Hello everybody. We have Mr. Seth Grae with us. He is the CEO of Lightbridge Corporation. Hello, Mr. Grae, and welcome to Business World.
Hello, it is a real pleasure to be speaking with you today.
It's likewise. I mean, I hope you had a good stay in India during your visit and it was a fruitful interaction session for you.
Yes, it's been an amazing last 5 days with the US Civil Nuclear Trade Mission in India, meeting with leaders of the government and the private sector about potentially working together in the tremendous growth of India's nuclear power sector.
So when we talk about India and US nuclear cooperation, it's a deal that has been signed about two decades ago. So why has the commercial nuclear cooperation moved slower than expected, and what can we do to unlock that momentum now?
Well, first of all, I think the US government at the time did not prioritize cooperation between American and Indian companies in nuclear power as much as both governments are doing today, actually. I think that in India, there was very little nuclear power and not great plans for growth of power. India domestically could handle most of what it wanted with just some help from foreign partners. Now India has about 8 gigawatts electric of nuclear power in the whole country. That's about as much power as New York City uses. But India has a policy now to grow that from 8 to 100 gigawatts electric of nuclear power by 2047, which is as much nuclear power as the US has. That's about a fifth of all the electric power in the United States. And I think that to do that, the government of India and the private sector have decided they must have foreign assistance. There simply is not the capacity to do that within India. And the US also has a priority of building its own nuclear power tremendously, to quadruple the nuclear power in the US by 2050, and also to cooperate with foreign firms and governments. So, now is a very different time.
India also has a target of achieving 100 gigawatts of nuclear power in particular by 2047. So, what role do you think US companies are playing in helping India achieve this target?
Well, right now the US companies are building relationships in the Indian government and in the private sector with the companies that are already involved in nuclear in India and would like to move into it. And the US companies have a lot to offer. The United States produces virtually everything needed to produce and operate a large nuclear power program. The United States operates 100 gigawatts of nuclear power, which is India's target to get there. And the United States operates these reactors at more than 90% of full power all of the time, what's called over a 90% capacity factor. That is by far the highest in the world. So, the United States can help not just in the design, the manufacture of the components, the building of the reactors, but the best practices for operating them so that you get the most efficiency out of them and overall lowest price of electricity generated from them.
I was doing a bit of digging and I came across a statement where it was mentioned that Lightbridge fuel can be used in India's heavy water reactors. It's compatible with the technology. So, what practical steps would be needed before we can adapt or deploy such a technology in India?
Right. So, the government program is for pressurized heavy water reactors that can use Lightbridge fuel, and the private sector is also looking at pressurized water reactors like most of the reactors in the United States today. So, I think that the fuel can be used in both. We're developing it for both. Our emphasis has been on the pressurized water reactor for the US reactors, but we've done quite a bit of work now for the pressurized heavy water reactors. And practically, one of the good things that will need to happen is if the American nuclear regulatory authority, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and India's nuclear regulatory authority start to harmonize their regulations so that something that is licensed to be used safely in the nuclear power sector in one can be used in the other country without too much of a regulatory hurdle.
So, I'm sitting at an airport right now where there are airplanes coming and going from all over the world without needing to be licensed everywhere they take off and everywhere they land because of a regulatory regime that allows that. And the more we get to that in nuclear, where it's trusted, it's safe as much as aviation across different borders, that's very good. Now, Lightbridge is in the process of selecting a site where we will build our pilot-scale plant to manufacture our fuel for commercial reactors on a site where the plant can grow to a large commercial-scale plant over time. And then we're going to be looking at sites regionally around the world for other similar manufacturing plants. And India makes tremendous sense for a lot of reasons, including because India domestically wants to grow to be as big in nuclear power as the United States is today. And also, it's a very good place for manufacturing for export for elsewhere in Asia.
For US nuclear, liability laws have been cited as a key hurdle for US companies in India. So, do you think that the regulatory environment is better now or is there still a lot more to be desired?
There's more to be desired, and that might change for the better soon. India very recently passed a law called the Shanti Act that in the text of the law does fix the issue. And it's very important because if a vendor, say someone that sells a valve to a reactor, gets blamed and is found guilty in an Indian court, say for the valve being defective, and might be held liable for a billion dollars of damage to the reactor building or something in some potential incident, that's not how liability works under international treaties. It is potentially out for work in India today. So, the liability flows to the operator of the plant. And the operator can make standards that can have its liability limited by its government. And the Shanti Act goes a long way toward doing that, but foreign firms will have to operate under rules that will come from the Department of Energy probably in about the next 3 or 4 months, and no one has seen those rules yet. So, hopefully in the next 3 or 4 months those rules will come out and be very good. If not, there might be more work to do on trying to make more progress.
