Shon, you have made the study of sustainability, particularly in the energy sector, the core of your scholarly program since you entered the PhD Program at Cornell a couple of decades ago.    Are you more or less optimistic now than you were when you started that real progress can be made to address climate change in time to avert a climate disaster?

As I have learned more over time, I can say that there’s been a lot of change.  Especially since feb 2022, there’s been massive change.  When Russian natural gas was cut off, the focus of effort changed toward energy security.   Fast forward to Dec 2022 or a little later, now we have to worry about whether we have enough energy to support AI training – which is 10 times as much as conventional computing – doubles down the challenge.  Which countries are going to win?  How do we accomplish energy expansion?

Shon is thinking about technological change that can meet these demands.   We need baseload power that is on all the time – which solar and wind can’t provide.   We also want clean energy.  This leaves us with nuclear and geothermal tech.  We are seeing the potential for renaissance in nuclear that we haven’t seen since the 1960s.  We can make it smaller, safer, and baseload oriented.  We’re going to see this in the 2030s – possibly in fusion.

Canada is positioned to be a leader as, in Ontario, through the building of small nuclear generators that can be co-located with established reactors.  Ontario Power has contracted with GE-Hitachi, and WholeTech International.  These are getting permits for 300 megawatts or lower power.  1 megawatt can serve about 700 homes.  Multiply that by 300, and you’re serving a significant population.

We’ve got this coming in with electrification of transportation, which is putting big demands on power systems.  We’ve always had hub-and-spoke models, but solar changed our thinking toward distributed generation.  The idea here is to rethink the electrical grid that is much more efficient by distributing the SNRs to where the demand.

Regulatory agencies are focused on safety.   Ive been thinking about this with the regulatory community.   We have to think about this carefully.   We haven’t considered the risks in as sophisticated a way that we need to make progress in a timely way.   Governments have to step into a new level of analysis to enable private companies to make progress.  There are structural challenges in venture and conventional investing that need to be addressed.  The big question:  What’s going to get us to 2031?  Natural gas.  We will have a large build-out of natural gas to get us to 2031.  But then we’ll see geothermal….

Geothermal is thrilling.   New tech is coming in from fracturing.  Im really excited about Fervo Energy – a fracker.   The CEO – Tim Lattimer -- thought:  I can release geothermal through horizonal drilling.  This is so expensive traditionally.    This company came up with a new way to explore underground with fewer fracking holes.  The drilling costs can be reduced to 1/3^rd what they were before.  The idea is to create something like a radiator of holes underground.

Where does 2031 come from?  You need a license to build and a license to operate.  The processes each take 3 years and are serialized.   Adding that up:  six years.

So in sum: The stakes are higher than when Shon entered graduate studies 20 years ago. There’s more political and conflict risk.  There’s the potential for greater disruption of energy supplies.   At the same time, there’s an order of magnitude greater demand for energy.  We simply need more electrons.  So the challenges are deeper and broader and greater than they once were.  At the same time, the pace of technological change has been so significant that we can see routes to energy security through natural gas, geothermal and nuclear that can resolve the challenge.  The emerging availability of small nuclear reactors over the course of the next decade may change the landscape fundamentally.

You have a fascinating recent paper on measuring sustainability.  How do we know whether a particular technology or organizational practice is worth investing in?  

The biggest challenge right now is in obtaining regulatory approvals.   What we need is an FAA for nuclear.  The FAA is accustomed to new tech advancement – new planes.  The problem with the new nuclear reactors is that they are beyond the experience of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as its currently constituted.  We need new ways of evaluating the potential of Modular Nuclear.

What are those new ways?  In his paper, Shon and his colleagues identified three different areas where tradeoffs arise:  Cognitive accuracy.  Scaling, eg, practical feasibility.  Scope, eg, what do audiences want, which we call “interest comprehensiveness.”   Put these three together, and you can assess the pros and cons of different approaches.  Geothermal, for example, is strong on cognitive accuracy and scope, but maybe not on scale.   SNRs may be strong on scale and cognitive accuracy but less right now on scope.   This points to our need for an envelope of approaches and for the measurement of changes in the ways in which the technologies can perform on these criteria.

You also have a recent paper on sustainability risk management.   What I appreciate particularly about this work is your focus on averting climate change as a complement to our customary focus on adapting to it.  What’s it going to take to lower sustainability risk broadly?  

One of the problems that we face is that energy has become politicized.  We need to cultivate understanding that each approach comes with risks.    We need an understanding of what those risks are.  We need an adult conversation about what the tradeoffs are, and what’s acceptable.   With conventional reactors, there’s latent heat that requires power that requires pumps.  An advantage of an SNR is that there is much less risk of a meltdown because there the latent heat that arises from a shutdown is insufficient for a melt.  That makes SNRs an order of magnitude safer than conventional nuclear.

What is the final thought that you want in our listener’s minds?

There are 1.3 billion people on the planet who do not enjoy energy stability.  Some don’t have access to energy at all.   Through doing this kind of work – through having these adult conversations – we can provide everyone with access to the kind of prosperity that we enjoy in places where energy is abundant.