning terrorists, rogue nations, or other bad guys getting their hands on nuclear weapons or figuring out how to make them. The opposite is true: I’m extremely concerned about this, and I think it’s a serious risk that warrants more public attention, not less. But the real risks are not the ones Peter is talking about. Some explanation is required to put this in context.

To properly understand weapons proliferation risks requires being able to distinguish possible risk scenarios from plausible risk scenarios. What do I mean by that? Here’s an analogy to explain it: I’m typing this post from the 31st floor of a high-rise residential building. Suppose that bad guys wanted to kill me before I finish posting this. It’s possible that they might hijack one of Elon’s rockets, then break Felix Baumgartner’s record for para-jumping from space. A team of assassins could para-drop out of low-earth orbit, HALO-jump using wingsuits and GPS navigation to land on the roof of my building, and then rappel down the sides of the building, crash through my office window, and take me out with assault rifles. That’s a possible risk.

But here’s the thing: There’s no security in this building, so in terms of plausible rather than possible risk, it’s a hell of a lot more likely the bad guys would just walk thru the lobby, take the elevator to the 31st floor like everyone else, and then kick my door down to make the same attack with assault rifles. And therefore, it’s silly to even worry about anyone hijacking one of Elon’s rockets for the purpose of assassinating me.

But in the world of nuclear energy, anti-nuclear activists latch on to any possible risk they can find, regardless of whether it’s plausible. The business about civilian power reactors being re-purposed as plutonium production reactors is more akin to the scenario of someone hijacking Elon’s rockets to get to me. It’s dumb to think they’d go to all that trouble when it’s so much easier to just take the elevator.

And there’s another possible but not plausible risk that Peter never mentioned, which has completely screwed up nuclear energy policy. That unrealistic risk, that’s never happened in real life, is the perceived risk that if we allowed more reprocessing (recycling) of spent nuclear fuel waste, someone might figure out how to extract the plutonium it contains and make a bomb from it. That’s possible, but it’s akin to the business of hijacking one of Elon’s rockets: the right question to ask is why would anyone go to all that trouble when they could just take the elevator instead? So the real question to ask about weapons proliferation (what Peter calls dual use) is, what’s the elevator-like scenario that terrorists might realistically use to make a nuclear bomb?

The answer centers on enrichment of natural uranium to weapons-grade using centrifuges. That used to be assumed well beyond the technological capabilities of most nations, never mind some guy sitting in a cave in Afghanistan. But the confluence of Artificial Intelligence, 3D Printing, cheap and easily accessible microcontrollers, and a general wealth of information on all subjects being available on the Internet have changed the calculus completely.

It’s far easier to build a “gun-type” nuclear bomb using enriched U-235 than it is to make a Plutonium bomb, which requires a much more complex “full implosion” trigger system. We should stop worrying about possible but implausible “hijack a rocket ship” scenarios like terrorists making their own Plutonium bombs, and instead focus on the very real risk of bad guys either stealing enough weapons-grade U-235 to make a bomb, else figuring out how to enrich natural uranium to weapons grade by building their own uranium enrichment centrifuges.

Anyone can buy natural uranium—it’s not even regulated. 50 years ago, the scenario of bad guys figuring out how to build an enrichment centrifuge ‘cascade’ was considered implausible. That was because these machines are quite complex, and some guy in a cave in Afghanistan could never source the specialized parts needed to build one. These days, they could 3D print most of those parts quite easily. And the knowledge for how to build that centrifuge cascade is well within the realm of what a jailbroken version of ChatGPT could teach them to do step-by-step.

Those are the real weapons proliferation risks we ought to worry more about. All the risks that stem from nuclear energy are so far down the “rocket ship” path of implausibility that we shouldn’t worry nearly so much about them, despite that they are indeed possible. We need to worry about terrorists getting on the elevator, not hijacking one of Elon’s rockets. But anti-nuclear energy activists don’t have any incentive to talk up those “elevator risks”, so nobody is even discussing them. Instead, Peter and others are worried about “hijack a rocket” scenarios that are possible but implausible.

“Effective Global Governance”

I wasn’t sure where Peter was headed when he briefly alluded to Global Governance. Perhaps he meant to underscore the risk that nuclear energy might be cited as yet another excuse to justify a global government, which I think poses a risk to humanity far greater than even nuclear weapons.

But while I don’t want to see a global government, we definitely need a global nuclear certification and regulation authority that has its act together a whole lot better than today’s IAEA. We need to adopt the same model that’s used for aviation, where reactor designs are certified in their country of origin, and then those type certifications are respected by other sovereigns. The current system, where a new reactor design has to be separately certified in every jurisdiction where it might operate, is utterly ridiculous! This alone will prevent a successful global nuclear renaissance if we don’t fix it ASAP.

By the way, my own nuclear energy transition plan fully addresses this need. So far, nobody in senior positions of power and influence are listening to me, but I’ll keep trying to get their attention.

Peter Couldn’t Possibly Get the China Story more WRONG if he tried on purpose!

Overall, Peter did a great job in this interview. But wow, I was completely shocked by his take on China, and particularly with the glaring errors in his statements about how much investment China is making in both conventional and advanced nuclear energy.

I’ll make this simple: China is at least 15 years ahead of the West on all things nuclear, and the stage is set for China to become the global economic and military superpower that will control energy globally for the next 100+ years. They have more conventional nuclear plants planned and under construction than anyone else, and just the number of planned new Chinese reactors exceeds half the entire U.S. fleet of operating reactors!

More importantly, China is far ahead of anyone else on so-called “advanced” nuclear technology. In the West, only a few guys like me are even talking about Thorium in realistic terms. There is no Thorium fuel cycle supply chain in the West yet, and that’s a real challenge for the most exciting advanced nuclear startups like Copenhagen Atomics.

China isn’t just talking about advanced nuclear like a few of us in the west are. They’ve been investing billions and actually building it for over a decade now. China is the first and only country to actually build a Thorium-fueled, molten-salt cooled nuclear reactor since the 1960s when the concept was first invented at the Oak Ridge national laboratory in Tennessee. China has already announced plans to build a fleet of container ships powered by thorium-fueled molten salt reactors, and they’re already building a Thorium nuclear fuel supply chain right now. The West is being left in the dust, and our policymakers don’t even recognize what’s going on!

China has enough Thorium under its own soil to power the entire planet for a thousand years, and they will be completely, totally energy independent as soon as they carry out the work they already have underway to build a new fleet of advanced reactors. Yes, that’s right: China already has a fully vetted plan for energy independence, and eventually, global energy dominance. And Western policymakers are asleep at the proverbial wheel.

And it doesn’t end with Thorium. The Chinese are also building another kind of advanced reactor called a “pebble-bed” reactor. This kind of reactor can operate at much higher temperatures than water-cooled reactors, and that makes it particularly suitable for seawater desalination and making hydrogen, which are both super important to energy transition.

The greatest threat to the West is the very real risk of being economically overrun by China, and it will be China’s leadership in both conventional and advanced nuclear technology that makes that happen. Remember the lesson of the Cold War: The only known way to take out a global nuclear superpower is to defeat that nation economically. That’s how the Soviet Union was defeated. China is well on the way to defeating the West economically, and their leadership in nuclear energy is the biggest feather in their economic dominance cap. Peter couldn’t possibly have gotten this part more wrong, but the rest of the interview was quite good overall.

The best insight was Joe’s, not Peter’s!

By far the best moment of this interview was when Joe started down the path of “But if there was a better design, one that worked better and solved these problems…” YES, JOE, YOU NAILED IT! What a pity Peter didn’t know the correct answer.

That better design Joe alluded to is called a thermal-spectrum molten-salt Thorium breeder reactor. Copenhagen Atomics (which almost nobody ever heard of) is the company doing the best work in that space. (Full disclosure: I own shares in Copenhagen Atomics). What a pity that Peter’s erroneous answer about dual use, which he got backwards, shut Joe down when he was really onto something!

Nobody ever mentioned the most important point!

As noted above, what matters most is that we figure out how to share the standard of living Americans unfairly enjoy while the rest of the world can’t. The solution to that problem is all about economics, not weapons proliferation. And we already have all the nuclear technology we need to solve every bit of that problem. If anyone can get Joe’s attention, I’d be delighted to lay out my entire plan to eliminate all nuclear waste in existence by 2044 and replace all energy now derived from fossil fuels with Thorium-fueled nuclear reactors by 2050. It would take a full Joe-length episode to cover the whole topic, but I’d love to do it.

Problem is, everyone and his brother wants to be on Rogan, and trust me, his producers are inundated with fakes, flakes, phonies, and wannabe’s. I started e-mailing them in 2018 when I published my book fully anticipating CBDCs and explaining the risks they would pose. That they ignored me was totally understandable. I’m a relatively low-profile guy with a niche podcast that only has a little over 100k listeners. He’s Joe Rogan. What would you expect?

If Rogan’s team ever want to “discover” me, I’m ready to be discovered! But that’s only going to happen if you, dear reader, encourage it very actively. Guys like me trying to promote themselves always get ignored, even by little podcasts like MacroVoices. So if anyone reading this wants the real story on nuclear energy transition possibilities to come out, you’ll have to be the ones to ask Joe to give me a platform. I gave up on reaching out to his team directly years ago.