How Quantum Sensors Could Transform Nuclear Power - EPRI

Most of us only think about infrastructure when it fails. A bridge closes, the train breaks down. But the real breakthroughs usually happen earlier.

When you can see the problem forming before anything stops working. Today's guest is Emma Wong, nuclear principal lead for innovation, quantum technologies, and international engagement at EPRI, the Electric Power Research Institute.

EPRI was founded after a blackout. Its job ever since has been to stop the next one.

Emma works on the frontier where physics meet power systems, nuclear, sensors, quantum technologies. But this isn't a sci fi conversation.

Really, it's about maintenance, uptime, and seeing trouble early enough to act. Emma explains why better sensing can be more valuable than building new power plants and how inspecting a world faster can save millions in lost generation. The technology is incredible, and we get very technical. But Emma is a perfect guide to these cutting edge technological advancements.

We also talk about nuclear's role in a high renewables grid, not as a silver bullet, but as a dependable base power while demand keeps rising. But before we start, I have something to ask you.

We want to give transmission a bit of a glow up, and we want you to tell us what's working and what isn't.

So we will put the link to a survey in the show notes. If you could take three minutes to fill it out, we would be super grateful.

Thank you.

Anyway, I'm Alejandro Adiego, and welcome back to transmission.

Emma, thank you very much for joining us today. A pleasure. We're gonna start with you telling us what you do within the energy industry and what EPRI as an organization does as well.

Alright. Well, we say EPRI. Can say EPRI. You can say EPRI. EPRI.

Yeah.

It's however you want it. It's okay. But it used to be the Electric Power Research Institute. So we all talk about different types of electricity, energy, all of those different things.

But it was founded in nineteen seventy two. It was literally born in a blackout. I think you might be familiar with some blackouts in your Yes. Year, your lifetime.

Yeah. Exactly. Right? And so, it was quite interesting because it was kind of a need for a research institution to come and do research with the industry.

Not for the industry, but it's with the industry to make sure that the not just the grid, but electropower generation, all aspects of it are actually resilient And will be sustainable and to support energy security.

And our biggest mission, which is why I love to work here so much, is actually it's a public mission. It's to help the people so they have access to energy they need. And so I actually have been working all over the world looking at different areas and how we might be able to help from maybe I give speeches on, you know, training seminars on different things or I'm I'm speaking about energy security or I'm speaking about different things.

And then we bring a lot of expertise into different areas as well.

Within EPRI or EPRI, what is your specific role? What do you do on a daily basis?

So good question.

I am currently the lead of nuclear innovation. Don't be scared by that. It's actually a really fun role.

I am a chemical engineer by training, and I was just really interested in how a nuclear reaction like fission can turn into energy. I was so fascinated by that when I was growing up, and I was like, my okay. I'm gonna be honest with you. My parents were like, do not do anything with this nuclear thing.

It sounds dangerous. I don't want anything to do with it. Please don't do it. And I was like, you know how you were when you were a child and you're like, my parents told me not to do it.

So what am I gonna do?

I want to do it.

I want to look into it. I want to learn more about it.

Yeah.

So as I was growing up through college and grad school, I was learning more about it. I was participating. And as I was learning, it was a fascinating field. And then I just fell in love with the energy field as a whole. Yeah. And so I actually started in battery technology and then moved to nuclear power. And now I look at how I can actually make a difference, not just in nuclear power, but all power generation to make it more resilient, to promote energy security.

Okay. I see. Very interesting path towards nuclear energy. I wanted to ask you what the typical readers or customers of your work are. Are we talking about utilities, regulators, everyday people that are interested in the energy industry? What are the different what are the different profiles?

That's a very good question. So the typical person is for the utilities. As I said, we do work with the industries, and most of our work is used by the industry. So, like, I work with Constellation. I work with Duke Power.

In Spain, it's Iberdrola, I believe. Yes. And, like, electro Electricity de France and, yeah, all over the world. Right? The fun part is in nuclear power.

All nuclear power plants from many different countries, we interface with them. We talk to them. We're able to except for countries that I am not allowed to since I am based in the United States. There are just some countries we're not allowed to interface with.

However, for all the other countries, we do spend time in Spain. It is quite nice. I have lots of colleagues in Madrid, so I have spent time there.

It is really hot in the summer, by the It is during the summer especially.

Very hot in the summer. Yeah. But I love it there. I love interfacing with different people and things like that.

So it it's really, really nice.

Great. Thank you for sharing that. And for the audience to really understand, sir, you travel all around the world. That's cool. You go to utilities.

You give panel discussions, special lectures about innovation in the nuclear field, and I've also read about the quantum field. You tell us a bit more about your work in the quantum field?

Absolutely.

So in the quantum field a few years ago, I started looking at quantum computing. Everyone starts with quantum computing because that's when you hear the word quantum.

Yeah.

I'm gonna be honest. I'm a chemical engineer. I did take quantum mechanics as a a course, and a lot of that is actually also material science. It kind of goes well together.

But I really didn't think much of it back then. I was like, yep. That's how you do materials work.

That's how you put a lot of those, you know, tests together and things like that. But when you actually think about, like, the new age of quantum, when it what does it really mean? I immediately thought quantum computing.

I was wrong. I'm going to admit it. When I really started learning about it and diving into what is this world of quantum technologies, it's more than just quantum computing. It's quantum sensing. It's quantum networking. It's also like quantum cybersecurity, like the quantum key distributions. And so when I was learning about all of those different areas, I was like, this is really interesting, but how can I use this practically?

Can I?

And when I first looked at quantum computing, I made the assessment, it's really interesting. The technology is coming.

However, it's a little bit further away than that I can implement today. I'm I need to get my researchers trained on what it is. I myself need to learn more about this whole technology and to implement that in a big way, I think it it was further down the road than I would have liked in my research. Yep. I was still doing some projects here and there because that's how you learn, by doing. Yes.

More recently, especially as I've been traveling around the world and I've been able to talk to more people about this quantum technologies area, I really started to zero in on the quantum sensors area.

Now you're like, how is that different?

Well, you have sensors all over. There's sensors in your phone to to do detection. Right? It's like you got Bluetooth.

You have sensors in your car to do proximity or at least a new car. Yeah. Some older people still have manual cars. My parents still do.

When I get in their car, I still gotta look behind me to be like, okay. There's no one there. Yeah. But now in my car, I have a, you know, I have a video monitor and I have a sensor to be like, oh, no.

You're getting too close or you're getting too close to the car ahead of you. Right? These are all sensor technologies. Well, just think if you have a new sensor technology that's just based on quantum mechanics.

It's just based on a property of an atom. You're like, that's that's easier to access.

It is. And I want you to give a step back and explain to the audience what makes quantum different and so special in these use cases. What is it? Like, the most fundamental layer and why is it better to use it for sensors, for example, than the normal sensor technology that we had so far?

Let me ask you a question. Yes. Did you take quantum mechanics in school?

I took material resistance, material science. I Oh. Know the I I think that I remember the basics of quantum. I'm not fully sure.

Yeah. That's true too.

Atoms on the most in the smallest scale can behave as a wave or as in deterministic Yes. Single atom. And depending on how you look at them, they can act on one way or the other. Is that correct or not?

And can you expand on Absolutely correct.

So now when you're looking at a quantum sensor, and I'm only gonna describe one There's so many different types of quantum sensors. But if you think about an atom There's a nucleus which has the protons and neutrons in it. And so for anyone who doesn't know about it, just it's the core of the atom. Yes.

It doesn't move. It doesn't do anything. It is the core. And then you have electrons that surround it.

That's all you need to know. Right? And for one type of quantum sensor, have just one electron that's free, and it just does what it likes to do.

And what you need to know is that it always has an energy state that it likes to be in. Yes. Its lowest energy state. Because like people, electrons are lazy. So they wanna be in a very safe space.

And so think about if you energize that electron to a higher state, it always jumps to a known state.

And then when it jumps down, it releases a photon.

And you always know what that energy of that photon is. It never changes because those are the properties of atoms. It's the quantum mechanics.

Yes.

And so if it's always the same unless you've sensed something different, so you always know what it should be, you always get a pure measurement.

Sensors today are measuring things by an indirect measurement. They don't actually give you a direct measurement.

And since it's always indirect and it's based upon what I will say a lot of electronics, electronics and the sensors, like, seem to drift. That means if you've heard about calibration, you're always calibrating sensors because they drift off of that target point you want it to be on. Yes. Sensors drift.

The electronics drift. Everything drifts. So you're always recalibrating. Well, how do you recalibrate an atom?

You don't have to.

And that's what creates this what we call a no drift sensor now. The sensor itself will still have leads and electronics to it, so you always have to think about how those might drift. But the sensor itself, because an atom is a fixed a fixed atom, a fixed Yes. Being, it doesn't drift. It's a quantum mechanic that is just there. That's the very basics of it. It can get very much more complicated than that, but it's it's really because you have this known quantity that's always there.

I see. So one of the advantages of using quantum sensors is no need for no calibration. Correct.

Second one, is it more accurate than normal sensors?

Much more sensitive.

And when we talk about costs, for example, what does it translate to?

The cost right now, because it's not being used, and it's as a lot of maybe people that are listening will know is like when something is wants to be bought, it's if you're buying one of a kind. Your first of a kind is is the only one in its being. It's very expensive. But when you start doing economies of scale, then you really bring down the price point.

Now one of the technologies is diamond. You think diamonds are expensive.

That's only if you want that diamond that goes on a ring or jewelry or things like that. Those can get very expensive. But when you want diamonds for other applications, they're actually not that expensive.

And if there's economies of scale, growing synthetic diamonds, meaning just lab grown diamonds, there are not anything different or wrong with them. People just value the the ones that you find, I guess, in nature. But if you're if you have these grown synthetic lab grown diamonds, they're actually not that expensive to even do testing on and things like that. Now the the part where it's not quite there yet is, like, for some things that you might wanna measure, there may be other properties in the diamond you may want to activate and look at that optimal arrangement in the in the diamond itself. Like, you know how diamonds have different colors? Yes. It's kinda like picking the right color for the application you want.

Okay. And it and they all go in different shades. And so that's kinda like what that sensor technology is like right now. You just have to figure out what is the optimal for what you wanna do.

Another advantage is it can do we would call it a multi multimodal sensor. That means it can sense more than one measurement type thing at one time. It's just how you kinda read what's going on. And so from that, normally, we would have multiple sensors to do that.

In this way, you can have one sensor, and you just have to know what you're looking at.

It's kinda like when someone's telling you something, they may be telling you multiple things, but if you're not like attuned to which thing they're really telling you, you only hear the one thing. So it's the same thing.

Okay. I see. This might be a little bit complex for part of the audience, me included.

If we translate this to real world applications, for example, the sensors you are most excited about now coming to the future because we've been talking about the theoretical layer of how these sensors work.

Absolutely.

What are the two highest impact potential sensors that you have been researching, studying, or applying right now in the energy industry?

One of the biggest ones that I'm really excited about is not the one I just talked about. Yes. It's actually quantum LIDAR. So do you know what LIDAR is?

Is it also for distance measuring?

It's distance measurement, but it's just it.

It's lights. It's like sonars, waves, radars, looking at this. And then so LIDAR is like looking at light. It's photons. It's optics.

Yes.

And so you're just using the quantum properties of light to do something for you.

And because you can do that, you're able to see much better in the dark. I mean, you can also do that with heat sensors and things, whatever. Everything is the same and you're in very, very dark and you wanna sense different It's much better seeing it in the dark and it's actually much better underwater.

Underwater has a lot of different, like, mirroring effects, a lot of, like, a lot of different light coming from everywhere. But quantum LiDAR actually lets you figure out when you send out a photon, and that photon comes back, you know which photon that was. So you actually have a very good measurement, and you're able to actually have a longer range for doing measurements.

Precisely.

And so wow. Exactly.

That was a nice little joke you made there.

And so with that, I'm very excited about that because a lot of energy in water, there's an energy water nexus, so there's always something we're doing with water.

Yes.

And so to be able to have a really good visual of things that are happening in water is key.

The thing is this technology is a much higher readiness level than this other diamond technology that I was talking about. That one's getting there. There's a lot of research being done on it, but, like, the optimal diamond, you know, color, so to speak, we're not really sure for a lot of the applications But this quantum LiDAR, I think we're gonna see some demonstrations coming up soon. And then when the demonstrations really happen, then we can go to commercial. This is all coming within the next year, year and a half. So this is really near term.

So I'm really excited about that Yeah. Because I can nuclear, there's a lot of water.

If you're looking at anything with hydropower, that's a lot of water. And then, like, when you're looking at creation of energy, you're just like looking at a lot of things with like creating steam, turbines, and all of the different Oh my cycles, yes.

And so, like, water is so key. You need to be able to see through it and be very precise. Now it also can see through other liquids as well. Water is just clear. It can go through murkiness and all of these different things. And that's what makes it so appealing is that it's able to see through even haze. It can see through it.

If you're looking at, like, say, your car lights, your headlights, when you're in fog, you can't see very far.

LiDAR, you can see very you can see through it.

And you get a very good image of what that looks like even but our eyes can't do that. Yeah. Yeah. Normal light, it gets reflected back at you. So it's kinda like what that technology looks like.

Okay.

You can actually use it in air as well.

I'm not so I'm actually excited for the things they can do in air, but for the underwater applications because it's harder to do today

That's what I'm more excited about.

If we look at the intersection between nuclear power plants, there's new quantum technologies. Oh, yeah. You mentioned mostly used on cooling systems where water is involved.

Oh, yeah.

What type of measurements of the water are we seeing? Like, speed of the water, temperature, or what things are we measuring there?

First, what I'm hoping to see well, first, if you're using Phantom LiDAR, like a lot of things, if you're looking at a water intake system because you need to keep bringing in cooling water to cool things, you can actually identify what's in it very accurately. Right? Because if you think about any drain anywhere and you have water going through it, the drain itself is gonna catch all the debris. Well, what if you have an incident that there's a lot of things that are gonna come up against the drain to clog the drain? Now you don't your source of cooling water is now slowed, and then it's clogged.

And then you need to go out and you need to clear the drain. Yeah. Usually, that's a diver or something else. But that does, though, when you do that, because you have less cooling water, you actually have to downpower. And it doesn't matter if it's a nuclear power it's any power plant because you need cooling water.

And because of your downpowering, that affects the grid, and it affects whatever else is going on at that times. And so if you needed that power just because your intakes are clogged, you no longer are able to produce that amount of power. Yes. So for something so simple, it has a huge effect on how it affects power.

Other things is, you know, you could also look through we're hoping to be able to look and do inspections of pipe, inspections of weld with this technology as well. So you can actually look if you have say you have some components that are underwater and you have to do an inspection. So you do maintenance of all components everywhere. And there's always on some periodicity.

Right? So for instance, there's lots of pools. There are lots of tanks everywhere. So you always wanna make sure, you know, how thick are the tanks?

Are all the welds still intact? Or is there something going on with them? And you need to do a visual. But a lot of times when you want to let's do something simple. Right? You have a piece of metal. There's a weld going through it.

And you need to inspect the weld, but you need to know if there are any cracks in it.

Okay. You can't see the cracks with the naked eye. Okay. That's fine. Right? We have sensors today that can do it, but they're very slow.

It takes a very long time. So think about if you have an Olympic sized pool and you have something that goes at a snail's pace, how long is it gonna take to do that inspection?

Very long.

Wouldn't it be great if you had something that could do this much faster?

So doing speeds of inspections are something that we're looking at to do a first pass to get a granularity to be like, okay, there's something here.

We need to maybe know the depth of the crack. We need to know, you know, more information. You can send the more precise tool down there. It's at a snail's pace, but, like, you're only doing the snail's pace of, like, this much versus an Olympic sized pool.

And so if you're doing inspections and say your downtime is based on how long this inspection takes, you can you can see how important it is, that speed's important, but accuracy. And you wanna make sure you catch everything. So this provides hopefully a speed up of how that could occur.

K.

Now, at power plants, you're gonna be like, okay, how much money? Right. You said this is almost financed too.

The estimate usually is if you're down for any reason, it's about a million dollars a day.

So if you For a nuclear plant?

Yeah. Come. It depends on the size. It's like average. Right?

It's about a million dollars a day is how I think about it. So if like you have to be down for three more days, that's like three million dollars. If if the rate is so slow and you're down, you know, two weeks, it starts to compound every time you have to do this.

In the United States, and this and there advances all over the world too. Yeah. Right? In the United States, these outages where they had to do all of these inspections because they took so long, they used to go up to, like, two months long.

And this is pre just preemptive maintenance.

Is all preemptive maintenance. Just trying to do it. It's every fuel cycle. So the fuel cycle's about eighteen months to two years. So it's not quite every year. But you can think about it that way.

But now they've gotten it down to sometimes down to a week because you have improved sensors. You have improved ways of doing things faster.

They're not well, I would say they have kind of used, like, quantum sensors one point o, but going to this next version could hopefully even speed that up even more, do more online inspections where you don't have to bring down power of a plant or even a grid or a substation to do inspections. So if you can keep anything online longer but still get the quality inspection you need of, like, how well is that component working, that's just more power that's going to the grid. And you didn't have to do much but improve your technology and improve the way you're thinking about it. Like, I did not have to build a whole new power plant. I just let this power plant do its thing by being able to do these preemptive maintenance, preemptive looking at things a different way. So, like, it's really thinking about it a little differently and, like, how you can do these inspections and maintenance.

Now if something's really gonna go wrong, we're always gonna take it down. We're gonna do the full, you know, repair or replacement and things like that. You can't avoid that. That's and usually, we don't do it till failure.

We wait until we okay. We have the key indicators. We wanna make sure, yep, that's the key indicator. We're gonna plan for the outage.

We're gonna order everything in time. We make sure that everything is done, that it's planned. It's not a, oh my gosh, you know, something happened today, and we have to go down. It wasn't planned.

You know, it wasn't communicated to all the other plants so they can make up.

You want everything to be planned.

So this just helps with that and getting it done in a more predictable way.

Yeah. I'm very, very much engineering mindset, having everything planned.

An engineer. I love plans. I love doing all of those things.

So another key advantage, yes, to repeat it for audio our audience Yes. Is downtime, reducing downtime of those nuclear sites. Yes. And can you tell us a bit more about any pilot program that you might be doing with utilities applying this technology?

So what we're currently working on, and I cannot say and name any real utilities yet. This may be something that comes out if you ever do a follow-up. But if we do, this will become public at some point. We are in discussions with a few different utilities on how we might be able to increase the sensitivity of some of their sensors in order to change some of their models to increase the capacity.

Now, I'm not gonna promise. This is what a pilot program. So pilot programs, you know, and testing programs don't really yield results because it's a test. You never know what will happen.

Yeah.

But we're gonna see if we have a method or a way to increase the sensor outputs in order to increase capacity, which if we can do that, it's way cheaper than building a new plant of any sort.

I agree. I agree. Okay. Thank you for sharing that even if it was limited.

Talking about the future, looking into the next five to ten years, what's the most underappreciated shift coming from quantum plus AI that you can see or that you're excited about?

Oh, that's a really good question. So quantum and AI, did you know you could probably do it today?

Tell me about it.

Oh. I didn't really understand what that really meant until sometime this year when I started doing like, what does this practically mean? Right? I'm very engineer mindset. So I'm like, okay, you're talking about these little cubits running around.

Is this really? Right? Tell me what really quantum and AI can do. And I finally got someone to put it into words that I clearly understood.

And if you don't understand, just ask some questions.

I will follow-up.

And so when you have AI

You have all of this data going into it and you gotta do some machine learning.

And sometimes there's so much data and it's chugging through everything, it takes a long time.

Long time also means more electricity, more everything because it's however long it takes is like it compounds itself. So the more data coming in for whatever you're trying to do with AI, that's what it does. Now what if you had an algorithm that could pick out the correct parameters that you need to look at more closely with the AI and cut that down?

It's called predictive analytics. So you're kind of doing that, and there are some industries that have already proved this out by using some simple predictive analytics to cut down the data they're looking at so the AI can function faster. And that is one of the true things that I believe can be done in the near term is how do you use it's a finance industry. Right? I mean, they're gonna adopt everything and they gotta figure out all of these interesting things. But like, how do you, you know, repurpose something that's already been out there into something we can use in another industry? Say, the energy industry.

Because we have so much data that is coming out.

We need to help it focus. You know, know, do all those little perturbations and figure out, okay, these parameters are not that important. These are the ones that I need my algorithm to look at and then to actually do the work.

Now, quantum algorithms aren't really good at, like, doing the work part, but they can help you do that triage. I call it like a triage and picking the the right parameters.

Finding the right parameters. Correct. The most simple would be a linear regression model, which looks which parameters are important. Quantum is the Ferrari of that, taking it to the next level and making it as complex as possible, making it simple. Is that correct?

That is correct.

Okay. That is done with the physical fundamentals applied to also sensors technology applied to predictive analytics.

Absolutely. You see how everything is like starting to put being put together? And it's super fascinating how this all works because Yeah. If you get better sensors, you're getting more data.

But you don't need all of that data to to then run AI models. Let's put it this way. AI is going to help power what quantum technologies can give it. And then quantum technologies are gonna help AI do its work.

So they really do go hand in hand. And the thing is they should be thought about and delivered together because one without the other, if not, you're just gonna be your data center's gonna be huge for what you have to do to like to do that. Pair it down so you have a very reasonable size to actually do that work on. And so it's an interesting concept.

And these models, I will say simpler models because we have, like, limitations on, like, the qubits we have today.

We are still trying to understand, like, which different quantum computing computer type is optimal for what problem. And I'm sure, you know, maybe they do know, but I am not fully aware.

And it's not in my mind simplistically what they're all good at yet.

Okay.

I do know for every different type, they do have a strength. They all have weaknesses.

And so I am theorizing that one day, and I've seen people working towards this. This is why I'm like, this is interesting to me, and this is what I'm watching. You're gonna ask what I'm watching. Right? This is what I'm watching is that there are efforts to link different types of quantum computers together to communicate that also communicate to a supercomputer and then use what each of them is good at to do your problem.

Can you imagine what we might be able to solve if everything is doing what it's optimally good at and it's not having to, you know, run through endless cycles because it's not you're not giving it the right information. Right? It's not what it's good at.

So that's what I'm watching today is like, how do we optimize that ecosystem so we can actually solve problems we've never been able to solve?

Okay. I see. And if I'm correct, to translate it to simple terms as well. Sorry.

No. No. No. No. No. It's for me to make sure that I'm understanding it and the audience as well.

The first key advantage is reducing downturn using quantum.

Yeah.

Second one that you have just explained is making data centers and compute more efficient overall. Right?

Yes. You're doing what it's good at. Just don't use a whole data center to to do a compute that is is gonna take way too long. Absolutely.

Reducing energy consumption, maybe even making them smaller and more efficient, and that's another use case for quantum technology. Correct?

Maybe. I don't think these data centers are getting smaller.

We'll just find more things to Yeah.

Exactly. I'm like, that that's a wish, but maybe we'll get more things done. That that could be interesting.

And so this is in the next five to ten years. Who do you think needs to collaborate to make this a reality? What are the key stakeholders here?

Key stakeholders are I'm gonna I'm gonna put them in very general buckets. Right? There's the government. There's all the vendors, startups, you know, the providers, and then all the end users.

I'm in, like, the end user bucket. I am not gonna be coding a quantum algorithm. Although, there are some companies that may actually allow me to to do it via Python. Super interesting. Like, okay. That that is more accessible to me than this mythical, you know, quantum coding. I'm sure I can learn it, but I would have to, like, really dedicate some time to do it.

And so the governments, as you're seeing, they're unlocking a lot of the research monies to look further. How do we do this together? Like, what are these projects that we need to be doing? Well, the end users need to be really honest with themselves and say, what are the problem sets that we have that we need solved?

Because the vendors are sitting here. They're like, what do you want us to do? If we don't have a problem set, what are we solving?

And if they know that, they can help you.

They can be like, okay. This is a project I wanna do.

You can get investors or you can get governments or whoever you need to do it, but you need to be doing something that has a true outcome at the end, whether positive or negative. Right? You tried something. It's a lot of research. Right?

And so if you have the right use cases, then it it it kinda moves itself. Right? Because you're actually solving a real problem. You're not starting with, okay, I I have this really cool quantum computer. What am I gonna do with it? I'm gonna go hit things with it until I find the right thing.

What I wanna try to do and what I want to see people doing is like really examine where are the the big use cases and then people going, well, that quantum computer could do this. This other one might be able to do this. This hybridization of things could do this giant problem. Or we can can carve it up into smaller problems and do it. Like, these are things that you only hear about once people, like, understand what problem they're trying to solve.

And then the vendors can do they can be like, okay. This is how we get this done if we're gonna try to do it. And then you have the people with the money.

They all have to work together to further this technology because without one or the other, it gets lost. We've seen this a lot in supercomputing where they find like all these great things but they didn't find the right users for anything so it never gets adopted.

Adoption is key.

I can find the greatest funders but if no one wants to buy your thing, I mean, does it really exist?

Yeah. So lead with the actual customer needs and then develop from them. Absolutely. And then you will find investors.

It reminds the entrepreneurship venture capital motto.

I mean, I mean, you're talking about, like, new technologies. That's exactly what it is.

Exactly.

Yeah. I mean, if we had all the money, I mean, we'd be doing something else.

We have a nuclear expert in today's episode, and we have to take the opportunity to talk a bit more on the nuclear energy side as well.

Go ahead.

In a in a grid, like the ones we're seeing coming into reality nowadays with high renewable penetrations, what is the job that nuclear energy does best, and why will it keep existing in the future? And they go, why do we need them in the future?

Well, I'm not sure you're I'm gonna say you need nuclear, but you definitely need a source of base power, baseload power. Right? Something that's resilient, something that's dependable and reliable.

I would love it if one day, you know, we can say we got nuclear power plants and we have this, you know, energy storage because it's stable and we have enough of it. Right? The thing is is, like, that would be a great future.

However, if you're looking at like what energy storage can do today, we need bigger capacity that comes off of it. We probably need some bigger innovations to get to that size that you really need to then be wholly reliant on it. So therefore, you always need, like, base power. Wind and solar will always be there. We just have to optimize what they're good for. Right?

I love seeing geothermal come up. But, like, nuclear, you know, it has been, it's a technology that's out there. It's a technology that if you're maintaining it in a really robust way can really serve you a long time. You are seeing all over the world, these power plants are having these really, really nice long lives.

If they have not been maintained correctly, they may not get that long in the life, but that that's not that's up to that operator and how they treated the plant. It's kinda like a car. Right? If you gave it all the oil changes it needs, if you changed its tires when you were supposed to, that car will live and it was built well.

Yes.

Right?

There's some there some vehicles I'm like First generation.

Wow. You have to solve them.

Right. But it it lasts a long time. Right? And you're able to repair it, you know.

We can get a new door, a new window, and Even restart them. That's what we see.

Even restart them.

I mean, like a car, you can go and you just refurbish, repair what you need to, and restart them Yeah.

As you need to. Or you upgrade them. It's like souping up a new car.

I came from Detroit. I have a lot of car analogies. Sorry about that. No problem.

And so because it it has a good baseload, it's reliable, we have the fuel, it's a well known technology for at least for the power plants we have today. It's kind of a good use. Now, when you talk about more of the advanced technologies that are out there, that's why you're seeing a lot of demonstrations happening. It's like, okay.

Let's learn more about it. So, like, we have more material properties. We have more of, like, what this fuel behaves like. You know, a lot of the things that we did with the initial set, and then we will that's why you do a demonstration.

You figure out, okay. Yeah. We like this. We don't like this. And then you have iterations.

Right? If you look at nuclear power, it went through many iterations and you're like, okay. There's a rev one, two, three, four, five, six. Yeah.

And they just made it better every time. And so for the grid, for today, especially since we have a higher demand of power, it seems like it just keeps going up and up all the time, especially with this more data centers coming online, more people wanting power. Especially in Europe, everything is going to heat pumps or heat from electricity.

Electricity for everything. A huge amount of EVs coming on Yeah. Onboard.

Which I'm gonna find interesting is like when you get your medium duty and heavy duty trucks also becoming electrified, that is also gonna draw from the grid. Yeah. And so you have just a bigger and bigger energy demand.

That demand isn't going away. It's probably going up. So, therefore, you're gonna need all the power you can get.

And you need baseload power.

So if it's not nuclear, you got hydro. Not hydro, if you have the capability for geothermal, go geothermal. Right? If you're in Iceland, you better go geothermal. You got lots of it coming out.

And so if you think about it that way, like, you're gonna need all the base you can, but then you're gonna need all the extras on top of it.

Until we get a good energy storage, then we we still need to make sure everything is there.

So from your personal view, you don't think that in the midterm or long term, there will be a technology that will be fully replaced or or a mix of technologies that will fully replace nuclear and will stay where it is?

I think it's gonna stay where it is right now until the energy demand is different.

What do you mean by energy demand different?

For some reason, like, we we we realize we don't want data centers for some odd reason.

Yes.

Or we go back to to gas fired, you know, heating systems or we're going back to all of these different things. Or if there is a true innovation in, you know, solar capacity. Right?

Could be really interesting. I would love to see that. But until then, you need what I like to call bridging technologies to get you to the next innovation. Yeah.

Until that comes, like, we are stuck with the toolbox we have, and I don't see our demand going away.

And so, personally, and I hope in Spain you like this too, air conditioning is top of my list of comfort levels that I need to be at. So I'm like, I'm all for what is gonna keep that on in the middle of the summer when I have to when it's horribly hot. And I don't know how you do it in Madrid because it is really, really hot.

It's like We also have air conditioning. You have great air conditioning. I have been in Madrid in in July and I'm like It's an oven.

Whoo.

That is something plus forty degrees Celsius Yes.

And dry. Very dry.

Very dry. I'm like, how do you do it?

Well, you're used to it.

And I don't think so because you're all inside in the air conditioning. Tell me you're used to it.

When people hear about nuclear energy, they're usually very scared about a renaissance, like a comeback. What would you tell them are the new safety measures of the latest nuclear energy reactors, like generation three, even four we're hearing now? What are the differences between these new nuclear reactors compared to the ones of the disasters of Chernobyl or Fukushima?

Chernobyl is a very, very old design. No one builds those designs now.

Some of the things that were lessons learned out of that is like oh, this is gonna go into, like, some science. So, basically, when you have a nuclear fission reaction happening, it it can be self sustaining.

Right? And you can either go one way where it self sustains until it goes into a runaway reaction, or you can have it where the reaction will dull itself and it just comes it just dies on its own with if you do nothing. Right?

So and one's called positive reactivity, and one is called negative reactivity. You always wanna build a power plant with negative reactivity. So if nothing is happening, it starts to just that just starts dying down on its own, and it doesn't do a runaway reaction.

Right? So that is one of the big differences is just realizing that while you can control both of them, if something were to happen, you always want it to be able to control. It it just kinda dies out on its own.

So that's kinda one of the things. It's called and we also like to do a lot of passive safety systems where if, for instance, for for whatever reason, like, you and I get locked out of the control room because we lost keys, okay, Would not will never happen. But the power plant can look will just do its own thing. You don't have to touch it for, like, seventy two hours.

You don't really have to worry about it.

Now, of course, by then we'll find the keys and we'll get back in. Right? Yeah. And doesn't actually happen that way.

If the cooling system fails, for example, there's a backup cooling.

There is a passive cooling.

There's a backup backup passive cooling. Everything is moving towards like a passive way of of safety. Meaning, a human doesn't have to turn a wrench. A human doesn't have to push a button. A human doesn't have to do all of these different things to to do all of this.

Now did the humans have to do a whole lot anyway to begin with? No. But it just is an added safety measure. And people like passive safety measures. Right? Yeah. Now the current fleet we have is completely safe as it is.

It's just added safety and added assurance that, okay, now you can probably have less people there, which actually helps with economics. Yes. Right? So it's a lot of different things, but you're actually are you improving safety marginally?

But they were they were already safe to begin with. Like, I have toured so many different nuclear power plants. I have gone into control rooms. I have gone on the floor.

I have walked through everything. I have looked into the glasses down into the spent fuel pools.

I am an engineer. I love looking at them. I have been up to the the the dry cast. I've hugged them, touched them. It's totally fine. Nothing happens. And they put little, you know, dosimeters on you to see how much dose.

Just measure. Yeah.

Nothing. Nothing is happening. I've been in an outage. I've been watching all the workers do all those things. Absolutely nothing.

But to see them all do their work is super fascinating because it's like an orchestration of everything and you're just like, it's just fun to watch. Really, really fun to watch. And now we got all these robots going around that are and drones flying around to do inspections.

Even safer for humans. Right?

Even safer for humans. Yeah. Like, does a human have to go up that scaffolding anymore? Nope. Let's send the drone. You know, does the human have to go into that maybe confined space? Send the robot.

You know? If a human has to go, we'll go down there. You know, we got submersibles to go down now. So all of these really fun innovations that I love tinkering with. Right? Yes.

It just makes it maybe not the plant safer, but it's safer for humans to do things. Yeah.

So we're not having to endanger human life. So humans can go and make new innovations, can do other things that only humans can do.

Yeah.

But Okay.

It's super fun.

Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. This actually reminds me of one of the scenes of Chernobyl, the TV series. When the meltdown happened, they would bring a robot, I think, from the US to try to actually clean the debris and and try to close the meltdown, the the reactor, and I think the the robot didn't work. At the end, after ten minutes, it collapsed.

I hope that the technology of those robots has evolved way sooner than robots came in to do a lot of inspections and things, and they have made so many improvements.

Yeah.

And then we continue to make more improvements in that area as well.

So I've seen that you have recently participated in the g twenty nuclear energy ministerial conference.

I did. Talking about nuclear energy and potentially quantum. You can tell us now what is the overall feeling that you have seen from those governments towards nuclear? Are you seeing a renaissance in the next ten years coming really into reality or not?

That's a really interesting question.

What I've been seeing, and I did participate in the ministerial, I was on a panel discussion for this, and a lot of who was on the panel were other international organizations like the IAEA who sponsored the event, and they were the the key player. Yeah. And it's the International Atomic Energy Agency that's located in Vienna. And I was on a panel, and we had the the nuclear operator that is in South Africa from ESCOM was there.

They had their representative, and then they had some other key players from, like, research and everything. So it was a really interesting panel because EPRI is considered an international organization because we play globally. We're independent. And we really do a lot of the research that underpins a lot of, you know, technical bases for decisions.

So very, very robust. Right? When we put something out, it is robust. It has been reviewed multiple times.

The questions that I was hearing and the questions that were directed to me are more not about the the state of the technology. It's more about public acceptance.

Are people going to accept the technology? How are communities, especially when you're talking about Africa? And a lot of the discussion talked about Africa. Because if you think about, like, the western world you you and I both live in the western world.

Spain is very advanced. We you have lots of solar in Madrid. Let's let's put it that way. Have a ton of solar in Madrid.

Reactors in Spain still.

And some nuclear reactors in Spain. The US has a lot of different technologies. But when you look at Africa, they are very energy they're they need energy to do a lot of things. They experience a lot of brownouts and things like this. So they want to bring I don't wanna just say nuclear energy. They wanna bring anything that will fit in the environment that they have to provide energy.

The people need energy. So for them, the discussion was really, is nuclear ready to step in and fill the void?

Can it do that? And then what will the communities do? Like, for instance, like, are there community discussions?

Are there, you know the the interesting thing and one thing I did talk about while I I was at one of these side events is talking about, like, how interconnects are so important between different countries because not everyone will have the technology to build these bigger reactors or or solar farms or whatever.

And some areas have more hydro than others. So interconnects to help other countries is gonna be a big thing.

But the thing is, while I think your listeners are learning a lot, think about the people that you're building all of this infrastructure in that never existed.

If they're seeing in their backyard a substation being built with all of these lines, but you never told them what this was, and they're and then you tell them, okay, well, this is power. And they're like, power to who?

Are you providing power to that community you just built this in?

Are you involving them and giving them benefit for this being in their backyard? Like, how are you having that conversation? Because a lot of the stories that I've been hearing from my colleagues who live there are a lot of these people just don't understand. Like, what is the benefit to me to support this infrastructure?

Right now, I am trying to figure out how I can feed my family.

How am I gonna cook? How do I you know, lighting and electricity is not the biggest thing on their mind.

And so when you do that, like, how do you do this? Because right now, the value of the copper in the wires is more valued with the bolts than than what's in the wire what the wire is carrying, the electricity. Yes. And so the most this is a little story. So my my colleague in South Africa, he actually took me on a little road trip for one of these events. He's like, Emma, I need you to see what it's really like.

Okay. I'm like, okay. Right? I've been in some rural areas. I've seen some things.

And he's like, Emma, we're going down this road. It's a dirt road. I'm like, okay. We're in an SUV.

Yeah. It's very fine. Everyone looks friendly. He's like, do you see all those poles that are kinda like toppled over?

I'm like, yeah. He's like, those used to be lampposts, but there's nothing in them anymore. As soon as they go up, they come down and they're sold because that's how they can buy food and things to do fire and to cook and things like that. Right?

And he's like, it's the basic necessities that are truly important. Until and until you do that, how do you support infrastructure in a big way? And it's same for all of, you know, your your towers and things. There's anything valuable in them, they will be slowly dismantled because to them, living another day is more important than anything you're gonna provide them in like a year.

And so, like, how do you combat that?

When thinking about that, I'm like, yes. I can provide power, but I think the the the discussion about energy security is more than just about power.

It's about how do you make it so that people can support it?

And see the actual benefits from having the Exactly.

Yeah.

And it's a chicken and egg question. Right? Because, okay, you are planning to develop that infrastructure to support the develop economic development of the people, but at the same time, maybe it's too soon for that. And and Absolutely.

And so how do you enable that? That is a question I don't know. I don't live in these communities or anything, but I have seen it, and it's made me think a little bit differently. Yes. Yes. I can enable all of these different things. It's easier to enable existing assets.

But, like, when you really wanna tackle energy security for the world, what does that really practically mean, and are we asking the right question?

Yeah.

I don't know.

It's a very much fascinating conversation. I wish we could keep talking for a while, but I know we're running out of time, so we are gonna jump to the final questions. Sure. First one being, is there anything you would like to plug or promote to our audience? This is the moment.

This is an easy one. I'm doing a lot of work on quantum technologies. I'm launching a quantum sensors program next year, so it's gonna I'm really gonna I mean, I kinda talked about this. We're gonna try to do pilots and really dig into this.

And then if any of your listeners really want to know more, I do actually have a quantum interest group.

How can they reach out to you for the quantum interest group? I will give you a link that you can add to this.

To the description of the episode. Okay.

In the description of the episode, there'll be a a link to the quantum interest group if they're interested. We'll give you a link to a really easily digestible quantum sensors paper.

Okay.

I can say that, but it's like thirty to forty pages. But okay.

Right? But I'll I'll give you that link as well Perfect. For downloads.

And I guess we can link to my LinkedIn page, and so then people can then connect if they have questions or anything like that.

Perfect. And the final question, what is your confirmed view about the energy industry?

I think I might have already given it to you that we're asking the wrong questions on how to really enable energy security for all.

If we just wanna do things in our backyard, is it really gonna help everyone else out? And will we pay for it in the end because of the destabilization?

Thank you for such a good take, and thank you for coming and joining us today. It was great to have you. A very interesting conversation that I think our audience would love. Thank you, Emma.

Thank you.