E5: Fission Founders, Part 2: Designing Advanced Nuclear Reactor Startups

25:00With robots, we have one less reason for LNT. More technical complexity in exchange for better safety and efficiency is a good way to sum up the various approaches that advanced nuclear startups are taking. I'd also add more regulatory complexity, But we'll get to that. As we discussed in episodes three and four, for nuclear to win, ultimately, everything needs to translate into better economics. That's how Mount Losef described the approach they're taking at Aloe, better safety and efficiency built in to unlock better economics for the company and its customers. And so at all of what we're trying to do is explore these more advanced reactors that use liquid metal, for example, with the coolant in order to achieve potentially even better economics.

25:45So a big part of that is with these liquid metal reactors, you can have greater power density, which means you might use less material to produce more energy. So that kind of screams good economics. And then also you have this really good safety characteristic where with our fuel, the hotter the reactor gets, the less reactive it gets. So what that means is because of the physics of it, it's safer as opposed to trying to engineer safety systems into it and around it. Building safety into the physics itself means less money and manpower spent on safety systems and greater power density means more output from every unit of fuel.

26:23Combined, that should translate into better economics, on paper at least. and ultimately into cheaper, more competitive nuclear power. There are some areas, though, where economics matter less for now, and what matters most is just delivering capabilities that nuclear is uniquely suited to serve. Xenopower is building in one of those areas, as its founder, Tyler Bernstein, explains to us. You know, really kind of started on these dual set of hypotheses that, A, there was this need for reliable, long-endurance power as we see growing activity in these off-grid environments from the surface of the moon to the seabed to the Arctic.

26:57And that B, if we could build a radioisotopower system that is affordable, but also lightweight, that's a key combination that would open up much broader usability. And our approach here is using Strontium-90, this available abundant fuel form, with a novel design that allows us to use far less heavy shielding material, resulting in a more lightweight heat source, enabling for the first time a commercially built radioisotopower system using an available abundant fuel and a lightweight form factor, opening up much broader usability in a variety of these environments. Did he say the moon? He said the moon.

27:30We'll get to that. But I want to focus on something else he said. Radioisotope power system. Every other company we've discussed is based off of the fission reaction, splitting heavy metals, typically uranium, apart. But with radioisotope power, there is no fission reaction. Instead, you're just taking advantage of naturally occurring decay. Because they store energy and release it over time, radioisotope power systems are sometimes called nuclear batteries. These systems are simpler and smaller, but they can be perfect for remote locations like the moon. Radioisotope power systems are hot rocks in a box.

28:06You have these isotopes that are decaying over decades because they're unstable. And as they decay, they produce heat. So you have these rocks that are just generating heat over decades as they decay based on the half-life of the isotope. So for example, the isotope the word primarily using is called strontium-90. And strontium then is a half-life of roughly 30 years. So over the course of 30 years, you're getting relatively constant heat generated. You can then convert that heat into electricity and again have a small box the size of a microwave oven that generates electricity for decades. Now this is small power.

28:36We're talking tens, hundreds of watts of electricity. Thanks for listening so far. Hang on. We'll be right back after a quick word from our sponsors. Zeno is a great example of the variety of approaches advanced nuclear startups are taking to serve diverse end markets, often ones where there's no workable alternative. And Terry's, the company I recently co-founded with Jordan Bamble, is another example of this. Here's Jordan to explain more. So we are 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.

29:21As Jordan mentioned, we are building micro-reactors, which are a subgroup under SMRs that are anything less than roughly 15 megawatts. In our case, we're going smaller than just about anyone else. We're targeting the low hundreds of kilowatts in size, which is similar to a large diesel generator and output, or enough power for about 300 households. This size matches the power needs of the most remote installations, such as radar systems in the Arctic. But they can also be scaled up into microgrids for slightly larger power needs. The reason we love this size and we've chosen to go this route is it is more nimble in this way.

29:56It makes it much easier to rapidly deploy in cases of escalation or changing needs. Jordan and I got excited about a military first approach because the military has already started to demonstrate their interest in nuclear and we think the opportunity overall here is really large. There's a demonstration project called Project Pele. This is the first microreactor demonstration that DoD has had in decades. It should be ready to go live in about 2027. So again, they've demonstrated this interest. The Department of Defense also doesn't have to go through the NRC, since they have their own regulatory jurisdiction that today oversees the Navy's nuclear-powered submarine and aircraft carrier fleets.

30:35This should help on the cost and timeline front, but I have no delusions here that any kind of regulatory process is a cakewalk. Finally, the DoD has made it clear they need power that can untether them from vulnerable and burdensome fossil fuel supply chains. Almost 50 % of the casualties in Iraq were from supply lines. The other thing you see is that weapons systems are also increasing in their ability and their quantity. And with that comes increasing power needs. The DoD right now is focused on deterrence of China and the Pacific in particular. And power and logistics are critical in that arena.

31:12Just think about how massive the geography is, right? They call it the tyranny of distance. And so getting power to the right places is really critical to the ability to win in case there is conflict. We want to be there to provide rapidly deployable, resilient power with a five-year lifespan for our military and our allies. And believe that micro-reactors are absolutely the best way to get there. It feels like, unfortunately, people have had to think more about war over the past couple of years than they have for a while, probably since the beginning of the Iraq War. But it's not something that I had ever thought about and makes so much sense that with the supply chain, you kind of know the starting point and you know the end point.

31:54And so you're kind of a sitting duck along that route. So to be able to bring your power with you seems like a huge advantage that whoever kind of capitalized on first, it just becomes a more flexible and nimble fighting force. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, every war does look a little bit different, right? Circumstances are different. The geography is different. The players are different. Weapons and capabilities they have are different. But when you're thinking about China, people, I mean, the military is thinking about them as a near peer adversary. Like this is a country that has been developing their capabilities now for a couple of decades and have proven they have the ability to build warships, to build attritable systems, drones and the like.

32:36And planes, I mean, they're flying right past our own planes today in a very provocatory manner. So the military wants to be ready in case there is escalation. Obviously, the primary goal is always deterrence. But deterrence usually means having a lot of fancy weapons that you can sort of show off and say, hey, we have these and we're ready to use them. Yeah, not to make light of it, but I do think when it's a matter of life and death, a lot of the niceties around not wanting nuclear or the environmental movement kind of fall away. You want the best possible solution for your force. And so it's heartening to me, at least, to see that the military is receptive and inviting even to nuclear.

33:15I think that's absolutely right. What's going to be interesting, though, is if you think about the Pacific, there were tests there, nuclear weapons testing back in the 50s that did harm people, right? Think about the Kenya Atoll. And there's legacy distrust in that region that I think will be a much higher hurdle than even nuclear in the U.S., for example. So I think that will be very interesting to see how the politics and conversation goes there. But if people do feel like things are escalated enough, I do think that it does change people's perception of how important are some of their concerns versus what could be an adversary right in their backyard.

33:55Yeah, I mean, to your point, I think everything that's coming out now, at least, is like China beats us in all of the war games that they run at the Pentagon. They have a 200 to 1 shipbuilding advantage. So at some point, you kind of just need whatever advantage you can get. I didn't realize, but Japan is now the third highest defense budget in the world because of their proximity to China and kind of getting ready for that, hopefully, you know, avoidance of a fight, but getting ready in case. And so to your point, I think you got to imagine that if nuclear is actually safe in the form that you're delivering it, and it can give an advantage to the U.S.

34:31and our allies at some point, that becomes the highest priority. Yeah, absolutely. And Japan, I think, is pretty aware that they are an island nation. They rely on other countries for their energy, for their fossil fuels. And they've actually turned their, well, you call it like the Titanic ship, like very slowly turned their direction on nuclear. They are no longer shutting down plants that they thought they would and they are moving to bring some additional plants back online, which I think is very promising. I love having you, and we're going to use your expertise. I love having you in this conversation as someone who's actually doing this.

35:06And I think even just that conversation shows that behind everything that we talk about, and this is going to be our longest episode, but it's also only so much time to talk about so many companies. There's so much that goes on beneath the surface. Why the different buyers want to buy nuclear, why the different startups are taking the approaches to design that they're taking, the different regulatory products. There's so much that we can't get to. But I want to kind of use you as the way to show that there really is so much beneath the surface on what we're going to talk about. And that's true across all of the startups that we'll talk to.

35:37Yeah. And what I think is really fun about this episode is that myself and Jordan with Interest, but also the other four different founders we talked to each have a unique approach, a unique either technology stack they're building or path to market or customer race. And I think it goes to show that, one, people don't think that you can just do the same old playbook because that doesn't seem to be working. We have had such a hard time getting any new nuclear online that people are saying, we got to try something else. Two, I think you'll see that all the founders we're talking to now are doing something much smaller.

36:13Why? Because you can go and do that for less money. You don't need to go blow$30 billion to try to build a plant. you can spend a lot less money and basically prove that we can do this again. So they're all smaller. And then finally, I'll say there are these underserved pockets out there that are quite different. I mean, Matt with Al is thinking like, how do we go to market via research reactors, which actually just got a bunch of funding via the CHIPS Act, like super creative angle here. And while we're at it, let's use the marble design that's already getting worked on at the INL to, again, be able to move as quickly as we can, right?

36:49Like Tyler at Zeno saying like, okay, I bet you there's just not as much bureaucracy and red tape of doing nuclear in space, right? Because we really haven't done that that much. So new territory here and let's try this new approach. So everyone's doing something. Yeah. One of the things that I think we maybe miss when we talk about the speed angle, like obviously it's slow, but that doesn't just have those kind of like primary effects of it's going to take you a long time. There's just knock-on effects of just like iteration cycles where like a software startup can iterate a thousand times a day.

37:19OpenAI, as we're recording this, is doing its dev day. And it's like the 9 ,000th iteration it's made since it released ChatGPT. Iteration is really important. You have to try something, see what works, see what doesn't. Obviously, with a nuclear reactor, just the way that it works, you're never going to iterate as fast as a software company. But having 10 years before you can like tweak your design a little bit and once it's locked in, you can't do anything else. It's like a real bottleneck to innovation. We'll talk about what that means for safety in a little bit, but I love seeing founders say like, all right, we know the market's bad.

37:48We know regulatory is bad. We know nuclear hasn't really worked in 50 years and we need it. And so we're going to figure out different approaches to solve the problem. We're going to get creative with all those pieces in order to move faster. We talked to, including you, five companies today. Besides the five companies that we spoke to, there are so many companies innovating in the space. and I just want to give a little shout out to some of them up front, just to give some sense of the kind of breadth of approaches and the size of the market. To me, it's really exciting that you're seeing 30 different, I think we're seeing the same thing on the fusion side, about 30 different approaches to solving this problem.

38:24And so let's go over a few of them. TerraPower, backed by Bill Gates, is developing a traveling wave reactor that can run on depleted uranium and is currently working on its first demonstration reactor. So it's getting close. Terrestrial Energy, a Canadian company, is going with integral molten salt reactors and his partnerships with National Labs in the US and Canada. And the National Labs route is a smart one that Aloe is kind of synthetically taking. Kairos Power is working on a low pressure reactor with a fluoride salt coolant. X-Energy is designing a gas-cooled pebble bed modular reactor.

38:57Thorcon is building a molten salt fission reactor using fuel in a liquid form. They're also putting it on ships and it has natural cooling baked in. But the Thor in the name comes from the fact that it's using a thorium fuel cycle, a process that converts the much more abundant thorium into uranium-233 and 235, which would mean the company needs to use about half as much natural uranium. I know there are people who are worried that at some point we'll deplete our uranium reserves or that supply chain can be challenging. So using a more abundant fuel source and turning it into uranium is an interesting approach.

39:30Transmutex too is working on enabling a thorium fuel cycle and on using spent fuel or nuclear waste to power its reactors. One company's nuclear waste storage headache is another company's treasure. Then there's Elysium Industries, which is developing molten chloride fast reactors for hydrogen production. Ultrasafe Nuclear is working on a graphite-moderated molten salt reactor. BWXT is partnering with Argonne National Lab on a microreactor design, and they actually won the contract for the Project Pele Department of Defense project, which I mentioned earlier. And Black Mesa, they're building a nanoreactor in the tens of kilowatt scale reactor to replace the average mobile diesel generator.

40:09Another really compelling advanced nuclear startup is Radiant Nuclear. They raised a$40 million Series B led by the American Dynamism team in April this year. Recall that Catherine told us that she sees nuclear as a market with a small number of very big winners. So her investment here as the only nuclear startup in the portfolio is definitely her vote of confidence. Radiant CEO Doug Bernard actually declined our request to be interviewed because he's focused on building, which you got to respect. Isaiah at Valor sung Radiant's praises for him. Yeah, I love what Radiant's doing. Like just the cojones to say like we are going to put this nuclear reactor on the back of a semi truck is just kind of mind bending for so many people.

40:52Like engineers have been dreaming about that for a long time. but to like actually go out and do it i was talking to somebody who's very high up at an existing old school nuclear construction company and trying to explain the concept of valor atomics and really just like not not connecting like wait you're going to manufacture like this doesn't make any sense and um even just like being able to point to radiant is like no look you can put a reactor in the back of a semi-truck is like a complete conversation changer. You just absolutely change the perspective on what nuclear could be. Narrative and examples that the impossible is actually maybe possible are vital to nuclear's progress.

41:37Entrepreneurs seeing Radiant put reactors on the back of a truck and investors seeing NuScale or Oklo going public mean that more entrepreneurs will try new ideas and investors will be more likely to fund them. The dozen different advanced nuclear startups we've spoken about prove Isaiah's point. These startups each offer their own fresh perspective on what nuclear could be. Coming to this season, I had no idea that there were so many nuclear startups pursuing so many novel reactor designs. I just pictured the big plants with the big hourglass-shaped cooling towers like we have on the podcast cover art.

42:09The reality is richer than that. But given the timelines and complexity in nuclear, success for any particular advanced reactor startup is anything but guaranteed. Many in the industry believe that advanced reactors are cute and good for attracting talent to the industry, but that they aren't going to have a particularly big impact compared to simply building more large reactors. The burden of proof is on the startups. They'll need to go from paper reactors to practical reactors. And to do that, they'll not only need to make the technology work, but to build real businesses that serve real customers and eventually earn real profits.

42:44So let's dive deeper into the most important pieces of building an advanced nuclear startup. Assuming that the tech works, how do you build a business around it? So we have to think about the business in terms of use cases, customers, what are the economics? Then there's the operations. How do you go fundraise the capital you need? How do you recruit the team to go build product and the rest of your government affairs team, your legal team, everything else? The design, how do you make design choices along the way? Vendors in your supply chain, who are you going to buy your parts from? And then, of course, there's navigating the regulatory landscape.

43:20I am not jealous, by the way, that you have to go through that process. Man, it's tough. It is tough. And it's very different from, I feel like I've made the transition from working in consumer tech with Opendoor to SpaceX, which has kind of, you know, kind of cleared its way and was just like able to move forward on building to just being at the very beginning where you're just looking at a mountain of red tape. And it's rough when you're not able to just like build directly for your customer the way you are with software. And you have to just navigate this morass, right, of government layers upon layers of different regulation and just gatekeepers along the way.

43:56It can definitely be disheartening. It's like one of those things that just is going to require tenacity over years. I'm glad we have people like you pursuing it. And I salute you on behalf of all of our listeners. Oh, man. it's it's going to be a fight um obviously i deeply believe one that is completely worth taking on uh and i'm i'm glad i'm in good company i mean i'm hopeful that congress and whoever else you know the dodo sees that there are these multiple companies out there really trying to make a difference and build some great technology you know doors eventually will open and progress will be made and you know as you think about what kind of progress we need to make here let's talk about what those end use cases and customers are, you have incumbents and the SMR manufacturing companies that we met last episode, typically building in that tens or hundreds of megawatts to a gigawatt reactor size and connecting them to the grid.

44:53And these buyers are typically utilities and governments, but they might also include companies with very large energy or industrial heat needs like AI data centers and chemical producers. But this class of company that we're talking about in this episode are these advanced reactors, basically always smaller, focused on establishing footholds in markets that are currently underserved, whether remote communities, whether it's the military, to the moon, you have the whole range here. So to start talking about the idea of powering off-grid use cases with advanced SMRs, we need to start with the OG in space, OCLO.

45:29Nuclear has powered off-grid uses before. Small nuclear reactors have been powering our submarines in the Navy since the days of Admiral Rickover. And Russia deployed a floating SMR, Akademik Lomonosov, I'm sorry to our Russian listeners for my pronunciation, in 2018. Paki, did you know that Russia also is the only country right now with an existing breeder reactor, one of those fast spectrum reactors we talked about? it just makes me think like, hey, can we get into some kind of nuclear energy cold war with Russia where we all try to outbuild each other? Because that would certainly be a positive outcome for all of humanity if we did.

46:07I mean, this is Josh Wolf's point from before, right? That part of getting people excited about nuclear again is greed and these are huge markets and all that. And part of it is fear. And while we don't need to be worried about them using a breeder reactor in the war because that's not how it works. There shouldn't be some kind of national pride and competitiveness here where we can't let the Russians out-innovate us on reactor designs. That innovate is a funny word in this context because as we've talked about, these are all old designs that are finally kind of being brought to market. But we should be able to get these things to market as quickly or more quickly than the Russians are.

46:41So let's go, people. Totally. It makes me want to go write up some leaflets and kind of drop them around to congressional offices. like, hey, did you know Russia has this type of reactor, this type of reactor, this type of reactor? Like, let's go. We are dragging our feet on this. Yeah. No, the number of reactors in China we talked about before makes sense, right? Like, if you're going to go top down, it's easy to say, like, we're going to do all of these reactors. We're going to do them cheaply. Labor is probably, like, not working in the best conditions. And, like, there's a lot of things that you can do to, like, build the old thing faster and faster.

47:12But the fact that we're also getting out innovated, I think you do need to go drop those pamphlets. next time you happen to be in Washington, DC. We do, however, as this episode shows, have, I think, this spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation here. Oklo, founded in 2013, is the first modern US company to attempt to power off-grid use cases with an advanced reactor. Its co-founder and CEO, Jake DeWitt, spent his career in more traditional nuclear, and he recognized that to sell advanced reactors, he'd need to start with the customers who most needed cheap, reliable energy, like data centers, factories, industrial sites, remote communities, and defense facilities.

47:48Then he kind of had, I think, an idea of a really small reactor in mind. And then as he talked to customers, they determined the size of the plants that they would build based on those conversations. What we saw was we wanted to be at the smallest reasonable size that still had a large growth market to it, not necessarily playing on niche edges or anything like that, but rather being big enough to find that. We initially started at about a megawatt and a half. We found that that was interesting, but as we got a lot further along, we actually learned the market really was more interested in more than that.

48:17We found people asking us, hey, can we have 10 of these? And we're interested in 10. It's kind of the number. And we learned pretty quickly they were more interested in 15 megawatts. Our roadmap was always that multiple plants would come up with this. So basically what we saw was, okay, minimum size, found that to be about 15 megawatts, found a market that can support quite a bit of growth there, finding a lot of traction in several different segments on that space. Jake has got it completely right here. It's so important to listen to who you think your end user is going to be and what they actually want, because you don't want to be building a science experiment in a garage by yourself and build something kind of cool, but it's not something that serves anyone's needs and certainly not something people will pay for.

48:59And so it's like along the way, starting day one, all the way for, you know, over the multiple years you're working on building this, being in constant communication with your end user, with your customer is just so important. And, you know, going back to Jordan, my co-founder within Terries, when we're setting out now to work with the Department of Defense, we spend a lot of time talking with them to make sure we really understand deeply what their needs are. Down to the specifics, you know, how exactly will you deploy this? What would it look like for your troops to be operationally working on these reactors as being the maintenance crew.

49:35And getting into those details early on are so important so that you make sure you're building to the right specifications. We really lean into the DoD first approach, whereas others are more of dual use, focusing on commercial and military simultaneously. And 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 a lot of our most important technologies, our ability to scale their deployment, it really comes down to a question of energy capacity.

50:16And 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. So the military market and the commercial markets are very different in terms of how the end buyer thinks about energy, right? When 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, you know, 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.

50:48They are largely, you know, the purpose of that energy is to unlock some kind of capability that would otherwise not be possible, right? 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. You see things as high as a dollar a kilowatt hour, right? So it's 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, it's a really hard place to start out building a product in my view.

51:23This continues to be a fun one because I could just ask you the follow-ups that I have directly to you. I know that you've been flying all over to the most remote places in America to talk to potential customers at the DoD. What's it been like selling to them? What have those conversations been like? How do they think about nuclear? It's been really eye-opening for me. It's been the first time for me even just stepping onto to a military base, first time in congressional offices. And I found that the vast majority of people I talked to are quite open-minded about nuclear, even excited about it.

51:53So I'm not facing, for example, the staunch anti-nuclear kind of environmentalist crew that does exist out there, but generally people are open-minded about it. And I have found the DoD actually be very informed on nuclear too. They come to the table with really good questions about how to deploy microreactors in the field in particular, things like how to manage its heat signatures. That's not easy for enemies to spot where it is, how to unload it from a cargo plane, if and how to use earth and other found material as shielding to minimize having to bring in your own kind of heavy metal shieldings for that purpose.

52:28So the conversations are actually able to go pretty deep pretty quickly. That said, the DOD is a massive organization and everyone has their own personal interests, their own agendas. If someone has a lot of other stuff that they're just more interested in working on or busy with, it just makes it painfully slow for us, right? People are slow to respond to emails or whatever else. They're busy and we're just one of many things on their plate. And so sales here is critical, right? It's like, how do you get someone to be excited about you, excited about what you're building, where you're headed, and feeling like they are excited to champion your work.

53:06The incentives also just aren't as aligned as they are in, let's say, a consumer startup where you're building software where everyone on the team has equity and is aligned around incentives towards hustle, efficient problem solving to build something and bring it to market and start making money as quickly as possible, right? Like these are people working within a very bureaucratic organization. They frankly just have a little less skin in the game. And so you see that sometimes with the pace of movement. Yeah, it's funny. It reminds me of, I wrote a piece on Anderle recently and talking to their team, it was like almost the same vibe where it's like very complimentary of the individual people involved, really impressed with just like the level of detail that the people at the DOD are able to get into really, really quickly.

53:50talked about even kind of making sure that you're actually building the thing that they want to buy because you could have the best thing in the world. And if it's not on their priorities list, they're just not going to buy the thing. But also the fact that it's just like, it's one of the biggest organizations, the organization with the biggest budget in the whole entire world. And so it's just really, really slow to move inside of the DOD. I was going to say, I mean, I think it's something where you either can look at it and be like, oh, what a morass. Like, this is awful. This is so slow. It's so painful.

54:21Or you can say like, I am playing in the biggest of the big leagues. Like you want to do sales, like talk about the most, like the biggest sales job you can possibly have to do. It's like, you need to go sell to a hundred different people, like have the wheeled influence in a hundred different directions and like constantly be doing that over a multi-year horizon to finally, you know, basically get the sale or get them to work with you on buying your product and having that become a program of record. And if you ever listened to the Unreal Founders, which you've obviously extensively studied, they talk a lot about how they went to DC on day one of starting the company and building relationships there, lobbying, just figuring out how to exert influence in all these different ways was P0 to the company.

55:06There's actually almost more required there from the skill set, even then building some of the technology, though I certainly, I don't want to sort of belittle how hard it is to build a microreactor, but there is an equal amount of just like tenacity and skill required on the overarching sales effort too. It's so interesting too, because, and it makes sense why like an advanced reactor is this really nice wedge in other than the fact that you're not going to bring like a large reactor around with you around the world. But they were talking about the fact that when they're early on a particular technology that other, you know, the defense primes certainly aren't making yet, that the military hasn't started buying yet, but might be interested in.

55:45So part of it is building to what they already said that they want to buy. And part of it is kind of either buying or building towards the thing that they like have kind of hinted that they might want to buy a certain capability around. But once you get that advanced technology kind of in your portfolio, it gives you the right to go out and kind of almost set the conversation and set the way that people are talking about it in DC. Have you found that with micro reactors that if you're going with kind of a first of this kind product, eventually you'll be able to kind of like everything that becomes a wall, maybe then becomes a moat as you write that into the RFPs and like get to do all of those types of things.

56:21Yeah, honestly, that's exactly right. You know, super hard to break into. But then once you, you know, the goal here is to become a program of record. Once you become that, it's hard for other people to come break into your little fiefdom, right? And it's just like they say, it's always easier to add to a budget than take away from a budget. So yeah, that is sort of like the ultimate goal. I don't love that it works that way. And I would love to think that over time, myself and other companies that work in defense tech with the government and the military can hopefully help change that over time because it's better for the country.

56:53But yeah, I mean, that's the game we're playing at least right now. This is like a bigger overarching point and hopefully all the defense startups and nuclear startups and everybody hear this, but like, I really want this current batch and AI is proving that it's maybe not this one, but really want this batch to be the one that wins and then doesn't try to use like some form of regulatory capture or lock in to extend that lead and like really just lets competition bloom. We'll see if that happened. All that said, I mean, it sounds like a bear, but kind of a cool thing to get to experience. There's also maybe an easier way, And this sounds absolutely crazy, but maybe it just takes a moon mission to cut through all that red tape.

57:29We promised that we'd take you back to the moon, and now it's the right time to do that. Here's Tyler at Xenopower to explain why his company is taking a literal moon shot. As a part of the Artemis program, NASA and a lot of our international partners are going back to the moon, and not just to visit the moon, but to stay there this time. And this is also a huge commercial activity in this area, again, kind of following the same trend of commercial industry, working in the space and nuclear industry and taking the charge on a lot of those fronts. But when you're on the moon, you're generally in lightness for 14 days, in darkness for 14 days, based off of the way that the moon orbits the earth and the earth orbits the sun.

58:07So if you're only using solar power and batteries, it can be very challenging, if not impossible, to operate in those 14-day lunar nights. For example, the US is going to land two landers on the moon later this year, built by commercial companies that are likely going to operate for 14 days and then freeze to death. With a radioisodal power system or other sources of nuclear, you can have heat and power that enables these assets to operate for years instead of 14 days. Really critical as we look to have this sustainable presence on the lunar surface. As we look at future settlements as well, nuclear reactors, of course, are a great source of power given a lot of the dark and shadowed regions on the lunar surface.

58:44So that's kind of that focus on power and specifically on the lunar surface. And I'll add that there's only one asset on the surface of the moon right now that is operating 24-7, 365. And that is a Chinese rover that is powered by a radio-isotopower system using plutonium from Russia. So a lot of what we're doing and contracts we just want from NASA and our engagement with other commercial companies is to build American-made assets that can have that same presence on the lunar surface. Aside from being spectacularly cool, powering the moon has economic benefits. As we touched on in episode two, there's a long tradition of the government being the first buyer for promising new technologies that aren't yet commercial market competitive in terms of cost.

59:25When it goes right, the government gets valuable new capabilities and private companies get to begin their journey down the experience curve to competitive prices. Tyler explained how he sees that dynamic playing out in me, and I can't believe I get to live in time when this is a thing, in the space nuclear market? Yeah, I'll start with cost and economics because it's a big distinction compared to terrestrial markets. And when you look at nuclear terrestrially, at the end of the day, what matters more than anything else is the dollar per kilowatt hour. These are primarily competitive energy markets.

59:57And you are starting to see this change a little bit. You look at X Energy, for example, who is now looking to use the heat in the chemical industry. And you're starting to see where there's use of industrial heat. But generally, you want to get your energy cost as low as possible, or else you could get out-competed by the energy sources. In space, it's a very different paradigm, and it's not about the cost of the energy produced from nuclear. It is about the capability that is enabled, and it's enabling brand new capabilities from taking a lander that right now can operate for 14 days and enabling it to survive for five years and operate on the lunar surface.

1:00:31This is taking satellites that are in static orbits right now and increasing the maneuverability of them so they can have more dynamic operations as space becomes a contested environment. This is about cutting the transit time to Mars so we can reduce the radiation that astronauts are receiving to, again, increase the likelihood that they can safely visit and return from Mars. So, again, it's not about the cost. It's about the capability that is enabled. If you thought energy was a hard problem on Earth, it's even harder in space. When you're on the moon, you're in light for 14 days and darkness for 14 days.

1:01:03If you rely on solar and batteries, you're dead half the time. Tyler told us that two lunar landers the U.S. plans to send up later this year are going to operate for 14 days and then freeze to death. And you just can't bring up more diesel. Getting satellites to low-Earth orbit is cheaper than it used to be, thanks to SpaceX, but sending a payload to the moon is still much more expensive. Then I'll give another example to put some newer numbers on this. Right now, the rule of thumb price to land one kilogram on the surface of the moon is$1 million. dollars. So you have a lot of companies right now that are commercially landing payloads on the lunar surface for a price of around$1 million.

1:01:40And that$1 million will result in 14 days of operations. Now, if we can tell someone who wants a scientific payload or commercial payload on the lunar surface, this can operate for five years instead of 14 days. Again, that completely blows up the economics there. It's a brand new capability. And we're still working through what this business model is going to look like exactly with a lot of these providers. But again, a very different paradigm than terrestrially, where the cost of energy is extremely competitive and one of the primary drivers. In addition to the benefit of finding less cost-sensitive buyers, another reason that advanced nuclear founders are avoiding traditional markets to start is that many traditional markets, the communities that would ultimately buy nuclear power from utilities, don't want nuclear reactors.

1:02:22Isaiah at Valor said that choosing the right customers, ones who actually want the product, is the most important thing. And what so many previous nuclear companies have gotten wrong. There's a second problem, and that is that individual communities don't necessarily want that reactor. So you've got a cheap reactor, fantastic, but do people want to buy it? And that's still a massive problem. That's a public perception problem. So that's kind of the second place that I landed was like, all right, so we can mass manufacture these. We could get them through the regulatory approval processes, but would communities buy those reactors?

1:02:55So what's Valor doing instead? We mentioned that they're using fission to make synthetic hydrocarbons. They can produce those anywhere and send them around the world. One of the big benefits that we have here, and this is really intentionally chosen, is like, if you're producing a hydrocarbon, if you're producing an energy commodity, you get to pick a lot of things because hydrocarbons are so transferable through time and space. So transferable through time means you can store them, you can put them in a tank and they'll stay there, right? They won't dissipate nearly at the rate that, for instance, like an electrical capacitor will.

1:03:30You can translate them through space. You can put them in a pipeline. You can liquefy them, put them on a ship. That's something that we do all the time. You can compress them. So that gives us a lot of flexibility, right? We are currently shipping massive tankers of LNG across the sea to Europe. So there's just like a good example of you can produce a hydrocarbon in one corner of the world, liquefy it, ship it across the entire planet. So that's something that gives us a lot of flexibility in where this plant goes. If you're producing electricity, you need to be connected to your end customer's grid or to their facility itself.

1:04:04If you're producing industrial heat, you need to produce at the facility where it will be used. But if you're producing something that is already piped and shipped around the world, that's transferable through time and space like hydrocarbons, you can separate the decision. You can put your plant where it makes the most sense and transport the product to wherever customers are willing to pay the most for it. There's not one right answer here. Like at Antares, you're building something specifically designed to replace the need to transport hydrocarbons to a steer locations not connected to pipelines, so you need to make something that moves with them.

1:04:37Same with radiant and xenopower. Valor wouldn't make sense for those customers. You can't bring hydrocarbons to the moon, and as you pointed out, bringing hydrocarbons to the front lines of war is a dangerous endeavor. But cheaper carbon-neutral hydrocarbons make sense for a lot of people around the world. If Valor can produce them, they'll find buyers. The energy markets are so huge, and the needs for energy so varied, that there's room for every approach. It's not large versus small or traditional versus advanced, but a mix of all of it. If you can deliver energy more cheaply or reliably, or in some cases, deliver it where it's not currently possible, there will always be a buyer.

1:05:17There's this thing, Jevin's Paradox, where the cheaper something like energy gets, the more demand there is for it. The overall market expands, even as the cost approaches zero over time. So if you can make cheap energy, there will be buyers for it, and we promise that people will find new uses for that energy. So customer selection then is just a matter of sequencing. Who's willing to buy first when the product is more expensive than it will be once you scale? It's also a matter of regulation. The second leg of the advanced nuclear startup playbook, where they're working with the NRC as it stands, trying to get ways to work around it or both.

1:05:52What matters to entrepreneurs is getting their product to the right market as quickly, safely, and cost-effectively as possible. And they'll shape the company's strategy in part around minimizing regulations roadblocks. No advanced or Gen 4 reactor design has ever achieved regulatory approval in the United States yet. Full stop. As we discussed, regulators are more comfortable with designs they've already approved and are familiar with. They're not incentivized to take risks on new reactors. Although, as Jake told us, they're increasingly willing to try. And they're working on regulation to accommodate new designs.

1:06:28The NRC's Part 53, which Alex Epstein talked about in episode three, is a new set of regulations being developed to modernize and streamline the licensing process for advanced nuclear reactors. It aims to provide a more risk-informed, performance-based approach for the licensing of advanced non-lightwater reactor designs, which includes SMRs and other advanced reactors. Part 53 was mandated by Congress because there wasn't a framework that was actually geared towards non-water-based reactors. And it was making it really hard for the advanced reactor companies to figure out how they were supposed to get through the regulation process when there was no framework that was geared towards the type of technology that they were building.

1:07:09But they were given this timeline until 2027 to actually enact it. But there's been so much pressure to do that sooner that they actually have come out with a draft of it. Some people are not fans. I think it's still quite complex. But as we can see, entrepreneurs are not waiting around. People are starting to build. And I think what we'll see is that people will just try to work directly with the NRC as this new framework comes together and sort of be co-creating along the way. I think you just have to be hopeful here that that's going to work for people, right? That the NRC does have enough pressure to be helping advance the nuclear reactor space overall.

1:07:50People often are citing these these stats on the fact that like, hey, there have been no new advanced reactor designs license since the NRC has been developed. And we need to change that. And so again, the more public support, the more congressional support we have for the NRC moving more efficiently along towards this, I think the better. And I'm really, I'm hopeful that we will see that. This feels like one of those specific areas maybe where we can say like, if you have to direct your attention somewhere and self-serving for my friend and co-host Julia, So I'm going to say it on her behalf, and this is not even in the script.

1:08:24But this feels like one of those areas that if we could just focus pressure down onto one thing, it's call your congressperson and tell them what on Part 53. What should we tell people to do? I think it's maintaining pressure on the NRC to move more efficiently. It's not saying cut corners because they have set up a very robust framework on regulatory. It's the fact that we are having the opposite problem. There's no new nuclear getting built. We've got to change this. And again, let's go look at Russia. They're doing this. We can do this too. We're basically like shooting ourselves in the foot here with this burdensome regulatory framework we have.

1:09:00Despite that, thank God for the entrepreneurs because they're not waiting around. Isaiah actually just thinks it's on the entrepreneurs to prove to the NRC and the country that what they're doing is worth moving faster for. The thing that has to catalyze change here is really like entrepreneurs who are coming to the table with better ideas and are willing to push them forward over decades. That's what this comes down to. People have to be in this fight for decades. That's what actually creates change over time. No one that we've spoken to embodies that more than Jake at Oklo. He's been working with the NRC for a decade to get Oklo's design approved.

1:09:34And the other is on the regulatory side, which our view was, you know, everyone can sort of play footsie about, you know, okay, well, we're going to do this for some kind of regulatory shortcut about whether it's going to some other country or we're going to find, you know, we're going to build a test reactor from the NRC or do it at DOE or get DOD to do something. All those things have been looked at, tested, explored before. I think at the end of the day, for anything commercial, you're still going to have to get through the commercial licensing process in the NRC unless you want to play on a very niche side of things, which I can understand that.

1:10:05So we just said engage early and often, so to speak. So we went in, and that was a big purpose of ours because so many people waited and sort of were wringing their hands about, well, the regulatory process. That's what's so daunting, so daunting. And look, it is daunting. But the way you do it is you do it. So we leaned into that pretty hard from very early on in the company's history. Obviously, you have our bumps and bruises on the path, but that's what happens when you're sometimes trying to blaze a new trail on this. When Jake says bumps and bruises, he's most specifically referring to the company's 2020 application that ended up getting denied.

1:10:38We're going to let Jake tell the story, and it's a bit of a longer one, because it provides an inside look into the process at the NRC, an organization we've talked about a ton on the series and one that every U.S. nuclear company will need to work with in some form or another. It shows that persistence that Isaiah spoke about on Oclo's part, it shows a regulator that is at least trying to streamline its processes, even if there are bumps en route to improvements, and that there is a whole lot of work left to be done if we want to bring more nuclear online in a reasonable timeframe. Yeah, I mean, the denial that we had to go through was, I mean, that sucked because like, you know, They never gave us a heads up that that was happening.

1:11:16And shame on them for that. They should have done that by their own procedure and policies. They should have called us and said, hey, we're doing this. But you know what? That's water under the bridge. You just get right back in with them. They gave us some good feedback, which was great about what they wanted to see. We took a very forward-leaning approach based on our feedback with the NRC. Look, just to go back in time and give the playbook of what happened or account of what happened. Started in 2016 meeting with them. A bunch of things that happened through until 2018. we submitted a pilot application that they then performed audits on between 2018 and early 2019 that resulted in feedback saying, hey, because what we piloted was a very novel structure of an application.

1:11:50They said, hey, we can review an application that looks like this. Awesome. So we said, okay, we'll work on submitting that. So we spent the year developing that, familiarizing them with what that would look like as we went through it. They proposed that, hey, that said, part of the methodologies you piloted maybe don't make sense for you because you're so small, it just changes the risk profile. So we said, great, we'll kind of actually go back in time and do some sort of old school ways of doing that. That is what they did in the past. Pretty just straight engineering analyses, if you will. Then from there, we submitted an application in March, literally March 11, 2020.

1:12:19And this was also built in parallel with the NRC building a novel in-person audit review process for us. They wanted to be more agile, more mean, focus in on a cohesive cross-functional team that would meet very dynamically. The audits are very rigorous. They're really hard. They're different than their normal approach of sort of sending you questions and you respond to. You get through a lot more ground more quickly because of that though. So it's valuable. And so we were like, yeah, let's try this. Let's lean heavily into that. And then of course, when you submit something like that in March 11, 2020, the day the pandemic's declared, like that all went out the window.

1:12:50We thought, you know, hey, we can try something really innovative. We knew there were going to be some things that were going to be challenging. And we figured depending on how that discussion would work, we could either adapt, we could change, or we could resolve. And then what we found was that that process of doing those things just became really hard in a fully remote review environment. So sadly, you know, they got that place really kicked it back to us. But the good news was that very clearly eliminated where we were having some obstacles with them and where they were having a hard time with what we were doing.

1:13:17So then as soon as we could, starting in the spring of 2022, we started engaging again and in person and focused on resolving those things and mapped out this whole process. And next thing we know, we got from where we were, you know, with those items and on a good trajectory to be able to close those out, generally speaking, by the end of this year, early next year to then transition us into what's called a pre-application readiness assessment to do dress rehearsal again before we submit an updated application and go from there. So have you had to engage with the NRC yet, or has it mostly just been with the DRD?

1:13:50We haven't yet engaged with the NRC, and we certainly will at some point, probably pretty soon. I do believe people that have absolutely the right intentions. It's just that, you know, the incentive has always been like, keep these things safe. And it's like, well, if you don't change much, you're going to probably succeed and keep things safe. Although we actually have that, we have that great image of what's it, the FAA's chart of if you do too little, you're going to, you know, have accidents and deaths from like aviation deaths. But if you actually don't allow any new safety innovation, you're also missing out on saving lives.

1:14:24So you need to be in that pre-optimal spot. This whole episode is a testament to that, right? We're like, all these entrepreneurs, at least again on paper are saying this is a reactor design where the physics themselves make these safer than the current ones that we have online, which already we haven't had a disaster in 12 years anywhere in the world since Fukushima and like really no big disaster since Chernobyl. So everything's safe. It's getting safer in the physics if we just allow these designs to come to market, but they can't come to market and there's a chicken and an egg and this whole problem.

1:14:58I'd be curious to hear kind of how the Navy does it because I've never heard of an incident with our nuclear Navy and they have submarines going around the world powered by nuclear reactors 24-7 in hostile environments. And it seems like it's been really, really safe with people, by the way, living inside a submarine underwater for weeks and months at a time with no incident as far as I'm concerned. It's absolutely a well-oiled machine. It's very much like the terrestrial civilian grid plants though. I mean, this is like a, you know, a group of extremely well-trained operators who, you know, this is their craft.

1:15:34This is their, you know, lifelong livelihood to take care of these reactors and make sure, you know, they're running properly. And so they've done it really well. I also think again, the NRC's oversight of the civilian grid has done it really well. I have no doubt that we're going to be able to continue that trend here. I just think we've gone too far at this point that we're not even, you know, enabling anyone to try anything new to like, you know, proceed with a design. And the risk you run here is that companies are going to start designing, they're going to start building. They're not going to get regulatory approval and they're going to run out of money.

1:16:07You know, how can you sit around, like stick around for 10 years and, you know, just keep hoping that you'll get more and more funding. But realistically, that's a hard, we've talked a little bit about fund timelines, right? You can't really be going much more than 10 years without any sort of return. And I do worry that that's one of the biggest challenge facing all nuclear startups. Yeah. I mean, this is just a fun fact aside, but there was a kid that I went to high school with who ended up going to Naval Academy and he was like, he was smart, but he wasn't like the math genius in our class.

1:16:39And then I heard that he was going to be working on submarines and he said that he was studying nuclear physics. And I thought the nuclear physics was a thing reserved for like the top 0.01 % of geniuses. So it's cool that they have a whole program set up where if you're going to be working on the submarines, you need to be trained on the nuclear physics up front. Yeah. And you know, there's actually been a decline in people studying nuclear engineering in the university systems. And we need to reverse that too. It's like, you need a, you need a workforce that knows about this and the Navy does it phenomenally well.

1:17:09I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of these startups that we're talking to end up actually hiring out of the Navy. Although I'm sure the cultures are quite different, right? In terms of like, move fast and break things versus, you know, do not move too fast, nor definitely don't break anything. But, you know, it is definitely respected as a group of people who have really been trained in this better than probably anyone else. I mean, we're going to go, I'm going to keep going back to Anderle. They just seem like so appropriate here, but they've hired just so much ex-military talent because you want to move fast and break things, but like you don't want to in defense or nuclear break too many things.

1:17:45I think Tyler said it's move fast and bend things in the nuclear industry, which I really like. So I would love to see my buddy from high school end up working at Interest or somewhere else. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that other advanced nuclear startups have learned from OCLOS experience and have built a big part of their plan specifically around going through faster regulatory pathways. It reminds me a little bit of what Tyler told us about regulation for space nuclear. Again, I'm going to smile every time I say that. it's not regulated by the NRC, but by the FAA as the result of a 2019 presidential memorandum.

1:18:19So regulatory is in a very exciting area for space nuclear right now. And in 2019, there was a presidential memorandum that overhauled the launch approval process for spacecraft with nuclear power systems. And prior to this presidential memorandum, any spacecraft with a nuclear power system, whether it had a gram or a thousand kilograms of nuclear material had to go through the same multi-year, multi-agency safety review that ended in the president's signature. And very notably, only the government could launch nuclear power systems into space. This presidential memorandum did two things. First, it is breaking down the launch approval process into three tiers based off of the risk level of the launch.

1:18:59Tier three being the highest risk launch, primarily a highly enriched uranium reactor. Tier one being the lowest risk launch, primarily a radioisotope source that meets certain standards to ensure that it'll be safely launched. And these tiered approaches, again, have different tiers of regulation surrounding it. Tier one, for example, being able to be regulated and authorized for launch by a single agency, whether that is NASA or the Department of the Air Force. So it broke this down into potentially a more streamlined process. Second, for the first time, this presidential memorandum opened up a commercial pathway to launching a spacecraft for the nuclear power system under the jurisdiction of the Department of Transportation and the FAA.

1:19:40So in a lot of ways, this was the presidential memorandum that has now unleashed this wave of commercial space nuclear companies and commercial space nuclear opportunities. So right now, with our contract that we have with the Space Force, we're working diligently meeting these guidelines at a presidential memorandum. We're engaged with the FAA and the Department of Defense. Very excitingly, we've developed an approach and we submitted this approach to the FAA in January of this year, and our payload review application was accepted, which means the FAA believes that there could be a chance to see this to actually approving a launch.

1:20:12And right now we're targeting an approval for the launch in early 2025 to enable our launch in the latter part of that year into early 26, which could be the first commercial nuclear power system ever launched into space. A few things made my ears perk up in Tyler's response. First, Elon has been doing battle with the FAA over SpaceX launches, so it's by no means a rubber stamp organization, but they do at least approve launches. Second, getting approval to launch by 2025 or 2026 would be a much faster timeline than terrestrial nuclear companies that we've spoken to can hope for. And third, and importantly, that a clear and hopefully efficient regulatory framework, quote, unleashed this wave of commercial nuclear space companies.

1:20:53I do think good regulation, we've talked a lot about bad regulation. I think good regulation can be a huge unlock for the number of companies that are out there innovating and doing it responsibly. Not just because the path gets more clear, but because faster timelines can mean faster iteration, like we talked about earlier, and better safety. Isaiah pointed out that poorly designed regulation can actually make things less safe. This is a huge, huge problem in governance is like when you add a strict regulatory framework around something, you actually get local minima of safety. So for instance, And we've got self-driving cars finally hitting the market, and that's going to create this massive new category of safety where human error is slowly removed.

1:21:32But a huge part of what's taken so long to get there has been regulations, which were added to cars to make them safer. So there's always this catch-22 with regulation. I think a really good example of that is molten salt, where we have this incredible negative reactive coefficient of salt, where we actually can slow the reactions down as they begin to overheat automatically just as a fundamental thing of physics, right? That's incredible. Passive control is something that we should have been having for the last 50 years. But you're right, it is a little bit harder to get in there because things that have been done before are easier to do again in a regulatory framework.

1:22:12The FAA has this great graph, which I mentioned earlier, titled Applying the Safety Continuum, where they show that too little rigor is unsafe due to inadequate safety programs, but too much rigor is also unsafe due to lack of any safety innovation. Eli Drader wrote about it in a great piece on the FAA's new Mosaic rulemaking initiative, which we'll link to. We talked about the built-in safety features in many advanced reactor designs, these passive safety systems, but despite their potential for increased safety, they're actually harder to bring to market. It's a catch-22. Isaiah thinks the only way out is through.

1:22:48And he's designing Valor's plants to minimize regulatory drag as much as possible relative to their size by stacking reactors in one location far away from people. Regulatory bodies that are given a mandate from Congress to protect the U.S. people are automatically going to be extremely risk averse. They're going to tend towards slowness, bureaucracy, and the absolute of safety, even if it's not totally rational. And they actually have to be catalyzed into action by entrepreneurs and people who are demonstrating extremely, you know, high value over time. And again, I think that part of the issue with nuclear power so far, there have been people who have had good designs for nuclear reactors, but there hasn't been the right customer yet.

1:23:32When you're trying to generate electricity and you're trying to go to the NRC and saying like, look, we've got this reactor and we're going to go put it in Chicago. We're going to go put it in New York City. We're going to put it here and there and all over the country. that actually is a very one it's a very different safety profile and two it's a different revenue profile that individual reactor now you know has its own revenue stream associated with it and maybe that's not totally justified to the nrc of doing something completely different because it's that unit itself can't produce quite enough power to maybe justify changing the rules right what i want to do here is i think going to you know catalyze the movement and the reason for that is we're doing this on a very different ground than nuclear power has ever been done before.

1:24:17We're talking about sort of remote offsite generation of chemical fuel, which goes into the existing supply chain. And we can kind of have a bit of a hybrid here, right? Like we can take these things off of a mass manufactured supply chain, but we can house them in a secure facility. So we can check all of the boxes that the NRC wants as far as containment and radiation and surviving a 747 attack, but the actual units themselves can be mass manufactured and deployed centrally in this offsite location. I think that this is something that really threads the needle on a lot of different ways, both regulatory and actually delivering energy to the end consumer.

1:24:58Like I said, it's been a five-year process of trying to answer this question for me of how can we actually get the benefits of nuclear power to the American people in the existing framework, which has a million problems, but like, let's hack this thing, right? Like, let's find a way to do it and provide that energy. There's one final pathway here, which we think is really smart. Allo is taking a design that's being tested at the Idaho National Lab called Marvel, scaling it down and selling it to universities that have research reactors and funding for new research reactors. What that team has done is really impressive because, Because in the world where often nuclear projects can take five years, 10 years, 20 years, in just three years, they've gone from an idea in someone's head into essentially getting approval to start building and all the funding in between to make that a reality.

1:25:47There's this chicken and egg problem in advanced reactor regulation. The NRC wants to see real data from operational reactors to approve new reactors. But if those designs haven't been allowed to be built yet, where do you get the data? This is why I think Aloe has a clever approach. They're taking a design that was implemented within a national lab. So it already has that data, that test data that can go and be used with the NRC so that they, again, can beat that chicken and egg cycle of not being able to have any data because they're not allowed to build anything. It is amazing to see the lengths to which these startups have gone just to be allowed to operate.

1:26:26And even more amazing to see the creativity and grit with which the entrepreneurs have approached the problem. We've heard a few different approaches to dealing with burdensome regulation as an advanced nuclear startup. So one, you can just deal with the NRC process, one, for your design up front, like Oklo has been for the past decade, and then kind of on the construction side each time you want to go put a new reactor somewhere. two you still go through the nrc process on your design the nrc has to approve your design but you go through the process on the construction side once you build a big facility that's as secure as you can possibly make it and has room to expand in one location so that each time you want to add more capacity you just add it to that one spot that has construction approval already so might still take a long time in the beginning but then over time it speeds up each one it reminds me of the approach that Matt is taking at Blue Energy, where the first one might take six or seven years, but then after that, you're just printing the same thing over and over and over again.

1:27:28That's kind of how Isaiah is thinking about doing it at Valor. Or three, and this sounds not easy, but less painful up front at least, is to get regulated by somebody else like the FAA, the DOE, or the DOD, like you are, like Xeno is, and Aloe is. And then once the designs have run in the wild and generated data, it might be easier to build commercial versions with NRC approval. The attitude seems to be that there are roadblocks, but the opportunity and potential for impact are so huge that they're worth figuring out. You hear a lot about mission-driven founders, but it's hard to imagine going through advanced nuclear regulation without being particularly deeply mission-driven.

1:28:07The regulatory aspect of nuclear is especially burdensome, but not entirely unique. Biotech founders do ultimately need to get FDA approval if they want to bring a new drug to market. And that too is onerous and expensive, but new drugs are approved all the time. And because there's some degree of confidence in that, there's a whole ecosystem around supporting those companies. Investors, lawyers, large pharma companies who know how to finance those companies and bring those drugs to market, but we're still building that muscle in the advanced nuclear space. And then there are all the other things you have to do to run and grow any startup.

1:28:41Raise money, build a team, create a brand, do sales and marketing, set up a supply chain. You need to operate the business. I think each of the founders that we've spoken to has something to say about each of those. But to kick off the section on operations, again, we have not only an advanced nuclear founder, but somebody who's done operations for her whole career at these big complex companies. So I'm going to turn the mic on you again, Julia. And Terry's just raised an$8 million seed round. Congratulations, first of all. And second of all, what was that process like? I think it was helpful that Jordan and I had some operating experience in the past.

1:29:14This is a second company. I've worked in a couple big operating type roles. And, you know, having a track record can be helpful here. The big thing, though, about raising in the nuclear space right now is that people believe in the why now moment. There is enough turning of the tide, whether it's public sentiment, what you're seeing out of Congress with a lot of bipartisan support for nuclear, what you're seeing in the DoD, for example, of people wanting to start up things like Project Pele to demonstrate microreactors. I think generally what we heard is it does seem like now's the time people are focused on clean energy, for example.

1:29:50They're trying to move away from fossil fuels. And, you know, you just got to believe that you're going to be able to get through the regulatory environment, get through building things. But, you know, we've now developed kind of a hard tech ecosystem that I think will be also a tailwind to building a nuclear. You have engineers who have worked at SpaceX or other big companies that are ready to take on the challenge of building from scratch these complex projects and actually completing them, turning them around for the market. And so it was a, you know, it was a hard process, but people believed that we have what it takes to do this.

1:30:25And so the round, you know, came together within a month or so. And we're now back to the races, you know, heads down. Once you have money in the bank, it's like now it's time to recruit and start building. Clock is ticking. I mean, it sounds, if not easy, a month is pretty good. It's easier than I would have expected coming into this for a nuclear startup. I think that's a testament to you and Jordan and to your point to the moment that we're in right now. Matt at Allo and your co-founder, Jordan, when we talked to him, told us a little bit something similar that now feels like the right moment for nuclear and that investors are starting to look at nuclear as the next big thing.

1:31:02I think there's a lot of VCs who made some good money in the software world in the past 10, 15 years. And a lot of them are now looking for what is the next big thing going to be. And in my opinion, quite rightly, a lot of them are identifying energy as this insane opportunity. 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 kind of narrow down who we spoke to, to people who have already spent some time thinking about this, which is awesome because learning from scratch, right, or having to go through that education process, it can take a long time.

1:31:48But 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. That reminds me of what Jake at Oklo told us on the last episode, that investors, even in the public markets, are coming to meetings more educated on and excited about nuclear. And it kind of makes sense for public market investors, many of whom are used to investing in energy companies and manufacturing companies, companies that spend enormous amounts on CapEx to unlock massive markets. Still, the excitement among VCs is somewhat of a surprising positive development.

1:32:21Investing in nuclear energy is very different from investing in software. Matt told us that a lot of the milestones for a seed stage company are around regulatory approval, then design milestones, then commercial milestones, versus in software looking at a team and early traction. Did you get to a million dollars in ARR? What does your retention look like? How's your marketing efficiency? Nuclear and I guess deep tech in general, but specifically nuclear, given the regulatory landscape, feels a lot more like whether you're able to pass through a series of very particular gates as opposed to where you are on some continuous growth curve.

1:32:56What do you think has changed more broadly that's made investors more comfortable investing in advanced nuclear? I think one of the reasons investors are feeling more comfortable investing in these capital intensive businesses like advanced nuclear startups is the fact that there have been other companies that have come before us and been successful. Andrel, for example, Varda, whether you're in this, you know, some sort of space or hard tech ecosystem or building and defense tech, there have been companies that have been able to, first of all, get non-dilutive capital from elsewhere as well. So government grants, military contracts to enable them to have more capital to build without the dilution and without the VCs having to be the only source of that.

1:33:38And because there have been these other examples out there, and I think because the market is saying, hey, there's a market here, like the government wants these new products, the space industry wants these new products. Now you're seeing venture capital say like, oh, you can actually build a really healthy business here. Yes, it's going to be more capital intensive upfront. And I think there is some risk of like, you know, You end up going to zero versus becoming a really like a program of record, massive revenue company. But you see that type of power law in the rest of venture investing. So that's not really anything new.

1:34:12But I think, again, the comfort around there are good outcomes to be had here because of what we're seeing in this sort of burgeoning hard tech, defense tech ecosystem means that more people, more investors are very interested in playing in that space. yeah it's fascinating because i mean i'm seeing on my side too just from like the personal seat really i'm just way more drawn to this type of company now i think that sass is going to be in trouble maybe over the next decade in terms of just defensibility and like we're as recording this again open ai is doing their developer day who knows what companies they've killed on the software side whereas if you can get through all that crap on the regulatory side and you can build an advanced reactor, you are more protected.

1:34:55And so to your point, if you make it through, the outcome is maybe more protected and bigger. David, you'll have mentioned A16Z did tell us that if you don't, there's no pivot. There's no easy way out. You don't sell this company to somebody else. You don't restart and fire a few people and build a new kind of product with the rest of your money. It is all or nothing. But if you can make it to the other side, And Andrew is now worth$10 billion. SpaceX is worth$150 billion. When we talked to Josh Wolfe, he told us that there are two motivators. And it's actually in Morgan Housel's new book that one of the things he's always willing to bet on is that people feel either fear or greed.

1:35:35And it's hard to look at these massive potential markets, markets with practically unlimited demand, where the biggest, I mean, SpaceX is the biggest private company and all the new big rounds are in this space, and not get a little bit greedy. So the money part is a challenge still, but it's not as big of a challenge maybe as it was before. So now you've raised it. What's the next thing that you need to think about? It's really company building. So everything that entails, there's kind of kicking off a few different areas of that, right? So one is actually getting started on the reactor design itself and moving to building something, an actual prototype as quickly as possible.

1:36:13I think one of the failure modes you'll see in hard tech and even in nuclear reactor companies is people spend a lot of time just on their computers simulating things, and they don't get out there and actually start building because you just learn so much about how things work when you do it in the real world. That's, again, where it's capital intensive, so you want to be well funded to be able to do that. But that's an important piece to go kick off. And then there's team building. You want to recruit a diverse team of different types of engineering disciplines. You know, some people are great to have come from a nuclear background, but there's not a huge depth of talent there, at least today.

1:36:49So I think, you know, pulling from a lot of the other engineering disciplines who can come in, learn what they need to learn about nuclear, but also just be building the rest of the reactor, mechanical engineer systems, engineering, eventually software engineering, you need all of that to come together. And then, you know, you're building out the other functions as well, government affairs and everything from your legal accounting, et cetera, although that comes a bit later. And then I think it's building up your go-to-market arm. So what's your BD look like, right? Who are you out there engaging with as your customer, learning about their requirements, their needs, the specs that you want to build to, and then the general government affairs team.

1:37:26We've talked about how important it is to go out and be engaging with Congress, with the regulatory bodies, with the DOE, to make sure that you're constantly building, again, towards the right thing, making sure people are invested in you as a company. So it's just a lot of that, you know, setting all of those things in motion so that they each can develop alongside each other. That's not something you want to do in sequence, right? You certainly don't want to go build your prototype and then go talk to your customers or regulators, right? You want to be doing all of that in parallel. Yeah, it's cool to see, like, obviously you've been knee-deep in nuclear over the past couple of years, but before that, we're a newcomer to the industry, now starting an advanced nuclear company.

1:38:08And a bunch of the founders that we've spoken to have said that they're looking for that fresh talent, partially because there just isn't the homegrown talent in the nuclear industry, partially because fresh perspectives matter given how little progress has been made. You kind of need a fresh perspective. That's what David at A16Z told us. When you go to the incumbents or the experts in the field, they'll just be like, oh yeah, we should just do what we've been doing forever because obviously it's work. But anyone that can look at the nuclear industry You can actually be a non-expert. And in fact, you probably should be a non-expert to look at the nuclear industry and say, obviously, this has not worked at all.

1:38:41It takes a mix. Your co-founder, Jordan, grew up in the nuclear industry. But he mentioned that in Terry's, you're looking to bring in people from all backgrounds. 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, it's totally something that people can pick up. If you have an interest in it, you can go from hobby to practice. So you have a team, you have a design that's being worked on and tested. What's the next big thing that you need to focus on? Supply chain is critical, and it's one of those things that takes a while to develop.

1:39:11So like everything else, you're going to want to start that at the very beginning. The supply chain is basically where you get all of the different components that you're going to use to make your reactor. And those can be really expensive, right? We know that if you're working in the nuclear industry, you need to work with supply chain vendors who are complying with the specific regulatory compliance. So these can run up to 100 times more expensive than the same part used in another industry. There's also the fuel supply chain. Many of the advanced nuclear startups are using non-traditional fuels, something like Triso, for example, or Halo.

1:39:50We'll get to those in a second. Because there hasn't been demand yet for these fuels or at least anything consistent. The supply chain just isn't there yet. People have demonstrated the ability to produce these fuels, but they certainly aren't something you can buy off the shelf or just place an order for it to arrive next week. The thing about nascent supply chains is that you can't get everything you want, right? So there's trade-offs to be made here. You might have to make a trade-off between efficiency of something like your fuel and the realities of whether or not you can procure this more efficient fuel at some kind of timeline and cost that's going to work for your business.

1:40:28Matt at Allo told us that while supply chains build back up, they're making trade-offs between fuel efficiency and supply chain realities. It's a big concern and it's a big question, but I think it is something that's getting better. And we're doing our best to make decisions today that can help us to get something done in the near term. And then as the supply chains get better, then we can make more bold decisions. So one example of that is a lot of reactor vendors are planning to use HALU. So this is 20 % enriched fuel and we're looking at using LEU plus, so more like 10%. This is more readily available.

1:41:04This should really help in terms of getting something done in a practical and near-term sense. But I think you're right that a lot of the nuclear supply chains are somewhat atrophied from where they might've been a number of decades ago. You know, maybe an interesting anecdote is with Ontario, they just are in the process of finishing a number of refurbishments for their Bruce power plant. And it's been really exciting to see what they're doing because just by doing these kind of upgrades to the existing system, which were scheduled years ago, they've been able to maintain a supply chain, which will be super helpful for their subsequent deployment of a bunch new generation capacity in the years that come.

1:41:42There are some cases there where things are kind of hanging on by a thin line, but I think as more nuclear developments happen, that muscle will build back up just naturally. And it almost comes back to the buzzing bees analogy where the more interest in nuclear, the more things that are happening, the more that supply chain gets built out. It's a positive snowball effect. So in summary, we're trying to make the right choices given the atrophied supply chain of today, given those constraints. and then we'll do our part in bolstering nuclear's image and trying to get stronger supply chain just by spreading the good word and hoping that more and more deployments happen and we'll do our part as best as possible in that.

1:42:19Supply chains seem like another strand in this Gordian knot that we talked about in episode three. If reactors aren't being built, if there's regulatory uncertainty surrounding the approval of certain advanced reactor designs, it makes rational economic sense for potential suppliers to stay offline. They don't want to spend the capex and go through all the pain of producing a product for which there might not ultimately be buyers. But if the fuel isn't available, it slows down the companies that would become the buyers. This is a really interesting place for government to step in and play a role here in standing up a supply chain that is not yet healthy on its own, right?

1:42:55When you have a brand new industry and there's that chicken and egg problem. Earlier this year, the Senate voted 96-3, so almost unanimously, in favor of a bill to accelerate the availability of domestically produced HALU for advanced reactors. And this is just a really big step in saying us as the government, as Congress, would like to support this advanced reactor industry getting off the ground. And here's what we're doing to support from the fuel side. So we've talked about HALU fuel a couple of times. What's special about it? Why are advanced reactor startups looking to use that versus regular uranium?

1:43:31Halo fuel, high assay, low enriched uranium is enriched to a level that is between 5 % and 20%. So that's higher than existing fuels, which are in the kind of 2%, 3%, 4%, 5 % range, and lower than highly enriched uranium, which you'd use for something like atomic weapons. So people like this middle ground better fit for smaller designs. You want some more enrichment in there than the just purely low enriched uranium. But people don't want HEU, highly enriched uranium, in the hands of just anyone. People are worried about proliferation. And so this is kind of a nice middle ground. That said, it just hasn't been extensively used yet.

1:44:11So as we talked about, not much of a supply chain yet. And it's cool to see the government coming in, like not just saying we'd support nuclear, which we broadly see, but this very specific, important thing for the advanced nuclear industry. So it's cool to see that level of support in 96.3 is amazing. I think that takes us back to our conversation that we've been having throughout the season on the role of popular support from fundraising to getting legislation passed. A big part of these entrepreneurs job is making nuclear sexy enough that people demand it. when Isaiah, who we've heard from throughout this episode, announced Valor on X recently.

1:44:47There was one snarky reply to the effect of these companies are doing a service to the rendering industry by keeping the rendering artists in business. And they do have these beautiful renderings. If you look at the website, there's a split between these very basic websites that are just the name of the company and not much more detail. And then completely over-the-top beautiful sites full of animations and beautiful renderings. You should check out Radiant's site at radiantnuclear.com. And as you scroll down, there's a truck with the Kaleidos reactor on the back that drives from the factory to the customer site.

1:45:20And then it drives back for a refuel. On Oklo's site, the renderings are particularly beautiful. They actually collaborated with this renowned architecture firm, Gensler, to design their Aurora powerhouse. And you can check out a little animation there at oklo.com showing one being built in this like little beautiful tree lined area where they just kind of like plop it down. We'll link to it in the show notes. I kind of want to live in an Aurora powerhouse, but it's one of the things that we asked Jake about, and I really loved his answer about the importance of when you're doing this like really hard thing, also at the same time, building a visual brand.

1:45:55We asked him, he lit up. Frankly, from a visualization and from a branding perspective, reflect that. Like that's what we do. That's why we come to work every day. It's not because, oh, it's cool to work on nuclear. It is really cool to work on nuclear, but it's really, really cool to work on nuclear because of what it can afford for humankind going forward. A very clean, sustainable future that's also very, very, very full of energy that's affordable and reliable and clean. It's a pretty cool setup there. So that was important for us. We did not want to look like what's out there before. We did not want to be stodgy on that.

1:46:25I think that's really important. Accordingly, we wanted to take an architectural approach that was functional and beautiful. So we spent some time internally and working with some great firms to support that. And, you know, I think that's a core thing for how we want to approach what we're trying to do with respect to sort of the imagery and the visualization of what these things can bring to bear. So, you know, I think that's just kind of core to how we think about this. And I think it kind of reflects for how we do things, not just the exterior wise, but internal wise. I kind of have a weird, I don't know if it's weird, but I guess I kind of do think it's weird.

1:46:57I really like reactor art and how they look. I mean, at the end of the day, like the performance of the system is what dictates the design, but you can do things that also bring some elegance to that. Sadly, they're, they're not often very visible right to the outside, but I think they're kind of cool when you can show that stuff too. So that's something that I'm kind of excited more about is, is sort of the sleekness and the lines of what machines like this are and kind of, you know, I think one thing I always get a kick out of is in many ways, you know, I think next generation plants and next generation reactors that are the most promising are inherently quite simple and we can do that, right?

1:47:29Because we have energy density on our side, we as an industry. And that elegance and simplicity, I think is pretty beautiful. So it's great to be able to, I think, highlight that. And I think as folks start to see that and understand that, I think it can get more exciting too. One of the beautiful things about entrepreneurship is that each generation of startups gets to learn from and build on the previous generation's work. We've talked about Elon and Tesla and SpaceX a lot here, and we're going to do it again. Tesla taught deep tech entrepreneurs that making something sexy, something that people clamor for, is half the battle.

1:48:04When you need to change hearts and minds to move people from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles, or from, in this case, fossil fuels to nuclear, the brand can be as important as the technology itself. A community is going to be a lot more willing to put a beautiful, small footprint nuclear plant like Oklo's in, rather than those big hourglass-shaped structures that come with all sorts of mental baggage. Putting a radiant Kaleidos on the back of an 18-wheeler is valuable logistically, but it's also an important shift in perspective. Nuclear reactors can be safe and simple enough that you can just drive them around.

1:48:41Lux Capital's Josh Wolf, while an outspoken critic of some of Elon's actions, also believes that what the nuclear industry needs is its own Elon. It probably requires an Elon-type character. Despite all the misgivings I have about his relationship with the truth, particularly around Tesla, what he did was not wait for batteries to get better and for government regulation. It's sort of just plowed forward with irreverence and, in some cases, disregard for whether it's national highway safety for self-driving or disregard from any number of regulatory authorities from capital markets on down, but he advanced the field in doing that, right?

1:49:20So you can absolutely say that that was a virtue amongst the vice of the behavior. I think you need an entrepreneur that is just absolutely dead set, that galvanizes with belief and conviction. That in turn creates the flood of capital behind them. You know, of course, the root of the word credit is credere, to believe. And that's what you need. You need people believing. So it starts with belief. And that usually starts with an entrepreneur that is so dead set that at first people have that Gandhi like you and, you know, they laugh at him and then they join him and then he wins or she wins. While Josh's plan sounds like a risky path that would require a particularly brave founder, there is kind of recent precedent.

1:49:57It's exactly what Anderil's doing in defense. When Palmer Lucky started Anderil in 2017, defense was the black sheep of the tech industry. Outside of Palantir, big tech companies and their employees wanted absolutely nothing to do with defense, with the DOD. Listening to Palmer tell his story, he was a pariah in Silicon Valley for starting the company and especially for working with Customs and Border Patrol. But in the meantime, while people were ignoring the defense industry, Andro built something that leveraged tech's unique advantages, a suite of defense products built on an AI-powered operating system.

1:50:29They hired mission-aligned talent, and they chipped away until when Russia invaded Ukraine, defense all of a sudden became sexy. Palmer Luckey is like an Elon-like character in a space that needed one. But instead of flaunting regulators, Andrel has worked closely with the DOD, as you pointed out earlier, since day one. Of course, there's still some disregard for capital markets. Lucky called public market investors Wall Street weenies in a recent interview, which I absolutely loved. But the company is exhibiting a balance of brashness and seriousness that might become the new playbook for deep tech companies, especially ones in an industry as highly regulated as nuclear.

1:51:04In that playbook, there are a few lessons that advanced nuclear startups can take away. One, leverage the technical advantage. There are large established companies that build tried and true large reactors, and it's hard for startups to compete with that. So compete on the innovation and the speed. This is where startups shine and hire the best technical talent you can to go do that. Two, balance public marketing with behind the scenes sales. Andrel's public brand, for example, excellent, well-executed, sexy, exciting, but behind the scenes, There are teams of various serious people there, including a number of ex-military folks that are engaging with the system as it is and working to change it from within.

1:51:47Three, make it exciting. Cheap, abundant energy is exciting. Advanced reactors that leverage physics for safety are exciting. Powering areas not touched by the grid, including the moon, and replacing dirty diesel fuel is exciting. So lean into that movement. And four, understand where to work around the status quo. Bend, but don't break the rules. If the path through the NRC is too slow, find a faster path. You can't go put an unlicensed reactor on the grid, but you can find a faster way to try to get licensed. All right, so there's a bit of a playbook, which is awesome. And it's been so cool for me getting to talk to so many of these founders and getting to work with you on this and seeing so many smart people who have a million other options out there.

1:52:31they could go work at SpaceX or Anderle or go start something in a slightly easier space, like space, for example, but they're going after this really, really, really hard thing. I'd love to hear from you, right? You've had a successful career so far, and now you're jumping into this thing that we said was entrepreneurship on insane mode. Obviously, you're excited about nuclear. You've been digging in. You've been an advocate. But were there cons that you were weighing? Were there reasons that you thought maybe this wouldn't work or that this isn't something that was worth dedicating the next decade of your life to?

1:53:05Well, I'll start by framing it in. The mission here of energy abundance to me is just too important to not work on. And so I just feel personally drawn to it. I think a lot of other people who are working in the nuclear energy space or any other hard industry like this is probably just feeling some pull to do it. because it is, as you mentioned, like there are so, the deck is stacked against you in so many ways to be a small nuclear reactor company. I mean, we've gone through a lot of these already, but the regulatory environment is no joke. It's extremely expensive. It's extremely time consuming.

1:53:40Unfortunately, I think it's just one of the things that puts companies out of business, right? To last and to endure that long through that long of a process is really difficult. Same thing goes for your sales cycle, whether you're selling into the military or selling into some space companies or into commercial where you actually just need to go through the NRC first. And, and, and anyway, you slice it, you're working with the national labs or other, you know, national testing facilities to do this. There's just bureaucracy everywhere you turn. And what I find challenging about that is that's, it's somewhat out of your control, not completely right.

1:54:15You do your best to influence, ingratiate yourself, like whatever you can do to move through that process quickly. But it's not one of these things where it's like, hey, how much can I stay up all night coding to ship my product? It's just a completely different paradigm. And I think that can be one of those just very, very tiring processes. And it's also, you know, multi-year endeavor, right? It's something where, you know, when you're building in the real world with the atoms and like in hard tech, you have a, again, much longer timeline. And so your tenacity level needs to be even higher than shipping something on the software side, for example.

1:54:53So I think there's so many challenges here. But I think anyone who's working on this is probably like me, believes that the world will be a better place with more nuclear energy. And so give it your all, give it a go and get as many people to be supporters and influencers around you, right? To like change the narrative and collectively say, we have this moment, we have this opportunity now. Now we need to unblock this technology and allow it to flourish. Hell yeah. One of the things that I just like generally, and we touched on it, on this idea that kind of entrepreneurs get to learn from what's happened in the past.

1:55:26You've had 70 years since Admiral Rickover wrote about paper reactors versus practical reactors. How does that play into the way that you're thinking about product development and building the reactor? Knowing that things are going to look good on paper and you won't know until you get down the line. I'm sure we have better software now. I'm sure there's better ways of doing it. What has the industry learned on that front over the past 70 years? Yeah, you're so right to say we do have much better simulation software now. But as like anything else, you don't want to get bogged down in the design phase.

1:55:58You don't want to just be sitting on your computer simulating all day. So you still have to get to cutting metal as quickly as possible. And the way we're thinking about it, at least, is how can you build something subscale as quickly as possible and get that to testing as quickly as you can so that you can validate that a lot of your assumptions and your online computer modeling are actually valid in the real world. And most of the time, that's not actually the way things work, right? When you test things in the real world, they don't actually go quite as expected. So you need to go back, make your tweaks, try it again.

1:56:31And so this is, I mean, again, we're going to mention Elon one more time here, but he's done this so well with Tesla and with SpaceX, as have many other entrepreneurs, which is to just say you must constantly be iterating, trying things, being with the hardware. And so the goal here is to move away from being a paper reactor to an actual functioning reactor as quickly as you can. I mean, it was Brett Kugelmaas who said that he thinks that we should have more nuclear meltdowns. I would say maybe a difference with SpaceX is that we don't want full explosions of the products, which, as we've talked about physically, kind of impossible now.

1:57:07But I guess a last one and one that I'm curious about, it almost feels like, you know, in a normal industry, you're racing against your competitors, but you're almost all gated by the same thing now. Like if the NRC passes a part 53 that is clear and easy and there's a path to market that makes sense, you kind of all win. Is it a more collaborative environment? Are you working with others on the regulatory side? Or is it still this really competitive thing where you're like, whoever gets to their first use case first can get to the second and kind of build up to larger and larger scale? Oh, there's so much opportunity for collaboration here between startups.

1:57:45There's already been some discussion. I'm sure there will be a lot more in terms of what do you want to see from the Department of Energy, for example, or the National Labs to better support this nascent microreactor or SMR industry. So there's definitely opportunity to, whether it's improve the regulatory framework or the testing environment, the facilities, working in collaboration with other startups is going to be a win for everyone. There's still going to be like, well, let the competition fly in terms of like how you get through that regulatory framework or like how the testing actually goes at that facility and how you actually end up selling to your customers.

1:58:21But in terms of just opening up opportunity for multiple players, like we all should be absolutely in favor of that and working together towards that. It sounds like such a fun environment. I guess last, last one for you, what does success look like for Antares and for your just kind of career in nuclear? I think it's, you know, ship your first reactor. That is the day I'm looking forward to is like, you've actually sold and brought a reactor online and that in and of itself would be just huge success in my book. But bigger than that, I mean, that's the first milestone we're aiming towards is just building a company that can proliferate these, right?

1:59:00To say like, we're going to bring energy and abundant energy to all corners of the earth and hopefully, you know, have reactors of different sizes for different use cases. And I mean, I would love to see the entire industry flourish, right? Like there will be in a successful case here, multiple, very, very successful companies because we're going to need so much more energy. If we want to be replacing fossil fuels, we're going to need even more energy. So there's just room for so much here. And so I think there can be many, many winners. I'm rooting for all of you, you in particular, but rooting for all of you.

1:59:34It's just such a, I mean, it's such a cool thing to be working on. If I were a little bit smarter, I think I'd probably be working in the nuclear industry. I think this is the job here though, to say like, hey, get the word out about what nuclear is. Honestly, two years ago, I didn't know anything about it. It's just, it's one of these like great cases to say, the more people who just like show up, get involved, learn, hey, try their hand at working in this industry, like the better it's going to be, the better the outcomes are going to be. Amen. Well, this I think has been my favorite episode that we've done so far.

2:00:03It's been so cool getting to hear directly from you on it. Before we get too excited, next episode on episode six of Age of Miracles, we're going to be talking to people like Noah Smith, Casey Hanmer, Eli Dorado, and a bunch of others who make the argument that there are other energy sources like solar and batteries and geothermal that we should be even more excited about. So I'm really excited to let people have their say. You know, my perspective on this is we want it all, but they make some really convincing arguments and I'm excited to do that one with you. Yeah, I'm super excited for that episode.

2:00:35So stay tuned for the next one. Thank you for listening and watching to this episode of Age of Miracles. If you like what you hear, please rate, subscribe, and share. And if you're feeling really generous, tell us what you think in the comments. Plus, we have a ton of resources and references in our resource hub if you want to go deeper. And we've linked them all in the show notes below. See you next week.

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