Okay, hello everyone. Welcome to Wind Down Friday. Today our guest, our special guest, is James Walker, NANO Nuclear CEO. Hi James, welcome aboard. How are you? How's it going?
Hi Maro, I'm not doing too badly. Thanks very much for having me on.
Thank you, thank you. Where are you located? So the head office of our company is in New York, but I'm actually in Vancouver in Canada today.
The head office of our company is in New York, but I'm actually in Vancouver in Canada today.
Nice, so thanks a lot for being here, James. So I have a couple of questions to share with you. I know that you have extensive experience in engineering and project management, in particular for nuclear engineering, mining engineering, mechanical, construction, manufacturing, infrastructure, safety management, and so on. So what recent technological advancements in nuclear engineering are you most excited about? So tell us more.
All right, so I know it's going to sound biased, but I think what we're doing within the company is what I'm most excited about. Like the possibility of designing reactors that are so small that they can be transported anywhere in the world by road or by rail and shipped to locations they've never been before. So whether that's military bases or island communities or remote industry or mining projects, you know, all of these kind of areas where diesel generators have been before and they've had no competition from other energy sources, and now for the first time there'll be a nuclear reactor inside an ISO container that can ship into these areas and be put down and plugged in and start outputting consistent, high capacity factor power.
And you know, this opens up all sorts of possibilities. Like for instance, we were recently in Rwanda and we were working with the government there to develop their nuclear industry. And you know, they said, you know, 60% of our population has access to consistent power. So if you're looking to deploy these sort of micro reactors to remote locations, that means you can suddenly introduce things like desalination, vertical farms, industry in all of these remote locations and you can be away from the grid. So that means a big increase in the quality of life for a lot of people, especially in these remote locations. So that's pretty exciting. So like obviously the power system is great, yeah, but like the benefits that it could bring a lot of local communities are huge too. So obviously I'm very excited about that and obviously that's partly why I'm doing this.
And if I was to talk about other things that I think within the industry are very exciting, I still think the small modular reactors, which are much larger systems than the one we're producing, are still very exciting things because it basically will reduce a lot of the upfront capital costs, which will reduce the financing costs and the time to deployment. So big systems can be deployed faster and more cheaply, and I believe that once there is that economy of scale, our energy bills will come down. Not to mention that this is a clean, consistent form of energy and you've got guaranteed power for 20, 30, 40 years, whatever it is depending on the system. I mean, that's pretty great.
That's pretty terrific. Thank you. So as the philosophy of Wind Down Friday, I would like to know more also about you outside your job. So let me jump on outside of your job and then we can come back in terms of technology. So outside your job, can you share some of your hobbies, how they help you unwind from your demanding career, how to stay relaxed, maybe with a good wine?
Well, good wine never hurt anyone. But I would say where I am at the moment in Vancouver, for instance, it's got some beautiful mountains. Like the hiking here is fantastic. I would say maybe the best in the world, that might offend a lot of people, but like it's really beautiful. I would say that's a major hobby of mine.
And I try a couple evenings every week where me and my wife will go to the gym and we'll put the children in the YMCA child care. We'll just have a couple of hours of just us trying to do some exercise to try and physically unwind a little bit. That happens, you know. I would say the funny thing is that before you have children, you know, you have way more time to do a lot of things. So whether that's mountain biking or skiing. But now it seems that when I go home at the weekend, I just have children that I take to parks. So I would say it's become a hobby of mine just to take the children places, whether that's the pool or the sea or just like nearby parks or anything like that. So I would say that does help you unwind, it still does help you unwind doing that kind of thing. It's just, you know, you get relegated as a person and then they take priority.
