Cal Abel: Nuclear Power for Human Flourishing | Tom Nelson Pod #128
Tom Nelson
Introduction
Cal Abel served 10 years in the Navy from 99 to 2009 aboard two different submarines. He started going into doing research on energy policy and policy analysis. While at Georgia Tech he came up with a concept that I called nuclear thermal energy storage which is taking a sodium fast reactor.
Cal is the co-founder and CTO of an energy and governance company, Signal Power and Light, with coal mining operations in Northern Alabama and a special governmental zone, ZEDE, in Honduras, ZEDE Orquídea. Cal’s work in governance and energy as a means of addressing global poverty stemmed from his early economic work connecting statistical physics to economics, which has been completed with The Quantum Foundations of Utility and Value. Cal is an accidental engineer, choosing nuclear engineering on a whim because it was hard and seemed interesting. He served 10-years in the nuclear Navy driving submarines, finishing his last tour as the Engineer Officer on the USS Florida (SSGN-728).
Before leaving the Navy, Cal became interested in climate change after watching An Inconvenient Truth. Confused as to why nuclear was not featured prominently, he modeled a nuclear buildout using Small Modular Reactors to repower existing coal stations and then using the nuclear heat to drive Coal to Liquid synthetic fuels. He presented this to the American Nuclear Society in 2010, The Impact of Small Modular Reactors in a Carbon Constrained Economy, and attempted to patent the technology, but later found that there were already many similar patents from the 1970’s. He even tried to pitch the idea to the coal industry in 2012, but it fell on deaf ears.
Thinking that he was on to something and seeing policy as a major hurdle in preventing a nuclear buildout, he went to Georgia Tech to learn more about public policy and to see if he could find a solution, which he managed to do. His doctoral work created the conceptual design of a sodium fast reactor with thermal energy storage replacing the intermediate loop. He showed that by marrying the two technologies, we separate the kinetics of the energy demand from the reactor kinetics (reactor safety) and can confine the regulator’s warrant to just the nuclear island. 7-months after defending his dissertation, TerraPower took the concept and in October 2018 began detailed engineering of what was to become Natrium. While at Georgia Tech, and in response to Fukushima, Cal suggested to the world that we use concrete pump trucks to refill the spent fuel pools instead of helicopters.
Cal’s current work is revitalizing and adapting the Karrick Process to the swelling coals of the Eastern United States, his company has finished the conceptual design of the pilot facility and will start construction in the near future and hopes that one day he will be able to marry this technology with a nuclear reactor. He has also extended his theoretical economic work and shown the relationship of energy and value with Bitcoin (soon to be published) and for the entire US economy (unpublished). Having developed actual technologies that increase energy access and reduce carbon intensity, he sees the entire global warming policy complex as a scam to give away tax dollars and create fake assets for traders to manipulate.
Coal is not the enemy, bad policy and insufficient energy access are.
https://www.signalpowerandlight.com/en/
https://www.signalpowerandlight.com/team/cal-abel/
Cal Abel on the Decouple Media podcast: https://youtu.be/fwacuS1Dy3I
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