Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Here is our friend Cabot Phillips over from Morning Wire about the Manhattan Project 2.0 pursued by the Trump administration. in this AI arms race with China. The United States will lose the arms race if... Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The site of uranium enrichment for the Manhattan Project. And now, over 80 years later, it's the site of a new technological leap.
one that will shape the future of America's fight for dominance. The enemy is China. Their weapon? Digital warfare. To counter this threat, President Trump's Energy Secretary Chris Wright and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman have gathered America's brightest scientific minds together to accelerate scientific innovation using Oak Ridge's supercomputer, Frontier.
So with China's threat growing, I've been sent here for an exclusive look at Frontier and to meet the people working to keep America from falling behind. You've used this phrase, the new Manhattan Project. What does that mean and what are the stakes?
In the Manhattan Project, it was critical that we developed an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany did. Think of the world today if they had led and had an atomic bomb before we did. The world would be unrecognizable. AI has been around for a long time, but it's hitting critical mass now.
In the next few years, AI is going to change our world, not just economically, but in science and also in national defense. China is working aggressively at AI. If they got a meaningful lead on us in AI, it will be a different world in the future. We have to lead and win the AI race, just like we did Manhattan Project. This is Manhattan Project 2.
The last four years, do you feel like we did a good enough job of keeping abreast of our competitors? And what will the Trump administration do differently compared to the Biden administration? The last four years seem to be consumed with theology regarding the environment. We're more interested in helping other countries than we were our own.
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Chapter 2: What is the Manhattan Project 2.0 and its significance?
So we're here today with the Energy Secretary, with my good friend, Congressman Chuck Fleischman, to see what we can do to make certain that America remains at the cutting edge and that we're doing everything we can here in Tennessee to make that so. For folks at home who are asking, why nuclear specifically? Why not coal? Why not natural gas?
What makes nuclear inherently different from those other sources?
Today, the United States mostly runs on oil and natural gas. Those are our two dominant energy sources. But what could become big to the scale of oil and natural gas? nuclear. It's the only technology that works whether the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. Nuclear just provides electricity, but in the not distant future, nuclear will also provide high temperature process heat.
That is the most important energy source in the world. If you want to make steel or plastics and aluminum and all the materials we build everything around us, you need high temperature process heat.
There seem to be two camps when it comes to AI globally. One camp saying collaboration is a good thing, and if any country makes AI advancements, it will benefit all of us. Others saying if the countries making those advancements are China or Russia, they're not going to share that information with us. That's dangerous. Where do you fall on that question?
I think what we have to do here in America is out-innovate everybody on the planet. And creating energy security is a big part of that because this is an inherently energy-intensive business.
Russia, China, and other countries, South Korea and France, not only our enemies are in this sphere, our friends are in this sphere. America needs to win. It is critically important that we have nuclear as part of a key all-of-the-above energy portfolio in America.
We will lose the AI arms race if we strangle innovation. We need to unleash American energy. And if we do that, we will win the AI arms race. We will win Manhattan Project, too.
And to ensure the success of this new Manhattan Project, public-private partnerships are forming. In fact, today's event marks the beginning of a collaboration between the US government and OpenAI, represented by co-founder Greg Brockman. Brockman's shared faith in AI has sparked intense opposition, drawing parallels to the resistance nuclear technology faced following World War II.
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Chapter 3: How is nuclear energy being integrated with AI?
All right, tell us about the 1,000 Scientists AI Jam. This is such an exciting day for us and for the scientists at the National Labs because we're bringing together our AI with the work that they are doing. And so 1,000 scientists are exploring how to use artificial intelligence to accelerate their work.
I've been talking to a number of them, some people who are using it to advance nuclear fusion research, to come up with novel designs that would normally take weeks to do that they can do very fast. I'm talking to people using it for biology and various other kinds of research. Getting a big variety of whole food ingredients into my diet, it's really key, especially with the constant work travel.
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To better understand the research that Frontier will accelerate, I spoke with the director of the Neutron Scattering Division, who oversees Oak Ridge's Neutron Source, a system that provides neutrons for studying the atomic structure of materials. So what does atomic structure have to do with the digital arms race?
As I found out, this research has massive applications for one of America's weakest links, manufacturing.
This is a sample can. So this machine is specifically designed to measure the structure of whatever you put in that can. And that can be anything you want. I mean, it could be table salt. But if you put a material in there and put it in the neutron beam, the data you get out of the instrument will tell you exactly with atomic resolution where all the atoms are inside.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of the AI arms race with China?
This is one of somewhere over 18,000 of these in this room, all networked together to make science calculations.
For the person at home who has a computer set up, they got their laptop, their phone. How much computing power are we talking about on one of these blades?
Huge. This is probably 50 times your laptop, just this one. When we're using our laptop, we're asking it to do a lot of things. When scientists are doing this, they are writing algorithms that have billions of parameters. We're working with some folks from GE designing a new aircraft engine. The amount of parameters that they're looking at is unbathable.
And so they need those really, really fast calculations to make their simulation usable to make decisions for their business.
So this system was debuted in 2022? Correct. How much is it able to be modified to make sure that it doesn't become obsolete?
So when we buy these systems, the technology doesn't exist. We make the procurement and then we design them hand in hand with the vendor. In this case, it was Hewlett Packard Enterprise and AMD, for example. The cooling technology here, we pushed them to make warm water cooling, saving us at least 40% in our energy costs.
And then we pushed them to design chips so that we could make them available to our scientists. A year later, you could buy this chip.
Wow. What sort of possibilities does this technology open up for the future of energy and research in America?
We could run protected health data, which is a huge area for us. We have a lot of users who come to us with huge, huge data sets, and they want to look for trends, cancer-related trends, for example, so that clinicians can make decisions way faster. And so that means we make this big machine available to scientists who have really big problems.
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Chapter 5: Why is nuclear energy considered essential for America's future?
As we approached our destination, we were told to turn the cameras off.
The Oak Ridge reactor here, they were built to figure out different problems in the early days. What's the best material? How do you make sure a reactor's safe? So we'll go inside. You're allowed to film inside.
First, just tell me where we're sitting right now.
We're sitting at the X10 graphite reactor, which is a National Historic Site at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This is where Oak Ridge National Laboratory began. This is the face of the graphite reactor. This is 1,248 channels that go through seven feet of concrete and through a three-foot air gap. into a 24 foot cube of graphite.
The workers loaded the reactor by putting four and a quarter inch slugs of natural uranium into the cube of graphite. They loaded 31 tons and the reactor went critical. It began operating on November 4th, 1943. And then after the uranium,
was irradiated, workers would take it next door to a chemical separation facility, and their workers behind a great deal of shielding would separate out the plutonium from the irradiated uranium. The graphite is a moderator that slows down neutrons. So uranium neutrons circulate when there's no neutron absorbing material to stop them.
And some of those neutrons will penetrate other atoms of uranium and split them. Some of those neutrons will hit other uranium atoms and split them, and so on. And you get a chain reaction.
How much sequestering of information was going on at this time? To keep the secret here, how much knowledge was there of exactly what was being worked towards?
It was extremely compartmentalized. Most of the 75,000 people didn't know what was happening. People would do the job in front of them and they would pass it on to the next room. When the bombs were dropped, the government was very open immediately with what had happened. They said these bombs were made in Oak Ridge and the workers realized what they had been working on.
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Chapter 6: What challenges does America face in the AI race?
Obviously, the revolutionary work that's happening here with the Frontier supercomputer. Is there any nuclear research going on here at the site currently?
Oh, yeah. We have a significant commitment in both fission and fusion energy. So in nuclear energy, we use that supercomputer to model reactors. And we actually have modeled a reactor core. We modeled one of TVA's reactors. TVA started up the reactor, and then we compared our model to reality and it matched.
So what that does is tells you if we want to improve reactor performance, safety, efficiency, let's do it on the computer first and narrow down what might be the best solution. And then in fusion energy, we continue to do work to perfect the materials necessary to control a burning plasma, essentially a sun on Earth.
The sun is a big fusion reactor, and the holy grail, so to speak, in fusion is to produce more power out than it takes to run the reactor. And we're trying to accelerate that and working with private companies to commercialize fusion as an energy source, which would be transformational.
Final question, the Manhattan Project. We have the benefit of hindsight now. We say, oh, well, it worked out. But I can't help but think of the people who came to do this work, who were stepping into the unknown with the technology. They had no idea what the ramifications were. Talk to me about the dangers that were inherent in that work.
The risk for all of this was not only is it going to work, but is it safe? When DuPont built the X10 graphite reactor, they realized there's a risk. Maybe this reactor runs out of control. Maybe we send nuclear particles up into the air or over a wide area. Maybe our workers are killed because we lose control of the reaction. We look back now and go, of course it worked.
This was brand new stuff. From the very beginning, there was this tension of we realize the power of unleashing the atom, but we also realize the great responsibility that comes with it. Science has profoundly altered the conditions of man's life, both materially and in ways of the spirit as well. It has extended the range of questions in which man has a choice.
It has extended man's freedom to make significant decisions. No one can predict what vast new continents of knowledge the future of science will discover. But we know that as long as men are free to ask what they will, free to say what they think, free to think what they must, Science will never regress, and freedom itself will never be wholly lost. What was it like Merlin, to be alone with God?
Is that who you think I was alone with?
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