Bonus: Mass Manufacturing Micro-sized Nuclear Reactors with Jordan Bramble and Julia DeWahl of Antares

0:09Jordan, welcome to the pod. Thanks for having me. I'm going to pass it over to Paki to kick it off with our favorite opening question. All right, Jordan, get ready. So we kick it off with a tough one, which is in the year 2050, what do you think the pie chart of the energy sources in the U.S. is going to look like? Oh man, it's really difficult to know, but one thing I'm certain about is it's not predetermined. It's a policy question. It's an engineering question. and I think we should really think hard about what kind of world we want to live in 2050 and what needs to be true for us to get there.

0:45So here's how I would think about it. I think we should want to live in a world where global standard of living is at least equivalent to an American standard of living today. And we also need to decarbonize in the process of that. There's a really good book on this topic, actually, Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop. So a top recommendation for anyone getting into nuclear for the first time. But the book goes through this exercise and the conclusion is we need something like 10x the energy that we have today. What needs to be true for us to do that? We're going to need to deploy a lot more energy at speed and at scale.

1:22And there's obviously the grid to think about, but I think in order to do that, there's going to be a lot more behind the meter as well. So there's this obvious trend today of deploying solar behind the meter, but solar has some, like any energy source, solar has advantages and disadvantages. It's really awesome when you put it on your roof and there's no incremental land requirements that you just get to take advantage of really cheap energy. But when you look at scaled industrial activity where energy density really matters and land use starts to matter, solar really breaks down behind the meter.

1:58So this is, I think, in nuclear, the promise of microreactors, right? You could put them anywhere you have high energy density and you can deploy megawatts quickly. That's what we should be striving towards. And going back to the grid, I think there's going to be a lot more solar on the grid as well. But if we want to keep our critical infrastructure running and we want to be able to use the grid for industrial activity, we're also still going to need a lot more nuclear. And it is the absolute best form of baseload power out there. and then I think there's this important question of what happens to fossil fuels as well and I think it's exceptionally hard to entirely phase out fossil fuels by 2050 if we're trying to grow global standard of living and also grow the world's population and so we should be thinking a lot about how we can make fossil fuels as close to net zero as possible.

2:49I think both hydrogen and nuclear have a potential role to play in that and solar as well.

2:57I think the other market to consider is power in space. So you're almost entirely dependent on solar today. But by 2050, we should really be doing some kind of scaled economic activity on the moon, and hopefully on Mars as well, but certainly on the moon. And it's exceedingly hard to do that with nuclear not being part of that mix also. When you think about anything, hundreds of kilowatts in space, megawatts in space, it really has to be nuclear. So we figure out some kind of large scale power beaming solutions. Nuclear is the best way to do that. Essentially, we need a lot more of everything, but nuclear is the one that stands out here in that it's the one that's stagnating.

3:33And so that's a problem that I care deeply about, figuring out how to fix stagnation in nuclear. So I'll take to the next question, hopefully a little more of a softball than the last one. But how did you get into nuclear? And how did that take you into starting in Teres? Yeah, so it really goes back to childhood for me. I've always been passionate about astronomy and astrophysics. As a teenager, I read a bunch of Robert Zubrin's books. Nuclear just has such an important role to play. It's something I've always thought about. I remember my mom and my grandmother buying me science books as a kid.

4:08And then I grew up in Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Virginia, that area, Hampton Roads, as people call it. Our power consumption was largely nuclear from the Surrey Power Plant. And it's also where the Newport New Shipyard is, which is where we build our nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. And it's one of two shipyards in the U.S. where we build our nuclear-powered submarines. So I had the opportunity to work there multiple years when I was 19, 20 on new construction of nuclear-powered submarines and overhaul of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. And then in college, I studied physics and systems engineering.

4:41And I think it was my sophomore or junior year of college, I actually wrote an engineering report on light water reactor designs. And it was a root cause analysis of what went wrong in Fukushima. So in short, I've always had an interest in nuclear, but frankly, I never pursued it as a career because going back into 2010, 2011, post-Fukushima, it was just a dead industry. And the shipyard where I'm from, I think it was paying engineers something like$50 ,000 a year starting salaries. This is when the mobile web was the hot thing. And you could make two and a half times that by going into software engineering.

5:18Yeah. Cool. Okay. So you get into software engineering and then you find yourself back. And maybe this kind of transitions us into a next question here, which is tell us a little bit about the approach of Antares. why this exact form factor or customer for nuclear, there's obviously a bunch of paths you could go down if you're thinking about starting some sort of small nuclear company. So maybe tell us a little bit more about the Antares approach and why you decided to go that path. Yeah, so we're building micro reactors for military applications. And I think one thing that differentiates us from other players in the micro reactor space is I would say we really lean into the DoD first approach, whereas others are more of dual use, focusing on commercial and military simultaneously.

6:09And the reason I believe in that approach is because I think the writing is on the wall at this point. The military is going to be the first and largest at-scale adopter of micro reactors. So this is really motivated by a shift in our military's focus to the Indo-Pacific region. We have great power conflict and And a lot of our most important technologies, our ability to scale their deployment, it really comes down to a question of energy capacity. And so it's forcing people to think more creatively about how do we get what the military calls operational energy into the field where we need it at the times that we need it.

6:46And so there's four ongoing projects in the military currently that are focused on microreactor deployment. One is an installation project. So this is just one by Okla recently. So a microreactor on a military base. One is nuclear propulsion, so using nuclear reactors to power rockets. Another is focused on space nuclear power, so powering satellites in syslunar orbit. And then finally, there's Project Pele, which is a terrestrial microreactor between one to five megawatts. And I think there's going to be a lot more to come in this space over the coming years. And the DoD is just frankly moving a lot faster than the commercial markets on the adoption of micronuclear.

7:26So I think it's a really exciting place to start. Thanks for listening so far. Hang on. We'll be right back after a quick word from our sponsors. What's the speed difference working with the DoD than trying to just do this commercially? How fast can you go from you have a design ready to go to actually getting the thing implemented? Yeah. The real answer is I think in the commercial markets, no one actually knows how long it's going to take to deploy nuclear right now. Whereas in the DoD, we actually have real data points. So Project Pele is going to be deployed and tested on something like a four-year development timeline.

8:03And there's also the Marvel Project at Idaho National Lab, which is also a four, four and a half year development timeline. And these projects are largely on track, on budget. They're being done for tens of millions of dollars to low hundreds of millions of dollars. Whereas we're used to thinking about nuclear as billion-dollar projects, right? So stark contrast between what's happening in the military and what's happening in the commercial sector right now. I think the military, whether they think about it this way or not, they have an opportunity to really crack the commercial market. So maybe an analogy here is we think about the semiconductor industry in the 1950s.

8:41It's really bootstrapped by military demand. My hope, and certainly the way I think it could turn out, is it's very similar for the microreactor industry. It starts with military demand. And we get these real world examples of deploying them, getting utility out of them, gathering empirical operating data for regulatory purposes. And that's ultimately what unlocks the commercial markets. Yeah, it's unbelievable how frequently that story comes up. We've talked about it actually a little bit even on one of the episodes that we recorded last week. But it is cool to see the difference there too, right?

9:17Like there's in the semiconductor case, it's just, we need to bring the cost of these chips down and we're a buyer who like really desperately needs this stuff. And so we'll provide that initial demand before commercial gets there. Is there some coming down the cost curve on micro reactors as well? Or do you really think it is the regulatory showing this can be done, showing that it can be done fast until kind of eliminating excuses in the commercial sector by seeing how the military does it? What do you think are the different aspects of the example the military can set? So the military market and the commercial markets are very different in terms of how the end buyer thinks about energy, right?

9:52When the military talks about what they call operational energy, which is getting energy into tactical environments where there is no grid, there are no existing supply chains. There's not a gas station you can just go to and fill up a tank, right? You have to invent all of that from scratch. They are largely, the purpose of that energy is to unlock some kind of capability that would otherwise not be possible. And at times, they pay prices as high as$10 a kilowatt hour or$400 a gallon for diesel fuel. And maybe even in more common scenarios, it's still something like$7 a gallon, things as high as a dollar a kilowatt hour, right?

10:29So very much a non-commodity market, whereas in the commercial sector, energy is effectively a commodity. You just try to get it as cheap as you possibly can. And so something capital intensive like nuclear, a really hard place to start out building a product in my view. That said, you even look at Hawaii, you look at what the average electricity consumer is paying for electricity in their home. It's something like 40 cents a kilowatt hour. And I think if we can solve some of the regulatory challenges with micro reactors, which really amounts to, I think, just answering questions about how these are going to be regulated that are not answered today, Micro reactors can totally get down to 40 cents a kilowatt hour.

11:10I think actually there's a path for them to get cheaper. Large parts of the world pay as high as 60 cents a kilowatt hour. Even in northern Arctic remote communities, stuff is high as 80 cents a kilowatt hour, which numbers of numerous micro reactor designs are competitive with that today. Most micro reactors rely on high-assay, low-enriched uranium, and the triso fuel form factor is also the most common fuel form factor. There's obvious benefits, nonproliferation, safety being the main ones. The downside is it's an extremely expensive fuel form factor to manufacture. I think, first I'll say microreactors, it's a very different cost breakdown compared to grid scale nuclear.

11:52In grid scale nuclear, I think fuel is something like single digit percentages of the total cost of operating a power plant. whereas in micro reactors, it can be anywhere between, let's say, 40 % and maybe even 65 % fuel is just the largest. If you add up the uranium itself plus manufacturing the fuel form factor, it's the largest single cost line item. And so if you can get fuel manufacturing down by a factor of five, you can start to see how these things become a lot more cost competitive. And it's also a little bit of a chicken and egg problem here where we have commercial manufacturers of Triso in the U.S.

12:33now. And largely, it's a question of scaling demand in order to get those prices down further. You're new to nuclear, Jordan. How do you think about learning what it takes to build a nuclear reactor? What type of team are you bringing together to actually go and start building your first prototype? Awesome question. One thing I think about, and I hope that we will prove out within Terry's is nuclear is fundamentally, it's largely a subset of mechanical engineering with some nuclear physics underpinning it. And so my message to every engineer interested in contributing to nuclear, it's totally a skillset that can be learned and you can learn it fast.

13:15And And maybe an unfortunate side effect of our regulatory stance for half a century now has been there hasn't been a ton of change in the nuclear industry and in the nuclear engineering fundamentals since the 60s and 70s. And so there's not a huge body of work that one has to go catch up on. So for me, I just started picking up the textbooks. I've got a couple on my desk right now. This is Principles of Nuclear Reactor Engineering. And I think this copy of this book is from, I think, 1958, if we cracked it open and looked inside of it. And I've got a couple others on my desk here. And I picked up my university physics books from college, the first three physics courses that you take in a physics program and most engineering programs you take it to.

14:00I got some books on material science, and I really just started diving in. And so I think as a society in a nuclear industry, I actually think it's deeply important that we bring in people from other backgrounds, right? You think about the aerospace industry or SpaceX, for instance, deep culture of testing and iterating very fast, right? Lots of experience with implementing regulated quality programs while still continuing to ship. and the nuclear industry, unfortunately, just doesn't have that, right? You look at the Yucca Mountain Project, there's people who have had to spend their entire career, decades working on that and it's still not live.

14:44And so I actually think it's really important that we find ways to bring people from other backgrounds into the nuclear industry. So my message would be like, it's totally something that people can pick up if you have an interest in it. You can go from hobby to practice. And the other way I would encourage thinking about it is as you look at nuclear reactor designs, paper reactor designs, they all have their nuances, but the subsystems and the components are largely the same. Every reactor has a core design and a fuel form factor. Some are moderated, some aren't, but a moderator is a way that you slow down neutrons to increase the reactivity in a reactor.

15:23They have some mechanism of heat transfer, whether that's a circulating coolant or some other kind of component. And then they all have some method of power conversion. And as it stands today, for most of these, there's a pretty finite number of choices out there. And each of those subsystems, they have their own mechanical engineering discipline that goes into them as well. Once you start thinking about it in this way, you can pick the parts where you choose to go deeper on and learn more. Thanks for listening so far. Hang on, we'll be right back after a quick word from our sponsors. In terms of founding the company, going from software to then building a company in nuclear, what are some of the similarities that you've seen?

16:04And then what are some of the areas that have been most different so far? Yeah. So the things that are most similar, capitalizing a company and getting it off the ground and building an organization, It's really the same regardless of if it's software or hardware or really anything, right? You need to get a lawyer. You need to incorporate. You need to set up a bank account. And a lot of the early work just follows from that. We have a very maybe hyper-specific sales process, which is we're focused on the DoD. And so that has some intricacies that we can get into in more detail. But I would say it largely looks the same for any defense tech startup, the path that you take to market.

16:41And then on the hardware side, there's a, so nuclear has its own quality standard in QA1. I've been told by people that it actually looks a lot like the aerospace industry's quality standard, but it's pretty unique to nuclear. The way you go about designing an early stage project is pretty similar to doing something in aerospace. We do systems engineering, so anyone who's worked at a SpaceX or even a government contractor would be familiar with that methodology. Take power conversion, for instance. We work with turbo machinery. It's also something that would be very familiar to people in the aerospace industry.

17:18So there's a lot of similarities to other industries. I would say the biggest difference between nuclear and software, it really comes down to the pace of iteration, right? Even things like simulating the behavior of your core, Neutronics, it just doesn't move as fast as something in software where you can make a change and push it on a branch to customers the next day and see how it works. So you just don't get the same speed of feedback cycles that you get in software. On the capital raising side, what's it been like talking to investors about nuclear? Do you think there's understanding in the space now?

17:55Do you target nuclear your specific investors? Is it an area of more general interest now that American Dynamism and deep tech companies are becoming more popular? What's that whole process like? So it's certainly an area of interest for even generalist VC funds. We found a lot of the larger brand name funds have actually invested in developing a thesis in this space. And so when we went out and did our most recent fundraise, we were actually able to narrow down who we spoke to people who have already spent some time thinking about this, which is awesome because learning from scratch or having to go through that education process, it can take a long time.

18:34But we had the benefit of being able to talk to a lot of investors that have already spent time in thinking about this and thinking about the market opportunity. I can take the next one here. We talked a little bit about selling to the DoD. I want to back up a little bit to just broader. What do you see as the biggest risks to Antares and how are you thinking about mitigating those? Today, I actually think the largest risk that we have is it comes down to credibility. We're going into an industry where everyone else that's been successful to date is almost a century old or at the very least half a century old.

19:14You think about the Westinghouses of the world, the BWXTs of the world, and we have to rapidly build credibility. It's also the kind of thing where the existing players have done this for years without any kind of material disclosed safety incident. So you hear the adage, what's it? No one ever got fired going with IBM. And it's sort of the same thing here. And I think the credibility really comes from two things. One is the engineering side, just getting to a point where we have hardware that validates our design as soon as possible. And so it's going to be a big focus for us in the coming 12 months.

19:52And aside from getting us closer to a working unit and having a prototype, it also just shows that the DoD shows the end customer that we're capable of building this. And then the other piece is just continuing to show up, right? One of the things that I make a point of in our culture here at Antares, and I actually got this from an organization I worked in when I was in the White House back in 2017 is go where the work is. It's one of our values. And I think that's so important for the credibility piece because the existing players in the space, they might not be willing to just hop on a plane and go meet a general or a colonel in person to the same degree we are.

20:34That's one of the advantages that you have as a startup is you can just find ways to outwork everyone else in the early stages. And so those meetings go so much better when you meet someone in person. You know, you imagine a lot of these people in positions where they're allocating a budget inside of the government. They constantly have companies that they've never heard of reaching out to them over email, trying to schedule meetings with them. They have no idea who you are. You get on a Microsoft Teams meeting. And I think there's just something about that kind of interaction where it's easy for people to, whether it's conscious or subconscious, default to skepticism, right?

21:12But when you are willing to hop on a plane and just the act of booking a ticket and getting on a plane and going to meet someone in their place of work, I think is a sign of seriousness in and of itself. So we think a lot about these things. What are the things we can do that we have control over every single day that just, if we keep doing it, just build more and more credibility? I think that's our biggest near-term risk. That's super cool. I love the idea of going where the work is. Are there other kind of things inside of the culture that you want to build into the company from the early days?

21:42Yeah, another one is systems thinking. So I mentioned that we practice systems engineering, but from a cultural standpoint, it really goes beyond that. I'd say first principles thinking is not enough when it comes to nuclear, because if you just purely apply a first principles lens to nuclear, it's just like such an obviously good idea. We should be doing it. We should be doing more nuclear. But why hasn't it happened for half a century at this point? There's clearly deeper systematic things at play here. And when you really start to peel back the layers on that, you realize it's a complex stakeholder relationship.

22:14There's competing interests, there's perverse incentives, and you really have to think through those kind of things before you can be successful. So it's another cultural value that we try to institute here. One other topic here, shifting gears a little bit. This is maybe another risk to the business, but supply chain, this is a nascent industry. There's a little bit of a chicken and egg problem. You see this a lot in nuclear fuel, for example. How do you see the supply chain risk playing out here? And again, how are you thinking about mitigating some of that? Yeah. So fuel is obviously the tough one.

22:51So we'll come back to that. But this kind of goes back to what I was talking about earlier, where reactors, they have their critical subsystems. And the good thing for a lot of these, especially with micro reactors, is there are existing vendors inside of the U.S. that produce a lot of what you need at scale. For instance, in our reactor design, we work with heat pipes for heat transfer, and we have a vendor partner that we work with for that. We use the machinery for power conversion. We also have a vendor partner that we work with for that. So supply chain partnerships are critical. And this is not unlike SpaceX, for instance, where you have a complex network of vendors throughout the U.S.

23:36And a lot of what engineers do is actually go on site to the vendor site for quality assurance purposes, right? But fuel is clearly the tough one. So there's been a lot of development in the last few years on Triso fuels. We now have at least one at-scale manufacturer inside of the U.S. and two more that should be coming online in the coming years. And it's incredibly expensive today. And it is just like you mentioned, it's a chicken and egg problem. I think as demand increases for this fuel, prices can come down. So it's really a capex expenditure problem, right? These manufacturers have to invest a lot of capital up front to build out that manufacturing capability.

24:22And you can't really lower prices until there's scaled demand as a result of that. Now, HALU is another question, and I think that HALU is high-assay, low-enriched uranium. Unlike uranium that goes in grid-scale lightwater reactors that's enriched to a couple percentage points, HALU is enriched to a maximum of 20%, 19.75 % is what you commonly see. There is at least one manufacturer in the U.S. now that has been licensed to enrich HALU. but beyond that we don't have a domestic supply chain currently so there's a there's policy work that has to be done here I think we should be trying to think about a nuclear a North American supply chain broadly like how do we access a Canadian supply chain as well and how do both countries benefit economically from advancements in nuclear and certainly that's the view of most nuclear developers in the U.S.

25:19they want to deploy in Canada alongside of the U.S. And then this is also an area where I think that the DOD has an advantage and can also help bootstrap the commercial markets. So the DOD has its own full stack supply chain for nuclear that supports the Marine and carrier, the nuclear Navy, essentially. And going back to what we were saying earlier about the DoD being the first at scale, I would like to see them step up here, be creative and figure out how to unlock this supply chain for HALU. And it was two weeks ago, there was a press release where we started to see a little bit of this. So there's a company that was awarded a$47 million contract to downblend highly enriched uranium scraps from the Navy program into HALU to support the DoD's needs.