From Nuclear Waste to Powerhouse: Ken Baer’s Vision for America’s Energy Future

Ken Baer, founder and board member of Metatomic Incorporated, says that his company can turn more than 90% of the "nuclear waste" stored at commercial and other nuclear reactors into fuel for the next generation of both large and small reactors.

His project is analogous to the emergency creation of the steel industry by Abraham Lincoln, and the creation of the synthetic rubber industry by Franklin Roosevelt. Mr. Baer was recently interviewed about his exciting technology by Michael James Carr of Promethean Action. 

Carr: Today we are joined by Ken Baer, who has an exciting story to tell us about taking what is thought to be nuclear waste, and turning it into the source of the rebirth of massive production of nuclear electrical power in the United States. What's one man's trash is another man's precious resource, and this is another example. Ken Baer is a nuclear operative, a founder of a company, and he's got a lot to tell us. So we will simply let you take it away.

Baer: Thank you, Michael. Yes, I'm on the board and a founder of Metatomic Incorporated.

I'll just give you my background. I went through the Navy nuclear power program and was on a couple different nuclear submarines and was a nuclear operator. After that, I worked as a Senior Reactor Operator (SRO) at DC Cook Nuclear Power Plant. I won't go into a lot of sidetracks here, I'm only going to mention that DC Cook was the first ice containment reactor built in this country. I was operating that nuclear plant for a few years. I went to Memphis State University where I taught incoming students about nuclear operation. And I had enough contacts in the nuclear field and in nuclear power plants that all of my students got jobs at various nuclear plants on the Mississippi River or east of it all the way out to New Jersey. So, all over the place. Florida, New York, etc.

From there, I came to do some contract training for various utilities and helped on Braidwood Nuclear Station during construction and Hot Functionals, then followed up by working at the Savannah River Plant (SRS) in South Carolina. At SRS I certified as a Principle Sabotage Vulnerability Analyst. So I have experience in nuclear reactors and operation.

At the Savannah River Plant I qualified as a sabotage vulnerability analyst. And so that got me into all these isotopes that you see on the background behind me. So, Savannah River, and Hanford, and Oak Ridge, and places like that produce and study many isotopes. They are produced in nuclear reactors, or accelerators, or other machines. Engineers deal with these isotopes every day. So that’s kind of an introduction.

I can speak to nuclear operations. The nuclear power plants that generate electricity in this country are all light water reactors.

That means they just use regular water—everyday water. But it’s highly purified to take out all the Oxygen. People should know that Oxygen causes a lot of corrosion in piping systems. So you have very, very pure water from which any Oxygen is taken out. There are two types of light water reactors in the United States.

They're running very, very well. There have been no serious accidents except for Three Mile Island Unit 2. But again, never any radiation incidents or leakage of high radiation that caused any serious concern. The reactors are of two types and they generate lots, about 20% of the electricity in United States

Boiling water reactors are just what it says. They boil the water in the reactor. The steam is created and steam goes to a turbine generator, and electricity is produced.

The pressurized water reactor is just what it says. The water is pressurized like in a pressure cooker where it does not boil, but it is extremely hot, 600 degrees.

It's under pressure—about 2200 pounds per square inch pressure. And I'm not going to get very technical on this, but I just want you to know. And then it transfers the heat to a heat exchanger outside the reactor. Steam then comes out of that steam generator. Then, the steam goes through a turbine generator and electricity is produced.

So a couple different examples. Boiling Water Reactors make up about one third of the power plants out there and the Pressurized Water Reactors are about the other two thirds of the power plants.

Carr: So what is the new type of reactor that you are talking about that is going to use salt—liquid salt?

Baer: Yeah. Thank you. The molten salt reactors.

When I say thermal or fast reactor, what I’m really talking about is the energy of a neutron. So we get down to the basic neutron. In a thermal reactor, like in a light water reactor, neutrons lose nearly all of their energy and they can split isotopes like Uranium 235 or Plutonium 239, which are typically in fuel. New fuel contains only U235, and that's what we’ll be changing. Enrichment right now is at about 5% in light water reactors, and the other 95% is U238, which only fissions with fast neutrons. When you look at spent fuel, nearly 90+ percent of the fuel was never used.

Only that 5%, which had thermal [slow neutron] fission properties was used. I was going to talk a little bit more about the salt reactor. A reactor can be thermal or fast. If it's a thermal reactor, the waste will most likely have to be removed and the spent nuclear fuel will be enriched, so that it can be used in a molten salt fast reactor.

This is the one that really gives us hope. 90% of Uranium in the spent nuclear fuel, along with the waste products, and along with some breeding of plutonium in there can be used right in a molten salt fast reactor with some enrichment. Enrich it to the point where it can get restarted, and when it gets restarted, it can burn waste.

It can fission the U238, the largest amount of Uranium that’s left in the fuel for centuries. And it can burn the waste. And we’ll have an abundance of neutrons. So, such an abundance of neutrons. I'm sorry, did you have a question?

Carr: Let's clarify for people the difference between a fast fission reaction and a thermal or a slow fission reaction. And the difference between the 238 and 235 Uranium.

Baer: Okay, thank you. U235 will fission with fast neutrons, but it's primarily a thermal fuel. In other words, it fissions by neutrons that have nearly lost all their energy. U238 is the other isotope of Uranium and it fissions with fast neutrons—very high energy neutrons. So now most of the Uranium in what we call nuclear waste is that Uranium238, which has great energy potential but doesn't get used in light water reactors, and therefore is sitting there as a lot of weight, dead weight so to speak.

Well, it’s a precious fuel source for fast reactors. We have enough of it to operate for many, many decades, if not longer.

Carr: So besides the liquid salt reactors, are there other types of reactors which can use Uranium 238?

Baer: For example, the Natrium reactor, which is being built out in Wyoming right now by Terra Power, which is a Bill Gates organization.

That's a Uranium alloy metal reactor that is cooled not by water, but by Sodium metal—Sodium. It's heated up. It turns to liquid. It is an excellent heat transfer medium and it can operate at a much higher temperature and be more efficient at producing electricity. That’s a fast reactor.

It will burn waste as well as make energy. Then you have the regular, small modular reactors, which are the same technology as the light water reactors. They’re just smaller. Then you could have any kind of small modular reactor and they could be a boiling water reactor or a pressurized water reactor.

They could be small at the beginning and made bigger. So that’s another type of molten reactor. You could have a lead-cooled fast reactor. Now that’s maybe odd, but again, it’s a fast reactor. It uses a Uranium alloy and metal fuel, but again, it's not cooled by anything but liquid lead.

If you heat lead up, it will also flow and become a good heat transfer medium, and it will keep the neutrons at a very high energy and it’ll be a faster reactor. So there are other visions of versions out there, but those are the most prominent ones right now.

Carr: So, right now President Trump has the plan of doubling our electricity generation. And I just saw yesterday that in Germany they’re blowing up one of their coal-fired plants that they had just built six years ago, and now they're blowing it up. And in the United States, we’ve gone through this period where we’ve been shutting down beautiful coal plants that had met all the stringent pollution regulations. They had reduced all the heavy metals and they reduced all of the emissions down to tiny, tiny little fractions of what were once emitted from coal plants. But then they said that Carbon Dioxide is a pollutant. By labeling Carbon Dioxide—which is plant food, which we’re all made of—by labeling that as a pollutant, then they use that as the basis to try to shut down coal. But we’re going to try to revive as much coal as we can. We’re going to revive as much nuclear as we can. But what are the prospects with your ideas and the new companies? There are a whole bunch of little companies that are coming forward with mass produced small reactors of various types to be modular or completely built inside factories quickly and deployed. So, how does your company fit into this picture. Introduce your company, since I didn’t mention it yet.

Baer: Well, let me just briefly say Metatomic was established for a primary purpose, the primary goal of processing spent nuclear fuel, which we have about 94-or-95,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel stored.

Existing nuclear power plants hold it on concrete pads in dry fuel storage casks. That is energy we need to use in a fast reactor. It's just Uranium that could be used in a fast reactor to generate energy, and that's what Metatomic’s purpose is. What does Metatomic want to do? We ourselves, as a company, don’t want to build a reactor.

We want to provide the fuel for the reactors. So we would process spent nuclear fuel in our facility and convert it from Uranium Dioxide, UO2 into Uranium Chloride, UCL4. It can be melted then as a salt fuel.

If you take salt—the white, granular crystal. Just regular table salt. And if you melt it, heat it up hot enough, it would melt into a clear liquid like water and it would flow. So, the idea with a molten salt reactor is that you can have a couple different types. You can have a thermal spectrum reactor or a fast reactor. Ideally you want to build the fast reactor and there are about 8 to 12 different companies out there, startups, small companies that want to build their own version of a molten salt reactor.

So going to that slide, we would take light water reactor fuel, Uranium Dioxide and convert it, grind it up to a powder. We would mix the powder with enrichment to get things going.

And Thorium is also an option, but I want to emphasize that Thorium by itself is not a fuel, it does not fission. So what happens with Thorium in a reactor? Well, it’s a breeding material. So when Thorium absorbs a neutron, it decays to Protactinium, which then decays into Uranium, I won't go into details.

So Thorium is a starter material to produce more Uranium fuel that can be fissioned. There are a lot of organizations which are very interested in Thorium as a breeding possibility. So you take in step number three, you take fuel powder, you take out Oxygen and fluorinate. Again, Oxygen is corrosive.

Carr: It's an oxidizer as they say.

Baer: Yeah, you don’t want to use that. So we ended up with Uranium Chloride—UCL for Uranium Chloride salt. We sample it and certify it, and save it in containers for a molten salt reactor, which would then be built at the same nuclear power plant site.

At an existing reactor and as an existing source of spent fuel on the concrete pads in the dry storage cask, then the molten salt would be kept in a secure area and then ultimately it would be added to a molten salt reactor for fueling the molten salt reactor.

I should say about the storage of spent fuel at nuclear power plants. I did mention that they’re stored on concrete in dry concrete storage casks. There are lots of pictures on the internet of these. You can find plant after plant, after plant. And these are called, ISFSI—Independent Nuclear Fuel Storage Installations.

We always have acronyms in the nuclear business. These pads have lots of big dry casks on them, and that’s where they’re stored—even at reactors that are now shut down and disassembled like Maine Yankee, of course in Maine. They still have the dry casks there sitting on the pad there that can be used someday.

Carr: Right. I always had the idea that someday our city dumps will become mines. But that’s a whole different question. You mentioned where the molten salt reactors would be located, and you also mentioned about modularity in building them in factories, and that would be ideal if we could get a lot of those parts in modules produced in a factory and bring them to a site.

Baer: To assemble them into the molten salt reactors—we don’t know what size the first ones will be, but they’re all working on it. You've got companies like ThorCon Power, Thorizon, Exodys, the Canadian companies, Terrestrial Energy, and Moltex. You have Terra Power, and then there’s Seaborg Technologies, a company in the Netherlands, and a couple others outside.

Carr: So, we have lots of potential. And we have a new administration. We have a new Department of Energy, which is going to be pushing these measures. But the timing is the thing that everybody wants to know about. And it seems like one aspect of your proposal is that it might be faster to produce fuel from existing fuel rod assemblies that are in storage than it would be to start a new Uranium mine and begin this process of mining and purification.

Baer: Sure.

Carr: And all of that.

Baer: Well, ideally it would be great, more beneficial. And for us to be good stewards of the environment, it’d be more beneficial to take spent nuclear fuel.

That contains 90+ percent of the Uranium isotope that is a fast fissionable fuel. And fissioning it in a fast reactor will burn up the waste at the same time. I could go into that, but in the interest of time, I'll leave that for a question later.  But it would be more beneficial to use spent fuel.

We can reduce the amount of spent fuel over time, over many, many decades, and get power from it without mining.

Carr: Right. So, I think you covered the main points. Are there any other points that you would like to make to our audience?

Baer: Well, we can talk about molten salt reactor conferences—every year at Oakridge National Lab. The last one was actually held in a venue in Knoxville. So many people were attending the Molten Salt Reactor Conference—350, 400, 450 people—that they had to move it. You have speakers and it's usually a two-to-three day event.

And they talk about the progress they're making on molten salt fuels, and molten salt reactors of all kinds and have companies in the United States as well as foreign contributors to these conferences. And it’s really very technical. It gets into all the technical issues and everything that they’re trying to solve about valving and pumps and all sorts of ways to move the molten salt around.

So there's a lot of attention being given to this right now. Each year they have this Molten Salt Reactor Workshop. So it’s usually in the October-November time frame. And I would encourage anybody who wants to know more about this to just look on the internet for information about the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Molten Salt Workshop.

It’s very, very good scientists and engineers from all over the United States, a university in the Netherlands, and France. They have their own idea about a molten salt reactor. And they also want to build a fast reactor with Uranium alloys. So they’re a big company that has the capability to go in any direction—either molten salt, or sodium-cooled, or even lead-cooled.

Big, advanced nuclear companies. Other countries are getting very involved in this. Japan and France just announced a collaboration between their countries to work on molten salt and advanced reactors.

Building a fast reactor—again, for all your listeners—fast means the neutron energy is extremely high. When neutrons are produced from fission—that’s where we get the neutrons—they have extremely high energy. In a light water reactor those neutrons quickly get out into a water channel, and when that happens, they lose all of their energy very quickly. Very quickly to where they almost have no energy left. But that’s beautiful, because they thermal fission U235. And so there are, going back to what I was saying before, there are a lot of companies out there that promise to produce a molten salt reactor. Either a thermal reactor, molten salt reactor, or a fast molten salt reactor.

And, to be clear about this, it’s not going to happen next week or next month or even next year, probably. There are a lot of technical challenges, but it looks promising. And it looks like maybe in five or 10 years, and hopefully less than that, we’ll have a molten salt reactor prototype built. Metatomic wants to process the spent fuel for that prototype. But we’ll see how that happens, right?

Carr: So, let me ask one other thing. What recommendations would you give to the Department of Energy to accelerate the process beyond what they’re already trying to do?

Baer: Well, they should put more resources toward it. I can't tell you exactly what, or how the funding works. There are funding avenues already being used to help these companies.

So a lot of that’s being done now. It’s a priority for the Department of Energy.

Well, right now, the government’s being looked at pretty, pretty, closely to see what programs should advance, which ones should fail or be done away with. But I think that clearer heads and broader minds will understand that we need advanced reactors.

Wright is a good pick to lead the Department of Energy because he understands gas and oil and coal, and he is pro-nuclear. He wants to see advanced nuclear reactors advance.

Carr: Okay. Thank you very much Ken. Is there anything else that we needed to cover that we haven’t covered?

Baer: There probably is . . .

There probably are. A lot of advances have been made. For example, just east of Oak Ridge National Laboratory at the Clinch River Reactor site, Kairos Power, one of the molten salt reactor makers has gotten permission and is going ahead, building their first reactor, their prototype, a molten salt reactor.

That's being built right now at that location. We hope that there will be other ones that will follow, but right now Kairos is the first one doing that. They were based out of San Francisco with a team of engineers and scientists that developed their own prototype, their own molten salt reactor system.

A venue like this is good to talk about molten salt, but there are a lot of differences, nuances—more than nuances—but differences between the various types of molten salt reactors. Thorcon, for example, does have a great way of building their modules. They use a shipyard system of development where  precise components are built in a shipyard that can then be hauled to a site on a ship and assembled at the location. So that's one idea. Other reactors that would be built would have pumps that are either integral to the reactor or separate from the reactor. So there are different ideas going around.

And hopefully some will coalesce. There are technological barriers right now with new materials and new ideas about how to pump molten salt around and transfer heat from the reactor.

I didn’t really talk about this, but the molten salt reactors are of two types. They can have solid fuel in the center, and that would be called like a heat pipe reactor with molten salt around the pipes. The energy would come out of the pipes into the liquid, and the liquid would get pumped around through another heat exchanger and the heat would be removed.

Or you can have just strictly a full core, full of liquid, which will be critical and generate power in itself and will be pumped completely around. But the only criticality critical area of heat generation fission area is in the larger core itself. That's how it operates.

So there are different types, and the benefit of the molten salt reactor is that it operates at so much higher temperatures. Instead of 600 degrees Fahrenheit. We’re talking about 1100 to 1200 degrees Fahrenheit, where you can get superheated steam for a turbine generator.

Carr: Help with desalinating water probably, and other high . . .

Baer: Yeah, exactly. Any, anything you want to use heat for. Say heat produced for industry and factories, or heating. And a big thing in Europe is the central heat system. That’s how they heat some of their buildings. So there are many ideas, I’m sure right now the bigger people who are involved with these data centers like Google and Microsoft, and . . .

They want to build data centers. Well, they need a lot of energy for these data centers. So they’re talking to Three Mile Island, for example in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Everybody knows that Three Mile Island Unit 2 had the accident back in 1979, but nobody was hurt. Nobody got a radiation dose, right?

It was okay. It was all contained within that big domed cylindrical building, but the reactor was ruined. That was Unit 2, right? Unit 1 was shut down—just for principle. But now one of the companies, Google, I forget which one exactly, but one of the data center builders wants to restart Unit 1.

And so they're working with the company to get Unit 1 started so that they can produce power for their data centers. Holtec is working in Michigan to restart the Palisades nuclear power plants. There is talk right now in Iowa of restarting Duane Arnold Energy Center, which is the Duane Arnold nuclear power plant, which was also shut down earlier.

So, their states are very interested in seeing where their power is going to come from. And right now there's a lot of need for power. We can’t wait until it’s too late. And you know it takes years to build a new nuclear power plant.

So, it could take anywhere from five years . . . One of the things that Chris Wright could really help: he could talk to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is supposed to be streamlining some of these regulations. And we really need to be able to build nuclear power plants, not in 15 years, but in six or eight years, or mass produce in a factory on an even quicker scale.

And, you mentioned the shipyard case. There are nuclear power plants that were started but never completed. For example, in southern Indiana, you have the Marble Hill Plant, and my last phone call with them, they told me that little by little, they're doing work on it too, to build it.

Who knows how long that’ll take though. It’s not a . . . And an abandoned project was being built in the extreme northeastern corner of Alabama, a TVA plant. They built the cooling towers already. They’ve got the containments built, they’ve got the turbine buildings built, the bigger structures are built, and they just walked away from it after Three Mile Island. But it would produce a humongous, a huge amount of electrical power. I think two units, at 1400 megawatts each, as I recall.

Carr: Yeah, very big. Okay, Ken. Well, I think that should wrap up our discussion here, and I think it has been educational for me and will be educational for other people who are interested in how we’re going to Make America Great Again and enter the Golden age of America as the President speaks of so much. So thank you very much.

Baer: I hope you’re right. Thank you. 

Carr: Thank you.