At just 29 years old, Taylor Wilson has over 15 years of studying and practicing nuclear physics under his belt. As a child, he built a nuclear reactor in his garage that later allowed him to produce nuclear fission. Through an accelerated education, Taylor was able to work his way into his career as a nuclear physicist straight out of high school. Dedicated to helping create a greener future, he is now using his experience and knowledge to explore the possibilities of using nuclear energy for everyday power.
Taylor Wilson’s Unique Approach to Nuclear Energy
Nuclear physicist Taylor Wilson has been making groundbreaking scientific discoveries since he was a child. At age 14, he became the youngest person to produce nuclear fission, which sparked his interest in nuclear power. His curiosity about science and the natural world blossomed into a passion for solving problems with nuclear physics. While studying at the Davidson Academy in high school, Taylor was given a lab in the University of Nevada, Reno’s Physics Department. After graduating high school, Taylor was able to launch directly into his career, skipping the traditional route of college and graduate school. Currently, Taylor is working on the commercialization of nuclear energy, hoping to reduce our carbon footprint by using nuclear power on the grid.
In this episode of the Li-MITLESS ENERGY Podcast, host Denis Phares sits down with Taylor Wilson to explore his unconventional journey in the field of physics. From starting his scientific endeavors at a young age to pioneering nuclear fusion at 14, Taylor shares his passion for understanding the fundamental forces of nature. He delves into his work on nuclear security, counterterrorism, and non-proliferation, driven by a desire to address pressing global challenges. Taylor envisions a collaborative effort among industry players to drive the commercialization of next-generation nuclear technology, paving the way for a sustainable energy future.
Listen to the full episode or watch the recording on our YouTube channel, and be sure to keep up with Taylor Wilson on his website!
Podcast Transcript
Denis Phares 0:14
Welcome to The Li-MITLESS ENERGY Podcast. And today, my guest is nuclear physicist, Taylor Wilson. Welcome Taylor.
Taylor Wilson 0:21
It’s good to be with you.
Denis Phares 0:23
A lot of people know your story, but I do want to talk about it a little bit because you’ve got a very unconventional story for a physicist, in general. And you started very young as a physicist, went to school, and basically, skipped college, went right to the professional part of it. So, can you give a little background about how that came about?
Taylor Wilson 0:46
Yeah. So, the short version of it all is that I was always interested in science. So, way back when I was, I don’t know, five or six years old, I was interested in science, and I thought I was going to be an astronaut, and was building rockets, and doing genetic engineering experiments in my garage…
Denis Phares 1:05
Just for the record, I thought I was going to be an astronaut too, but I didn’t build any rockets. But, anyway, go ahead.
Taylor Wilson 1:08
Well, I guess I was precocious in that way. I always wanted the real thing. And so, I was just really interested in how the world worked, and how, not only things worked, but kind of the underlying principles of nature and engineering. And when I was 10 years old, I found nuclear science. And I was like, “Well, this is like really interesting. It is the fundamental kind of forces and matter that makes up our universe.” And so, I got into nuclear science, and I was like, “Well, this is fascinating.” And I started collecting radioactive material and decided that I wanted to access some of these very fundamental transmutation reactions. So, I started to build small particle accelerators.
Denis Phares 1:59
When you were 10?
Taylor Wilson 2:01
Yeah, when I was 11, 12 years old. And, at some point, I decided, “Well, I want to build a nuclear fusion reactor.” And so, when I was 14, I produced nuclear fusion, and that was a fun project. But up until that point, everything I had done, it really had already been done. It wasn’t new science, it was just replicating stuff other people have done in the past. But once I built that nuclear reactor, that fusion device, that gave me the opportunity to start doing new things. And the University of Nevada, Reno, their physics department, I had a lab up there throughout my kind of high school years. And there’s a school here in Reno called the Davidson Academy. And so, I grew up in Arkansas, but the whole family moved out so that me and my brother could attend the Davidson Academy. And it was during that time that I had my lab off the physics department and got to build some interesting experiments and do some fun nuclear-related things. And yeah, by the time I was ready to graduate high school, I was like, well, let’s go out and see what I can do, how I can apply this knowledge.
Denis Phares 3:10
Let’s skip college and grad school. Okay, so yeah, let’s start there. So, you had built a nuclear reactor at 14, so obviously, you’re very gifted, you have a lot of interest. And you basically got started on a career as a nuclear physicist. So, did you raise money? Did you start experiments in your home at the university? What progressed there?
Taylor Wilson 3:32
Yeah, that’s a great question. So, going back to what would have been like my freshman year in high school, so I had this nuclear reactor that I’d built. And I started thinking about the ways that I could apply nuclear techniques, or the technology, or technologies that went into that reactor to solving different problems. So, one of the first things I did was work on nuclear security-related counterterrorism and non-proliferation issues. So, say if you have a cargo container that’s coming into the United States, how can we determine if there’s nuclear material inside that cargo container?
Denis Phares 4:08
Why did you go in that direction?
Taylor Wilson 4:10
Well, it’s a great question. I think, for a variety of the things I’ve done in the applied nuclear physics space, there was some problem out there that I’d seen and I thought, well, there’s something I can contribute to that. So, in the case of nuclear non-proliferation, I grew up, I lived through 9/11, and in the environment around in the early 2000s. And I realized that even though the likelihood of a terrorist, or group using a nuclear weapon in a terrorist attack was very low, that the consequence of that happening is a very high consequence of it. So, that was something that was kind of on my mind. And I was like, well, if I have some part I can play, and some way I can help out, I probably should do that.
Denis Phares 4:57
After 9/11 happened, I was a college professor. And I remember that there was, all of a sudden, a lot of worry about terrorism. And often, professors will do work they know they can get funded. And this often related to, well, I think I can apply what I know to counterterrorism. That was not your angle. It’s not like, “Oh, I know, I can get funding for this.” This was true, like interest on your part.
Taylor Wilson 5:27
Yeah. I would say almost all the projects, I have either, A) It’s just something new I’ve thought of, and I’m like, “Oh, no one’s ever tried that, I’m going to go try it,” or it’s something where I thought, “Oh, this is like a really kind of pressing issue that might kind of be a little frustrating or a little stressful to me.” And I think, “Oh, well, I can go out and in some way contribute to that.”
Denis Phares 5:45
So, is funding something you don’t worry about, you just start a project?
Taylor Wilson 5:50
Yeah. So, my kind of background, I started building experiments at my garage. So, even to this day, even though I have obviously…
Denis Phares 5:58
You can work on a shoestring.
Taylor Wilson 5:59
Yeah. And even though I have more resources than I did when I was 14, I still, a lot of times, will start a project in my garage. So like if there’s some new material I want to make, I’ll go out into the garage and start fooling around and trying to make that new material. And then, once I’ve demonstrated I can do it, then kind of scale from there.
Denis Phares 6:17
And then, you work through developing collaborations and getting… I don’t mean to be harping on funding, but as a professor for quite some time, it was all about funding, it was all about how do you… Not only do you need money to actually do experiments, but you’re often judged by how much money you bring in, and you’re kind of sheltered from that in some way. You don’t have to worry about that. That frees you up a lot, but how do you get the work done?
Taylor Wilson 6:46
No, it’s a great question. Like I said, for a lot of the projects I do, I kind of started myself. And then, once I’ve demonstrated, hey, that might work, whether it’s a new material, or a new process, or a new type of electronics, or whatever it is, once I demonstrate that I can do it, or, at least, kind of proof of concept, then I like to go out and build a team around it. So, today, I kind of split my time between two different kind of realms. One is more fundamental science, so that’s more in the academic world, that’s looking at everything from basic physics and chemistry, the fundamentals of radiation, interaction with matter, and even biology. And then, the other kind of realm, which is the applied world or the commercial world. And in that case, these projects come about in a lot of different ways. So, in some cases, I’ll take it to kind of that prototype stage, and then I’ll spin it out and let someone else commercialize it. In some cases, I’ll commercialize it myself. And in some cases, if a company or organization, or the government has a challenge that they are having problems with, I’ll go in and say, “Hey, I know a way we might fix this.” And so, a lot of the work I do, in that way, is contract for others where the government wants to… A good example of that is a project I did with nuclear robotics. So, the government wanted to clean up a site where they manufactured enriched uranium, so they enriched this uranium isotope. And it’s a very challenging project because it’s a very large facility, it’s got hundreds of miles of piping. And so, we developed robots that could basically go through this facility, and inventory, the uranium that was held up in the equipment, and in doing so created a technology that was able to save a lot of money, save a lot of time, reduce accidents, and things like that. And so, I really enjoy that. I enjoy getting to kind of work on my own projects that I kind of think up in the shower. And I also enjoy solving problems that people come to me with and say, “Hey, we have this challenge, do you have any ideas on how we can fix it?” And that’s also very rewarding.
Denis Phares 8:57
That’s great. You’re not limited actually. You work with companies, you work with university groups, and you said you’ve commercialized things yourself as well?
Taylor Wilson 9:07
Yeah. So, it all kind of depends on what the idea is, or what the scale of idea is. So, again, I like working on a lot of different problems. So, on a given day, or a given week, I’ll be working on material science, I’ll be working on radiation biology, I’ll be working on medicine. And, in that way, it kind of keeps my brain firing on a lot of different cylinders, so I get to work on a lot of different areas. Now, one thing, when I graduated high school and kind of branched out on my own, so to speak, I was kind of looking at the problems that existed in society. And so I’d worked on medical processes and problems, I’d worked on security issues, but I kind of looked out the landscape and I saw that energy was going to be this next great frontier. That even at that point, and this is 2011, 2012, I could tell, I had that early inclination that we were on the precipice of this massive transformation in the way that we use energy, the way we consume energy, the way we transmit energy, all these things. And so, that was driven by challenges like climate change, but it also was driven by this kind of very abundant opportunity to do things better than we’ve done it before, and enable new mission sets, and do things more cleanly, and efficiently, and all these things. And so, energy, I would say, even since 2012, has been really the biggest focus of my time. So, even though I spend a lot of time working on a lot of different issues, people ask me, “What are you focused on?” Or, “What’s kind of your biggest priority?” It really is energy.
Denis Phares 10:55
Well, let’s focus on energy. So, what gets you excited now about how nuclear energy can contribute moving forward? Because obviously, there’s been a while, and historically, nuclear energy has been, theoretically, the cleanest kind of energy that we can make. So, how are we going to do it safely? What are the greatest challenges? And what are you most excited about in that realm?
Taylor Wilson 11:22
It’s a great question. And I’ll preface this by saying I’m working on a lot of different energy technologies. Of course, my background is nuclear. So, when I was in high school is when Fukushima happened. And, up until that point, I obviously viewed nuclear as this thing that had great potential, and didn’t probably spend a lot of time thinking about the downsides. And Fukushima really reinforced to me that, obviously, I knew this was very powerful technology, but it was a technology that really had never been perfected. The fact that, in this country, we really have not built new nuclear in a long time. And when we have, it has been kind of the same original light water reactor designs that we initially put atoms on the grid with in the 1950s. So, there was all this opportunity. And it’s not a new concept, for decades, people have talked about new types of reactors whether they’re cooled with metal or molten salts, breeder reactors, all of these things, but nuclear never really made its leap into the 21st century. And so, after Fukushima happened, again, about the time I was graduating high school, I really started to think a lot about how can I help push nuclear into the 21st century. Knowing that nuclear is emissions-free, it doesn’t emit carbon dioxide, and I think, most importantly, it’s an incredibly dense source of power. The amount of energy contained in just a very small amount of uranium is just almost unfathomable. And so, when you think of a lot of these things, just as the amount of materials and resources that you need, nuclear really checks off a lot of boxes because you can build just a few nuclear power plants and produce very abundance amounts of clean energy if you can do it safely, if you can reduce or eliminate the risk of a meltdown. And you can reduce the quantity of radioactive waste and how long you need to store that waste for, and all of these things. So, I spent a lot of time thinking about that, and still do. And so, my hope is that, combined with a lot of these other new energy technologies that advance fission, and then looking out on the horizon fusion will be able to provide a very dense source of dispatchable generating capacity. So, where you have the ability to produce that power on demand without a lot of variability, that matches really well with the other technologies that are really having a renaissance, so to speak. Technologies like solar, wind, geothermal. And so, if we look out, say, 20 years into the future, what does the energy mix look like? Well, today, all the new generating capacity that’s being installed is either really renewables, so solar wind, a little bit of geothermal, but, primarily, non-dispatchable forms of energy generation, and then a lot of natural gas generation. So, the most efficient, or the most cost-effective source of power that a utility may today want that’s dispatchable is these combined cycle gas turbine plants. So, if you’re a utility today, you’re buying a lot of renewable capacity, and you’re buying a lot of combined cycle gas turbine plants. And if we really want to deeply decarbonize the grid and want to go away from fossil fuels, not only for the climate, but for just basic economics, the fact that natural gas is a limited resource and has very unpredictable pricing, if you really want to do that, and you want to go away from fossil fuels, I think looking out 20 years, that mixture could be a mixture of renewables like solar, wind, backed with battery storage, with some advanced nuclear there also.
Denis Phares 15:17
Obviously, that’s where we’re headed. We believe that it will be economical for utility companies to actually install more solar and wind if there’s a lot more storage on the grid. That’s what we’re working towards in terms of the levelized cost of the storage, the safety of the storage. But it’s still a tall order to completely decarbonize without something else, without more nuclear. So, how feasible is it going to be to do that safely? We’re going to need more, right?
Taylor Wilson 15:52
No, absolutely. And that really is the challenge. It really is kind of a necessary thing that we’ll have to have going forward in the generating mix as a not just low carbon, I think a carbon-free, baseload dispatchable energy source, and nuclear kind of fits a lot of those aspects. And so, how do we do it? And my opinion is, we’re probably just not going to see a lot of new nuclear built the way we built it in the latter mid-part of the 20th century where you built these very large gigawatt-scale nuclear power plants. And each one was kind of a one-off design and build process out in the field, and, say, Georgia or somewhere.
Denis Phares 16:34
You think it will be more distributed, smaller?
Taylor Wilson 16:36
Yeah. So, what I really believe in and spend a lot of time working on is this idea of a small modular nuclear reactor that you can build in a factory, very similar to the way that you build airliners. So, if you look back in the history of commercial aviation, early airliners were very expensive, they weren’t that safe. And that’s kind of where nuclear was in the 20th century. But companies like Boeing were able to standardize the design, the regulatory compliance process, the quality assurance process, and everything, and make airliners commercial jets that were safe, that were something that you could insure, that you could build in quantity, and that really opened up the commercial jet age. And nuclear has never really had that. So, kind of what I’ve spent a lot of time working on is this idea of a small nuclear reactor that you can build in a factory where each one is the same design, the same license, the same quality assurance process. And if you can build them in that way, I think, not only do you dramatically improve things like safety and quality, but you can dramatically lower the cost because of those…
Denis Phares 17:48
And ease of deployment as well.
Taylor Wilson 17:49
And ease of deployment, absolutely. And it’s also from a utility standpoint. Utility today, they may want to install nuclear, but it’s a huge hurdle for them to say, “Well, we have to have these massive capital outlays.” And we don’t really know what the installed final cost is going to be, it might be a decade delayed because each one is kind of its own individual design, own site licensing, and all of that. So, by building in a factory and standardizing it, you kind of lower the barrier for a utility to say, “This is something we want to install as part of our generating capacity.” And so, if you can build a nuclear reactor in a factory, you have all these economic advantages, you have safety advantages, and then you just have to figure out what’s the right kind of reactor to build. And that’s what I’ve spent basically the last, I don’t know, decade — doesn’t feel like that long, but last decade thinking about is what is the best reactor, what’s the best coolant for that reactor, the best fuel, the best kind of mode and methodology of operation, all of these things. And so, what I have today, I think, really is that reactor. It’s a reactor that is cooled by molten salt, so it’s a really great heat transfer mechanism. You’ve taken water out of the equation. Water in a nuclear reactor is really responsible for a lot of the kind of inherent instability of that reactor, so the ability of coolant to void or go away, then the fuel can melt the hydraulic potential to spread radioactivity out of the core chemical reactivity that generates hydrogen which can cause explosions. So, just by changing the coolant, you’ve dramatically improved the safety profile of this reactor. And then, you add in things like natural passive circulation for removing heat. In the event of an accident where you don’t need an operator, you don’t need offsite power to remove heat. If something goes wrong, you use fuel that is much better fuel than we use today. Fuel that, basically, can withstand way past the temperature that an accident scenario would ever generate without melting. And you just add in all these different features, what you end up with at the end of this design process is a reactor that is, say, 150-200 megawatts thermal. Use a really efficient power cycle, you might get 80, 90, 100 megawatts worth of electrical power out of that reactor. And it’s a reactor that really, no matter what you do to it, even the conditions, the extreme conditions that the reactors at Fukushima faced with earthquakes, and water inundation, and all these things, there’s just no potential or way for the radioactivity in the core to exit the reactor and cause problems.
Denis Phares 20:39
I’m sure you’ve done a lot of analysis on this. Have you come up with any levelized cost numbers?
Taylor Wilson 20:45
Yeah. So cost is always the big question. What I wanted to do is create a reactor technology that is competitive with combined cycle gas turbines, natural gas plants…
Denis Phares 20:58
We’re talking cents per kilowatt hour.
Taylor Wilson 21:01
Yeah. So, there’s several different metrics you can use. So, dollar per unsold watt, costs for generating of seven, eight cents a kilowatt hour, potentially, less than that, five cents a kilowatt hour, generating cost, wholesale electricity costs. But really, to make it work, to make it pencil out, big nuclear power plants take a long time to pay off. So, a large nuclear power plant that was built, say, in the 1970s, it took a little while to pay off the cost, but I think that if you can build them in a factory, and you can standardize the design, you can get the cost out the door to be really competitive with fossil generation. And then, I think it’s a really obvious case for utility to buy that technology because, not only do you have a technology that is competitive with or comparable with the dollar per installed watt generating of fossil, but is carbon-free. And you don’t have to worry about the pricing of the fuel over the life of the powerplant. So, with things like coal, natural gas, these fossil resources that you have to buy fuel supply for, the price can be incredibly variable over the life of the plant. And another aspect of these reactors that I’ve really worked hard to create is a life of reactor core, meaning even nuclear power plants today really only keep the fuel in the reactor for, say, 18 months. And so, if you can create a reactor where you load all of the fuel in the reactor at the beginning of life for the duration that that plant generates electricity, not only have you done a lot of things for the economics, but you’ve also improved the proliferation resistance and the security aspects of that reactor. So, that’s another aspect to all this, which is, I want to fight climate change, and I want to create energy technology that is producing all these benefits for humankind.
Denis Phares 23:04
But what’s the typical duration that you imagined, like 30 years, 50 years?
Taylor Wilson 23:08
So it depends. I think the first generation of reactors will probably be less than 20-year operating life. Partly, that’s the fuel burn up, partly that’s materials issues and things. But even if the first reactors only have a 15 to 20-year operating life, you might push that with further generations of reactors. But our plan right now, say, the first generation reactors is, even if you have a 15-year design life, you ship it, you fuel it, you run it for 15 years, and then you bring it back, and you can recycle a lot of the components back into new reactors. Not the fuel, necessarily, not right away, but the profile the fuel is… The goal is to make the fuel less radiotoxic. So, not only the isotopes that are in the fuel, but also the duration that those isotopes are radioactive. You’ve changed the profile from light water reactors, and so you have much less waste to deal with, and potentially, have to deal with it for a lot less amount of time.
Denis Phares 24:06
Who buys into this vision now and who needs convincing?
Taylor Wilson 24:09
Yeah. So, it’s a good question. And I always tell people this because people are like, “Well, is it a funding issue, is it whatever?” And I’m like, “Well, no, it’s…”
Denis Phares 24:19
Is it a policy issue, I mean, if it can be done now?
Taylor Wilson 24:21
Yeah. There are policy and funding aspects to it, but really, it’s going to require… Maybe that’s me, maybe that’s someone else, but it’s going to require the kind of first generation of the technologies to be… The reactors to demonstrate it. And once it’s demonstrated, I think you will see a real proliferation of the technology, but it just requires good engineering, good material science, folks that are really smart working through these technical challenges in building that kind of first-of-its-kind reactor.
Denis Phares 24:52
Is the hurdle engineering or is it actual public opinion and policy, and the ability to actually deploy something like this without freaking people out?
Taylor Wilson 25:00
Yeah, it’s a great question. I think today, so 2023, we have mostly moved past the engineering issues. I would say, today, in 2023, it’s now a question of how you execute it and bring it to fruition. So, that’s both funding, although it seems like the Department of Energy and the federal government is very interested in advanced nuclear and supporting it, at least, on a kind of cost-sharing basis in the development where they match private funding.
Denis Phares 25:26
I would imagine they listen to you on this topic.
Taylor Wilson 25:29
Yeah. And we’ve had discussions, and I really do think you’ll see a lot of support. The other thing about nuclear is it’s a very bipartisan issue. So, you have people from the right, the left, across all different administrations and levels of government that are interested in nuclear. If you can make it safe, and you can demonstrate that it’s safe, I think there’s a lot of support across the ideological spectrum for it. And what my hope is that we kind of can change the thinking around nuclear. Obviously, nuclear has a stigma around it, and I would say, probably, most people — I don’t know if this is true or not, I don’t feel this way — but I would say most people probably aren’t super comfortable with a nuclear reactor going into their town or their neighborhood. But I think the technology is there, the engineering, the science is there to change that, at least, in principle. And so, if we can demonstrate a new generation of this technology, I’m really hopeful, from a public perception standpoint, that we can kind of change that mentality. But, as with a lot of energy technologies, really, economics is going to be the biggest driver. And even though nuclear energy is such a great energy source from a standpoint of cost, and carbon emissions, and things like this, nuclear power today is not really a viable economic proposition for utilities because the plants are so expensive to build. So, you’re 30, 40 years out from the building of a plant, yes, that’s a very low-cost source of generating capacity, but it’s a huge pill to swallow for utility to spend billions and billions of dollars without really a lot of guarantees of when that generating capacity is going to come online. So, I think, as with a lot of technologies, and energy in particular, once we really nail down the economics and demonstrate a plan and say, “Hey, we can build these things at a cost that’s competitive with fossil generation,” I think it will really take off.
Denis Phares 27:26
Who’s going to commercialize it, you think?
Taylor Wilson 27:30
Well, so it’s a good question. I would like to. We’re not quite at that skill yet, but I’m hoping that once we find the right industrial partners, big industrial partners that know how to make heavy machinery, that once we find the right partners, and once we kind of line up the right kind of coalition of support funding from governments, and private industry, that we can make it happen. And I don’t care if it’s me, personally, or my company that does it, I think it’s going to require many companies developing this technology. But my hope is that we’ve kind of identified the right set of technologies, and materials, and things, that us and many other people can start making these things because, if you look at just the amount of terawatt-hours per year a country needs to reach a high quality of life and a functioning economy, energy is really a problem of scale. And nuclear has the potential to do that because it’s very dense, and a small reactor can produce 200 megawatts, but you’re still going to need to build a lot of them. And we’ve talked about this in the past, I really don’t think a lot of these energy technologies are all that competitive, I think it’s more collaborative at this point. And we will get to a point, hopefully, with all these technologies, where companies will start to compete within a space, but right now, we need everyone…
Denis Phares 29:03
We need it all right now, yeah.
Taylor Wilson 29:04
… And all the technology is being built out to try to really make a difference in what I think is one of the biggest technological challenges that we’ve ever faced, which is how to make this energy transition. And once we’re done with it, we’re going to be in a much better place from so many different aspects; safety, and health, and economics, and everything. And hopefully, we will put a stop to this burning that’s happening right now where we add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and they’re creating these feedback loops that aren’t great for our planet.
Denis Phares 29:37
Amen. Well, on that note, thank you so much for coming on. And you’re local, will you come back?
Taylor Wilson 29:42
I will come back anytime, absolutely.
Denis Phares 29:44
Okay. Thank you so much. Taylor Wilson, everyone. Be sure to subscribe to The Li-MITLESS ENERGY Podcast on any of your favorite podcast platforms.
[End Of Recording]
