Is the Road to the Future Paved with Upcycled Plastic? Shelly Zhang and Molten Materials Thinks So

Happy New Year friend, and welcome to the 104th episode of the Business four Good podcast. While the show comes out twice each month, year round, we count each year as a new season. So you are now officially listening to the fifth season of this podcast. If you're just joining us for the first time, there are four great seasons of Evergreen episodes just waiting for your download.

But if you want a cheat sheet to the most downloaded episodes ever in the show's history, we have now added a new section on the homepage. Business for good podcast.com so you can go see what listeners have been most interested in. Alright, now onto this episode. I recently gave a speech at the [00:01:00] TEDx Boston conference and while there I saw Sheey Zang give a speech also about her company Molten Materials, and I was highly impressed.

About what she's doing. I knew I had to get her onto this show, and so I tried to talk with her after her talk, but she was swamped with admirers, so I couldn't even get close to her. Thankfully, she replied to my email a couple days after the conference and we recorded this episode together. What is shall we doing that is impressing so many people?

Nearly none of the plastic that we use gets recycled. As we've discussed before on previous episodes of this show, the plastic that we throw into the recycling bin often ends up in landfills since it's just not economical to recycle the plastic. Especially now that China has banned imports of American plastic waste.

So what are we gonna do with all these vast oceans of plastic that we seem to love to. Sheey has an idea, as you'll hear in this episode. The Death of Shelley's father led to the birth of her company, molten Materials. Armed with her PhD in engineering, Sheey has pioneered a method of taking [00:02:00] plastic waste and upcycling it into pavement, Sears, asphalt, rejuvenators, and more.

In other words, she's betting that she can take our. And turn it into her treasure, all while solving the pressing problem of what to do with all of our plastic waste Already. Sheey has earned seed investment, hired a dozen team members filed for various patents, and is now readying her first ever product.

An upcycled, plastic DIY pavement sealer that you can use on your own driveway. Or other cracked surfaces. Her story is an inspirational one, moving to the US from China, earning her PhD, and now founding her own company. I think you'll be impressed too. So let me allow Sheey to tell you her story herself.

Hello Shelly and welcome to the Business for Good Podcast. Hi Paul. Good to be here. It's awesome to be talking with you. You gave a really stellar talk at the TEDx Boston event, so you and I were both speakers there and I was also in your audience and I got to listen to you and I was so wowed.

I thought, geez, [00:03:00] I need to talk to this person on the podcast cuz I was so interested in what you're doing. But before. Sheey to what you are doing now. What led you to this? Like I see you have a PhD in engineering. What was it that led you to think, oh, I want to go get a PhD in engineering.

Shelly Zhang: Oh it's funny.

I, that's a good question. I think growing up you could call me a daddy's girl. I was just really close to my dad and he was a self-taught this inventor. Slash engineer and we will be always be building things together and making things. And sometimes, this little like I started learning electrical circuits from him and learning how to weld very early on.

And, now one of my like meditation self soothing Habits. It's welding, sorry. Sorry. . Oh, wow. Soldering. That's what I want. , right? Soldering. Okay, cool. When I got stressed I would, just sit down and solder some circuits that I needed to do. So yeah, that speaks in that winds back to to high [00:04:00] school.

I guess we had, we first started learning circuits that just somehow was really good at it and I was like, okay, maybe I can do this. I can be an electrical engineer myself. I like daddy . Somehow it just, and then the more I learned into, got into it and the more I feel, wow, this is a fascinating field.

Not just electrical engineering, just engineering and science in general. So that's how I got into engineering. .

Paul Shapiro: And yeah. It's one thing to be interested in engineering and, it's hard. It's funny because, I've never soldered anything in my life to be honest with you.

And so for me it's like foreign to think, oh that would be soothing and meditative to start soldering circuit boards. But I'm glad it was for I'm glad that it was for you. But it's still, it's a far jump to go. Being interested in soldering to thinking, this is gonna be my PhD.

So what happened? You were going to Caltech and then you thought , I really should be an electrical engineer by profession.

Shelly Zhang: It, I mean it, [00:05:00] the moment more, more of came from the, I was doing internship and then I was deci internship I think with Fairchild in Maine not to say anything bad about the company just like a corporate company and then.

I was thinking, should I when I graduated the next year from college, should I stay here or should I get another job or go to grad school? So I was undecided at that point. And then, Just that, the nine, five every day and it I was in an engineering role and I thought, oh, if this is what, like a beginning engineer would be doing and then coming, just go into industry then I didn't like that.

It's the, mostly the nine five, the super, everything's defined. You have a certain role and then. , that's what pushed me over, over the boundary to pursue a grad graduate school, either master or PhD degree. And I just somehow, I think I got, I was really lucky and I got into Caltech and that kind of opened up just [00:06:00] a whole bunch of doors, open, just brought to this.

My mindset to a different level. I'm really grateful for that.

Paul Shapiro: Before you were there, were you thinking, I may wanna start my own company? Or was that an idea that you had once you were in school and you're thinking, Hey, I might actually be interested in being an entrepreneur here. ?

Shelly Zhang: Oh, yes.

I think that I thought I would be. It's just, and actually before I was graduating the from college, the last year I was helping my dad with his business. Just growing up I witnessed my dad as a failed entrepreneur. Like not to, he. Practically, died, tried hard and died trying.

And he's my hero. How my family put through, put me through college was when I was really young and then everything was tough. I grew up in China by the way, and so my dad quit his job and started this business to start to. Television is for people. So I think he would, charge $10 [00:07:00] and he would work three days and to fix one television.

And then somehow, because the whole economic situation in China, there was a lot of opportunities. So he at one point made some decent money with the with his business doing like highway I think for actually making control panels control like machines to that controls the ventilation in the AC for the buildings.

Anyway, and towards the end of my, my second, my first year of college, that business just really wasn't was having a hard time. And then he was pivoting. So he started working on started like making this little asphalt repair, crack filler machine for this Just by, sheer chance for some importer in the us So I was, and then that wasn't making money.

It was a really thin margin cuz as the manufacturer in China, you don't you don't keep the margins. It's the importers that do. And then I. , I was helping him starting was like, dad, we don't need, we don't need somebody else. And they're I see how, they're bullying you.

Let's just, [00:08:00] I'm gonna sell it for you. Let's just sell it here in the US ourselves. So that's how. I started this asphalt store online trying to sell da machine. . Yeah.

Paul Shapiro: Wow. That, wow. That's really something. So you started this store basically to try to get around these fees that were, that he was paying.

So Molten then is not really the first company that you started.

Shelly Zhang: No, it's not the first company. It's the first company I'm very passionate about though , . But but I think I went through my whole, my, my own business school for the last decade starting, I was saying 20 11, 20 2012.

2011, yeah. .

Paul Shapiro: So you have you have your formal PhD, but you also have your informal mba then Nice. . Yeah. I'm sure that he really appreciated that. So when you got into that, you're doing like, things relating to pavement. When did the idea go off in your head that maybe there was some play here?

That you could actually do something good in the world of pavement? It's one thing to do something because you wanna help your [00:09:00] father out. It's another thing to think I can actually solve a serious social problem, like plastic.

Shelly Zhang: Yeah, it's a very good question. It's it how the story developed was then I've always wanted do something related to environment.

But I was in grad school and doing this medical implantable devices, so that was somehow unrelated. But Okay, let's rewind the story a little bit and see how I got here. I was helping my dad throughout, on the side, throughout grad school. And then he passed away from cancer. He got cancer in 2015, just a year before I graduated Caltech from Caltech.

And then so I was left with the store, right? And then so I had, I was left with two choices. One is to. Shut down the store. And in that sense, it's to me it's like sh letting the business die, right? together with that. And then the other choice. And get a job.

That would be the first option where, work at Google or work at some big pharmaceutical company. And [00:10:00] second is to continue this and make something great out of this business. I think I took the maybe the irrational to the option. And all my friends think I was crazy, but it was pretty clear to me I wanted, I didn't want the business to die.

I think if I wanna make something I put my own passion into the business and morph it into something that, that's good. , that's legacy Levon. That's in one sense I feel connected to him. The second is, it, I it's like my passion. And then I was luck also, luck strike, and I was pitching around some AI company at that time.

I thought I'll change this into this like I made, I wrote a AI software that would detect potholes and cracks on the roads trying to sell to the go. That you will mount it like in this software will be in the like a smartphone camera smartphone camera, collect the data, and then the software would do all the learning.

So that will be mounted on the like [00:11:00] garbage truck and et cetera. So that be selling to government and I was pitching it around. So this investor to, I met this

Paul Shapiro: investor to who were you pitching This? This is you're pitching it to investors, you're pitching it to government agencies. Okay, got it.

Shelly Zhang: Yeah. At that time it was just a prototype of the software. So I was pitching to investors and trying to yeah, basically get that off ground and then the, this investor. What turned out to be the investor, right? I'm talked with many, but Tom, he was saying, you're gonna be selling to governments, you're gonna be a vitamin which is a nice to have.

It's not a painkiller. I'm sure Paul you're in business and you're great ceo. You know all about that, right? Selling is gonna, and also selling to government, selling to G is gonna be really long, tough selling cycle. And then why, then we started talking about this the plastics, how all the landfills are filled up.

And because that, at that time was 2018, that was a was 2019. So that's the year after China has stopped taking in plastic waste cuz [00:12:00] all of our plastics, all of our like municipal waste To be just literally packed into containers and shipped to China. Then they would do the heavy lifting and recycle.

And China in 2018 decided they have enough on their own they to recycle plastic wise. So they banned all imports of waste plastics. And then that's why the system got a shock in Europe and in, in us, all the, like the developed worlds. So you used to be able to. You used to have to pay for these waste plastics.

And now they're giving it for free and nobody will take them. They just end up in landfills and they so you actually have to pay to dump in landfills. And so we, Thomas, I thought it was a, It was it is a problem, obviously it's a problem. And also it presents a huge opportunity because if, cuz chemically it's the same thing.

It's a plastic if, and you know it, if we can somehow make use of it downgrade it or something to put it into Asph asshole in [00:13:00] a way then that would be a big business. And it's good for everybody. It's a win. Yeah, that's how that. Go ahead. Sorry.

Paul Shapiro: Oh, that's okay. It's an impressive story, Shalley.

The idea that you could turn, trash into treasure basically, but how do you do it? What is it that actually, you go to a landfill, you take a whole bunch of plastic out of it, and how does that become something that then goes into a highway?

Shelly Zhang: It's a very good question.

Basically the problem with landfill not being useful is as prob I probably touched a little bit in, in the talk. So now I can expand here a little. It's mostly because the way we're trying to recycle them, we try to sort everything out and make them into. upcycle them in a sense to make them into their original shape.

P e t as p e t and l d p as l d p. It's very hard to do with plastic and it's just thermodynamic, thermodynamically upheld very energy intensive, doesn't, is fighting against nature, fighting against physics. That's very hard to do. [00:14:00] And what we're trying to do. Instead of trying to make them pure again, we make a soup.

So we take all this mixed plastic and then we would thermally break them down in the absence of oxygen. So it's also called cracking or pyrolysis. Basically if we're careful and then, control the parameters, we can Break down these to have different groups of useful chemicals that would have like important performance.

What that would enhance the performance of asphalt. So basically we take the landfills and then we make a soup of different, group of groups of useful.

Paul Shapiro: And so is this being used as a sealant where there is a crack or a pothole, or is this the actual road? Could you pave a fresh road with this?

Shelly Zhang: Oh, okay. It's a very good question. This what we're making, it's at least right now, is a additive to asphalt. So what it means is we used to have your [00:15:00] asphalt, and so what we put this in to make the road last longer, and actually there are, depending on how we crack this these plastics, there are different functions we can provide.

For example, we. One product is called the Rejuvenator. What it does it's a Asti Lauder for asphalt . So it's like a face cream anti-aging face cream for asphalt. So what one, so one use case. It is, you would pave your roads and then you would spray this rejuvenator, right?

This anti-aging cream every year. So as a maintenance, which people do spray similar petrochemicals. And then you spray this to prevent the premature aging of asphalt. So instead of say the road would be repaved every 10 years, you can extend this to say 2030. So this actually tackling Oxidative stress of, everything is ha is under oxygen, right?

That's on the planet earth. And we're all under oxygen stress. So it's like [00:16:00] giving the vitamin, giving vitamin E, vitamin C, the antioxidant to the asphalt. So that's the additive we provide. That's one of the

Paul Shapiro: s interesting. All so you, so in that case, you're more like a vitamin for the asphalt as opposed to the painkiller for the asphalt

Now I think about it, yes. . Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that, oh, that's really cool. So how far along are you, you mentioned you have an investor. How much money is, has molten materials raised so far? Like how scaled does this process? Uhhuh ?

Shelly Zhang: Yeah. I, unfortunately, I cannot disclose the amount, but we the investor had Like personally putting, three rounds already, and I, we are setting up a pilot.

A pilot production facility in Sacramento, actually around Sacramento in that area. Okay. Around, oh, cool.

Paul Shapiro: Alright. I hope to come visit. I hope to get an invite to come visit. That would be pretty cool.

Shelly Zhang: Yes. When we're demo ready for sure. And we're hopefully in the spring cuz we're setting it up as we speak right now.

And hopefully next year we'll have our first product out and [00:17:00] that's when we'll be looking at some, like the first series. Got

Paul Shapiro: it. So these products are not being commercialized just yet. Your, the company is still pre revenue.

Shelly Zhang: We have our correct in the sense that this product is not being revenue it is not generating revenue yet.

And we do have our bicycle store . That's how I like to think. We are profitable in the sense we have, we'll have a slightly longer runway than we support our own r and d with our existing. The store I had, helped started with my dad, so , the bicycle store to the Wright brothers.

That's how I see. Cuz they use their revenue from their bicycle store to support the r and d of their flight the adventure. Eventually they succeeded. So that's how I would like to tell my employees, our team that's how I see this. , what we're doing now. . . Okay.

Paul Shapiro: Cool.

All right, very cool. I read on your website shall we said that, you could basically use all of the world's [00:18:00] plastic and instead of landfilling or incinerating it, turning it into roads. That's a lofty claim. And yeah. I wonder how many cracks and roads, like how many, how much demand is there for this the entirety of the world's plastic is of course, billions of pounds of plastic.

And you're saying that you could single-handedly take all of that, subject it to your process and just revolutionize how we make roads is that's the claim.

Shelly Zhang: Yes, that is the general claim, and it's based on just the pure calculation of how many asphalt row there are in the world. And actually how many are then there's a maintenance and that was a maintenance site.

And how many new roads are being built each year worldwide. And then I'm not. I can, or I want to single-handedly, I would welcome, people and, other startups and doing, taking plastic other ways. The reason I put that in is I got excited because numberwise this, we ha we paved enough rows to be able to take in all this [00:19:00] plastic.

Paul Shapiro: ,

that's the take. . So will you be the one selling this or are you looking to license the technology to others who might be able to scale it up more quickly to then go and do that? What's the business model here? Is it that, as can my wife and I we're homeowners can and we have a crack in our driveway will I be able to, buy a box of mol and pavement sealer that I can utilize in my own?

Shelly Zhang: Yes. Hopefully next year. Okay. It's our first the current business model is, will be the manufacturer and we'll make it in house. Then, and then our first market will be actually the DIY market, because that will be the best like the fir, the fastest iteration. We can do the.

Product feedback cycle we can have in terms of how we need to improve and all that. And before we go pursue DLTs, for example and the bigger contractors. So to, yes, to your question, you should be able to buy box Moin hopefully next year. And in terms of. Sorry. [00:20:00] The second question is yeah, will,

Paul Shapiro: will there be a play toward, yeah.

Will there be a play toward licensing? There's, presumably companies that like, you're an expert in this technology of how to turn plastic into something that can be a road sealant. But presumably there are companies that have extensive manufac. assets already in place.

And I bet , that some of them may want to license your technology so that they can do that. So do you have the patents in place where you'll be able to license this to them? And is that of interest to you? Or do you want to do it all yourself?

Shelly Zhang: Yes. We have the ips and then it, anything is possible, right?

It's whatever makes sense. And then whatever opportunities comes our way. We're open to that, to all opportunities.

Paul Shapiro: Cool. Okay, great. So when you say you have the ip, you have filed for the patents, or you already have patent protection, granted. Oh, it's pending. Okay, cool. Yeah. It's exciting what you are building here.

Sheey could really make a, obviously a really big difference. How big is the company? Now, I know that you've raised some cash from an [00:21:00] individual investor. I know you're not disclosing exactly how much, but how many folks are working at Molten?

Shelly Zhang: Okay. We have we have about a dozen people. It's a small team.

. And I try to keep it lean and on, on top of that with it's individual contractors and stuff.

Paul Shapiro: Okay, cool. Yep. And so the goal is that by the end of next year, so by the end of 2023, you're gonna have the first products out to market. Yes. Exciting. My

Shelly Zhang: fingers crossed. Alright. . Yes. I believe in the tech that's, it's just a matter of implementation, right?

Yeah. And when things scale up and all, we just need to learn as we set it up. Indeed.

Paul Shapiro: All right. Very cool. Is there a difference between one type of plastic and another do you have to have access to a certain type of plastic and that you can't just use any plastic that comes your way.

Shelly Zhang: Yes the chemistries in different plastics are very different. And what's good about this technology is if we keep it in within certain temperature range, we have and we're very tolerant in the [00:22:00] products we can make a soup, right? And yes the plastics are important.

However it's We don't have to be as careful as the, say the upcycling folks, they have to get 97% purity. No, we just need to say, make sure we have like within 20, 30% range of, LTP for example, and then the general landfill. That's, that reflects the general landfill.

So we're not too picky. .

Paul Shapiro: And why go to the landfill? Like I presume that recycling factories have this, have, have a much easier way to give you plastic that you may want. Is there a reason to go to the landfill where things are commingled versus just going to a recycling factory that may have plastics so they can't.

That's a very

Shelly Zhang: good question. I think actually post-industrial the, what you're saying, like the, we are working with factories. So I cannot disclose the names but yes, we are factory so they want it zero waste, closed loop. They wanna say their productions that way. And then it [00:23:00] works very well for us as well.

So to take directly post-industrial plastics and break them down. So what we'll do That's obviously the preferred way, but eventually we really want to be able to attack the landfill problem. , because that's where most things are. That's where most where the problem is, where other people cannot.

deal with. So how,

Paul Shapiro: how does that happen? If you go to a landfill, it's this massive dump of just intermingled trash. Do you require humans to go through and pick out the pieces of plastic that are in there? Like how do you actually work with a landfill to recover those pieces of plastic in order to upcycle them?

Shelly Zhang: .

Yeah, that, that's very good question. Right now, if we wouldn't be digging up landfill per se, it'll be like instead of dumping in landfill, people will come to us. Got it. We'll take them for

Paul Shapiro: free. I see. So people when you'll be averting waste, that would go into the landfill.

Exactly. Got it. Interesting. So basically instead of paying to dump it in the landfill, they'd give it to you for free.

Shelly Zhang: Cool. Okay. They don't have to pay. We don't have [00:24:00] to pay. Yeah. And then in the end it's a much, it's a cheaper product even and performs better. Then digging up then the petrol based, when it becomes like a valuable thing and we can sell it for cheaper. So it's a win.

Paul Shapiro: That's right. So when you say cheaper than petrol based you mean cheaper than what I as a homeowner would go and, if I went to Home Depot to purchase a product that was like a pavement, see?

Or you'll be selling it for cheaper than what I would pay for that.

Shelly Zhang: That's idea be we're able to sell for cheaper. It's because we can make it for cheaper. I see. Cool. Basically, what if you just go get a box of maybe just to be more accurate, a bottle of rejuvenator or like a jug of it. Today you'd be probably paying two to $3 per.

Per pound. It's actually, the stuff is cheaper and more expensive than gasoline. It is a niche market. So anyway and this rejuvenator is mainly mo is made mostly from asphalt. I see. And then so asphalt price, because the Ukraine war and [00:25:00] Covid and all the logistic problems everything compounded price went up like three times over the last year.

Last two years. , that's why all and plus at, so that's one. The price of this stuff had really skyrocketed. And then that's why you have to pay more expensive, more higher price than gasoline to, to get this to get this, something that presume will be cheaper to make.

And. And we will be able to it will be a perfect opportunity for us because our costs have increased. It's zero, still the same, in terms of raw costs. Raw material wise. Yes. So we have a competitive edge. Cool. So from the core technology. Yeah. Okay. That's what I'm really excited about.

It,

Paul Shapiro: it sounds very exciting. If you have a free feed stock in order to feed into your process, that's pretty good. So basically your, your energy and your labor costs are gonna be your, the primary cost of goods sold for you. I can't wait sheey to purchase a box of Molten for my home.

I'll look forward to that. I hope you'll let me know. But in the meantime you've been running your own business for some time [00:26:00] now. Molten is only a couple years old, but obviously as you mentioned , you were doing. You were doing your own business even prior to that. So in your own education, either as your D I Y M B A program, or even in your formal PhD program, were there any resources, Sheey, that were useful for you in your own journey that you would recommend to others?

Any books or anything else that you think somebody would be wise to check out? .

Shelly Zhang: Yeah. I think there are many great books. It's all, the stories of of how o other entrepreneurs really made it big. There was one, for one example it's like this book called Shoe Dog. It's how the Nike like how Nike became Nike.

And it's really this the owner, the entrepreneur himself that made something possible. Keeps pursuing wind to Japan a bunch of times. It's a really fascinating story. Shoe Dog and another book I, maybe a little similarly unrelated, but it really changed my life. I wanna recommend to any entrepreneur, scientist, or just any person is called, it's this book about [00:27:00] Richard Feynman.

It's called Shirley. You're joking, Mr. Fey. So it's about, it's, it is about, it's anecdotal stories of of Fi told about Fymen. I think he told, with his drumming buddy later on of all these stories from when he was in college too, later, graduate school and then the PhD and as a professor and how he won the Nobel Prize and okay.

.

Paul Shapiro: We'll link to both of those. So for those who aren't familiar with Richard Fineman, he was a a physicist who as you mentioned is a Nobel Prize winner. And we'll link to both of those. I have not read Shirley, you're joking, Mr. Fineman. But I did read Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, the founder, or the co-founder of Nike, and I loved it.

, I thought that was such a good book. I loved hearing. or rather reading all of the near death experiences that the company had prior to making it and Right. You just know of Nike as this major behemoth in the business world. But. You don't know the backstory until you've read Shoe Dog and see how many times this thing came [00:28:00] close to Total Catastrophe.

So I really appreciated that book and we'll certainly link it in the show notes at Business for good podcast.com along with this other book too, here. So I'm glad to get that recommendation. It looks great. And I can't wait to read it. Let me ask you finally then, Sheey obviously you have started now, not one, but two companies, and you are presumably going to be committed to multi materials for many years to come as you're growing this business.

But you probably have ideas for other types of companies that you hope will exist that could solve some problems there in the world. If you weren't doing this, maybe you'd be doing something else. Do you have any recommendations for a listener that maybe they should take up the mantle on and start their own company?

Shelly Zhang: Oh wow. Yeah, indeed. I think first of all it. Who somebody should really just follow their heart, right? It, I can only speak from my personal experience and what I'm passionate about, but finding your passion, it's, I think it's the key difference of when near death, like you mentioned during those near [00:29:00] death experiences, whether you survive or not, it's coming from, has to come from your heart.

That being said, I I think there are, important things that could change the world. That if I'm not I would, if I had extra time or maybe extra money, I would really want to work on , there are two things, energy and computation. So that's everything, all the resources we're fighting about.

I think the war and the goat and everything, right? It coming from this scarcity based on of energy. And we're still today digging up carbon from ground and burning up yesterday's leftovers. And when there are so many, I'm talking about nuclear. Nuclear fusion, nuclear fis.

Fission is probably more, more realistic, clean, fission. I think safe, clean, fission is what I think maybe the most realistic pathways to a energy abundant. Society we can have as, as human beings. And [00:30:00] I would really, I would love to be working on that. And so that's one. And also the treatment of the nuclear waste.

And that's also important because there's no, it. There is none right now. We're just storing them in tanks. But it is an engineering problem that's solve just like any other engineering problem. Another thing I would think is quantum computing, cuz everything comes down to energy and information and quantum computing will just open up.

If you think AI is, it's, we're good now and this will be kids play if we have quantum computing, it just opens up all the possibilities of what hu as human beings can do. I might just solve the energy problem or vice versa, so yeah, these are the two things and seemingly, little, yeah.

Crazy, but very cool coming from my heart.

Paul Shapiro: That's very cool. We did a past episode with Elizabeth Mower from Deep Isolation, which is a startup that's working on nuclear waste disposal. And so it was a really interesting episode. We'll link to it at the show notes at business for good podcast.com.

But in, in [00:31:00] short, , it's illegal by federal law in the United States for a private corporation to permanently dispose of nuclear waste. . And so all of these nuclear power plants have all this radioactive waste that's just sitting there on site. So you have all these different locations with very insecure, radioactive waste just sitting there. And so Elizabeth and her company are pioneering ways to essentially create ways that you can store. That waste for thousands of years safely, but also make it retrievable so that they can get around this federal law, which says you can't permanently store it. And so it basically involves diagonal drilling as opposed to going straight down and making it putting it deep beneath some of the rock on the crust of the earth, but making it technically retrievable should you be able to, go out and get it.

Or if somebody figures out a way that you can actually do something with that radioactive waste to, either neutralize it or make money off of it in some other way. So we'll link to that episode, but it's a pretty interesting look at the economics of [00:32:00] the nuclear waste problem that we face today.

But hopefully with queen Fission or maybe even fusion in the future, we won't have that problem.

Shelly Zhang: Yeah, for sure. And I just wanna add to your point that these nuclear fission waste they may not be just, waste, just like the plastics, right? And it's because the efficiency of the current or the old technology, the fission technology the temperature they're running at, I'm not a, I'm by no means expert in nuclear fission.

It's just some the little knowledge I have and it's the. With new technologies, with new, clean and maybe high temperature fision, and these ways maybe just become new feel. So in that sense, what what she's doing, making it retrievable, I think it's. It what makes it really, it's valuable.

It's very valuable.

Paul Shapiro: I hope that you have such success with the company, that you will not be in the fission world anytime soon. I hope that you're gonna be running molten for many years, Shelly, but it sounds. If you have an exit from Molten that maybe you have your [00:33:00] next company waiting for you there with that idea.

So with that said, I wanna say thank you. I'm really rooting for your success. I hope that Molten is a massive improvement over what we currently do with all of this waste plastic today. So I'll look forward to getting my own from my own driveway when it comes out and cheering you on from the side.

Aw.

Shelly Zhang: Thank you so much, Paul. It's a great pleasure talking with you.