Amazing prospective solution, seeding the oceans. But at the end of the conversation, it would seem nuclear power is the real solution. Stop the emissions. That done, would we still need the ocean seeding solution?
The problem is timing. New generation nuclear technology is going to take another decade to be mature, then another decade after that to roll out at scale. We can’t afford two more decades of rising emissions.
Ocean photosynthesis is a stop gap, but an extremely important one.
This was truly a great topic, Dr Toro. Thank you for that and for the work you do. I've never heard of this strategy before, perhaps it really CAN help us fix the climate mess we put ourselves in. I really hope so, in a way I don't see many other paths.
Thank you Josh for your push backs, very effective. They helped Dr Toro to go deeper in the details. I believe your counterpoints, and Dr Toro rebuttals, cleared many of the questions i had on the theory he is working on.
Two decades seems pessimistic. There seems significant interest in modular small scale nuclear, particularly for data centres. Bill Gates and others are driving it.
Unfortunately not all SMR designs are actually advanced. Some are just smaller versions of those old 1950s designs. They can be rolled out more quickly, but they’re not transformational like the next generation designs…
Kudos to Quico Toro for putting a concrete, testable idea on the table with the “Growing Oceans” phytoplankton initiative. As he explains, the aim is not to seed new organisms but to restore natural nutrient cycling by fertilising the phytoplankton already present, an approach inspired by the whale pump that once made mid-ocean waters far more productive. A striking natural analogue is the Tonga undersea vent, which fertilises a patch roughly the size of Germany and is estimated to absorb about 15 million tonnes of CO₂ a year. The project’s plan for careful, stage-gated trials, from lab tests through progressively larger pilots with regulatory checkpoints, is the right way to manage ecological uncertainty while measuring real-world impact. If it works at scale, it could contribute toward gigaton-level carbon removal, complementing deep power-sector decarbonisation rather than substituting for it.
We should also focus on decarbonisation that has worked. France standardised on nuclear and ran a national system with very low emissions for decades. Germany leaned hard on wind and solar while closing nuclear and still needs fossil backup. That is the lived contrast. As Quico Toro notes, the current mantra to electrify everything and embrace renewables is not working because emissions keep rising year after year. He also points out that weather dependent renewables are affordable at small shares but at higher shares they introduce variability, price swings and large land needs. Wind and solar are excellent for pushing out coal and gas at moderate shares, but no economy has fully decarbonised using wind and solar alone. The systems that got closest anchored themselves in firm low carbon hydro and nuclear capacity and used renewables around that core. The goal is whole of life carbon reduction above all. If a grid must rely on fossil firming it is not fit for purpose; cost, speed, land and materials matter but are secondary.
Energy demand is rising fast, yet weather dependent renewables have struggled to replace existing demand, let alone cover new loads like data centres, electrified heat and industry. As Quico Toro points out, the mantra to electrify everything and embrace renewables has not stopped emissions rising each year, and these technologies are affordable only at small shares before variability, price swings and large land needs bite. That is why we should look seriously at advanced fission that can scale and run 24/7/365 anywhere with compact land and materials footprints; in Toro’s view, nuclear is the superior route to reliable, firm zero carbon power.
Pehaps Mr. Szeps you could interview one or both of the following:
Ed Pheil, Chief Technology Officer at Exodys Energy (formerly Elysium Energy). Their molten chloride fast reactor concept is designed to consume spent nuclear fuel and weapons material while delivering reliable power with passive safety characteristics. This is my personal favourite option to date. It is part of a broader global race on molten-salt fission that now spans the US, Canada, Europe and China.
Thomas Jam Pedersen, Copenhagen Atomics. They are developing factory-made molten-salt breeder modules with a thorium blanket and a uranium fuel salt, aiming for mass manufacture and very low operating costs. Even if specific claims evolve, the focus on repeatable, container-scale hardware is exactly the kind of industrialisation nuclear needs.
Last, currency issuing governments can (without taxpayer dollars and bonds) capitalise, build and own firm zero carbon plant directly, instead of facilitating rent seeking intermediaries. Public purpose finance-built France’s fleet; the same approach can build the next one. If the test is maximum real world carbon reduction over the full life of the system, firm nuclear belongs at the centre of the plan. Rather than pour money into complex market subsidies or monetise carbon, a better use of public finance is to build, fund and operate modular reactors in developing countries before they lock in fossil fuels. As Quico Toro notes, for every tonne of carbon dioxide avoided in rich countries, developing countries have added about five, which is why scalable, reliable zero carbon power matters most. In his view, the superior answer to this reliability problem is nuclear energy that is affordable, reliable and fundamentally safe.
This was a fascinating conversation. Quico was spot-on, in my opinion, about the reasons why the current emissions reduction measures are failing. I really hope he is right about ocean fertilisation too, and that we start to hear about further research in the near future.
Wondering if Josh started with Venezuela to put Quico in a sympathetic light. As he was about to stand in front of us all and say ‘yes, you are all wrong’
I think it worked if it was on purpose or not. Good job Josh.
Please don’t let these people do this to the ocean. The cane toad analogy was a good one. Josh you should have Bjorn Lomborg on, his contrarian opinion is the actual uncomfortable conversation. And based on previous comments you’ve never read the book. Worth the perspective even if you
People do have this intuition about "unknown unknowns" — there are risks out there that we don't know about yet, so it's best just not to develop such and such a technology at all.
Of course, if we applied that reasoning to new drug development, we'd just never develop new types of medicines at all: you can't ever be 100% sure what will happen when you put a new compound into a human body, after all.
We understand that just stopping all new drug development is not a reasonable solution, though, because people will die needlessly if you do that. So instead we develop protocols to manage the risk associated with developing new drugs: we start in the lab, assess safety and efficacy, then go to a small trial, assess again, if it works and if it's safe you scale up, and you keep doing that until you have a new drug in the market.
Well, lots of people are going to die from climate impacts if we don't develop new technologies to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So we better manage the risks of doing that. Which we can do, by starting in the lab, assessing safety and efficacy, then going to a small trial, assessing again, if it works and if it's safe scaling up, etc. etc.
You have to create off ramps so you know to stop if what you're doing is not safe, or not working. What we shouldn't do is let the existence of risk paralyze you and stop you from generating new technologies at all.
I'm glad to hear there are people approaching the climate problem from multiple directions. We should diversify our search for a s solution, in case the current solutions of today don't pan out.
Josh, please have a nuclear expert on (not just an advocate). Quico seemed mostly right, but to his own admission, he's no expert (and neither am I). Worth pointing out is that we've had meltdown proof reactors basically since the begining (quoting from Wiki, emphasis mine):
The TRIGA was developed to be a reactor that, in the words of Edward Teller, "is safe even in the hands of a young graduate student." Teller headed a group of young nuclear physicists in San Diego in the summer of **1956** to design an inherently safe reactor which could not, by its design, suffer from a meltdown
The story of how we got stuck with these stupid pressurized water reactors as the standard is incredibly frustrating. Turns out we started developing water cooled reactors mostly because the U.S. Navy needed a way to power submarines such that they could stay underwater almost indefinitely, and nuclear reactors were the only way to achieve that, and if you're underwater all the time, the obvious way to cool them is with, duh, sea water! So that design reached maturity first not at all because it was the best one — it obviously isn't— but just because that's what the U.S. Navy would pay for!
Cooling reactors with water is just a bad idea. Salt, sodium, lead, almost every other coolant is inherently safer. But the thing submarines had easy access to was sea water, so...
I would not call pressurized water reactors stupid. As you note, they arose for historical reasons, yet they have delivered reliable power with a very low whole of life carbon footprint for many decades, unlike intermittent wind and solar systems that still rely on fossil firming for reliability. Had these so-called stupid reactors continued to be built at scale, the planet would not be in the position we are in today. And had the early molten salt reactor work at Oak Ridge not been shelved in the late 1960s, light water reactors might already be a legacy technology.
One of many alternatives, is represented by Ed Pheil’s work. He is the Chief Technology Officer at Exodys Energy (formerly Elysium) and ironically began his career in the US Navy’s submarine program. Exodys’ molten chloride fast reactor (MCSFR) is designed to consume Uranium and Thorium with a focus on spent nuclear fuel and surplus actinides, operate without water cooling, follow load, and achieve passive, walk away safety. It is scalable, and while not small, its major components are sized to be produced in factories and shipped by road.
So yes, water cooled designs became standard because they were first to mature, but they are not a bad technology, and they are not the only path forward. Advanced fast spectrum salt reactors address many of the concerns, if only the average person could view them critically.
Is this really true? there were loads of reactors developed before the first Navy reactor sailed -- not just in the US, but also Canada, the Soviet Union and the UK. At least one of the was even molten salt cooled.. and the Navy even tried molten salt for the submarine reactors.. I think the story is more mundane, water is cheap and simple, and can be directly coupled to steam turbines.
Josh, please stop cutting away to another camera in the intro. We will accept jump cutting, or blowing up the image and cut down the line. Unless of course you think the angle view is more attractive.
Josh says Australia is responsible for 2% of the world carpet admissions, which I thought was a little high. However, upon fact, checking the answer I got was about 1.1%. As compared to Australia’s population, which is something like .3% of the global population. If anything, both of those numbers were a little bit higher than expected for me.
Amazing prospective solution, seeding the oceans. But at the end of the conversation, it would seem nuclear power is the real solution. Stop the emissions. That done, would we still need the ocean seeding solution?
The problem is timing. New generation nuclear technology is going to take another decade to be mature, then another decade after that to roll out at scale. We can’t afford two more decades of rising emissions.
Ocean photosynthesis is a stop gap, but an extremely important one.
This was truly a great topic, Dr Toro. Thank you for that and for the work you do. I've never heard of this strategy before, perhaps it really CAN help us fix the climate mess we put ourselves in. I really hope so, in a way I don't see many other paths.
Thank you Josh for your push backs, very effective. They helped Dr Toro to go deeper in the details. I believe your counterpoints, and Dr Toro rebuttals, cleared many of the questions i had on the theory he is working on.
Thank you both!
Glad you found it inspiring! Alas I’m plain old Mr. Toro — but happy to hear I come across as a Dr.!
I preferred getting the "Dr." wrong, then the other way around!
Two decades seems pessimistic. There seems significant interest in modular small scale nuclear, particularly for data centres. Bill Gates and others are driving it.
Unfortunately not all SMR designs are actually advanced. Some are just smaller versions of those old 1950s designs. They can be rolled out more quickly, but they’re not transformational like the next generation designs…
Maybe.
Thank you for the podcast, very informative. But with all these things, we tend to go with what we are invested in.
A surprising and refreshingly critical podcast.
Kudos to Quico Toro for putting a concrete, testable idea on the table with the “Growing Oceans” phytoplankton initiative. As he explains, the aim is not to seed new organisms but to restore natural nutrient cycling by fertilising the phytoplankton already present, an approach inspired by the whale pump that once made mid-ocean waters far more productive. A striking natural analogue is the Tonga undersea vent, which fertilises a patch roughly the size of Germany and is estimated to absorb about 15 million tonnes of CO₂ a year. The project’s plan for careful, stage-gated trials, from lab tests through progressively larger pilots with regulatory checkpoints, is the right way to manage ecological uncertainty while measuring real-world impact. If it works at scale, it could contribute toward gigaton-level carbon removal, complementing deep power-sector decarbonisation rather than substituting for it.
We should also focus on decarbonisation that has worked. France standardised on nuclear and ran a national system with very low emissions for decades. Germany leaned hard on wind and solar while closing nuclear and still needs fossil backup. That is the lived contrast. As Quico Toro notes, the current mantra to electrify everything and embrace renewables is not working because emissions keep rising year after year. He also points out that weather dependent renewables are affordable at small shares but at higher shares they introduce variability, price swings and large land needs. Wind and solar are excellent for pushing out coal and gas at moderate shares, but no economy has fully decarbonised using wind and solar alone. The systems that got closest anchored themselves in firm low carbon hydro and nuclear capacity and used renewables around that core. The goal is whole of life carbon reduction above all. If a grid must rely on fossil firming it is not fit for purpose; cost, speed, land and materials matter but are secondary.
Energy demand is rising fast, yet weather dependent renewables have struggled to replace existing demand, let alone cover new loads like data centres, electrified heat and industry. As Quico Toro points out, the mantra to electrify everything and embrace renewables has not stopped emissions rising each year, and these technologies are affordable only at small shares before variability, price swings and large land needs bite. That is why we should look seriously at advanced fission that can scale and run 24/7/365 anywhere with compact land and materials footprints; in Toro’s view, nuclear is the superior route to reliable, firm zero carbon power.
Pehaps Mr. Szeps you could interview one or both of the following:
Ed Pheil, Chief Technology Officer at Exodys Energy (formerly Elysium Energy). Their molten chloride fast reactor concept is designed to consume spent nuclear fuel and weapons material while delivering reliable power with passive safety characteristics. This is my personal favourite option to date. It is part of a broader global race on molten-salt fission that now spans the US, Canada, Europe and China.
(Reference Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81QMGOgNb54)
Thomas Jam Pedersen, Copenhagen Atomics. They are developing factory-made molten-salt breeder modules with a thorium blanket and a uranium fuel salt, aiming for mass manufacture and very low operating costs. Even if specific claims evolve, the focus on repeatable, container-scale hardware is exactly the kind of industrialisation nuclear needs.
(Reference Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s6_CFPAuP8)
Last, currency issuing governments can (without taxpayer dollars and bonds) capitalise, build and own firm zero carbon plant directly, instead of facilitating rent seeking intermediaries. Public purpose finance-built France’s fleet; the same approach can build the next one. If the test is maximum real world carbon reduction over the full life of the system, firm nuclear belongs at the centre of the plan. Rather than pour money into complex market subsidies or monetise carbon, a better use of public finance is to build, fund and operate modular reactors in developing countries before they lock in fossil fuels. As Quico Toro notes, for every tonne of carbon dioxide avoided in rich countries, developing countries have added about five, which is why scalable, reliable zero carbon power matters most. In his view, the superior answer to this reliability problem is nuclear energy that is affordable, reliable and fundamentally safe.
This was a fascinating conversation. Quico was spot-on, in my opinion, about the reasons why the current emissions reduction measures are failing. I really hope he is right about ocean fertilisation too, and that we start to hear about further research in the near future.
Wondering if Josh started with Venezuela to put Quico in a sympathetic light. As he was about to stand in front of us all and say ‘yes, you are all wrong’
I think it worked if it was on purpose or not. Good job Josh.
Please don’t let these people do this to the ocean. The cane toad analogy was a good one. Josh you should have Bjorn Lomborg on, his contrarian opinion is the actual uncomfortable conversation. And based on previous comments you’ve never read the book. Worth the perspective even if you
People do have this intuition about "unknown unknowns" — there are risks out there that we don't know about yet, so it's best just not to develop such and such a technology at all.
Of course, if we applied that reasoning to new drug development, we'd just never develop new types of medicines at all: you can't ever be 100% sure what will happen when you put a new compound into a human body, after all.
We understand that just stopping all new drug development is not a reasonable solution, though, because people will die needlessly if you do that. So instead we develop protocols to manage the risk associated with developing new drugs: we start in the lab, assess safety and efficacy, then go to a small trial, assess again, if it works and if it's safe you scale up, and you keep doing that until you have a new drug in the market.
Well, lots of people are going to die from climate impacts if we don't develop new technologies to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So we better manage the risks of doing that. Which we can do, by starting in the lab, assessing safety and efficacy, then going to a small trial, assessing again, if it works and if it's safe scaling up, etc. etc.
You have to create off ramps so you know to stop if what you're doing is not safe, or not working. What we shouldn't do is let the existence of risk paralyze you and stop you from generating new technologies at all.
Feeling better than I have in ages about this issue, hope this all pans out!
I'm glad to hear there are people approaching the climate problem from multiple directions. We should diversify our search for a s solution, in case the current solutions of today don't pan out.
Josh, please have a nuclear expert on (not just an advocate). Quico seemed mostly right, but to his own admission, he's no expert (and neither am I). Worth pointing out is that we've had meltdown proof reactors basically since the begining (quoting from Wiki, emphasis mine):
The TRIGA was developed to be a reactor that, in the words of Edward Teller, "is safe even in the hands of a young graduate student." Teller headed a group of young nuclear physicists in San Diego in the summer of **1956** to design an inherently safe reactor which could not, by its design, suffer from a meltdown
The story of how we got stuck with these stupid pressurized water reactors as the standard is incredibly frustrating. Turns out we started developing water cooled reactors mostly because the U.S. Navy needed a way to power submarines such that they could stay underwater almost indefinitely, and nuclear reactors were the only way to achieve that, and if you're underwater all the time, the obvious way to cool them is with, duh, sea water! So that design reached maturity first not at all because it was the best one — it obviously isn't— but just because that's what the U.S. Navy would pay for!
Cooling reactors with water is just a bad idea. Salt, sodium, lead, almost every other coolant is inherently safer. But the thing submarines had easy access to was sea water, so...
I would not call pressurized water reactors stupid. As you note, they arose for historical reasons, yet they have delivered reliable power with a very low whole of life carbon footprint for many decades, unlike intermittent wind and solar systems that still rely on fossil firming for reliability. Had these so-called stupid reactors continued to be built at scale, the planet would not be in the position we are in today. And had the early molten salt reactor work at Oak Ridge not been shelved in the late 1960s, light water reactors might already be a legacy technology.
One of many alternatives, is represented by Ed Pheil’s work. He is the Chief Technology Officer at Exodys Energy (formerly Elysium) and ironically began his career in the US Navy’s submarine program. Exodys’ molten chloride fast reactor (MCSFR) is designed to consume Uranium and Thorium with a focus on spent nuclear fuel and surplus actinides, operate without water cooling, follow load, and achieve passive, walk away safety. It is scalable, and while not small, its major components are sized to be produced in factories and shipped by road.
So yes, water cooled designs became standard because they were first to mature, but they are not a bad technology, and they are not the only path forward. Advanced fast spectrum salt reactors address many of the concerns, if only the average person could view them critically.
Is this really true? there were loads of reactors developed before the first Navy reactor sailed -- not just in the US, but also Canada, the Soviet Union and the UK. At least one of the was even molten salt cooled.. and the Navy even tried molten salt for the submarine reactors.. I think the story is more mundane, water is cheap and simple, and can be directly coupled to steam turbines.
Josh, please stop cutting away to another camera in the intro. We will accept jump cutting, or blowing up the image and cut down the line. Unless of course you think the angle view is more attractive.
Josh says Australia is responsible for 2% of the world carpet admissions, which I thought was a little high. However, upon fact, checking the answer I got was about 1.1%. As compared to Australia’s population, which is something like .3% of the global population. If anything, both of those numbers were a little bit higher than expected for me.
“carpet admissions”, lmao
It's high time Australia stopped admitting all these carpets...
Stop the carpet boats