Because we have not been investing so much in nuclear energy over many years, even the progress of the technology has suffered. We are still basically producing or envisaging the same nuclear power plants as we were designing 40 or 50 years ago. This is the so called pressurized boiling water reactors. Which are characterized by the fact that the nucleus of the reactor, where the nuclear reaction takes place, is cooled through the use of pressurized water. In other words, in order to be able to cool the nucleus in case of an accident, you still need to be able to maintain the pressure because that is what allows the water to cool the reactor. If by any chance you are not capable to operate the pumps that maintain the pressure, then you may have an accident and this is exactly what has happened in Fukushima. Because in Fukushima when the earthquake and then the tsunami happened, all the nuclear power plants automatically shut down and that was properly executed and there was no problem. However, when the wave of water, the tsunami came over the plants, it essentially decommissioned all the diesel pumps that were available in the plant as a backup capacity if in case electricity from the grid could not allow continuous utilization of the pump. So what has happened is that eventually the pumps cease functioning, pressure was not maintained, and the water started boiling at very high temperature until there was a hydrogen explosion. A hydrogen was released and there was a hydrogen explosion. So this is the dynamic of the Fukushima power plant. But we have alternative technologies that are being studied, it's not the only way to produce electricity out of nuclear. It is important to understand that if there is a revival of nuclear energy, we will be testing alternative solutions, which of course at the beginning may be more expensive but down the road would not be necessarily more expensive. There are two developments in particular that I think you should be aware of, and one is in the direction of building small nuclear power plants. A standard nuclear power plant is a very large machine. It is capable of producing 1.5 gigawatts of electricity. It is the largest power plant that we know. So it is very centralized in even generally in one site, you have more than one such power plants. So for example the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi is building four power plants in the same site and this will total in between six and seven gigawatts, which is a very large capacity. But it is not necessary to go in the direction of this large capacity. For many years, we have known and used smaller nuclear power plants for example the nuclear power plants that power some of the submarines that are in the fleets of some countries or the large aircraft carriers or even in some cases some commercial vessels. So it is possible to miniaturize a nuclear power plant and adopt solutions that are safer. So there is a large number of companies that are studying smaller nuclear power plants that range from a capacity of just 30-35 megawatts to 200-300 megawatts. Thirty- 35 is something that is comparable to a solar power plant of a significant dimension. Two hundred and 300 megawatts is comparable to a gas power plant of significant dimension. These are relatively smaller plants. So this offers several advantages, not only the cost of course is reduced and in some cases, the plant can be built in such a way that it has passive safety which means that it doesn't need anything in particular to prevent an accident for happening like in a pressurized water reactor where you need the compression, the pressure to be maintained in order to avoid an accident. Even if there is no pressure in some of these smaller nuclear power plants, it would be possible to allow for this slow cooling of the reactor, which is for example the case in the scheme that is being proposed by NuScale which is a company active in the United States. They are proposing a solution of modular nuclear power plant with several small reactors, each of which would be passively safe and would not need the active functioning or any pump or any other mechanism in order to keep it cool and avoid an explosion. Another advantage of smaller nuclear power plants is that they would be smaller and so not only can be distributed more widely and local communities could decide whether they want or they don't want a nuclear power plant, and they don't necessarily have to decide on a huge machine sitting in their backyard, they can be more easily buried or located in places where there is less danger of radiation escaping. They can be and that's very important, manufactured in a factory environment because they can easily transported. So you should picture nuclear power plants that are- such that can be loaded on a truck or a train and transported in place and then simply put in place. Obviously if they could be produced in a factory environment this would allow for significant reduction of course and also better control over quality and safety characteristics. So it's something like building an airplane or I don't say a car but a complex machine but in factory conditions. So the possibility of having smaller nuclear power plants is quite attractive. Other possibility in this context that has been proposed especially by some companies in Russia, is that they would not even sell the nuclear power plants, they would sell the electricity that the nuclear power plants would produce. In other words, the nuclear plant would be something perfectly, self-contained and sealed including the fuel, and the customer would simply allow this to be located close to where it has to be utilized and connected to the grid. Then this nuclear battery would work for a certain number of decades, 30-40 years, and when it comes at the end of his life, the producer takes it back, brings it back to Russia where there is the infrastructure for dealing with the nuclear waste, radioactive waste and for reprocessing the fuel, and this would also limit the potential for proliferation. Also from Russia comes the proposal and actually its being implemented, of a floating nuclear power plant. This is a ship that will contain a nuclear power plant, which would move from one location to another depending on the requirements, and would dock in allocation, connect the nuclear power plant on-board to the grid and then sell the electricity for the time needed. This is originally thought of in connection with conditions in Siberia where the nights are very long and the consumption of electricity is speaking strongly in the winter. The same ship would not be needed in the summer, and could move to some other location and sell electricity to some other client in the summer. So you would have a sort of roaming power generation plant. I must say that we have this tendency to go out at sea for all energy sources, there is this tendency for wind, there is this tendency for gas, there is this tendency for oil. So it looks like we are increasingly going out at sea for producing energy and there is nothing that prevents nuclear power plants to be built out at sea, far away from any inhabited land or any land of any sort inhabited or not inhabited. Therefore, the consequences of a potential accident would be much less significant. So what I'm trying to convey to you is that there are multiple possibilities and multiple developments connected to nuclear power plants, nuclear energy is not necessarily what we know today, it is in the process of changing and I would expect that we will see some important innovation and new experiments down the road which may completely change our understanding and our view of nuclear energy, its dangers, and its drawbacks as we know it today.
