john- I'm from the thorium Energy Alliance executive director and
This morning's
presentation that briefing was
Really? Both briefings were always meant to be sort of mirror images of each other
the morning briefing was obviously very much concentrated on rare earths and critical materials and
Near the end
So there's gonna be a little bit of the department of redundancy department for you guys
If you if you sat through the original first one, but the second one is going to sort of start
With Jim explaining the the rare situation again a little bit just for
the sake of anybody who has come in for the the two o'clock briefing that wasn't here earlier and
so Jim will give a condensed version of the rare earths situation and I will give an
extended version of the thorium
The uses of thorium and
the thorium bank and liability issues with the thorium
So with that are you okay have you injected sugar   Jim- just straight in
So again Jim'll
Jim Kennedy from ThREE
consulting is going to talk about the rare earth situation here and
So I think there's mostly the same faces. So I'm gonna be brief
The United States mining industry throws away enough
recoverable rare earths every year
To meet the entire nine Chinese demand the fat if we equated everything that was recoverable from existing mining
We could actually probably meet half of China's demand in addition to the non Chinese world
Where do these materials come from? Where are these magic free rare earth materials come from?
They come from
Mineralization is called monazites xenotimes and appetite and what they are phosphate based
minerals that have a real affinity
For all of the rare earths and as you go from the light ones to the heavy ones
This guy shows up thorium. Thorium is always associated with rare earths. There's one
exception which are called the ionic clays in China and
I'm pretty darn sure no country in the world would let you mind them with the way they mine them outside of China
so it's not an option so
Anyway, these materials still exist. They're still being thrown away and they're being thrown away because of a regulatory snafu from 1980
Now we all know that members of Congress don't like
Changing rate regulations and they certainly don't like changing regulations for the radioactive materials because some groups somewhere
It's going to take that as a threat to safety a threat to whatever or a way to raise funds when they scare people
so what do we do we work within the regulations and
we allow this material to pass through that that
Cooperative and which I saw before you the rare earths are pulled out and utilize
The other material goes into the thorium bank
I'm gonna show you what these things actually look like
really pretty impressive
So this is Bayan Obo so the largest rare with mine in the world
Over fifty percent of China's earths come from this one mine
So how does any?
How does any US mining company look you in the face and saying hey we could mined cheaper than China
Really I mean it's so disingenuous, but they'll do it with a straight face
So this is what they get in
Over 50 percent. It has no direct mining cost. These are the ionic clays
These are really important but China actually has a very short future in these. These won't last much longer
This is what mountain pass produces a
Lot of zeroes here. That means you're not getting any of these very very important heavies
They actually never produced a commercial gram of
This they've never produced a commercial gram of this. So it's zeros from here on down
This is the stuff. We're throwing away every day when we might titanium
Our zircon or rutile
Very heavy there's plenty of these materials to recover
Some have this some don't but the bottom line is they're there. This is a respectable amount of heavies
The lightest deposit in Australia, which does shift their material to Malaysia to be processed
their
quantity of heavy rare earths this 0.3
point three
not 3%
That's really a whopping advantage over Molycorp has point one
So when they say we're making heavy rare earths in Australia and Malaysia
really you gonna run an economy on that - no and the reason they're so naked here is they're trying to avoid thorium
but when you avoid thorium
You get dumpster stuff. I mean this is really not good stuff. This is what we're throwing away
This is a selected apatite these things you'll find in the tailings of iron ore
So if you're mining iron ore and you're cleaning the iron ore up enough that you can make quality steel
You actually are forced to strip this out
And in the process to strip it out you concentrate it. There's no other way to get rid of it
I mean it'll follow that iron ore all the way into the steel furnace unless you strip it out using
Very old but very dependable
Beneficiation techniques
So it comes out just like this. These are very respectable numbers
Okay, this is the really sexy one over here
Florida phosphates
Florida phosphates they're producing
Fertilizer for the food we're going to eat for the next hundred years and for the next hundred years
They're going to keep throwing this way, unless we fix this problem
and according to a USGS
Report by a guy named Poul Emsbo and about six of the USGS guys
They said just six u.s. Mines mining phosphates could meet 65% of the world's demand and we're throwing it away
Look at this spread on heavy. Okay, maybe I'm talking and you guys don't find this sexy and attractive but for me
This is pretty damn good 30 to 60 percent heavies
So this stuff literally will come free. But if we've got one problem, we've got one liability we have to deal with
all of them have
Thorium and that has to be dealt with within the regs which means as it passes through the value chain
And and we strip out a rare earths. We're still responsible for dealing with that thorium
Here's a letter from the phosphate
Because these guys represent the phosphate industry, it's the University of southern Florida and this is the phosphate Institute
Basically, it says just one mine throws away 22,000 tons a year. That's
roughly two times US demand
Let's say you can just get half of it, which is kind of a low number in mining? thats 100% of US demand
There's five other Mines just like that so this number keeps getting bigger and bigger this you add them in I
Had a expert in the mineral sands business right out and I can actually provide you the document
This is a professional consultant and he gave estimates on production of monazites
With dates six to 12 months
Doubling that capacity 12 to 18 months. That's how fast we're producing
Monazites that literally run between 50 and 60% rare earth and if you remember they contain they're very attractive
They contain all the good stuff
So if you look at them Audience member- do they have thorium?
They do have thorium. That's why they're throwing them away
so so the only way to get an
Uninterruptible supply is to use the historic supply that fed this industry for decades and just be reasonable
Get out of bed put your big-boy pants on and manage that liability because if you don't manage it
You know what they do with it
They dump it into a "legal tailings reservoir" That's actually the environment
That thing is connected with waterways and fish and trees and everything else no matter what you call it
They're dumping it in the enviorment. And so if you want cleaner better mining
Let's just do it. Right and we can do it. Right. So anyway, that's it as you can see you can have
reasonable cottages almost instantly and then as your phase in the phosphate guys you're getting up into
national
Quantities for one or more or many countries and as you roll up through all six of those phosphate guys
Now you can cover huge parts of the world
So
Anyway we get back to the where we transfer these over to the thorium bank and they comply with all NRC and IAEA guidelines
this is where john takes over
So, thank you johns gonna take over   John- eat some cookies or chips. He's like a hummingbird we need to put a feeder above him
But so again, I apologize the the format of the second briefing is a little bit different than I hoped for I hoped to show
a
Supercut of this movie called thorium and it's it's going to be available online
Thorium Energy Alliance bought the english-speaking rights to it. So it's
actually, I think it is available right now on iTunes and
so
but we just had a few a few like issues with with showing it so
That's fine instead of just showing you a movie I get to yap at  ya if for a couple of minutes here
Let me give you a tiny little background
I should have probably done this as part of an introduction like hey, where'd you guys come from?
so what happened was the short form story is I
was
Running an engineering consultancy, and I had a client
Call and this claim it was not technical whatsoever
But he's like he had a process that he wanted to find a replacement
material for because well kind of like this he was having trouble sourcing some material so he's like I
knew you could tell he was just had a
Periodic table in front of him and he was just running through it. He's like, well tin work will copper work?
well this you know eventually it's like no no
So me and my partner were kind of trying to give a little reports and
eventually, he worked his way all the way to the end of the periodic table and he's like will thorium work and I'm like
God! i've never even heard of that shit!
I Don't know let me let me check and
So I looked it up and it was it was incredibly fascinating for
Mainly for the reason that I'll speak to hear
there's incredable uses for thorium and
Obviously one of the big uses that a lot of people get very interested in is energy
but but there's other uses and
we'll hit upon a minute here, but the
so anywho
Direct that introductory thing and like how did Jim and John come to be? I put together a conference at Gallaudet University
in Washington DC in October 19th of 2009
Because I was all the all the thorium enthusiasts were all like ex-lab guys
And propeller head guys and tech guys and they had like super genius ideas
"Like we're gonna paint a bus man, and we're gonna paint the bus with the word thorium on the side
and drive it around the country." I'm like "i..... you know?"
And we my partner I had
Political work earlier in my life and I knew it was like to lobby Congress and I knew you know
They could talk to staffers
you don't try and talk to the man himself or the woman or herself to try and get to the
staffers go on to you know guide policy and
And so that's why I held the first conference in Washington at Gallaudet
You know
We had some training there and but I announced a conference threw down thousands of dollars and then I had to find people to speak
and so I was like
I was just
Calling everybody I knew and I called this guy named Cannon and I said "cannon! give me every rare, you know?
Give me every thorium guy you have" he's like "well, you know Jack lifted and you know, the bla bla bla
Jim Kennedy, so I have my way out to my farm in, Iowa
I'm calling all these guys that I called Jim now like "hey, mr. Kennedy, will you come and talk at my
Conference on thorium?" I just heard this like
*grown* "ok"
You know, I
Jim- Was gonna be there anyway! John- yeah turned out it was a total fluke. Just you know, maybe there is some Providence in the universe that
Jack lifted was handing a rare earth conference down the street and Jim was going to be there anyways, so he came
And I'm ashamed to say as the head of the thorium Energy Alliance
Knew about thorium except kind of like where it came from, you know
and
I didn't I mean I had some vague ideas and some it
Just never put two and two together and I'm a little doubly ashamed because I'm an engineer and I went
We would go way out of our ways to speck rare earth, you know magnets samarium-cobalt magnets
neodymium and
we would design them and
We're also
Unashamedly, very patriotic western leading guys. I would slave to get stuff made in America, you know, manufactured here!
So when Jim came and said hey
You know
I've got this rare earth
Deposit on my mind and it's it's riddled with this filthy junk of thorium
You know, what do I do with it?
And you know and we had a whole group of guys who just you were like salivating dogs, you know
Like I know exactly what you can do with it
and of course the vast majority of the one to start reactor companies and design reactors and the most
favorable reactor form that we can think of
the molten-salt type reactor and there was the reason that's so attractive is that
Fifty years ago
Oak Ridge National Labs actually built and ran for twenty three thousand hours a molten salt reactor
So it wasn't a paper reactor. It wasn't some fantasy
And so I think that gets you up to like why
How we got together and then after the conference
The the short of it is after the conference Jim and I discussed them for a very long time and
About like well, how do we solve this?
and I originally had this idea of a network of
Universities sort of ganging together to do some do some work
It wasn't a bad idea because it had that general idea if you've got 50 universities
In 20 states and you got those state senators and state congressmen, you know, they they can be lobbyists for you
But Jim Jim's idea was was a much better more holistic
and it was the co-op and so so for nine years now, I guess we've been pushing this idea of
the cooperative
and you've heard quite a bit about the
Cooperative this side of the screen what I'll tell you a little bit more about now
Is this other side of the screen the thorium bank? So that's a that's fairly
That's a difficult representative icon of a bank and actually Jim, maybe
Just two seconds and see if it pops up
I wasn't really prepared to give this particular form of the talk
But we did spend a lot of time and dollars we worked with
PNNL and we actually did a literal
design for what a thorium thing now, we call it a thorium bank because it helps
Policymakers get it. We're storing this for you set a future date sort of thing. So it's a strategic reserve
Really, but thorium isn't very hard to handle to begin with
It's a light alpha emmiter that are you're gonna have
Million pounds of it in a pile and nothing's going to happen because it's fertile. It's not fizzle it needs an
external
neutron source for it to go from
thorium-232
Species of uranium called uranium 233 and so it's got a lot of attractive features not least of which you get them for free
when you process rare earths and
There's no such thing as highly enriched thorium. Thorium is good to go and enrichment is a hugely costly
process, its dirty as hell and uses, you know 30 thousand centrifuges and
millions of megawatts of power to do it
I mean, I'm so good
the environmentalists
Aren't very smart is that they were?
Wanted to really hell cause he'll somebody would actually do an energy balance and and see how much energy is released
You know processing uranium any new so so the thorium bank is a literal thing in
You know, Jim could find it. It's it's no big deal if it's too hard to dig out of the archives
But we'll show you some blueprints and this was quite a facility. It was seismically isolated
It looked basically like a barrel roof, you know
Warehouse it was pretty bland
But from the rare earth processing facility, there would be the when you create rare earths
I'll give you a little boring
Summation you're basically there's lots and lots of ways to do it
But essentially you're doing something along the lines of tight trading, right?
And so you have this liquor and the rare earths are coming in this this liquor, you know
generically
Maybe it's powders or gas and you know, there's there's lots of different ways to skin the cat much much more efficient in clean ways
I should say Jim and I have been been sponsoring and promoting and helping guys do research and clean rare earth
Separations for years now and but the thing is it falls out heaviest the lightest
So the first thing that would fall out would be one
Uranium if there's a little bit of uranium in there there often is in other mineralasations  like seen in time and such
But the second thing to fall out
Thorium, you know, what we say is we literally as it falls out literally gravitationally falls out
We're there in the catcher's mitt and we catch it and the way it physically works in the design is it would get captured?
We would concentrate it and then we would
take it into like a tunnel and bring it into a
Small processing, you know, basically what amounts to a gumball facility and we would encase it in a phenolic resin
So we wouldn't get any radon. That's to
Contain any radon from the decay of thorium and these balls are pretty big so they're about the size of a basketball
And it's literally too heavy to steel. All right
each ball would weigh like a thousand pounds
in my head i would say 3000 but that seems
Like a lot but thorium is heavy as hell right? I mean a little ball bat that big weighs 19 pounds
So so a basketball size
Literally sort of in
If you see this and I can send it to you later and it's on the thorium Energy Alliance website the
this thing is so clownish lee overbuilt because we really understand that that the public is is
rightfully
Concerned that people aren't honest with them. And so we want to really go overboard with the safety. So
We make these balls whose candy-coated gigantic jawbreakers. We bring him into this facility. It's completely automated underground
No humans at all. It's brought up. It's brought up into an antechamber the antechamber brings these these
Enormous balls and puts them in a building. So we have a building
Seismically isolated inside a building, you know, so that's real belts and suspenders and then we stack these balls in
Stainless steel casks the same casts then you store spent nuclear fuel
And so again, you know, you could have them as doorstops
there's no there's no reason for any of this other than
People and so then these casks are
cryogenically chilled to 40 degrees below zero because that's the temperature which radon becomes a liquid and so
We have all sorts of sensors. We have all sorts of refrigerants. We did this with PNNL
Now you could play devil's advocate and I often do when you make something when you go to that length to store something safely
somebody's gonna do the jujitsu on you and be like well
It must be really dangerous if you're doing that and so it's sort of like you can't win for losing, you know
And and because it's like you're trying their best to allay any fear and somebody will make use that against you to stoke fear
and but
What else are you gonna do and so
No, it's okay
They they get it by I my art of description was painted them a picture and audio picture
It's like it's like listening to the radio
so
so anywho
the
So, how does all this get paid for so this is the part that people
policy people really want to perk up at
the reason we only need an iconic version of that Bank is because that is symbolic of exactly what
It would really be
Where the thorium bank is is also even called like a garbage service or a Sin Eater
We are going to take thorium
Which is the one thing that keeps rare earths of being processed in the United States
And we're going to through the executive order or through Rubio's bill
What we do is we are able to sever
The liability joint and several liability and we take it on
Forever are and that's pretty in the weeds boring stuff, but it is nothing
We as the energy alliances volunteering to be the manager, I mean
If you look at the bills or the executive orders, there's no there's nothing in them. It says thorium energy
Alliance Jim John, but I mean, we hope that they dance with the one who brung them
you know, I mean we're going to these bills or
executive orders gets passed
Literally the the thorium Energy Alliance would serve with or you know, it's not guaranteed
jim- It offers a multi national platform
We are in contact with Parliament's around the world where there are parties including green parties
It's basically an open platform for all of our friendly partners to invest in because the amount of money it will take to develop this economy is tremendous
So in the end it's not
Right, it's going to be a consortium of sovereign government's sovereign wealth funds and then the users and consumers
Of energy. We're going to run the commercial side of this John is probably going to be stuck running the bank
But so what
It's exactly right? I mean, this is not a one-man band or two man. You know, this is a huge
international consortium we're talking about but just trying to simplify it, you know in terms for
audience interruption
Just talking about the bank we talked about exactly
so the bank part which is, you know, literally, you know separated a fence line away from from the production facility
that
Bank charges a fee, you know, we don't do it out of the kindness of our hearts
so every kilogram of thorium gets taken in and let's say it is arbitrarily thirty five bucks and
the lifetime perpetual care that kilogram is going to be
$10 or $20
There's a margin there that we can use as you make thousands of tons of
Rare earths you get thousands. You almost get as much
thorium because you do rare earth out in these mineralization and so as we accumulate
thousands of tons of thorium
You know, we will accumulate an account and that account
that is the magic of this is the millions of dollars in that account
Once again, we don't go with our hat in our hand begging the DOE the NRC to fund
Reactor development. We know that that's a very fraud thing
we have excellent programs like gain and programs like that and the best National Labs in the world, you know, but
we we can privately fund if this hat if we can do this the
Bank can be the bank to fund private
Research and development and we don't pick winners and losers and Maggie there, you know, somebody comes they ask
You know for funding if they have a good argument and then in a good design
Then they can have access to millions of dollars that and not you know
So I would expect that it would be grants, but you could also you don't think of other funding. Yes
jim- so the bank itself is a really boring place  and you dont really want to hear it because no coustomer would ever drive through
its really boring
So that is a very very kind of boring side of this
the platform is very exciting because the platform says we have authority from the United States congress
or an executive order  or both
To be a platform for multinational funding and so
we have
We are in contact with governments, which sends
Members of their Parliament to our conferences to express their interest to directly invest with us
so if you get the netherlands and you get the Brits and you give the Aussies and you get
Germany has a real problem because they're supposed to be shutting down
Reactors and Japan has no choice and they all start putting money into this thing. This thing becomes a
Very rich environment for you start the development another cashflow source for it is they're not just getting thorium
They're getting uranium
Why would you hold the reader uranium it's got a market
So you would sell that uranium into the energy market and that would generate that would generate meaningful
revenues that would generate meaningful revenues so you would have a steady flow of cash from uranium sales and
you would have
member states buying into this when you have all of your member states buying in the sale to them is
You can we can all own this reactor technology together or China is going to beat us to it
And we're going to be buying their reactors and it's going to be a very motivating self motivating actuator for these people
to get together and fund this thing
Because China has major head and the start DOE literally handed them
every single thing
They literally gave them day to day
operational manuals for when they were running the reactor
They actually tasked our universities and National Labs to help China
Develop this reactor and then guess what they realize where this is a threat
So anyway when this went went on the thorium side of this you're going to be going out you're going to be meeting
Sovereign countries just like on the co-operative side for rare earths. You're going to say there's a rare earths threat
There's an energy threat and if you guys all work together as government, you will be guaranteed top-line revenue for this thing forever, you know
(audience interuption) (gordon cut): yOu KnoW i FuNdeD a lOt Of tEcHnOloGiEs aNd fRoM tHe taLK So fAr I wOulDNt FuNd yOu
*Jim john and JJ actually flabbergasted for prob the first time ever *
(more intrupting) Because you're not really starting off with what is the problem that you're trying to solve
What is it about some of the what was it in the rare birds?
That if I have them I can create something that I can't create without
That I really need proof or maybe like micro electronics or something magnets and stuff like that (this is all in the first breafing)
Are you saying you don't you're not fully aware of all the time? Are they your talk should start at that low, okay
That's what I'm saying. Is it your
One word here about this take the wearer's
Is it a really an application that it's so strategic I gotta add
Something that me in the US has to control
Well, I hope I'm just telling you you need that story to get me excited about the rare purse now for you
Okay, you're right. Nobody you should do with Tory because people say oh my god
Uranium reactors. We don't want it. You should have a big ball of thorium. You should sit on the damn thing
You're gonna sit right on this area carry a bowl of thorium in my pocket
And what we do I go into classes with thorium and do something to bring my
Well
Ramp it up and I can
We can riad ress why
critical materials like rare earths are working for like
gyroscopes and space travel and homem lasers of
About 300 meetings with these men in in offices. That's how they do it Jim Kennedy has
Because because the first the first from eleven to one was about rare earths
Yes, the whole talk
We're hearing the thorium now. Why on earth do I really care about thirty because you process births
Where earth skies have a problem they end up in Astoria. Yeah, they end up with a story
We say news uranium where you can use thorium. Yeah. Yeah, they're not equal
Right was eighty percent of the throwing the energy up
Some things so we start with the tons. I'm an independancy. I'm not one of you guys you start with a ton of uranium
And you'll get out
Not you'll get out too. You'll use 2% of it and the other 98% will be
Waste materials according to caste. Yes, so we start with a ton of
That's (uncut)
So let me let me stay open here real quick. He is right with the nuclear reactors
We used today in light lager boiling water reactor. They use about two percent of the available energy
98 percent of it becomes really nasty shit
We got a store for a hundred thousand years and it's all sitting in parking lots because they can't get the Yucca Mountain
So thorium won't summer activists started the tough a guy who invented the light water reactor
Alvin Weinberg the guy out of the Pens
He knew that that thing was a first concept reactor and wasn't shouldn't be used for civilian energy
It had risks so him and Eugene Victor and a bunch of other guys got together and they developed
what they call a molten salt reactor and it takes the fuel in the
Fluid that's the coolant and they just keep recirculating it through the core until they burn up what
99.9% of it you don't that cost of this reactor is compared to this one about one-fifth
That thing can actually be financed. I would love to have (more inturpution cut here)
And have you take care of so I don't want a big reactor
Finish my little talk here job on all afternoon
So, let me just please
(end cut) It's actually not about the reactor right? It's not about the stuff it's the thorium Energy Alliance
These days is about the thorium bank
mostly because
The millions of dollars the resources that that would generate
Wouldn't just go
those grants or loans
Wouldn't just go
To reactors. I mean, that's what everyone gets excited about. I'm gonna have a
micro reactor in my glove compartment
It's like that's great
But there's so many other things and this is what I really look forward to
every fighter plane built in the United States used to be made with
material called mag core it was some of the strongest lightest material ever and
For various nutty reasons. We've stopped using it partly because it's a mere alpha emmiter
but you can still get thoriated welding rods the best welding rods you can get and
There's lighting technologies
There are medicines
There's all sorts of we barely barely understand the metallurgy of thorium. And so
Yes
There's a huge opportunity to burn it and we can burn it in really great reactors
Probably the best version of every reactor is the molten-salt reactor, but there's other reactors out there
I don't you know, I try not to when I am wearing my thorium Energy Alliance head
I try not to pick favorites, you know, but I if you, you know, catch me in the hallway
I'll tell you a particular couple of favorites of mine
and
so I think
That is the real promise of this that
There is boogeyman out there, you know China does have an eight-year head start and they've built a huge supply chain
You know, they're not idiots. They didn't just build a reactor
Anybody could just copy the blueprints of the reactor that we built in the 60s and build it again
Well what then you got a reactor they've got thousands of people in
a multi-year commitment and they've got a nuclear graphite Factory and they're making the
All the the super metals the hastelloy that they need they've gotten a salt production facility
They've got five working salt loops and in six months, they're going to turn on their first two megawatt very modest
But very good more than we have two megawatt thorium molten-salt reactor. And so there really is fantastic
Unbelievable promise and the idea that when you process rare earths, I mean, I'm not a religious guy
But there are some weird things out there that the mineralization for this stuff
monocyte xenotime apatite, you know, it's got
Phosphor that we desperately need for fertilizer
It's got rare earths that we desperately need for advanced technologies and it comes with the fuel to run it all you know
It's got its got the thorium. I mean that's pretty good. Somebody put those three things together in one little rock and
so
that just my conclusion to this is
You go out in the world or you read the paper it is
utterly
Unpleasant right? We've got a young kid over there that we've effed up her world and she's gonna be stuck working on it
I just might nephew just had a couple kids, you know
it's Jim's got some beautiful girls and everyone who has
something to look forward to in the future has to be
Really detected by the trajectory were on but I don't see it. I see a
future of energy abundance and
Energy equals wealth and energy is what brings people out of poverty and not only can the United States
Replace and de-carbonized and have an even better more prosperous world we can lift
billions of people out of poverty and
We can do it on the back of thorium
Garbage and so that's a that's essentially you know what I have to say about it
I mean, I think I think the opportunity to use thorium is
It's the most uh, tur
Optimistic thing you can do to lead to a world of energy abundance
Forever for thousands of years. We had thousands of years of thorium available to us
Yes
audience question- so does Rubio's bill punch all of these holes that you have?
Looks pretty good to me. I mean the very title of it is the thorium bearing minerals
rare earth coperative I mean it's got thorium right in the title. Yeah
That's why that's why I just spent another couple thousand dollars
without telling my wife and
coming out here again and talking to you beautiful people to try and
encourage you to do whatever you can to get that that bill passed or
at the very least if all the bill does is gets the
Executive to take an executive order action. Well, that would be great because the bill is symbolic of support in the Congress
audience question- how much support are you getting from commerce and the white house?
JJ-We probably can't speak they are all listening and interested thats all we can say
Yeah
They're listening. They listening to what we had to say
you know, what if the United States Congress the House and the Senate will pass a
regulation that mirrors an executive order they have
Then what you're sending the president is
bipartisan bicameral support to do this and it takes all the risk out of it for me and there's no risk because
You're asking foreign corporations to build that for that cooperative
You're you're asking them to commit to building an entire value chain in our country
But we're going to be the primary beneficiary of it and what they're going to get for
It is an uninterruptible flow of those materials. We're going to turn rare earths into a utility
It's going to be no different than the electrons coming through there because those electrons
coming through there and make the entire world work and we've done that through utilities because we see that when you give people
guaranteed low cost flow of
basic things that they can get very productive if we do that rare Earth's we're going to have an explosion of
Opportunity to develop technology and if we take the other route, which is around where we say
Hey, we're going to give you guys subsidies and they're $6 magnet costs $6,000. Then it's going to be the end of innovation
the only way we're going to nurture innovation is turn the link this this flow of
Materials just like those electrons just like the highway system
Into a public utility so we can live with a cheaply so to the other side then create possible prosperity
That makes America win and we haven't had a win in a long time
audience question- this morning jim you were talking about how china
Controls at least 75% of the rare earth processing, maybe higher
jim- it was 90 and at the metals level well over 95
They've been developing this capacity sense the 80's?, so what do we know
about China's thorium bank
They have thorium Bank they they store it and they have
They actually admitted to how much they had
You know, it's gone. It's huge but they keep it in what amounts to you know?
They keep theirs in their right to do this because it's not been they keep it in the form of thorium nitrate in sacks
stacked to the roof inside what it looks like giant working buildings and
bainite
That's why there's that's where they're um
That's why they're developing the thorium molten salt reactor the you know the but you know, I I need to very specifically
You know, hold on. I need to very specifically say something about
Molten salt reactors as the Chinese like to say not picky eater, you know, so there's a big big difference
between
developing molten salt reactors of all sorts of stripes and
The fuel you feed them, you know, so a molten salt reactor,
people conflate the two "its a thorium- molten-"
well, maybe it is there isn't you know, you can have a molten salt reactor they get and here's the the
Secret, you know ten minutes after you started on thorium
It's gonna be producing plutonium and all sorts of other weird species. So there's really no such thing as a as a
Thorium molten salt reactor, you know, there's molten salt reactors that are designed to run thorium
There's molten salt reactors that run the uranium tetrafluoride
I just as a sidebar
Editorial note and a promise to some folks out there
I need to make that clear that I I support molten salt reactors and I really like thorium once you get into politics
It's not clarity. It's unclear
jim- Yes, he's right by the way
The same reactor can be designed to do nothing but eat nukes spent fuel cutting in parking lots and plutonium like the the Canadians
It's a great opportunity
if China has a head start on separating thorium why wouldn't we all be available
Why wouldn't they put it into the market and use that to basically your client so so us thorium bank
the truth is thorium is worthless
The people who use it. That's so tiny that you can't sell it
It has no market and even if we're running thorium nuclear reactors from coast to coast around the world
That thorium is still going to be worth about zero. because we will produce so much form waste
how have you managed to develop a market
The market, the market is not in Thorium think of it as yeast right? There's yeast in the air
there's no value to it
There's value in what you do with it, right? So you make beer you make penicillin, you know
lets make some more beer
So the thorium is just don't think of it as zero value
I mean I could put you know, the United States buried something like
50,000
tons of
thorium nitrate cuz we used to think should we better start stockpiling this stuff and then suddenly realize
We're not running out man. We got tons
So there's a huge stockpile of it sitting out
desert the French
have a similar amount just a huge stockpile of thorium nitrate from because the French used to be huge separators of rare earths
And so the Chinese now, but the fact is that is enough fuel for a thousand years
what is the value to the co-op? they have to pay to build the facility and to operate it  for years.
Maybe I didn't make it clear enough
so what the thorium banks primary purposes isn't even to physically store the thorium or
Hopefully to fund research and turn the primary thing that the bank does is it eats the liability, right?
So, let me tell you a super tiny story
Anadarko bought a company called white
industries white industries bought
Another company and that company bought another coming going back a hundred and thirty years that used to make
thorium Lantern Mantle's in Naperville, Illinois
right
So a hundred and thirty years later
there's a settlement and
Anadarko finally
Five companies on is just like the hell with it and they settled an eight hundred million dollar fee
Which is crazy because that's nowhere near what it should actually cost them. But whatever
They're just like get it off. Our plate eight hundred million dollar liability that's joint in several
forever and ever and so part of what we're able to do as a thorium bank is to go in and
Cut that and so now our are a company like a Lucca who would give us
Monocyte from a titanium mine or company like mosaic that will give us
Monocyte or apatite from a
Phosphate mine in Florida, whatever whatever source it is
right now there is no incentive for them to give it to us because they it would still be on their books and
Part of what we can do is cut that liability
And so if there's three legs of a stew that the thorium bank sits on its we eat your sin, you know
We take your liability
we are store safely store crazily safely store your physical and
We are able to use the proceeds to fund advance research about asking the federal government for any money
i Really? Thank you guys you've been so kind to listen to us talk
About this crazly important topic
thank you
the two stories today, do they have to be linket together?
no they must be linked together you cant have thorium without rare earths
The liability would be so tremendous
we need a reactor for the thorium to run on
jim reenacting being excited about the reactor
until those reactors exist for you, lighting more alloys or spacecraft until they exist. We need the story
and we need to eat the liability
It is a fact China has a 8 head start
So they transferred everything that wanted further development for China. It's really far ahead of us because you know what?
We like a good race, right? And so
This is a very special and I dont how it happened, but the truth is
China develops these reactors first
They will be so inexpensive to build the inventor
Alvin Weinberg said all I need is a pot a pipe and a pump and I've got a reactor because I just keep
Recirculating that load through the reactor chamber in the reactor chamber. It's all done in geometry. It's the coolest thing in the world
Outside the space and that reactor chamber. It's literally impossible for that
Reaction to continue it needs a certain amount of geometry to happen
So all through the pipe something's going on it gets back in there and boom, you know
You have the right
Cross-section and the magic happens and then it leaves there and then if it gets too hot you have an alloy or something that melted
It unknown temperature and if for some reason it gets too hot that thing melts and then geometry shuts it down
It can't melt down. It can't blow up
It burns 99% of the fuel which means you don't have a storage issues and the thing is they're so cheap
There's cheap is building a coal-fired plant
So China gets there first, they're gonna offer every single country in the world these for free "No its free here you go
a free reactor, there's two cents a kilowatt-hour to run it forever
But because the fuel is free  go at it and that's really not that's a Trojan horse.
there gonna be charging the rest of the world's a tax  you are going to be paying the Empire you weren't going to be
Under their thumb and when you make anything you have a burden a cost burden that they don't have
They now have energy hegemony
The United States no longer is in the business of energy everywhere, right? The sixth Fleet is out of business
those guys are going to turn into a
Forrest Gump fishing boat because they've got nothing to do because China will so this is why I think it'll happen
Faster because the rest of the world's going to understand these risks and they're gonna realize if we don't work together
We're all losing and we're all gonna be wearing a
Mandarin yoke and we're going to be out plowing fields for the rest of our lives
To give them the resources and the food they need
Nobody wants to be there and anybody who understands this stuff
Understands, they're smart enough to do to us
These reactors this technology what they did with rare earths anything else
 
No matter how I mean we're even for us to snap our fingers they have a thousand reactors at there overnight
We make thorium in such unbelievable excess
we have 100,000 years not even including spent nuclear fuel
All the stuff sitting in parking lots if we we could burn it from
3% to 50% we'd have 500 years of fuel sitting in the parking lots of
Reactors, I mean, it's not just thorium
I mean in Canada the the the plutonium they have in Canada
Something that some calculation Canada can become a hundred percent
You know
That's all liquid fuels - this is like you did all the process heat
applications based on nuclear that you you know
You could run Canada for something like eight hundred years on just the plutonium. They have to sit around from their CANDU reactors
man we have some winz
Gonna be able to shave every other Thursday when my battery gets charged
I have a farm and I love it. I used to work for NREL
So I have a farm in Iowa that I have some solar cells
I wanted to build a windmill but I didn't get around it. But I have solar cells and a bunch of batteries and inverters and
I don't go out there more than
Every other week and in so they have like 10 days to charge up
I and I don't have like air conditioners and the hot tub is nothing
I got like a fan and a radio
And in some lights at night and I've managed to use up all the power
I did like 12 days and I get like a weekend of nights. Hey
I
Always tell people I'm like, I don't know if you've ever owned a house. We had your own well and septic tank
It's a freaking nightmare. You're your own utility
Why would you want to die people are like I got my own solar cells and I love the grid
I'm like, I'm like, alright, well, why don't you do that for your toilet and stuff to me because it's a nightmare
That's why you don't do it it it's so much better to pay the water company 50 bucks a month
Every time I turn on the water comes out
people
appreciate
Civilization
So
They are
$5 prob I guarantee we can make that
The liability my transferring of course, they have to you've got a transfer liability, otherwise the investors run away
Listen I got a roll I lost my plane. You guys are super patient
