An inconvenient truth started all of this for me. Or should I say watching An Inconvenient Truth started all of this for me. As they say ‘there are none so enthusiastic as the newly converted’ or something like that. And I was no different.
It was 2007 and I had my own investment management firm that dealt in private investment counsel and private equity portfolio management. After watching the movie I dug into Carbon Finance and I was going to help save the world. Overnight my practice focused on socially responsible investing, carbon credits, renewable energy, and anything to do with carbon finance. We joined the UN Principles for Responsible Investing, I knew the Kyoto Protocol and the CER / EU ETS / REC markets inside out, I was involved in wind turbine projects and I even developed a carbon overlay for analyzing securities. I was all in.
Sadly, the real inconvenient truths started to emerge. The wind turbine and solar power fields were not saving CO2. They have grid priority at much higher prices leading to grid instability, base power producer bankruptcy, and you need carbon based fuel peaker stations running 24/7 creating CO2 in case the wind or sun dies down suddenly. The projects underlying the Kyoto Protocol were rife with fraud in order to generate lucrative CERs for the project managers without regard to real CO2 reductions. In many cases socially responsible investing was just so much greenwashing. It was disappointing to say the least.
However, it made me look at the whole problem in a different light. First, I had to deal with the concept of ‘Saving the Planet’. My conclusion was that dealing with global warming had nothing to do with ‘Saving the Planet’. It’s been here for 5 billion years or so and will be for another 5 billion years or more before turning into a dark star. ‘Saving the Planet” was simply an arrogant human construct. We were in fact saving the human species. A good place to start.
Once that little inconvenient truth was addressed I then moved on to the global warming issue. I’m not sure if you remember but in the mid to late 1970s there were predictions, based on a string of very cold and snowy winters for many years that the earth was moving into another ice age. And now, not 40 plus years later, we are talking about global warming of catastrophic proportions. So it made me ask ‘Is global warming real?’. Well, I have no definitive answer even though a few years prior I would have sworn it so. And even though all the IPCC scientists say it’s so with 95% confidence, I remember the 1970s where all the scientists were saying the second ice age was coming with the same certainty. My conclusion was intuitive. We have 7 billion or so people on this planet creating CO2 or other greenhouse gases at an alarming rate not seen in many thousands of years. So while not 100% certain, it is reasonable to assume anthropogenic influenced warming is a real thing.
And while there is no certainty, it is a Pascalian Wager of epic proportion. We are best to act as if it is real because the consequences of not doing so if it is are no less than the self elimination of the human race and many other species as well. If we act as if it is so and it is not, then we simply end up with a cleaner, more sustainable, and ultimately livable world with which to pass on to our progeny. Ok, so saving the planet and the great Pascalian Wager solved. Now what?
Well, that brought me to CO2 and its equivalents and the quest to reduce these greenhouse gases in a material manner in order to reduce or eliminate the possibility of a homo sapiens induced species self elimination. God we are self destructive. And the fastest way to do this is baseload power generation and transportation which account for about 60 – 75% of the greenhouse gases produced each and every year and for which demand is increasing every year. Wind farms and solar farms will not do it even with battery storage (there is not enough lithium and other elements to make this possible…ever). There is not enough arable land to grow crops for energy (ethanol and bio diesel). And there are not enough dams or run of river projects that could be built to meet the demand. So then what?
Nuclear fission. Not nuclear fusion, the rolling 25 year promise for the last 60 years. And think about it, are we really going to harness a fusion reactor that at every moment is trying to create a new sun and blow it and everything in its path to pieces? Please. But nuclear fission, well that is the solution. Let me qualify this though. I HATED nuclear fission and the current crop of Light Water Reactors / Boiling Water Reactors (LWR and BWR) that only use 3 – 5 % of their fuel before the massive amounts of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel are placed in pools to cool and remain radioactively hot for 10,000 years. Or the fact that these reactors run at many times atmospheric pressure and are a ticking time bomb if all the safety systems fail (Chernobyl and Fukushima). And lastly, let’s not forget they produce Pu-239 for nuclear warheads and the reason they exist in the first place having been borne of the Cold War. And yet per KwH generated, they are the safest power source on the planet.
But, while researching this topic looking for any bright spots in a sea of darkness, I came upon Thorium. And this led me to the molten salt reactor. And this led me to the aircraft nuclear program of the 1950s and then to the molten salt reactor experiments at Oak Ridge National Laboratories (ORNL) in the 1960s and 1970s before the program was shut down BECAUSE IT DOES NOT PRODUCE Pu-239 FOR NUCLEAR WEAPONS. And had it not been for one specific individual, Kirk Sorensen, a NASA rocket scientist, who had the foresight to have all the molten salt reactor research produced at ORNL turned into PDFs and made publicly available in the early 2000s, this technology would have been lost forever and an immense opportunity and solution to the CO2 issue lost.
Once I learned of molten salt reactors, it then took me a year of research to determine which one had the best chance of making the jump to commercial possibility and that actually solved the problem at hand. It had to be fail safe, efficient, burn spent nuclear fuel if possible, and produce little or no nuclear waste. What I found was incredible. I found a technology that uses 95-97% of its fuel, can actually use spent nuclear fuel and warhead material to burn for power, has no nuclear proliferation issues, produces medical isotopes used in life saving examinations and for an incredibly powerful and safe cancer treatment, can power the world for millions of years, and has so many potential technology applications that it truly is stunning that this technology was almost lost.
What did I do? I called up the owner of the company, became an advisor, became an investor, and then became it’s CFO. And from this the concept of building the supporting eco-system of technologies required was borne. And that is how I got here.